Tag: us federal court system

Major Supreme Court cases to watch in the new term | CNN Politics

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Looking at an upcoming Supreme Court term from the vantage point of the first Monday in October rarely tells the full story of what lies ahead, but the docket already includes major cases concerning the intersection between the First Amendment and social media, gun rights, racial gerrymandering and the power of the executive branch when it comes to regulation.

The court will still determine if it will hear oral arguments on issues such as medication abortion and transgender rights, not to mention the possibility of a flurry of emergency requests related to the 2024 election.

Here are some of the key cases on which the court will hear oral arguments this term:

After the Supreme Court issued a major decision last year expanding gun rights nationwide, lower courts began reconsidering hundreds of firearms regulations across the country under the new standard crafted by Justice Clarence Thomas that a gun law passes legal muster only if it is rooted in history and tradition.

On the heels of that decision, a federal appeals court invalidated a federal law that bars an individual who is subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm. That law, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, “is an outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.”

The Biden administration has appealed, saying the ruling “threatens grave harms for victims of domestic violence.”

In 2019, nearly two-thirds of domestic homicides in the United States were committed with a gun, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.

Lawyers for Zackey Rahimi, a man who was prosecuted under the law in 2020 after a violent altercation with his girlfriend, have urged the justices to let the lower court opinion stand, arguing in part that there is no law from the founding era comparable to the statute at hand.

Racial gerrymandering: South Carolina congressional maps

Justices will consider a congressional redistricting plan drawn by South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature in the wake of the 2020 census. Critics say it was designed with discriminatory purpose and amounts to an illegal racial gerrymander.

The case focuses the court’s attention once again on the issue of race and map drawing and comes after the court ordered Alabama to redraw the state’s congressional map last term to account for the fact that the state is 27% black. The decision, penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, surprised liberals who feared the court was going to make it harder for minorities to challenge maps under Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act.

In the latest case, the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and a Black voter named Taiwan Scott, are challenging the state’s congressional District 1 that is located along the southeastern coast and is anchored in Charleston County. Although the district consistently elected Republicans from 1980 to 2016, in 2018 a Democrat was elected in a political upset, though a Republican recaptured the seat in 2020.

The person who devised the map has testified that he was instructed to make the district “more Republican leaning,” but that he did not consider race. He did, however, acknowledge that he examined racial data after drafting each version and that the Black voting age population of the district was likely viewed during the drafting process.

A three-judge district court panel struck down the plan in January, saying that race had been the predominant motivating factor. “To achieve a target of 17% African American population,” the court said, “Charleston County was racially gerrymandered and over 30,000 African Americans were removed from their home district.”

Expert explains why Justice Thomas’ gifts from wealthy friends are problematic

In the latest attack against the so-called administrative state, the justices are considering whether to overturn decades old precedent to scale back the power of federal agencies, impacting how the government tackles issues such as climate change, immigration, labor conditions and public health.

At issue is an appeal from herring fishermen in the Atlantic who say the National Marine Fisheries Service does not have the authority to require them to pay the salaries of government monitors who ride aboard the fishing vessels.

In agreeing to hear the case, the justices signaled they will reconsider a 1984 decision – Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council – that sets forward factors to determine when courts should defer to a government agency’s interpretation of the law. First, they examine a statute to see if Congress’ intent is clear. It if is – then the matter is settled. But if there is ambiguity – the court defers to the agency’s expertise.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices that the agency was acting within the scope of its authority under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and said the fishermen are not responsible for all the costs. The regulation was put in place to combat overfishing of the fisheries off the coasts of the US.

Representing the fishermen, former Solicitor General Paul Clement argues that the government exceeded its authority and needs direct and clear congressional authorization to make such a demand. “The ‘net effect’ of Chevron,” Clement said, is that it “incentives a dynamic where Congress does far less than the Framers anticipated, and the executive branch is left to do far more by deciding controversial issues via regulatory fiat”

For the second time in recent years, the court is taking aim at a watchdog agency created to combat unfair and deceptive practices against consumers, in a case that could deal a fatal blow to the future of the agency and send reverberations throughout the financial services industry.

At the center of the case at hand is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – an independent agency set up in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown that works to monitor the practices of lenders, debt collectors and credit rating agencies.

Congress chose to fund the CFPB from outside the annual appropriations process to ensure its independence. As such, the agency receives its funding each year from the earnings of the Federal Reserve System. But the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals held last year that the funding scheme violates the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution, that, the court said “ensures Congress’ “exclusive power over the federal purse.”

According to the CFPB, the agency has obtained more than $18.9 billion in ordered relief, including restitution and canceled debts, for more than 195 million consumers, and more than $4.1 billion in penalties, in actions brought by the agency against financial institutions and individuals that have broken federal consumer financial protection laws.

A handful of other agencies have similar funding schemes including the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Three years ago, the Supreme Court limited the independence of the CFPB by invalidating its leadership structure. A 5-4 court held that the structure violated the separation of powers because the president was restricted from removing the director, even if they had policy disagreements.

Agency regulatory authority: Securities and Exchange Commission

The justices are looking at the in-house enforcement proceedings of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in another case that invites the conservative majority to pare back the regulatory authority of federal agencies.

The court’s decision could impact whether the SEC and other agencies can conduct enforcement proceedings in-house, using administrative courts staffed with agency employees, or whether such actions must be brought in federal court.

On one side are critics of such agency courts who argue that they allow federal employees to serve as prosecutors, judges and jury, issuing rulings that could particularly hurt small businesses. On the other side are those who point out that several agencies, including the Social Security Administration, have such internal proceedings because the topics are often complex and the agency has more expertise than a federal judge.

The case arose in 2013 after the SEC brought an enforcement action against George Jarkesy, who had established two hedge funds with his advisory firm, Patriot28, for securities fraud.

The 5th Circuit ruled that the SEC’s proceedings deprive individuals of their Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury. In addition, the court said that Congress had improperly delegated legislative power to the SEC, which gave the agency unconstrained authority at times to choose the in-house administrative proceeding rather than filing suit in district court.

In December, the court will examine the historic multibillion-dollar Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement with several states that would ultimately offer the Sackler family broad protection from OxyContin-related civil claims.

Until recently, Purdue was controlled by the Sackler family, who withdrew billions of dollars from the company before it filed for bankruptcy. The family has now agreed to contribute up to $6 billion to Purdue’s reorganization fund on the condition that the Sacklers receive a release from civil liability.

The Biden administration, representing the US Trustee, the executive branch agency that monitors the administration of bankruptcy cases, has called the plan “exceptional and unprecedented” in court papers, noting that lower courts have divided on when parties can be released from liability for actions that caused societal harm.

“The plan’s release ‘absolutely, unconditionally, irrevocably, fully, finally, forever and permanently releases’ the Sacklers from every conceivable type of opioid-related civil claim – even claims based on fraud and other forms of willful misconduct that could not be discharged if the Sacklers filed for bankruptcy in their individual capacities,” Prelogar argued in court papers.

For the second year running, the justices will leap into the online moderation debate and decide whether states can essentially control how social media companies operate.

If upheld, laws from Florida and Texas could open the door to more state legislation requiring platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok to treat content in specific ways within certain jurisdictions – and potentially expose the companies to more content moderation lawsuits.

It could also make it harder for platforms to remove what they determine is misinformation, hate speech or other offensive material.

“These cases could completely reshape the digital public sphere. The question of what limits the First Amendment imposes on legislatures’ ability to regulate social media is immensely important – for speech, and for democracy as well,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, in a statement.

“It’s difficult to think of any other recent First Amendment cases in which the stakes were so high,” Jaffer added.

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August 2, 2023
Conservative justices suggest South Carolina GOP gerrymandering was based on politics, not race | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court’s conservatives expressed doubt at oral arguments Wednesday that South Carolina GOP lawmakers engaged in impermissible racial gerrymandering when they redrew congressional lines for a House seat to benefit Republicans.

The case is one of several racial and political gerrymandering-related lawsuits that could impact which party controls the House after next year’s congressional elections.

The district at issue was reworked in 2020 to benefit the GOP and current incumbent, Rep. Nancy Mace – one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker last week.

The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and a Black voter named Taiwan Scott say the use of race dominated the decision-making process and that the state worked to intentionally dilute the power of Black voters. A federal court agreed, referring to the revised map as “bleaching.”

Several of the conservative justices on Wednesday suggested that map drawers had taken politics into consideration, not race.

Chief Justice John Roberts said those challenging the map had “no direct” evidence that race had predominated in the decisionmaking process. He said that there were no “odd-shaped” districts drawn and that there existed a “wealth of political data” that would justify the chosen boundaries. He said the challengers had only presented “circumstantial evidence” and suggested the court would be “breaking new ground” in its voting jurisprudence if it were to side with them.

Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly suggested that a lower court had made serious legal error in invalidating the map by relying upon erroneous expert testimony. He said the Supreme Court could not “rubber-stamp” the district court’s finding and he noted that the individual charged with drawing the maps had years of experience and had worked for both Democrats and Republicans.

Alito contended that there was “nothing suspicious” if a map drawer is aware of race as long as it is not a predominant factor when drawing lines.

Justice Neil Gorsuch said there was “no evidence ” that the legislature could have achieved its “partisan tile in any other way.”

For their part, the liberals on the court suggested that the Republican-controlled South Carolina Legislature adopted the maps by considering race as a predominant factor, in violation of the equal protection clause of the US Constitution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Republicans were launching “pot shots” at the experts who claimed the maps could only be explained by race. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the challengers are not required to produce a “smoking gun” to prove their point.

The dispute comes as the justices this year ordered Alabama to redraw its congressional map to account for the states’ 27% Black voting population. That decision, penned by Roberts, came as a welcome relief to liberals who feared that the court was poised to make it harder for minorities to challenge maps under Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act. A federal court approved a new map last week that significantly boosts the Black population in a second district, which could lead to the pickup of a Democratic seat next year.

The South Carolina case raises different questions rooted in the Constitution concerning when a state crosses the line between permissible partisan goals and illegal racial discrimination.

The state chapter of the NAACP and Scott are challenging the state’s 1st Congressional District, located along the southeastern coast and anchored in Charleston County. Although the district consistently elected Republicans from 1980 to 2016, in 2018 a Democrat was elected in a political upset.

Two years later a Republican candidate, Mace, regained the seat in a close race. When the state House and Senate began considering congressional reapportionment in 2021, the Republican majorities sought to create a stronger GOP tilt in the district, one of seven in the state. A new map could make the seat more competitive.

After an eight-day trial featuring 42 witnesses and 652 exhibits, a three-judge district court panel in January held that District 1 amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because race was the predominant factor in the district’s reapportionment plan.

“To achieve a target of 17% African American population,” the court said, “Charleston County was racially gerrymandered and over 30,000 African Americans were removed from their home district.” The court referred at one point to the “bleaching” of Black voters out of the Charleston County portion of the district.

“State legislators are free to consider a broad array of factors in the design of a legislative district, including partisanship, but they may not use race as a predominant factor and may not use partisanship as a proxy for race,” the court concluded.

South Carolina Republicans, led by state Senate President Thomas Alexander, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the maps had not been drawn impermissibly based on race, but instead with politics in mind.

The person who devised the map testified in federal court that he was instructed to make the district “more Republican leaning,” but that he did not consider race while drawing the lines. He did, however, acknowledge that he examined racial data after drafting each version and that the Black voting-age population of the district was viewed during the drafting process.

“If left uncorrected, the panel’s holding would place States in an impossible bind by exposing them to potential racial gerrymandering liability whenever they decline to make majority-white, modestly-majority Republican districts majority-Democratic,” argued John Gore, a lawyer for the Republicans.

Mace filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the high court in support of the Republicans, charging that the lower court “ignored one of the most important traditional districting principles – the preservation of the core of existing districts.”

Joined by other GOP members of Congress from South Carolina, Mace argued that constituent services, voter education and the seniority of long-serving members of the House are “vital interests” and that the lower court was “bent on destroying the legislatures’ duly enacted and carefully negotiated map.”

Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund told the justices in court papers that the state impermissibly used race as a predominant factor when drawing the district.

“Using race as the predominant means to sort voters is unconstitutional even if done for partisan goals,” they argued.

They said the lower court made clear that the state “intentionally exiled more than 30,000 Black Charlestonians from CD1 predominately because of their race.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Supreme Court allows Biden administration to continue fully enforcing ghost gun regulations | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Biden administration to continue regulating so-called ghost guns – untraceable homemade weapons – as firearms under federal law.

The court’s brief order grants the Justice Department’s request to wipe away a lower court order and allow the regulations to remain in effect while a legal challenge brought by firearm manufacturers continues to play out in the lower courts.

There were no noted dissents to the order.

Ghost guns are kits that a user can buy online to assemble a fully functional firearm. They have no serial numbers, do not require background checks and provide no transfer records for easy traceability. Critics say they are attractive to people who are legally prohibited from buying firearms.

In the Justice Department’s emergency application to the justices, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out that a district court judge had essentially ignored an order the Supreme Court issued just two months ago.

Back in August, a 5-4 court sided with the Biden administration in a challenge brought by a group of manufacturers and allowed the regulations to remain in effect while legal challenges play out. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberal justices in the government’s favor.

After the order was issued, however, a district court judge based in Texas stepped in to block the regulations as applied to two manufacturers. The injunction was then largely upheld by the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

In an unusually sharp filing, Prelogar told the justices in an emergency application that the district court and the 5th Circuit “have effectively countermanded this Court’s authoritative determination about the status quo that should prevail during appellate proceedings in this case.”

The court “should not tolerate that affront,” she wrote.

“Although there’s no explanation for today’s ruling, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a repudiation of the lower courts for not correctly reading the tea leaves of the court’s August ruling that froze a similar injunction,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “In that sense, it’s just the latest in an increasing line of rulings by the Supreme Court pushing back against district courts in Texas and the 5th Circuit.”

Prelogar called the lower court ruling “a grave threat to public safety because the lack of background checks makes ghost guns uniquely appealing to felons, minors, and other prohibited persons – and because when ghost guns are inevitably used in crime, they are essentially impossible to trace.”

In 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives updated its regulations to define the kits as firearms under the law so that the government could more carefully track them.

The rule does not prohibit the sale or possession of any ghost gun kit, nor does it block an individual from purchasing such a kit. Instead, it requires compliance with federal laws that impose conditions on the commercial sale of firearms. Those conditions include requirements that commercial manufacturers and sellers mark products with serial numbers and keep records to allow law enforcement to trace firearms used in crimes.

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August 2, 2023
Israeli government passes law to limit Supreme Court power, defying mass protests | CNN

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The Israeli parliament on Monday passed a law stripping the Supreme Court of its power to block government decisions, the first part of a planned judicial overhaul that has sharply divided Israeli society and drawn fierce criticism from the White House.

The controversial bill passed by a vote of 64-0 in the Knesset. All members of the governing coalition voted in favor the bill, while all opposition lawmakers walked out of the chamber as the vote was taking place.

Huge crowds of angry protesters gathered outside, attempting to block access to the building. They were met with barbed wire and water cannons and at least 19 were arrested, according to Israel Police. Thousands of military reservists – including more than 1,100 Air Force officers – said even before the bill passed that they would refuse to volunteer for duty if it did.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said he would file a petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday to block the law and has urged the military reservists not to refuse to serve until the court delivers its ruling.

The so-called reasonableness law takes away the Supreme Court’s power to block government decisions by declaring them unreasonable. Its passing could trigger a constitutional crisis – if the court declares the law itself is unreasonable.

The Movement for Quality Government, an Israeli NGO, filed a petition with the Supreme Court immediately after the vote took place, asking the court to declare the law illegal on the grounds that it changes the basic structure of Israeli democracy, and requesting that it block its implementation until the court has ruled on it.

In pictures: Israelis protest as lawmakers plan judicial overhaul

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who left hospital on Monday morning after having been fitted with a pacemaker, pushed the bill through despite Israel’s most important ally, the United States, issuing increasingly forceful warnings not to do so.

In a highly unusual step, the US President Joe Biden weighed in on the policy and warned that rushing the changes through without a broad consensus amounts to an erosion of democratic institutions and could undermine US-Israel relations.

“Given the range of threats and challenges confronting Israel right now, it doesn’t make sense for Israeli leaders to rush this – the focus should be on pulling people together and finding consensus,” Biden said in a statement provided to CNN on Sunday.

Biden raised concerns directly with Netanyahu during a phone call last week and then called New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to the Oval Office to make clear his stance on the judicial overhaul.

Speaking after the Knesset passed the bill on Monday, the White House said it was “unfortunate that the vote today took place with the slimmest possible majority.”

The Israeli stock market dropped after the vote, its main index, the TA-35, trading more than 2% lower. The Israeli Shekel was also weaker against the dollar, dropping just under 1%.

The fierce debate over the planned judicial overhaul has turned into a battle over the soul of the Israeli state. It has pitted a coalition of right-wing and religious groups against the secular, liberal parts of Israeli society and sparked the longest and largest protests in the country’s 75-year history.

The fight is happening against the backdrop of some of the worst violence in many years. The number of Palestinians, militants and civilians, killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces is at its highest in nearly two decades. The same is true of Israelis and foreigners – most of them civilians – killed in Palestinian attacks.

