#supreme-court

#supreme-court

As the tumultuous first year of Donald Trump's second term as president approaches its end, it's difficult to assess his successes and his failures. For one thing, his governing strategy has been all but unprecedented. Most presidents who have just won an election are forced to choose whether they want to cash in their political chips to get big things done or build up political capital for future elections.

In its sweeping Trump v. Wilcox decision in May, the Court ruled that the president "may remove without cause" officials in administrative agencies-a decision grounded in the Court's ringing endorsement of the so-called unitary executive. An elementary application of the unitary-executive theory would allow the White House to interfere, unchecked, with the Fed-just as the Court has empowered Trump to gut every other federal agency.

The Republicans' plan to gerrymander their way to holding on to the House took a blow this week when a three-judge panel struck down Texas's new congressional redistricting map. The map, ordered by President Trump, sought to create five additional congressional seats for the GOP. US District Judge Jeffery Brown-a hardcore Republican appointed by Trump-struck down the map on the grounds that it was racially gerrymandered.

The US government has rolled back a policy that threatened to invalidate passports showing trans people's correct gender identity. Less than a week after the change was discovered, a section of the State Department's website was modified to remove the threat that trans people's passports would be invalidated if the document did not detail their "biological sex". An update on the website's page regarding passport sex markers, originally discovered by Transitics reporter Aleksandra last Thursday (13 November), said it no longer issued passports or other documents with a gender-neutral "X" marker or markers that did not match a person's "biological sex at birth".

The US supreme court agreed on Monday to hear a defense by the Trump administration of the government's authority to limit the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry along the US-Mexico border. The court took up the administration's appeal of a lower court's determination that the metering policy, under which US immigration officials could stop asylum seekers at the border and decline to process their claims, violated federal law.

Ed. Note: A weekly roundup of just a few items from Howard Bashman's How Appealing blog, the Web's first blog devoted to appellate litigation. Check out these stories and more at How Appealing. "A Senators-Only Right to Sue in Shutdown Deal; In their legislation reopening the government, senators awarded themselves a legal power to sue the government that should be universal": Anya Bidwell and Patrick Jaicomo have this essay online at The Wall Street Journal. "Judging The Justice System In The Age Of Trump: Nancy Gertner." You can access the new episode of David Lat's "Original Jurisdiction" podcast via this link. "Gorsuch Joins Sotomayor as Supreme Court Children's Author": Justin Wise of Bloomberg Law has this report.

India's Supreme Court has warned that toxic air in Delhi could cause permanent damage to people's health, as pollution levels in the capital remained in the severe range on Thursday. Justice PS Narasimha made the remarks during a hearing, urging lawyers to use virtual facilities instead of attending court in person. Why are you all appearing here? We have the virtual hearing facility. Please avail it. This pollution ... this will cause permanent damage, he said.

A Meath couple who built a house without planning permission have failed in their latest bid to prevent the demolition of the property after the Supreme Court rejected an application for a further appeal.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prevents states from discriminating by race or color to prevent voting. So if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 2, as it is considering, any equally populated House district is fair game, at least as far as federal law is concerned. There would be no federal law that might deter a 38-0 Texas congressional map that unanimously elected Republicans, or a 52-0 map in California with nothing but Democrats.

To understand how grudging Amy Coney Barrett's new book is when it comes to revealing personal details, consider that one of the family members the Supreme Court Justice most often refers to is a great-grandmother who died five years before she was born. On Barrett's desk at home, she recounts in " Listening to the Law," she keeps a photograph of her great-grandmother's one-story house, where, as a widow during the Great Depression, she raised some of her thirteen children and took in other needy relatives.

Yet history is littered with presidential miscalculations. President Eisenhower famously called his appointment of Earl Warren to Chief Justice one of his " biggest mistakes," as Warren became a liberal stalwart for over a decade. Justices Stevens and Souter, both nominated by Republican presidents, evolved into some of the Court's most liberal members. Had Republican presidents consistently installed reliably conservative justices since the mid-20th century, the Court would have been exponentially more conservative than it actually was.

The consolidated cases, Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. VOS Selections, challenge Trump's claim that he has the power to issue tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which permits the president to regulate transactions involving any property in which any foreign country or national thereof has any interest, in order to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat.

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether states can continue to count late-arriving mail ballots, which have been a target of President Donald Trump. The justices took up an appeal from Mississippi after a panel of three judges nominated by the Republican president on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the state law allowing ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day to be counted violated federal law.