US supreme court

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The Agenda review: why Biden must expand the supreme court – fast

      by

      If Congress follows Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief bill with an even more ambitious infrastructure bill, the new president could quickly claim the mantle of most transformative president since Franklin D Roosevelt.But this short, powerful new book by the legal journalist Ian Millhiser pinpoints the gigantic threat that could thwart most of the progress embodied in those two pieces of landmark legislation: the new 6-3 conservative majority on the supreme court.Writing clearly and succinctly, Millhiser dissects many of the worst opinions the modern court has rendered about voting rights, administrative law, religion and forced arbitration. After reading his cogent arguments, it becomes perfectly obvious why he thinks it’s necessary to end “with a note of alarm”.The extreme conservatives now steering the highest court may pose the single greatest “existential threat to the Democratic party’s national ambitions – and, more importantly, to liberal democracy in the United States … a Republican supreme court will fundamentally alter the structure of the American system of government” and “is likely to build a nation where … only conservatives have the opportunity to govern”.Trump’s greatest (and worst) achievement was the appointment of 234 federal judges, including three on the supreme courtHow radical are these justices? When the American Bar Association polled experts, 85% of them predicted all or most of the Affordable Care Act would be upheld. Then four supreme court justices voted to repeal it in its entirety. Clarence Thomas has suggested his predecessors were absolutely right to strike down child labor laws more than a century ago. The conservative justices on the current court rarely side with their liberal colleagues in 5-4 decisions – Samuel Alito has never done so. Chief Justice John Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and many observers think he is likely to join his newest colleague, Amy Coney Barrett, in a ruling this term that could complete the evisceration of the landmark civil rights legislation.Of course, most of the damage to voting rights has been done – and scores of state legislatures are poised to follow the loathsome example of Georgia by doing everything they can to make minority voting every more difficult than it already is.Millhiser does an especially good job of explaining the catastrophic effect of Roberts’ decision to no longer allow the justice department to require local jurisdictions to submit proposed voting rights law changes before they go into effect.This, he writes, gave state lawmakers “a profound incentive to enact gerrymanders and other forms of voter suppression even if those laws will ultimately be invalidated by a court order”, because “if the state gets to run just one rigged election under the invalid law”, it will already have advanced the racist goals of the law’s authors.Millhiser’s book is bulging with examples that prove that the same Republican justices who proclaim the need to rein in the executive branch whenever there is a Democrat in the White House have no trouble at all ignoring their imaginary “judicial philosophies” – as soon, say, as a Republican such as Donald Trump asserts a unilateral right to ban Muslims from entering the US.Trump’s greatest (and worst) achievement was the appointment of 234 federal judges, including three for the supreme court and 54 for the courts of appeals. This means there is only one Biden administration initiative which is potentially even more important than the Covid and infrastructure bills.It is the newly appointed commission charged with carrying out Biden’s campaign promise to investigate whether or not membership of the supreme court should be expanded – something that can be accomplished by a simple act of Congress.It’s no coincidence that Millhiser started making smart arguments to expand the court two years ago.In the words of Aaron Belkin, whose advocacy group Take Back the Court pushed for the rapid creation of the new commission, the current court “is a danger to the health and wellbeing of the nation and even to democracy itself”.“This White House judicial reform commission has a historic opportunity to both explain the gravity of the threat and to help contain it,” Belkin told USA Today.This great short book makes it clear that the breadth of the new commission’s ambitions and the success of the Biden administration in carrying them out will be more important to our nation’s future than everything else the president and Congress accomplish. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden orders commission to study supreme court expansion and reform

