Thursday, June 25, 2020

Prime Time at SCOTUS

It's June, prime time for the U.S. Supreme Court. So far this month, two very big decisions have been handed down, one about DACA and the other about LGBTQ rights.

DACA is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama Executive Order protecting "Dreamers" or people who were brought to the United States illegally when they were young. The Trump administration sought to rescind this order, removing its protections, and was unsuccessful before the Court. Nina Totenberg presents the ruling here (4 min., 49 sec., transcript available). NPR has many personal stories about the effect of the ruling here.

The other big loss for the Trump administration was one involving the 1964 Civil Rights Act which, the Court held, protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. Totenberg presents the legal questions involved here (6 min., 52 sec. transcript available) just before oral arguments in the case in October. She is interviewed after the Courts ruling in the two cases here.
Longer presentations of these two cases can be found here (38 min, transcript available).

In Dalhia Lithwick's Slate podcast, Amicus, she presents these two "blockbuster" cases. She is joined by Luis Cortes Romero, the attorney and DACA recipient who was part of the team that prevailed in this week’s DACA ruling and later by Professor Pam Karlan about this week’s landmark LGBTQ employment rights case which Karlan argued before the Court (1h, 43 min. no transcript).

Still to come before then end of the SCOTUS term -- important cases about abortion rights and Trump's tax returns and financial records.