Thursday round-up

At The Federalist, Margot Cleveland notes that although the justices denied cert this week in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, which asks whether federal law prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, “[t]he Supreme Court … will need to eventually resolve the circuit split and it’s likely to have that opportunity soon.” Lisa Keen discusses the cert denial in Evans at Keen News Service.

In two posts at the Election Law Blog, Nicholas Stephanopolous comments on the term’s two partisan gerrymandering cases, Gill v. Whitford, a Democratic challenge to Wisconsin’s statewide electoral maps, and Benisek v. Lamone, a challenge by Republican voters to a single congressional district in Maryland. Stephanopolous maintains here that “had the plaintiffs [in Benisek] attacked Maryland’s entire congressional map, they (likely) would have been entitled to prevail under the test adopted by the Whitford trial court.” Here, he elaborates on the convergences and divergences between the plaintiffs’ approaches in the two cases.
Briefly:

• At Powerline, Jim Hinderaker urges the court to“begin the process of reining in the out of control federal bureaucracy” by reviewing and reversing a lower-court decision that “upheld Fish and Wildlife’s designation of uninhabitable, privately-owned land as ‘critical habitat’ for the dusky gopher frog.”
• At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley explains why “Doug Jones’ victory in Tuesday’s special Senate election in Alabama may change Justice Anthony Kennedy’s calculus as he mulls retirement.”
• The editorial board of The Washington Post weighs in on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court will decide whether the First Amendment bars Colorado from requiring a baker to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, arguing that “politeness and tolerance are social values, not legal principles,” and “[t]hey are not reasons to overturn anti-discrimination law.”

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