      by

      Joe Biden on Friday ordered a study of adding seats to the supreme court, creating a bipartisan 36-member commission that will spend the next six months examining the politically incendiary issues of expanding the court and instituting term limits for its justices.The executive order fulfills a campaign promise to examine court reform, including expanding the number of justices or setting term-limits, amid growing calls from progressive activists to realign the supreme court after its composition tilted sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency. Biden has not said whether he supports expanding the court, also known as “court packing”.Trump appointed three justices to the high court. One was a seat that Republicans had blocked Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, from filling. Despite arguing in 2016 that the seat should be filled by winner of the year’s presidential election, Republicans rushed to fill the supreme court seat vacated by death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 election.The result was one of the most ideologically conservative courts in modern times.Biden’s executive order directs the commission to complete its report within 180 days of its first meeting. But it was not charged with making a recommendation under the White House order that created it.The panel is composed of a “bipartisan group of experts” that includes constitutional and legal scholars; former federal judges; practitioners who have appeared before the court as well as reform advocates.The commission co-chairs are Bob Bauer, professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law and a former White House counsel for Obama, as well as the Yale Law School professor Cristina Rodriguez, former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel at the US Department of Justice under Obama.The commission will hold public meetings appraising the “merits and legality of particular reform proposals”, according to the White House.The announcement comes after the supreme court justice Stephen Breyer warned this week that efforts to expand the court could erode public “trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics”.The remarks by Breyer, 82, the court’s oldest justice and a member of its minority liberal bloc, prompted calls for his resignation from reform advocates while Democrats still control the Senate and the confirmation process. Demand Justice, a progressive group focused on the supreme court, started an online petition calling for his retirement.“Tell Justice Breyer: put the country first. Don’t risk your legacy to an uncertain political future. Retire now,” the petition states.If an opening should arise, Biden has promised to appoint the nation’s first ever Black female justice.On Friday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that Biden was not pushing for Breyer to retire.“He believes that’s a decision Justice Breyer will make when he decides it’s time to no longer serve on the supreme court,” she said.During his presidential campaign, Biden repeatedly sidestepped questions on expanding the court. A former chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Biden has asserted that the system of judicial nominations is “getting out of whack”, but has not said if he supports adding seats or making other changes to the current system of lifetime appointments, such as imposing term limits.The size of the court has been set at nine members since just after the civil war. Any effort to alter it would be explosive, particularly at a moment when Congress is nearly evenly divided. Changing the number of justices would require congressional approval.“With five justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, it’s crucial that we consider every option for wresting back political control of the supreme court,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group.“President Biden’s commission demonstrates a strong commitment to studying this situation and taking action.”Associated Press contributed to this report More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue review: how Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed America

      by

      Two and a half years ago, at a naturalization ceremony for newly minted Americans, Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked: “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a supreme court justice?”Her answer: “One generation … the difference between opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.”From this new selection of Ginsburg’s arguments, speeches and opinions – the justice’s greatest hits – it is clear she deserves at least as much credit as any other American for that remarkably rapid transformation.This book is full of evidence that even in a nation like ours, where over the last 50 years the concentration of power in the hands of the top 1% has steadily worsened, a brilliant and determined individual with the right alliances can still bring about extraordinary change within her own lifetime.The book’s co-author, Amanda L Tyler, writes that Ginsburg’s work for gender equality is comparable to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s trailblazing quest to dismantle segregation.The burning determination of the gay activist Frank Kameny similarly transformed the status of LGBTQ people – and Ginsberg’s commitment to equal rights for all meant that she ended up doing just as much to expand the rights of sexual minorities as she did for the rights of women.Looking back from the third decade of the 21st century, the breadth and depth of the discrimination women of Ginsberg’s generation faced at the beginning of their careers is astonishing.Harvard Law School never allowed a woman student until 1950. When Ginsburg entered, in 1956, she was one of just nine women in a class of 500. Across America, women were routinely excluded from jury pools. Through the 1960s, the supreme court even declined to disturb a law that prohibited women from bartending “unless they did so under the auspices of a husband or father”.In 1963, when she started teaching law at Rutgers, Ginsburg was only the 19th woman professor at an American law school – and the dean proudly disobeyed the newly passed Equal Pay Act by paying her much less than her male colleagues, because she had a “husband with a well-paid job”.Ginsburg’s determination was obvious. When she was still in law school, her husband, Marty, developed a virulent form of cancer. They also had an infant daughter. But neither handicap prevented her or her husband from excelling in their studies and she actually described her child-rearing duties as an advantage in law school, because they gave her a more balanced life than most of her classmates.“Each part of my life was a respite from the other,” Ginsberg explained, six decades later. “After an intense day at the law school, I was glad to have the childcare hours. And then when Jane went to bed, I was ready to go back to the books. I think it was an appreciation that there is more to life than law school that accounts for how well I did.”In one of the first cases she litigated with her husband, in 1971, Moritz v Commissioner of Internal Revenue, they argued that Charles Moritz, a never-married man who cared for his mother, was denied a caregiver deduction a woman in his position would have received.Congress amended the law to permit all caregivers to claim the deduction going forward, but the government kept the appeal going anyway. It was then that Ginsburg received her greatest gift from her adversary: a list of every provision in the United States Code that differentiated on the basis of sex.“There it was, right in front of us,” she recalled, “all the laws that needed to be changed or eliminated … it was our road map, a pearl beyond price, that list of federal statutes.”In the 60s, excelling in law school didn’t mean a woman would be a strong candidate to be hired by any of the fanciest firms. But in retrospect Ginsberg agreed with the first woman on the supreme court, Sandra Day O’Connor, that even this kind of adversity had its advantages.Ginsburg often repeated O’Connor’s comment: “Suppose you and I had gone to law school … when there was no barrier to women in the legal profession. Where would we be now? We would be retired partners of a large law firm.” But because they had to find a different path, “both of us ended up on the US supreme court.”This book is also a reminder of the wisdom of Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian, who noted just two years after Ginsburg was appointed to the court that “ours is a time which, with all its agonies, has … been marked most of all by liberation” – black liberation, women’s liberation and gay liberation.“Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred,” Scully said. “Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.”Ginsberg’s energy and perspicacity gave her a singularly important role in bringing about many of those fundamental changes. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court could deal blow to provision protecting minority voters

