INTERNET SALES TAX AT SCOTUS TOMORROW | A Case Of History Repeating | Gorsuch Makes History With Summer Clerk
April 16, 2018
T'WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE ARGUMENT
|Tomorrow, the justices will hear a high-stakes showdown over the question of whether states can force online retailers to collect taxes even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state. The case was brought forward by South Dakota, which wants SCOTUS to overturn its own 1992 precedent. A ruling for the state would potentially rack up close to $18 billion in affected states, and it might help brick-and-mortar retailers compete with online rivals. Stay tuned for more coverage tomorrow on this major case that might change the way all of us shop online.
YOU DO THE CRIME, YOU DO THE TIME
|The Supreme Court today rejected an appeal from former Illinois Governor ROD BLAGOJEVICH in which he was asking for his 14-year prison sentence to be shortened. He was sentenced to prison for corruption offenses including soliciting bribes for appointment to the Senate seat vacated by PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA when he was elected president in 2008. The justices left in place a lower court ruling that rejected Blagojevich’s arguments that he deserved leniency because he has been a “model prisoner.”
YOU'RE FIRED
|“The Supreme Court is set to hear a seemingly minor case later this month on the status of administrative judges at the Securities and Exchange Commission, an issue that normally might only draw the interest of those accused of stock fraud. But the dispute turns on the president’s power to hire and fire officials throughout the government. And it comes just as the White House is saying PRESIDENT TRUMP believes he has the power to fire special counsel ROBERT S. MUELLER III.” That’s David Savage with the Los Angeles Times reporting on the sleeper SCOTUS case that (not being hyperbolic) could determine the survival of our democracy.
YOU'RE NOT YET FIRED
|The Deputy Attorney General, ROD ROSENSTEIN, it set to make his Supreme Court argument debut this month — that is, if PRESIDENT TRUMP doesn’t fire him first. Tony Mauro with The National Law Journal reports.
ANOTHER CASE OF HISTORY REPEATING
|Adam Liptak with The New York Times previews the upcoming Supreme Court arguments over the president’s travel ban policy, and Liptak notes that the case is shadowed by one of the high court’s darkest moments — when it endorsed FDR’s 1942 executive order that sent more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry to internment camps.
GHOSTS OF DEFERENCE PAST
|“During various crises in American history, government has decided to lower the boom on unpopular racial or religious groups; later generations have seen these restrictions for what they were—transparent rationalizations for bigotry, blots on the national escutcheon that, in at least two cases, called for national apologies to the survivors.” Garrett Epps writes in The Atlantic about the upcoming travel ban case and notes that it offers another chance for us to wonder how well our government (and specifically, the courts) are doing their jobs when they offer up enormous leeway for executives to close the door to immigrants. Epps notes, “Those Ghosts of Deference Past are loudly haunting the ‘travel ban’ case. Survivors of three of these previous episodes have filed amicus briefs urging the justices not to hide behind the wishful assumption that the executive branch this time—finally, really, this time—is telling us the truth, and that the ‘ban’ is based on national-security needs rather than raw racism and nativist politics. In previous cases, courts took the government’s word, the briefs argue; the Supreme Court should learn a bitter lesson from that history.”
A SCOTUS FIRST
|Repeat offender in this edition of SCOTUSDaily, Tony Mauro with The National Law Journal reports JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH appears to have made history. The freshman justice has hired a young Native American lawyer to be one of his clerks starting this summer.
PODCAST DU JOUR
|In a new podcast from Constitution Daily, President and CEO of the Constitution Center, JEFFREY ROSEN, sits down with JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER. They discuss the First Amendment, hate speech, Citizens United, and other free speech cases. Listen in to the rare one-on-one conversation with a Supreme Court justice.
GOT MY MIND ON MY MONEY, MONEY ON MY MIND
|Danny Heifetz with The Ringer (if you don’t read, for serious you need to start now) delivers us a primer on the impending SCOTUS case that could legalize sports betting in America. He provides background on the case as well as some predicted scenarios for different verdicts and fallouts from a Supreme Court decision.