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      in US Politics

      Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court justice, dies aged 87

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg

      Stalwart of court’s liberal bloc had survived four cancer treatments
      Death of justice gives Trump chance of third appointment

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words – video obituary

      The supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of pancreatic cancer, the court said Friday. She was 87.
      Ginsburg was the second woman appointed to the court in history and became a liberal icon for her sharp questioning of witnesses and intellectually rigorous defenses of civil liberties, reproductive rights, first amendment rights and equal protections under the law.
      In a statement, the court said Ginsburg, who served more than 27 years on the bench, “died this evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington DC, due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer”.
      The chief justice, John Roberts, said that the nation “has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the supreme court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her – a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
      Her death thrust an immediate spotlight on who might fill the vacancy on the court, with just over six weeks before the election. The news was received with alarm by liberals and moderates who feared that Republicans would exploit the narrow window to install a third Donald Trump appointee on the supreme court.
      The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, pledged to get Trump a swift vote his supreme court pick. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell said. More

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      in US Politics

      What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death mean for the supreme court?

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg

      A replacement for the liberal justice could reshape the court for a generation, marking Trump’s most lasting legacy

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      Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words – video obituary

      The supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on Friday evening. As messages of grief and gratitude for her life and career swept the country, here’s a look at what the liberal icon’s death means for the supreme court and what happens next.
      What does this mean for the court?
      Ginsburg’s death has set up nothing short of a historic war for the future of the court – and American life under the law. Donald Trump and Republicans in the Senate are determined to replace Ginsburg with a conservative justice. Their doing so could decisively tilt the ideological balance of the court for a generation and would probably constitute the most lasting legacy of the Trump presidency.
      What’s at stake?
      Reproductive rights, voting rights, protections from discrimination, the future of criminal justice, the power of the presidency, the rights of immigrants, tax rules and laws, and healthcare for millions of vulnerable Americans, to name a few issues. Every big issue in American life is on the line.
      Why is so much at stake?
      Replacing Ginsburg with a young conservative justice would fundamentally shift the ideological balance of the court, creating a seemingly bulletproof conservative majority of five justices (excluding chief justice John Roberts, who would make six conservatives but who is seen by the far right as less reliable). This new majority could usher in a new legal landscape that could last at least 30 years.
      Didn’t Trump already appoint two justices?
      Yes, Trump appointed justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. But they replaced justices who were nominated by earlier Republican presidents. They have pulled the court right, but not as far right as replacing Ginsburg with a conservative would. Ginsburg was nominated by Bill Clinton in 1993.
      That sounds dramatic. Is it really such a big deal?
      Yes. An ideological tilt of this kind on the supreme court has not happened for 50 years. Since 1969, Republican presidents have appointed 14 out of 18 justices elevated to the court – but certain Republican appointments, such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter turned out to occupy moderate ground or even drift liberal on some issues. In the recent hyper-partisan age, that middle ground on the court has mostly disappeared.
      Can Trump and the Republicans pull this off?
      It’s not a sure thing. Any new appointment by Trump must be confirmed by straight majority vote in the Senate. Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said he would confirm a new justice before the election. But McConnell is working with a narrow 53-47 majority, and if Trump nominates a conservative with extreme views, confirmation might be more difficult.
      But yes, there is definitely the time and the will for Trump to pull this off. And the willingness of Republicans to violate every norm in the process should not be underestimated. The Republican senator Joni Ernst of Iowa said in July that a Trump pick could even be confirmed during a lame duck session of Congress, meaning after the 3 November election but before a new Senate is installed.
      Who will Trump pick?
      He’s released a list of potential picks, among them Amy Coney Barrett, 48, whom Trump appointed to the US court of appeals for the seventh circuit in 2017. Barrett worries progressives as a committed Roman Catholic with conservative views on social issues. At Barrett’s circuit court confirmation hearings, the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein expressed concern that the judge would be guided by church law instead of the constitution.
      “The dogma lives loudly within you and that’s a concern,” Feinstein said, “when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.”
      Astonishingly, earlier this month the president augmented the list with the names of three sitting Republican senators among 20 additional names, including Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, who then tweeted “It’s time for Roe v Wade to go”, referring to the landmark 1973 court ruling that led to the legalization of abortion in the US.
      Could Trump fail to confirm a Ginsburg replacement?
      Trump sees appointing conservative judges as a political winner with his base, and a third supreme court justice in his first term could help him win re-election.
      But the hypocrisy in a move by McConnell to confirm a Trump pick with so little time before the election – after McConnell blocked the Barack Obama nominee Merrick Garland in March 2016 on the grounds that “only” eight months remained before that year’s election – could be politically costly.
      Because McConnell might be more worried about helping Republican senators win in close races, allowing McConnell to keep his leadership post, than helping Trump win a long-shot race, the political will to push a Trump nominee through might falter.
      The resistance to the confirmation would be extreme and the political fight would be all-consuming.
      Just hours before Ginsburg died, moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had remarked hypothetically, it was reported on Friday evening, that she would not confirm a new justice until after the presidential inauguration in January, 2021.

