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Tag: us supreme court

  • Supreme Court hears Texas’ challenge to Biden immigration and deportation policies | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court hears Texas’ challenge to Biden immigration and deportation policies | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider the Biden administration’s discretion on removing non-citizens in a challenge brought by two Republican state attorneys general who say the Department of Homeland Security is skirting federal immigration law.

    The case, brought by Texas and Louisiana, is the latest salvo from conservative states who have all but declared war on the Biden administration on immigration and have gone as far as busing undocumented immigrants to Democrat-led states in an effort to raise alarm about the issue.

    At the heart of the dispute is a September 2021 memo from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that laid out priorities for the arrest, detention and deportation of certain non-citizens, reversing efforts by former President Donald Trump to increase deportations.

    In court papers, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stressed that Congress has never provided the funds to detain everyone, prompting administrations to consider how to prioritize limited funds.

    “Especially given perennial constraints on detention capacity, the Executive retains authority to focus its limited resources on those non-citizens who are higher priorities for apprehension,” she wrote.

    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.

    Lawyers for Texas and Louisiana argued that the government lacked the authority to issue the memo because it conflicts with federal law. They point to immigration law that holds that some immigrants “shall” be taken into custody or removed.

    “When Congress required the Executive to act, the Executive lacks the authority to disregard that instruction,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued in court papers. He also charged that the guidelines violate the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that governs how an agency can issue regulations.

    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 plays out.

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

    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 that pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.

    Prelogar noted that the lower court holding against the government “runs counter to longstanding practice spanning multiple administrations” and emphasized that the guidelines are not binding orders compelling action, but instead, are an attempt to utilize available resources while leaving ultimate discretion to the judgment of individual immigration officials.

    “The guidelines simply tell federal officials how to enforce federal law in a field that the Constitution commits to the federal government,” Prelogar wrote.

    As a threshold matter, she urged the justices to dismiss the challenge, arguing that the states don’t have the legal right – or standing – to bring the challenge because they can’t show the necessary direct injury. Prelogar said if the lawsuit were allowed to go forward, any state could sue the federal government about “virtually any policy.”

    In a separate dispute, Arizona, Montana and Ohio also sued the Biden administration. A district court judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking the guidelines, but the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals put that decision on hold.

    “Federal law gives the National Government considerable authority over immigration policy,” the court held. It also expressed skepticism about whether the guidance directly injured the states.

    Paxton argued to the Supreme Court that the states have the legal right to bring the lawsuit because they bear costs related to law enforcement activities as well as health care and education costs of the non-citizens.

    Critics also say that Texas is guilty of “judge shopping” the case at hand by filing it where it had a 100% chance of drawing a Trump-appointed district judge who has previously issued nationwide injunctions concerning other immigration policies.

    “So far, Texas has taken the lead in 29 different lawsuits against the Biden administration, on immigration,” said CNN analyst Steve Vladeck who is a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. In a friend of the court brief filed opposing Texas, Vladeck noted that none of those cases had been filed where the Texas government is located in Austin.

    “This case is the latest battlefield in what has become an all-out war by red state attorneys general against virtually every Biden related policy,” Vladeck said.

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  • Supreme Court counsel says Justice Samuel Alito didn’t violate ethics standards | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court counsel says Justice Samuel Alito didn’t violate ethics standards | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court legal counsel said there is no evidence that Justice Samuel Alito violated ethics standards, according to a letter on Monday in response to questions from congressional Democrats about allegations that Alito revealed the outcome of a 2014 decision before it was released.

    “There is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito’s actions violated ethics standards,” wrote Ethan Torrey, legal counsel for the Supreme Court. “Relevant rules balance preventing gifts that might undermine public confidence in the judiciary and allowing judges to maintain normal personal friendships.”

    Torrey pushed back on allegations from an evangelical minister, Rev. Rob Schenck, published in The New York Times earlier this month. The story alleged that there had been an earlier Supreme Court breach in a landmark religious liberty case years before last term’s leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

    “Justice Alito has said that neither he nor Mrs. Alito” told Gayle Wright, a guest at his home years ago, “about the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or about the authorship of the opinion from the court,” Torrey wrote.

    Torrey also said Alito and his wife became acquainted with Wright and her now-deceased husband because of their support for the Supreme Court Historical Society, and “they had a casual and purely social relationship.”

    “The Justice never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything he did in either an official or private capacity,” Torrey wrote.

    Wright previously denied Schenk’s claims in an interview with CNN.

    The letter was in response to questions Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Henry Johnson posed to Torrey and Chief Justice John Roberts for answers last week after the Times story ran.

    The congressmen had asked Roberts to “assist our investigation” into the allegations and warned that the new allegations suggest “that the orchestrators of this judicial lobby campaign may have used their access to certain justices to secure confidential information about pending cases that only deepens our concerns about the lack of adequate ethical and legal guardrails at the court.”

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  • GOP-led states press Supreme Court to keep Biden student debt forgiveness on hold | CNN Politics

    GOP-led states press Supreme Court to keep Biden student debt forgiveness on hold | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A collection of Republican-led states argued on Wednesday that the Supreme Court should keep President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness policy on hold while the litigation around it plays out, pointing to fact that the Biden administration has extended its pause on student loan payments.

    The Republican states, which have already obtained an appeals court order blocking the implementation of the controversial program, said the extension showed that there would be no harm inflicted by the court order being left in place.

    “The Department [of Education] can point to no emergency or imminent harm because, just yesterday, the agency extended the payment pause on student loans until the summer of 2023,” they wrote in the new filing.

    Federal student loan payments were set to resume in January after a years-long pandemic pause. But the Biden administration said Tuesday that it is extending the pause until 60 days after the pending litigation over the forgiveness program is resolved. If the program has not been implemented and the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that.

    The Wednesday filing by the states came in response to a request from the Biden administration that the Supreme Court lift the hold that has been placed on the student debt relief program, which would forgive up to $20,000 in loans for individual borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021.

    The Republican states accused the Biden administration of relying “on the COVID-19 pandemic” as “a pretext to mask the President’s true goal of fulfilling his campaign promise to erase student-loan debt.”

    The policy was set to begin going into effect earlier this fall, but was blocked by the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina.

    They claim that in rolling out the program, Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona went beyond the authority he has under law to cancel individual debts. They also argue that the department violated administrative law in how it launched the policy.

    The states defended the appeals court order blocking the relief program, telling the Supreme Court on Wednesday that they will suffer the types of harm that make it appropriate for a court to intervene.

    This procedural threshold – known as standing – has been a legal obstacle for many opponents of the program who have tried to block it in court, including challengers whose requests for Supreme Court intervention were previously denied. The states in the new filing argue that they’ll suffer a loss of tax revenue and other kinds of injuries if the debt relief program goes into effect.

    The states also pointed to the ruling from a federal judge in Texas in a separate case that struck down the student debt relief policy, which the administration has appealed to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling will remain in effect even if the Supreme Court lifts the hold placed by the 8th Circuit, the states noted in their filing Wednesday.

    The Biden administration has indicated it will take that case to the Supreme Court as well if the 5th Circuit leaves in place the ruling striking it down.

    In the request it put before the Supreme Court, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that leaving the program on hold “leaves millions of economically vulnerable borrowers in limbo, uncertain about the size of their debt and unable to make financial decisions with an accurate understanding of their future repayment obligations.”

    Prelogar told the Supreme Court that the program was a lawful endeavor “to ensure that borrowers affected by a national emergency are not worse off in relation to their student loans.”

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  • Anti-abortion activists say Trump will still need to win them over in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Anti-abortion activists say Trump will still need to win them over in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Anti-abortion proponents who believe Donald Trump’s crowning achievement was the overturning of Roe v. Wade say the newly declared 2024 contender will still have to earn their support in the upcoming Republican presidential primary – and he may be off to a rocky start.

    In his more-than-hour-long speech announcing his candidacy, the former president omitted any mention of his anti-abortion credentials or his appointment of three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who ultimately abolished federal abortion protections. Within hours, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, released a statement pointedly dismissing candidates “who shy away from this fight.”

    Though the group did not mention Trump by name, its message was clear: No matter what he did to advance the anti-abortion cause during his first term, he must continue to prove his commitment as he seeks a second term or risk losing some conservative coalition support.

    Trump “raised the bar very high for what it meant to be a pro-life president,” SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser told CNN in an interview this week. For that reason, Dannenfelser said, she was “surprised” the former president didn’t do more to tout his anti-abortion bona fides in his campaign announcement.

    “It’s a deep moral failure not to step up in the most important moment for our movement and if you think you can breeze through Iowa and South Carolina without a strong pro-life national vision, you’re just wrong,” she said, naming two of the early voting states that can buoy or tank a presidential candidate’s bid.

    Others said Trump, who has confided to aides that he believes the abortion issue may be hurting Republican candidates, passed on a layup by touting some of his core achievements in the conservative policy sphere but declining to mention his first-term efforts to limit abortion access. Instead, Trump highlighted his deliverance of tax cuts and deregulatory and counterterrorism actions by his administration as he addressed throngs of loyalists in the ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday.

