Monday round-up

On Friday evening, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to block a lower-court order that had prevented the government from spending $2.6 billion in Pentagon funds for construction of part of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. For The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin and others report that “[t]he Supreme Court order … split the court along its conservative-liberal divide.” Robert Barnes reports for The Washington Post that “[t]he court’s conservatives set aside a lower-court ruling for the Sierra Club and a coalition of border communities that said reallocating Defense Department money would violate federal law.” Kenneth Jost maintains at Jost on Justice that the ruling “allow[s] the Trump administration to violate the text and spirit of the Constitution,” “openly flout[ing] Congress’s constitutional control over federal spending.” For this blog, Steve Vladeck explains that “the decision is part of a larger, emerging trend … in which the solicitor general has been unusually aggressive in seeking emergency or extraordinary relief from the justices, and the court, or at least a majority thereof, has largely acquiesced.”

Briefly:

• Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that “[t]he brewing debate over the shape and structure of the high court … could influence the Democratic race for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination and further politicize the nation’s judiciary following three brutal confirmation battles.”
• At CNN, Joan Biskupic observes that “[a]t the end of her 26th year on the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is going full bore.”
• At The Atlantic, Richard Hasen writes that a new cert petition, in Thompson v. Hebdon, may well “get the Supreme Court closer to killing what’s left of campaign-finance limits.”
• Video of a recent lecture on the Supreme Court by former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli is available here.
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Walter Olson remarks that the controversy resolved this term in Parker Drilling Management Services. Ltd. v. Newton, in which “the Justices unanimously agreed that federal law does not incorporate California’s for th[e] purpose” of determining whether 0ff-duty oil workers on offshore platforms are entitled to overtime pay, “typifies many other situations in which wage-hour law, especially as it comes under pressure to change and liberalize, generates uncertainty.”

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