Ballroom, ballots and ‘chaos’: The Supreme Court’s busy summer: Supreme Court justices will return to the bench on Monday to start their new term. But they haven’t completely been on vacation since handing down rulings at the end of June in a term that, on the whole, was a win for President Donald Trump and his party.
Even though they were out of the Washington courtroom in the summer months, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have settled several important emergency disputes ahead of the November midterm elections. In the process, they dealt some significant losses to the Trump administration and Republicans, who are trying to maintain congressional control.
Two of the latest rulings did well to sum up the high court’s approach, which has boiled down to backing the GOP while rejecting some of its most extreme requests.
‘Electoral chaos’
In one of the latest emergency cases, decided last week, the majority approved the government’s use of a citizenship verification database, over dissent from Democratic-appointed justices who warned that the court was needlessly putting lawful voters at risk.
In another decision that day, the justices unanimously smacked down — for a third time — Missouri officials’ bid to use a newly gerrymandered map for the midterms after the state’s top court said they couldn’t do so.
Allowing that new map while the election was already underway “would usher in electoral chaos,” the justices wrote in a joint opinion for the court, effectively blocking Republicans from gaining another congressional seat in the Trump-backed mid-decade redistricting push.
Of course, the Roberts Court has helped the GOP in the midterms and beyond with its April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which further weakened the Voting Rights Act. That the Missouri ruling came from the same court underscores the radical nature of that state’s officials and the Republican-appointed lower court judges who would have let them press their partisan advantage had the justices not intervened.
Justices say no to postal rule… https://www.ms.now/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/supreme-court-summer-rulings-emergency-cases-trump-new-term