    “For sure it was a missed opportunity,” said Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life. “President Trump has done many, many things we are grateful for but regardless, whoever gets our vote will have to earn it.”

    “We expect to be courted in the primary process and the person we want to get behind will be unapologetic in speaking up to defend the pre-born and calling for federal protections,” Hawkins said.

    The demand among leading abortion opponents for unflinching advocates comes as Trump, whose muted reaction to the overturning of Roe did not go unnoticed among anti-abortion conservatives, is expected to face primary challengers whose advancement of anti-abortion efforts date much further back than his own and may be more willing to embrace more stringent restrictions on abortion access in the months to come, possibly at the federal level. Trump has also found himself weakened in the wake of midterm defeats as some deep-pocketed GOP donors and elected Republicans call for the party to move on from him, underscoring the importance of keeping the conservative grassroots in his corner.

    “He does not want to risk any loss in the pro-life, evangelical or Catholic spheres,” Dannenfelser said.

    “I think Republicans who are running away from the issue right now are wrong,” added Tom McClusky, director of government affairs at CatholicVote, an advocacy organization that opposes abortion and spent $9.7 million in the 2020 presidential contest to boost Trump over Joe Biden.

    Trump’s apparent lack of interest in promoting his anti-abortion achievements is not new, McClusky added, saying that “he didn’t mention all that unless prodded during his presidency.” After the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights this summer – kicking authority on the issue to state governments – Trump took a brief victory lap, declaring in a statement that the landmark ruling wouldn’t have happened without him “nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

    Meanwhile, other elements of Trump’s reaction to the ruling raised questions among abortion opponents about his support for new laws restricting the procedure, particularly after the former president had previously sidestepped questions about whether he supported a controversial Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for life-threatening medical emergencies.

    “This brings everything back to the states where it has always belonged,” Trump told Fox News in the wake of the June 24 Dobbs decision.

    At a September campaign rally in Ohio for then-Senate GOP hopeful J.D. Vance, Trump once again affirmed his believe that abortion rights or restrictions should be determined “in the states,” adding that “Republicans have to get smart with that issue.”

    “It’s turned over to the states and it’s working out… The places where it’s not working out, it will work out,” Trump said.

    But if he repeats that in the primary, Trump could land himself in hot water with anti-abortion groups that have been championing efforts to legislate abortion at the federal level.

    “One thing that will not be satisfactory and a disqualifier is any candidate who says this is a state issue,” said Dannenfelser, who has remained in touch with Trump since he left office.

    Others simply want to see Republican presidential candidates – including Trump – talking about abortion as much as possible in the months to come. Prior to the midterms elections, however, Trump expressed concern to advisers that the reversal of Roe would backfire on GOP candidates by injecting a jolt of energy into the Democratic base, according to two people familiar with his comments.

    One of those sources said Trump has since griped to aides that his prediction was right, partly blaming the GOP’s underwhelming midterm performance on the attention abortion received from voters. CNN exit poll data found that 61 percent of voters were displeased with the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and about seven in 10 of those voters backed Democratic candidates running for Congress.

    A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

    “A lot of folks seemed skittish about talking about abortion immediately after Roe’s reversal. We believe that it’s dangerous for Republicans not when you talk about it but when you don’t talk,” said Hawkins.

    Democrats have similarly taken note of Trump’s caution around the abortion subject, noting that they will continue to highlight his record.

    “It’s no surprise Donald Trump is terrified about talking about his own record of paving the way for abortion bans across the country,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, adding that “Democrats will remind voters how [Trump] said there should be ‘some form of punishment’ for women who get an abortion’” during his 2016 presidential campaign.

    With Trump kicking off the 2024 primary earlier this week, several abortion opponents have said they have already been impressed with at least one of his potential rivals – former Vice President Mike Pence – and are closely watching to see how others handle the issue as they near possible campaigns of their own.

    That includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, potentially Trump’s leading foe if he mounts a campaign, who signed a 15-week abortion ban into law this past April but hasn’t committed to including additional legislative restrictions in an upcoming special session of the Florida state legislature, despite calls from abortion opponents to do so.

    “We would like to see him do more and see him speak more loudly,” said Hawkins, who remains hopeful that DeSantis’ sweeping reelection victory will embolden him “to take on additional measures in this coming legislative session.”

    Pence, for his part, has long charted a political identity with anti-abortion advocacy at its core since his days as a conservative congressman from Indiana. Just weeks after the Dobbs decision was handed down, the former vice president traveled to South Carolina to deliver a speech outlining a Republican policy blueprint for “post-Roe America.” He and his wife Karen have also been quietly raising funds for crisis pregnancy centers across the country and in keynote remarks at a gala for Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America in September, Pence also appeared to endorse Republican efforts to shepherd a national abortion ban through Congress.

    “I welcome any and all efforts to advance the cause of life in state capitals or in the nation’s capital,” Pence said at the time.

    At a CNN town hall this week, Pence praised the Dobbs decision, saying it gave “the American people a new beginning for life.” While suggesting that laws around abortion had been “returned to the states and the American people, where it belongs,” Pence also said he remains hopeful that all 50 states will eventually “stand for the sanctity of life.”

    Marc Short, a top adviser to the former vice president, said Pence will continue to train a spotlight on the issue whether or not he decides to run for president in 2024.

    “He’s always said we now have to take our case to the American people in a winsome way, while others have said, ‘just stop talking about it,’” Short said, adding that abortion “has never been a comfortable issue for President Trump and one he thinks of as a political loser.”

    While Pence’s intense focus on the issue has scored him points with abortion opponents, Short said it has also rankled some donors who don’t want to see third rail issues “highlighted as much [or] don’t necessarily agree with his position.” Pence, who is in the midst of promoting his new book “So Help Me God” that chronicles his time as vice president, has “loyal supporters who don’t necessarily share his views on life” but continue to support him because they consider him “a role model in public service,” Short said.

    After federal abortion rights were overturned, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – another possible 2024 contender – tweeted that conservatives would soon see “which politicians supported the pro-life cause to win elections, and which actually believed it.” But in a September interview with the Sioux City Journal during one of several visits he has made to Iowa, Pompeo also declined to offer support for Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds’ push to outlaw abortion after six weeks in her state.

    “Iowa will sort through it for itself, the state of Kansas will sort through it for itself,” said Pompeo, a former congressman from Kansas, which earlier this year rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment that could have paved the way for a statewide ban on abortion. Pompeo described the vote as “very confusing.”

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  • Opinion: The judge blocking student loan relief for millions is wrong about the law | CNN

    Opinion: The judge blocking student loan relief for millions is wrong about the law | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Steve Vladeck is a CNN legal analyst and a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He is the author of the upcoming book “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    The legal battles over President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief program heated up on Thursday, when the Fort Worth, Texas-based Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, struck down the program and issued a nationwide injunction purporting to block it across the country.

    Biden’s program aims to provide eligible low- and middle-income borrowers $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness – or up to $20,000 if they also received a Pell grant while in college. Before the program was put on hold, it had already received 26 million applications.

    But for Pittman, the central problem with the program is that its sheer economic size required clearer authorization from Congress than that provided by the 2003 statute on which the executive branch is relying. Invoking the Supreme Court’s new and deeply contested “major questions doctrine,” Pittman’s ruling would, if left intact, make it impossible for the program to be rescued without Congress stepping in.

    But the biggest problem with Pittman’s ruling isn’t its substance; it’s why he allowed the case to be brought in the first place. Every other challenge to the Biden program that’s been brought thus far (and there have been a bunch) have been thrown out by trial courts – the term courts use as a shorthand for whether the dispute before them is the kind of controversy over which the Constitution allows them to exercise judicial power.

    In a nutshell, a case’s standing has three elements: That the plaintiff shows an “injury in fact”; that the injury is “fairly traceable” to the defendant’s allegedly wrongful conduct; and that the courts are able to provide at least some redress for their injuries.

    Although standing is a technical doctrine, it’s also an important one. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a 2007 opinion, “No principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government.”

    Basically, the idea is that it’s not the federal courts’ job to answer hypothetical questions or resolve policy disputes. Only if a party can show how they’ve been harmed by the challenged policy in a manner that is concrete and particularized – real and discrete – will they (usually) be allowed to challenge it.

    If the complaint is just that the government is acting unlawfully in a way that doesn’t affect plaintiffs personally, that’s a matter to be resolved through the political process – not a judicial one. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it 30 years ago, “vindicating the public interest (including the public interest in Government observance of the Constitution and laws) is the function of Congress and the Chief Executive.”

    That’s why, until Thursday, each court to rule on a lawsuit challenging the Biden student loan debt relief program had dismissed the suit for lack of standing, like the St. Louis-based federal district court in a suit brought by six red states. Whether the plaintiffs were taxpayers or states, the problem was the same: Like it or hate it, when the government hands out a benefit to a class of individuals, that doesn’t usually injure other individuals discretely.