      by

      The US supreme court will hear a case on Tuesday that could allow the court’s conservative majority to deal a major blow to the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law designed to prevent racial discrimination in voting.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe case, Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, involves a dispute over two Arizona measures. One is a 2016 law that bans anyone other than a close family member or caregiver from collecting absentee ballots, sometimes called ballot harvesting. The second is a measure that requires officials to reject ballots cast in the wrong precinct, even if the voter has cast a vote in statewide races.Arizona rejected more than 38,335 ballots cast in the wrong precinct between 2008 and 2016 and minority voters were twice as likely as white voters to have their ballots rejected, the DNC noted in its brief. Minority voters, including the state’s Native American population, are disproportionately harmed by the ballot collection ban because they are more likely to lack reliable mail service.The DNC argues that the policies violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting laws that discriminate based on race. A trial court ruled in 2018 that the policies did not violate the law, and a three-judge panel on the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit later upheld that ruling. But the full circuit voted to rehear the case and last year found that the policies did violate the Voting Rights Act. Now, the Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, and the Arizona Republican party are appealing that ruling to the US supreme court.And though the facts in the case are about Arizona, the stakes could extend far beyond it. Brnovich and the Arizona Republican party are urging the court to use the case as a vehicle for announcing a narrower view of section 2 than the one currently in use.Such a ruling would take away one of most powerful tools that voting rights groups have to challenge discriminatory voting laws. Section 2 was elevated after the supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder that struck down another Voting Rights Act provision requiring certain places with a history of voting discrimination, including Arizona, to submit voting laws to the federal government for pre-clearance before they went into effect.“Without preclearance on the books, we’ve all had to rely more heavily on section 2 in order to address racial discrimination in voting,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who helped author an amicus brief in the case in support of the DNC’s position. “If section 2 is limited, then we have even fewer tools.”Losing the full power of section 2 would also make it harder for litigants, including the justice department, to challenge the wave of restrictive bills bubbling in Georgia and other state legislatures that would make it harder to vote, added Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which also filed an amicus brief in support of the DNC.The case arrives at a supreme court where conservatives now have a powerful 6-3 majority that appears increasingly hostile to voting rights. It repeatedly refused to expand access to the ballot during the pandemic last year. And since its decision in Shelby County v Holder, the court has given the green light to aggressive voter purging and severe partisan gerrymandering.Brnovich and the Arizona GOP want the supreme court to clarify the approach courts should take when they are evaluating whether a law violates section 2. Brnovich is also asking the supreme court to set a high bar for minority voters and their lawyers to clear in order to prove that a law runs afoul of section 2. Generally, he argues that courts should use an approach for evaluating section 2 claims that would make it harder to challenge facially neutral measures, such as voter ID laws, that do not explicitly make it harder for a specific group to vote. And if minority voters are able to prove that a law has a “substantial disparate impact” on them, Brnovich argues, they should be required to show that disparity is directly connected to the voting policy.But discriminatory voting laws often don’t work that way. There is a long history in the US of using policies that, taken in a vacuum, appear racially neutral because they apply to everyone, but are designed to interact with economic, social and other factors to make it harder to vote, LDF wrote in its amicus brief. Literacy tests and property requirements, the suppressive devices used in Jim Crow, applied to everyone, but made it harder for Black voters to register because of unequal education and economic factors, the group noted.“You’re talking about two very specific voting laws that have a really obvious connection to the history of discrimination against indigenous, Black and brown voters in this state,” said Allison Riggs, the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which filed an amicus brief in support of the DNC’s position. “Poverty, lack of transportation, lack of access to flexible work and living wages is why out of precinct voting is important and why ballot collection, particularly on indigenous lands is so important.”One of the most interesting votes in the case will be that of Chief Justice John Roberts. When he authored the Shelby opinion in 2013, he specifically pointed to section 2 as one of the most powerful tools still in place to combat voting discrimination. But in 1982, then a young lawyer in the justice department, he strongly advocated against expanding section 2 and keeping it only limited to cases in which there was evidence of intentional discrimination. Roberts ultimately lost the argument.Democrats argue in their brief that Arizona is proposing an “overly narrow” way of looking at section 2. The ninth circuit, Democrats say, appropriately analyzed the measures, finding that it disproportionately affected minority voters and worked in combination with social and historical conditions in Arizona to make it harder for those voters to cast a ballot.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, noted in a blogpost last month that voting rights litigators have generally been hesitant about pushing section 2 claims too far. The Democratic party, he wrote, didn’t seem to have that concern in this case, opening up an opportunity for Republicans to narrow the law.“Section 2 has done important work to rein in some of the worst forms of vote denial in recent years, and it would be a tremendous shame if this overreach of a case ends up serving as the vehicle to eviscerate what remains of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement,” he wrote in a post on SCOTUSBlog.In December, Donald Trump’s justice department filed an amicus brief backing Brnovich and endorsing a narrower framework for interpreting section 2. But in February, the Biden administration filed a letter with the court abandoning that position. The justice department said it still believed the Arizona measures did not violate the Voting Rights Act, but no longer backed the framework for interpreting section 2 put forth by the Trump administration.There are multiple ways the court could choose to rule in the case without weakening the scope of section 2. Morales-Doyle, the Brennan Center attorney, said he hoped the court recognized the climate around elections and race in which they were hearing the case.“There’s a big-picture narrative as to what’s going on with our democracy and race in American society. The court’s going to get to weigh in right now,” he said. “I think our hope is that the court instead sees it as an opportunity to reaffirm the values and the protections we have in place for our democracy.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      'This is not justice': supreme court liberals slam Trump's federal executions

