supreme-court

Less than 300 miles from the Arctic Circle, Toksook Bay, Alaska, has about 600 people, a dozen or so streets and averages a high of 12 degrees in January, the month the 2020 census will begin there.

The responses among Alaska Natives in Toksook Bay and throughout the state could have a huge impact on the future of their community, not just in terms of political representation but whether they have a roof over their heads.

Sen. Susan Collins declined to back a Republican colleague’s effort to desert then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh after a woman who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her gave an emotional account of the alleged incident and the effect it has had on her life, according to a new book.

Collins was confronted by an unnamed Republican senator who had devised a proposal to withdraw his support of Kavanaugh, who was seen as a flawed nominee amid sexual misconduct allegations. In exchange, he would promise to support whomever President Donald Trump nominated in Kavanaugh's place, according to conservative writers Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, who detailed the story of the newest Supreme Court Justice's confirmation in their new book “Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.”

GOP-held states with growing immigrant populations, Texas, Florida and Arizona, are more likely to gain House seats following the 2020 Census, as well as additional federal funding, if a citizenship question remains off, as the Supreme Court ordered on June 27. In this episode of the CQ on Congress podcast, CQ Roll Call reporter Michael Macagnone and Bryce Dietrich, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, discuss why Republican lawmakers continue to back President Donald Trump's plan to add it.  

The Supreme Court started its term last October amid the political divisiveness of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation process and with a much more private battle among the justices unfolding through the last day of the term Friday.

The departure of former Justice Anthony M. Kennedy after a decade as the court’s ideological axis, and the arrival of a more conservative Kavanaugh, sparked a new dynamic among the justices and a burst of writing as they staked out legal territory.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee will continue to investigate the addition of a citizenship query to next year’s census, Chairman Elijah E. Cummings said Thursday in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to block the question.

[Supreme Court deals blow to census citizenship question]

Democrats on Thursday seized on a Supreme Court decision they called a “green light” for partisan gerrymandering, pledging to redouble their efforts to win control of state governments, judicial appointments and the U.S. Senate.

In fundraising appeals and calls to action, Democratic politicians and aligned groups outlined a series of moves they said would become the next stage of the battle over political maps, largely drawn by Republican-controlled legislatures in the past decade, that have entrenched GOP control of elected offices.

A divided Supreme Court on Wednesday declined a chance to overrule two longstanding precedents that make it easier for government agencies to defend their regulations from legal challenges in cases about the environment, health care and consumer protection.

The court instead used the case to further outline its doctrine on when judges should defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation when that regulation is otherwise ambiguous. All the justices agreed to send the case back to a lower court for reconsideration.

The Supreme Court will delve into how much power members of Congress wield when they insert riders on appropriations bills, in a trio of cases that deals with $12 billion in payments to insurers related to the 2010 health care law’s exchanges.

The justices agreed Monday to decide whether lawmakers can essentially repeal a previous law that obligates government payments by later adding riders to a spending bill to prevent those payments.

Two states that have the most on the line in the Supreme Court case over the citizenship question in the 2020 census are taking drastically different approaches to the decennial count next year.

New York and Texas could have the biggest swings in congressional representation after the 2020 census. New York is projected to lose two seats, and Texas could gain as many as three, according to forecasting by the nonpartisan consulting firm Election Data Services. 

The Supreme Court faces decisions during its last two weeks of the term that could influence congressional districts for the next decade and make the justices an even larger topic in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The court left its most consequential and politically contentious opinions for the end of the term, as it tends to do every year. The justices on Monday will release some of the 24 decisions yet to come before the end of June.