SCOTUS Brief 5/24/2016
AP: Justice Breyer says Supreme Court not diminished with 8 members – Weekly Standard: Examining Trump’s SCOTUS List – Independent Journal Review: Hillary is Ready to Dump Justice Scalia’s Most Important Supreme Court Case for Gun Owners
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- The Associated Press’ Sam Hanahel writes that Justice Stephen Breyer believes the Supreme Court “has not been diminished” by operating with 8 Justices in the wake of Justice Scalia’s passing.
AP: Breyer says Supreme Court not diminished with only 8 members
“Justice Stephen Breyer said Monday that the Supreme Court has not been diminished by having only eight members since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. Breyer suggested in response to questions at an awards ceremony at the Library of Congress that Scalia would have made a difference in only four or five cases out of more than 70 the court will decide this term. ‘We may divide 4-4 in four or five cases, we may not,’ Breyer said of the term than will end in June.”
- The Weekly Standard’s Terry Eastland writes that Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees includes names with different experiences than sitting Justices and was well received by congressional Republicans.
Weekly Standard: Examining Trump’s SCOTUS List
“Trump said the lawyers on his list—some 11 in all—are ‘representative of the kind of constitutional principles I value and, as President, I plan to use this list as a guide to nominate our next United Supreme Court Justices.’ Note here the use of the plural Justices. The list will be used in filling not just the Scalia vacancy but also any others that might occur during a Trump presidency…Trump’s list has no lawyers from the states on America’s two coasts; most are from states in so-called fly-over country. Where all of the current Justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale, only one lawyer on Trump’s list went to an Ivy League law school (Colloton, Yale). Six (all appointed by George W. Bush) sit on federal appeals courts—whence has come every Justice since 1987. Intriguingly, five are on state supreme courts. The last Justice who came from a state court was Sandra Day O’Connor, whom Ronald Reagan, an advocate of federalism, selected in 1981…For some conservatives, then, the problem with Trump’s list has nothing to do with the list but everything to do with Trump: How can such a man be counted on to pick the kind of Justices he’s now promised? One answer is that Hillary Rodham Clinton manifestly would not choose such jurists. There is a chance Trump might.”
- Independent Journal Review’s Kelsey Rupp writes that Hillary Clinton would appoint Supreme Court Justices that would undermine the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Independent Journal Review: Hillary is Ready to Dump Justice Scalia’s Most Important Supreme Court Case for Gun Owners
“Now that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin is no longer a roadblock to gun control passing the Supreme Court, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is going after one of his signature rulings. On Friday, a policy adviser to Clinton told Bloomberg Politics that 2008’s case District of Columbia v. Heller was ‘wrongly decided’: ‘Clinton believes Heller was wrongly decided.’”
