Red States Hope To Capture The Attention of New Conservative Majority | Climate Change Case Comes To SCOTUS
November 25, 2020
NOT PARTICULARLY CLOSE OR COMPLICATED
|“DONALD TRUMP will no longer be president in two months. But an unconstitutional memorandum he handed down last July could potentially shape both U.S. policy and American elections for the next decade, if the Supreme Court, scheduled to hear the case on November 30, allows that memo to take effect.” That’s Ian Millhiser with Vox explaining the president’s ongoing effort to stop the 2020 census count from including undocumented immigrants living in the country. Millhiser notes an estimated 10.6 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. — nearly 20 percent of which live in the blue state of California. “The courts have thus far approached Trump’s memo with considerable skepticism. Four different three-judge panels have all unanimously concluded that Trump may not exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count. That means that a dozen judges, some appointed by Democrats and some by Republicans, all agree that Trump’s memo is unconstitutional. The legal questions in these cases, in the words of one lower court that rejected Trump’s arguments, are ‘not particularly close or complicated.’ Nevertheless, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. New York, one of the four cases challenging Trump’s unconstitutional memo.”
PRACTICAL MAGIC
|SCOTUS granted a Democratic request for five extra days to respond to one of two appeals from Republicans who are challenging the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision that extended the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received in the state. Greg Stohr with Bloomberg reports the cases “have lost much, if not all, of their practical significance in light of JOE BIDEN’S victory in the state by more than 80,000 votes.”
STRANGERS TO YOUR OWN KIDS
|Mark Joseph Stern with Slate reviews a request from Indiana in which the state attorney general asked SCOTUS to strip same-sex couples of their equal parenting rights and deny married same-sex couples the right to be recognized as the parents of their own children. The Indiana attorney general made this appeal at the request of SCOTUS and Stern notes, “What’s strange about this case, Box v. Henderson, is that it poses a question the Supreme Court has already answered—twice. The plaintiffs are eight married lesbian couples in Indiana who used a sperm donor to conceive. When a married opposite-sex couple uses a sperm donor, Indiana recognizes the birth mother’s husband as the child’s parent. When a married same-sex couple does the same thing, however, the state refuses to list the birth mother’s wife as the child’s parent. In both instances, the second parent has no biological connection to the child; Indiana’s decision to extend parental rights to the nonbiological husbands of birth mothers, but not the wives of birth mothers, is sheer discrimination. On two different occasions, the Supreme Court prohibited this kind of mistreatment.”
SHOT ACROSS THE BOW
|Chris Cillizza with CNN reports Arkansas Republican legislators have filed legislation “that would amount to an outright ban on abortion in their state.” Cillizza says the effort is likely being made for an audience of nine, a reflection of Republicans’ hopes to overturn Roe v. Wade now that a 6-3 conservative majority sits on the Supreme Court.
IT'S GETTING HOT IN HERE
|Ellen M. Gilmer with Bloomberg Law reports on the “Big Oil climate showdown” headed for the Supreme Court in January. The high court just scheduled arguments for January 19 involving a case stemming from Baltimore’s effort to make oil companies pay for the local harms associated with fossil fuels contributing to the acceleration of climate change.
WITH GREAT POWER
|Ben Geman with Axios notes today that powerful lobbying groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers filed amicus briefs this week supporting the Big Oil companies part of the pending climate change case at SCOTUS. Geman writes, “Big K Street groups’ interest in the case show the stakes of both the narrower technical question at hand, and the wider climate-related claims…The case is a jurisdictional tussle about the city of Baltimore’s litigation against BP, Exxon and others seeking damages for climate-related harms. But it’s also relevant to roughly a dozen similar lawsuits nationwide by local and state officials that plaintiffs want litigated in state courts.”
YOU CAN DANCE IN A HURRICANE
|“How far will the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority go?” Aaron Tang opines in the Los Angeles Times that so far SCOTUS is sending some seriously centrist signals. “The Supreme Court has relied on the least harm principle in a number of high-profile cases, including several last term…Least harm reasoning can preserve public confidence in the court because it avoids creating full-on losers. It won’t apply in every case, but in this dangerous and partisan moment, the kind of sensible middle-ground rulings it yields are precisely what our country needs.”
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
|SCOTUSDaily is taking a break this week and will return to your inbox on Monday — until then, have a healthy and yummy Thanksgiving!