Supreme Court Poised To Become An Election Issue | Biden And Trump Say They’ll Release SCOTUS Nominee Lists
July 1, 2020
HEATIN' UP
|Who says the Supreme Court can’t be an election issue? It’s sure shaping up to be a big one come November. JOE BIDEN said yesterday that his campaign is putting together a list of potential SCOTUS nominees — the first of which he pledged would be a Black woman. PRESIDENT TRUMP said he would release a new list of potential nominees for the high court as well, and when Biden was asked Tuesday about the Trump list he said, “One thing I hesitate to do is follow anything this President does because he does it all wrong.” Burn baby burn.
SAVE THE DRAMA
|“The president has long cast a potential third Supreme Court nomination as rationale for his reelection. But as the court’s term ends, Trump has begun musing at how a more immediate vacancy may help improve his weakened political standing in the months before November’s election.” Kevin Liptak with CNN reports PRESIDENT TRUMP is hoping some SCOTUS drama will help his flailing re-election campaign, even though his efforts to re-shape the high court haven’t exactly been playing out the way he hoped so far this term. “As CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS sides with liberal justices on immigration, LGBTQ rights and abortion, the issues conservatives had hoped would face new reckoning by Trump’s picks have gone in another direction. Monday’s decision striking down abortion restrictions in Louisiana was perhaps the strongest signal yet that efforts to force the reconsideration of divisive cultural issues would perhaps be more difficult than some conservatives once hoped.”
VOTE FOR SCOTUS
|Carl Hulse with The New York Times reports on progressives pointing to SCOTUS as a reason to vote in November. Hulse covers an advocacy group called Supreme Court Voter that is putting $2 million behind digital ads in politically competitive states. The goal of the ads is to mobilize voters around the idea that the long-term direction of the court — and the outcome of its rulings on hot-button policy and cultural issues — will be decided at the polls this fall. The ads will begin running in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that could decide the presidential election and determine control of the Senate.
OUT IN THE COLD
|Jane Coaston with Vox writes that social conservatives feel abandoned by SCOTUS after workplace rights were extended to LGBTQ workers and a woman’s right to choose was protected once again. “The promise the Republican Party makes to rank-and-file social conservatives and leaders of major conservative organizations — one Trump made in 2016, and again in 2020 — is transactional: If you vote for Republican presidents, and elect Republicans to Congress, they will put in place conservative judges who adhere to an ‘originalist’ view of the Constitution and will deliver conservative rulings on some of the most important aspects of American life.” But Coaston notes that although social conservatives have been given a number of major victories from the Supreme Court this year, it seems abortion access and LGBTQ rights continue to light their collective hair on fire.
SCOTUS VIEWS
How Not To Outlaw Abortion
The New York Times“For abortion foes and no doubt President Trump, the defeat is infuriating. But it’s their own fault. The case, June Medical Services v. Russo, was the wrong one to bring to the Supreme Court. In their impatience to restrict the procedure, abortion opponents miscalculated by asking the court to uphold a law virtually identical to one in Texas that the court had rejected four years ago. And for Chief Justice John Roberts, that was too much.”
COVID Pandemic Is No Time To Ask The Supreme Court To Kill Obamacare
USA Today“It is not hard to see the cruelty and incompetence in President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic: his repeated efforts to downplay the significance of COVID-19, his badgering of state leaders trying to act responsibly, his refusal to wear a mask in public, his touting of risky miracle cures and his reckless campaign rallies, to name a few. But perhaps nothing matches this: In the middle of America’s worst health crisis in more than a century, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court — yet again! — to strike down the Affordable Care Act.”
OTHER NEWS
Why The Supreme Court Says Booking.com Can Trademark Its Name—And Why It Matters
Fast Company“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Booking.com, the online travel reservation site, can get a trademark for its name. The Patent and Trademark Office had wanted to deny the trademark, saying that Booking.com is just a generic term for a travel reservation—booking—with dot-com attached. Generic terms, which just name something being sold, can’t be trademarked, a rule that makes sure nobody can get a monopoly on using words such as ‘hardware’ or ‘wine’ in a store name. But in an 8-to-1 ruling—Justice Stephen Breyer was the dissenter—the court found that just because a word itself is generic, a web address that uses it doesn’t have to be.”
Should Billy Joe Wardlow Be Executed For A Crime Committed When He Was Eighteen?
The New Yorker“Wardlow has petitioned the Supreme Court to stay his execution. He is asking the Court to consider whether the Texas death-penalty statute is unconstitutional as it was applied to him—and to forty-four other people on the state’s death row who, like him, were sentenced for crimes committed when they were under twenty-one. The heart of the argument is that a person’s brain continues to develop until he is in his early twenties and, as a result, so does his character.”