KENNEDY RETIRING AGAIN | The Rumor That Won’t Die | The Grim Precedent Of Jennings Case
March 9, 2018
FROM THE RUMOR MILL
|“Dean Heller knows he’s the most vulnerable Republican senator in the country. But he thinks Supreme Court JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY might just help him hang on to his seat.” Burgess Everett with POLITICO reports SENATOR DEAN HELLER predicted last week that the justice will retire in early summer, which Heller thinks will be a good thing for getting the votes he needs to win his hotly contested race.
THE ART OF LISTENING
|Benjy Egel writes in The Sacramento Bee, JUSTICE KENNEDY’S hometown newspaper, that it would be difficult to overstate the political ramifications of a Kennedy retirement. He has been the swing vote on the high court since SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR stepped down in 2006. “Kennedy’s retirement would allow President Donald Trump to nominate a more reliably conservative justice in his place, giving Republicans control of the Supreme Court to go with the House, Senate and Oval Office.”
A GRIM PRECEDENT
|“No matter how you analyze the issues, Jennings was a hard case under both the statute and the Constitution. And, as Kevin Johnson, the immigration maven and dean University of California at Davis law school, said in SCOTUSblog, last week’s decision doesn’t end the case. But the Court’s five-justice majority sent some fairly grim signals about their view of the ERO archipelago and the rule of law.” In The Atlantic, Garrett Epps examines the case of Jennings v. Rodriguez.
OTHER NEWS
Federal Judges To Weigh Request To Halt Congressional Map
The Associated Press“A request by Pennsylvania Republican congressmen to prevent the use of new district lines and an effort to dismiss their lawsuit are the topics of a hearing before a panel of federal judges. The hearing Friday in Harrisburg involves a claim by eight sitting members of the U.S. House that the state Supreme Court overstepped its authority in throwing out the congressional map put in place in 2011.”