Media Mentions

A few years ago, Steve Bannon promised at the Conservative Political Action Conference that President Trump would "deconstruct the administrative state." "Every day is going to be a fight," the former White House chief strategist declared to an appreciative CPAC crowd. It was February 2017, and Trump and his top aides had just arrived in Washington, with lofty promises to dismantle the U.S. regulatory system. During the campaign, Trump vowed to achieve "energy dominance" and sideline "extreme" environmental activists who he claimed had been writing the rules for industry for too long. He said he wanted to make oilman Harold Hamm richer and keep American workers employed...Even though Trump was a government novice, it was not lost on him that regulations were the key policy levers available to him. Eleven days in office, Trump directed agency chiefs to toss two regulations for every new one established. Later that year, Trump convened a White House event where a line of red tape was strung in front of tall stacks of papers, symbolizing the exorbitant number of federal regulations. "Let's cut the red tape," he declared. "Let's set free our dreams.” ... Perhaps most important, his critics point out Trump and his top officials have marginalized scientific experts working on policy at EPA and the Interior Department, slow-walked environmental enforcement, undermined public participation in environmental review, and jettisoned the words "climate change" from government parlance. "The administration went about its business methodically," said Joe Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program. "What the leadership at EPA and Interior did was change the role in which scientific experts played in the administration process." They also ousted scientific experts from science advisory boards, he said, and sought to wholly diminish the power of the agencies. In many ways, Goffman thought, "Bannon got his wish."

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen: During Donald Trump’s Presidency, we have called political events “constitutional crises” far more often than in any period in memory. Before 2016, the term was used rarely, and the last time there was concern about a possible constitutional crisis was in the aftermath of the Presidential election of 2000, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, more than a month after Election Day. As we approach the decision’s twentieth anniversary, with a President who has promised to take the election results to the Court, we may be facing a possible repeat of those events—and perhaps a genuine constitutional crisis around the Presidential election, which could prove much more chaotic and difficult to resolve. A constitutional crisis is not merely an instance of the Constitution being disobeyed or going unenforced. It is, rather, a much more confounding situation, in which two branches of government are in an active conflict with each other but our constitutional rules and norms do not tell us how to resolve it. There was a true constitutional crisis around the Presidential election of 1876, when neither Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat, nor Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, won a majority of the Electoral College. (Tilden won the popular vote.) In Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where vote counts were close and products of manipulation, rival Democratic and Republican electors attempted to get Congress to recognize their votes. To end a months-long political conflict, which was marked by intimidation, disenfranchisement, and threats of violence, Congress appointed a bipartisan electoral commission, consisting of members of each house and the Supreme Court. The commission reached an ugly compromise, to withdraw federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction, in exchange for awarding the disputed states’ electoral votes to Hayes, who became President.

Donald Trump has changed the ideological cast of our entire federal court system, appointing the most appellate-court judges in a single term since Jimmy Carter, along with three conservative Justices to the Supreme Court. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a contributing writer and a professor at Harvard Law School, unpacks the complicated question of court-packing. Joe Biden’s cautious engagement with the strategy, she thinks, is smart politics. The Supreme Court’s members “do not want to see Congress mess with the number of Justices on the Court or the terms,” she tells David Remnick. “So they now also understand . . . that they’re being watched with an idea that the institution can change without their being able to control it.”

This year’s riven, pandemic-complicated election has been unusual on many fronts and undeniably historic, marking the first time a woman of color has been nominated for vice president by a major political party. But there have been other surprising contests in the nation’s history. American saw its first woman presidential nominee and its first Black vice presidential pick in 1872, just seven years after the end of the Civil War. All of it was owing in large part to the women’s suffrage movement and radical feminist Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president against the incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party and chose (without his knowledge or consent) abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate. For Woodhull, a polarizing political activist who was considered an eccentric by many, it would be the latest of many firsts — a self-declared clairvoyant, she had already been the first woman in the country to own a brokerage firm and to start a weekly newspaper...But while Woodhull was clear about her presidential intentions, she never informed her running mate, Douglass, who never even acknowledged he had been nominated...Douglass also likely didn’t recognize the vice presidential nomination in 1872 because he was already supporting a different presidential candidate, said Kenneth Mack, a historian and Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School...Douglass was a lifelong supporter of women’s suffrage despite splitting with activists in his support of the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the vote but left women disenfranchised. “Thousands of Black people were being murdered across the South. And Douglass gave his famous speech saying, ‘This is a matter of life and death,’ and he really meant life and death,” said Mack...What would Douglass have thought of the country’s recent elections? “It’s impossible to translate from the 19th century to today … but certainly the principle that Douglass stood for, that the most vulnerable people in our society should have access to the ballot in order to protect their interests, that ballot access should be expanded rather than contracted, was his position all the way through. And he supported women’s suffrage because he thought that women needed the ability to look out for their own interests rather than to supposedly have men look out for them,” said Mack.

