Predicting Election Day Legal Battles | Should Kavanaugh Recuse Himself From Facebook Case Next Term?

July 24, 2020

On this day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Today, the Trump administration published its rule allowing single-sex homeless shelters to exclude transgender people despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that extended civil rights protections to transgender people. Chris Cameron with The New York Times reports, “The new rule on homeless shelters will go into effect after a 60-day comment period. Administration officials argue that it will make women’s shelters safer by preventing men from gaining access to abuse or attack women seeking protection. Transgender rights groups say it is more likely to force some transgender women to go to men’s shelters where they could face assault.” 

Joseph Ax with Reuters notes that election day could kick off a lengthy legal battle over the fate of the presidency — and perhaps democracy itself. “PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S refusal this week to say if he would accept the results of November’s election, and his repeated assertions that the vote will be “rigged” because of mail-in ballots, have raised the specter of a disputed election that could take weeks, or even months, to resolve.” Ax walks through potential scenarios that could play out, including the possibility of an Electoral College dispute or the need for the military to remove Trump from office.

A coalition of progressive groups are calling on JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH to recuse himself from a case scheduled for next term that involves Facebook. The demands stem from the justice’s close ties to Facebook’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan, who was present at Kavanaugh’s notorious confirmation hearing. Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson with Bloomberg Law writes, “Transparency group Fix the Court, which has aggressively urged the justices to shed conflict-causing financial stocks, said Kavanaugh probably doesn’t need to recuse here, although that might not be the case in future matters involving Facebook. ‘I could see a scenario in a few years where the more liberal Facebook employees sue the company over some equal protection claim that would not have existed but for Kaplan’s influence in company policy,’ said Fix the Court’s GABE ROTH.”

“On Tuesday, PRESIDENT TRUMP signed yet another executive order designed to solidify the political power of his white Republican base at the expense of members of minority groups: It would exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count used to apportion congressional seats. The order appears to emphatically confirm what the Supreme Court concluded last summer in a blockbuster decision that forbade the administration from adding a citizenship question to the U.S. Census — namely, that the administration had ‘contrived’ a rationale for that action.” Leah Litman points out in The Washington Post that Trump wasn’t hoping to add a citizenship question to the census to enforce the Voting Rights Act as his administration had argued, and this week’s action confirms “that the court was correct in finding the administration to be disingenuous in the earlier case.”