Even if the Senate confirms the pick by the spring, a new justice may not be seated on the bench before the court concludes arguments at the end of April.
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November 2014: Obama acted unilaterally by executive action to put plan in place, bypassed the Republican-led Congress. Democrats, though, would not make it easy for Trump to fill an opening that occurred under a Democratic president.
“By continuing their historic, unprecedented obstruction of Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination, Republicans are spreading gridlock and denying justice to the American people”, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said. U.S. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer, left, Clarence Thomas, center, and Anthony M. Kennedy, right, leave St. Mathews Cathedral, after the Red Mass in Washington on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016. Today, the court opens a new term with questions on race and death, church and state, immigrants and deportation. But so far, Senate Republicans are ruling out that possibility.
As it gathered, the court rejected hundreds of appeals that accumulated over its long summer recess.
That tie vote was possible because of the vacancy left by Scalia’s February 13 death. The justices made no remarks in their decision.
But Kagan warned that, as the months tick by, the consequences grow more severe. They also managed to deal with one controversial case concerning the so-called contraceptive mandate, by simply sending it back to the lower court and urging the parties to find consensus. “No, it’s absolutely not”. For the first time in decades, there will be only eight justices, not nine, to begin the new term. “People on Wall Street particularly are watching this case very, very carefully”, says Theodore Olson, a former solicitor general who has argued 62 cases at the high court. And as to the most controversial cases accepted previous year before Scalia died, several have not been scheduled for argument yet, as they normally would have been. It is possible that some of the dissenters in those cases might have balked if they had a provisional majority to undo the biggest and most hotly debated statute in the past 50 years.
A Lutheran church in Missouri is fighting a decision by the state that omitted its preschool from a program to resurface playgrounds with rubber from scrap tires. “The stakes in this case are clearly enormous for the two parties”, says appellate lawyer Kannon Shanmugam, who’s argued 18 high court cases.
The Case: Bobby Moore was convicted of murder in Texas and initially sentenced to death.
For well over a century, the Supreme Court has said that allowing such challenges could inhibit frankness in the jury room.
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The voting rights cases concern claims of racial gerrymander – or how states draw district lines. The original 4-4 vote counted as a loss as it had the practical effect of upholding the 4th Circuit’s ruling that struck down the executive orders, although it carries no precedential weight otherwise.