Lawsuits over voter access and vote counts have already become a major battleground of the 2020 general election. If results are close, then post-election court rulings may be the deciding factor in whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden is sworn in as president next year. This past week the president said he wants courts to step in and prevent ballots from being counted beyond election night. The Trump and Biden campaigns ought to be on a level playing field in any court dispute, just as they should be at the ballot box. But what if the president wields the Justice Department as a sword to influence the courts’ decision-making? ... The first way Barr could co-opt the Justice Department to aid Trump’s reelection campaign would be by having the department directly intervene in any resulting litigation. This would be an unparalleled and deeply inappropriate action, but one that is not a terribly far leap from Barr’s current attempt to use the Justice Department to personally defend and protect Donald Trump. When asked about the possibility of such a court intervention, constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who served as a lead counsel for then-Vice President Al Gore in litigation over the 2000 Florida election recount, told us, “I would’ve been shocked and appalled to see Clinton’s DOJ weighing in during Bush v. Gore.” ... However, the extreme nature of Justice Department intervention in the issue might not be enough to stop Barr ... This would cause a variety of harms. First, having the Justice Department intervene would improperly aid the Trump campaign’s arguments in court, granting an added air of legitimacy and potentially tipping the scales of justice in what is supposed to be an even dispute between campaigns. According to Tribe, “the credibility, personnel, and financial resources of the department exceed those of any private attorney or firm, and the fact that it speaks in the name of the United States gives it enormous influence. Its arguments come with the cloak of official legitimacy even when its interests are in fact those of the incumbent president who seeks reelection.”

As the CEOs of Twitter, Google, and Facebook testified before the US Senate just weeks before the election, the Facebook page of right-wing commentator Dan Bongino, which boasts more than 3.7 million followers, gleefully shared clips of Republican senators grilling the execs. But instead of sending people to watch the videos on Bongino’s popular YouTube channel, his page referred them to rumble.com, a relatively unknown video site that has become the darling of right-wing figures including Bongino, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, writer John Solomon, Rep. Devin Nunes, and pro-Trump commentators Diamond and Silk...Prior to its influx of conservatives, Rumble's partners included news organization Reuters, venerable viral video outfit America’s Funniest Home Videos, television station owner E.W. Scripps, and fact-checking site Snopes. Its new content creators are more controversial. Solomon’s previous work for the Hill resulted in a damning internal inquiry, while Diamond and Silk have at times been flagged by Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers. The New York Times also noted that Bongino was a proponent of the “Spygate,” which it called “a dubious conspiracy theory about an illegal Democratic plot to spy on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.” That means Rumble will soon have more difficult content moderation decisions to make, according to evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “If Rumble doesn't want to be a haven for hate speech or harmful health misinformation or upset its user base and genuinely wants to moderate responsibly, it needs to think ahead about how it's going to draw lines and, just as importantly, how it's going to clearly communicate those lines to its users,” she told BuzzFeed News. “These decisions can be genuinely hard.”

Don could run out of Teflon if he loses the election. Trailing in the polls a day before the election, President Trump faces the very real prospect of swapping the White House for the Big House. He’s directly implicated in campaign finance crimes and is under investigation by both Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and New York State Attorney General Letitia James for alleged fraud in his business dealings. On top of that, he faces civil defamation lawsuits from women accusing him of sexual assault...Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said the James and Vance investigations should be of “greatest concern” to Trump. The scholar, who advised top House Democrats during Trump’s impeachment, said it’s “almost inevitable” that the president will be criminally charged should he lose the election. “The investigations of greatest concern would focus on Trump’s seemingly criminal financial manipulations — bank and insurance fraud in knowingly falsifying his income, his wealth and the value of various assets,” Tribe said... “The degree to which post-presidential prosecution is discussed during the current election tells us that this has been a presidency so mired in apparent criminality, from the top on down, that just about everyone knows a major incentive for Trump to stay in office as long as he can is to exploit the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president,” Tribe said.

