Thursday round-up

For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that, “[s]aying the opioid crisis requires bold measures, the state of Arizona filed an audacious lawsuit in the Supreme Court on Wednesday asking the justices to order members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, to return what the state said were billions of dollars looted from the company.” Ariane de Vogue reports for CNN that “[l]egal experts say such a filing made directly with the Supreme Court is unusual,” because the “justices don’t like to be deprived of a lower court’s consideration of the issue.” Additional coverage comes from Anita Snow and Geoff Mulvihill at AP and from Howard Fischer at Capitol Media Services (via the Arizona Capitol Times).

Briefly:

• Jordain Carney reports at The Hill that “Senate Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment on Tuesday to undo the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision”: “The … amendment would let Congress and states set rules on spending and money in elections.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse writes that “[w]hat’s most troubling” about last week’s order allowing the government to spend Pentagon money to construct part of the border wall is “that even if five justices found the administration’s argument attractive or even compelling, the court’s unconditional surrender (even issuing the stay on the precise date the administration requested, July 26, and not a day later) was simply unnecessary.”
• At Justia’s Verdict blog, Vikram David Amar notes that “August 3 marks Stephen Breyer’s completion of 25 years of service as a justice.”
• In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Patt Morrison discusses a cert petition that asks for review of a “9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals [telling] Boise that it’s unconstitutional to stop the homeless from sleeping in public spaces if there’s not enough shelter available for them.”
• At his eponymous blog, Michael Dorf identifies “one likely long-term phenomenon on Roberts Court Version 8 (or possibly successive versions) that our current politics is masking”: “[F]or now, the politics of support for a Republican administration tempers the conservatives’ hostility to the administrative state. It won’t always.”
• At The Fire’s First Amendment News blog, Ronald Collins highlights two First Amendment cert petitions to watch next term.

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