The morning read for Friday, September 19

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Without further ado, here’s the Friday morning read:

• The Roberts Court is Doing Its Job (Jonathan H. Adler, The Dispatch) and The Supreme Court’s Trump Collusion (Erwin Chemerinsky, The Dispatch) — The latest entries in The Dispatch’s Debate Series center on the Supreme Court. Jonathan H. Adler and Erwin Chemerinsky hashed out their conflicting views on whether the justices are responding appropriately to the second Trump administration, with Adler defending the court and Chemerinsky criticizing it. Both men reflected on the state of the separation of powers, with Adler contending that judicial overreach and congressional inaction are bigger problems than recent emergency docket decisions and Chemerinsky contending that “the high court has made it far more difficult to restrain Trump’s unconstitutional actions.”
• On Constitution Day, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett discusses new book, keeping things cordial on the bench (Cory Sharber, WHYY) — Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book tour brought her to Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center on Wednesday, where she helped mark Constitution Day. Among other topics, she spoke about how Justice Antonin Scalia inspired her memoir and why writing an opinion in emergency docket cases “isn’t always the best course,” according to WHYY. “To write an opinion on which you can get a majority, five people agreeing takes time,” Barrett said. “The process can be very arduous. You’ve got a lot of cooks in the kitchen. … And the point of the emergency docket is to move quickly.”
• How Supreme Court may get chance to reexamine landmark climate ruling (Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette) — The Supreme Court soon could get a chance to revisit its landmark 2007 decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency has “the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” according to The Harvard Gazette. The Trump administration has signaled that it plans to repeal a variety of emissions regulations and rescind “the endangerment finding,” the legal basis for past administrations’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Such a move would likely prompt lawsuits on the government’s responsibilities under the Clean Air Act.
• Jimmy Kimmel Has Supreme Court Precedent on His Side (Aziz Huq, Politico) — In an opinion column for Politico, legal scholar Aziz Huq contended that comedian Jimmy Kimmel should sue the Trump administration over his suspension from late-night television. “The constitution doesn’t guarantee Kimmel a talk show, but it does guarantee that the government won’t quash his speech because of what he chooses to say. Kimmel now has a straightforward suit for damages and forward-looking relief that he can and should file — not just against ABC, but also against the government officials who were the driving force for his embarrassing public disciplining,” said Huq.
• The Case for Protecting the Apaches’ Oak Flat (Mark Rienzi and G. Marcus Cole, Wall Street Journal) — On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published a response to former U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s recent column on the Western Apache’s effort to block a proposed mining project in Arizona, in which he contended that “no one has the right to demand perpetual access to federal property, for religious worship or any other purpose.” Authors Mark Rienzi and G. Marcus Cole criticized Barr’s claims about the scope of religious freedom protections, noting that his views were “rejected” by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch when they dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the Apaches’ case. “Mr. Barr suggests that governing would be ‘impossible’ if anyone could simply ‘deem’ a site ‘sacred.’ But that’s a straw man. The reason religious-freedom law protects Oak Flat is that Apaches use that discrete location for irreplaceable religious ceremonies—and the government’s proposal would obliterate it,” Rienzi and Cole wrote.