Tuesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JUL 2, 2019 7:03 AM

Yesterday the Supreme Court released its October argument calendar for next term. Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, that “[t]he justices will tackle one of the highest-profile issues of the term almost immediately, when they hear oral argument in a trio of cases involving whether federal employment-discrimination laws apply to LGBT employees.”

At Take Care, David Gans asserts that 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 the latest in a string of Roberts Court decisions that have failed to honor our Constitution’s democratic promise.” At Rewire.News, Suzanne Almeida writes that “the movement to end gerrymandering is far from over,” “because the U.S. Supreme Court decision does nothing to stop state-based, citizen-led efforts to give map-drawing power to the people.” At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin suggests that the political-question doctrine, on which the court relied in Rucho, “is an emperor walking around with no clothes.”

Joshua Matz explains at Take Care why, contrary to “articles and tweets [that] have celebrated the Chief Justice for his bravery, principle, and (long-delayed) unwillingness to accept pretextual reasons for a Trump Administration policy” in Department of Commerce v. New York, a challenge to the government’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, “it’s extremely likely that the citizenship question will appear on the 2020 census—and the Chief intended precisely that result.” At The Atlantic, Thomas Wolf and Brianna Cea maintain that “[i]n the process of reaching the right outcome [in the case], … the Court has rewritten history, with justices up and down the bench joining together to create an atmosphere of normalcy around a question that is anything but.”

Briefly:

• At NPR, Nina Totenberg offers six takeaways from the Supreme Court term that ended last week.
• At Irish Liquor Lawyer, Sean O’Leary explains why Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association v. Thomas, in which the court held that the Constitution bars states from imposing residency requirement for liquor licenses, “is a game changer.”
• At Stanford Law School’s Legal Aggregate blog, Suzanne Luban looks at United States v. Davis, in which the court held that the definition of “crime of violence” in the context of federal criminal prosecutions involving firearms is unconstitutionally vague, arguing that “[t]he 5-4 majority opinion, penned by Justice Gorsuch and joined by the Court’s liberal wing, … inspires hope that a dominant number of the current Court continues to uphold some measure of fairness in criminal law.”
• At Rewire.News, Jessica Mason Pieklo writes that the court’s order last week “reject[ing] an attempt by Alabama lawmakers to revive a state ban on the most common form of second-trimester abortion … is good news—to a point,” warning that “while the Court’s term ended without a major abortion rights case on its docket, that may be temporary.”
• In an op-ed for Forbes, Mark Chenoweth pushes back against Chief Justice John Roberts’ concurrence in Kisor v. Wilkie, in which the court declined to overrule prior precedent holding that courts should defer to an administrative agency’s reasonable interpretation of its own genuinely ambiguous regulation, maintaining that “a yawning constitutional chasm still separates Justice Kagan’s and Justice Gorsuch’s competing approaches to deference, however much the Chief Justice might wish to bridge the gulf.”

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