Tuesday round-up

AMY HOWE MAY 10, 2016 8:44 AM

There is still more coverage and commentary relating to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the battle over the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to succeed him.  Emmarie Huetteman of The New York Times reports on the “tango of praise and rejection” as Garland meets with senators, while Burgess Everett of Politico reports that “Democrats are getting badly outspent by their conservative rivals in the war over Merrick Garland’s confirmation, suggesting that President Barack Obama’s closest allies in the Supreme Court battle have more bark than bite.”  Elsewhere in The New York Times, Carl Hulse reports that “Democrats intend to step up efforts to make” Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa “the poster boy for refusing to act on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Garland.”  At The Hill, Jessie Hellmann reports on remarks by Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, who said on Sunday “that his colleagues should approve President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee if it appears the Republican Party will lose the White House in November.”  Finally, Richard Wolf of USA Today reports that Scalia’s “presence while cases were being considered in the fall and winter has led to decisions this spring that shed light on his input during the last months of his life.” 

Commentary comes from Ed Kilgore, who in New York discusses possible Supreme Court nominees from a President Donald Trump, while at the Brennan Center for Justice, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy suggests that Scalia’s “unexpected death could mean that troublesome language in Roberts Court campaign finance cases during the past 11 years will not be used to jettison even more regulations.”  And Steven Mazie argues in The Economist that, whether the division among the remaining Justices “manifests as 4-4 splits or a tendency to hear fewer cases in which those splits seem likely, a curbed Supreme Court is not a court that can possibly live up to its name.”
Briefly:

• In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that the “new edition of a 37-year-old Supreme Court novel in which the chief justice is promoted to pope features a foreword by a real Supreme Court justice: Samuel Alito Jr.”
• At Just Security, Steve Vladeck notes that, “[l]ater this year, the Supreme Court will decide whether to take up the case of Akbar v. United States — in which the Petitioner is seeking review of a capital court-martial conviction on the ground that the means by which the military imposes the death penalty is unconstitutional.”
• At Tucson.com, Howard Fischer reports that an “attorney for a Phoenix family is asking the nation’s high court to effectively require TV stations to use tape delay when broadcasting events that could end in violence.”
• In a post at Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston looks at the “statutory path in the debate over transgender equality, which seems headed on a long-term road to the Supreme Court.”
• At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger criticizes a recent story in The Washington Post on the Court’s recent decision in Hurst v. Florida.

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