Israel, which has no written constitution and no upper chamber of the parliament, has had a relatively powerful Supreme Court, which supporters of the changes argue is problematic. At the same time, the Supreme Court is the only check on the power of the Knesset and the government, since the executive and legislative branches are always controlled by the same governing coalition.

Netanyahu and his allies call the measures “reforms” and say they are required to rebalance powers between the courts, lawmakers and the government. Other parts of the planned overhaul which are yet to be voted on by the Knesset would give Netanyahu’s coalition more control over the appointment of judges, and would remove independent legal advisers from government ministries.

Opponents of the plan call it a “coup” and say it threatens to turn Israel into a dictatorship by removing the most significant checks on government actions.

Netanyahu was forced to pause the legislative process earlier this year, but resumed it earlier this month. He has argued that the Supreme Court has become an insular, elitist group that does not represent the Israeli people.

But critics say Netanyahu is pushing the overhaul forward in part to protect himself from his own corruption trial, where he faces charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. He denies any wrongdoing.

Another bill, already voted through in March, makes it more difficult for a sitting prime minister to be declared unfit for office, restricting the reasons to physical or mental incapacity and requiring either the prime minister themselves, or two-thirds of the cabinet, to vote for such a declaration.

Despite his victory on Monday, Netanyahu is likely to face more pressure over the reforms.

The mass protests that have engulfed Israel since the reforms were first announced in January and are unlikely to stop now. After hearing the law has passed, protesters outside the Knesset began marching around, chanting “We will not give up. We will not give up until it’s better here.”

The Israel Bar Association is already preparing a legal challenge to the bill, the lawyers’ group said Sunday. The Bar is also warning it will shut down “as an act of protest against the anti-democratic legislative process,” the statement said. That means the Bar Association would not provide professional services to its members, not that lawyers would go on strike.

Israel’s umbrella labor union, the Histadrut, warned moments after the government passed the reasonableness bill that if the government continued to legislate unilaterally, there would be serious consequences.

The law still needs to be rubber stamped by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, a formality under Israel’s political system.

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July 24, 2023
‘Race neutral’ replaces affirmative action. What’s next? | CNN Politics

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When the Supreme Court cut affirmative action out of college admissions programs Thursday, it did not outlaw the goal of achieving diversity, but it set a new “race-neutral” standard for considering applicants.

That term – “race neutral” – does not appear in the opinion of the court, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, which states that colleges and universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.”

But when Roberts clarifies that students can still refer to their race in admissions essays, explaining challenges they’ve overcome, he and the majority are buying into the idea of race neutrality.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own concurring opinion, uses the term “race neutral” repeatedly, offering it as an antidote to affirmative action.

Pointing to efforts in California and Michigan to enroll diverse classes at top universities even after voters in those states ended affirmative action, Thomas says race-neutral policies can “achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without any of the burdens and strife generated by affirmative action policies.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor shot back at Thomas and the majority, rejecting the term.

“The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored,” she wrote.

For more on this view, read this piece in The Atlantic by scholars Uma Jayakumar and Ibram Kendi: “‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal.’”

If the experience of California and Michigan – where voters ended affirmative action programs years ago – is any indication, we can expect that the representation of Black and Latino students at top-level universities will fall.

Those states argued in briefings to the court that their race-neutral efforts have not been completely successful, particularly at top-tier, flagship public schools, in creating environments that are inclusive for all.

California has, according to its brief, tried race-neutral measures that “run the gamut from outreach programs directed at low-income students and students from families with little college experience, to programs designed to increase UC’s geographic reach, to holistic admissions policies.”

While it has made strides, it says, there is a shortfall “especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses, where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”

In California, half of the college-age population – 18-24 – is Latino, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California. Compare that with just 27% of enrollees for 2022 at the University of California’s nine undergraduate campuses who the UC system categorizes as Hispanic/Latinx.

On the other hand, less than 13% of the college-age population is Asian, compared with 38% of UC enrollees.

A little more than quarter of college-age Californians are White, compared with 18% of UC enrollees.

Five percent of UC enrollees are African American, which is about on par with the 5.6% of college-age Californians who are Black.

The figures change in comparison with the system overall at UC Berkeley, the system’s flagship undergraduate campus, where a smaller portion of entrants in 2022 were categorized as African American / Black (3.6%) and Chicanx / Latinx (21.1%), and more were White (30.7%) and Asian (52.1%).

It’s also interesting to note that the Supreme Court exempted military academies from the decision. They can, presumably, still utilize affirmative action even though they are the higher learning institutions over which the federal government has the most control. The court, according to the majority opinion, feels the academies have “potentially distinct interests.”

Those interests were perhaps outlined by former military leaders who wrote a brief last year arguing affirmative action aided national security.

Meanwhile, even though race is off the table as a determinative factor, schools like Harvard University can and still will very much take into account whether an applicant’s parents went there, how much their parents might be able to donate and whether an applicant can help their sports teams.

“While the actual language of the Supreme Court will come across as very intellectualized and esoteric, as if in a classroom, in reality, how will this work?” wondered Laura Coates, CNN’s chief legal analyst, appearing on the network Thursday.

“How will you be able to have certain color blindedness but then at the same time allowed to take into account one’s experiences when race has been a part of that? That’s the devil in the details of every affirmative action case.”

CNN’s Nicquel Terry Ellis wrote about what the data suggests will happen:

A study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that colleges and universities are less likely to meet or exceed their current levels of racial diversity in the absence of race-conscious admissions. They are also less likely to reflect the racial makeup of the population graduating from the nation’s high schools.

Zack Mabel, a researcher for Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce, told her race-neutral practices have not driven the diversity many colleges hoped for, and some students are simply not applying. Read more from Terry Ellis.

Creating a more equitable and representative workforce has been a public aim in corporate America, where companies have created diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments. Multiple corporations – from Apple to IKEA – asked the Supreme Court to allow affirmative action to continue so that their potential workforce is more diverse.

But efforts to recruit students of color in the race-neutral, post-affirmative-action world will be complicated in states where there is a growing backlash to diversity efforts.

CNN’s Leah Asmelash recently wrote:

More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced or passed bills reining in DEI programs in colleges and universities, claiming the offices eat up valuable financial resources with little impact.

“The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates,” writes Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.

He suggests the decision will “widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors.”

Rather than ease social tension, he argues, the new race-neutral requirement could actually propel it.

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July 1, 2023
Federal judge slams Supreme Court in gun case while reluctantly ruling in favor of convicted felon | CNN Politics

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A federal judge in Mississippi ruled in favor of a convicted felon in a gun case on Wednesday while simultaneously slamming a recent landmark Second Amendment decision that expanded gun rights and changed the framework lower courts must use as they analyze firearm restrictions.

In his ruling, Judge Carlton Reeves, an Obama appointee who has previously been critical of the Supreme Court decision, dismissed a federal criminal case against a man prosecuted for possessing a firearm despite a past felony conviction prohibiting further gun ownership. The apparent reluctant decision announced by Reeves in his 77-page opinion included a blistering assessment of recent Supreme Court precedent pertaining to guns and public safety.

At issue was a case involving Jessie Bullock, a Mississippi man who was previously imprisoned for approximately 15 years after being convicted for aggravated assault and manslaughter following a bar fight in 1992.

Bullock was indicted 26 years later after being found to be a past felon in possession of a firearm, according to the ruling, but petitioned for his case to be dismissed following a landmark Supreme Court ruling last summer.

That decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations and determined that modern-day laws restricting gun ownership are only constitutional if similar regulations were in place when the Constitution was drafted.

Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Last November, Reeves released a scorching order expressing frustration with the high court’s new historical legal standard, insisting it had inflicted confusion upon lower courts, and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote last year.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

In response to Reeves’ request to the Justice Department for clarity, the Biden administration last year defended a federal statute barring felons from possessing firearms and urged the court not to hire an historian, arguing that the government should win the case without such an intervention.

In his decision Wednesday dismissing the case against Bullock, Reeves acknowledged the government was in the “unenviable position” of pointing to certain past laws barring felons from possessing firearms, but nevertheless ruled that the Justice Department had not met the burden required to show laws barring felons from possessing firearms met the Bruen decision’s historical test.

But Reeves repeated his past complaints blasting the entire process courts must now use to determine whether a present-day law had a historical analogue at the time of the founding of the nation.

“Judges are not historians,” he once again wrote. “We were not trained as historians. We practiced law, not history. And we do not have historians on staff.”

Reeves also appeared to criticize the very notion of deciding modern laws through the lens of colonial times.

“Bruen shows us that originalism is now the Supreme Court’s dominant mode of constitutional interpretation,” he wrote. “This Court is not so sure it should be.”