    Instead, objections to the Biden program present the classic kind of “generalized grievance” that the Supreme Court has long held federal courts lack the constitutional authority to resolve – like when a taxpayer tried to sue the CIA in an attempt to force the agency to provide a public accounting of its (allegedly unlawful) expenditures.

    Against that backdrop, Judge Pittman’s holding that the two plaintiffs in his case had standing just doesn’t hold up. For both of them – Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor – Pittman tied their standing to the fact that they are partly or fully ineligible for the program. The injury they suffered, in Pittman’s view, is that they were unable to argue for more expansive eligibility criteria that would’ve included them – not that the program itself is unlawful. That reasoning, such as it is, is especially ironic for two reasons.

    First, Pittman recognized later in the same opinion that the Biden administration didn’t need to provide Brown and Taylor with an opportunity to argue for expanded eligibility criteria – because the law the program is based on is exempt from the administrative law requirement known as “notice-and-comment rulemaking.” So they had standing based on an injury Pittman held … didn’t exist.

    Second, the rest of Pittman’s analysis – that there was no means by which the Biden administration could have expanded the eligibility criteria, since the program itself is, in his view, unlawful – makes it impossible for Brown or Taylor to show how their injuries could have been redressed by the courts. Indeed, Pittman’s ruling blocking the program on a nationwide basis provides Brown and Taylor with precisely … nothing.

    The Biden administration has already announced its intent to appeal Pittman’s ruling to the ultra-conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and it’s likely that whoever loses there will take the matter to the Supreme Court. So Pittman is unlikely to have the last word. But it’s still worth taking a step back and reflecting on the lengths to which Pittman went to find standing in a context in which every other court to date has held it doesn’t exist.

    Part of what Pittman might be chafing against is the idea that the federal government could take any action that might be immune to judicial review (during one hearing in the case, he compared Congress’ delegation of authority to the executive branch under the relevant statute to the infamous 1933 Enabling Act in Germany). But the federal government takes actions courts can’t review. Indeed, it’s the conservatives on the Supreme Court who have spent much of the past 40 years tightening the requirements for standing – and making it harder for plaintiffs to challenge allegedly wrongful government action. Reasonable minds can dispute – and have disputed – those precedents, but they’ve become the foundation of contemporary federal courts doctrine.

    In that respect, Pittman’s ruling, and the public discourse surrounding the student loan debt relief program more generally, is also a helpful reminder that not every policy dispute should lead to litigation – and that it’s not the job of the courts to resolve every contentious issue in American politics.

    For if Justice Alito was right that “no principle is more fundamental to the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government” than the idea that courts can only decide cases that present actual, justiciable controversies between adverse parties, then that principle ought to prevail even against the most strenuous (if not well-taken) objections to the government policy being challenged. Otherwise, the courts aren’t acting as courts; they’re just taking sides in policy debates that no one elected them to resolve.

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  • Supreme Court again declines to block Biden’s student loan relief plan

    Supreme Court again declines to block Biden’s student loan relief plan

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    Supreme Court nominee and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 21, 2020.

    Ken Cedeno | Reuters

    The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a second request to block the Biden administration’s student loan debt relief program.

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied an emergency application to block the program brought Tuesday by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group, on behalf of two borrowers in Indiana.

    On Oct. 20, Barrett rejected a similar request from the Brown County Taxpayers Association in Wisconsin.

    Barrett is responsible for such applications issued from cases in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Indiana and Wisconsin.

    Friday’s decision has little practical effect. For now, student loan forgiveness remains on hold from a challenge brought by six Republican-led states. An appeals court judge in the 8th Circuit in October granted the states’ emergency petition to stay the plan pending consideration of the states’ appeal.

    More from Personal Finance:
    Treasury announces new Series I bond rate of 6.89%
    Education Department to reduce ‘red tape’ on public service loan forgiveness
    26 million borrowers have applied for student loan forgiveness

    Since the White House in August unveiled its plan — to cancel $10,000 in student loans for most borrowers and up to $20,000 for those who received Pell Grants for low-income families — it has faced at least six lawsuits.

    Close to 26 million Americans have already applied for student loan forgiveness, and the Biden administration has approved 16 million of the requests, the White House said Thursday. The administration has continued to encourage borrowers to apply for relief despite the recent challenges.

    Caleb Kruckenberg, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, in an emailed statement said, “We’re disappointed by today’s denial but will continue to fight this program in court.”

    “Practically since this program was announced, the administration has sought to avoid judicial scrutiny,” Kruckenberg said. “Thus far they have succeeded. But that does not change the fact that this program is illegal from stem to stern.”

    ‘Standing’ remains an issue for forgiveness challenges

    The main obstacle for those hoping to foil the president’s action has been finding a plaintiff who can prove they’ve been harmed by the policy, experts say.

    “Such injury is needed to establish what courts call ‘standing,’” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, recently told CNBC. “No individual or business or state is demonstrably injured the way private lenders would have been if, for instance, their loans to students had been canceled.”

    In that light, Barrett’s decision to reject the Pacific Legal Foundation’s request isn’t surprising, said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

    “There were very few substantive differences between their original lawsuit and the new lawsuit, which spells a lack of legal standing,” he said.

    In the Pacific Legal Foundation case, Indiana-based plaintiffs Frank Garrison and Noel Johnson said that they would be financially harmed if some of their student debt was automatically forgiven because they would incur state taxes on that canceled debt.

    Indiana is one of several states that has said forgiveness would be taxable at the state level, and potentially the county level.

    Both Garrison and Johnson are lawyers; Garrison works for the Pacific Legal Foundation and Johnson for the Public Interest Legal Foundation. They are pursuing relief through the public service loan forgiveness program, which allows those who work for the government or specific nonprofits to get their debt canceled after 10 years, or 120 payments. PSLF forgiveness is not considered taxable income.

    After the initial lawsuit, the Education Department said that borrowers can opt out if they do not want to have their loans forgiven.

    Student loan borrowers ‘in limbo’

    As legal challenges mount, financial advisors say borrowers are left wondering where student loan forgiveness stands.

    “The interference of the courts is really troubling because people are looking for certainty with what’s happening with their student loans,” said Ethan Miller, a certified financial planner and founder of Planning for Progress in the Washington, D.C., area. Miller specializes in clients with student loans.

    “There was a plan that clearly outlined the steps,” he said. “And yet everyone’s been put in limbo.”

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  • With the fate of affirmative action in the hands of the Supreme Court, these graduates are fighting to save it | CNN

    With the fate of affirmative action in the hands of the Supreme Court, these graduates are fighting to save it | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For nearly 60 years, institutions of higher education have been able to give limited preference to people of color and women with admissions.

    The practice, advocates say, has afforded marginalized people a fair chance to attend colleges and universities that may have otherwise overlooked them. It has also been a tool to prevent discrimination at institutions, many of which historically only admitted White students.

    Now the fate of affirmative action is in the hands of the conservative majority Supreme Court. On Monday, justices will hear arguments for two cases at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

    The challenges are being spearheaded by conservative activist Edwin Blum who filed the lawsuits in 2014.

    The Harvard challenge cites Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits schools receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race. The UNC lawsuit also claims Title VI grounds, as well as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law, which covers state institutions.

    The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights is among the groups that will be defending the constitutionality of affirmative action before the Supreme Court.

    Genevieve Bonadies Torres, associate director for the Educational Opportunities Project for the committee, said affirmative action has led to college campuses becoming more diverse. In return, Black and brown students are able to achieve “profound economic mobility” and uplift their communities, Torres said.

    “What we know from both experience and research is that when colleges stop considering race, they have seen steep declines in the number of Black and Hispanic students who gain access,” Torres said. “Students of color are less likely to apply once they stop considering race because they see them as less inclusive and welcoming.”

    Torres said in 2015 students at both Harvard and UNC got involved in the cases by submitting letters and testifying about their experience on each campus and the importance of diversity.

    CNN spoke with three of the college graduates involved about why they believe affirmative action should be upheld.

    Cecilia Polanco grew up in a working-class family to parents who immigrated to the United States from El Salvador. Polanco said her father worked construction and her mother was a seamstress who also cleaned homes to provide for their family.

    She said her parents allowed her to focus on school because they wanted a better life for her. Neither had the opportunity to finish school in El Salvador.

    Polanco said she worked twice as hard and took AP courses in high school. She knew that as a Latina child of immigrants, she didn’t have the same resources as her White counterparts.

    In 2011, Polanco was selected as a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill which offered her a full ride scholarship.

    Polanco said she believes affirmative action helped “level the playing field” so that students of color like herself could receive such a prestigious scholarship.

    “If we had a more equitable and just society, we wouldn’t need something like affirmative action,” Polanco said. “But we do because our society is unjust.”

    Polanco recounted being one of few students of color in some of her college classes and reading hurtful comments online from people who said she only got into UNC because the school had to meet a diversity quota.

    But she didn’t let it deter her. She ultimately became a staunch advocate for affirmative action and was eager to contribute to the court case.

    Now Polanco works as a community organizer in Durham, North Carolina where she focuses on philanthropy, racial equity and youth organizing.

