SCOTUS (& SCOTUSDaily) Is Back In Action | Why Are Justices Stalling On Trump Tax Returns?
February 19, 2021
TEXAS IS A MESS
|Yours truly wasn’t able to send SCOTUS updates all week thanks to the miserable experience of living without heat or power in Austin, Texas. Power has been restored to many after millions were left in the dark for several days this week. But nearly half of all Texans remain under boil-water warnings as water and food run scarce. Ongoing crisis aside, now that WiFi is a thing again let’s check in on what we missed at the Supreme Court these past few days…
BACK TO BUSINESS
|SCOTUSDaily isn’t alone in having to get back into the swing of things. The Supreme Court returns to work today after a three-week recess — although bets are they all had uninterrupted access to clean drinking water. They’ve now crossed the midpoint of the term and John Fritze with USA Today notes the cases on deck “are far from the type that could give the new 6-3 conservative majority a chance to assert itself in the nation’s most divisive controversies.” Fritze writes, “By design or by luck, the court’s nine justices are so far steering clear of hostile political debates at a time when the rest of Washington is still reeling from the fallout from the November election, including a second Trump impeachment trial that brought to the fore images of Americans storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.”
WHAT'S THE HOLD-UP
|Joan Biskupic with CNN reports that even though DONALD TRUMP is no longer president, justices still seem to be “riven by him.” It’s been nearly four months now that SCOTUS has refused to act on emergency filings relating to the Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena of the former president’s tax returns. Biskupic calls the Supreme Court’s lack of movement on the issue “an extraordinary departure from its usual practice of timely responses when the justices are asked to block a lower court decision on an emergency basis.”
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
|The Supreme Court has spent the last few years using its “shadow docket” more and more often — forgoing the usual appeals procedure in order to provide a fast decision without hearing arguments or receiving full briefing. They’ll even refuse to reveal who wrote the opinion or how each justice voted on the matter. But as Mark Joseph Stern with Slate points out, Congress seems interested in doing something about this trend. Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to see what, if anything, Congress can do. It wasn’t clear after the two-hour hearing whether committee members saw a path forward for how they might be able to intervene, but Stern says they may have already taken an important step forward toward a solution by merely having the hearing in the first place. “The more that lawmakers scrutinize the shadow docket, the less attractive it becomes for the justices—especially those, like CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS, who are conscious of the court’s public image. Thursday’s hearing proved that Democrats are serious about exploring court reform. The justices are now on notice that they cannot keep doing their work under cover of darkness much longer.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
A Powerful Tool To Take On The Supreme Court — If Democrats Use It Right
The Hill“As Senate Republicans rushed to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat in the waning days of the 2020 election, the once-radical notion of reforming the Supreme Court went mainstream. Joe Biden pledged to create a court-reform commission if Republicans confirmed Judge Amy Coney Barrett, and then-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowed that ‘nothing [would be] off the table.’ Four months later, Justice Barrett sits on the Supreme Court, President Biden is staffing his commission, and Majority Leader Schumer faces a difficult question: What now?”