Kavanaugh Tried To Avoid The Fight This Term | Trump’s Restrictions On DACA Program Challenge Court Guidance
July 29, 2020
PART THREE BABY
|Joan Biskupic with CNN continues her exclusive four-part series with her third installment that looks at what JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH did behind closed doors ahead of the court’s major decisions on abortion and presidential immunity this term. The Supreme Court’s most junior member sent a series of private memos to his colleagues urging them to avoid a ruling on the merits of the Louisiana abortion access law, and he presented an idea for avoiding the fight over PRESIDENT TRUMP’S financial documents. Biskupic writes, “The details, revealed as part of CNN’s series on the justices’ private deliberations, show how Kavanaugh is approaching his role on the bench. Behind closed doors, he looks to please dueling factions of the court as he seeks to move beyond the angry and defiant image he projected in 2018.”
INVISIBLE INK
|After the Supreme Court blocked PRESIDENT TRUMP’S attempt to end the DACA program, the Trump administration won’t take another run at ending DACA, it’s just placing new restrictions on it. The rub is that these new restrictions won’t allow first-time applicants to be accepted into the program. Also, requests for renewal of status will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis and renewals will be granted only for a one-year period. Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer on the case that went to the Supreme Court regarding DACA, told The New York Times, “We obviously have no choice but to go back to court. It was illegal the first time, and now it’s a constitutional crisis. It’s as if a Supreme Court decision was written with invisible ink.”
A PROBLEM WITH AUTHORITY
|Mark Joseph Stern with Slate reacts to the announced restrictions on DACA and argues that PRESIDENT TRUMP is now openly defying the Supreme Court and “effectively rejecting the judiciary’s authority to say what the law is.” Stern suggests the Trump administration has “tried this malfeasance before” with its handling of the census. “After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, Trump insisted they would find a way to do it anyway. That court decision, too, found that the government had violated the law through dishonest incompetence. And in its aftermath, the administration scrambled to work around SCOTUS and snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat. It failed, though not before tiptoeing up to the line of defying the Supreme Court.”
A SHORT-LIVED WIN
|Rebecca A. Reid and Todd A. Curry note in The Washington Post that even though SCOTUS handed down a rare legal victory for Native Americans when it upheld an 1866 treaty between the Muscogee Nation and the United States, Congress could undo that decision entirely. They note the Supreme Court’s decision on the matter “invites and creates incentives for congressional action to diminish or disestablish reservation lands in Oklahoma.”