      by

      The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11th-hour clemency appeal was rejected.Higgs, 48, was convicted of murdering three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, even though it was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime but sentenced to life.“This was not justice,” Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in an order issued late on Friday.Sotomayor, who was critical of the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what she saw as “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates. All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020.The government executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than in the previous six decades“To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades,” she wrote.“There can be no ‘justice on the fly’ in matters of life and death,” Sotomayor added. “Yet the court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.”Breyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, Breyer said, would “subject him to a sensation of drowning akin to waterboarding”.He said the court needed to address whether execution protocols risked extreme pain and needless suffering and pressured the courts into last-minute decisions on life or death.“What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind?” he wrote. “Are they supposed to ‘hurry up, hurry up?’”Breyer went further than Sotomayor by questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, the first member of the current panel to do so. The third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also dissented in the Higgs case but did not give an explanation.Higgs’s petition for clemency said he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, it said.He was convicted in October 2000 by a federal jury in Maryland for the first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. Although Haynes shot the women, Higgs handed him his gun.“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” the US district judge Peter Messitte wrote in December.Arguably the most high-profile execution of the Trump administration came just days ago when Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection at Terre Haute and became the first woman put to death by the federal government almost seven decades.Her lawyer accused the Trump administration of “unnecessary and vicious use of authoritarian power”.Many believe officials rushed to complete a series of executions before Joe Biden is inaugurated on 20 January. Biden has stated his desire to have the death penalty abolished at federal and state level. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden to nominate Merrick Garland for next US attorney general

