NEW CAMPAIGN FOR SCOTUS TERM LIMITS | 60 Legal Experts Sign Letter Calling For End To Life Tenure | Barr Says Administration Set To Take Action This Week On Census
July 9, 2019
TIME FOR TERM LIMITS
|In non-census news, Fix the Court announced yesterday a new campaign to set term limits on Supreme Court justices. As part of the campaign launch, Fix the Court also announced that more than 60 legal scholars from across the ideological spectrum signed a letter calling for an end to life tenure at the high court. Signers included former U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, Yale Law’s Bruce Akerman, Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe and Larry Lessig, Berkeley Law’s Erwin Chemerinsky, Columbia Law’s Jamal Greene, Miami Law’s Mary Anne Franks, NYU Law’s Stephen Gillers and Northwestern Pritzker Law’s Steven Lubet.
A MOVE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
|The Campaign for Supreme Court Term Limits letter acknowledges the credibility-damaging polarization at the high court, which is made worse by life tenure because it casts each nomination into “apocalyptic terms.” The letter reads, “There is no easy way to move us out of this dynamic, but it has become clear to us that a strong step in the right direction would be to revisit life tenure at the Supreme Court. We choose not to endorse any particular plan here, so long as terms are sufficiently long to maintain judicial independence. But we believe that continuing to concentrate power in the hands of a few individuals, who sit for many decades with almost no oversight and little incentive to compromise, is no longer good public policy, if it ever was.”
THE SHOW GOES ON
|AP’s Mike Balsamo reports on the Attorney General’s comments yesterday in which he said he sees a legal path to adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, despite a Supreme Court ruling that blocked its inclusion, at least temporarily. In his interview with AP, WILLIAM BARR said the Trump administration will take action in the coming days to put the question on the census, though it’s still unclear what the administration’s rationale will be.
IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS
|“The fear that immigrant communities are experiencing as the result of the administration’s open hostility toward them was not an issue that the Court was asked to address in the census case. Neither did the justices resolve whether racism may have played a role in how the administration’s proposed citizenship question came to be. But in the time since the Court ruled against the administration, at the end of June, these questions have acquired greater importance. That, in great part, is thanks to PRESIDENT TRUMP, whose insistence that the citizenship question be included in the census has sown chaos and uncertainty for the courts, the public, and members of his own administration.” That’s Christian Farias writing in The New Yorker that as everyone scrambles to understand what to do next and how to win the war over the census, we have to remember that ultimately this is a war over civil rights.
LONG HAIR DON'T CARE
|Adam Serwer with The Atlantic reviews the Supreme Court’s handling of the census case. He says that even though the Trump administration lied to the high court about its motivations behind putting a citizenship question on the survey, four justices didn’t care. Serwer pulls no punches and argues that the Supreme Court severely fudged up on this one. “The Supreme Court has seen lower moments in its history, such as its rewriting of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations rather than the former slaves it was designed to enfranchise. It has countenanced greater evils, such as when it concluded that black people could never be citizens and when it gave its constitutional imprimatur to Jim Crow. But it has never been more pathetic.”
PREZ V. CHIEF JUSTICE
|In her latest, Dahlia Lithwick with Slate wonders whether CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS will let PRESIDENT TRUMP get away with adding a citizenship question to the census. She asks, “Will John Roberts allow Donald Trump to do again what he did in the travel ban case, laundering a terrible idea so it’s just clean enough to take at face value?” It’s possible Roberts thought he’d settled the census issue already, but now he may have to take another crack at it. Lithwick: “And so now it seems Trump will have his season finale smackdown with the chief, the man he has never forgiven for his vote in the Obamacare cases. And Roberts, who probably believed he had settled this issue last week, must now decide, again, whether it’s worth his while to let the circus clown tear down the institution he prizes above all things. It’s lose-lose for the chief justice, win-win for the president, and a boon for ratings all around.”
YOU BEST BELIEVE
|Ted Hesson and Josh Gerstein with POLITICO explain why PRESIDENT TRUMP will likely lose the census fight. They say it all comes down to believability — which hasn’t exactly been the president’s strong suit. “To pass muster with the Supreme Court, the new DOJ team must find a rationale that the high court will rule consistent with regulatory law and also believable — a tough assignment given that the court said in its ruling that the previous rationale was not.”
NOT BUYING IT
|However, the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times isn’t willing to buy whatever the Trump administration tries to sell. “Seizing on an opening provided by the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is scrambling to offer a new, legally defensible rationale for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. But it’s all a charade ordered up by PRESIDENT TRUMP, who is determined to enlist the decennial census in his crusade against people living in the country illegally.”
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK
|“We don’t know whether the Department of Justice lawyers working on the census case were fired en masse or quit. Either way, Sunday’s announcement was a genuinely shocking development in PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 count. It’s bizarre to the point of being unprecedented for the government to change horses like this in the middle of such a highly time-sensitive legal process.” Noah Feldman for Bloomberg wishes luck to the new lawyers assigned to the census case, noting they have quite the uphill battle ahead as they’ll have to stand up in court and say the Justice Department was previously wrong about its handling of the census issue.
OTHER NEWS
New York City Asks Supreme Court To Drop Gun Case
The Wall Street Journal“New York City has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to drop its planned review of a gun-rights case, saying legal disputes over transporting handguns no longer exist due to changes in city and state law.”
She Urged Her Boyfriend To Die. Now She’s Asking The Supreme Court To Call It Free Speech.
The Washington Post“In a petition for Supreme Court review, filed on Monday, lawyers for the young woman are asking the justices to vacate Carter’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter in the July 2014 death of Roy, who poisoned himself with carbon monoxide in a Kmart parking lot in Fairhaven, Mass., after exchanging text messages and speaking twice on the phone with Carter on that summer day. She lived about 50 miles away in Plainville, Mass.”
Obamacare In Jeopardy As Appeals Court Hears Case Backed by Trump
The New York Times“A federal appeals court panel will hear arguments Tuesday on whether a federal judge in Texas was correct in striking down the Affordable Care Act, a case with enormous stakes not only for millions of people who gained health insurance through the law but for the political futures of President Trump and other candidates in the 2020 elections. The case, which could make its way to the Supreme Court ahead of those elections, threatens insurance protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions and many other sweeping changes the 2010 law has made throughout the health care system.”