Sotomayor To Sit Out Of “Faithless Electors” Case | Trump’s Defamation Suits Pose A Serious Threat To Our Democracy
March 11, 2020
SITTING THIS ONE OUT
|News today of JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR recusing from one of the two cases SCOTUS will hear in April to decide whether the Constitution forbids states from dictating how members of the electoral college must cast their votes. Because she says she is friends with one of the partners in the case from Colorado, she will not be participating in that case. However, she will still participate in the case from Washington state.
UNCHARTED TERRITORY
|Now that the coronavirus has been officially declared a pandemic, it’s worth considering what our rights are in a quarantine. Ian Millhiser with Vox explains that the reality is under these circumstances, a person’s rights aren’t clearly defined. He writes, “How much can be done varies by state based on their particular public health laws (NCSL has a helpful rundown of each state’s law here). The Constitution places fairly strict limits on the federal government’s power to quarantine individuals within a single state — though these limits do not apply to state officials. And the Constitution prohibits both federal and state governments from denying anyone ‘life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ But the contours of this right to ‘due process’ is not particularly well defined, at least in the context of quarantines.”
LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE
|Fred Barbash with The Washington Post reports a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, LYNN S. ADELMAN, has published a “blistering critique” of the Supreme Court’s record under CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS. The article from Adelman criticizes the chief justice directly, suggesting a string of decisions that have fostered “economic inequality,” “undermined democracy” and “increased the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals” at the expense of ordinary Americans.
A DANGER TO DEMOCRACY
|“DONALD TRUMP’S reelection campaign is launching a legal war against the free press. In the past two weeks, while Americans worried about the coronavirus, the Trump campaign has sued The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. These suits are, legally speaking, frivolous. They pose no danger in court, where they’re all but certain to fizzle and fail. But don’t let that disguise their import. Outside of court, these lawsuits are a real danger to democracy. They abuse the American justice system to attack and intimidate America’s journalists.” That’s Joshua A. Geltzer and Neal K. Katyal writing in The Atlantic about the defamation lawsuits Trump’s team is pushing, and they note that while those suits may be dead in the water legally speaking, they still could do lasting harm to American democratic institutions.
SCOTUS SKETCHBOOK
|Check out sketches from NPR’s visual journalist LA Johnson portraying an abortion rally on the steps of the Supreme Court. The sketches present both sides of the issue of reproductive rights — in particular as it relates to the SCOTUS case out of Louisiana that justices are expected to render a decision on by the end of the term.