      by

      Joe Biden will nominate the federal appeals judge Merrick Garland to be the next US attorney general, a transition official for the president-elect said on Wednesday, a choice most Americans know as the supreme court nominee of Barack Obama who was memorably blocked by Republicans.Garland, 68, serves as a judge on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. Obama, a Democrat, nominated him to the supreme court in 2016 while Biden was vice-president, but the Republican-controlled US Senate refused to hold hearings on the nomination.Biden, who takes office in two weeks, also intends to nominate justice department veterans Lisa Monaco as deputy attorney general and Kristen Clarke as the assistant attorney general to the civil rights division, the official said.During his election campaign, Biden pledged to take steps to end racial disparities in sentencing by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, ending the use of the federal death penalty and restoring the justice department’s role of investigating and holding police departments accountable for “systemic misconduct”.While many of these initiatives would require approval from Congress, Garland as attorney general will still have significant power to address these topics through changes in policy, such as by instructing prosecutors not to seek the death penalty or to make charging decisions that will not trigger mandatory minimums.The news came as Democrats looked set to win two US Senate seats up for grabs in Georgia runoff elections held on Tuesday, which would give the party control of both houses of Congress and give Biden more leeway to enact his agenda.Garland, who has served on the federal appeals bench since 1997, is no stranger to the justice department.Before becoming a judge, he worked as a federal prosecutor where he helped secure a conviction against Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. He was also on the team that helped secure a conviction of former District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry for cocaine possession.Garland held other key posts at the justice department, including serving as principal deputy associate attorney general to the deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, starting in 1994.Obama nominated Garland in March 2016 to replace the long-serving conservative justice Antonin Scalia, who died on 13 February 2016. But the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican, refused to consider the nomination on the grounds it should not occur in a presidential election year.That stance, assailed by Democrats at the time, came under further criticism two months before the 2020 presidential election, when McConnell rushed to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to fill the vacancy of the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.While serving as attorney general under Trump until last month, William Barr faced criticism for his willingness to intervene in criminal cases in ways that benefited Trump’s political allies, such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. More

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden wants to fill federal court seats – but he needs to win the Senate first

      by

      During the disastrous first presidential debate in September, Donald Trump mocked Barack Obama, and Joe Biden by extension, for leaving office with so many federal court seats unfilled.“I’ll have so many judges because President Obama and him left me 128 judges to fill,” Trump said, slightly inflating the 105 vacancies he inherited. “When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges. That’s like, you just don’t do that … If you left us 128 openings, you can’t be a good president.But as is often the case with Trump’s attacks, there is much more to the story than that. It is true that Trump inherited nearly twice as many federal court vacancies as Obama did in 2009. However, Democrats blamed the high number of vacancies on what they described as an unprecedented level of obstruction from Republicans after they took control of the Senate in 2015.Over Trump’s lone term as president, he and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, have successfully remade the federal judiciary, and Democrats are anxious to confirm liberal judges once Biden takes office. But some Democratic lawmakers are already voicing concern that Republicans will once again obstruct judicial nominations if they keep the Senate by winning at least one of the Georgia runoff races next month.Dick Durbin, who is seeking to become the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, raised that concern in late November, predicting Biden would have “very little” impact on the federal judiciary if Republicans maintain control of the chamber.“If the last two years of the Obama administration were any indication, they’ll freeze them out,” Durbin told Politico. “Hope springs eternal, but I believe in history.”Daniel Goldberg, the legal director of the progressive Alliance for Justice, said Durbin’s comments underscored the importance of the Georgia Senate elections. If Democrats were to win both of the 5 January runoff races, the Senate would be 50-50, and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris could provide a tie-breaking 51st vote.“I think Senator Durbin just made clear how important the Georgia elections are. The stakes could not be higher,” Goldberg said.If Republicans were to win at least one of the Georgia races and keep control of the Senate, Chuck Grassley is expected to chair the judiciary committee, and the Iowa senator would have the ability to block Biden’s nominees from receiving hearings.“If Grassley decides to play hardball, he could just not bring them up for hearings, and there’s nothing the other side can do,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston and an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute.That possibility is distressing to Democrats, who have watched with dismay as the Senate has approved more than 200 of Trump’s judicial nominees since 2017. While Obama was able to have 55 of his nominees to the federal appeals courts approved over eight years, 54 of Trump’s nominees have been confirmed over just four years. Roughly a quarter of all trial-level federal judges are now Trump appointees.Risk for RepublicansJosh Blackman also warned there could be potential consequences for Republicans if they choose to “play hardball” with Biden’s nominees. “If the Democrats take the Senate in 2022, they could just fill the vacancies then, so you may get more moderate nominees now to fill the void,” Blackman said. “If you wait two more years, they might become less moderate.”That calculus may be part of why some Democrats are more optimistic than Durbin about the likelihood of Biden’s judicial nominees being confirmed.“I think the dynamic is very different than the dynamic with Donald Trump as president,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin. “Having served in the Senate for 18 years, 16 years on the judiciary committee, I can tell you people back home want those seats filled. And there is pressure from newspapers, from the legal community when that doesn’t happen.”Feingold, the president of the American Constitution Society (ACS), argued Biden’s team has also prioritized judicial nominations in a way that the Obama administration didn’t.“Because of the economic situation and the need to pass healthcare, this didn’t get the attention it deserved” during Obama’s presidency, Feingold said. “I believe the Biden transition and the Biden administration will give it the attention it deserves and make it a higher priority.”The ACS has already provided Biden’s team with extensive lists of potential nominees, in the hope of ensuring a smooth nomination process once a seat on the federal judiciary opens up.“It’s not just getting past McConnell,” Feingold said. “It’s being ready and getting those names moving and being ready when there are vacancies.”Legal experts argue that, if McConnell were to blockade Biden’s judicial nominees, the repercussions for the country would be severe. Not only would courts probably struggle to handle their caseloads with vacancies piling up, but the potential standoff could jeopardize the reputation of both the federal judiciary and the Senate.“The American people just repudiated Donald Trump, and they elected Joe Biden to the presidency, and one of the critical roles of the presidency is nominating individuals to sit on our federal courts,” Goldberg said. “I think what the American people expect is the Senate to not have one set of rules for Donald Trump and one set of rules for Joe Biden.”Although Feingold is more optimistic than Durbin about Biden’s judicial nominees receiving hearings, he acknowledged it was likely to be a hard-fought fight. If Democrats lose the Senate, Feingold said, they should not wallow but instead prepare for battle.“I understand it will be a challenge, a tremendous challenge that will involve a lot of negotiating, should the Democrats not be able to control the Senate,” Feingold said. “But it’s a challenge that I think can be met … We shouldn’t despair. We should be ready for the fight.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme court rejects Trump-backed Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn election results