Reeves added, “This Court is also not sure that ceding this much power to the dead hand of the past is so wise.”

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June 29, 2023
Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticize each other in unusually sharp language in affirmative action case | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling Thursday on affirmative action pitted its two Black justices against each other, with the ideologically opposed jurists employing unusually sharp language attacking each other by name.

The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, saying programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race.

Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s other four conservatives joined Roberts’ opinion. But Thomas, who in 1991 became the second Black person to ascend to the nation’s highest court, issued a lengthy concurrence that attacked such admissions programs and tore into arguments posited by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to join the court, who penned her own fiery dissent in the case.

Thomas has previously acknowledged that he made it to Yale Law School because of affirmative action, but he has long criticized such policies. He spoke in personal terms in his concurrence as he put forth his argument against the use of the policies, which he described as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

“Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color,” Thomas wrote.

“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination,” he added, “I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

As he read his concurrence from the bench on Thursday, Jackson, who joined the court last year, stared blankly ahead. Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, Jackson did not read her own dissent, in which she went after Thomas’ concurrence and accused the majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

A footnote near the end of Jackson’s dissent went after the concurrence by Thomas, with the liberal justice accusing her colleague of demonstrating “an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”

“Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson wrote. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”

“But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind,” Jackson said.

(While Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case, she did hear the UNC case, and her dissent was focused on the latter.)

Thomas then explicitly attacks Jackson’s opinion.

“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” Thomas wrote.

“Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims,” Thomas wrote at another point in his concurrence. “Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.”

‘You don’t have to be perfect’: Watch Judge Jackson’s emotional message to her girls

Thomas, one of the court’s most conservative members, has long been known for his distaste for affirmative action policies. He has been open about the fact that he made it to Yale because of affirmative action, but says the stigma of preferential treatment made it difficult for him to find a job after college.

In his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas says he felt “tricked” by paternalistic Whites at Yale who recruited Black students.

“After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” he wrote.

“I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for White graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas wrote. “As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it one the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

He dissented in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed for the limited use of race in college admissions.

“I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators,” he wrote in his dissent.

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June 29, 2023
Federal judge defends Clarence Thomas in new book, rejects ‘pot shots’ at Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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A federal appeals court judge previously on short lists for the Supreme Court is taking the rare step to broadly and publicly reject allegations that Justice Clarence Thomas has been improperly influenced by lavish gifts provided by a conservative billionaire, dismissing “pot shots” at the Supreme Court in general.

“Judges are just like every other human being. We have a diverse group of friends, and those friends don’t influence the way we do our job,” Judge Amul Thapar, who sits on a Cincinnati-based appeals court, told CNN in an interview.

Thapar this past week released a new book about Thomas entitled “The People’s Justice,” in which he explores the justice’s favored judicial philosophy of originalism. Thapar posits that the theory is wrongly described as always favoring the “rich over the poor, the strong over the weak, the corporation over the consumer.”

He walks through Thomas’ reasoning in a handful of cases dealing with affirmative action, the Second Amendment, school vouchers, a cross burning law and public takings of private property, among others, and contends that Thomas’ originalism “more often favors the ordinary people who come before the court – because the core idea behind originalism is honoring the will of the people.”

RELATED: Supreme Court limits federal prisoners’ ability to bring some post-conviction challenges

President Donald Trump nominated Thapar in to serve on the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, and he was also on Trump’s short list for Supreme Court vacancies. Thapar, 54, is a favorite of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who handpicked him to serve as the US attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky in 2006.

Thapar declined to talk about specifics regarding real estate magnate Harlan Crow’s hospitality to Thomas that included rides on private jets and luxury yachts. But he said that any determination about whether judges or justices have been improperly influenced must begin with a look at the body of their work.

“You can judge their works, and what they do, against what they’ve done in the past,” Thapar told CNN. “And if it’s consistent, then it’s hard to say anything influenced them.”

Thapar added that he finds it “disheartening that people who know better are taking pot shots at the court.”

And while Thomas speaks often about his cross-country travels with his wife, Ginni, in their RV every summer, he never publicly detailed the extent of luxury travel associated with Crow until the news was fleshed out by ProPublica in April.

Thapar, however, said the media has ignored Thomas’ other friends.

“What they don’t tell you,” Thapar said, “is that he also has friends who are homeless, friends he meets in RV parks across the nation.”

In his book, the judge wrote: “It makes sense that a justice who would rather spend his time in Walmart parking lots than at cocktail parties is an originalist.”

Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the title of Thapar’s book is “completely disingenuous.”

“Given the hundreds of thousands of dollars in private jet travel, luxurious vacations and other extravagant gifts he has accepted from his wealthy benefactor, Thomas represents anything but a justice for the people,” Canter said.

Thapar rejects suggestions that Thomas should have disclosed the hospitality provided by Crow on annual financial disclosure forms.

In April, Thomas released a statement saying he hadn’t disclosed the hospitality because the ethics rules – that have since changed – didn’t require disclosure at the time. The Crow dispute has been referred to the Administrative Office of the US Courts, the policy arm of the federal judiciary.

“As judges, we try not to disclose more than is required under the rules because otherwise it becomes a game of ‘gotcha’ – you disclosed ‘x,’ why didn’t you disclose ‘y’?” Thapar said.

“So, what the Administrative Office has recommended is we disclose what is required by the rules, and I think it’s important we do that,” Thapar said. “I wish the rules were crystal clear, and when they are, we disclose whatever is required, or we should, and if we make a mistake ,we should own up to it.”

But when it comes to recusing themselves from cases when there’s a possible conflict of interest with a party to the case, Thapar said it’s easier for a lower court judge – who often sits on multimember panels – to make that choice.

“I’m one of 16,” Thapar said. “Another judge can step in my shoes.”

But the Supreme Court, on the other hand, only has nine members, Thapar pointed out, “and they have no provision – if they recuse – for someone to take their spot, so it’s a lot harder for them.”

Thapar’s book is a ringing endorsement of originalism, a judicial theory that requires the Constitution to be interpreted based on its original public meaning.

“Originalists believe that the American people, not nine unelected judges, are the source of the law that governs us – through the Constitution and statutes enacted by our elected representatives,” the judge writes.

He says Thomas has been misunderstood over his career.

“By cherry-picking his opinions or misrepresenting them, Justice Thomas’s critics claim that his originalism favors the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak, and corporations over consumers. They have called Justice Thomas ‘the cruelest justice,’ ‘stupid,’ and even an ‘Uncle Tom’ a traitor to his race,” Thapar writes.

Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, which supports what it calls a progressive view of originalism, believes the text and history of the entire Constitution, as amended, is “remarkably progressive.”

She rejects the views taken by Thapar and Thomas.

“While it is true that originalism can lead to wins for the ‘little guy,’ it only works that way if you give sufficient weight to the amendments that have, over time, pushed our Constitution along an arc of progress and made it a more inclusive and equality-focused document,” Wydra said.

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June 25, 2023
Supreme Court rejects Texas and Louisiana challenge to Biden deportation priorities | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 ruling on Friday, revived the Biden administration’s immigration guidelines that prioritize which noncitizens to deport, dismissing a challenge from two Republican state attorneys general who argued the policies conflicted with immigration law.

The court said the states, Texas and Louisiana, did not have the “standing,” or the legal right, to sue in the first place in a decision that will further clarify when a state can challenge a federal policy in court going forward.

The ruling is a major victory for President Joe Biden and the White House, who have consistently argued the need to prioritize who they detain and deport given limited resources. By ruling against the states, the court tightened the rules concerning when states may challenge federal policies with which they disagree. The Biden administration policy was put on pause by a federal judge nearly two years ago and the Supreme Court declined to lift that hold last year.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote Friday’s majority opinion in the case.

“In sum, the states have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” Kavanaugh wrote, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests. Federal courts have not traditionally entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”

Kavanaugh said that the executive branch has traditional discretion over whether to take enforcement actions under federal law. He said that if the court were to allow the states to bring the lawsuit at hand, it would “entail expansive judicial direction” of the executive’s arrest policy and would open the door to more lawsuits from states that think the executive is not doing enough to enforce the law in other areas such as drug and gun regulation and obstruction of justice laws.

“We decline to start the Federal Judiciary down that uncharted path,” Kavanaugh said.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the administration welcomes the court’s ruling and that his department looks forward to using the immigration guidelines.

The guidelines “enable DHS to most effectively accomplish its law enforcement mission with the authorities and resources provided by Congress,” Mayorkas said.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, wrote a concurring an opinion that concluded that the states also lacked standing, but for different reasons than the majority opinion. Justice Samuel Alito dissented.

