Source: http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2018/06/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 14:13:53+00:00

Document:
As U.S. Attorney General, Jeff Sessions has been so prominent that much of the time - including in the midst of the current immigration crisis - he has vastly overshadowed the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein. And of course, under ordinary circumstances, most Americans cannot name the Attorney General, much less the Deputy. But current circumstances are not ordinary, and with Sessions having recused himself from the Russia investigation, Deputy AG Rosenstein is in charge of this extraordinarily important legal and political undertaking - one that is putting him increasingly at odds with the Republican-controlled House. On Thursday, June 28, 2018, he was back in the spotlight, being questioned by the House Judiciary Committee - and holding up admirably.
When I wrote the column, therefore, my musings about Supreme Court departures were entirely hypothetical, and I honestly thought that the column was a bit self-indulgent because, as I put it in the second paragraph, I was simply following a stream of consciousness that had been sparked by the Travel Ban decision.
Well, unhappy surprise to all of us! With Kennedy's announcement, I considered rewriting the column, but I have decided not to do so. Indeed, the paragraph that I wrote that begins "As an aside" (after the "confirmation equation"), regarding unexpected Supreme Court openings, is already being proved prescient.
Accordingly, although I would surely change some things if I were to allow myself to rewrite this column, I am happy to ask readers to take a look at these thoughts about the future of the Supreme Court that were written in blissful ignorance of Kennedy's plans. There will be much more to write in the weeks and months to come.
I am hardly the only person who, upon hearing that the Supreme Court's five conservative justices had upheld Donald Trump's Muslim Travel Ban, immediately thought about the stolen Supreme Court seat that Neil Gorsuch currently occupies. Somewhere, Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers are drinking a toast to their ability to hijack the U.S. Constitution.
In his latest Verdict column, Professor Dorf has tried to find some silver linings in the conservatives' travel ban decision, and his thoughts do offer some solace. Here, however, I will follow my stream of consciousness and start to think about how the successful theft of Merrick Garland's seat will play out in the very near future.
Where do we go from here? More specifically, what happens after the 2018 midterm elections if one or more Supreme Court seats opens up before the 2020 general election? I have a few thoughts.
The early part of this week saw the political chatter turn to another meaningless sideshow over "civility" and whether it is absolutely horrible that a few Trump Administration figures have been made to feel bad about themselves by members of the public. It seems that some Americans are becoming unwilling to apply the usual rules to so-called public servants who are willing to enable a would-be king, and even though the restaurant owner who started the latest controversy was apparently polite in the extreme, that has not stopped the right-wing outrage machine (and, of course, Donald Trump himself) from going into overdrive.
As usual, Sarah Huckabee Sanders managed to tell the biggest whopper by responding to this social slight with the claim that "I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so." The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin had the perfect, deliberately understated response: "Anyone who has seen her sneer, insult and condescend to the press knows that’s not the case."
This is all an unnecessary distraction from Trump's actual policy outrages, but I am nonetheless glad that some commentators have said what needs to be said about the civility issue before it again fades away (until the next manufactured controversy). In addition to Rubin (who had an even better followup piece), New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg did a masterful job of showing why the tut-tutting by people who purport to oppose Trump is utter nonsense.
In particular, Goldberg called out The Post's editorial board for its false equivalence in saying that liberals should let Trump people eat in peace lest, say, anti-abortion protesters decide to harass their opponents. She notes incredulously: "Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches, firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools." Seriously, how detached from reality does one have to be not to remember such things and to claim that anything that liberals are now doing or saying is even close to what right-wing extremists have been doing since long before Trump came along?
Although I have nothing to add to the discussion about what counts as acceptable civility, I do want to weigh in on the latest round of hand-wringing in anti-Trump world about how this will all play out politically. Bottom line: Stop worrying about whether this will make Trump's supporters (even more) angry!
Today's announcement that Justice Kennedy is retiring has led immediately and understandably to speculation about how the process for replacing him will play out. This strikes me as silly. The GOP has 51 votes in the Senate. Mitch McConnell will make sure that a new justice is confirmed before the midterm elections or, in the worst-case scenario for Republicans--i.e., should the confirmation somehow be delayed until after the midterms and the Democrats take the Senate--in a lame-duck session. The new justice will certainly be at least as conservative as CJ Roberts, so regardless of how this goes, the Chief Justice is now the center of the Court.
