BACK TO WHERE IT WAS BEFORE, When We Were On Fire | Trump’s Basic Tweet | On This Day in 1804
November 30, 2016
TODAY AT SCOTUS
|The justices today heard arguments in a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrants testing whether immigrants fighting deportation have a legal right to a bond hearing and possible release if they are held more than six months while awaiting resolution of their case. David Savage with the Los Angeles Times reports the case of Jennings v. Rodriguez takes on “added significance with the election of DONALD TRUMP.”
HONEY LET'S NOT FIGHT
|Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr reports the justices in oral argument today suggested they are likely to be divided on whether foreigners have a right to periodic bond hearing while being detained during deportation proceedings.
SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE?
|Yesterday at SCOTUS, justices considered how the state of Texas determines whether a person is intellectually disabled and thus whether they should be spared the death penalty. Justices seemed inclined to agree with the Texas death row inmate who brought the case, Mr. Bobby James Moore. JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY said the factors that Texas courts employ “are really intended to limit the classification of those persons with intellectual disability as defined by an almost uniform medical consensus.” That one remark could mean defeat for Texas, with Kennedy holding what will likely be the deciding vote.
UNTIL NEXT TIME
|When the justices return next week for oral argument, they’ll take on two cases relating to race and the process of drawing legislative maps. Amy Howe with SCOTUSblog notes, “The justices’ rulings in those cases could provide important guidance on when the use of race in redistricting goes too far and how courts should make that determination.”
ICYMI
|Controversy was set ablaze once again with DONALD J. TRUMP at the very center of it. He tweeted that flag burning should merit a person being jailed or even having their citizenship taken away – two criminal punishments deemed unacceptable by the U.S. Supreme Court. For what seems to be a necessary lesson in American jurisprudence, Eugene Volokh explains in The Washington Post why SCOTUS protects flag burning.
BACK TO WHERE IT WAS BEFORE
|For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports it’s unlikely the Supreme Court will change its mind on the issue of flag burning. “The high court has been a bulwark in defense of the First Amendment,” he writes. Even JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA sided with his liberal colleagues on this issue. And though Scalia defended the right to burn the American flag, he did so by putting his personal views aside. The late justice once said, “If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy weirdo who burns the American flag. But I am not king.”
WHEN WE WERE ON FIRE
|Charlie Savage in The New York Times reports it would be no easy task for DONALD TRUMP to get his way on flag burning. “Even if Mr. Trump were to persuade Congress to enact a criminal statute, a dramatic shift in the balance between government power and individual freedom, anyone convicted and sentenced could point to clear Supreme Court precedents to make the case for a constitutional violation.”
IT'S A BURNIN THING
|The most interesting element to TRUMP’S tweet-bomb is his suggestion to force the loss of citizenship as a punishment for flag burning. In The Atlantic, David Graham refers to Trump’s thought as “an almost comical equation for, say, forging a notary seal with the forfeiture of citizenship, and all of this simply for a speech act, albeit one that many Americans find deplorable.” But as Graham points out, the proposal to strip citizenship as a punishment has been in vogue among Republicans in recent years, and perhaps “this is the America to which [Trump’s] campaign slogan suggested returning.”
YOU'RE SO BASIC
|In The Washington Post, Aaron Blake is here to tell us that DONALD TRUMP’S “basic” position on flag burning isn’t all that controversial, because it probably won’t strike most Americans as being all that controversial. “In fact,” he writes, “making flag-burning illegal appears to have had overwhelming support as recently as a decade ago.”
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|“When DONALD TRUMP, hand on the Bible on Jan. 20, swears to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, we the people will have good reason to doubt he knows what he’s talking about.” That’s the Editorial Board of The New York Times showing little confidence in the president-elect’s familiarity with our nation’s most important document, especially in light of his recent tweet suggesting he has little understanding or respect for constitutionally protected speech. NYT: “He tweets, he posts, he incites. He trolls. He commands a global platform and will soon be America’s commander in chief. But it has to be said, and said again: This is not normal. It demeans the presidency.”
ED BOARD OVERTURE 2.0
|And over on the West (best) Coast, the Editorial Board for the Los Angeles Times agues it’s high time that SCOTUS gets specific and decides who is too intellectually disabled to be executed. Moore v. Texas offers the justices the perfect opportunity to do so. But LAT doesn’t stop there. Taking things one step further the Ed Board opines, “The Moore case once again points out the root absurdity of the death penalty, which forces lawyers to argue over whether someone is smart enough to die in Texas, where he might have already been spared had his crime occurred in a different state using contemporary clinical assessments. Capital punishment is a medieval practice disproportionately applied to the poor and to people of color under a system that is too easily gamed to be trusted, and where the decision to seek death varies by the whims of local district attorneys. Eventually the court needs to recognize that capital punishment is fundamentally unjust and do away with the practice altogether.”
TODAY IN HISTORY
|“On this day in 1804, the Senate, for the third time in its then-brief history, began preparations to sit as a trial court. It acted after the House had voted for eight articles of impeachment against U.S. Supreme Court JUSTICE SAMUEL CHASE, accusing him of political bias.”
OTHER NEWS
It's awful, ungrateful and unpatriotic. But it's not unconstitutional
The Sacramento Bee“In America, the details matter. In America, every protection and freedom was earned by fighting for it…If you don’t care about facts, and if you’re too timid to fight for your beliefs, then you do greater damage to America than any flag burner ever could.”
Pro Se Lawyers Tilt at Senate Inaction on Garland, Iran
The National Law Journal“Two pro se lawyers from opposite ends of the country, frustrated by a lack of U.S. Senate action, turned to the courts to confront two of the hottest political topics of the day: the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy and the Iran nuclear agreement.”