Immigration At SCOTUS Yesterday | Joe Biden Promises To Put A Black Woman On The Supreme Court
February 26, 2020
A HARD NO
|ICYMI, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled against the parents of of teenager who was killed by an American border agent. The agent shot across the Mexican border — at least twice, and once in the boy’s face — killing the 15-year-old where he stood on the southern side of the border. Justices voted 5-4 along ideological lines to affirm previous lower court rulings that held foreign nationals are not protected by U.S. federal laws that can only be applied domestically.
GOOD ENOUGH
|Justices also ruled yesterday along their same ideological lines that an Arizona death row inmate, Mr. McKinney, was not entitled to be resentenced by a jury after a federal appeals court ruled that the trial judge who had condemned him to death failed to take into account evidence of abuse he had endured as a child. Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports, “JUSTICE KAVANAUGH, writing for the majority, said it was enough that the Arizona Supreme Court had considered whether the additional evidence would warrant a different sentence for Mr. McKinney, who was initially sentenced to death in 1993 for killing two people in their homes during separate burglaries.”
ISSUE OF THE DAY
|NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports on the two immigration cases that the Supreme Court addressed yesterday. The first was of course the case in which the high court provided its opinion that the family of 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez cannot sue the U.S. border agent responsible for Sergio’s death. Totenberg reports, “Following the opinion announcement, the court heard arguments in a very different immigration case — one involving the First Amendment. At issue was a statute that critics say makes it a crime for grandparents, ministers, lawyers and human rights activists to encourage or advise illegal immigrants to stay in the country.” The case involves the conviction of a woman in California who ran an immigration consulting business and was convicted of mail fraud, tax violations and also of illegally encouraging or inducing an undocumented immigrant to remain in the U.S. Totenberg explains that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out that last conviction as a violation of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, and advocacy groups from across the ideological spectrum are urging SCOTUS to do the same.
THAT'S THE MOTTO BABY
|At last night’s Democratic presidential debate, former VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN pledged to put a black woman on the Supreme Court if he’s elected to the White House. Just days before the South Carolina primary, Biden used a question round about every candidate’s motto to discuss SCOTUS. He said of his personal motto, “When you’re get knocked down, get up, and everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity — no matter what, no matter who they are…Also, that everyone should be represented. No one is better than me and I’m no better than everyone else…We talked about the Supreme Court — I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure that they in fact get representation.” It was the only time the Supreme Court was mentioned at last night’s debate. So much for the Dems amping up their focus on SCOTUS!
POWERS OF PERSUASION
|At a time when the judiciary is under attack, David Fontana and Christopher Krewson wonder in The Washington Post if the Supreme Court can learn to start speaking up for itself. They conducted a survey of a representative sample of Americans to find out whether they were persuaded by recent comments from CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS in which he pushed back on attacks from PRESIDENT TRUMP. The results of their survey suggest that “if the Supreme Court wants to use its microphone to protect its powers — and the rule of law — it might have to start speaking into that microphone a little differently.”
SPEAKING OF ATTACKS ON THE JUDICIARY
|Robert Barnes and Ashley Parker with The Washington Post report on PRESIDENT TRUMP calling for JUSTICES RUTH BADER GINSBURG and SONIA SOTOMAYOR to recuse themselves from anything “Trump-related.” They note that his comments seem to have come in response to a Fox News segment. “The president’s broadside breached what normally is an arm’s-length distance between the White House and the high court, and cast the disagreements into starkly personal terms. It follows Trump’s recent attacks on Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who oversaw the conviction of his friend Roger Stone, and underscored complaints from Attorney General William P. Barr that the president’s tweets and statements were making it ‘impossible’ for Barr to do his job.”
BACK TO REALITY
|Aaron Blake with The Washington Post explains PRESIDENT TRUMP’S comments about JUSTICES GINSBURG and SOTOMAYOR were “based upon a Fox News segment that twisted Sotomayor’s words and made some dubious claims.” Blake writes, “He quoted a chyron that said Sotomayor had ‘accused GOP appointed Justices of being biased in favor of Trump.’ He also suggested that Sotomayor was trying to ‘shame’ others into voting with her, which [Laura] Ingraham and her guest, the Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino, talked about. He also criticized Sotomayor for not speaking up when Ginsburg criticized him as a ‘faker’ when he was a candidate in 2016. The reality of both Sotomayor’s dissent and the Ginsburg situation, though, bear little resemblance to Trump’s description.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
Trump’s Bromides Against Judges Are Hallmarks Of Authoritarianism
The Washington Post“President Trump appears to believe that he should be the chief enforcer of law in the United States. He has even said that Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves from cases involving his administration because their dissents criticizing it display bias against him. His recent round of pardons for financial criminals or corrupt politicians also is worrisome. Taken together, Trump’s approach to the judicial system and its verdicts builds on an intellectual tradition rooted in extreme authoritarianism.”
Trump Brings The Autocrat’s Logic To The Supreme Court
The Washington Post“President Trump has made clear time and again his firm belief that institutions of government we thought were supposed to operate in the interests of the nation — the U.S. military, the Justice Department — should act as though they belong to him personally and have no higher purpose than serving his desires. You can add the Supreme Court to the list.”
Why Religion Is the Best Hope Against Trump
The New York Times“For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality is a useful guide to much of anything these days is risible, particularly since so many evangelicals have thrown in their lot with a relentlessly solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts and sneers. The political hero of the Christian right of 2020 has used the National Prayer Breakfast to mock the New Testament injunction to love one’s enemies, and it’s clear that leading conservative Christian voices are putting the Supreme Court ahead of the Sermon on the Mount. And yet history suggests that religiously inspired activism may hold the best hope for those in resistance to the prevailing Trumpian order.”
The Supreme Court’s ‘Janus’ Decision Merits An Encore
The Washington Post“The State Bar Association of North Dakota, which has neglected some recent developments in constitutional law, will have its memory refreshed if the U.S. Supreme Court decides, as it soon might, to hear a case that is germane to the Janus decision the court rendered less than two years ago. The matters at issue — the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and association — are momentous.”