Friday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS NOV 23, 2018 7:41 AM

At NPR, Nina Totenberg reports that “[i]n a rare moment of direct criticism, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked President Trump on Wednesday for the president’s description of a federal judge who ruled against his asylum policy as ‘an Obama judge,’” and that “[w]ithin hours, the president fired back on Twitter, launching an unusual conflict between the executive and judicial branches.” At AP, Mark Sherman reports that “[b]efore now, it has been highly unusual for a president to single out judges for personal criticism[, a]nd a chief justice’s challenge to a president’s comments is downright unprecedented in modern times.” Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal that “[f]ollowing previous presidential attacks on the judiciary, Chief Justice Roberts has remained publicly silent.” Additional coverage of the back-and-forth comes from Adam Liptak for The New York Times, Robert Barnes for The Washington Post, Matthew Choi at Politico, Lyle Denniston at Constitution Daily, Lydia Wheeler at The Hill, John Bowden, also at The Hill, Pete Williams at NBC News, Jonathan Allen, also at NBC News, and Vanessa Romo at NPR. For The Washington Post, Fred Barbash writes that “[a]s unusual as Roberts’s comments were, he could have said so much more.”

Briefly:

• At The Hill, Lydia Wheeler reports on reactions to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent health scare, noting that “the repercussions of Trump appointees are why some on the left have criticized Ginsburg and 80-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer – another aging member of the court’s liberal wing – for not stepping down when former President Obama was in office.”
• At the Council of State Governments Knowledge Center blog, Lisa Soronen looks at the recent cert grant PDR Network, LLC v. Carlton & Harris Chiropractic Inc., a dispute over “junk faxes” in which the lower court required “blind adherence to an agency order.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse remarks that “someone was missing” from the conservative Federalist Society’s gala banquet last week: Roberts, who, “despite being one of the most reliable conservatives in recent Supreme Court history, has paid a heavy price for the two times during his 13-year tenure that he departed from conservative orthodoxy.”
• At High School SCOTUS, Anna Salvatore interviews SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein “about his teenage years, his internship for Nina Totenberg, and his recent challenge to the Attorney General’s appointment.”
• In an op-ed for The Hill, Alan Dershowitz maintains that it would be “a serious mistake[], both legally and politically,” for Congress to investigate or impeach Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

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