An article by Beatrice Lindstrom and Joey Bui ‘21: Ten years ago this month, Haiti confirmed the arrival of a deadly cholera epidemic that killed more than 10,000 people. The disease — and the United Nations’ response to it — has caused immeasurable harm in Haiti and undermined the UN’s moral standing when it is sorely needed. As victims in Haiti pause to commemorate their loved ones and reaffirm their fight for justice, the UN must compensate victims and ensure stronger accountability in the future. When cholera broke out in 2010, the source was quickly traced to a UN peacekeeping base where faulty waste management leaked contaminated sewage into Haiti’s largest river. Rather than conduct an independent investigation or respond to the evidence in good faith, the UN denied responsibility, released false statements and discredited people who called for truth. The cover-up compounded the sense of injury in Haiti and became an embarrassment for the UN. It took six years of lawsuits and civil society-led advocacy campaigns for Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general at the time, to shift course and publicly apologize for the UN’s role. In doing so, he acknowledged the damage to the UN’s reputation and committed to taking a “new approach” to bring long-overdue assistance to victims. Today, four years later, the plan is funded at only 5 percent, and though elimination of cholera finally appears within reach, the only assistance for victims has taken the form of a few symbolic community projects that are not targeted at addressing victims’ injuries. The lack of follow-through on the new approach and reluctance to provide compensation has further undermined the UN’s standing in Haiti, the region and far beyond.

As nationalism, misinformation and the pandemic have emerged as threats to democracy — and a presidential election has roiled the United States — the relatively small nation of Bolivia, in political upheaval for most its 195-year history, managed a free and fair vote. It did this amid extreme polarization and racial division, on the back of violent protests, while battling voter distrust and fighting one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world. Luis Arce, a former economy minister, won with 55 percent of the vote, a clear sign that much of the country embraced his party’s socialist project. The feared mass protests and violence never happened. And voter turnout hit a historic high at nearly 90 percent...Approaching its Oct. 18 election, Bolivia was intensely divided between supporters and critics of Evo Morales, a larger-than-life former leader who had been the country’s first Indigenous president...In late 2019, his attempt to run for a fourth term ended in allegations of electoral fraud, and in demands from protesters that he step down. The police and armed forces soon joined the call, and he fled the country. Supporters called his ouster a coup. In the turbulent year that followed, the country was run by a temporary president, Jeanine Añez, who persecuted Mr. Morales’s allies and terrified much of the Indigenous population with harsh anti-Morales rhetoric. After Ms. Añez took power, at least 23 Indigenous civilians were killed during pro-Morales demonstrations. State agents were responsible, according to a recent report by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the University Network for Human Rights. No one has been held accountable. Many Indigenous Bolivians feared that a future with Ms. Añez — or any conservative candidate — meant a return to the past.

The President was despondent. Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options...The downfall of Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1974, was, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relate in “The Final Days,” one of the most dramatic in American history...No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish...Though Trump doesn’t have the power to pardon or commute a New York State court conviction, he can pardon virtually anyone facing federal charges—including, arguably, himself. When Nixon, a lawyer, was in the White House, he concluded that he had this power, though he felt that he would disgrace himself if he attempted to use it. Nixon’s own Justice Department disagreed with him when it was asked whether a President could, in fact, self-pardon. The acting Assistant Attorney General, Mary C. Lawton, issued a memo proclaiming, in one sentence with virtually no analysis, that, “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, it would seem that the question should be answered in the negative.” However, the memo went on to suggest that, if the President were declared temporarily unable to perform the duties of the office, the Vice-President would become the acting President, and in that capacity could pardon the President, who could then either resign or resume the duties of the office. To date, that is the only known government opinion on the issue, according to Jack Goldsmith, who, under George W. Bush, headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and now teaches at Harvard Law School. Recently, Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, a White House counsel under Barack Obama, co-wrote “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” in which the bipartisan pair offer a blueprint for remedying some of the structural weaknesses exposed by Trump. Among their proposals is a rule explicitly prohibiting Presidents from pardoning themselves. They also propose that bribery statutes be amended to prevent Presidents from using pardons to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice. Such reforms would likely come too late to stop Trump, Goldsmith noted: “If he loses—if—we can expect that he’ll roll out pardons promiscuously, including to himself.”

