Supreme Court’s “Special Friend” | Will SCOTUS Save Trump On Tax Returns?
March 9, 2020
VERY SPECIAL FRIEND
|Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports on a new study from two students at Yale that shows the Supreme Court routinely granting argument time for the solicitor general is a “recent and curious phenomenon.” Liptak writes, “The study took a thorough look at requests for argument time from amici, considering 2,235 motions in 1,945 cases from 1889 to 2017. The court’s responses to those requests told the story of the solicitor general’s rising dominance, culminating in something approaching a monopoly.”
ADD IT TO THE LIST
|Today, SCOTUS announced that it will hear a case on the constitutional limits of sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison without parole. John Kruzel with The Hill reports, “At issue is whether handing down these sentences absent a finding that the defendant is incapable of rehabilitation violates the Constitution. Defendant Brett Jones received a life sentence without parole for murdering his grandfather with a kitchen knife during a domestic dispute. Jones, who was then 15, claimed to have acted in self-defense.”
GO AWAY AND WAIT
|Josh Gertsein with POLITICO reports on the Justice Department asking SCOTUS “to block an appeals court ruling that threatens to prevent the Trump administration from carrying out its remain-in-Mexico asylum policy along much of the southern border starting next week.” The 9th Circuit issued an order last week that would halt the policy in California and Arizona beginning March 12. The remain-in-Mexico policy forces most non-Mexicans seeking asylum in the U.S. to be sent to Mexico while they await further hearings on their claims.
TWO WORDS, ONE MAJOR QUESTION
|What if the Supreme Court saw other rights as generously as it does gun rights? That’s the question Aaron Tang focuses on in an essay in The Atlantic. He explains, “This is an essay about two words no one wants to see in the same story: guns and schools. But this isn’t about school shootings. This is instead about two starkly different social-activist groups: gun-rights proponents and educational-equity advocates. It’s about their steadfast pursuit of wildly divergent civil rights. It’s about a surprising similarity in their legal strategies. And more than anything, it’s a story about law and ideology, and the difficulty of deciding the former without the influence of the latter.”
POD DU JOUR
|Today’s episode of The Daily podcast looks at the abortion case that was before the Supreme Court last week involving a Louisiana clinic. Adam Liptak, NYT’s Supreme Court correspondent, joins the pod for a conversation on what’s at stake and he describes his experience visiting the clinic at the heart of the SCOTUS case.
SO WHAT'S IT GONNA BE
|In The Atlantic, David Frum writes that DONALD TRUMP is hoping the Supreme Court will save him from having to turn over his financial records to investigators. Frum suggests, “Plainly, there is something in those documents that Trump dreads letting the world see. We now seem on track to one of three possible outcomes of this dispute. The first is that precedent and law prevail. Trump loses his lawsuit against his accountants and bankers, and the subpoenaed documents are surrendered to Congress. The second is that the political imperative to save Trump that swayed Rao will sway the conservative justices on the Supreme Court—and that Trump’s secrets will be protected by a 5–4 decision. The third is that Trump loses—but continues to devise new delays to thwart the subpoenas and defy not only Congress but also the courts. Every one of these possible outcomes leads to explosive controversy in the summer before the 2020 election.”