At the heart of the dispute was a September 2021 memo from Mayorkas that laid out priorities for the apprehension and removal of certain non-citizens, reversing efforts by former President Donald Trump to increase deportations.

In his memo, Mayorkas stated that there are approximately 11 million undocumented or otherwise removable non-citizens in the country and that the United States does not have the ability to apprehend and seek to remove all of them. As such, the Department of Homeland Security sought to prioritize those who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.  

Kavanaugh’s opinion stressed that the standing doctrine “helps safeguard the Judiciary’s proper – and properly limited – role in our constitutional system.” He said that by ensuring a party has standing to sue, “federal courts prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.”

The majority did not address the underlying question of whether the administration had the authority to implement the policy.

“We take no position on whether the executive branch here is complying with its legal obligations under §1226(c) and §1231(a)(2),” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to the relevant immigration statutes. “We hold only that the federal courts are not the proper forum to resolve this dispute.”

Kavanaugh pointed out that five presidential administrations have determined that resource constraints necessitated prioritization in making immigration arrests.

In his sole dissent, Alito wrote that this “sweeping executive power endorsed by today’s decision may at first be warmly received by champions of a strong Presidential power, but if presidents can expand their powers as far as they can manage in a test of strength with Congress, presumably Congress can cut executive power as much as it can manage by wielding the formidable weapons at its disposal.”

“That is not what the Constitution envisions,” he wrote.

Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst who filed an amicus brief in the immigration case, noted that Friday’s ruling was the second decision within the last week in which the court “held that red states lacked standing to challenge a federal policy – perhaps a signal of dissatisfaction with how liberally lower courts, especially the Fifth Circuit, have permitted these challenges to go forward.”

“And it’s the second in the last two years in which it has reversed a nationwide injunction against a Biden immigration policy in a suit brought by Texas,” Vladeck said. “When states are the right plaintiffs to challenge federal policies is also one of the central issues before the court in the challenges to Biden’s student loan program – in which the court is expected to rule next week.”

Kavanaugh’s opinion emphasized that, in “holding that Texas and Louisiana lack standing, we do not suggest that federal courts may never entertain cases involving the executive branch’s alleged failure to make more arrests or bring more prosecutions.”

In court, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stressed that Congress has never provided the funds to detain everyone, prompting different administrations to consider how to prioritize limited funds. She noted that the executive branch retains the authority to focus its “limited resources” on non-citizens who are higher priorities for removal and warned that if the states were to prevail, it would “scramble” immigration enforcement on the ground, leading to a totally unmanageable landscape. She said the states’ view in the case was a “senseless” way to run an immigration system.

“I think that that is bad for the executive branch. I think it’s bad for the American public and I think it’s bad for Article Three courts,” she said.  

The guidelines call for an assessment of the “totality of the facts and circumstances” instead of the development of a bright-line rule. The government lists aggravating factors weighing in favor of an enforcement action, including the gravity of the offense and the use of a firearm, but it also lists mitigating factors that include the age of the immigrant. 

Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone, representing Texas and Louisiana, argued that the administration lacked the authority to issue the memo because it conflicts with existing federal law. He accused the government of treating immigration law in the area as “discretionary” and not “mandatory” and argued that the executive branch lacks the authority to “disregard” Congress’ instruction.

“The states prove their standing at trial based on harms well recognized,” Stone said, emphasizing the costs incurred when the government “violates federal law.”

A district court judge blocked the guidelines nationwide. “Using the words ‘discretion’ and ‘prioritization’ the executive branch claims the authority to suspend statutory mandates,” ruled Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee on the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “The law does not sanction this approach.” 

A federal appeals court declined to issue a stay of the decision, prompting the Biden administration to ask the Supreme Court for emergency relief last July. A 5-4 court ruled against the administration, allowing the lower court’s decision to remain in effect while the legal challenge played out.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined her three liberal colleagues in dissent without providing any explanation for her vote.  

This story has been updated with additional details.

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June 23, 2023
Ron DeSantis spells out possibility to cement ‘7-2 conservative majority’ on Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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Ahead of an expected White House bid in the coming days, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spelled out the possibility to build a “7-2 conservative majority” on the US Supreme Court.

The Republican pointed to four justices – three appointed by Republican presidents – who he believed are poised to leave the bench during the next eight or nine years, during a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando on Monday.

“If you look over the next two presidential terms there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito. And the issue with that is you can’t really do better than those two. They are the gold standard for jurisprudence, so you gotta make sure that we are appointing people as close to that standard as possible,” DeSantis said, referring to two conservative stalwarts.

Alito is 73, Thomas is 74.

DeSantis also highlighted what he sees as a potential opportunity to replace conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, 68, or liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 68, to cement a conservative majority for years. The court currently has a 6-3 conservative supermajority.

“If you replace a Clarence Thomas with someone like a Roberts or somebody like that then you’re actually gonna see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that. I also think if you look over those eight years, you very well could be called upon to replace Chief Justice John Roberts, and perhaps even, someone like Justice Sotomayor,” DeSantis said.

“So, it is possible that in those eight years we would have the opportunity to fortify justices Alito and Thomas, as well as actually make improvements with those others and if you were able to do that then you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter century, so this is big stuff,” he added.

As governor, DeSantis spoke about tilting the Florida Supreme Court to a conservative majority, with the help of age limits.

“We have age limits for justices,” DeSantis said. “The minute I got elected to office, three of the four liberal justices were off the court, because of age. So, I was able in my first term of office to replace three liberal justices with three conservative justices.”

He teased another judicial appointment this week to replace a retiring conservative justice.

“I will have ended up doing seven appointments throughout my tenure,” DeSantis said. “Judicial activism in Florida is now officially dead.”

Like all federal judges, Supreme Court justices are appointed for life.

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May 23, 2023
Federal judge calls out judicial panel’s handling of 2011 ethics complaints against Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

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Leaders of the policy-making body for the federal courts repeatedly failed to inform its full membership of complaints raised by lawmakers and watchdog groups about Justice Clarence Thomas’ pattern of nondisclosure on his financial reports more than 10 years ago, a sitting federal judge testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday.

In 2011, the Judicial Conference received a number of complaints from lawmakers and watchdog groups about Thomas after media reports revealed that he failed to disclose income his wife earned between 1998 and 2003 from The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The complaints asked the conference to refer the matter to the US attorney general to probe whether the justice’s behavior ran afoul of a federal ethics law. Thomas quickly amended his reports when the allegations were brought to his attention, leading the body to conclude that no further action was needed.

But US District Judge Mark Wolf, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, said on Wednesday that the full Judicial Conference did not receive notice of the complaints sent to leaders of the conference and therefore couldn’t decide how the body should act on them.

“This concerned me because the issues raised by the letters were serious,” Wolf said in testimony to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee looking into court ethics.

“Pursuant to established conference policies and procedures, if the committee (on financial disclosures) had considered the letters, my colleagues on the Judicial Conference and I should have been informed of them in its reports to the Conference, even if the committee was not recommending any action by the Conference,” he said.

“Such information would have afforded me and the other members of the conference the opportunity to discuss and decide whether there was reasonable cause to believe Justice Thomas had willfully violated the act and, if so, to make the required referral to the attorney general,” Wolf added.

The decade-old complaints have reentered the spotlight amid recent reports about Thomas’ decision to not disclose years of luxury travel and expensive gifts that were paid for by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, as well as a real estate deal he and his family cut with the donor.

Those reports have fueled similar calls by lawmakers and watchdog groups for the Judicial Conference to refer the justice to the attorney general for potential violations of the ethics law, and CNN has reported that Thomas intends to amend his financial disclosure forms to reflect the 2014 real estate deal.

They’ve also put the Judicial Conference, which among other things handles financial disclosure forms submitted by justices and federal judges, in the hot seat. When the 2011 complaints were made, Wolf was serving on the conference, which is comprised of a small selection of federal judges from various courts around the country.

Earlier this week, the conference defended its decision more than 10 years ago to not refer Thomas to the DOJ to investigate allegations that his pattern of nondisclosure on his financial reports broke federal law.

Roslynn Mauskopf, the conference’s secretary, explained its reasoning in a letter Monday to Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee looking into court ethics, noting that Thomas “immediately amended his reports” after the issue was raised with the justice.

“The then-chair of the committee, the Honorable Bobby R. Baldock, reviewed the January 2011 allegations and the amended reports and concluded that the reports were properly amended and that no further action was warranted,” Mauskopf wrote.

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May 17, 2023
Company with ties to GOP megadonor and longtime friend of Justice Thomas had business before Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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A company related to Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who paid for lavish trips for the Supreme Court justice and his wife, had business before the Supreme Court in the mid-2000s, records show.