Today's decision in Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees was completely predictable, given that the eight-justice Court divided evenly on ideological grounds on this question; anyone who thought Justice Gorsuch would ride to the rescue of public sector unions should consider buying a certain bridge I'm selling. Yet, if the outcome was predictable, Justice Alito's reasoning for the majority is nonetheless revealing. Here I'll note the key points of contact between Janus and what I regard as the weakest argument accepted by the conservative justices in NFIB v. Sebelius (the Obamacare case).
My latest Verdict column identifies a number of silver linings in the Supreme Court's generally disheartening Travel Ban decision yesterday. In it, I discuss the majority opinion of CJ Roberts, the concurrence of Justice Kennedy, and Justice Sotomayor's dissent. I don't discuss the Thomas concurrence or the Breyer dissent. Here I want to add a brief word about the former.
After listing a number of reasons why he thinks the travel ban case was an easy win for the government, Justice Thomas pens a little essay lamenting the spread of nationwide, or as he calls them, "universal," injunctions. His basic gripe is that relief going beyond the parties to a case cannot be squared with the traditional equity powers of courts.
Today's decision in National Institute of Family Life Advocates (NIFLA) v. Becerra was ironic in at least one respect. The Court applied strict scrutiny to California's law requiring so-called crisis pregnancy centers to post information regarding abortion options because of a broad understanding of what renders a law content-based. And yet readers of the Court's opinion could be excused for thinking that the decision itself was content-based.
That irony aside, the case is telling in at least one other respect. Justice Thomas is often and appropriately held up as the most originalist justice, at least as evaluated by his professed commitments. And yet his opinion contains not a single word about the original meaning of the First Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment (which makes the First applicable to the states).
I'll probably be back a bit later today with a post on one or more of the cases the SCOTUS is expected to hand down this morning. Meanwhile, the video from my debate on originalism with Prof. Randy Barnett (which I previewed here) is now available from the Reason magazine YouTube channel. If you prefer to listen only, you can also get it as a podcast here or through iTunes. A summary can be found at the SoHo Forum website. There is a warmup act--a "libertarian comedian"--with the actual debate starting at the 12:12 mark (of the video).
It’s really easy to become discouraged about global politics and the state of the American experiment. Earlier this month I hit a personal low point, where I felt I was truly missing something, as I watched the US news media’s ability to reduce the US-North Korean “event” to a mixture of wishful thinking and reality TV.
One can almost forgive the vacuousness of the news coverage of President Trump’s Mighty Handshake with Kim Jong-Un, since the bar was set so ominously low: just a few months earlier Trump and Kim were publicly comparing missile sizes.
But other than a rhetorical cease-fire, what kind of deal could have possibly been expected with a US leader who revels in contradicting himself, who surrounds himself with a war-mongering Secretary of State and National Security Advisor that have each spoken about militarily overthrowing the North Korean government, and who are all categorically against negotiations?
This is the same leader who has just walked away from multiple international agreements endorsed by previous US governments (on climate change, Iran, NAFTA), not to mention his own endorsement of the G-7 communiqué only days before. With the Trump “negotiators” gleefully admitting to minimal preparation, how could any grown-up reporter or news analyst expect any meaningful agreement with the North Koreans?
Finally, even if the North Korean regime were remotely serious about sticking to an agreement this time, highly doubtful in itself, why would Kim—or indeed, any rational leader--believe that Trump would stick to this particular agreement? Even though the “agreement” has quickly been revealed to be as vacuous as expected, no one should be fooled that a legally and politically endangered Trump won’t turn on a dime and dangerously lash out at a future “betrayal” by his new role model.
The only saving grace is that this reality TV event has been quickly eclipsed by subsequent episodes. So indeed, a very logical response is to stop following the news. To drop out, and asked to be woken up if anything really changes.
In today's ruling in Carpenter v. United States, the Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts joined by the Court's four liberal-leaning justices, finds that collection of cell phone tower location data from a mobile phone provider constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, thus presumptively requiring probable cause and (absent exigent circumstances) a warrant. Here I want to note what looks like a glaring inconsistency between Justice Kennedy's Carpenter dissent and his approach to the constitutional right to privacy in other contexts.