      by

      The US supreme court has unanimously rejected a baseless lawsuit filed by Texas seeking to overturn the presidential election result, dealing the biggest blow yet to Donald Trump’s assault on democracy.In a brief, one page order, all nine justices on America’s highest court dismissed the longshot effort to throw out the vote counts in four states that the president lost: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The decision hammers another nail in the coffin of Trump’s increasingly desperate effort to subvert the will of the people and deny Joe Biden the presidency.The suit filed by Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, sought to invalidate the results in four swing states, asking the court to extend the deadline for election certification so alleged voting irregularities could be investigated.It was backed by Donald Trump, 17 other states and 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives – more than half the caucus – including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, and the minority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana.Trump had long expressed hope that a disputed election would go before the supreme court, to which he appointed three justices during his term, ensuring a 6-3 conservative majority. Earlier on Friday he tweeted: “If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!”But hours later, his hopes of a political miracle were all but extinguished. The supreme court wrote: “The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”Officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin had derided the suit as a publicity stunt. More than 20 other attorneys general from states including California and Virginia also filed a brief on Thursday urging the court to reject the case.Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, welcomed the court’s ruling. “Our nation’s highest court saw through this seditious abuse of our electoral process,” he tweeted. “This swift denial should make anyone contemplating further attacks on our election think twice.”Democrats in Congress also expressed gratitude. Eric Swalwell of California tweeted: “The Supreme Court, a mix of conservative and liberal members, united to defend your vote against @realDonaldTrumpand his democracy deniers in Congress.”And Senator Ben Sasse, one of relatively few Republicans to acknowledge Biden’s victory, signalled that it was time for the party and government to move on. He said: “Since Election Night, a lot of people have been confusing voters by spinning Kenyan Birther-type, ‘Chavez rigged the election from the grave’ conspiracy theories, but every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court – including all three of President Trump’s picks – closed the book on the nonsense.”Courts have dismissed numerous of lawsuits and appeals by the Trump campaign and its allies in various states. William Barr, the attorney general and a staunch Trump ally, has said the justice department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the election.Saturday will mark the 20th anniversary of the court resolving the 2000 election in Republican George W Bush’s favour but that was a much closer contest that came down to one state: Florida. Biden gained 306 votes in the electoral college – the same as Trump in 2016 – and leads the national popular vote by 7m.Some Democrats have accused Trump and his Republican backers of sedition. Chris Murphy, a senator for Connecticut, said in a floor speech on Friday: “Those who are pushing to make Donald Trump president for a second term, no matter the outcome of the election, are engaged in a treachery against their nation.” More