Wednesday round-up

For The Washington Post, Elise Viebeck and Gabriel Pogrund report that “[a] Republican senator whose vote could ensure the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh” — Sen. Susan Collins of Maine – “offered an upbeat assessment of their meeting Tuesday, highlighting the judge’s statement that the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion is ‘settled law.’” Additional coverage comes from Scott Detrow at NPR , Natalie Andrews and Byron Tau for The Wall Street Journal, Sheryl Gay Stolberg for The New York Times, and the Associated Press. At The Hill, Tal Axelrod reports that “[a] Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday shows a plurality of Maine voters want … Collins … to reject Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and many will be less likely to support her for reelection if she votes to confirm him.” Megan Keller reports at The Hill that “Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on Tuesday said that he thinks a ‘smelly special interest network’ of dark money was involved in Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination process.”

In an op-ed for The Hill, Steven Calabresi refutes “criticism of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court [charging] that his references to constitutional originalism suggest he would reach a series of bad results in certain cases.” At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern suggests that “[a]side from the looming election,” “there is one clear reason” why the Republicans are “so eager to push through Kavanaugh’s nomination before the documents [from the nominee’s days in the White House counsel’s office] are released”: “The Supreme Court has stacked its October docket with major cases that will require Kavanaugh’s vote for a conservative victory.”

Briefly:

• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman “examine[s] aspects of the petitions the justices will review [at their ‘long conference’] in September and then focuses on forty of the petitions that have a higher than normal likelihood of success.”
• At ACS Blog, Lawrence Fox maintains that Lacaze v. Louisiana, a pending cert petition, “is a perfect vehicle for the U.S. Supreme Court to address when a judge must disclose his personal interests in a given case and recuse himself.”
• For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that although “[t]he Constitution should mean the same thing in Arizona as it does in Texas,” “federal appeals courts have issued starkly different rulings about whether border guards … can be held to account for shootings across the Mexican border that took the lives of two teenagers”; the Supreme Court has already been asked to review one of the cases, Hernandez v. Mesa.

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