The court's summary rulings today in a pair of redistricting cases from North Carolina seem to drive home that the justices are not in a hurry to reconsider claims of partisan gerrymandering after sidestepping two major cases earlier this term, but that they will continue to pay close attention to claims that district lines were drawn due to race-based considerations, of course, whether Justice( Anthony) Kennedy's successor will tip the scales in favor or against these claims more categorically remains to be seen, so today's decisions are perhaps best understood as putting things into a holding pattern.

Steve Vladeck

Categorized in : Politics

Sullivan provides crucial protection of the independence of news outlets, whose reporting might otherwise be chilled, even for accurate stories, if Supreme Court were easier to sue them for defamation, the more justices who look poised to potentially revisit that precedent in the coming years, the more alarming Justice Thomas's previously idiosyncratic critiques become.

The Court's decision to leave the lower-court ruling intact sends a couple of different messages, on one hand, The US Supreme Court is refusing to go any further than it went in the Catholic Social Services decision from last week, and is thereby siding with the State of Washington's enforcement of its antidiscrimination laws over religious objections.

Today's decision is another victory for religious groups, but not the major one that they sought, the court's three most conservative justices wanted to overturn three decades of precedent and subject virtually all government regulations that even incidentally impact religious practice to the most exacting judicial scrutiny. But Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett appeared unwilling, or at least not yet ready, to make such a move -- resting the decision on narrower grounds.

Today's decision is going to make it incumbent upon businesses and governments to be far more specific in their policies governing access to databases -- not just about who is allowed to access particular databases, but about the specific purposes for which those individuals are and are not allowed to access that database, in the process, The Supreme Court on Thursday has made it a lot harder to punish those who misuse databases to which they generally have lawful access -- and a lot more important for database owners to expressly prohibit uses of the data that aren't specifically permitted.

By vacating the decision below and ordering the lower court to dismiss the suit as being moot, the Justices avoided either tacitly endorsing or rejecting the lower court's analysis, leaving no federal precedent to govern the question of whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was allowed to extend the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots last fall.

Once again, the court's involvement in the 2020 election is going out with a whimper, not a bang.

The Supreme Court's procedural order not only wipes away two lower court rulings, but it also orders dismissal of the entire dispute -- leaving for some other time resolution of the many questions Trump's conduct raised about The Emoluments Clause, ordinarily, The Supreme Court pursues such a step only when the prevailing party moots a case while the appeal is pending -- as opposed to here, where the disputes became moot because Trump's term ended.

Because the Biden administration is eight days away, the odds that this FDA rule is on the books that much longer seems pretty slim, the much bigger import of tonight's ruling is the harbinger it seems to provide of how the new conservative majority is going to approach abortion cases.

From a legal perspective, the fat lady has sung.

Even Justice Thomas and Samuel Alito, who might otherwise have been sympathetic to these challenges, went out of their way to express that they would grant no relief on the merits, not only did Supreme Court reject Texas's effort to challenge the results in four battleground states, but Supreme Court did so on a ground that will prevent any other states from doing so.

To make a long story short, I think the effort to have him confirmed is principally with an eye toward attempting to ratify all of the programs and policies that could be struck down by courts holding his acting appointment was unlawful, from the perspective of a new administration rolling back this administration's policies, it shouldn't make a difference whether they're promulgated by a Senate-confirmed secretary or someone lawfully exercising the duties of the office on an acting basis.

When The Trump campaign says we have all this evidence of voter fraud, the court of public opinion is ill suited to measure that evidence. A court of record is actually perfectly suited to measure that evidence.

If it's purely a question of who's louder, the campaign -- with a casual relationship with the truth -- can take advantage of the mechanics of judicial proceedings to spin a narrative of how the proceedings are going, but only for so long.

There's this specter that the same issues will come back.

The first prayer of the elections administrator is,' Please, God, don't let it be close,' and that's increasingly the prayer of the elections lawyer as well.

Election Day's all probabilistic. If Pennsylvania is not the tipping point, this won't matter, imagine Pennsylvania is within 3,000 votes. Nothing that Supreme Court did settles whether those ballots would be counted.

We saw earlier this year that, even though four of the current justices are ready to take up a number of Second Amendment cases, they weren't sure if they had a fifth vote on the merits -- because they weren't sure about the chief justice, it seems likely that the confirmation of Judge Barrett would remove that uncertainty and open the pipeline to a flurry of Second Amendment cases, perhaps ranging from the constitutionality of criminal felon-in-possession statutes to large-capacity magazine bans.

The result is not especially surprising given the uphill battle The Federal Government faced in defending such a content - based speech restriction. But the implications of the Court's decision to save the rest of the statute are potentially quite significant, how courts should treat the rest of a statute when one provision is unconstitutional is at the heart of the major Obamacare challenge the Justices are set to hear next fall.

Given the potential implications of a holding that electors could vote for anyone they chose, it's not surprising that the justices held that states can prevent them from doing so, the only surprise is the unanimous vote in cases at least some expected to divide The Supreme Court.

Even if the court hears arguments in November, it's unlikely it would render a decision before January 3, 202 -- when this Congress ends and this case along with it.