Crow’s name does not appear in a caption of the case, which concerned a dispute related to a copyrighted architectural drawing, and his office said neither Crow nor his company were involved in the matter or discussed it with Thomas.

But the revelation challenges assertions by both men that their relationship was completely separate from Thomas’ role as a Supreme Court justice and is likely to add to scrutiny over his ethical conduct. Recently, justices have been under pressure to be more forthcoming about their actions and finances, and Thomas’ trips paid for by Crow were not disclosed on his financial disclosure forms. In addition, in a statement Thomas released in April, he said that Crow “did not have business before the court.”

In January 2005, the Supreme Court declined to hear Womack+Hampton Architects v. Metric Holdings Limited Partnership, according to the docket on the court’s website. Had a justice been recused from participating in the case, it would have been noted. There were no such notations.

The Crow name does not appear in the caption of the case, but a corporate disclosure statement attached to the filing says that the corporate parent of Metric Holdings is Trammell Crow Residential Company. According to a statement from Harlan Crow’s office, the Crow family at the time had a non-controlling interest in Trammell Crow Residential Company.

“At the time of this case, Trammell Crow Residential operated completely independently of Crow Holdings with a separate management team and its own independent operations,” Crow’s office said in the statement.

“Crow Holdings had a minority interest in the parties involved in this case and therefore no control of any of these entities. Neither Harlan Crow nor Crow Holdings had knowledge of or involvement in this case, and a search of Crow Holdings legal records reveals no involvement in this case. Harlan Crow has never discussed this or any other case with the Justice,” the office said.

When the architecture firm filed its appeal to the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow was Crow Holdings’ chief executive officer and chair of its board, a position he still holds. He stepped down as CEO in 2017, according to Bloomberg News, which first reported the case and relationship to Crow.

Thomas, via a Supreme Court spokesperson, declined to comment for this story.

Earlier this month, after ProPublica first reported on the trips paid for by Crow, Thomas explained in a statement that he hadn’t disclosed the trips because he was advised that he did not have to report them under ethics rules in place at the time.

In a rare statement from Thomas and his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, they considered Crow and his wife as “dearest friends.”

Thomas said that the trips were the “sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends” that he was advised did not require disclosure. He noted the rules had recently changed and said it was his “intent to follow this guidance in the future.”

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April 25, 2023
Supreme Court clears way for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed to try to use DNA to prove innocence | CNN Politics

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The Supreme Court cleared the way on Wednesday for Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed to seek post-conviction DNA evidence to try to prove his innocence.

Reed claims an all-White jury wrongly convicted him of killing of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old White woman, in Texas in 1998.

Texas had argued that he had waited too long to bring his challenge to the state’s DNA procedures in federal court, but the Supreme Court disagreed. Now, he can go to a federal court to make his claim.

The ruling was 6-3. Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of the court and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Since Reed’s conviction, Texas courts had rejected his various appeals. Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Rihanna have expressed support, signing a petition asking the state to halt his eventual execution.

The case puts a new focus on the testing of DNA crime-scene evidence and when an inmate can make a claim to access the technology in a plea of innocence. To date, 375 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 21 who served time on death row, according to the Innocence Project, a group that represents Reed and other clients seeking post-conviction DNA testing to prove their innocence.

Kavanaugh, in his opinion Wednesday, said that the court agreed to hear the case because federal appeals courts have disagreed about when inmates can make such claims without running afoul of the statute of limitations. Kavanaugh said Reed could make the claim after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately denied his request for rehearing, rejecting an earlier date set out by the appeals court.

“Significant systemic benefits ensue from starting the statute of limitations clock when the state litigation in DNA testing cases like Reed’s has concluded,” Kavanaugh said.

He noted that if any problems with a defendant’s right to due process “lurk in the DNA testing law” the case can proceed through the appellate process, which could ultimately render a federal lawsuit unnecessary.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Alito, joined by Gorsuch in his dissent, said Reed should have acted more quickly to bring his appeal. “Instead,” Alito wrote, “he waited until an execution date was set.”

Alito charged Reed with making the “basic mistake of missing a statute of limitations.”

Reed has been on death row for the murder of Stites.

A passerby found Stites’ body near a shirt and a torn piece of belt. Investigators targeted Reed because his sperm was found inside her. Reed acknowledged the two were having an affair, but says that her fiancé, a local police officer named Jimmy Fennell, was the last to see her alive.

Reed claims that over the last two decades he has discovered a “considerable body of evidence” demonstrating his innocence. Reed claims that the DNA testing would point to Fennell as the murder suspect. Fennell was later jailed for sexually assaulting a woman in his custody and Reed claims that numerous witnesses said he had threatened to strangle Stites with a belt if he ever caught her cheating on him. Reed seeks to test the belt found at the scene that was used to strangle Stites.

The Texas law at issue allows a convicted person to obtain post-conviction DNA testing of biological material if the court finds that certain conditions are met. Reed was denied. He came to the Supreme Court in 2018 and was denied again. Now he is challenging the constitutionality of the Texas law arguing that the denial of the DNA testing violates his due process rights. 

But the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals held that he waited too long to bring the claim. “An injury accrues when a plaintiff first becomes aware, or should have become aware, that his right had been violated.” The court said that he became aware of that in 2014 and that his current claim is “time barred.” 

Reed’s lawyers argued that he could only bring the claim once the state appeals court had ruled, at the end of state court litigation. In court, Parker Rider-Longmaid said that the “clock doesn’t start ticking” until state court proceedings come to an end. He said Texas’ reading of the law would mean that other procedures in the appellate process are “irrelevant.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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April 19, 2023
Democrats bash Justice Clarence Thomas but their plan to investigate ethics allegations is unclear | CNN Politics

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Senate Democrats railed against Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday amid reports that the Supreme Court conservative failed to disclose luxury travel, gifts and a real estate transaction involving a GOP megadonor, but their plan to investigate the conservative jurist remains unclear.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin has promised that his committee will hold a hearing on the alleged ethics violations in the coming weeks, but shared no details when pressed by CNN on whether lawmakers will seek testimony from Thomas or others who might have knowledge about his relationship with the donor, Texas-based billionaire Harlan Crow.

Asked if subpoenas were on the table, Durbin said that no decision has been made on that yet. He said that it was “too soon” to share more information about what his committee’s hearing on Supreme Court ethics might look like. He and other Judiciary Democrats sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts last week calling for him to open an investigation into the Thomas allegations.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Tuesday that “the American people deserve all of the facts surrounding Justice Thomas’s blatant violation of law.”

“I hope that [Thomas] will voluntarily appear, and if not, we should consider subpoenas for him and others, like Harlan Crow, who have information,” Blumenthal said.

Other Democrats on the committee said Tuesday that they were deferring to Durbin, who huddled with Democrats on Monday evening to discuss their strategy towards Thomas.

Meanwhile, Republicans appear mostly united in defending the Thomas, suggesting the court can handle its own affairs.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell attacked Democrats for criticizing the court, and said he has confidence in Roberts “to deal with these court internal issues.”

“The Democrats, it seems to me, spent a lot of time criticizing individual members of the court and going after the court as an institution,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.

Bringing more transparency to the high court has had some bipartisan support in the past, but the court’s jerk to the right – particularly with the three justices that former President Donald Trump put on the bench – has raised the partisan stakes around the issue. In recent years, the conservative majority has handled pivotal rulings undoing abortions rights, dismantling gun regulations and reining in the powers of executive branch agencies – all prompting outcry from Democrats.

Even as Senate Democrats have yet to settle on a plan for their own response to the Thomas allegations, they sought to highlight the issue and framed it within their broader push for a code-of-ethics for the Supreme Court, which is excluded from many of the ethics rules that apply to lower rungs of the federal judiciary.

“I’m disturbed by the recent reports detailing potentially unethical – even potentially illegal conduct – at the highest levels of our judiciary,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said at a Judiciary Committee hearing for three lower court nominees on Tuesday. “It should go without saying that judges at all levels should be held to strict and enforceable ethical standards.”

Durbin said in a speech that Congress shouldn’t have to wait for the court to act.

“The Supreme Court doesn’t need to wait on Congress to clean up its act; the justices could take action today if they wanted to, and if the court fails to act, Congress must,” Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

Back-to back-reports in ProPublica this month detailed how luxury travel and gifts to Thomas from Crow – and even a real estate transaction – went unreported in Thomas’ annual financial disclosures.

Thomas has said that the travel and gifts to him and his family that were financed by the Crows went unreported because he had been advised that he was not required to do so, under an exemption in the court’s disclosure rules for so-called “personal hospitality.” After scrutiny of those rules by lawmakers, the Judicial Conference – which operates as the policy-making body for the federal judiciary – recently closed a loophole in those rules that appears to have covered some of the hospitality Thomas received. Thomas said that he intended to follow that updated guidance in the future, and a source close to the justice also told CNN in recent days that he planned to amend his disclosure form to report the real estate transaction, the sale of his mother’s home to Crow.

