Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JUL 8, 2019 6:53 AM

For this blog, Amy Howe covers the government’s latest representations about its efforts to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census after the Supreme Court’s decision blocking the question. Bill Mears and Adam Shaw report for Fox News that “President Trump said he is considering using an executive order as one of several options,” and that “[a]ny executive order would almost certainly be challenged in court and would restart the litigation process all over again.” At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen remarks that although “[s]ome say the executive order could help things for the Administration, since the President is not subject to the Administrative Procedure Act and doesn’t have to offer reasons for his actions,” “the problem for the administration is that there are injunctions in place preventing the inclusion of the question, whether or not the APA applies.” Additional commentary comes from Kenneth Jost at Jost on Justice and Garrett Epps at The Atlantic.

Briefly:

• At Public Discourse, Derek Muller explains that “[t]he heart of the conflict between majority’s opinion and the dissenting opinion” in Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the court held that partisan-gerrymandering challenges to electoral maps are political questions that are not reviewable in court, “is a difference of visions of how the judiciary ought to interact with the electoral process.”
• At NPR, Nina Totenberg notes that court-watchers are engaging in “a lot of speculation about the motives of” Chief Justice John Roberts in the wake of Roberts’ opinions in the census and partisan-gerrymandering cases.
• Kevin Daley writes at The Daily Caller that a “forthcoming book on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court relays incendiary allegations about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes “the Court’s closest decisions [this term] in 5-4 and 5-3 splits,” noting that “[t]he Court with Kavanaugh is distinctly different from the Court with Kennedy” because “[t]here is no longer a clear swing vote.”

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