HANDMAID’S TALE IS REAL | Chief Justice Always Worrying About Reputation | Nov. 8 Voting Rights Case Before SCOTUS
October 23, 2017
THE HANDMAID'S TALE
|Late Sunday, lawyers for an undocumented 17-year-old girl in a federally funded shelter in Texas asked the full bench of a federal appeals court in Washington to permit her to have an abortion immediately, despite resistance from the Trump administration. This move came after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday declined to let the young woman get an abortion.
I KNOW THIS LOOKS BAD
|“CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN G. ROBERTS JR. has made it his mission to try to convince the American public that the Supreme Court is something unlike other Washington institutions — different from the gridlocked mess across the street in the Capitol, more disciplined and respectful of its place in the constitutional constellation than the bellicose White House down Pennsylvania Avenue.” Robert Barnes with The Washington Post reflects upon this term’s big political gerrymandering case that strikes at the very core of the chief justice’s big fear of getting a bad reputation. Barnes: “Roberts’s real objection seemed to be that forcing the court to make such decisions would put the justices in a no-win position and tarnish the reputation that they — he — had worked hard to burnish.”
THOSE DAYS ARE GONE
|Adam Liptak with The New York Times brings us the story of Larry Harmon, a software engineer from Ohio who was denied the right to vote after being removed from the state voting rolls. On November 8, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether election officials went too far with its use-it-or-lose-it proposition that stripped the freedom to vote from people like Larry Harmon.
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|The Editorial Board of The New York Times weighs in on the case of the 17-year-old immigrant currently being denied the ability to get an abortion, saying the legal argument behind denying her the procedure is “as weak as it is ideologically brazen.” NYT: “Nationally and globally, through restrictions on foreign aid, women’s reproductive rights are endangered by administration officials warping policy to their beliefs, regardless of the law. Now they don’t even bother to hide their intent.”
YOU'RE A REGULAR ORIGINAL KNOW-IT-ALL
|Over the weekend, JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH told an audience at a conference of lawyers that suppressing disagreement in the name of civility is wrong.
PODCAST DU JOUR
|On the 9th episode of The Washington Post’s “Constitutional” podcast, issues of crime and fair punishment are considered. The podcast hosts Ron Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Criminal Justice Institution, and David Oshinsky, author of “Worse Than Slavery” and a professor at NYU.
SCOTUS VIEWS
The Supreme Court Should Exercise Judicial Restraint in Microsoft Data Case
The Hill'Front Row Kids' and Values Have Taken Over Our Courts
USA Today“While teaching constitutional law after the election, it occurred to me that while the Back Row Kids can elect whomever they want as president, senators or representatives, there is one branch of the federal government (and all state governments) that is, more or less by its nature, limited to Front Row Kids: the judiciary.”
Anti-Innovation Patent Tribunal is Begging SCOTUS to Check Its Power
The Hill“Oil States vs. Greene’s Energy Group is a big fracking deal. I am optimistic that the Supreme Court will rule that the PTAB is unconstitutional. Jobs are at stake, our innovation economy is at stake, and the glimmer in the eye of the next generation of inventors – and the investors that will enable that glimmer – are at stake. The Supreme Court was designed to check the powers of the rest of government if they get out of control. This Tribunal is begging for it.”