The court is now divided with four liberals and four conservatives.
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Oklahoma has some of the most restrictive, controversial abortion laws in the nation, and earlier this year, state legislators voted to make them even stricter. It was the start of a quarter-century of Republican appointments that steadily moved the court to the right. Democrats want to elect Hillary Clinton.
Howe says Garland is much more moderate and could be confirmed during a lame duck session to avoid a much more liberal candidate than Garland.
However, the Supreme Court has just denied that request, without comment.
President Obama’s last hope for pushing through his executive action on immigration have vanished.
In fact, given the age of other justices on the Court, it’s very likely the next president will appoint at least two, if not more, new justices to the Court. Judge Garland’s nomination has long passed the previous record for a nomination to languish, and there’s no end in sight. It may be some time before the issue is resolved.
It declined to rehear a bid by the Obama administration to revive the president’s plan to spare from deportation millions of immigrants in the country illegally, a case in which the justices split 4-4 in June.
Because of the holiday, the court diverged from its usual practice of hearing cases then. That ruling left in place lower court decisions that had blocked the plan, which Obama announced in 2014 but never went into effect.
They also refused to hear a Washington Redskins’ appeal challenging a federal decision to cancel the National Football League team’s trademarks after finding the name disparaging to Native Americans.
Aid to church schools: Is it unconstitutional to exclude a church school from taking advantage of a state program that provides recycled crushed tires for playgrounds?
Last term, progressives scored victories in the areas of abortion rights and affirmative action.
So far, the approximately three dozen cases the justices have agreed to hear include two redistricting cases involving the rights of minority voters and two appeals from death row inmates in Texas. This case is especially piquant given the ongoing debates about political correctness.
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Such a procedure, Akbar argued, was inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ring, because Congress’s power to delegate such authority to the President was based on the view that aggravating factors are not elements of the crime – a view the court had expressly rejected in Ring. Compromise is all well and good, she said, but last term some cases were decided on such narrow grounds that the court ultimately decided nothing of outcome, leaving unanswered the question the justices had initially planned to resolve, and leaving in place conflicting lower court decisions across the country.
