SCOTUS Watch

The justices are back and were a bit busy. 

Attacks on the Courts 

We already talked about the Supreme Court handling two executions and Chief Justice Roberts responding to Trump's call to impeach a lower court judge. It also handed down a couple rulings today. 

I was wary of Roberts doing that since impeachment is largely a political question. Nonetheless, given Trump (and others) broadly going after the courts, it is understandable that Roberts responded. His response had wider implications. Breyer agreed with Roberts.

There are additional Roberts connections:

The chief justice himself appointed Boasberg to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as presiding judge; in that position, he regularly reviewed, and ruled upon, extraordinarily sensitive requests by intelligence agencies to surveil communications between suspected spies and foreign powers. 

He also appointed Boasberg as chief judge of the U.S. Alien Terrorist Removal Court, where he would hear similarly sensitive information to determine if terrorists should be deported. 

It’s notable, too, that George W. Bush appointed both Roberts and Boasberg to the bench. 

(Barack Obama later elevated Boasberg to his current position.)

This is the guy that Trump wants to go after? He was even Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale! 

Orders

We already dealt with the death penalty-related orders. SCOTUS appointed someone to argue a case that the federal government did not defend. 

On Friday, the Court dropped a housekeeping order regarding assigning time for argument.

Opinions

I was not aware of opinions coming down today. Checking, the court calendar available on the home page, noted on Monday -- a day with nothing scheduled -- of possible opinions. Tricky.

Roberts handed down a unanimous opinion with Alito and Jackson with brief concurrence arguing its limited reach. He can still lose on remand. It involved the reach of a federal law criminalizing false statements. The opinion was one of several that limited the reach of federal anti-corruption laws in recent years with supermajority support.

Thomas upheld a criminal conviction via a 7-2 opinion that has law school hypo vibes. Gorsuch, starting off in a conversational tone (he has improved his writing style), dissents with Jackson. He is a possible "get" when attacking federal power.  

Back to Work

The opinion announcements show the justices are back to work. They had a conference, will drop an Order List on Monday, and will have oral arguments next week. They never did clear up that "what happened to the cert grant" in the capital case. 

ETA: The Monday Order List was ho-hum except for Alito (who also recused in another case without explanation as conservative justices do) and Gorsuch dropping statements (taking somewhat different approaches) proposing taking a case in the future to tweak how to apply the Confrontation Clause.