All posts tagged "Supreme Court Justices"

If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in a high-profile redistricting case within the next few weeks — likely weakening the Voting Rights Act, as experts anticipate — Republicans are poised to gerrymander as many as eight House seats in their favor ahead of November’s midterms, a nonpartisan political reform group warns in a new report.

Long-term effects could be more drastic, resulting in 15 or more districts gerrymandered to benefit the GOP in 2028, if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, according to Issue One.

The Court heard oral arguments in the case involving racial gerrymandering in Louisiana late last year and could issue a decision anytime between now and June. ...

The Supreme Court is poised to overturn a 90-year-old decision protecting the heads of independent federal agencies from firing by the president — a move more significant in the court’s rightward march than the 2022 decision to overturn the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, alarmed legal experts tell Raw Story.

“This is the most important case of the decade,” said Seth Chandler, professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Following oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter last week, most observers predict the Court will side with President Donald Trump in his firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. ...

When law professor Seth Chandler asked artificial intelligence to predict how the Supreme Court would rule in Trump v. CASA this summer, he won a $1 bet with a colleague. The AI-generated draft opinion proved “exactly right” about the 6-3 conservative majority ruling that limited universal injunctions in response to President Donald Trump's executive order curtailing birthright citizenship.

That might not seem too surprising — the court to which Trump appointed three justices has generally proved favorable to the president’s draconian policies, after all. Nonetheless, when the court heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Chandler, who specializes in constitutional law and computer science at the University of Houston, turned to AI again.

He asked Google Gemini to draft an opinion for the redistricting case. Once again, the AI assistant predicted a 6-3 ruling, the conservatives sticking together. ...

President Donald Trump's series of U.S. Supreme Court wins backed by a majority of conservative judges now has two theories emerging, and an expert saying "the crisis is now."

In Slate's Amicus podcast interview, Dahlia Lithwick speaks to Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox. Millhiser covers the high court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in America.

In the conversation, the journalists discuss two potential theories, including the appeasement theory — a diplomatic strategy that harkens back to Neville Chamberlain's approach during World War II, when the former British Prime Minister attempted to appease Germany in hopes of negotiating with Adolf Hitler. This theory suggests that justices could patiently wait to push back on the president. Ultimately, the high court could stack up wins for Trump in an attempt to finally hand him a loss....

Rightwing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court fear “hell to pay” if they oppose Donald Trump on key cases, because the president may refuse to follow their rulings, a leading constitutional scholar said.

Asked about recent decisions by the court’s rightwing majority to let controversial Trump policies stand, notably including allowing racial profiling by federal immigration enforcement agents, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, said: “I think there are a couple ways to understand it."

“One is that a majority of the court thinks that the legal arguments the lower courts have made for stopping the initiatives in question are not strong, and either they're wrong or we need to have a holding action until we can decide whether they're right. ...

Donald Trump Saturday made a move that is being seen as a middle finger to both the Supreme Court and the intelligence community, experts say.

Trump over the weekend announced his appointment of Kash Patel as the director of FBI, leading critics to lash out and causing a pre-emptive strike against Senate Republicans by a top MAGA lawyer who said he would make their political lives hell if they opposed Patel.

Sophia Cai, senior national politics reporter for Axios, said, "Trump's decision to name hardline loyalist Kash Patel to FBI director amounts to a massive middle finger to the intelligence community." ...