Could Trump SCOTUS List Backfire? | Biden Camp Builds Legal War Room, Prepares For Drawn-Out Election Battle
September 14, 2020
SUPREME SIDESTEP
|Last week, PRESIDENT TRUMP unveiled his updated Supreme Court shortlist which included his former political rival, SENATOR TED CRUZ. But Cruz says he wouldn’t want the SCOTUS gig even if he had the chance. On Fox Business News he explained, “I want to be in the political fight. I want to be fighting to nominate and confirm three, four, five principled constitutionalist justices, but that’s not where I want to serve. I want to stay fighting right where I am in the US Senate.”
CRED FOR CLARENCE
|John Kruzel with The Hill points out that Trump’s new list includes a half dozen former clerks of JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS, which Kruzel writes is “a reflection of the staunch conservative’s growing clout in the Trump era.”
ON AND ON IT GOES
|On Friday, PRESIDENT TRUMP’S fight to keep his financial records away from Manhattan district attorney, CY VANCE, continued with a new legal filing accusing a federal judge of “stacking the deck” against Trump. Tal Axelrod with The Hill explains SCOTUS already rejected Trump’s challenge to the DA’s subpoena, and a judge ruled last month that Trump would need to hand over his records to Vance. But the Trump camp is taking issue with the judge’s assertion that Trump was trying to “reargue presidential immunity.”
TOP-ED
|Brian Fallon with Demand Justice argues in NBC News that if the release of PRESIDENT TRUMP’S Supreme Court list “was a masterstroke in 2016, this time around, it feels more like a display of [his] political weakness.” Fallon suggests: “That Trump would issue such an incendiary Supreme Court list in the closing weeks tells us a lot about what his priority is right now. It is not to win over these kinds of persuadable voters; it’s to try to further gin up enthusiasm among his base. Trump, it seems, hopes to juice turnout among his core supporters just enough in some swing states to squeak out an Electoral College win without ever attempting to win over the majority of the country that disapproves of the job he is doing.”
ELECTION COUNTDOWN
|With only 50 days left until Election Day, JOE BIDEN’S campaign is getting ready for a drawn-out legal battle — building a legal war room that will be on call. Shane Goldmacher with The New York Times reports two former solicitor generals and hundreds of other lawyers have been enlisted by the Biden team. The campaign described this team of legal muscle as “an election protection program unlike any before.”
CAN'T TELL ME NOTHING
|Election legal battles are already taking place at the state level. Stephanie Saul and Nick Corasaniti with The New York Times report on what’s going on in Wisconsin where they say voting rights activists and political officials are “bracing for” a State Supreme Court decision “that could upend the elections process by forcing the reprinting of thousands of ballots and creating havoc in elections offices throughout the state.” The court is deciding whether to preprint ballots to include Green Party presidential candidate, HOWIE HAWKINS, who made a bid to be included in the list of candidates, as did rapper KANYE WEST. “The Wisconsin Elections Commission ruled in August that neither Mr. Hawkins nor Mr. West had qualified for the ballot, citing deficiencies in their applications. Late on Friday, a Wisconsin Circuit Court upheld the commission’s decision to keep Mr. West off the ballot. Mr. West’s campaign could still file an appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”
2020 ELECTION
A Texas Federal Court Decision Is The Latest Hit To Voting Rights In America
CNN“In several places, the United States Constitution says that states may not ‘deny’ or ‘abridge’ the right to vote based on several characteristics: race, sex, inability to pay a poll tax, or age. Given that these constitutional amendments prohibit both ‘denial’ and ‘abridgement,’ we would expect those terms to mean different things and for courts to prevent either action. Unfortunately, in a case out of Texas, a federal appeals court just construed the word ‘abridge’ so narrowly as to render it almost a nullity, once again showing the federal courts’ hostility to a broad understanding of the fundamental right to vote.”
Claims of a rigged election? Here’s how Congress could save our democracy from vote-count chaos.
Los Angeles Times“President Trump’s claim that only ‘a rigged election’ will yield a Democratic victory poses the risk of a constitutional crisis far beyond anything Americans witnessed in Bush vs. Gore, when the Supreme Court precipitously intervened to award the 2000 election to George W. Bush. Two decades later, the best way to confront the looming crisis is to enlist the Supreme Court in a very different fashion — by creating a special commission, headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., to oversee the disposition of any disputed state election results.”
OTHER NEWS
Trump's Supreme Court Shortlist Is 'Terrifying,' LGBTQ Advocates Say
NBC News“The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, called the 20 names a ‘wishlist’ from conservative groups that have a ‘record of hostility towards progress, tolerance and equality.’ ‘If the past is prologue, he may once again nominate people who would deny legal protections for LGBTQ people, take away the health care provided by the Affordable Care Act, undermine the fundamental right to vote, erode core civil rights laws, and fail to value the lives, needs and Constitutional rights of the LGBTQ community,’ the group’s president, Alphonso David, said in a statement.”