Wednesday round-up

For The Wall Street Journal, Natalie Andrews and Peter Nicholas report that “[u]nder White House pressure, the Senate Republican leadership is moving to expedite the final stages of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court after Thursday’s planned hearing featuring [Dr. Christine Blasey Ford,] the woman who has accused him of sexual assault when they were teenagers.” For The Washington Post, Seung Min Kim and others report that “[l]ate Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent out a notice scheduling a 9:30 a.m. committee vote Friday in the case ‘that a majority of the members are prepared’ to vote then.” Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos report for The New York Times that “Rachel Mitchell, the chief of the Special Victims Division of the Maricopa County attorney’s office in Arizona, has been hired to question Dr. Blasey rather than having the 11 male Republicans grill her about the sexual assault in high school that she has described.” Commentary comes from Roger Klein in an op-ed for The Hill, Madeleine Schmidt at Rewire.News, the editorial board of The New York Times, and the editorial board of the New York Post.

At Constitution Daily, Scott Bomboy highlights several high-profile cert petitions the justices considered at their conference on Monday. Amy Howe does the same at Howe on the Court, noting that “[s]everal interesting cases that had originally been distributed for Monday’s conference have been ‘rescheduled’ – that is, removed from consideration,” possibly because “the justices may want to wait until they have a full court to consider the petitions.”

Briefly:

• At the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice & Comment blog, Bernard Bell has the third in a series of posts on the issues in Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, which involves the scope of the Freedom of Information Act’s trade-secrets exemption and in which the Supreme Court recently recalled the mandate.
• In a video on his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel looks at Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido, in which the justices will decide whether the 20-employee minimum in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act applies to state and local governments.
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman tests the claim that “Justice Scalia changed the tenor of oral arguments and specifically gave rise to the ‘hot bench’ of justices who ask many questions.”
• At E&E News, Ellen Gilmer breaks down the environmental-law cases to watch in October Term 2018.
• In another post at E&E News, Gilmer notes that the first case on the new term’s docket, Weyerhaeuser Company v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a challenge to the federal government’s critical-habitat designation for the dusky gopher frog, will likely be heard by an eight-member court, and she assesses the implications of that possibility. 

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