WJI's weekend reads for Oct. 23-24, 2021

The Hill: Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls U.S. Supreme Court refusal to block Texas abortion law "catastrophic."

Reason: Gun rights group targets Texas abortion law.
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Courthouse News Service: Environmental organizations call for halt to state power line construction.

The companies building the line — the American Transmission Company, ITC Midwest and Dairyland Power Cooperative — announced their intent last month to begin construction on-schedule, before the end of October. (U.S. District Judge William) Conley said that by putting him in a rush, the group hadn’t helped its chances of evading an injunction.

“You asked [the plaintiffs] not to precipitate a preliminary injunction, which could have been filed a year ago, or at least nine months ago when they filed suit, and you agreed with them that you would hold off. I haven’t heard you say that you told them all along, ‘we’re gonna stick to our construction schedule,'” he told attorney Stacey Bosshardt of Perkins Coie, who represented the companies at the hearing.

“Certainly we all had notice that this could suddenly come before the court, but there was a more orderly way we could have accomplished this,” he added.

Marijuana Moment: IRS official says cannabis banking reform would help feds get paid.

​Balls and Strikes: The U.S. Supreme Court is an international embarrassment.

Nobody who wrote the Constitution actually thought the Court should have as much power as it does today. (If only Lin-Manuel Miranda had rapped about Federalist 78, more people might understand that the Court has gotten entirely too big for its britches). If anything, this drift is one of the best reasons for Court expansion: If the Supreme Court is going to have the power to simply prohibit laws passed by the people, it simply must be more representative of the people who actually live here. 

Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor.  That is the full and complete list of people of color who have been allowed into the conversation of how to interpret our Constitution. People of color have had a larger role in adjudicating the rules of hockey than they’ve had in American constitutional interpretation. Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sotomayor. That’s the full and complete list of women. Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Stephen Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kagan. I have just listed all of the non-Christians, ever, to serve on the Supreme Court. Historically speaking, MAGA rallies are more diverse than the Court. There’s never been an Asian American justice. There’s never been a Muslim American justice. There’s never been an openly LGBTQ person on the court, which is kind of amazing considering the Court claims the power to dictate the precise conditions in which LGBTQ people can kiss or pee or start a family. 

And don’t even get me started on professional diversity. Don’t get me started on educational diversity. This country has one of the most powerful high courts in the world, and it has all the experiential diversity of a yacht flotilla taking a booze cruise off Martha’s Vineyard. This is what the international legal community sees: a multiethnic, multicultural, allegedly pluralist society that cedes democratic self-government to nine unelected high priests drawn from a small ruling class of elites.