Wednesday round-up

Briefly:

• At CNN, Ariane de Vogue and Ted Barrett report that “Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a supporter of abortion rights who cast a critical vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said in an interview with CNN that despite his vote in a recent abortion access case, [June Medical Services v. Gee,] she did not believe Kavanaugh would ultimately vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
• At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston reports that “the Supreme Court on Monday set the stage for acting soon – probably on Friday – on the constitutional controversy over asking everyone living in America about their citizenship, as part of the 2020 census,” by “plac[ing] the census dispute on the agenda for the Justices’ private conference on Friday morning.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman tracks the involvement of “friends of the court” at the certiorari stage “in cases with direct financial implications that the justices later heard on the merits between the 2008 and 2018 Court terms.”
• NFIB weighs in on Kisor v. Wilkie, in which the justices will reconsider precedents that require courts to defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of its own regulations, arguing that those precedents “create[] a perverse incentive for federal agencies to use ambiguous language when promulgating regulations.”

• A Washington Legal Foundation program (video) assesses October Term 2018 at its midpoint.
• At ACS Blog, Sirine Shebaya maintains that the court’s 5-4 decision last week to allow Alabama to execute a Muslim inmate who had challenged the state’s refusal to permit an imam to be by his side when he died “signals that this Supreme Court majority is adopting a jurisprudence of religious liberty, not for all, but only for a chosen few.”
• At Law360 (subscription required), Jeff Overley reports that in Cochise Consultancy v. United States, ex rel. Hunt, “[t]he U.S. Department of Justice is endorsing a relatively long time limit for whistleblowers to launch False Claims Act suits, telling the U.S. Supreme Court that FCA cases not joined by the government don’t need to start sooner.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondent in this case.]

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!