DACA At SCOTUS Tomorrow | Are The Dreamers In Chief Justice’s Hands? | Is SCOTUS In Kagan’s Hands?

November 11, 2019

“On Nov. 10, a hundred years ago Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes issued a remarkable opinion that gave birth to our modern understanding of free speech.” That’s Thomas Healy writing in The New York Times about how today’s understanding of the First Amendment was born a century ago. He explains that Justice Holmes was an unlikely deliverer of that opinion, but that our history’s events led him to a conversion of thought — one Healy says illustrates “the importance of a judiciary willing to protect our most fundamental rights.” 

This week the Supreme Court will hear arguments in one of the most anticipated cases of the term, which will ultimately decide the legal status of 700,000 Dreamers. Richard Wolf with USA Today reports, “The Supreme Court’s willingness to hear the case signals a potential win for the White House, but how it wins would be crucial. If the justices say Trump has the same discretion to end the program that Obama had in creating it, a future president just as easily could renew it. If they agree with the Justice Department that it’s unlawful, Congress would have to step in.” Wolf also notes, “Few cases come to the Supreme Court in which one side enjoys such lopsided support. Nearly every federal court to consider the question has blocked the administration from ending the DACA program.”

Jonathan Blitzer with The New Yorker also previews Tuesday’s DACA case and notes that the Trump administration has offered “a shifting set of explanations for the cancellation of DACA.” Blitzer spoke with TED OLSON, who will represent the Dreamers on Tuesday, and Olson compared the upcoming dispute to an earlier SCOTUS case on the issue of adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Olson said of that case, “The Supreme Court decided, ‘Well, you might be able to add that question, but you’ve got to be able to explain it, and you can’t give us bogus reasons for doing so,'” Olson also said the DACA case “is a rule-of-law case…involving hundreds of thousands of individuals who will be hurt by an abrupt and unexplained and unjustified change in policy.”

“Given the conservative majority on the court, the so-called Dreamers’ best hope for victory almost surely depends on CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS JR.” That’s David Savage with the Los Angeles Times noting the important, if not critical role the chief justice will play in deciding this week’s DACA case. Savage writes, “Though Roberts has repeatedly ruled that the president enjoys broad powers when it comes to immigration, he is also one of the few remaining conservative justices who has shown a willingness to side with liberals on high-profile cases, including one recently in which he agreed that the Trump administration had not adequately defended its actions — the same issue in play in the Dreamers case.”

In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot considers whether the fate of the Supreme Court is in the hands of JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN. Talbot argues, “Kagan, who has long been admired by legal scholars for the brilliance of her opinion writing and the incisiveness of her questioning in oral arguments, is emerging as one of the most influential justices on the court—and, without question, the most influential of the liberals. That is partly because of her temperament (she is a bridge builder), partly because of her tactics (she has a more acute political instinct than some of her colleagues), and partly because of her age (she is the youngest of the court’s four liberals, after Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor).”