Today's decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. is defensible on the merits, but Justice Kennedy's majority opinion inadequately responds to the key objection by Chief Justice Roberts (for himself and Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan). To see why will require a bit of backstory on that most delightful topic in the constitutional law corpus: the Dormant Commerce Clause (DCC).
and now (4) the disastrous human rights crisis that Trump's (in)Justice Department has created by separating children from their parents at the U.S. border.
There have, of course, also been big stories about various Supreme Court decisions and other issues. Before the next big outrage comes along (most likely when the Supreme Court destroys public employee unions and/or blesses Trump's Muslim ban), I thought I would take a few moments to comment on how the "children ripped from their parents' arms" story is likely to play out.
Bottom line: It will not end badly for Trump, which means that it will end badly.
My column for this week considers the recent case of Byrd v. United States. The US Supreme Court held there that if police unreasonably search a rental car, then the driver of that car who is in lawful possession of it has standing to object to the admission of evidence found during the search. In other words, you do not need to be the renter or have your name on the rental agreement list of authorized drivers in order to enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in the concealed portions of the car, such as the trunk. I explain in my column that this outcome is positive for two reasons: it takes Fourth Amendment privacy doctrine away from pure property concepts, and it broadens (or at least fails to narrow) standing so as to permit more people to hold police accountable for Fourth Amendment violations by excluding evidence obtained as a result.
In this post, I want to suggest that not only is Fourth Amendment standing doctrine a misguided endeavor, for reasons that I elaborate in greater detail here, but Article III standing doctrine would be better discarded as well.
One of the mixed pleasures of being an academic is the opportunity to teach and conduct research at other universities, often in foreign countries. Although some outsiders might view these as little more than junkets, the work is not easy by academic standards -- that is, it is even more difficult to explain U.S. tax law to foreign students than to explain it to U.S. students -- and the travel itself can become a grind.
I am, of course, fully aware that these are the quintessence of what we now think of as First-World Problems, but even at best the "working" part of these supposed working vacations does feel like something short of leisure. In any case, such visits achieve both scholarly and institutional goals, with research being advanced by collaborating with foreign scholars in person and with our universities anxious to have us "fly the flag" elsewhere to enhance reputations.
This is all a long way of explaining that I am currently back in Vienna, Austria, for my fourth visit in the last nine years. I have just completed teaching a course to masters-level students, and I led a research seminar to doctoral students, at Wirtschafts Universitat Wien (or WU, the University of Business and Economics in Vienna). As always, the students were engaged and impressive.
During and after my visits in 2009 and 2013 (but not, for some reason, in 2015), I wrote a number of columns here on Dorf on Law and elsewhere on Vienna-related topics, focusing in particular on the superior public transportation system here. (See, for example, here and here.) With my adopted home city of Washington -- which has the second-worst automobile traffic in the country, second only to Los Angeles -- still awaiting a connection between its inadequate Metro system and Dulles International Airport (a connection that was scheduled to be completed this year but is now hoped for in 2020), and with the plan to reintroduce a system of street cars now all but abandoned, the contrast with Vienna is as stark as ever. And transit fares are still much lower in Vienna.
In the remainder of this column, however, I want to focus on some similarities between these two capital cities and their respective countries. The entry point for that discussion is gay rights, which was brought to mind by the 2018 version of the Vienna Pride and Rainbow Parade this past Saturday.
This is shaping up as a real nothing of a Supreme Court Term. Two weeks ago, the Court ducked the important questions in Masterpiece Cakeshop and Hughes v. United States. Today the Court ducked the question whether claims challenging partisan gerrymandering present non-justiciable political questions and if not, how to adjudicate them. In a brief per curiam in Benisek v. Lamone, the Court affirmed the district court's denial of preliminary injunctive relief in Republicans' challenge to Maryland gerrymandering, relying entirely on the technical details of the standard for a preliminary injunction. Meanwhile, in an opinion by CJ Roberts for a more or less unanimous Court, the justices declined to say anything about the justiciability or merits of Democrats' challenge to Wisconsin gerrymandering in Gill v. Whitford, resolving the case on the grounds that the particular plaintiffs had failed to prove the elements of standing at trial.
