IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE TO DEPOLITICIZE THE SUPREME COURT? | Alabama Abortion Ban Gets Blocked
October 30, 2019
YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT
|Ian Millhiser with Vox tracks the trajectory of Democratic presidential candidate PETE BUTTIGIEG on the issue of the Supreme Court and says Mayor Pete’s conception of a depoliticized court is likely nothing but a pipe dream. “It’s far from clear that his stated goal — depoliticizing the court — is even possible. Much of the law, including the Constitution itself, is so vague that it is impossible to pin down one clear meaning. And so judges will have to draw on something beyond the text of the law to answer the most difficult legal questions — which are the very same questions that come before the Supreme Court. In the toughest cases, justices often can’t avoid drawing upon their own values to answer questions where the law does not provide clear answers. All of which raises a question for Democrats: Is it really worth deploying a nuclear tactic such as court-packing if the end result could be a Supreme Court that is only a few steps to the left of the current one?”
WHOA NELLY
|Yesterday, a federal judge blocked an Alabama law that would have forbidden abortion in almost any circumstance. The ruling freezes the law from taking effect while challenges to it make their way through the courts. Rick Rojas and Alan Blinder with The New York Times report, “Federal judges in six other states have blocked laws that would ban abortions after what becomes the fetus’s heartbeat can be detected from going into effect, and judges in two other states have temporarily blocked laws that would ban abortions after 18 weeks. Alabama’s law would have gone into effect Nov. 15.”
TOP-ED
|William Bennett Turner and Dennis Aftergut argue in USA Today that the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision “opened the floodgates” for money in politics to corrupt folks like DONALD TRUMP and his posse. They write, “The Supreme Court gave corporations permission to buy ‘ingratiation and access’ through ‘independent expenditures,’ leading the Trumpians straight into the swamp.”
NO TAKE BACKSIES
|“The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to toss out a lawsuit by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac investors that challenged the federal government’s hoarding of nearly all the mortgage giants’ profits.” That’s Greg Stohr with Bloomberg reporting on the appeal filed last week in which the Justice Department said a federal appeals court was wrong when it ruled in September that the investors’ lawsuit should go forward.