IS IT TIME FOR TERM LIMITS? | Will Trump Get To Appoint Another Justice? | The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher For New SCOTUS Term
October 1, 2019
TOP-ED
|In an op-ed for CNN, Kermit Roosevelt and Ruth-Helen Vassilas make the case for Supreme Court justices to have term limits. They point to recent comments from JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH in which he said that “nine old people in Washington” wearing robes shouldn’t be telling everybody else how to live. They write, “Yet that is the current reality of our Supreme Court. These days, it’s the justices, and not the people or their elected representatives, who decide who gets health care and who can vote, whom we can marry and who’s allowed into the country, who’s won a presidential election and who can spend money on the next one. Meanwhile, the court has also had a historic lack of turnover and nationally embarrassing confirmation hearings.”
ANOTHA ONE?
|In the words of Lawrence Hurley with Reuters, “The stakes could not be higher for the Supreme Court.” As the justices gear up for another term, the reality for everyone else is starting to sink in that the liberal voting bloc is aging, which may provide opportunity for PRESIDENT TRUMP to get yet another conservative justice on the bench. “The court has a 5-4 conservative majority, and two of the four liberal justices are over 80 years old, including STEPHEN BREYER, who turned 81 last month. GINSBURG, a justice since 1993, underwent radiation therapy in August to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas after having two cancerous nodules in her left lung removed last December.”
HOT TOPIC
|“As the Supreme Court justices prepare to take their seats next week to start a new term, they will meet behind closed doors Tuesday to discuss how they’ll handle one of the most explosive issues running into the 2020 election: Abortion.” That’s Ariane de Vogue and Caroline Kelly with CNN reporting on the abortion challenges looking for Supreme Court input. “As early as this week, the justices could decide whether to take up two cases out of Indiana and Louisiana and they may indicate how they will address a slew of other challenges springing up in conservative states across the county. Additionally, the Court will consider an abortion-related case from Chicago concerning the First Amendment rights of so called ‘sidewalk counselors’ who stand outside abortion clinics hoping to deter women from going inside.”
STRAIGHT TO THE TOP
|Garrett Epps argues in The Atlantic that Congress needs to go straight to SCOTUS for a clear answer on the reaches of executive privilege because PRESIDENT TRUMP “has felt free to take the most extreme executive-privilege position possible in its ongoing battles with the Democratic House.” Epps says that if Democrats are serious about impeachment, they need to go to the Supreme Court to get the information they want for their inquiry. “If [Congress] needs testimony or documents, it should go to the high court immediately to enforce its demands. As Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and an expert on impeachment, suggested to me, the court may find that the subpoenas are a ‘political question,’ which it cannot decide. If so, then at least we will know.”