Federal Courts and Nominations
When Corporate Interests and the Radical Right Control Our Courts
- The Push for a Conservative Court: The Supreme Court has swung from left to right throughout most of its history. Yet, the selection of Brett Kavanaugh culminates a three-decade long push to establish a reliable conservative majority on the Supreme Court that will continue to shape the law to the will of the right.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/us/politics/supreme-court-conservatives-trump.html - Benjamin Johnson, The Supreme Court’s Political Docket: How Ideology and the Chief Justice Control the Court’s Agenda and Shape Law, 50 Conn. L. Rev. 581, 585 (2018): Johnson gives a comprehensive overview of the problems with the current cert process, noting that the Court’s certiorari decisions have led to the perception that the Court is ideologically driven. Johnson provides four policy prescriptions — changing the rules, releasing votes/records to ensure transparency, amending the Rule of 4, and instituting an external review body in charge of cert petitions.
Read more: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/benjohnson/files/the_supreme_courts_political_docket_0.pdf - The Chamber in the Chambers: The Making of a Big-Business Judicial Money Machine: Inside the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s judicial climate change operation and its efforts to transform the composition of the state court benches by facilitating the election of business-friendly judges.
Read more: https://via.library.depaul.edu/law-review/vol67/iss2/7/ - Court Capture: Professor J. Jonas Anderson challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured, and points to one court exhibiting many of the classic signs.
Read more: https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr/vol59/iss5/2/ - History Will Judge John Roberts if His Court’s Steady Stream of 5–4 Pro-GOP Decisions Continues: Roberts now faces a momentous choice: Does he stem the torrent of 73 partisan 5–4 decisions benefiting big Republican interests? Or does he double down into a continued payday? The corporate and special interest forces that fashioned this court majority will be watching. So, of course, will history.
Read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/john-roberts-history-brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court.html - Sen. Whitehouse: There’s a ‘Crisis of Credibility’ at the U.S. Supreme Court: The Roberts Court has shown an “undeniable pattern of political allegiance.” What explains its record of 73 partisan 5–4 wins for the Republican Donor class?
Read more: https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/02/15/sen-whitehouse-theres-a-crisis-of-credibility-at-the-u-s-supreme-court/ - Corporations and the Supreme Court: Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the Supreme Court, the Court has become increasingly friendly toward Big Business, often elevating the interests of corporations over those of individuals. Since 2010, Constitutional Accountability Center has tracked this trend through its reports on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its record before the Roberts Court.
Read more: https://www.theusconstitution.org/series/chamber-study/ - Trump’s New Judicial Litmus Test: Shrinking ‘the Administrative State’: “With surprising frankness, the White House has laid out a plan to fill the courts with judges devoted to a legal doctrine that challenges the broad power federal agencies have to interpret laws and enforce regulations, often without being subject to judicial oversight. Those not on board with this agenda, the White House has said, are unlikely to be nominated by President Trump.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/us/politics/trump-judges-courts-administrative-state.html - Senator Warren on the Corporate Capture of the Federal Courts:“There is an intense fight going on, right now, over what our federal courts will look like. It is a fight over whether those courts will remain a neutral forum, faithfully interpreting the law and dispensing fair and impartial justice — or whether we will see the corporate capture of the federal courts, with the courts transformed into one more rigged game. And right now, we are losing that fight.”
Read more: https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/udclr17&id=10&men_tab=srchresults
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