For the second time in less than a month, President Barack Obama’s administration ran into a buzz saw at the Supreme Court in oral arguments Wednesday over Arizona’s law cracking down on illegal immigrants, reports Politico. Both conservative and liberal justices expressed deep skepticism about the federal government’s case against the core of the law: a provision requiring local law enforcement to check the immigration status of people arrested or even detained briefly for a traffic violation if they’re suspected of being in the country illegally.
The outcome could be felt in states nationwide that have passed similar laws or are considering them. And there could be significant consequences at the polls in November, whichever way the court rules. The justices clearly were not swayed by the Justice Department's argument. The skepticism was strongest among the conservative justices, but even a couple of liberals said they’re perplexed by the federal government’s claim that Arizona is violating the Constitution by requiring police to perform immigration status checks that they already can request at their own discretion.Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. says the Supreme Court arguments over the health care law "demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee." Dionne says it was difficult to discern at times whether it was a courtroom or a lobbyist's office. He writes, "It fell to the court’s liberals — the so-called 'judicial activists,' remember? — to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches."
He continues, "The conservative justices were obsessed with weird hypotheticals. If the federal government could make you buy health insurance, might it require you to buy broccoli, health club memberships, cellphones, burial services and cars? All of which have nothing to do with an uninsured person getting expensive treatment that others — often taxpayers — have to pay for. Liberals should learn from this display that there is no point in catering to today’s hard-line conservatives. The individual mandate was a conservative idea that President Obama adopted to preserve the private market in health insurance rather than move toward a government-financed, single-payer system. What he got back from conservatives was not gratitude but charges of socialism — for adopting their own proposal."
Read full entry »Politico says the Supreme Court of Justice John Roberts is on public trial as it wades into another election-year political maelstrom with its consideration of President Obama's health care law. If the Affordable Care Act goes down — especially if it suffers the same schismatic 5-to-4 blow sustained by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law in the Citizens United case — critics will accuse the Roberts Court of rigging the game and covering their power play with constitutional doublespeak.
The critics aren’t even waiting for the third and final day of arguments before drawing their conclusions. Roberts’ grilling of administration officials Tuesday—and his willingness to take up polarizing immigration and affirmative action cases in an election year--has already invited comparisons to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose court decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush. If the court again splits along a traditional conservative-liberal fault line, the health care debate will further erode the ideal of the court as an impartial arbiter and cast doubt on Roberts’s own idyllic description of his role as judicial “umpire” laid out during his 2005 confirmation hearings. “John Roberts is a terrific representative of the contemporary Republican Party, a terrific representative of the Bush administration and living proof that elections really do have consequences,” said New Yorker legal writer Jeffrey Toobin, who sat through Tuesday’s deliberations — and judged them “a train wreck” for supporters of the law.
Read full entry »Parts of Alabama's strict immigration law will remain in force until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on its predecessor, the Arizona statue that started a...
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By Lori Andrews
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this month in United States v. Jones provides little guidance about Fourth Amendment rights in today's digitized world, says a leading legal scholar.
Read full entry »The Supreme Court has called for 5 1/2 hours of oral arguments on the health law, reports the Wall Street Journal. That's the longest in recent decades and harks back to the court's custom in the 19th century. The overwhelming majority of cases nowadays receive just an hour of argument time before the court, thanks to a rule change in 1970.
Oral arguments have grown steadily shorter as the court has evolved. In the 1950s and 1960s, arguments "seemed to go on forever," one expert told the paper. In 1966, arguments in South Carolina's challenge to the Voting Rights Act lasted more than seven hours. Arguments in 1955 over enforcement of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools, went on for more than 13 hours over several days. Before 1849, there were no time limits on oral arguments. Over time, the court's workload increased, as did its reliance on written legal briefs and legal precedent, making the long arguments burdensome and unnecessary.
Read full entry »John Thompson, a New Orleans man who narrowly escaped a death sentence for a murder he didn't commit, will join a nationwide tour aimed at halting the prosecutorial misconduct that almost took his life, says USA Today. Thompson was freed 18 years after his conviction because defense lawyers discovered that the prosecutors in his case deliberately hid blood evidence that could have cleared him.
Thompson initially won a $14 million judgment, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision and ruled that prosecutors have absolute legal immunity for their official actions. Thompson says he is joining the tour organized by the New York-based Innocence Project, the Northern California Innocence Project's Veritas Initiative, and other groups because the U.S. system of justice "cannot correct itself" without outside prompting.
Read full entry »Just one thing emerged clearly after a busy and often confusing hour of Supreme Court argument Wednesday on the constitutionality of strip-searches in local jails: the outcome is not going to be a categorical rule, one way or the other, reports Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog.com None of the three lawyers argued for that, and nowhere near a majority of the justices seemed prepared to rule flatly for or flatly against strip-searching of arrested individuals. But where five Justices might draw the line was entirely unpredictable after the hearing.
What might turn out to be decisive is that the justices discovered — to the surprise of some of them — that there was so little evidence that smuggling weapons or drugs into jails or prisons was actually a serious, documented problem. Several members of the Court pressed for “empirical evidence” of actual experience, but got in response only surmises, suggestions that it was fantasy not to appreciate that jails are by nature very dangerous places. The justices were deeply concerned about protecting the security of jails, but also were highly skeptical of an “anything goes” policy that would force every newly arrested individual to disrobe and have their bodies inspected, up close and perhaps with some manual manipulation.
Read full entry »The Supreme Court will rule next term on whether police need warrants to track suspects using high-tech surveillance. It could have a major impact on defining modern privacy rights.
Read full entry »The New York Times reports that some are questioning the ethics of a close financial relationship between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. Crow is financing a museum in Thomas' hometown of Pin Point, Ga. He helped finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Thomas, and he reportedly providing $500,000 for Virginia Thomas, the justice's wife, to start a Tea Party-related group.
The Times says the Pin Point museum project, Crow’s largest act of generosity, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Thomas’ extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges. Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge. In addition, judges are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them.
Read full entry »The question before the Supreme Court seemed simple: Are poor people facing jail time for failing to pay child support entitled to court-appointed lawyers? But the answer the justices gave was complicated, reports the New York Times. In a 5-to-4 decision divided along ideological lines, the court said there is no automatic right to counsel for people charged with civil contempt, at least when the parent seeking to collect child support does not have a lawyer. In those circumstances, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority, states must use “substantial procedural safeguards.”
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the answer to the simple question the court had agreed to decide is that there is no constitutional right to counsel for people facing jail for civil contempt. He also objected to the court’s decision to fashion safeguards based on suggestions from the federal government, which was not a party to the case. Starting with Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963, the Supreme Court has held that poor people facing the loss of liberty for crimes must be provided with lawyers. But those decisions concerned criminal proceedings. The case decided Monday involved a South Carolina man, Michael D. Turner, who was repeatedly held in civil contempt and jailed for not paying child support.
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