    “I think affirmative action helps see the ways in which I didn’t have some of the same opportunities as other people, as my White counterparts,” Polanco said. “There are many valuable life experiences that I had that made me a valuable asset to UNC.”

    Polanco plans to be in Washington D.C. today as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the case. She believes the high court will ultimately uphold the practice.

    “I’m definitely feeling optimistic,” Polanco said. “I feel like I’d be surprised if it went the other way.”

    Andrew Brennen said he has always faced reminders that he is Black.

    Andrew Brennen

    From high school peers asking why he didn’t fit the stereotypical Black teen to being one of few Black students in his classes at UNC, Brennen said he never felt completely accepted.

    He recounted one class discussion about affirmative action at UNC when a White student questioned whether some Black students were fully qualified to be at the university. Brennen also witnessed the protests on UNC’s campus when the “Silent Sam” Confederate statue was toppled.

    With college campuses still battling racism, Brennen fears that overturning affirmative action could only make matters worse.

    “The evidence is pretty clear that when admissions officers are not able to take race into account, diversity on campus suffers,” Brennen said. “These efforts to hold folks accountable for the history and current day racism on campus are led by students of color. And the reality is that our schools need to be as diverse as the workplaces and societies that we are supposed to be preparing to move into.”

    Brennen said he was eager to offer his perspective when the North Carolina Justice Center asked him to write a letter in support of affirmative action for the case.

    Brennen, the son of two attorneys, credited affirmative action for the success of his family. His parents, he said, both grew up poor but were able to attend law school and pursue legal careers.

    Brennen said his parents instilled the importance of education in him and taught him how affirmative action had helped many Black families prosper.

    Brennen graduated from UNC in 2019 with a degree in political science. He now works for a social change venture.

    “There are people out there who want to exploit the fact that affirmative action somehow means that your White kid is going to suffer,” Brennen said. “I think that hugely mischaracterizes what affirmative action is doing.”

    Affirmative action, he said, gives everyone, regardless of race, a fair shot at a quality education and success.

    Brennen said he worries that the conservative majority Supreme Court won’t agree.

    “While I’m confident that our attorneys are making strong, constitutionally-backed, precedent-based arguments in support of affirmative action, I’m nervous that this court doesn’t care,” Brennen said.

    Thang Diep experienced confusion over his identity throughout his childhood.

    Diep said he immigrated with his family from Vietnam to the U.S. (Los Angeles) at the age of 8 and didn’t speak much English. As he gradually learned the language, he still had a thick accent and classmates teased him throughout the grade school. Some would call him Chinese when really he was Vietnamese. As Diep settled into American life, he watched his father travel back and forth to Vietnam for work so he could still provide for the family. Diep’s mom didn’t work and stayed home.

    Thang Diep

    When it came time to apply for colleges, Harvard was not on Diep’s radar.

    “It seemed out of reach and this impossible thing,” Diep said.

    But three days before the admissions application was due, his mother encouraged him to take a chance and apply. Diep said in his admissions essay, he wrote about his struggles with racial identity and fitting in during grade school.

    Diep ultimately was accepted and studied neuroscience at Harvard.

    When Diep was asked to write a letter in support of affirmative action while attending Harvard, Diep jumped at the opportunity. He believed Asian Americans, particularly Southeast Asian Americans, had been left out of the conversation and wanted the world to know that they too support affirmative action. Asian Americans, he said, are not a monolith. Contrary to the “model minority” stereotype, some Asian Americans come from working- class families like he did, Diep said.

    “I think we live in society where race plays a critical role in our experiences and what access to resources we have,” Diep said. “One way we can make the education system better is to acknowledge and take into account these barriers.”

    Diep now works for a nonprofit that works to combat domestic violence.

    Diep said he will be in Washington D.C. rallying around affirmative action with other college graduates and students. He said he stands in solidarity with all communities of color that are fighting to keep affirmative action.

    “I feel like there is some sense of optimism,” Diep said. “I hope that this will become an educational opportunity to spread awareness about the impact.”

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  • Alito says leaked abortion opinion made conservative justices ‘targets for assassination’

    Alito says leaked abortion opinion made conservative justices ‘targets for assassination’

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    Associate Justice Samuel Alito poses during a group photo of the Justices at the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021.

    Erin Schaff | Pool | Reuters

    Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Tuesday night that the leak of the draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade this year endangered the lives of justices by putting a target on their backs.

    “It was a great betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock, because nothing like that had happened in the past, so it certainly changed the atmosphere at the court for the remainder of last term,” Alito said at an event at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation in response to a question about how the leak has affected the court.

    “The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe and Casey targets for assassination, because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us,” he added. The court also overturned its related 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in the ruling in June.

    Alito, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush and is part of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, authored the draft and the final opinion that removed constitutional protections for abortion.

    In his remarks Tuesday, Alito referred to the charges against Nicholas John Roske, of Simi Valley, California, who was armed with a handgun, a knife, pepper spray and burglary tools when he was arrested in June near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, between the release of the leaked draft and the court’s eventual ruling. Roske has pleaded not guilty to trying to kill Kavanaugh.

    “But that was last term. Now we’re in a new term,” Alito said Tuesday, adding that the justices and staff members “want things to get back to normal, the way they were before all of this last term, before Covid.”

    Alito’s comments echoed, in part, Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement shortly after the leak in May confirming the authenticity of the draft while condemning what he called a “betrayal of the confidences of the court.”

    Roberts said at the time that he ordered the marshal of the court to launch an investigation to identify the leaker. No findings from the probe have been made public.

    Additional security measures were put in place in the aftermath of the leak and in response to demonstrations outside several justices’ homes. Last week, a Georgia man was arrested on weapons charges after police said they found two handguns and a shotgun in a van he was driving in Washington with plans to “deliver documents” to the Supreme Court.

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  • Federal appeals court pauses Texas social media law’s enforcement amid looming Supreme Court petition | CNN Business

    Federal appeals court pauses Texas social media law’s enforcement amid looming Supreme Court petition | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN Business
     — 

    A federal appeals court has agreed to suspend enforcement of Texas’ social media law restricting content moderation, in the face of a looming request by tech industry groups for the Supreme Court to review the case.

    In an order on Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay of its earlier mandate that had paved the way for the Texas law, known as HB 20, to take effect.

    HB 20 aims to expose social media platforms including Meta, YouTube and Twitter to new private lawsuits, as well as suits by the state’s attorney general, over the companies’ decisions to remove or reduce the visibility of user content they deem objectionable.

    The law is viewed as a challenge to decades of First Amendment precedent, which holds the government may not compel private entities to host speech.

    In a filing leading up to Wednesday’s order, the technology groups challenging the Texas law said they planned to ask for the Supreme Court to rule on HB 20, and that Texas did not oppose the motion for a stay.

    The Supreme Court has already indicated it is open to regulating social media platforms, agreeing this month to hear two cases that could indirectly narrow the scope of the tech industry’s all-important liability shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

    Some justices, including conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have explicitly cited the role and power of social media platforms as reasons the Court should step in.

    Last month, Florida’s attorney general called on the Supreme Court to review a social media law in that state that is similar to Texas’ legislation. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier blocked Florida’s law, saying it was likely unconstitutional.

    That finding created a split with the Fifth Circuit’s decision to uphold Texas’ law, making it even more likely for the Supreme Court to take up the matter.

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  • Supreme Court to take critical eye to Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of Prince | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court to take critical eye to Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of Prince | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court will consider Wednesday whether the late Andy Warhol infringed on a photographer’s copyright when he created a series of silkscreens of the musician Prince.

    The case marks a rare foray for the court into the world of visual arts and has attracted the attention of those in the art world who say an appeals court decision against Warhol calls into question the legitimacy of generations of artists who have drawn inspiration from preexisting works.

    Museums, galleries, collectors, and experts have also weighed in asking the justices to balance copyright law with the First Amendment in a way that will protect artistic freedom.

    Central to the case is the so called “fair use” doctrine in copyright law that permits the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances.

    In the case at hand, a district court ruled in favor of Warhol, basing its decision on the fact that the two works in question had a different meaning and message. But an appeals court reversed – ruling that a new meaning or message is not enough to qualify for fair use.

    Now the Supreme Court must come up with the proper test.

    “Fair Use protects the First Amendment rights of both speakers and listeners by ensuring that those whose speech involves dialogue with preexisting copyrighted works are not prevented from sharing that speech with the world,” a group of art law professors who support the Andy Warhol Foundation told the justices in court papers.

    Lawyers for the Warhol Foundation contend that the artist created the “Prince Series” – a set of portraits that transformed a preexisting photograph of the musician Prince– in order to comment on “celebrity and consumerism.”

    They said that in 1984, after Prince became a superstar, Vanity Fair commissioned Warhol to create an image of Prince for an article called “Purple Fame.”

    At the time, Vanity Fair licensed a black and white photo that had been taken by Lynn Goldsmith in 1981 when Prince was not well known. Goldsmith’s picture was to be used by Warhol as an artist reference.

