CHIEF JUSTICE DIPPING TOES IN POOL OF MODERATION | D.C. Circuit Rules On CFPB Structure
February 1, 2018
TOP-ED
|“This column is not — repeat, not — going to argue that our conservative chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., has morphed into a moderate.” That being said, Linda Greenhouse with The New York Timesused her column inches this week to focus on three times in recent weeks where we’ve seen CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS opposite his conservative colleagues. Although the shift she’s seen from the chief is subtle, it’s possible it might have some positive effects on the high court as a whole. She points out, “There’s a cliché in journalism that it takes three to make a trend, and I’ve counted to three in just the past three weeks. If I’m right, there’s a realignment, however subtle, in progress at the court now that portends a future more hopeful, or at least more interesting, than appeared likely even a few months ago.”
SPEAKING OF TRENDS
|Andrew Chung with Reuters reports that when the going gets tough for Trump, Trump goes straight to SCOTUS. Chung writes, “In the last year, the Justice Department sought to bypass lower courts four times using varying legal procedures in several high-profile cases, most recently to defend the administration’s right to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. It also skipped the normal legal process in a fight over whether pregnant immigrant teens held in detention can obtain abortions. And it asked the Supreme Court to quickly intervene in its defense of the president’s travel bans, which primarily affected people from several Muslim-majority countries.”
YOU'RE FIRED? NOT FOR NOW
|Yesterday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 7-3 that a provision of the Dodd-Frank law that limits the president’s ability to remove the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director during his/her term does not violate the president’s authority to appoint and remove executive branch officers. In other words, the president can only fire the CFPB director for cause only. This decision upholds the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure and preserves the agency’s independence as it faces continued challenges from business interests and conservatives alike.
A CASE RIPE FOR SCOTUS
|The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal thinks the D.C. Circuit Court’s decision on the CFPB “offer[s] the Supreme Court an opening to issue a landmark ruling on how the bureau violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”
RISKY BUSINESS
|“Pennsylvania Senate President pro tempore Joseph Scarnati announced on Wednesday that he will not comply with a state supreme court order to redraw Pennsylvania’s congressional lines. His open defiance of a court order raises the serious possibility that he may be held in contempt for brazenly violating the law.” Mark Joseph Stern with Slate reports on the latest news in the saga over Pennsylvania’s congressional map deemed unconstitutional by the state supreme court just last month. Pennsylvania Republicans have appealed that decision to the Supreme Court which is part of the reason why the state senate pro tempore thinks he can ignore the state supreme court ruling. “Scarnati explained that he is so certain of SCOTUS intervention that he has decided to reject the state supreme court’s order.” Pretty sure that’s now how this works…