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14 Oct, 10 tweets, 3 min read

So far this morning, Democrats are hammering the theme of voting rights. Both Feinstein and Leahy grill Barrett on her views on the Voting Rights Act and Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case in which the Supreme Court struck down part of the VRA.

Barrett's response to Sen. Leahy on the court's inability to enforce its judgments:

"The Supreme Court has no power, no force, no will, so it relies on the other branches to react to its judgments accordingly."

Under questioning from Sen. Leahy, Barrett declines to characterize the Constitution's emoluments clauses as "anti-corruption" measures. Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit alleging that Trump is violating the foreign emoluments clause.

Durbin: Does the president have the Constitutional power to "unilaterally delay" an election? Barrett responds as she did yesterday. She won't answer "hypotheticals." Durbin responds that the text of the Constitution makes quite clear that the president has no such authority.

Sen. Lee asking Barrett about SCOTUS religion doctrine & the "ministerial exception." That came up last term in Our Lady of Guadalupe School where court said 2 teachers at a Catholic elementary school couldn't sue the school for employment discrimination. scotusblog.com/2020/07/opinio…

@AHoweBlogger

Lee now asking Barrett about 7th Cir. cases before Barrett including 1 where she dissented from the panel’s ruling in favor of a Wisconsin man who admitted that he shot his wife 7 times, killing her in their driveway. More on those cases from @AHoweBlogger scotusblog.com/2020/09/profil…

Sen. Sasse asks Barrett to list the "five freedoms" contained in the First Amendment. Barrett lists speech, press, religion and assembly, then asks Sasse which one she's forgetting. Sasse fills in the fifth: the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances.

Sen. Coons asks about Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that held that the Constitution protects the right to purchase contraceptives. Barrett: "I think that Griswold is very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely to go anywhere." That's six VERYs.

A reminder that occasional audio problems aren't limited to telephonic SCOTUS arguments: The Judiciary Committee has gone into recess due to an apparent problem with the sound system in the committee room.

Sen. Blumenthal now discussing the emoluments clause lawsuit against Trump that he & other Dems brought (& which SCOTUS declined to take up yesterday). As a reminder, there are 2 other cert petitions in separate emoluments clause cases currently pending before the Supreme Court.

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@SCOTUSblog

14 Oct

There was A LOT of Supreme Court News yesterday: Trump financial records, election-related litigation, the census case, new cert grants, AND oral arguments in two cases. 😅

Let's catch you up.

@ahoweblogger

Trump returned to SCOTUS Tuesday to ask the court to block a NY grand jury subpoena for his financial records. The case is back after SCOTUS ruled in July that the president wasn't absolutely immune but could make additional arguments. By @ahoweblogger scotusblog.com/2020/10/trump-…

@jamesromoser

SCOTUS handed the Trump administration a win yesterday when the court granted its request to stop the census count. The admin said it needed to discontinue the count to be able to process the census data and meet a key statutory deadline. By @jamesromoser
scotusblog.com/2020/10/suprem…

Read 4 tweets

SCOTUSblog

@SCOTUSblog

13 Oct

In an exchange with Sen. Booker (D-NJ), Barrett agrees with him that there is implicit racial bias in the US criminal justice system. "It would be hard to imagine a criminal justice system as big as ours without having any implicit bias in it."

@AbbeGluck

Sen. Crapo just mentioned a case from last term on severability. The case was about anti-robocall laws & was called Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants. Prof @AbbeGluck wrote about the its potential relevance to the upcoming ACA case: scotusblog.com/2020/07/a-scal…

Barrett voted in a law school moot of the upcoming ACA case last month that the individual mandate is unconstitutional but severable so the law still stands. She stressed to Sen. Crapo that the moot did not reveal her actual views and that she was not trying to signal anything.

Read 7 tweets

SCOTUSblog

@SCOTUSblog

13 Oct

Chairman Lindsey Graham has gaveled the Senate Judiciary Committee into session. Each senator gets 30 min for the 1st round of questioning. There are 22 senators on SJC (12 GOP/10 Dem), so that means 11 hours minimum if they use all of their time. Every senator may not go today.

Graham asks Barrett whether she would be a female Justice Scalia and about her beliefs on Originalism. She wrote about both in the same essay for Notre Dame Law School in 2017 on whether stare decisis is compatible with Originalism.

scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol92/iss…

Graham asks Barrett about precedent (called stare decisis) & substantive due process. She says SCOTUS has grounded certain rights not explicit in the Constitution, like the right to abortion, in substantive due process. She wrote on both topics in 2003. scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_sc…

Read 26 tweets

SCOTUSblog

@SCOTUSblog

12 Oct

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham (SC) gavels the room into session with some housekeeping remarks and then speaks about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg getting confirmed with a bipartisan vote of 96-3.

He's now introducing Amy Coney Barrett including her judicial background, clerkship experience with Justice Scalia, and academic background.

Senator Graham is not wearing a mask while speaking. Feinstein next to him also not wearing a mask. Barrett is still wearing her mask.

Graham trying to head off at the pass criticism that confirmation happening in an election year. "There's nothing unconstitutional about this process."

Read 42 tweets

SCOTUSblog

@SCOTUSblog

19 Sep

@AHoweBlogger

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, feminist pioneer and progressive icon, dies at 87. From @AHoweBlogger

scotusblog.com/2020/09/justic…

Born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, she was quickly nicknamed “Kiki” by her older sister Marilyn, who died in 1934 of meningitis at the age of 6. Neither of her parents attended college: Her father, Nathan, came to the US from Russia as a teenager and worked as a furrier.

Her mother, Celia Amster Bader, was born a few months after her parents arrived in the country from Austria and worked in a garment factory. Her mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer around the time Ginsburg began 9th grade and died 2 days before her high school graduation.

Read 25 tweets

SCOTUSblog

@SCOTUSblog

8 Jul

Today's pair of decisions on religious employers will have broad consequences for workers. According to some estimates, the ruling in Our Lady of Guadalupe means that hundreds of thousands of employees of religious institutions will lose employment-discrimination protections.

And the ruling in Little Sisters of the Poor could mean that between 70,000 and 126,000 women will lose access to free coverage of contraceptives in their employee health plans. That's the government's own estimate of how many people are affected by the expanded exemptions.

The decisions are a big win for businesses with conscientious objections to the ACA contraceptive mandate like Little Sisters & "many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation" whose employees still have the ability to get coverage from alternative sources

Read 6 tweets

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