    Goldsmith – who specializes in celebrity portraits and earns money on licensing – had taken the picture initially while on assignment for Newsweek. Her photos of Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley are all a part of the court’s record.

    Vanity Fair published the illustration based on her photo – once as a full page and once as a quarter page – accompanied by an attribution to her. She was unaware that Warhol was the artist for whom her work would serve as a reference, but she was paid a $400 licensing fee. The license stated “no other usage rights granted.”

    Unbeknownst to Goldsmith, Warhol went on to create 15 additional works based on her photograph. At some point after Warhol’s death in 1987, the Warhol Foundation acquired title to and copyright of the so-called “Prince Series.”

    Fans pay tribute to Prince

    In 2016, after Prince died, Conde Nast, Vanity Fair’s parent company, published a tribute using one of Warhol’s Prince Series works on the cover. Goldsmith was not given any credit or attribution for the image. And she received no payment.

    Upon learning about the series, Goldsmith recognized her work and contacted the Warhol Foundation advising it of copyright infringement. She registered her photo with the US Copyright Office.

    The Warhol Foundation – believing that Goldsmith would sue – sought a “declaration of noninfringement” from the courts. Goldsmith countersued with a claim of copyright infringement.

    A district court ruled in favor of the Warhol Foundation, concluding that the use of the photograph with no permission and no fee constituted fair use.

    Warhol’s work was “transformative,” the court said, because it communicated a different message from Goldsmith’s original work. It held that the Prince Series can “reasonably be perceived to have transformed Prince from a vulnerable, uncomfortable person to an iconic, larger-than-life figure.”

    The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals however, reversed and said that the use of the pictures did not necessarily fall under fair use.

    The appeals court said the district court was wrong to assume the “role of art critic” and base its test for fair use on the meaning of the artistic work. Instead, the court should have looked at the degree of visual similarity between the two works.

    Under that standard, the court said, the Prince Series was not transformative, but instead “substantially similar” to the Goldsmith photograph and therefore not protected by fair use.

    It based its ruling on the fact that a secondary work, even if it adds “new expression” to a source material, can be excluded from fair use. The appeals court said the secondary work’s use of the original source material has to have a “fundamentally different and new” artistic purpose and character “such that the secondary work stands apart from the raw material used to create it.” The court emphasized that the primary work does not have to be barely recognizable within the secondary work, but that at a minimum it must ” comprise something more than the imposition of another artist’s style on the primary work.”

    The court said that the “overarching purpose and function” of the Goldsmith photo and the Warhol prints is identical because they are “portraits of the same person.”

    “Critically, the Prince Series retains the essential elements of the Goldsmith Photograph without significantly adding to or altering those elements, ” the court concluded.

    In appealing the case on behalf of the Warhol Foundation, lawyer Roman Martinez argued that the appeals court had gone badly wrong by forbidding courts from considering the meaning of the work as a part of a fair use analysis.

    He warned the court that if it were to embrace the reasoning of the appeals court, it would upend settled copyright principles and chill creativity and expression “at the heart of the First Amendment.”

    According to Martinez, copyright law is designed to foster innovation and sometimes builds on the achievements of others.

    Martinez stressed that the fair use doctrine – “which dates back at least to the 19th century” – reflects the recognition that a rigid application of the copyright statute would “stifle the very creativity which that laws was designed to foster.”

    He noted that Warhol’s works are currently found in collections across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian collection and the Tate Modern in London. From 2004 through 2014 Warhol auction sales exceeded $3 billion.

    Martinez said Warhol made substantial changes by cropping Goldsmith’s image, resizing it, altering the angle of Prince’s face while changing tones, lighting and detail.

    “While Goldsmith portrayed Prince as a vulnerable human, Warhol made significant alterations that erased the humanity from the image, as a way of commenting on society’s conception of celebrities as products, not people,” Martinez argued and added, “the Prince series is thus transformative.”

    Lisa Blatt, a lawyer for Goldsmith, told the justices a very different story.

    “To all creators, the 1976 Copyright Act enshrines a longstanding promise: Create innovative works, and copyright law guarantees your right to control if, when and how your works are viewed, distributed, reproduced or adapted,” she wrote.

    She said that creators and multibillion-dollar licensing industries “rely on that premise.”

    She said that the Andy Warhol Foundation should have paid Goldsmith’s copyright fees. Blatt argued that Warhol’s work was almost identical to Goldsmith’s own.

    “Fame is not a ticket to trample other artists’ copyrights,” she said.

    The Biden administration is supporting Goldsmith in the case.

    Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar noted, for example, that book-to-film adaptations often introduce new meanings or messages, “but that has never been viewed as an independently sufficient justification for unauthorized copying.” She said that Goldsmith’s ability to license her photograph and earn fees has been “undermined” by the Warhol Foundation.

    The Art Institute of Chicago and other museums told the court that the appeals court decision has caused uncertainty not only for the work of arts themselves but the market for copies of works the museum creates through catalogues, documentaries and websites.

    Smokey Robinson on Prince: ‘He was a genius’

    Lawyers for the museums also noted that the lower court opinion “failed to consider” longstanding artistic traditions of using elements of pre-existing works in new works and asked the Supreme Court to revisit the appeals court ruling.

    In the Baroque era, for example, Giovanni Panini painted modern Rome (pictured in court papers) depicting a gallery showing famous art. Included are copies of preexisting works including Michelangelo’s Moses, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statutes of Constantine, David, Apollo and Daphne and his fountains of Piazza Navona. Contemporary artists also continue to leverage preexisting artwork, the museums argued. The street artist Banksy, for example, painted a piece, “Girl with a Pierced Eardrum” onto a building in Bristol. It was in reference to Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” from 1665.

    “All of these works would not be considered transformative under the Second’s circuit’s” approach, the museums argued.

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  • Trump goes to Supreme Court over Mar-a-Lago search and seizure of documents | CNN Politics

    Trump goes to Supreme Court over Mar-a-Lago search and seizure of documents | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the dispute over materials marked as classified the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate this summer.

    His emergency request with the Supreme Court is the latest example of the former President seeking to involve the justices in investigations that entangle him – at a time when the high court’s legitimacy in politically explosive cases is under intense scrutiny.

    Trump is specifically asking the court to ensure that the more than 100 documents marked as classified are part of the special master’s review. The request, if granted, could bolster the former President’s attempt to challenge the search in court and have the documents returned to him.

    Trump’s emergency application to the Supreme Court comes after the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Justice Department and said that the department’s criminal investigation into the documents marked as classified could continue. The probe’s use of the records had been put on hold by a district judge in Florida, who granted a Trump request for a third-party review of the materials obtained in the Mar-a-Lago search.

    The appeal puts the political spotlight back on to the Supreme Court.

    Earlier this year, he asked the justices to block the release of documents from his White House to congressional US Capitol attack investigators. The high court rejected the request.

    The Supreme Court, with its current conservative majority, is already viewed by the American public as partisan following a string of controversial rulings this year, including overturning Roe v. Wade, and will likely make the Mar-a-Lago search even more of an issue in the upcoming congressional mid-term elections.

    Trump appointed three of the current justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

    In addition, the justice who receives Supreme Court emergency requests out of Florida is conservative Clarence Thomas, although he is almost guaranteed to refer the petition to the full court to consider.

    Thomas’ wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, promoted efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and has testified before the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack.

    CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said the appeal is intended to delay the Justice Department’s investigation into the former President, if possible.

    “This is part of the delay strategy,” Honig said on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” noting Trump lost at the appeals court. “So either he accepts that loss and those documents don’t go to the special master and they go right over to DOJ, or his only remaining recourse is to try to get the Supreme Court to take it, and that’s the course he’s taking now.”

    Honig said it’s a “close call” if the court will take up the case.

    “The Supreme Court typically likes to stay out of messy, political disputes,” Honig said. “On the other hand, when it comes to sort of unique, novel issues of constitutional law, of separation of power, of issues like executive privilege and classification of documents, that’s sort of why the Supreme Court exists – to adjudicate those high level disputes between branches that involve sort of core constitutional principles.”

    This story is breaking and will be updated.

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  • Supreme Court rearranges its seating chart as Jackson takes the bench | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court rearranges its seating chart as Jackson takes the bench | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Tradition is a long-held value at the US Supreme Court, where the nine justices’ adherence to a myriad of historic rules makes the inner workings of America’s highest court reliably consistent even as its decisions sometimes send shock waves through the country.

    Some of those treasured rules will soon be on display as the court’s newest member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, takes her seat on the bench for oral arguments. Although Jackson was administered her official oaths last spring, her investiture ceremony sealed her position on the bench days before the court’s new term begins on Monday, October 3.

    The addition of Jackson will cause the court to invoke one of its closely held traditions: the rearrangement of where the justices are seated on the bench when a new justice joins its ranks.

    In the courtroom, justices are seated by seniority, with the chief justice in the middle. “The senior associate justice sits to his right, the second senior to his left, and so on, alternating right and left by seniority,” according to the court.