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    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump expected to announce new list of potential supreme court justices

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      The White House is expected to announce a new list of potential supreme court justices as soon as Wednesday, a move designed to shore up conservative support for Donald Trump as his race for the White House against Joe Biden enters the final stretch.Trump’s decision to name a list of possible picks during the 2016 election is widely seen to have boosted support among conservatives otherwise queasy about backing him against Hillary Clinton. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both now on the court, were included on that list of reliably conservative picks.Last week, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, flagged the impending announcement, telling reporters: “You will see it soon.” On Tuesday, Politico reported that the list was imminent.Trump signaled he was compiling a new list after a pair of supreme court rulings went against his administration in June.The updated list is expected to include many of the 2016 lineup, including Raymond Kethledge, 53, an appeals court judge on the sixth circuit, and Amy Coney Barrett, 48, a member of the seventh circuit appeals court.Both were reported to have been close to being nominated when Kavanaugh was picked in late 2018, to fill a seat vacated by the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh, a former White House aide to George W Bush, was confirmed after contentious confirmation hearings featuring allegations of sexual assault, which he vehemently denied.After Trump’s two picks, conservatives hold a 5-4 majority on the supreme court, where seats are vacated by the retirement or death of an incumbent. Over the summer, the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, has announced health problems including treatment for cancer.Trump promotes his judicial appointments as perhaps his most important accomplishment. A Biden presidency, he warns, would mean more liberals on the highest court.But Trump’s appointees have not always performed as anticipated. This summer, for example, Gorsuch sided with the chief justice, John Roberts, and the liberal justices to guarantee protection from discrimination in the workplace for LGBTQ individuals – a disappointment to conservatives.Last month, Vice-President Mike Pence told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Roberts, who was appointed by George W Bush, had been “a disappointment to conservatives”.But Trump’s appointments to lower courts offer plentiful consolation. During his first term, nearly 200 judges have been installed with lifetime appointments.According to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center, in July there were 792 active judges across the three main tiers of the federal system.Of those, Trump has appointed 194, or 24% of the total. Barack Obama appointed the largest share of currently active federal judges, 39%. Of judges still sitting, George W Bush appointed 21% and 11% were appointed by Bill Clinton.Much smaller shares were appointed by George HW Bush (2%) and Ronald Reagan (2%). A single federal judge, Puerto Rico’s Carmen Consuelo Cerezo, dates her appointment to Jimmy Carter’s administration. More

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      in US Politics

      'We just keep fighting': behind an urgent, inspiring film about the ACLU

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      If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump would cement a campaign heralded by calling Mexicans rapists into policy, it was dispelled on 27 January 2017, when, to cap his first week in office, the president issued an executive order barring entrance from a slew of Muslim-majority countries. The so-called “Muslim travel ban” immediately roiled the country’s airports, as travelers were detained and families indefinitely separated in the midnight hours after the ban’s announcement. At the same time, protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn; as depicted in early scenes from The Fight, a new documentary on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a crowd cheered as lawyers got to messy, long-haul business of going to judicial war.Actor Kerry Washington, most recently of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and a producer on The Fight, watched on TV as the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, exited the courthouse to chants of “ACLU! ACLU!” and declared a temporary victory: those detained by the new administration in airports would not be deported. Gelernt’s breathless recounting of the injunction’s relief had the feel of a post-championship court-side interview, and it caught Washington’s eye. “They are going to be on the frontlines of all the most important battles that we’re going to be facing to defend our civil rights and civil liberties,” she recalled thinking to the Guardian. “Who’s going to be in the trenches with these guys capturing this war movie that’s unfolding in front of us?”In the crowd at the Brooklyn courthouse that night was Elyse Steinberg, a documentary film-maker captivated by the same determined exhilaration on Gelernt’s face. “When Lee got his victory and he emerged from the steps and I saw him with his fists raised high,” she told the Guardian, “I just felt like this is the film that we needed to make. We needed to be with the ACLU and the lawyers in this epic battle for civil liberties that was going to be raging for the next four years.”In the three and half years since Steinberg stood outside the courthouse, the ACLU has held the legal line against the civil rights assaults of the Trump administration, work that The Fight depicts as variously harried and routine for the Manhattan-based team of lawyers and deeply consequential for the clients they represent. The Fight, co-directed by Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres follows four pivotal court cases central to combatting the Trump administration’s racist, Maga-exclusive agenda: the separation of migrant families at the southern US border and the horrific, indefinite detention of children without their parents; a policy which allowed the Office of Refugee Resettlement to deny abortion access to an undocumented woman detained by Ice; the addition of a citizenship question to the decennial US census; and the blanket ban of transgender people from serving in the US military.In each case, The Fight reveals the work of an ACLU attorney, particularly under an administration whose policies are often enacted without regard for bureaucratic chaos, to be mostly a scramble: hustling through briefs, cramming in a hotel room the night before argument, hungrily reading just-downloaded PDFs. The moments of mundane work dilemmas – Gelernt finding a single workable outlet at Starbucks to charge his dying phone, the LGBT & HIV project attorney Joshua Block fussing with uncooperative Microsoft Word dictation, the voting rights lawyer Dale Ho accidentally misreading a consequential decision or saying goodnight to his kids during another long day on the road – paint a fuller picture of the work. They take the ACLU staff “from being these larger than life Avengers legal superheroes, which is what they are, to also being husbands and wives and moms and dads, regular folks who have figured out how to use their talent for good in the world”, said Washington.The unglamorousness of the hustle, or of the reproductive rights lawyer Brigitte Amiri’s celebratory “train wine” on the Amtrak back to New York after a favorable hearing, contrast sharply with the stakes of the court cases at hand. “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, then…when?” says Ho as he worked on a census decision which, had it been in favor of the administration, would have inaccurately skewed fair representation in Congress and federal funding for a decade to come. Amiri’s case – in which the federal government unlawfully barred an unidentified, undocumented asylum claimant for obtaining an abortion was “a harbinger of things to come”, she told the Guardian, as it preceded several states passing abortion restrictions or outright bans in 2019. More