Not all non-decisions are the same. When the Supreme Court ducks a question that the lower courts have been deciding in a way that one approves, then one can be sanguine. It's not as good as a SCOTUS victory, but it's not bad either. That's the lemonade that supporters of LGBT rights (like me) can make out of lemons like the Masterpiece Cakeshop non-decision of the key issue. However, if one disapproves the status quo--either in the lower courts or pursuant to current SCOTUS precedent like Vieth v. Jubilirer--then a non-decision is almost tantamount to a bad decision.
Nonetheless, Justice Kagan, in a concurrence joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, tried to make some lemonade out of the Gill v. Whitford lemon. Did they succeed?
Like other movements for change, the animal rights movement hosts its share of internal battles. Ethical vegans disagree, for example, on the Impossible Burger, a plant-based burger with the taste and texture of a hamburger made of cow flesh. Some support it because it diverts demand from the slaughterhouse, while others oppose it because one of its ingredients was tested on animals.
Vegans also part ways on whether a person who eats a plant-based diet to achieve optimal health should be considered a vegan at all. Disagreements abound over whether laws regulating the treatment of animals in agriculture and laboratories are generally a positive intervention or an empty promise that impedes actual progress toward the abolition of animal exploitation. When it comes to determining what the best steps are for ethical vegans, consensus is the exception rather than the rule.
It was therefore unsurprising to find that ethical vegans disagreed over how to react to the death of a very non-vegan chef.
Recently, Samantha Bee of Full Frontal referred to Ivanka Trump, the President's daughter, as a "feckless c---." Bee became the subject of immediate condemnation, especially from the right. Not long before that, ABC had terminated Roseann Barr's television show because she had sent out a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, former advisor to President Obama, suggesting that Jarrett was the offspring of Planet of the Apes and the Muslim Brotherhood. For this post, I would like to explore how critical we should be of Samantha Bee for using the C word against Ivanka Trump.
First, though, I want to briefly discuss two other issues. One is whether what Bee did was comparable to what Barr did. And the second is what it means when someone compares an African American woman to an ape.
Two days ago, I wrote in amazement about the simplemindedly literalist arguments that Donald Trump's defenders have been pushing (with straight faces) to justify his claims that he can pardon anyone, including himself. I then offered two theories that were no crazier than those that Trump's minions have been pushing, including a move that could allow Trump to prevent his own impeachment (and then pardon himself for doing so).
I was somewhat tempted not to say anything about those cockamamie theories, because I did not want to give Trump's loyalists any ideas. I then realized that, even if they were to read what I wrote here on Dorf on Law (a far-fetched idea, at best), they have repeatedly proved themselves capable of coming up with even more off-the-wall theories on their own than I could ever imagine. My column was thus an exercise in "fun" in the sense that it is somehow amusing to think about how people can convince themselves to support autocratic power grabs.
"It is so demonstrably wrong that it is not even worth a full column to debunk the argument, so I am going to use this space to draw some parallels between the literalism of the Trump-can-do-anything-he-wants-with-the-pardon-power claim and the form-over-substance claims that are now being made in the context of some blue states' attempts to sidestep the limit on state-and-local tax deductions. Trust me, the analogy is not as odd as it might sound -- and the tax stuff is not boring (even though it is tax stuff)."
I might be about to prove that I was wrong about the tax stuff not being boring, but I already proved myself wrong in thinking that there was not a full column's worth of material in the self-pardoning discussion (which is why I deleted the paragraph above). My bad. Here, I will take up the literalism argument in the tax context, showing that no matter how much contempt I might have for the self-pardoning argument, there are times when it is not as easy to dismiss literalism as it might seem.
Today's ruling in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute divides the Court 5-4, with the five Republican-appointed justices voting to sustain, and the four Democratic-appointed justices voting to invalidate Ohio's procedure for--depending on your priors--updating or purging the voter rolls. There is, to be sure, a genuinely difficult question of statutory interpretation that divides the justices, but one would have to be incredibly naive to think that that is where the real action lies.
In my column for this week, I discuss the Irish vote on abortion and consider how all of us might empathize better with those on the other side of this issue as well as the related issue of animal rights. In this post, I want to consider an empathy question regarding abortion: why do (some) people empathize with embryos and fetuses? Why, in other words, does anyone want the law to protect the rights of unborn humans?

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