    This means that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas will occupy the same seat this term that they did last term. But the remaining justices will be shuffled around, with Jackson seated to Roberts’ left on the end, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court in late 2020, seated on the opposite end, and the other five justices taking new seats depending on when they joined the court.

    On Friday, Jackson also participated in other court traditions, including sitting in the historic John Marshall Bench Chair at the beginning of the ceremony, as is customary for all new justices.

    President Joe Biden attended the Friday morning ceremony. It is customary before the event for the president to chat privately with the justices in a conference room and to sign the court’s oversized guest book.

    After the ceremony, Jackson took the traditional walk down the 36 marble steps at the front of the columned building accompanied by the chief justice.

    Although the justices will take new seats this term, much of the public won’t ever see them in those positions because photography is not allowed in the courtroom. But Roberts has announced that after more than two years of pandemic-related restrictions, members of the public will be allowed back into the courtroom, though he has yet to lay out details.

    Before October, the justices will likely discuss whether the court will continue to allow a live audio feed of oral arguments, a practice that began during the pandemic that enables the public to follow along in real time.

    Continuing that practice could allow court watchers across the country to get an understanding of Jackson’s style on the bench as she participates in oral arguments during her first term.

    In the new term, the justices will consider issues including voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, environmental regulations and religious liberty — areas where the solid conservative majority can easily control the outcomes.

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  • Ginni Thomas tells January 6 committee she didn’t discuss election activities with Justice Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

    Ginni Thomas tells January 6 committee she didn’t discuss election activities with Justice Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, stressed that her election activities were separate from her husband’s role on the high court during her Thursday meeting with the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

    Thomas addressed her dynamic with her husband through a prepared statement at the onset of the four and a half hour meeting with the panel, two sources familiar told CNN.

    “Regarding the 2020 election, I did not speak with him at all about the details of my volunteer campaign activities,” Thomas said under oath in her opening statement obtained by CNN. “And I did not speak with him at all about the details of my post-election activities, which were minimal, in any event. I am certain I never spoke with him about any of the legal challenges to the 2020 election, as I was not involved with those challenges in any way.”

    Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who chairs the January 6 committee, told CNN that Thomas answered “some questions” in her interview with the panel and reiterated her belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

    “Yes,” the chairman said when asked if Thomas said she still believes the election was stolen. “She said that.”

    Thompson would not divulge what the committee asked about, including whether she addressed her text messages with then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. In her prepared remarks, Thomas asserted that her husband was “completely unaware” of her texts with Meadows until the media reported on them.

    When asked if Thomas tried to clear up her previous statements, as her lawyer said, Thompson told CNN, “We didn’t accuse her of anything.”

    Thompson said that overall, “at this point we are glad she came in.” And asked whether the panel will incorporate the interview into its next, currently unscheduled hearing, he said, “If there’s something of merit.”

    When entering her voluntary interview on Thursday morning, Thomas declined to tell CNN why she felt the need to speak to the committee and instead said, “Thank you for being here.”

    She declined to say whether she spoke with her husband about her beliefs that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “Thank you for your question, I look forward to answering members,” she told CNN.

    Thomas’ prepared remarks, however, stressed, “that my husband has never spoken with me about pending cases at the Court. It’s an iron clad rule in our home.”

    “Additionally, [Justice Thomas] is uninterested in politics. And I generally do not discuss with him my day-to-day work in politics, the topics I am working on, who I am calling, emailing, texting, or meeting,” she added.

    Thomas’ attorney, Mark Paoletta, confirmed the voluntary interview last week.

    “She was happy to cooperate with the Committee to clear up the misconceptions about her activities surrounding the 2020 elections,” Paoletta said in a statement after Thursday’s interview. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the Committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated.”

    Members of the panel have long said they are interested in speaking with Thomas, particularly after CNN first reported text messages she exchanged with Meadows prior to January 6 about overturning the election.

    But in the months after those messages emerged, there had been little indication that compelling her to testify was a top priority for the panel despite subsequent evidence that Thomas also encouraged state lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate electoral win.

    Thomas attended the rally that preceded the attack on the US Capitol, as she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, where she stressed that her and her husband’s professional lives are kept separate. She also said that she had left the gathering before the protesters turned violent.

    She has also been publicly critical of the House January 6 investigation, calling on House GOP leaders to boot from their conference the two Republicans serving on the select committee.

    Thompson also told CNN that the panel had yet to reschedule its next hearing, after postponing it on Wednesday because of Hurricane Ian. The Mississippi Democrat said he doubts the hearing will take place next week.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments Thursday.

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  • Justice Department asks Supreme Court to reverse ruling striking down bump stock ban | CNN Politics

    Justice Department asks Supreme Court to reverse ruling striking down bump stock ban | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department on Friday asked the Supreme Court to take up an appeals court ruling that struck down a Trump-era federal ban on so-called bump stocks.

    The request comes as the high court has repeatedly declined to disturb those rulings that favor the restriction on the device, including not considering a challenge to the federal ban in October. Bump stocks are attachments that essentially allow shooters to fire semiautomatic rifles continuously with one pull of the trigger.

    “Like other machineguns, rifles modified with bump stocks are exceedingly dangerous; Congress prohibited the possession of such weapons for good reason.” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the new filing with the Supreme Court. “The decision below contradicts the best interpretation of the statute, creates an acknowledged circuit conflict, and threatens significant harm to public safety.”

    The January appellate court ruling concluded that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, ATF, did not have the authority to classify the devices as machine guns, a classification that had effectively banned them. But in the new filing, the Justice Department argued that prior to the ruling, three other appeals courts had upheld the bump stock regulation.

    In 2018, the ATF classified the devices as machine guns under the National Firearms Act after then-President Donald Trump ordered a review of bump stocks – which were used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting a few months prior.

    But the appellate majority in January argued that bump stocks were not covered by the law.

    “A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machinegun’ set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority’s opinion.

    In 2010, the ATF had determined that bump stocks were merely accessories, or firearms parts – and therefore not regulated as a firearm.

    But following the Las Vegas shooting that killed over 50 people and injured hundreds, the Justice Department said that the “devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger,” similar to automatic rifles.

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  • Chief Justice John Roberts will not testify before Congress about Supreme Court ethics | CNN Politics

    Chief Justice John Roberts will not testify before Congress about Supreme Court ethics | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Chief Justice John Roberts has notified Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin that he won’t testify at an upcoming hearing on Supreme Court ethics, instead releasing a new statement signed by all nine justices that is meant to provide “clarity” to the public about the high court’s ethics practices.

    “I must respectfully decline your invitation,” Roberts wrote in a letter to Durbin, which was released by a spokesperson for the high court Tuesday.

    “Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence,” he added.

    Without addressing Durbin’s specific concerns over ethics Roberts simply attached a “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices” to which he said, “All of the current Members of the Supreme Court subscribe.”

    The Illinois Democrat had asked Roberts, in a letter, to voluntarily testify in a hearing on Supreme Court ethics set to take place May 2. The request came in the wake of a ProPublica report that found that Justice Clarence Thomas had gone on several luxury trips at the invitation of a GOP megadonor. The trips were not disclosed on Thomas’ public financial filings.

    Thomas said in a statement that he had not reported the trips because the ethics guidelines in effect at the time had not required such disclosures.

    It was widely expected that Roberts would decline Durbin’s invitation to appear before a separate branch of government to discuss ethics reform.

    Durbin responded to the refusal in a statement Tuesday.

    “Make no mistake: Supreme Court ethics reform must happen whether the Court participates in the process or not,” Durbin said in the statement.

    He also noted that he was surprised that the chief justice had amended his letter with a statement meant to provide “clarity” to the public about how the justices consider ethics issues.

    Durbin dismissed the statement as a “recounting of existing legal standards of ethics” and said that Roberts’ suggestion that current law is adequate “ignores the obvious.”

    “It is time for Congress to accept its responsibility to establish an enforceable code of ethics for the Supreme Court, the only agency of our government without it,” Durbin said.

    The new statement, signed by all nine members of the court, says that the justices want to provide “new clarity” to the public. It might serve instead, to infuriate critics of the court who will say it falls far short of what is necessary to provide more binding regulations applicable to the justices.

    Less than an hour after the court released the statement, for example, Gabe Roth, who runs watchdog group Fix the Court, blasted what he called a “rehashing of things we already knew and found insufficient.”

    “Following weeks of scandal, Americans had been seeking some reassurance that nine of the most powerful people in the country understood their responsibility to act above board, avoid corrupting influences and be honest in their dealings and disclosures,” Roth said in a statement.

    The newly drafted statement by the court notes that the justices “today reaffirm and restate foundational ethics principles and practices to which they subscribe in carrying out their responsibilities as Members of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

    The statement reiterates something that Roberts has stressed before: that the justices “consult a wide variety of authorities to address specific ethical issues.”

    “They may turn to judicial opinions, treatises, scholarly articles, disciplinary decisions, and the historical practice of the Court and the federal judiciary” and they “may also seek advice from the Court’s Legal Office and from their colleagues,” the statement says.

