Tuesday round-up
on Sep 26, 2017 at 7:43 am
After Sunday’s imposition of new restrictions on entry into the United States by nationals from eight countries, the Supreme Court yesterday removed the pending entry-ban cases from the October argument calendar and directed the parties to address the effect on the cases of both the new order and the scheduled October 24 expiration of the refugee provisions in the previous order. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. Additional coverage comes from Laura Meckler and Brent Kendall in The Wall Street Journal, Richard Wolf in USA Today, Ariane de Vogue at CNN, Gary Gately at Talk Media News, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Robert Barnes and Devlin Barrett in The Washington Post, and Josh Gerstein at Politico, who reports that “the Supreme Court’s new order seems to be a signal that at least some justices are eager to get rid of the pending cases without deciding them on the merits.” In The New York Times, Michael Shear, Ron Nixon and Adam Liptak report that dismissal of the cases as moot “would allow [President Donald Trump] to avoid a definitive ruling on whether he had violated the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom and exceeded his statutory authority to control the country’s borders, as civil rights lawyers had argued.”
Yesterday the justices convened for the first time since June for their “long conference,” at which they considered the hundreds of cert petitions they received over the summer. Surveys of some of the notable petitions come from Kevin Daley at The Daily Caller, who notes that so far “the Court has accepted a paltry 32 cases, less than half the number of cases they typically hear over the course of a term,” and Scott Bomboy at Constitution Daily, who reports that “[d]uring the long conference, the Justices will accept more cases than usual but also reject a much-higher percentage than usual, because of the sheer bulk of the cases before them.”
Counting to 5 (podcast) features a discussion of Epic Systems v. Lewis, in which the court will decide whether employment agreements that ban collective resolution of workplace disputes violate federal employment laws, which will be argued on October 2, the first day of the new Supreme Court term. At his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel notes that, because the Department of Justice switched sides in the case after the change in administration, “we will have the rare treat of watching the US Solicitor General arguing in favor of the employers and the NLRB’s General Counsel arguing in favor of the NLRB and the employees.”
The Associated Press reports that “opponents are lining up to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out Ohio’s system for removing inactive voters from the rolls,” filing amicus briefs in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. Additional coverage comes from John Myers in the Los Angeles Times, who reports that California is one of 11 states that filed a brief opposing the Ohio system, and from Sabrina Eaton at Cleveland.com, who reports that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) also filed a brief in support of the challengers.
In The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that “extraordinary developments in Wisconsin,” where partisan-gerrymandering case Gill v. Whitford arose, “have given the public an inside look at what usually is a top-secret process — and confirmation of the adage that in redistricting, legislators choose their constituents, not the other way around.” At Slate, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, argues that “[j]ust by changing how district lines are drawn—without persuading a single voter—gerrymandering warps the entire political system,” and that without “judicial intervention …, in gerrymandered states, the government will persistently flout the public will.”
Briefly:
- At Law.com, Marcia Coyle and Tony Mauro report on several Supreme Court-related projects that “will soon be coming to the big and small screens.”
- At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps laments that “as the first Monday in October, which opens the Supreme Court’s 2017-18 term, bears down upon us,” “[n]ot since the New Deal crisis of 1937 has the Supreme Court been so clearly revealed to the world as fully enmeshed in the rankest partisan politics.”
- At The Federalist, Margot Cleveland argues that the free-speech right asserted in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court will decide whether the First Amendment allows a state to require a Christian baker to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, is “a breastplate for believers who seek protection from laws which would require them to violate their conscience, as such protection is no longer offered by the Free Exercise Clause of the constitution.”
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