A Little Bit of History Repeating | ACA Gets Another SCOTUS Review, Abortion At 1 First On Wednesday
March 2, 2020
HERE WE GO AGAIN
|The Supreme Court today announced it will once again review the Affordable Care Act, agreeing to the request of Democratic states and the House of Representatives to review a lower court’s decision that challenged the constitutionality of the law. It’s likely the case won’t be heard until next term.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
|“The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear its first abortion case since PRESIDENT TRUMP’S two appointees took their seats, a dispute that could mark the first step in a gradual retreat from Roe vs. Wade.” David Savage with the Los Angeles Times reports on this week’s case out of Louisiana in which it is largely expected that the court’s conservative majority will decide to give states even more freedom to restrict abortion access.
HAVEN'T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE
|“It was just 2016 when the high court struck down restrictions on Texas clinics and doctors as an undue burden on women. The ruling helped abortion rights advocates beat back similar laws in other states. Now a nearly identical law in neighboring Louisiana is before the court, and the prognosis for abortion opponents has improved dramatically.” Richard Wolf with USA Today also looks at the upcoming abortion case. He says that even though it’s essentially a copycat of what we previously saw a handful of years ago out of Texas, times have changed now that JUSTICE KENNEDY is gone and GORSUCH and KAVANAUGH are in.
THIS IS BIG...AND NEW NEWS!
|On Friday, REPS. NADLER, JOHNSON AND QUIGLEY introduced the 21st Century Courts Act which would require a number of fixes to make our judicial system more transparent and more accountable. The bill would same-day (and later live) audio at the Supreme Court, live audio in the circuits, a SCOTUS ethics code, judiciary-wide recusal explanations, judiciary-wide online financial disclosures and a new, modernized PACER that would be free for nearly all users.
ALL THE FIXES
|Fix the Court worked on the 21st Century Courts Act with congressional and nonprofit partners over the last year and is calling on members in both parties to add their names in support of the measure. FTC’s Executive Director GABE ROTH said in a statement, “An independent judiciary requires the public’s confidence in the impartiality of judges and justices. Ensuring that the Supreme Court abides by a code of conduct, that every level of the judiciary better accounts for conflicts of interest and that all Americans have unfettered access to court documents – as this bill calls for – would go a long way toward building that confidence.”
BUMP THAT NOISE
|Today, the Supreme Court turned down an attempt from gun rights advocates to overturn PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ban on bump stocks that was implemented after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. Andrew Chung with Reuters reports on the story.
ON DECK
|Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will consider a case over the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created in 2010 during the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis to safeguard consumers in banking, mortgage, credit card and other financial transactions. Ariane de Vogue with CNN explains that while Tuesday’s case puts the fate of the CFPB in question, it also “provokes core questions of how involved government should be in people’s lives and how far presidential power should extend.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
Will The Supreme Court Crown Trump As King?
Los Angeles Times“President Trump is playing a shell game with the American people and rejecting the founding principle of this nation: We have a president, not a king. In a case to be argued before the Supreme Court this month, Trump v. Vance, Trump’s lawyers maintain that the president is absolutely immune from criminal proceedings. In their view, not only can the president not be indicted or prosecuted, he cannot even be investigated by law enforcement if he were to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, as one of Trump’s lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.”
Trump Made A Baseless Attack On Two Supreme Court Justices. Here’s Why He Did It.
The Washington Post“Still, Trump persists in his assault on judges for essentially the reason he continues to attack the media: to discredit and demean the courts, so that when they rule against him, no one will believe, or perhaps obey, them. In doing so, he attacks more than individual judges; he shows contempt for the rule of law. It is a dangerous thing for the country to have a man whose office charges him with faithfully executing the law instead so brazenly seek to undermine respect for it.”
Supreme Court Just Made It Much Harder To Hold Border Agents Accountable
The Washington Post“The Supreme Court’s determination in Hernández v. Mesa means that our legal system’s response to this extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing is nothing. All available evidence shows us that the government will rarely, if ever, hold its agents accountable for violence. Now, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, victims and their families at the border will not even be able to sue the individual agent who violated their rights to hold them responsible.”
The Mysterious Meaning Of The Second Amendment
The Atlantic“What does the Second Amendment mean? This question is at the center of one of the most divisive debates in modern American constitutional law. The amendment itself contains 27 words: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’ This provision references both the collective right of a militia and an individual right. Does this two-century-old text, then, mean that Americans today have a right to gun ownership and use?”