Monday round-up

At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court enters the homestretch of its term with looming decisions that could affect the 2020 election and thrust the court even deeper into the nation’s political wars,” and he highlights the cases that “will be atop the court’s agenda this month.” Ariane de Vogue reports for CNN that “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned on Friday that the court is likely to be sharply divided in the coming weeks over some of the ‘most watched’ cases that remain — perhaps even giving a clue to how justices will rule on the fight over the 2020 census.” Adam Liptak suggests for The New York Times that “[t]here was little in [Ginsburg’s] remarks to hearten liberals.” At her eponymous blog, Amy Howe reads the tea leaves to predict which justices may be writing which majority opinions in some of the court’s outstanding cases.

Briefly:

• Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that although “[w]hat the public sees of the Supreme Court is mostly above-the-belt – literally and figuratively,” “in [the justices’] written opinions and dissents, things have gotten a bit snippy.”
• At NPR, Nina Totenberg reports that “on Friday, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and NPR filed a motion with the Supreme Court requesting it unseal the material that was blocked from public view” in the case of Christopher Price, who was put to death last month after the court denied his request for a stay of execution.
• Ari Berman writes at Mother Jones that the census-citizenship dispute is “not the only pending Supreme Court case in which Thomas Hofeller, the late redistricting guru, was involved”: “The court is considering two lawsuits over extreme gerrymandering in which Hofeller played a key role in drawing maps to help Republicans.”
• At American Greatness, Ken Masugi calls Justice Clarence Thomas’ “reply to the leading threat to the principles of the Declaration of Independence” in abortion case Box v. Planned Parenthood, in which the court declined to disturb a lower-court ruling striking down Indiana’s ban on abortions based on the disability, sex or race of the fetus, Thomas’ “latest attempt in a career of restoring [that document’s] authority.”
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost considers various proposals for depoliticizing the Supreme Court, concluding that “the path to Supreme Court reform begins and ends at the ballot box.”

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