Justices To Do Oral Arguments Via Teleconference | Texas Fight Over Abortion Access Reaches SCOTUS
April 13, 2020
CALL ME BEEP ME IF YOU WANNA REACH ME
|The Supreme Court made an unprecedented announcement today, sharing its plans to hear oral arguments via teleconference in May. All justices and counsel will participate in the hearings remotely, and the arguments will take place on May 4-6 and May 11-13. Which cases will be heard on what days has not yet been decided, the high court said, but justices will hear cases regarding PRESIDENT TRUMP’S financial records and the much-anticipated “faithless electors” case.
NO EXCUSES
|Over the weekend, abortion providers in Texas asked SCOTUS to let their clinics continue to perform some procedures after a federal appeals court temporarily upheld orders from state officials prohibiting most abortions. Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports, “In their Supreme Court filing, lawyers from Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights said the health crisis did not justify severe restrictions on the constitutional right to abortion. At least medication abortions, which use pills to induce abortions, should be allowed to continue, they said.”
LONE RANGER
|Greg Stohr with Bloomberg also reports on the Texas abortion dispute that landed at the Supreme Court on Saturday and notes that it’s the second emergency coronavirus case to reach the high court. The abortion clinics argued in the their filing, “No other court in the country has countenanced the type of categorical ban on medication abortion the state is attempting to enforce here as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Accordingly, Texas now has the most restrictive abortion policy in the nation.”
TOP-ED
|“If pandemics can justify intrusions on constitutional rights, they cannot be employed as excuses for interfering with or eliminating them. And that, of course, is exactly what Texas is up to in its order prohibiting abortions during the pandemic.” That’s Ruth Marcus making clear in The Washington Post that the attempts at blocking access to abortions during the pandemic has nothing to do with health and safety concerns, or preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus. She writes, “The immediate issue at the court is whether to allow medication abortions to proceed, as abortion clinics are seeking and the district judge ordered. The deeper question is whether the justices will follow logic and precedent — or whether they will let the pandemic serve as Texas’s latest bogus justification for trampling on women’s rights.”
JUSTICES ZOOM TOO
|“Supreme Court JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER recently plunked down before his computer camera for a lively Zoom chat with students at the United Nations International School, offering a glimpse of the justices’ private negotiations against a canvas of how the law develops in America. Speaking from his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Breyer’s mien alternated between intellectual former law professor dropping French literary allusions and animated 81-year-old grandfather bursting with enthusiasm for the US constitutional structure, both of which he is.” That’s Joan Biskupic with CNN recounting Breyer’s recent reflections (delivered virtually, of course) on his work for the U.S. Supreme Court and what life has been like in isolation.
OTHER NEWS
Thousands Of Wisconsin Ballots Could Be Thrown Out Because They Don’t Have A Postmark
Vox“Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of Wisconsin voters may have their ballots tossed out for the most arbitrary of reasons: because the post office either did not place a postmark on their absentee ballot when it was mailed in, or because that postmark doesn’t have a date. The reason why stretches back to a surprising decision the Supreme Court handed down the night before Wisconsin’s Tuesday primary election. That case, appropriately named Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, was brought by Republicans seeking to make it harder for many absentee voters to have their ballots counted.”
How Mitch McConnell Became Trump's Enabler-In-Chief
The New Yorker“The most famous example of McConnell’s obstructionism was his audacious refusal to allow a hearing on Merrick Garland, whom Obama nominated for the Supreme Court, in 2016. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died, vacating the seat, there were three hundred and forty-two days left in Obama’s second term. But McConnell argued that ‘the American people’ should decide who should fill the seat in the next election, ignoring the fact that the American people had elected Obama. As a young lawyer, McConnell had argued in an academic journal that politics should play no part in Supreme Court picks; the only thing that mattered was if the nominee was professionally qualified. In 2016, though, he said it made no difference how qualified Garland, a highly respected moderate judge, was.”