SCOTUS 101 POD TALKS TRANSPARENCY | DOJ Makes Last Ditch Request On DACA | The Great Republican Power Grab
February 9, 2018
ON DECK
|Next week, the Supreme Court will conference on the Justice Department’s request to review a ruling that keeps in place the DACA policy originally enacted under PRESIDENT OBAMA. The DOJ is asking the Supreme Court to depart from its normal protocols and grant relief the justices have eschewed for nearly 30 days. Alison Frankel with Reuters reports.
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|“In the next few months, the Supreme Court is expected to rule, at last, on one of the most corrosive practices in modern American democracy — the drawing of legislative district maps to entrench the party in power, no matter how many voters might want a different result. Even as this behavior, known as partisan gerrymandering, has gotten out of control in recent decades, the court has refused to rein it in because, the claim goes, any possible fix lies with the political branches and not the courts. That’s bunk. The justices will see why if they look at what’s happening in several states where lawmakers have been holding clinics in self-interested mapmaking.” That’s the Editorial Board of The New York Times weighing in on what it’s calling the “great Republican power grab” — the GOP’s efforts to lock in their political advantage across the country through partisan gerrymandering. NYT: “So this is where we are: Increasingly partisan actors, mainly on the right, are wielding high-end mapmaking tools to lock in their party’s majority for years or longer, then hobbling another branch of government that is trying to rein them in. And the Supreme Court still thinks gerrymandering can be fixed through the political process?”
TODAY'S THE DAY
|Pennsylvania lawmakers have to submit a new congressional map today and they’re running right down to the wire on their deadline. The legislature’s Republican leaders were scrambling late on Thursday to produce boundaries that could win consensus among members as well as the approval of the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf.
PODCAST DU JOUR
|Press play this weekend on the latest pod from the Heritage Foundation. The folks at SCOTUS 101 are joined by GABE ROTH, Executive Director of Fix the Court, to talk about bringing greater transparency and accountability to the Supreme Court. Redistricting and the NOTORIOUS RBG “dissenting in style” are also discussed.
OTHER NEWS
Parties Gird For Supreme Court Showdown Over Union Fees
Education Week“Judging by the tone of a joint press conference the four largest public-employee unions held last week about Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 (Case No. 16-1466), the labor movement is girding for an era in which they will no longer be able to charge “agency fees” to employees in a bargaining unit who refuse to join the union to cover those workers’ share of collective bargaining costs.”