Supreme Court allows Trump to end protected status for group of Venezuelan nationals

A former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh was tapped on Thursday to defend a lower court ruling before the Supreme Court this fall in a Georgia man’s challenge to the federal government’s efforts to collect restitution from him. 

The Supreme Court appointed John Bash, a former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general who has argued 10 cases in the court to argue Ellingburg v. United States as a “friend of the court” in support of the judgment of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit — which ruled for the government — because the federal government has opted not to defend that court’s reasoning. 

This article is part of a series on the legacy and jurisprudence of the late Justice David Souter. 

Charles Barzun is a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where he teaches Constitutional Law, Evidence, Jurisprudence, and Torts. He is currently working on a book on the American common law tradition. 

I met Justice Souter only once, in the summer of 2019. He agreed to meet with me to discuss the ideas in a law review article I had written about his judicial philosophy. When I arrived to meet him for lunch at a restaurant in Concord, N.H., he was already there, waiting for me. It turned out we were the restaurant’s only customers that afternoon. Our conversation lasted about two and a half hours, touching on everything from Souter’s time as a New Hampshire trial judge to the philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:

• Supreme Court allows Trump to revoke protected status for thousands of Venezuelans (Lawrence Hurley, NBC News)
• US Supreme Court may broaden religious rights in looming rulings (John Kruzel, Reuters)
• Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Comes Under MAGA Fire (Sonam Sheth, Newsweek)
• Trump Is Tired of Courts Telling Him He’s Breaking the Law (Adam Serwer, The Atlantic)
• Ed Sheeran Tells U.S. Supreme Court to Reject ‘Let’s Get It On’ Copyright Case Over ‘Thinking Out Loud’ (Bill Donahue, billboard)

Coming up: On Thursday, May 22, the court expects to issue one or more opinions from the current term. We’ll be live at 9:30 a.m. EDT that day for the opinions.

Hi, everyone! I am very excited to be joining SCOTUSblog as its executive editor. Please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected], even if just to say hello.

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Monday morning read:

• Courting Controversy: Justices’ side commentaries undermine the Supreme Court (Jonathan Turley, The Hill)
• Supreme Court Retains Block on Using Wartime Law to Deport Venezuelans (Abbie VanSickle, The New York Times)
• The Supreme Court just got an important police violence case right (Ian Millhiser, Vox)
• ‘Spaghetti against the wall?’ Trump tests legal strategies as judges block his policies (Bart Jansen, USA Today)
• Alito and Roberts take stock as they near their third decade on the bench (Joan Biskupic, CNN)

Coming up: On Thursday, May 22, the court expects to issue one or more opinions from the current term. We’ll be live at 9:30 a.m. EDT that day for the opinions.

The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon, asking the justices to temporarily block an order by a federal judge in San Francisco that bars the Trump administration from implementing an executive order and a related memorandum calling for large-scale reductions in the federal workforce – the elimination of jobs, followed by the transfer or firing of the employees who did those jobs. 

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court that the order by Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has “caused mass confusion throughout the Executive Branch.” “Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has ever intended to make federal bureaucrats ‘a class with lifetime employment, whether there was work for them to do or not,’” Sauer wrote.