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      in US Politics

      Roger Stone has escaped punishment for his crimes. Trump is sending a signal | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      At America’s birth, when delegates in Virginia were debating whether to ratify the constitution, a politician called George Mason had an objection. Mason, who was influential over the development of the bill of rights, wondered whether the presidential pardon power was too broad. Might not the president encourage people who worked for him to commit crimes, and then pardon them? If he could, there would be essentially no check on a president’s power to break the law. Given that sort of leeway, an unscrupulous president could “establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic”.Mason’s objection ought to concern us still today. Late on Friday, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, all but guaranteeing that Stone will never face justice for crimes he committed while obstructing an investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence agencies who attempted to tip the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Backlash to the decision has been swift, with Trump’s fellow Republican Mitt Romney condemning the president’s “unprecedented, historic corruption”.It is not quite true to say that there is no precedent for Trump’s act. As Mason foresaw, executive clemency has been misused by presidents throughout American history. George HW Bush pardoned six officials who had been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal – an act which may have been intended to cover up his own wrongdoing. George W Bush commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who obstructed a federal investigation into the illegal outing of a CIA operative who was critical of the Bush administration.This history doesn’t make Trump’s actions any less troubling. In fact, by revealing how little restraint there is on the use of executive clemency, it ought to make us worry how much further the president – whose disregard for political and constitutional norms truly is without precedent – might go in the future.Most presidents issue their most controversial pardons furtively, at the end of their terms in office. But Trump has reveled in his ability to toss aside the principle of the rule of law when it comes to his own allies. In 2017 he pardoned the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had violated the constitutional rights of countless Arizonans. During the Mueller investigation – which exposed evidence that Trump himself may have committed obstruction of justice, a crime for which he could still be charged after leaving office – the president issued a full pardon to Libby, seemingly with the sole purpose of sending the message that he would forgive those – like Stone – who committed obstruction to protect himself.A president who is willing to use executive clemency to forgive violations of constitutional rights and protect himself from the rule of law could become, as Mason foresaw, a monarch. At the Virginia ratifying convention, James Madison replied to Mason that such a president would surely face impeachment. But today’s Republican party has made it clear that it will protect Trump from impeachment even in the face of overwhelming evidence of his abuses of power. Instead, by refusing to convict, they licensed Trump to double down.As America moves towards an election which Trump looks on course to lose, he is likely to become even less inhibited. The issuing of pardons and commutations for crimes already committed might pale in comparison with crimes yet to come. Trump could seek, once again, to sway the outcome of the election, promising pardons to his co-conspirators. He could order, as he did outside the White House, security forces to be used to disperse protesters who came into the streets in response, then issue pardons for any crimes tried by court martial or in Washington DC’s highest court.The fact that Trump has rarely shown the focus, intelligence or competence necessary to pull off such a conspiracy is little comfort. What he lacks in these qualities he makes up for in brazenness, in loyal subordinates equally willing to subvert the rule of law, and in the possession of a compliant conservative politico-media apparatus that will rationalize any action he takes. He could do incalculable damage to confidence in American democracy and the rule of law before he is finally wrested from the White House.In this sense, Roger Stone is the canary in the coal mine. Trump’s ability and willingness to commute his sentence is a reminder that for all its genius, the American founding left behind a structure which can be exploited and abused by an unscrupulous president. As we live through what are hopefully the dying days of the presidency of the most unscrupulous of them all, we have to remain on our guard. Partly because of his fears over the pardon power, George Mason ultimately became one of only three of the framers of the constitution to refuse to sign the final document, believing it created a blueprint for tyranny. Proving him wrong requires constant vigilance, now and in the future. More