Tag: U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court dismisses emoluments lawsuits against Trump as moot

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The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a pair of emoluments lawsuits against former President Trump, ruling that the cases are moot now that he has left office.

The two lawsuits, filed by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the attorneys general for Washington, D.C., and Maryland, were part of a novel legal effort that alleged Trump violated the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by continuing to own his business empire while in office.

Before Trump came into office, the courts had never considered the question of what the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses prohibited, as few presidents had sought to test their boundaries. But Trump held office while also retaining private business interests that were unprecedented in modern times. Continue reading.

Supreme Court tosses challenge to Trump’s immigrant census plan

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The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday to dismiss a challenge to the Trump administration’s exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the U.S. census, the once-per-decade population count used to allocate House seats among the states.

The decision broke along ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices finding that the lawsuit brought by nearly two dozen states was premature. The court’s three more liberal members dissented.

If the courts take no further action on President Trump’s plan, the Friday ruling would effectively allow him to subtract undocumented residents from his mandatory January apportionment report to Congress, which could reduce House seats and federal funding among states with large undocumented populations.  Continue reading.

Supreme Court deals reality check to Trump’s post-election legal fight

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a reality check to President Trump’s far-fetched bid to overturn his election loss through the courts, just hours after he implored the justices to clear a path toward his second term despite having lost the race by more than 7 million votes.

To court watchers, it came as no surprise to see the justices deny an emergency bid by Trump-allied Pennsylvania Republicans to nullify President-elect Joe Biden’s certified victory in the Keystone State — a state Biden won by more than 81,000 ballots.

For Trump, however, the justices’ defiance of his plea prompted a now-familiar refrain amid his series of disappointing post-election court fights, with Trump downplaying the significance of the loss while reassuring supporters that his increasingly desperate legal campaign would ultimately secure his reelection.  Continue reading.

Conservative justices seem prepared to let Trump proceed with immigrant census plan for now

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The Supreme Court on Monday seemed reluctant to issue an immediate ruling that would halt President Trump’s plan to count — and later subtract — immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally from the once-per-decade population count. 

The court, which has a new 6-3 conservative majority due to Trump’s three appointments, appeared to signal that it would let the Trump administration tally at least some of the country’s undocumented population as part of the 2020 census.

But a majority seemed inclined to defer future challenges over how that data could be used to determine House seats among the states, a key part of taking the census and a motivator in the Trump administration’s desire to exclude undocumented workers from census counts. Continue reading.

Trump’s bid to exclude undocumented immigrants from reapportionment arrives at Supreme Court

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President Trump will swing for the fences in his last immigration legal battle at the Supreme Court, where he claims authority for the first time in the nation’s history to exclude undocumented residents when deciding the size of each state’s congressional delegation.

Opponents of his plan say it is foreclosed by more than 200 years of practice, the text of the Constitution and the authority granted the president by Congress. Three lower courts have ruled against Trump, and a fourth said the time was not ripe for a decision on the question’s merits.

But the president’s lawyers will tell the Supreme Court on Monday that it is up to the president to decide whether undocumented immigrants should be counted, a decision that could have far-reaching implications for a state’s representation in Congress and power in the electoral college, and for billions of dollars in federal funds. Continue reading.

Gorsuch questions law at the legal root of abortions in concurrence blocking limit on religious gatherings

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On the night before Thanksgiving, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) COVID-19 executive orders to prohibit large church gatherings amid the pandemic, Justice Neil Gorsuch weighed in with a conservative stance condemning a number of key laws that do not align with his beliefs. 

According to Law and Crime, Gorsuch’s choice of words centered on a column of constitutional law — a passage highlighting “implied right to ‘bodily integrity.” Gorsuch opted to draw a major distinction between “rights explicitly granted by the Constitution (e.g., the First Amendment rights to speech and religion) and rights presumably read between the lines of the Constitution’s text,” per the publication.

Here is an excerpt of the statements in which Gorsuch referred to Jacobson v. Massachusetts to explain his logic: Continue reading.

Supreme Court relieves religious organizations from some covid-related restrictions

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The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority late Wednesday night sided with religious organizations in New York that said they were illegally targeted by pandemic-related restrictions imposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to combat spiking coronavirus cases.

The 5-to-4 order was the first show of solidified conservative strength on the court since the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom President Trump chose to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg following her death in September. The decision differed from the court’s previous practice of deferring to local officials on pandemic-related restrictions, even in the area of constitutionally protected religious rights.

“Even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten,” said the unsigned opinion granting a stay of the state’s orders. “The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.” Continue reading.

The Supreme Court fight over Trump’s last-ditch effort to rig the census, explained

The Court must decide whether to follow the Constitution’s clear text — or to rubber-stamp an illegal effort by Trump.

Donald Trump will no longer be president in two months. But an unconstitutional memorandum he handed down last July could potentially shape both US policy and American elections for the next decade, if the Supreme Court, scheduled to hear the case on November 30, allows that memo to take effect.

The Constitution provides that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” Nevertheless, Trump’s memo claims that “aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status” should not be counted when seats in the House of Representatives are allocated following the 2020 census.

The memo, in other words, violates the unambiguous text of the Constitution, as well as federal laws governing who should be included in census counts. Continue reading.

Supreme Court goes idle on Trump-related disputes and time is running out

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Has the Supreme Court hit the pause button on all things President Trump?

The justices for more than three weeks have been holding on to the president’s last-ditch plea to shield his private financial records from Manhattan’s district attorney.

And all has been quiet on the election front. Continue reading.

Political gaze shifts to the Supreme Court as justices hear pivotal health care case

The argument marks the first major case for Justice Amy Coney Barrett

The Supreme Court with new Justice Amy Coney Barrett hears oral argument Tuesday in a case that threatens to wipe out the 2010 health care law, likely the term’s most consequential case, under a political spotlight that rarely shines brighter on justices who would rather stay out of it.

In the third major test for President Barack Obama’s signature law at the high court, the focus at oral argument largely will be on whether the justices will follow one of several ways to let the law stand, even though it is a more conservative court than in previous challenges.

It is the first major case for Barrett, who arrived after a divisive confirmation fight in the Senate that largely focused on what she might do in this case. President Donald Trump said in an interview with “60 Minutes” that he hopes the Supreme Court ends the law known as the Affordable Care Act — “It will be so good if they end it” — and Democrats argued that’s why he appointed her. Continue reading.