SCOTUS Allows Sandy Hook Shooting Lawsuit To Move Forward | DACA Before Justices Today
November 12, 2019
FIRE AWAY
|This morning the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the gun industry by allowing a survivor and relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to pursue their lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used to kill 26 people. The justices’ action allows the lawsuit to move forward at the state level, on the allegation that Remington Arms Co. marketed the military-style rifle used in the mass shooting “for use in assaults against human beings.” The case tests the reach of a federal law that protects firearms manufacturers from being held liable for crimes committed by gun purchasers. Although the law does include exceptions, including one for violating rules related to the marketing and advertising of guns.
SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS
|The Supreme Court today heard what is expected to be one of the most consequential cases of the term, with justices considering the legality of PRESIDENT TRUMP’S effort to rescind the DACA program that protects hundreds of thousands of people from deportation. Early reports indicate that the justices appeared divided during oral arguments. As Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung with Reuters report, conservative justices seemed to question whether they could review Trump’s plans for DACA at all.
HAVE YOU ANY DREAMS YOU'D LIKE TO SELL
|Michael D. Shear, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Adam Liptak with The New York Times report on how the Trump administration “eroded its own legal case on DACA.” They explain the administration left itself legally vulnerable to outside attacks, even when then-Attorney General JEFF SESSIONS knew better. “Mr. Sessions also understood that the legal argument was not the strongest possible rationale they could make in court, according to several people familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private deliberations. If courts disagreed with him that DACA was unlawful, Mr. Sessions knew, the president would lose. And that is just what happened.”
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal weighs in on today’s DACA case in a piece titled, “The Court and the Dreamer Pawns.” The Ed Board argues that Dreamers do deserve legal status, but not at the hands of the justices. “Congress would likely have come to a sensible compromise to protect the young immigrants if judges had not short-circuited the legislative process. DACA recipients who in good faith identified themselves to the government should be protected, but this is for Congress and the President to negotiate—not for unelected judges to pre-empt.”
ANOTHA ONE
|The Washington Post’s Editorial Board also looks to Congress on the issue of DACA — though with not as much generosity. “In the expansive realm of congressional dysfunction, there are few recent examples that surpass the failure to shield from deportation hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants, now in their 20s and 30s, who have grown up, studied and entered the job force after being brought to the United States as children. Here is a youthful cohort of more than 700,000 — as ambitious and promising as their native-born neighbors, classmates, co-workers and friends — whom large majorities of Americans want to protect. And still their fate remains hostage to Capitol Hill’s habitual gridlock.” The Ed Board concludes, “But Congress could regain some respect by doing the right, the obviously right, thing before the court rules.”
THINK ABOUT IT
|SENATOR BOB MENENDEZ shared an op-ed with NBC News in which he defends the Dreamers and urges the Supreme Court to protect their status and not have them thrown “back into the shadows again.” Senator Menendez writes, “Think about it. Despite the past few years of frightening uncertainty, Dreamers continue to inspire us with their courage and determination to keep the dream alive. Every day, they continue going to school, serving our country, starting businesses and raising families — all while organizing, raising their voices and fighting for the lasting and permanent pathway to citizenship they deserve. Simply put, Dreamers are working hard to shape our nation for the better. If that’s not what it means to be an American, then I don’t know what is.”
RUNNIN DOWN A DREAM
|“Lawyers trying to save an Obama-era program that defers the deportation of certain undocumented young adults are strategically directing their arguments to one man: CHIEF JUSTIE JOHN ROBERTS. They have found ammunition in his own words, from a Supreme Court ruling last June, when he sided with the court’s four liberals to cast the decisive vote against the Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.” That’s Joan Biskupic with CNN reporting on the Dreamers’ defenders using the chief justice’s own words to convince the court to block the White House from ending DACA.
SCOTUS VIEWS
The DACA Case Is A Test Of The Administration’s Basic Competence
The Atlantic“One distinguishing feature of the Trump administration is its ambitious, radical policy agenda. A second is how absolutely incompetent it has been at putting that agenda into law. Consider the ‘DACA cases,’ which the Court will hear tomorrow. These cases raise important human issues. But legally, they turn on an abstract question: Was Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to ‘rescind’ the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or ‘Dreamers’) program legal?”
In Battle Over ‘Dreamers,’ Anti-Obama Posturing Boomerangs Back On Trump
The Washington Post“For years, it was as natural as breathing for Republicans to cry that former president Barack Obama’s immigration policies were nothing but lawless exercises in Caesarism. Republicans regularly denounced his executive actions to defer deportations in the most lurid of terms, often without feeling the slightest obligation to defend their claims. But now, with the case over the ‘dreamers’ set to be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the ease with which Republicans reached for such charges might be a key reason President Trump finds himself in a serious political and legal jam.”
As Supreme Court Considers DACA, Protesters Spotlight Adoptees Who Face Deportation
NBC News“There’s a common adoption narrative in this country that foreign-born children adopted into American families have won the lottery: They’ve been rescued from poverty and should be grateful for the life of security and opportunity they’ve been granted as citizens of the United States. I see firsthand the psychological, economic and political challenges undocumented adoptees face. Simply put: It’s appalling. But the real story is much more complicated.”