“If the reports are accurate, it stinks,” Sen. Mitt Romney said Monday evening, in rare comments from a Republican criticizing Thomas’ lack of transparency.

Other Republicans lined up in defense of the justice – who was named to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 – and said it wasn’t Congress’ place to push an ethics code on the high court.

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, suggested that the accusations against Thomas were part of a “multi-decade effort now to target Clarence Thomas by these liberal activist groups.”

This is not the first time Thomas has been at the center of an ethics controversy. Last year, CNN reported that his wife Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist, was texting with Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about the former president’s efforts overturn his 2020 election defeat, and her political lobbying has long raised questions about when justices are obligated to recuse themselves from cases.

Yet Republicans have shown little interest in joining Democrats in using legislation to impose an ethics code on the justices.

“The Court, kind of historically I think, has sort of policed itself,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the GOP’s Senate Whip, who said Thomas had been a “solid justice on the court through the years and has acquitted himself well there.”

“Let’s see what the court does,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN Tuesday. “I prefer them to do it internally.”

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April 18, 2023
Supreme Court seems sympathetic to postal worker who didn’t work Sundays in dispute over religious accommodations | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Supreme Court seemed to side with a former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, who says the US Postal Service failed to accommodate his request to not work on Sundays.

A lower court had ruled against the worker, Gerald Groff, holding that his request would cause an “undue burden” on the USPS and lead to low morale at the workplace when other employees had to pick up his shifts.

But during oral arguments on Tuesday, there appeared to be consensus, after almost two hours of oral arguments, that the appeals court had been too quick to rule against Groff.

There seemed to be, as Justice Elena Kagan put it, some level of “kumbaya-ing” between the justices on the bench at times.

But as justices sought to land on a test that lower courts could use to clarify how far employers must go to accommodate their employees’ religious beliefs, differences arose when a lawyer for Groff suggested that the court overturn decades-old precedent. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed open to the prospect.

Critically, however, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were sympathetic to arguments made by the Postal Service that granting Groff’s request might cause morale to plummet among the other employees. Kavanaugh noted that “morale” among employers is critical to the success of any business. And several justices nodded to the financial difficulties the USPS has faced over the years.

Groff, who lives in Pennsylvania, served in 2012 as a rural carrier associate at the United States Postal Service, a position that provides coverage for absent career employees who have earned the ability to take off weekends. Rural carrier associates are told they need flexibility.

In 2013, Groff’s life changed when the USPS contracted with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. Groff’s Christian religious beliefs bar him from working on Sundays.

The post office contemplated some accommodations to Groff such as offering to adjust his schedule so he could come to work after religious services, or telling him he should see if other workers could pick up his shifts. At some point, the postmaster himself did the deliveries because it was difficult to find employees willing to work on Sunday. Finally, the USPS suggested Groff choose a different day to observe the Sabbath.

The atmosphere with his co-workers was tense and Groff said he faced progressive discipline. In response, he filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is charged with enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against an employee because of religion.

Groff ultimately left in 2019. In a resignation letter, he said he had been unable to find an “accommodating employment atmosphere with the USPS that would honor his religious beliefs.”

Groff sued arguing that the USPS violated Title VII – a federal law that makes it unlawful to discriminate against an employee based on his religion. To make a claim under the law, an employee must show that he holds a sincere religious belief that conflicts with a job requirement, he must inform his employer and has to have been disciplined for failing to comply.

Under the law, the burden then shifts to the employer. The employer must show that they made a good faith effort to “reasonably accommodate” the employee’s belief or demonstrate that such an accommodation would cause an “undue hardship” upon the employer.

District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled against Groff, holding that that his request to not work on Sundays would cause an “undue hardship” for the USPS.

The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in a 2-1 opinion.

“Exempting Groff from working on Sundays caused more than a de minimis cost on USPS because it actually imposed on his coworkers, disrupted the workplace and workflow, and diminished employee morale,” the 3rd Circuit wrote in its opinion last year.

“The accommodation Groff sought (exemption from Sunday work)” the court added, “would cause an undue hardship on USPS.”

A dissenting judge, Thomas Hardiman, offered a road map for justices seeking to rule in favor of Groff. The main thrust of his dissent was that the law requires the USPS to show how the proposed accommodation would harm “business” – not Groff’s coworkers.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stayed Gerald Groff from the completion of his appointed rounds,” wrote Hardiman, a George W. Bush nominee who was on a shortlist for the Supreme Court nomination that went to Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017. “But his sincerely held religious belief precluded him from working on Sundays.”

Groff’s lawyer, Aaron Streett, told the high court that the USPS could have done more and was wrong to claim that “respecting Groff’s belief was too onerous.” He urged the justices to cut back or invalidate precedent and allow an accommodation that would allow the worker to “serve both his employer and his God.”

“Sunday’s a day where we get together and almost taste heaven,” Groff told The New York Times recently. “We come together as believers. We celebrate who we are, together. We worship God. And so to be asked to deliver Amazon parcels and give all that up, it’s just really kind of sad.”

The Biden administration has urged the high court to simply clarify the law to make clear that an employer is not required to accommodate an employee’s Sabbath observance by “operating shorthanded or regularly paying overtime to secure replacement workers.”

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar acknowledged, however, that employer could still be required to bear other costs such as administrative expenses associated with rearranging schedules.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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April 18, 2023
Opinion: Why isn’t the House Judiciary Committee looking into red flags about Clarence Thomas? | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” Follow him @DeanObeidallah@masto.ai. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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On Monday, the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee — chaired by Donald Trump ally Rep. Jim Jordan — is set to hold a field hearing in New York City called “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.” A statement bills the hearing as an examination of how, the Judiciary Committee says, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s policies have “led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents.”

In response, Bragg’s office slammed Jordan’s hearing as “a political stunt” while noting that data released by the New York Police Department shows crime is down in Manhattan with respect to murders, burglaries, robberies and more through April 2, compared with the same period last year.

In reality, this Jordan-led hearing isn’t about stopping crime but about defending Trump — who was recently charged by a Manhattan grand jury with 34 felonies. Trump pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges stemming from an investigation into a hush-money payment to an adult film actress. The former president also is facing criminal probes in other jurisdictions over efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Bragg sued Jordan and his committee last week in federal court, accusing the Judiciary Committee chairman of a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” his office for its investigation and prosecution of Trump by making demands for confidential documents and testimony.

While Jordan and his committee appear focused on discrediting the investigation into Trump, why aren’t they looking into two recent bombshell reports by ProPublica that raised red flags about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ financial relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow? After all, the House Judiciary Committee’s website explains that it has jurisdiction over “matters relating to the administration of justice in federal courts” – for which the revelations concerning Thomas fit perfectly.

First, we learned in early April that Crow had provided Thomas and his wife, Ginni, for decades with luxurious vacations including on the donor’s yacht and private jet to faraway places such as Indonesia and New Zealand. That information was never revealed to the public. (In a rare public statement, Thomas responded he was advised at the time that he did not have to report the trips. The justice said the guidelines for reporting personal hospitality have changed recently. “And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” he said.)

Then on Thursday, ProPublica reported that Thomas failed to disclose a 2014 real estate deal involving the sale of three properties he and his family owned in Savannah, Georgia, to that same GOP megadonor, Crow. One of Crow’s companies made the purchases for $133,363, according to ProPublica. A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires Supreme Court justices and other officials to make public the details of most real estate sales over $1,000.

As ProPublica detailed, the federal disclosure form Thomas filed for that year included a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, but Thomas left that space blank. Four ethics law experts told ProPublica that Thomas’ failure to report it appears to be a violation of the law. (Thomas did not respond to questions from ProPublica on its report; CNN reached out to the Supreme Court and Thomas for comment.)

The House Judiciary Committee has long addressed issues such as those surrounding Thomas. In fact, the committee is where investigations and the impeachment of federal judges often commence.

One recent example came in 2010 with Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr., whom the committee investigated and recommended for impeachment.

The committee’s Task Force on Judicial Impeachment said evidence showed Porteous “intentionally made material false statements and representations under penalty of perjury, engaged in a corrupt kickback scheme, solicited and accepted unlawful gifts, and intentionally misled the Senate during his confirmation proceedings.” The Senate later found Porteous guilty of four articles of impeachment and removed him from the bench.

Yet the Judiciary Committee has neither released statements nor tweets raising alarm bells about Thomas. Instead, its Twitter feed is filled with repeated tweets whining that C-SPAN won’t cover Monday’s New York field hearing. Worse, the committee retweeted GOP Rep. Mary Miller’s tweet defending Thomas as being attacked “because he is a man of deep faith, who loves our country and believes in our Constitution.”

