Friday round-up

For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “President Trump asked the Supreme Court Thursday to block New York prosecutors from obtaining eight years of his tax returns, setting up a landmark separation of powers battle.” Jess Bravin, Brent Kendall and Corinne Ramey report for The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that “[t]he filing marks a new phase in Mr. Trump’s battles with the judicial branch, thrusting the Supreme Court into the constitutional struggle between a norm-smashing president and law-enforcement authorities and congressional opponents.” At AP, Mark Sherman reports that “[a] second, similar case is headed to the court over a House committee subpoena demanding Trump’s financial records from the same accounting firm.”

At NPR, Nina Totenberg and Shontee Pant report that “[a] vast hall filled with members of the conservative Federalist Society Thursday night welcomed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a conquering hero, while outside on a large screen protesters played video from Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing of testimony by Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused him of sexual misconduct.” Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that Kavanaugh delivered “a self-effacing, 34-minute address almost completely devoid of controversial topics.”

Briefly:

• In two posts at Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy, here and here, Josh Blackman weighs in on Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, a challenge to the government’s decision to terminate the DACA program, which allowed immigrants brought to this country illegally as children to apply for protection from deportation.
• The latest episode of Law360’s The Term podcast focuses on the oral argument in the DACA case, along with “the court avoiding gun maker Remington’s bid to stop a lawsuit by the families of Sandy Hook victims and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s absence from the court on Wednesday.”
• At The Employment Law Group, R. Scott Oswald argues that Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, which involves pleading standards under a federal statute that prohibits race discrimination in contracting, “is a manifestly flawed vehicle for making law: A non-employment case that will impact mostly employment cases, concerning the dismissal of a complaint that omitted a key fact and was tainted by dubious insinuations, posing a false dichotomy between pleading standards that could be harmonized, and examining a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that added its own layer of shakiness.”

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