    Indeed, Thomas in a rare statement on April 7 said that he had turned to the advice of his colleagues when deciding that luxury trips paid for by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow did not need to be disclosed in his yearly financial disclosure reports under the ethics guidelines that were in place at the time.

    Last weekend, Durbin released a separate statement noting that Roberts had declined to directly respond to a letter asking him to investigate Thomas’ filings but had referred the letter to the Judicial Conference, which serves as the policy-making body of the federal courts.

    Durbin had also included a letter from Judge Roslynn Mauskopf, the secretary of the Judicial Conference, who said that she would send the matter to the conference’s Committee on Financial Disclosure.

    But the new statement emphasizes that while the Judicial Conference has a code of conduct that is followed by lower court judges, the conference “does not supervise the Supreme Court.”

    The statement does note that in 1991, members of the court “voluntarily adopted” a resolution to follow the financial disclosure requirements and limitations on gifts that apply to all other federal judges.

    But when it comes to recusals, the standards are necessarily more restrictive because unlike the lower courts that can freely substitute one district or circuit court judge for the other, the Supreme Court allows only its own members to hear a dispute.

    The statement explains why individual justices “rather than the Court” must decide recusal issues.

    “If the full Court or any subset of the Court were to review the recusal decisions of individual Justices, it would create an undesirable situation in which the Court could affect the outcome of a case by selecting who among its Members may participate,” it says.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Here’s what’s left for the Supreme Court’s final week of the term | CNN Politics

    Here’s what’s left for the Supreme Court’s final week of the term | CNN Politics

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    Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story ran in early June.



    CNN
     — 

    All eyes are on the Supreme Court for its final week, as the justices will release cases on issues such as affirmative action, student loan payments, election law and LGBTQ rights.

    Of the 10 cases remaining, several that most capture the public’s attention are likely to lead to fiery opinions and dissents read from the bench.

    In addition, they will come down as the court finds itself in the center of a spotlight usually reserved for members of the political branches due to allegations that the justices are not transparent enough when it comes to their ethics disclosures, most recently with Justice Samuel Alito last week.

    Here are some of the remaining cases to be decided:

    The court is considering whether colleges and universities can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, a decision that could overturn long standing precedent that has benefited Black and Latino students.

    At issue are programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that the schools say help them to achieve diversity on campus.

    During oral arguments, the right side of the bench appeared ready to rule against the schools. Such an opinion would deliver a long-sought victory for opponents of affirmative action in higher education who have argued for decades that taking race into consideration – even in a limited manner – thwarts the goal of achieving a color-blind society.

    John Roberts skewers Harvard attorney’s comparison of race and music skills as qualities in applicants

    At the center of another case is a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who seeks to expand her business and create custom websites to celebrate weddings – but does not want to work with gay couples out of religious objections to same-sex marriage.

    Smith has not yet moved forward with her new business venture because of Colorado’s public accommodations law. Under the law, a business may not refuse to serve individuals because of their sexual orientation. Smith, whose company is called 303 Creative LLC, said that she is willing to work with all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but she draws the line at creating websites that celebrate same-sex marriage because expressing such a message would be inconsistent with her beliefs.

    The state and supporters of LGBTQ rights say that Smith is simply seeking a license to discriminate.

    The conservatives on the court were sympathetic at oral arguments to those put forward by Smith’s lawyer. They viewed the case through the lens of free speech and suggested that an artist or someone creating a customized product could not be forced by the government to express a message that violates her religious beliefs.

    Moore v. Harper has captured the nation’s attention because Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are asking the justices to adopt a long dormant legal theory and hold that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules established by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections.

    The doctrine – called the Independent State Legislature theory – was pushed by conservatives and supporters of Trump after the 2020 presidential election.

    The North Carolina controversy arose after the state Supreme Court struck down the state’s 2022 congressional map as an illegal partisan gerrymander, replacing it with court-drawn maps that favored Democrats. GOP lawmakers appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, arguing that the North Carolina Supreme Court had exceeded its authority.

    They relied upon the Elections Clause of the Constitution that provides that rules governing the “manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” must be prescribed in “each state by the legislature thereof.”

    Under the independent state legislature theory, the lawmakers argued, state legislatures should be able to set rules with little to no interference from the state courts.

    The justices heard oral arguments in the case last winter and some of them appeared to express some support for a version of the doctrine. The justices could, however, ultimately dismiss the dispute due to new partisan developments in North Carolina.

    After the last election, the North Carolina Supreme Court flipped its majority to Republican. In April, the newly composed state Supreme Court reversed its earlier decision and held that the state constitution gives states no role to play in policing partisan gerrymandering. After that decision was issued, the justices signaled they may dismiss the case.

    exp juneteenth anita hill amanpour intw 061901PSEG2 cnn us_00002001.png

    Anita Hill: America “has lost confidence in the Supreme Court”

    The Supreme Court is also considering two challenges to President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, an initiative aimed at providing targeted debt relief to millions of student-loan borrowers that has so far been stalled by legal challenges.

    Republican-led states and conservatives challenging the program say it amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student loan debt under the guise of the pandemic.

    At the heart of the case is the Department of Education’s authority to forgive the loans. Several of the conservative justices have signaled in recent years that agencies – with no direct accountability to the public – have become too powerful, upsetting the separation of powers.

    They have moved to cut back on the so-called administrative state.

    In court, Chief Justice John Roberts as well as some other conservatives seemed deeply skeptical of the Biden administration’s plan.

    A former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, seeks to sue the US Postal Service because it failed to accommodate his request not to 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.

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

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  • ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

    ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A Texas billionaire and GOP megadonor paid boarding school tuition for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew, and the justice did not report the financial assistance for the child he helped raised on his annual disclosures, according to a new ProPublica report – the latest revelation raising ethical questions around the high court.

    The ProPublica report on Thursday revealed that the billionaire Harlan Crow paid tuition for Mark Martin, who lived with Thomas’ family as a child and for whom the justice became a legal guardian. ProPublica cited a 2009 bank statement and an interview with a former administrator at the Georgia boarding school Martin attended.

    The former administrator at the school, Hidden Lake Academy, told ProPublica that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition for the year or so Martin was at the boarding school. The administrator said, according to ProPublica, that he had been told by Crow that Crow also paid for Martin’s tuition at another school, the Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia, which is Crow’s alma mater.

    A statement from Crow’s office did not address the payments for Martin’s tuition directly but said that he and his wife had “supported many young Americans through scholarship and other programs at a variety of schools, including his alma mater.”

    A friend and defender of Thomas, conservative lawyer Mark Paoletta, said on Twitter that Crow paid for the first year that Martin spent Randolph-Macon Academy and for the year he spent at Hidden Lake. Paoletta denied that Thomas ran afoul of the court’s financial disclosures rules by not reporting the payments, arguing that Martin did not qualify as a legal dependent under the federal ethics law in question.

    However, on the justice’s 2002 financial disclosure submission, Thomas reported as a gift $5,000 from another couple that was characterized as an “Education gift to Mark Martin.”

    The Supreme Court’s press office did not respond to requests seeking comment from the court and Thomas.

    ProPublica previously reported that for years, Thomas has accepted lavish trips and gifts from Crow, which have gone mostly unreported on the justice’s financial disclosures, and that Crow also purchased several real estate properties, including the home where his mother lives, from the Thomas family.

    The extent to which these transactions and hospitality should have been reported by Thomas has been the subject of debate among judicial ethics experts, who have noted that a recently-closed loophole for certain “personal hospitality” may have covered some of the luxury trips.

    Thomas has said he followed the advice of others in deciding what required disclosure, and a source close to Thomas previously told CNN that the justice plans to amend his disclosure forms to reflect the real estate transaction, which also went unreported. Thomas also said in a statement last month that Crow “did not have business before the court.”

    Nevertheless, court reforms advocates and Democratic lawmakers say that Thomas’ conduct shows that the current ethics rules for the justices – who are not subject to a code of conduct akin to the standards imposed on lower courts – are too lax.

    Amid the ethics firestorm, which included a Senate hearing this week, Chief Justice John Roberts and the other eight justices released a “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices” last week that the court’s critics say did not go far enough to address their concerns.

    “Today’s report continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin in a statement on Thursday. “I hope that the Chief Justice understands that something must be done – the reputation and credibility of the Court is at stake.”

    Republicans have pushed back on Democrats’ calls that Congress step in to enact stricter ethics rules for the justices, but some GOP lawmakers have acknowledged they’d like to see the high court – on its own – take steps towards greater transparency.

    Asked Thursday about the latest ProPublica report, Sen. Mitt Romney said, “I hope they’ll look – they’ll evaluate.”

    “I have no way of knowing the accuracy of that report and what’s been done but it clearly justifies taking a good look at it,” the Utah Republican said.

    Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he wasn’t going to speak to the specifics of the new allegations against Thomas, “because I could sit here and talk about other instances from other justices that the fact patterns are similar.”

    “Which goes back to the point of the Supreme Court should address this and they should address it on a consensus basis,” Tillis said.

