Senate’s Broken Confirmation Process | The SCOTUS Ruling Protecting & Perpetuating Police Brutality
June 9, 2020
RACE TO THE BOTTOM
|urgess Everett and Marianne Levine with POLITICO report the Senate’s confirmation process is nearly broken, as PRESIDENT TRUMP faces more delays to his nominees than any other president and it’s possible JOE BIDEN would have it even worse if he gets elected. They note, “The practice of blocking or delaying presidential nominees didn’t even begin until Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas was picked to be chief justice of the United States by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The campaign to thwart Fortas’ nomination ended with his resignation from the high court. The filibuster on nominations picked up steam under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, became incredibly popular during Obama’s presidency and is now routine during Trump’s.”
USE OF FORCE
|In The Washington Post, Charles Lane explains the 1989 Supreme Court ruling that has been providing cover for police brutality ever since. “Every police use of force since reflects law enforcement’s absorption of constitutional lessons the justices drew from the Charlotte police’s violent treatment of an innocent, desperately ill man. Training for police officers across the country — probably including Derek Chauvin of Minneapolis — teaches they can’t be sued if they behave in accordance with the holding of Graham v. Connor. That holding, in an opinion written by CHIEF JUSTICE WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST, is that courts should evaluate use of force under the Fourth Amendment, which governs ‘seizures’ — not under the expansive ‘substantive due process’ doctrine underlying liberal rulings such as Roe v. Wade and, later, Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 same-sex marriage case.”
MANNER OR METHOD
|The Trump administration’s plans of resuming federal executions after a decade-plus hiatus is back at SCOTUS, Jordan S. Rubin with Bloomberg Law reports. Several death row prisoners have petitioned the high court over the “manner” of execution. Rubin writes, “The case, which involves several prisoners that the government wants to execute—all of whom were convicted of murdering children—was before the justices in December on a preliminary matter. While the court sided with the prisoners then, JUSTICES SAMUEL ALITO, NEIL GORSUCH, and BRETT KAVANAUGH made clear in a separate opinion that they thought DOJ had the better of the argument. Now with the issues more squarely presented to the high court, if those three justices still hold the same view, then the question could be how the rest of the court comes down on the sensitive subject.”
IT'S OVER, IT'S OVER
|The Associated Press reports that Monday a federal appeals court threw out legal challenges to PRESIDENT TRUMP’S Muslim travel ban, finding that a judge misinterpreted a Supreme Court ruling that found the ban has a “legitimate grounding in national security concerns.”