Today marks three months since we launched the SCOTUStoday newsletter. Thank you so much for supporting our work — we are so grateful for your readership!

A reminder: This is an abridged edition of SCOTUStoday, and we will also be sending abridged editions tomorrow and Wednesday. Given the holidays, we will not be sending SCOTUStoday on Thursday or Friday. We’ll then do the same (three abridged editions, two days off) from Monday, Dec. 29 – Friday, Jan. 2. We will resume our regularly scheduled programming on Monday, Jan. 5.

SCOTUS Quick Hits

• On Friday, the Supreme Court turned down a request from the Trump administration to pause a lower court ruling requiring additional fact-finding by a federal trial court in a dispute over a policy limiting speaking engagements by immigration judges. The court left open the possibility that the government could return to the Supreme Court to seek relief “if the District Court commences discovery proceedings” before the justices rule on the government’s petition for review of the lower court’s decision. For more on the case, see the On Site section below.
• The court could issue a decision in the interim docket case on President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy the National Guard to Illinois at any time.

Morning Reads

• Trump’s win streak on Supreme Court emergency docket breaks (Zach Schonfeld, The Hill) — Friday’s ruling in the dispute over immigration judges was “a rare loss for the Trump administration on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket,” according to The Hill. “The administration has filed 32 emergency applications with the justices since Trump retook the White House,” and “the Supreme Court has almost always sided with the Trump administration in those decided so far,” The Hill noted.
• The pending Supreme Court decision that worries disability rights groups (Maureen Groppe, USA Today) — Across the country, disability rights groups are closely watching the Supreme Court’s case on intellectual disability and the death penalty, which they believe “could have implications for the intellectually disabled far beyond the criminal context,” according to USA Today. “The justices are considering how to weigh multiple IQ scores when determining if a death row inmate’s intellectual disability is severe enough that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to execute him. But how the court rules could potentially affect eligibility for government services for people with disabilities, such as health care, education services and income support, according to advocates.” Advocacy groups “worry that the court could move towards relying solely on IQ tests and not factoring in other information about someone’s ability to navigate daily life and how early any problems started.”
• How the Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Could Affect Voters (Nick Corasaniti and Christine Zhang, The New York Times)(Paywall) — Early next year, the court will hear argument in a case on “whether states can count mail-in ballots received after Election Day,” according to The New York Times. “Should the court rule that all ballots nationwide must be received by Election Day, it could lead to the rejection of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ballots in the future, affecting a swath of American voters in rural and urban areas.” In last year’s election, “at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day” but arrived after Election Day within a legal post-election window that could be affected by the current case.
• Waco judge who refused to marry same-sex couples asks federal courts to overturn right to gay marriage (Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune) — A judge in Waco, Texas, “filed a federal lawsuit Friday that asks the courts to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide,” according to The Texas Tribune. The lawsuit is part of a long-running dispute between Judge Dianne Hensley and the State Commission on Judicial Conduct over Hensley’s effort to be allowed to perform marriages for opposite-sex couples but not same-sex couples. Hensley’s attorney “acknowledged that a lower court does not have the authority to overturn a Supreme Court precedent, [but] he indicated in the filing that he was introducing this argument now with the hopes of the case eventually reaching the high court.”
• Prosecutors ask US Supreme Court to restore conviction in Etan Patz missing child case (Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press) — Five months ago, a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, who New York City prosecutors allege killed 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979. Now, those prosecutors are asking the Supreme Court to reinstate the conviction even as they “prepare to retry the accused man,” according to the Associated Press. In the Supreme Court petition, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg contended that the appellate court violated “a law that limits when federal courts can invalidate a state-court conviction.” “Etan vanished while walking to his downtown Manhattan school bus stop on May 25, 1979. Hernandez worked at a nearby convenience shop at the time, but the Maple Shade, New Jersey, resident didn’t become a suspect until 2012.”

On Site

From Amy Howe

From Kelsey Dallas

From Nora Collins

“Supreme Advocacy”: supreme on style, a bit light on substance

We haven’t had a film review on SCOTUSblog for quite some time now. Given that, we figured Bloomberg Law’s “Supreme Advocacy: What It Takes to Argue at the Supreme Court,” was the perfect candidate.

The post SCOTUStoday for Monday, December 22 appeared first on SCOTUSblog.