    Ethics experts who spoke to ProPublica also acknowledged that the tuition payments, if considered a gift to Martin, may not have required disclosure. But since Thomas was Martin’s legal guardian, according to ProPublica’s report, he would have had responsibility for the child’s education and the tuition could also be viewed as an unreported gift to the justice himself.

    The statement from Crow’s office said that that the tuition he and his wife has provided for young people “is given directly to academic institutions, not to students or to their families.”

    “These scholarships and other contributions have always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.”

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  • How the ‘independent state legislature’ theory, now rejected by SCOTUS, fueled chaos in 2020 and could influence 2024 | CNN Politics

    How the ‘independent state legislature’ theory, now rejected by SCOTUS, fueled chaos in 2020 and could influence 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a controversial legal theory that would’ve given partisan state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over US elections.

    Former President Donald Trump and his staunch allies used the now-rejected “independent state legislature” theory to justify their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. And many Trump critics warned that, without action from the Supreme Court, these same vulnerabilities would threaten the 2024 election.

    In a case about North Carolina redistricting, the Supreme Court ruled that state courts and other state entities can review laws passed by state legislatures setting rules for federal elections. The court’s majority – a coalition of three conservatives with the three-justice liberal bloc – rejected the GOP-backed theory that elected politicians have unreviewable authority to set election rules.

    One of the reasons Republicans might want to shift power to state legislatures is because their party has a structural advantage on that front. Republicans currently control the legislatures in four states that Joe Biden carried in 2020 – Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and New Hampshire – and they control two additional statehouses in the battleground states of North Carolina and Florida.

    States across the country adjusted their election rules in 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic was raging and before vaccines were available. The changes included adding dropboxes in populated areas and easing the rules for when mail-in ballots can be accepted, among other things.

    Many of these tweaks were implemented by state courts, governors, secretaries of state and other state election administrators. But according to the “independent state legislature” theory, these rule changes were illegal, because they didn’t come directly from the state legislature.

    This is what formed the basis of many of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

    Trump allies, like right-wing lawyer John Eastman, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, used this theory to argue Biden’s victories in key states were illegitimate because they “unlawfully” conducted elections or “failed to follow their own laws.”

    This legal theory fueled their unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to nullify millions of votes, and their attempt to reject Biden’s electors when Congress tallied the electoral votes on January 6, 2021.

    Still, after the 2020 debacle, conservative legal figures kept up the fight, perhaps with an eye toward 2024. Top Republicans, including Trump and House GOP leaders, continued to peddle the theory. Eastman filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the North Carolina case, urging the justices to give state legislatures full control over elections.

    “Federal courts overwhelmingly rejected those Republican arguments before and after the 2020 elections, and the Supreme Court today put the issue to bed,” said R. Stanton Jones, a lawyer who argued against the theory when the case was before the North Carolina Supreme Court.

    The high court’s ruling will have a significant impact on the 2024 presidential election, because it closes off some legal pathways for Trump to once again undermine the electoral process.

    For starters, there is now Supreme Court precedent rejecting some of the more maximalist but unsettled theories that have been championed by Eastman and other GOP lawyers. (Never mind the fact that amid the 2020 chaos, even Eastman admitted that his harebrained legal proposals would be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, as CNN recently reported.)

    But the somewhat limited ruling leaves plenty of avenues for future election-related challenges, regarding how districts are drawn, the deadlines for mail-in ballots, and other key questions.

    Legal scholars observed Tuesday that the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, specifically said federal courts have “a duty to exercise judicial review” over state court decisions that influence federal elections. But the majority opinion didn’t set the ground rules.

    “By not setting a clear standard for when state courts would go too far in the future, the decision leaves open a number of questions that will have to be resolved in future election-related disputes,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

    Indeed, Adam Kincaid, who leads a national GOP redistricting group, said in a statement that Tuesday’s ruling “should serve as a warning to state courts inclined to reach beyond the constitutional bounds of judicial review,” signaling that there are plenty of lawsuits to come.

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  • Supreme Court halts execution of Richard Glossip | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court halts execution of Richard Glossip | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The US Supreme Court on Friday put on hold the execution of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma death row inmate whose capital conviction the state attorney general has said he could no longer support.

    The latest round of litigation was brought to the Supreme Court by Glossip, with the support of the Oklahoma Attorney’s General office, who asked for his May 18 execution to be set aside.

    The emergency hold on his execution will stay in place while the justices consider his request that they formally take up his case.

    There were no noted dissents from Friday’s order. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in Friday’s ruling.

    Glossip has maintained his innocence, having been convicted in 1998 of capital murder for ordering the killing of his boss.

    A review launched by Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general found that prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence to Glossip that they were obligated to produce and that the evidence showed that the prosecutors’ key witness – the supposed accomplice of Glossip’s who committed the murder – had given false testimony.

    Despite Oklahoma’s assertions that it could no longer stand by Glossip’s conviction, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeal declined Glossip’s request that his execution be halted.

    In their filings with the US Supreme Court, Glossip’s attorneys argued that – in addition to the obviously irreparable harm he would suffer if the execution moves forward – Oklahoma “will also suffer harm from its Department of Corrections executing a person whom the State has concluded should never have been convicted of murder, let alone sentenced to die, in the first place.”

    Glossip’s case has been before the Supreme Court before, including in a major challenge the justices heard in 2015 that he and other death row inmates brought to the lethal injection protocol used in executions.

    In that case, the court’s conservative majority rejected the inmates’ claims that the lineup of the lethal drugs, which had come under scrutiny after several botched executions, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

    Glossip has narrowly avoided being executed on several occasions, including months after the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling, when the execution was called off at the last minute by state officials because of questions about the drugs they were planning to use.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • HHS secretary says ‘everything is on the table’ amid calls to ignore medication abortion ruling | CNN Politics

    HHS secretary says ‘everything is on the table’ amid calls to ignore medication abortion ruling | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Sunday said “everything is on the table” following a Texas federal judge’s ruling to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication abortion drug mifepristone.

    In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union,” the secretary would not say whether he believes the FDA should ignore the ruling and keep the drug on the market, but he maintained that the Biden administration is considering all options.

    “We want the courts to overturn this reckless decision,” Becerra said, adding that there was a “good chance” of Supreme Court intervention but declining to say how, exactly, the administration will handle the ruling in the interim.

    “Everything is on the table. The president said that way back when the Dobbs decision came out. Every option is on the table,” the secretary told Bash, referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.

    Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a separate appearance on “State of the Union,” did not back away from her call Friday on CNN for the ruling to be ignored, saying that if it was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, “it would essentially institute a national abortion ban.”

    “I do not believe that the courts have the authority over the FDA that they just asserted, and I do believe that it creates a crisis,” she told Bash.

    Ocasio-Cortez called the ruling “an extreme abuse of power” and said there was precedent for the executive branch ignoring court rulings.

    “I do think that when it comes to gaming out what the very real possibilities are in the coming days, weeks and months, this is not just about speculation, but this is about preparation. And the reality of our courts right now is very disturbing,” she said.

    Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas warned in a separate interview with Bash on Sunday that House GOP appropriators could defund certain FDA programs if the ruling is ultimately ignored.

    “The House Republicans have the power of the purse, and if the administration wants to not lead this ruling, not live up to this ruling, then we’re going to have a problem,” the second-term lawmaker said. “And it may come a point where House Republicans on the appropriation side have to defund FDA programs that don’t make sense.”

    US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Friday issued a ruling to halt the decades-old approval of mifepristone, but he paused the ruling from taking effect for a week so it could be appealed, a process that is underway.

    “This is not America,” Becerra said Sunday. “What you saw is that one judge in that one court in that one state, that’s not America. America goes by the evidence. America does what’s fair. America does what is transparent, and we can show that what we do is for the right reasons. That’s not America.”

    Within an hour of the ruling Friday, a different federal judge ruled in favor of 17 Democratic-led states and Washington, DC, looking to expand access to the abortion pill, allowing them to keep the drug available.

    Becerra on Sunday touted the proven safety of the drug, a factor that Kacsmaryk questioned in his ruling. He confirmed that the Department of Justice had already filed its appeal and is waiting for its day in court.

    Still, Becerra had little to say about what tangible preparations the administration would take to secure access to abortion should the drug no longer be available after the weeklong pause.

    “Well, [women] certainly have access today, and we intend to do everything to make sure it’s available for them not just in a week but moving forward, period,” Becerra told Bash when asked if women would have access to the medication after this week.

    The Justice Department and Danco, a mifepristone manufacturer that intervened in the case to defend the approval, have both filed notices of appeal. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Danco said in statements that in addition to the appeals, they will seek “stays” of the ruling, meaning emergency requests that the decision remains frozen while the appeal moves forward.

    They’re appealing to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which is sometimes said to be the country’s most conservative appellate court. Yet some legal scholars are skeptical that the 5th Circuit, as conservative as it is, would let Kacmsaryk’s order take effect.

    “I got to believe that, Dana, an appeals court, the Supreme Court, whatever court has to understand that this ruling by this one judge overturns not just access to mifepristone, but possibly any number of drugs,” Becerra said.

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