HOW RBG ENCHANTED PRESIDENT CLINTON AND WON A SUPREME COURT SEAT | Why Dahlia Lithwick Hasn’t Gone Back To SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh
October 31, 2019
I PUT A SPELL ON YOU
|Yesterday at the Georgetown University Law Center, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON, former Secretary of State HILLARY CLINTON, and JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG engaged in a public discussion on what they said was a radical change in federal judicial nominations. Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports that they also discussed the circumstances in which President Clinton nominated Ginsburg to SCOTUS. Liptak: “Mr. Clinton said he was taken by Justice Ginsburg’s career as a pathbreaking women’s rights litigator when he was considering her for the Supreme Court. He said he was also struck by her forthrightness when they met in 1993 for an interview. ‘I knew after about 10 minutes that I was going to give her the job,’ he said.”
ARE YOU A GOOD WITCH OR A BAD WITCH
|Robert Barnes with The Washington Post reports that at the public discussion, JUSTICE GINSBURG said she knew there was concern about her age when PRESIDENT CLINTON was considering nominating her to the Supreme Court. “Some people thought I was too old for the job,” Ginsburg said. Then after she paused for a beat she followed up with, “If you worried about my age, it was unnecessary.”
YOU SAY WITCH LIKE IT'S A BAD THING
|Ariane de Vogue with CNN also covers the Clinton/Ginsburg talk and reports that HILLARY CLINTON admitted to playing a role in getting RBG the SCOTUS gig. De Vogue: “‘I knew that of all the people who were part of the women’s movement she was one of the key players because of her creative understanding of the law and her sense of commitment,’ said Hillary Clinton, who’s a lawyer herself. She added, ‘I may have expressed an opinion or two about the people he should bring to the top of the list.'”
JUST A BUNCH OF HOCUS POCUS
|Speaking of federal judicial nominations…Rebecca R. Ruiz with The New York Times notes, “PRESIDENT TRUMP is nearing a milestone in his push to overhaul the federal judiciary with conservative judges. If the Senate confirms a batch of nominees now working their way through the approval process, a quarter of the nation’s 179 appeals court judges — those sitting just below the Supreme Court — will be appointees of Mr. Trump.”
BAD MOON RISING
|Dahlia Lithwick with Slate explains in her latest why she hasn’t gone back to the Supreme Court since BRETT KAVANAUGH was given a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. She says she can’t — in the words of the late JUSTICE SCALIA — “get over it.” Lithwick: “It is not my job to decide if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty. It’s impossible for me to do so with incomplete information, and with no process for testing competing facts. But it’s certainly not my job to exonerate him because it’s good for his career, or for mine, or for the future of an independent judiciary. Picking up an oar to help America get over its sins without allowing for truth, apology, or reconciliation has not generally been good for the pursuit of justice. Our attempts to get over CIA torture policies or the Iraq war or anything else don’t bring us closer to truth and reconciliation. They just make it feel better—until they do not. And we have all spent far too much of the past three years trying to tell ourselves that everything is OK when it most certainly is not normal, not OK, and not worth getting over.”
PRACTICAL MAGIC
|The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times wonders whether a right to an abortion should be federal law and concludes, “Of course it should.” The Ed Board argues, “We should all hope that the Supreme Court stands by its five decades of precedent recognizing women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies and their own futures. But as long as there’s worry that the Supreme Court might not give abortion rights its full-throated support, it’s worth pursuing a national law as well.”
LIFE'S NO FUN WITHOUT A GOOD SCARE
|Marie Solis with VICE reports on a hidden “wrecking ball” inside a new Supreme Court case that could make it impossible to challenge abortion bans in court. “A measure hidden within June Medical Services v. Gee, the abortion case the Supreme Court will rule on in the next year, would target third-party standing. When Supreme Court justices agreed to hear Louisiana’s law requiring abortion providers to have hospital-admitting privileges—which is identical to a Texas law the court struck down in a landmark 2016 ruling—they also agreed to rule on a cross-petition from the state that argues doctors and clinics can’t speak for their patients.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
If It Takes History Seriously, The Supreme Court Will Strike Down The CFPB
Forbes“There’s a case to be made that the second most powerful person in the federal government sits a block from the West Wing, in a drab concrete structure the sightseers invariably pass without a glance. The building houses the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the director of which implements more than a dozen major statutes—and answers to no one. Not to voters. Not to other bureaucrats. Not even to the chief executive.”
SCOTUS Will Affirm US v. Nixon
The Hill“While it is usually unwise to predict a decision of the United States Supreme Court, here is a dramatic prediction about the great impeachment debate that grips the nation today. In the coming months, probably sooner than analysts expect, the Supreme Court will uphold and affirm the unanimously decided case of U.S. v. Nixon and apply its guiding principle to critical pending legal cases and impeachment proceedings advancing in Congress.”