Wednesday round-up

For The Washington Post, Seung Min Kim reports that “[s]enators escalated a bitter dispute over Brett M. Kavanaugh’s documents” yesterday, as “Senate Democrats, infuriated with Republicans for requesting only a portion of Kavanaugh’s records from his tenure in the George W. Bush White House, sent a wide-ranging request demanding that his entire paper trail be provided to Congress.” Stephen Dinan reports for The Washington Times that “[t]he National Archives on Monday released the first big batch of documents from … Kavanaugh’s time in the independent counsel’s office in the 1990s,” which “show … Kavanaugh’s role in negotiating with Congress over what information the independent counsel would make public during its investigation.” Also for The Washington Times, Alex Swoyer reports that Republicans “are ramping up pressure” on Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.V., “the first Democrat to speak with Judge Kavanaugh, breaking with party leaders who urged a freeze on such meetings.” The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal remarks that “Kavanaugh’s march to confirmation advanced Monday when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul announced his support.”

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that “Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment.” At Take Care, Helen Marie Berg and others document statements showing that “the case made for Kavanaugh before the President officially announced the nomination differs markedly from the case made for Kavanaugh after the President officially announced the nomination.” In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Patrick Purtill maintains that “belief in the broad power of the executive is more deeply rooted in the legislative and judicial branches, who have helped create it, than it is in Kavanaugh.” At Real Clear Policy, Adam White writes that on constitutional and regulatory issues, “Kavanaugh has become the intellectual leader of his generation of judges on the lower courts,” as shown by “[t]hose cases in which Judge Kavanaugh’s analysis was adopted by the Supreme Court even after Kavanaugh’s colleagues on the D.C. Circuit rejected it.”

Briefly:

• At the Harvard Law Review Blog, Guy-Uriel Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer call “[t]he Roberts Court’s election law jurisprudence … a puzzle to scholars of the Court,” citing “[t]he recent decision in Abbott v. Perez approving Texas’s racially discriminatory redistricting plan” as “another data point” that belies the “purported aspiration” of “[t]he conservative Justices … to approach their task modestly, invoking analogies to baseball umpires and the duty to call balls and strikes.”
• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Will Baude highlights a new law review article co-written with Eugene Volokh in which the two take issue with the court’s ruling in mandatory-union-fees case Janus v. AFSCME, arguing that “compelling people to give money, by itself, is not a First Amendment problem but is rather akin to taxation.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up.  If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!