Attention to the Unseen

Jeffrey Toobin writes: Amy Coney Barrett, whom President Trump has nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, was born in 1972, so she can expect to spend several decades shaping both American law and American life. As it happens, a year before Barrett’s birth, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., then a prominent lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, and later a Supreme Court Justice himself, wrote a now famous memorandum to the United States Chamber of Commerce, arguing that businesses…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: In the effort led by President Trump to create a misleading impression of widespread voter fraud, administration and campaign officials have seized on nine mail-in military ballots in a Pennsylvania county that Mr. Trump won by 20 points in 2016. Federal officials have disclosed that they are investigating whether local elections officials improperly discarded the ballots, at least seven of which were cast for Mr. Trump, they said. A Justice Department official said on Friday…

Read More Read More

Noah Feldman writes: Like many other liberals, I’m devastated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, which opened the way for President Donald Trump to nominate a third Supreme Court justice in his first term. And I’m revolted by the hypocrisy of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s willingness to confirm Trump’s nominee after refusing to even allow a vote on Judge Merrick Garland. Yet these political judgments need to be distinguished from a separate question: what to think about Judge Amy…

Read More Read More

John Avlon writes: American democracy has been defined by the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump seems to have other ideas. This is not a drill. This is not a game. Because the President of the United States just told us that he would not commit to peacefully turning over the government to a new administration if he loses the election. Forty-one days before the election, Donald Trump failed to affirm on Wednesday the most basic civic question any president…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who was not previously a prominent face of the Supreme Court reform movement, jumped on board on Saturday, the day after Ginsburg died. “We should leave all options on the table, including the number of justices that are on the Supreme Court,” she said. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted that if Mitch McConnell violates his own precedent of not filling vacancies in a presidential election year, “when Democrats control the Senate in the next…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: For much of 2020, Al Gross’s Senate campaign in Alaska has proceeded as something of an afterthought for most Democrats, a distant contest that was off the radar in terms of determining control of the U.S. Senate. After all, Mr. Gross is not even technically running as a Democrat, an affiliation that might doom him in a conservative state. But in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on Friday, Dr. Gross’s campaign as…

Read More Read More

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reports: Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world. The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S….

Read More Read More

New York Post reports: New York City was among three cities labeled “anarchist jurisdictions” by the Justice Department on Sunday and targeted to lose federal money for failing to control protesters and defunding cops, The Post has learned. Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash., were the other two cities on the list, which was approved by US Attorney General William Barr. “When state and local leaders impede their own law enforcement officers and agencies from doing their jobs, it endangers innocent…

Read More Read More

George Packer writes: Andrew Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he’s about to publish the first insider account, called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. The title comes from an adapted quote by the philosopher John Locke that’s inscribed on the façade of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Weissmann offers a damning indictment of a “lawless” president and his knowing…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: A majority of Americans, including many Republicans, want the winner of the November presidential election to name a successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday. The national opinion poll, conducted Sept. 19-20 after Ginsburg’s death was announced, suggests that many Americans object to President Donald Trump’s plan, backed by many Senate Republicans, to push through another lifetime appointee and cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court….

Read More Read More

Jane Mayer writes: As the Democrats weigh their options about how to stop Mitch McConnell from filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat, one tactic that they should forget about immediately is arguing that it would be hypocritical of McConnell to jam in a new Justice so close to an election. Obviously, it nakedly is, given that Ginsburg died forty-five days before the 2020 election, and this was McConnell’s rationale for blocking Barack Obama’s nominee two hundred and sixty-nine days…

Read More Read More

Jeffrey Toobin writes: In Washington, grief yields quickly to calculation. The announcement of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice and epic figure in American legal history, came in the early evening on Friday. This led to two simple questions that are now preoccupying the Capitol: Can President Trump win confirmation for Ginsburg’s successor before the end of his term? If so, who will it be? The broad outlines of the situation are already clear. Mitch McConnell,…

Read More Read More

Dahlia Lithwick writes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87 years old when she passed away on Friday night. If you were keeping cosmic score, it was the Jewish New Year and a day for hope and new beginnings. In a world that won’t cast 50-year-old women in films, Justice Ginsburg managed to be an aspiration for the soccer moms and also the middle schoolers and, yes, the toddlers who dressed in tiny glasses and oversized collars for Halloween. She was the…

Read More Read More

Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg paying a courtesy call on Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., left, and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., in June 1993, before her confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. AP/Marcy Nighswander By Jonathan Entin, Case Western Reserve University Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, the Supreme Court announced. Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement that “Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature.” Even before her appointment, she had reshaped American law. When he…

Read More Read More

The Associated Press reports: A federal prosecutor who was helping lead the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe has resigned from the Justice Department, a spokesman said Friday. Nora Dannehy was a top prosecutor on a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, who was appointed last year to lead an investigation into how the FBI and other federal agencies set out to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign…

Read More Read More