OVER PROMISE, UNDER DELIVER | SCOTUS Gets Its Moment In The Sun Tonight | The Hot Bench Tomorrow
October 19, 2016
NOT GONNA HAPPEN
|Yesterday SENATOR CHUCK GRASSLEY, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters that the Senate cannot “stonewall” potential nominees from HILLARY CLINTON. The senator said, “We will very clearly vet, and then once that’s done we will make a decision whether we will vote for or against, but…if that new president happens to be Hillary we can’t simply stonewall.”
BUT MOM!
|Amber Phillips with The Washington Post is here to tell us that although SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN may have back-tracked a bit, his pledge that Senate Republicans would block any SCOTUS nomination from a President Clinton is legally sound and very possible. She notes, “We have actually been over this before. The night JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA died in February, Russell Wheeler with the Brookings Institution pointed out that there is nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to confirm, or even consider, the president’s nominee.”
IN PRACTICE
|So if SENATOR MCCAIN’S promise holds true, what would that look like? Lyle Denniston for Constitution Daily does a quick Constitution check for us to see if and how the Supreme Court could handle a long-term vacancy.
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times has this to say about SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN’S recent promise to block any and all of HRC’S Supreme Court nominees should she become president: “The Republicans’ obstruction is wrong; it also could backfire by giving the next president an even freer hand in shaping the Supreme Court. Some might call that poetic justice.”
I'LL ALWAYS COME BACK TO YOU
|Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis explains how a party divided over their presidential candidate has also led to extreme party unity over the Supreme Court. Could it be, that as the root of all things, the Supreme Court is what we will always come back to?
WEAPON OF CHOICE
|“On Monday, during a Q&A session at the University of Minnesota, SOTOMAYOR confirmed that Scalia’s outré quips sometimes infuriated her. ‘There are things he’s said on the bench,’ the baseball fan told the audience, ‘where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it.'” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports on this comment from Sotomayor, among others. Of note, Sotomayor also emphasized that losing Scalia was like losing a family member and that justices try to remember that “differences don’t stand, necessarily, on ill will.”
SYSTEMATIC & RELENTLESS
|In The Washington Post, Tom Toles explains that conservatives understand the importance of SCOTUS, even if their liberal counterparts don’t. Toles: “In any case (so to speak) the GOP has their eye on the ball here, and have their sophist thinking caps on. Because they revere the Constitution so deeply, they rewrote it recently to say that presidents only get to appoint Supreme Court justices in the first three of their four-year terms.”
DEBATE PREP
|The New York Times staff provides 12 questions it would like to hear at tonight’s debate, with two pointed specifically at the incompleteness of the Supreme Court.
LEFTOVERS
|Adam Howard for NBC considers the 10 big issues still on the table ahead of tonight’s debate, some of which, of course, has everything to do with the Supreme Court.
HOT BENCH
|noun. a judge or panel of judges that actively questions lawyers presenting appellate arguments… Consider this your personal preview to our new Q&A series launching tomorrow in which SCOTUSDaily turns the tables on leading Supreme Court correspondents and asks them about their perspectives on the high court. Tomorrow we kick things off with one of the greats…
OTHER NEWS
Voting Rights: New Laws, New Cases After U.S. Supreme Court Ruling
Bloomberg“Courts and legislatures across the U.S. continue to grapple with a big question the Supreme Court tossed onto the political battlefield in 2013: Has the country overcome its history of racial discrimination enough to justify relaxing laws against it?”
Drawing the line on the most gerrymandered district in America
The Guardian“Opponents of gerrymandering fear the voices of voters may be washed out in the upcoming presidential election, even as statewide restrictions that have been intensively litigated pose potentially more direct obstacles to voting. This coming term, the US Supreme Court will review the long-running battle over line-drawing.”