“The president’s ability to nominate judges to lifetime appointments on the federal courts never came up during the two nights of debate this week involving the Democratic candidates,” the Washington Post reports.
“Over those same two days, the Senate confirmed 13 of President Trump’s judicial nominees, giving Republicans a remarkable 144 judicial appointments since his inauguration, allowing him to reshape the courts and their decisions for decades.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg came to the defense of her more conservative colleagues on the bench, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, CNN reports.
Said Ginsburg: “I can say that my two newest colleagues are very decent and very smart individuals.”
“There was a Senator, I think it was after the pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator whose name I’ve forgotten is now himself dead. And I am very much alive.”
— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an interview with NPR.
From a New York Times obituary of Justice John Paul Stevens:
“Justice Stevens was known around the court for treating others with sensitivity and respect. One former law clerk, Christopher L. Eisgruber, described in a 1993 essay an incident at a party for new clerks: Before Justice Stevens arrived, an older male justice had instructed one of the few female clerks present to serve coffee. When Justice Stevens entered, he quickly grasped the situation, walked up to the young woman and said: ‘Thank you for taking your turn with the coffee. I think it’s my turn now.’ He took over the job.”
Jeffrey Toobin: “It wasn’t just the Republican Party that evolved during Stevens’s thirty-four years on the Court (the third-longest tenure in history). Stevens moved left on some issues, especially the death penalty, which he came to see as an institution fatally at variance with the nation’s legal traditions. (Blackmun had reached the same conclusion, a few years earlier.) Still, it’s clear that the Republican Party changed more than Stevens did. The party of Donald Trump—and of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, his appointees to the Court—shares almost nothing with the humane ideological home of John Paul Stevens.”
“Trump is not a deep thinker about legal issues, but he understood politics well enough to know that he could prove himself to the right-wing base of his adopted party by embracing its extremist agenda for the Supreme Court. This commitment remains the core of his appeal to his party. In fact if not in words, Trump and his appointees are dedicated to overturning virtually everything that Stevens stood for as a Justice: equal rights for women, including the right to choose abortion; civil rights for gay people and for racial minorities, especially concerning the right to vote; a sensible understanding of the right to regulate guns under the Second Amendment (which Stevens, in retirement, called for repealing); separation of church and state; reasonable limits on the power of the Presidency.”
“John Paul Stevens, a moderate midwestern Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago who evolved into a savvy and sometimes passionate leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing and became the third-longest-serving justice on the high court before his retirement in 2010, died July 16 at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale,” the Washington Post reports.
He was 99.
Adam Liptak talks to Chris Riback: “It was the Supreme Court session Democrats feared and Republicans had waited a generation for – a solidly conservative 5-4 majority. So how’d it go?”
A new book, Justice on Trial, “has some colorful, behind-the-scenes details about the secret White House meeting where former Justice Anthony Kennedy told President Trump he was planning to retire,” Axios reports.
White House counsel Don McGahn “quietly arranged” that a White House car with a pre-cleared driver would take Kennedy to the White House, where then-chief of staff John Kelly had arranged for Trump “to leave his lunch promptly at one o’clock and come to the White House residence, where the justice would be waiting with McGahn.”
Washington Examiner: “Legal experts said that over his first term, Trump is expected to name some 250 judges to the Supreme Court, district courts, courts of appeals, and the U.S. Court of International Trade. Overall, there are 870 federal judges.”
Joe Biden told Iowa Starting Line that he might renominate 66-year old Merrick Garland, the federal judge who never made it to a Senate hearing when President Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court.
Said Biden: “Sure, I would. By the way, he’s a first-rate person.”
He also said he doesn’t favor expanding the Supreme Court: “I’m not prepared to go on and try to pack the court, because we’ll live to rue that day.”
“The Supreme Court is already poised to drop some big political bombshells right into the heat of the 2020 campaign. And there are even more waiting in the wings,” Axios reports.
The justices are likely to take up an abortion case out of Louisiana. And yet another challenge to the Affordable Care Act is also working its way through the system.
FiveThirtyEight: “Now that this year’s Supreme Court term is over, we know that Kavanaugh is shaping up to be a solidly conservative justice — he barely beat out Roberts as the court’s new median and voted most frequently with Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. And although Roberts did step several times into the role of ‘swing’ justice, he wasn’t the only conservative justice who joined the liberals over the course of the term.”
“Although he wasn’t in the middle ideologically, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s other nominee, was actually the most likely to join the liberals in closely decided cases. In fact, each of the conservative justices joined the liberals in a 5-4 or 5-3 decision at least once. With a newly cemented conservative majority on the court, the days of a single ‘swing’ justice may be over.”
Washington Post: “According to data compiled by Adam Feldman, who runs the website Empirical SCOTUS, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have disagreed more than any pair of new justices chosen by the same president in decades.”
“Kavanaugh was about as likely to be in sync with his liberal seatmate Elena Kagan as his fellow conservative Gorsuch, Feldman’s research shows.”
“The Supreme Court announced Friday it will take up next term whether the Trump administration illegally tried to end the program that shields from deportation young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children,” the Washington Post reports.
“A string of lower courts have said that President Trump’s decision to terminate the Obama-era program was based on faulty legal reasoning and that the administration has failed to provide a solid rationale for ending it.”
“The Supreme Court would likely render its verdict during the 2020 presidential election year.”
Rick Hasen: “The Supreme Court decision on Thursday in Rucho v. Common Cause purports to take federal courts out of the business of policingpartisan gerrymanders and leave the issue for states to handle.”
“But the decision will instead push federal courts further into the political thicket, and, in states with substantial minority voter populations, force courts to make logically impossible determinations about whether racial reasons or partisan motives predominate when a party gerrymanders for political advantage. It didn’t have to be this way.”
Former Reps. Steve Israel (D-NY) and Zach Wamp (R-TN) write in The Atlantic:
“Today’s Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution doesn’t bar even extreme partisan gerrymandering is the worst election-related decision since Citizens United, which in 2010 opened the floodgates for corporate money in campaigns. The Court just stacked the deck in favor of parties over voters—and laid the groundwork for yet more polarization.”
Rick Hasen: “Despite a favorable ruling for opponents of the census citizenship question on Thursday, the Supreme Court did not definitively decide to exclude citizenship question from the 2020 census.”
“Indeed, I expect that the Trump administration’s Commerce Department and Department of Justice could well be back before the Supreme Court’s next term begins in October arguing for the question’s inclusion, and they could well win and include the question.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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