Jordan’s use of his committee to assist Trump should surprise no one. The House January 6 committee’s report called the Ohio Republican “a significant player in President Trump’s efforts” to overturn the election. The report detailed the lawmaker’s efforts to assist Trump including on “January 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump, and other Members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session.” As a result, the January 6 committee subpoenaed Jordan to testify — but he refused to cooperate.

In contrast with the House panel, the Senate Judiciary Committee — headed by Democrats — announced in the wake of the reporting on Thomas that it plans to hold a hearing “on the need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.” Beyond that, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia sent a letter Friday calling for a referral of Thomas to the US attorney general over “potential violations of the Ethics in Government Act 1978.”

The House Judiciary Committee’s website notes, “The Committee on the Judiciary has been called the lawyer for the House of Representatives.” Under Jordan that description needs to be updated to state that the Committee on the Judiciary is now “the lawyer for Donald J. Trump.” And the worst part is that the taxpayers are the ones paying for Jordan’s work on Trump’s behalf.

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April 17, 2023
Colorado governor signs bills further enshrining rights to abortion and gender-affirming care | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado signed a trio of bills Friday that further protect the rights to abortion and gender-affirming services in the state, as access to the so-called abortion pill across the country remains in limbo and some neighboring conservative states have moved to restrict such procedures.

Polis’ signature comes a year after he signed a measure to codify the right to abortion into Colorado law, months before the US Supreme Court eliminated federal protections for abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade. At the same time, conservative neighboring states Oklahoma and Wyoming have passed strict abortion bans, while in Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill earlier this year banning hormone treatment and surgical procedures for minors seeking gender-affirming care.

One of the bills Polis signed, SB23-188, sets Colorado up to be a haven for people from states with more restrictive laws who are seeking access to abortion and gender-affirming treatment.

The new law bars Colorado courts or judicial officers from issuing subpoenas in connection with a proceeding in another state that involves a person who receives or “performs, assists, or aids” an abortion or gender-affirming treatment in Colorado, both of which are legally protected in the state.

Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Colorado’s blue neighbor to the south, also signed legislation last month that prohibits local municipalities and other public bodies from interfering with a person’s ability to access reproductive or gender-affirming health care services in the state.

“I’m proud to sign these pro-freedom laws to further uphold Colorado’s value of protecting access to reproductive health care,” Polis told CNN in a statement. “[Here] in Colorado, we value individual freedoms and we stand up to protect them.”

Another bill Polis signed into law directs large employers to provide coverage for the total cost of abortion care starting next year.

The third law will make it a “deceptive trade practice” for an entity to advertise that it “provides abortions, emergency contraceptives, or referrals for abortions or emergency contraceptives” when it does not, according to a bill summary. A health care provider would also be subject to disciplinary measures if it “provides, prescribes, administers, or attempts medication abortion reversal” in violation of any related rules by state authorities.

The three bills passed the state’s Democratic-controlled state legislature earlier this month.

Republicans have criticized the new laws, with state House Minority Leader Mike Lynch saying they deny a woman the right to choose “alternative options other than to end her pregnancy.”

As Polis signed the bills into law Friday, the fate of access to the abortion drug mifepristone continued to play out in the courts after a US district judge in Texas said last week that he would suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill.

US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday extended a hold on that lower-court ruling in an effort to give justices more time to consider the issue.

Parts of the Texas ruling had been set to go into effect Saturday at 1 a.m. ET, but Alito’s hold puts off that deadline in the fast-moving dispute until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

The case centers on the scope of the FDA’s authority to regulate a drug that is used in the majority of abortions today in states that still allow the procedure.

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April 15, 2023
Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose 2014 real estate deal with GOP megadonor, ProPublica report finds | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose a 2014 real estate deal he made with a GOP megadonor, according to a ProPublica report published Thursday.

The deal involved the sale of three properties in Savannah, Georgia, that were owned by Thomas and his relatives to the megadonor, Harlan Crow, according to ProPublica, which said that tax and property records showed that Crow made the purchases through one of his companies for a total of $133,363.

But Thomas “never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties,” the report said, noting that ethics law experts told the outlet that his failure to report it “appears to be a violation of the law.”

“The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice,” ProPublica said in its report.

Thursday’s report comes on the heels of a bombshell investigation published last week by ProPublica that detailed Thomas and his wife’s luxury travel with the Crows, which included trips on the donor’s yacht and private jet. The justice also did not disclose that travel, and he later defended the decision not to, saying in a rare statement last week that he was advised at the time that he did not have to report it.

CNN has reached out for comment from the Supreme Court and Thomas.

Crow said in a statement to CNN that he purchased the properties to “one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice.”

He added that he made the purchases at “market rate based on many factors including the size, quality, and livability of the dwellings.”

Though two of the properties were later sold by Crow, according to his statement, the real estate magnate still owns the property on which Thomas’ elderly mother lives. Citing county tax records, ProPublica said one of Crow’s companies pays the “roughly $1,500 in annual property taxes on Thomas’ mother’s house,” which had previously been paid by the justice and his wife, Ginni.

Experts told ProPublica that Thomas’ failure to disclose the 2014 deal raises more questions about his relationship with Crow.

“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who now works for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told the outlet. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”

The report has already prompted the watchdog group to call for an investigation into Thomas’ decision not to disclose the real estate deal and the various trips and gifts.

In a letter sent Friday to Chief Justice John Roberts and Attorney General Merrick Garland, CREW said that Thomas may have violated the Ethics in Government Act. The group said Roberts also should investigate whether Thomas violated his “ethical obligations” under Judicial Conference regulations.

In the wake of last week’s revelations, congressional Democrats have also called for an investigation into the matter and for a stronger ethics code for the justices, and some federal judges have also spoken out.

Earlier this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it plans to hold a hearing “on the need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards,” and at least one watchdog group has urged lawmakers to call Thomas as a witness in the upcoming hearing.

This story has been updated with additional details Friday.

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April 14, 2023
Supreme Court makes it easier to bring constitutional challenges to federal agencies | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Supreme Court held Friday that a party involved in a dispute with the Federal Trade Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission does not have to wait until a final determination in the proceeding has been issued before bringing a constitutional challenge to the agency’s structure in federal court.

The ruling is a win for critics of the so-called administrative state who are seeking to scale back the power of agencies that they believe are too insulated from the usual checks and balances essential to the separation of powers.

The court’s decision means that targets of investigative actions do not have to wait long periods of time before lodging constitutional challenges to the proceedings that could ultimately weaken the agency.

Although the court’s opinion could weaken the power of federal agencies, liberal justices likely signed onto the opinion because it will only apply to a small subset of cases.

The decision of the court is unanimous and was penned by Justice Elena Kagan.

“The question presented is whether the district courts have jurisdiction to hear those suits — and so to resolve the parties’ constitutional challenges to the Commission’ structure,” Kagan wrote. “The answer is yes. The ordinary statutory review scheme does not preclude a district court from entertaining these extraordinary claims.”

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April 14, 2023
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reiterates call to impeach Justice Clarence Thomas over trips with GOP donor | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York reiterated on Sunday her call for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas following revelations that he didn’t disclose several luxury trips subsidized by a Republican megadonor.

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union,” Ocasio-Cortez called for an inquiry into the matter, saying it was “the House’s responsibility to pursue that investigation in the form of impeachment.”

“I believe that we should pursue the course. And if it is Republicans that decide to protect those who are breaking the law, then they are the ones who then are responsible for that decision,” she said of the House GOP majority, which would be unlikely to pursue such an investigation. “But we should not be complicit in that.”

Ocasio-Cortez first called for Thomas’ impeachment on Twitter on Thursday following a bombshell ProPublica report that detailed his travel paid for by Republican donor Harlan Crow, which included trips on the donor’s yacht and private jet.

Thomas said Friday that he did not disclose the luxury travel because he was advised at the time that he did not have to report it.

In a rare statement sent via the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas said that the trips he and his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, took with the Crows were the “sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends” that he was advised did not require disclosure.

Two dozen Democratic lawmakers from both chambers sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday, calling for a “swift, thorough, independent and transparent investigation” into whether ethics rules and laws were violated by Thomas’ trips.

But Ocasio-Cortez said she did not have faith in the Supreme Court to conduct an internal investigation, saying, “what we are seeing right now is a breaking of the law.”

The ProPublica report describes Thomas accepting travel hospitality from Crow that included lavish trips to Indonesia, New Zealand, California, Texas and Georgia. Some of the trips reportedly included travel on Crow’s super yacht or stays at properties owned by Crow or his company.

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April 9, 2023