USE IT OR LOSE IT | Next Week’s Major Voting Case | Could This Be High Court’s Shot At Redemption?
January 5, 2017
JEFF BEZOS WHO?
|David Savage with the Los Angeles Times reports that the last time the Supreme Court took a hard look at taxing home shopping was before Amazon was even a thing. Now, lawyers for 35 states are asking SCOTUS to revisit a prior decision that held states can’t require mail-order sellers to collect sales taxes if the vendors have no “physical presence” in that state. As Savage points out, the good news for these states is they have JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY on their side. Two years ago the justice noted that the 1992 decision should be reexamined as soon as possible. The time has come, it seems.
USE IT OR LOSE IT
|Steven Mazie writing in The Economist considers the question of whether voters who don’t vote should be allowed to stay on voter rolls — a question which will come before the justices next week on January 10.
ROLL WITH IT
|“When it comes to purging names from the voter rolls, the state of Ohio is second-to-none. Since becoming secretary of state in 2011, Republican Jon Husted has excised more than 2 million voters from the state’s registration lists. On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in a high-stakes case over whether one of Husted’s controversial methods for removing voters violates federal law. And if the court sides with Husted, it will open the door for states across the country to use what amounts to a legal loophole to cancel the registrations of millions more Americans.” That’s Pema Levy with Mother Jones previewing the major voting case slated for oral argument next week.
NEW YEAR, NEW HIRES
|David Lat with Above the Law shares with us a new installment of Supreme Court hiring watch, taking a look at all the clerks hired so far for October Term 2018 AND October Term 2019. That’s right, some justices really like to plan ahead and we can very much understand why.
A SCOTUS REDEMPTION
|Karen Hobert Flynn opines in The Washington Post that the Supreme Court has a shot at redemption this term. She’s thinking, of course, of next week’s Ohio case involving voter purging. Following “misguided decisions by the Supreme Court, most notably on the Voting Rights Act, and partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill,” she says SCOTUS can change the course of our democracy so that it belongs to every citizen.
OTHER NEWS
What To Know About The Death Penalty In 2018
ABA Journal“The number of executions and new death sentences have been trending downward for years. Support for capital punishment in the U.S. is at about 55 percent, its lowest point in more than four decades. Trump’s first year saw a slight rise in death sentences and executions, but those are the product of counties and states; the president and attorney general have little say beyond the occasional federal case. What can we expect at the beginning of 2018? Is the death penalty almost gone, or will the president’s support rejuvenate it?”
Blame The Supreme Court For Letting The Feds Target Legal State Pot
Reason“If the attorney general follows through on his threats to unleash the federal government against legal state marijuana, make sure you reserve a portion of your outrage for the lousy SCOTUS decisions that empowered the feds in the first place.”