BLOCKBUSTER AT SCOTUS TODAY | Gorsuch A Grown-Up Gunner | The Power of a Playground
April 19, 2017
TODAY AT SCOTUS
|The U.S. Supreme Court today hears oral arguments in a Missouri case with the potential to open grant programs to religious schools. Read NPR’s Nina Totenberg preview of Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley — a case involving a church’s application to rubberize a school playground surface.
THE ILL-EST
|SCOTUS yesterday seemed willing to make it tougher for the government to recover “ill-gotten gains” from people convicted of securities fraud. This would mean that the Securities and Exchange Commission could be prevented from collecting huge amounts of money in many cases where the alleged fraud goes back years or decades before officials bring charges. The agency collected more than $4 billion in those so-called “disgorgement” actions and other penalties in the 2016 fiscal year.
THE CONSERVATIVE AGENDA – WEEK ONE
|Jeffrey Toobin with The New Yorker notes that JUSTICE GORSUCH has a chance to immediately make his mark thanks to today’s case that “involves one of the top priorities for the conservative movement: lowering the barriers between church and state.”
DOG DAYS FOR GORSUCH
|“With the yearlong struggle over a Supreme Court vacancy now complete, JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH took the bench on Monday, but instead of wrestling with the nation’s grandest legal questions, his debut crashed into the drabness of the day’s cases.” Brent Kendall and Jess Bravin with The Wall Street Journal report on the newbie’s first week on the bench in which he’s been “greeted by highly technical cases.”
SUPREMELY ANNOYING
|“Gorsuch is a grown-up gunner: That archetypal law student who sits at the front of the classroom, asking and answering every possible question.” Mark Joseph Stern with Slate reviews JUSTICE GORSUCH’S first day at the Supreme Court and notes that the newbie was something of an annoyance to pretty much everyone in the courtroom, including his new colleagues. “The junior justice’s sharpest critics weren’t sitting in the press section but on the bench alongside him.”
FROM THE RUMOR MILL
|Alan Smith with Business Insider reported earlier this week that a confidant to PRESIDENT TRUMP, CHRIS RUDDY, suggested that the president might cut a deal with JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG and replace her with JUDGE MERRICK GARLAND. Ruddy also pointed to JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY—rumored to be considering retirement from the court—as the next justice who would be replaced with a “Gorsuch-like nominee.”
GORSUCH MORE LIBERAL THAN GARLAND?
|The staff over at Reason argues that contrary to popular opinion, JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH may actually be more liberal than JUDGE MERRICK GARLAND in some regards.
SCOTUS VIEWS
What the playground can teach the government about fair play
USA Today“The playground surface grant, much like an in-kind benefit, is a partial reimbursement only after Trinity purchases the rubber surface. And there’s simply no risk that making a religiously operated playground safer does anything to promote religion.”
SCOTUS playground case can end anti-religion, anti-Catholic law
The Hill“The preschoolers at Trinity Lutheran are the hallmark example of the kind of innocent victims that Blaine Amendments make of ordinary citizens. Their crime is that their parents chose a parochial nursery for them, one which clearly wants its kids to have the same safe and ecologically innovative blacktop enjoyed by innumerable other kids around the country.”