Donald Trump Impeached Again | What Happens To SCOTUS After Trump?
January 14, 2021
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS
|The Supreme Court this week allowed an FDA rule to once again be enforced, which requires abortion pills to be administered in person — even during the pandemic. Joan Biskupic with CNN suggests the outcome highlights the Supreme Court’s “pattern of letting the Trump administration enforce highly charged priorities before legal challenges have been resolved.” She explains that it’s the latest case — and likely one of the last — to emerge from the “shadow docket.” Biskupic: “A question for the months ahead is whether the high court under CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS, and more lopsidedly conservative than it has been in decades, will be similarly ready to let any challenged policies of the Democratic Joe Biden administration go forward.”
SCOTUS WITHOUT POTUS
|“I’ve been wondering what CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS thinks about his former law clerk SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY. I don’t mean to sound snarky, and I’m certainly not implying that the chief justice bears the slightest responsibility for his law clerk’s subsequent effort to overthrow a democratic election. Rather, I mean to open the door to a deeper inquiry: Now that the Trump presidency has disintegrated into mayhem and madness, how are the conservative members of the Supreme Court processing these past four years?” That’s Linda Greenhouse with The New York Times wondering in her column this week what happens to SCOTUS after four years of being “DONALD TRUMP’S enabler to an unfortunate degree.”
DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL
|Bill McKibben argues in The New Yorker that JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT should recuse herself from a Big Oil case justices are expected to hear on January 19. “The case before the Supreme Court hinges on a narrow procedural question, but the underlying lawsuit is one of almost two dozen brought by cities and states that want the oil companies to compensate them for the damages—the rising seas and the gathering winds—caused by the fossil-fuel industry’s products. They contend, and the record leaves little doubt, that the industry knew for decades that it was triggering dangerous climate change.” But Barrett’s father was an attorney for Shell for almost three decades, and he worked for the American Petroleum Institute for two decades. As McKibben’s piece suggests, Barrett’s father could have direct knowledge of how Shell managed climate threats and he could even be called for a deposition.
SUPREME DILEMMA
|Sonja West and Genevieve Lakier with Slate review the sequence of events that took PRESIDENT TRUMP off the map last week. He was banned or suspended on multiple social media platforms, and several companies took steps to remove his campaign and the Trump organization from their websites. “Ultimately, the decision to deplatform Trump reveals the tremendous power that companies like Twitter and Facebook possess over our public debate. Do these companies have the constitutional right to censor Trump? Sure. Should their stunning collective show of force still concern us? Absolutely. It is the underlying dilemma of the First Amendment that no matter how many checks and balances we try to embed into our government structure, eventually we have to give someone or something the final power to decide who gets to speak, when they may speak, and what they may (or may not) say. The problem, however, is that all of the possible alternatives of where to entrust this power are deeply flawed.”
A PRESIDENTIAL TWOFER
|Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to impeach PRESIDENT TRUMP for inciting an insurrection, making him the first president in history to be impeached twice. The second impeachment was also the most bipartisan in history, with 10 Republicans voting to impeach. Court-watchers are now watching closely to see if Trump might actually pardon himself in his remaining days in office. Josh Gerstein with POLITICO covers that possibility and writes there’s no clear guidance in the Constitution that bars a president from giving himself a pardon. However, he notes the Constitution does say that a president’s pardon power does not apply to impeachments.