SCOTUS Grants Trump Money To Build Border Wall | RBG Going Full Bore | Need Term Limits Now
July 29, 2019
BUILD BABY BUILD
|On Friday, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 ruling allowing PRESIDENT TRUMP to begin using $2.5 billion in Pentagon money for his border wall. The high court overturned an appellate decision and said Trump could start spending the money even while litigation over the matter proceeds. Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports, “While the order was only one paragraph long and unsigned, the Supreme Court said the groups challenging the administration did not appear to have a legal right to do so. That was an indication that the court’s conservative majority was likely to side with the administration in the end.”
BLOCKING THE BUILDING
|The four liberal justices dissented from the border wall decision, while the conservative majority noted in a brief order that the government had made a “sufficient showing” that the challengers did not have the legal right to bring the case. JUSTICES GINSBURG, SOTOMAYOR and KAGAN wrote they would have blocked the funds for now, while JUSTICE BREYER wrote separately to say that he would have allowed the government to use the funds to finalize the terms for contractors but block the funds from being used for the actual construction. Ariane de Vogue with CNN reports.
LEST WE FORGET
|Jessica Taylor with NPR reminds us that the dispute over funding the border wall began earlier this year when PRESIDENT TRUMP declared a national state of emergency along the country’s southern border when Congress refused to appropriate enough money for him to build his wall.
THE CLASH OVER COURTS
|“It’s been 150 years since the Supreme Court added seats to its bench and 82 years since a president tried. The court’s conservative evolution over the past three years, however, has persuaded a cottage industry of left-wing groups to try, try again.” That’s Richard Wolf with USA Today covering the “brewing debate” over the Supreme Court, and he says Democrats and Republicans are “eager to brawl” over the issue ahead of the 2020 elections.
GOING FULL BORE
|Joan Biskupic with CNN says that even as she wraps up her 26th year at the Supreme Court, RUTH BADER GINSBURG is going full steam ahead “speaking out and traveling as much as ever.” Biskupic notes that the justice is also very “plainly laying groundwork for what’s next on the liberal wing.” Biskupic: “In the most closely watched cases this session she assigned younger colleagues to speak for the left. Her earlier pattern as the senior liberal, since 2010, had been: she wrote, they signed. Now, when Ginsburg so chooses, the pattern is reversed.”
MONARCHIC TENURES
|In a letter to The Washington Post, Gabe Roth says there’s a lot we can learn from the life and career of the late JUSTICE JOHN PAUL STEVENS — in particular, that justices should have term limits. Roth argues, “If Stevens left the court after a reasonable amount of time — say, after 18 years, during President Bill Clinton’s first term — he could have been replaced with someone equally compelling.”