Friday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS AUG 17, 2018 7:11 AM

At CNN, Lauren Fox and others report that “Senate Democrats are threatening to sue for documents related to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s record, the latest escalation in a partisan battle over the court.” Burgess Everett reports at Politico that “[t]he potential lawsuit would come right as Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings begin in early September.” Additional coverage comes from Kevin Daley at The Daily Caller, who calls the threat “one of the few procedural weapons Democrats can use to slow progress on a Supreme Court confirmation some see as inevitable.” At The Hill, Jordain Carney reports that “[t]he National Archives is distancing itself from President George W. Bush’s legal team as both groups work to hand over hundreds of thousands of documents tied to … Kavanaugh.” In an op-ed for The Washington Times, Matt Mackowiack maintains that “[t]he record will show that Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, is leading the most transparent confirmation process of all time.”

 At the Washington Examiner, Susan Ferrechio reports that “Senate Democrats say they are planning to meet with Brett Kavanaugh, adding to a short list of party lawmakers who have now sat down with President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.” Niels Lesniewsky reports at Roll Call that “Democratic senators have, at least from Republican states, started meeting with … Kavanaugh, but they are mostly avoiding the press when doing so.”

At The Hill, Jessie Hellmann reports that “[t]he possibility of another Trump nominee ascending to the Supreme Court bench has created a sense of urgency among abortion supporters in the states, where activists are pushing to safeguard access to the procedure.” For this blog, Charlotte Garden surveys Kavanaugh’s record in labor and employment cases. At The New Republic, Matt Ford presents “some questions that Democrats could ask Kavanaugh that he might feel compelled to answer, rather than parry,” at his confirmation hearing. At The Federalist, Chad Felix Green pushes back against claims that “Kavanaugh would allow a ‘license to discriminate’ that would affect the everyday lives of LGBT Americans.”

Briefly:

• For The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie explains that the outcome of Weyerhaeuser Company v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a challenge to the federal government’s critical-habitat designation for the dusky gopher frog that will be argued on the first day of October Term 2018,“will be important not only for the three-inch-long, warty, speckled frog but for the fate of a long-standing principle of judicial deference to federal agencies.”
• At The Federalist Society Review, Richard Raile argues that last term’s decision in partisan-gerrymandering case Gill v. Whitford “is not the meaningless punt it is advertised to be,” but instead “articulates principles that undermine partisan-gerrymandering theory at the most fundamental level” and “should be read to definitively end these claims.”
• For Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan looks at the evolving role of the solicitor general, who “remains, by a wide margin, the most frequent and influential advocate before the Supreme Court.”
• At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Political Insider blog, Tamar Hallerman reports that “[t]he latest chapter of Georgia’s long-running water rights battleagainst Florida has cost the state’s taxpayers nearly $50 million — a price tag that will undoubtedly rise after the Supreme Court punted the case earlier this summer,” but that “legal bills for the two states are likely to mount a little slower thanks to a decision quietly made by the justices late last week,” when they replaced the private attorney who had been serving as the special master with a federal judge.
• In an op-ed at USA Today, Jack Phillips, the cake artist at the center of last term’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case, explains that he is suing the Colorado state officials who are “attempting to punish me for declining to create a different custom cake — one that the customer admits was intended to express a message contrary to my faith.”

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