Wednesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS FEB 7, 2018 7:20 AM

In yet another redistricting ruling, the Supreme Court yesterday partially granted a request by North Carolina Republicans to block a decision by a three-judge federal court invalidating voting maps for the state’s General Assembly. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “[t]he justices seemed to split into three camps.”

Coverage continues of Monday’s order denying requests by Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers and voters to put a hold on a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that struck down Pennsylvania’s congressional district lines and ordered lawmakers to draw new maps. At Governing, Jonathan Lai and Liz Navratil report that “[t]he maps will play a large role in whether Democrats can gain any ground in the House.” Additional coverage comes from Lyle Denniston at Constitution Daily. At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie observes that “[i]t should not come as a shock that Justice Alito, who hears emergency requests from the federal circuit encompassing Pennsylvania, turned down Republicans’ demand to get involved in a state-law question over which the nation’s highest court has no jurisdiction.”

Briefly:

• Subscript offers a graphic explainer for Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in which the court will consider whether an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment.
• At E&E News, Amanda Reilly reports that “[t]he next big Supreme Court decision affecting the scope of the Clean Water Act may come from an unlikely source: a plaintiff’s fight to reduce a prison sentence for drug and weapons possession charges,” noting that “Hughes v. United States also centers on how lower courts interpret fractured Supreme Court decisions in which five of the court’s nine justices fail to come to an agreement,” such as “Rapanos v. United States, an infamously murky 2006 decision on Clean Water Act jurisdiction.”
• At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s blog, Deborah La Fetra urges the court to review a challenge to a Berkeley, California, “ordinance requiring all cell phone retailers to provide posters and other large documents warning against unsafe cell phone usage and including the city’s advice about ‘how to use your phone safely’”; she argues that “[s]o long as cell phone retailers comply with federal disclosure requirements, they have a First Amendment right to refrain from unwillingly parroting the government’s preferred speech.”

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