This edition of James Romoser’s round-up highlights a few updates regarding the Supreme Court as the summer recess continues. Included in these updates is a recent ruling on the continued construction of the border wall between the United States’ southern border and Mexico, in which the Supreme Court ruled that construction may be permitted to continue despite the claims of lower courts that funding has not been authorized. Other emergency orders have kept the Supreme Court busier than usual during this period which, in previous years, presented a lull in activity.
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“August is here and the Supreme Court is well into its summer recess, but the court has been anything but quiet. Since July 9, when the court handed down its final opinions in argued cases for the 2019-20 term, the justices have continued to issue a string of high-profile rulings in response to emergency requests in ongoing litigation. Most recently, as Amy Howe reports for SCOTUSblog (in a story first published at Howe on the Court), the court on Friday afternoon allowed the construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall to continue, despite lower-court rulings that said funding for the project was not authorized. One day earlier, the court intervened in an Idaho election dispute to reinstate stricter rules for gathering signatures as part of a ballot initiative. Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal has additional coverage of the border-wall ruling as well as a story that puts the Idaho ruling in the context of the court’s other recent election-related orders — in which, Bravin writes, the conservative justices have consistently voted to “overturn lower court directives to extend balloting or take other measures because of the pandemic.” In the Washington Post, Robert Barnes observes that the court’s “customary summer lull” is nowhere to be found this year, and the rapid pace of consequential emergency orders is likely to continue into the fall.”
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You can read the rest of the original post on SCOTUSblog.com.