DACA STRAIGHT TO SCOTUS | Plot Twist Before Justices Today, Totenberg Previews
January 17, 2018
CUT TO THE CHASE
|In an unusual move yesterday, the Trump administration said it would go straight to the Supreme Court to review a federal judge’s ruling from last week that blocked PRESIDENT TRUMP’S effort to end the DACA program. In a statement Tuesday, ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS said, “It defies both law and common sense for DACA – an entirely discretionary non-enforcement policy that was implemented unilaterally by the last administration after Congress rejected similar legislative proposals…to somehow be mandated nationwide by a single district court in San Francisco.”
KEEP ON KEEPING ON
|The DACA program—which protects about 700,000 people from deportation—will remain in effect while litigation proceeds. Joseph Tanfani with the Los Angeles Times reports a spokesperson with for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said yesterday, “Until further notice…the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in place before it was rescinded…We are still accepting applications.”
BLUE MOON
|Pete Williams with NBC News reports the administration’s request to go straight to SCOTUS was indeed a bold maneuver. TOM GOLDSTEIN, publisher of SCOTUSblog, noted on the website, “It’s an extremely unusual request, one that is granted once in a blue moon. It’s a signal by the Trump administration that they take this issue incredibly seriously and think the justices should, too.”
GOOD TO GO
|Case R. Sunstein opines in Bloomberg that the judge who upheld the DACA program was on solid legal ground. He argues, “To begin to understand why, imagine that in 2021, a Democratic president — say, BERNIE SANDERS — starts repealing dozens of regulations issued during the Trump administration, on the ground that the new attorney general believes those regulations are ‘illegal.’ Though Democrats might celebrate, that’s a horrible idea. The executive branch can’t simply assert that the decisions of its predecessor were ‘illegal.’ It has to justify that conclusion. If it isn’t able to do that, it must come up with better grounds for changing course. In a nutshell, that’s what Judge William Alsup told the Trump administration last week in his DACA decision.”
HONEY LET'S NOT FIGHT
|Today at SCOTUS, the justices will hear arguments in a case where the defense lawyer admitted his client’s guilt of a triple murder, refusing to follow the instructions of his client who asserted his own innocence. The question now before the high court is whether the lawyer’s decision to side-step his client’s instructions violates the client’s constitutional right to counsel. Nina Totenberg with NPR previews the case for us.
OTHER NEWS
Adventures In Extreme Gerrymandering: See The Fair And Wildly Unfair Maps We Made For Pennsylvania
The New York Times“As unfavorable as the current map is for Democrats, Republicans could go even further in 2020 if they controlled the process again. This is unlikely because the Pennsylvania governor is now a Democrat, but Pennsylvania serves as a good illustration of how gerrymandering can play out. We’ve redrawn the Pennsylvania congressional map in two ways. One is a neutral map, the kind that might be drawn by a nonpartisan committee. The other is an adventure in extreme gerrymandering that aims to maximize the number of Republican-held seats.”