Virtual SCOTUS Week Continues

Yet another pandemic-related emergency filing reached the Supreme Court tonight. A group of Pennsylvania businesses led by the Friends of Danny DeVito, a committee formed to support a candidate for a seat in the state’s legislature (and no relation to the famous actor), asked the justices to temporarily block the enforcement of the executive order entered last month by the state’s governor, telling them that the order and others like it are doing “substantial, unprecedented damage to the economy.”

Busy week for Virtual SCOTUS. Monday -- Orders, Mon-Wed -- Arguments (four total), Thursday -- Opinions and Friday -- Conference with odds and ends mixed in.  (The odds and ends including rejecting, without comment, a request to override a stay it home order; the lawsuit not related to the actor).  This includes RBG dealing with a benign gall bladder (though giving some stress) issue, taking part in the  Wednesday conference call argument to call out threats to the birth control mandate from her hospital room.  She sounded feisty, let's say.

The second argument involving robocalls was a less controversial issue but had a bit of a bump when a toilet flushed. The Court delayed release of the audio and transcript; looking into it (comparing the audio posted on Twitter), they edited out the unscheduled sound effect.  The first week of live streaming of telephonic arguments overall was fine with many appreciating them, including law professor types.  The glitches were minor -- Breyer, e.g., accidentally got cut off, Thomas for some reason wasn't ready the first time he was called and we had that little toilet thing that amused a lot of people. But, we had a lot of this in the Age of Zoom, be it companion animals, children or whatever.  The justices seem to take things in stride and basically are pretending like nothing much special is happening. If this little silly toilet thing is latched on as some excuse to restrict livestreaming, it is stupid. 

The informative live-streaming of arguments followed up by special discussion (both on C-SPAN and SCOTUSBlog & likely other places) will continue next week, including with an issue involving faithless electors. Imagine if that was a thing (besides one who submitted a null vote since nothing turned on it) in 2000 when a handful of electoral votes determined things.  Or, in 1877 -- what if some faithless elector complicated things there?  Like the Third Amendment, these constitutional debates seem largely theoretical until suddenly they are a thing.

Anyways, opinions.  (There was an important district court ruling, but it might be short-lived and also seems best for next week's primary entry.) First, from the oral argument not too surprising, the Supreme Court via Kagan said the Bridge-gate prosecutions at issue was a misapplication of the relevant federal statute.  As the opinion notes, this doesn't erase the abuse of power.  Plus, not only were three people fired, but a person not covered by the litigation pled guilty to other charges.  And. Gov. Christie's national hopes were seriously hurt by the whole thing.  Finally, there have been many local (the persons here might have been guilty of local crimes) and federal prosecutions of government officials over recent years.  Things are not all hopeless though a few responded as if things are.

Let me toss in yet again that ideally we would have audio from the Supreme Court for these opinion announcements, but with the Big V., it doesn't even look like we will get a lot of them even (months later) on the Oyez.com website.  The usual practice is to announce them in court with the justice providing an opinion announcement and more rarely dissenting from the bench.  They could have done a livestream of that too.  When talking about livestream or video of oral arguments comes up, this subject often isn't even raised though it is even less defensible not to post it than video (which lots of appeals courts do now without difficulty). 

Anyway, the second opinion appears to be something of a surprise except for Thomas also concurring separately to find one more area of law he wants to do away with, because a conflict that seemed to be over the free speech overbreadth of a federal statute was a slam-down (in another unanimous opinion, this time by RBG) on the appeals court for reaching out to decide things in a certain fashion.  Guess adding new arguments is SCOTUS' job. Seriously, this seems like a somewhat curious opinion.

And, thus we come to the virtual conference. The results will be provided on Monday.  Meanwhile, CJ Roberts held up the release of grand jury materials from the Mueller Investigation for a response, due within ten days.  The House accepted that beforehand though maybe not for that long.  Meanwhile, the independence of said investigation is being screwed over by the Barr Justice Department, clearly not free from bias but not recusing, changing its mind regarding the Flynn prosecution.  The guy pled guilty over two years ago, so that delay alone pissed me off.  And, now this.

Oral arguments for the Trump financials will be heard next week.

ETA:  I thought things were over for the week, but one additional thing occurred arising from an allegation that the seat (soon to be filled, confirmation recently accomplished, by Judge Justin Walker, an under 40 Trump troll type) that opened up on the D.C. Court of Appeals might have done so because of undue influence of Sen. McConnell.  Judge Thomas Griffith, a conservative judge, is retiring in September, apparently because he has fifteen years of service time and thus gets full benefits.  Note the link -- he is sixty-five, so that  adds up to "80." 

The current Chief Judge (who recently replaced Merrick Garland and was also on the short list to replace Scalia) asked to have the complaint handled by another circuit to avoid claims of bias.  On the merits, I think the allegation as applied to this specific person probably was dubious, but seemed sound to at least investigate.  I saw a reference by a member of the Strict Scrutiny Podcast (liberals) that she respected Judge Griffith and was sorry to see him go.  I will grant that he is a respectable sort etc., but appearance of bias is important too. 

Well, it was reported today that Chief Justice Roberts rejected the move on procedural grounds.  As with tossing out the complaints against Kavanaugh once he became a justice, which btw was done per rules that Sen. Warren proposed changing, maybe this is sound application of the rules.  I'm not going to pretend to know otherwise.  But, if there was any reasonable chance to have the matter investigated, and I'll bet my nonexistent farm that there probably was reasonable grounds to go the other way, it would have been good to do so.