Paul Farrell has spent his career tackling one of the state’s most intractable environmental problems — dirty air — clocking 27 years at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection alone, the last two as director of air planning. So when Farrell says, “I think the environmental stakes of the upcoming election are as significant as I’ve ever seen in my career,” he knows what he’s talking about. To be clear, the state’s battle with the Trump administration isn’t its first but, as Farrell points out, it’s one for the books. “I’m tracking right now somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 different environmental actions EPA has taken in different areas,” Farrell said. “Without a doubt, they’re all weakening some standards in some form or fashion.” And that’s just air quality issues. In nearly four years, the Trump administration has endeavored to roll back some 100 environmental regulations and policies as documented by The New York Times from databases at Harvard University, Columbia University and others. Then there are a hefty number of new regulations and policies. And let’s not forget the court actions...Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard, who has also served in numerous environmental roles in government, called the Trump administration approach to weakening environmental rules “horrifying.” “Whenever it does a rule that weakens pollution standards, it goes the route of articulating a new legal theory that has the effect of restricting EPA’s authority at the threshold,” he said. “They’re trying to create a legacy for their successor of an EPA and a Clean Air Act that are much less powerful as toolboxes for dealing with air pollution and climate change.” Such concerns have given rise to speculation about whether a second Trump administration would go after some of the biggest bedrocks, not just of environmental law, but also of administrative law... “The effect of the Trump rollbacks of climate regulation is that we will have lost time and we have lost another increment of climate stability that we will not be able to recover,” Goffman said, noting the greenhouse gas emissions of the Trump era so far will remain in the atmosphere for a long time. “The five years of emissions that we will have to see – there’s no way to offset them. There’s no way to reel them back.”

The Presidency of Donald Trump has been unlike any other in America’s history. While many of his core promises remain unfulfilled, he managed to reshape our politics in just four years. On the cusp of the 2020 election, David Remnick assesses the Trump Administration’s impact on immigration policy, the climate, white identity politics, and the judiciary. He’s joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen, Jonathan Blitzer, Bill McKibben, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Andrew Marantz.

In 2018, Wells Fargo & Co. sent its high-powered attorney, Eugene Scalia, then a partner at corporate law firm Gibson, Dunn + Crutcher, on a mission to San Francisco to make a U.S. Labor Department investigation go away...Two years later, Scalia’s primary objective as U.S. Labor Secretary has been to solidify an enforcement philosophy at DOL that’s predictable for employers. Businesses had railed against the Obama administration for what they viewed as its overly punitive, “gotcha"-style tactics. Their frustration mounted when President Donald Trump‘s first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was slow to rebalance the enforcement landscape. Scalia, who took office Sept. 30, 2019, has worked to centralize decision-making; shift power away from career investigators and attorneys; emphasize providing employers with fair notice of pending actions; and ensure consistency across DOL’s vast bureaucracy of enforcement offices, according to interviews with two dozen current and former DOL officials and outside lawyers...Yet organized labor, Democrats, and workers’ rights attorneys view Scalia’s quest as a naked, corporate-friendly agenda that undermines the agency’s mission to safeguard employees. The pandemic has heightened this criticism...DOL’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has spent the past month promoting citations levied against companies for coronavirus-related violations. But those fines have averaged $14,000 per employer, prompting greater outcry that weak enforcement is endangering worker safety. “No one wants unfair enforcement. But this is the wrong focus at this particular moment,” said Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program. “In the midst of these multiple crises, the sole, burning focus of the Labor Department should be on protecting workers from danger and destitution.”

An 0p-ed by Noah Feldman: After four years of President Donald Trump’s assault on the Constitution, it comes down to this. The courts have done what they could to limit the damage; the House impeached him; and the Senate let him get away with it. Now all that remains is the final check provided by the Constitution: a vote of the people. James Madison would have seen this coming. While the Constitution was being ratified, he argued that its checks and balances would preserve the liberty that the document was supposed to enshrine. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote in the most famous of the Federalist Papers. Yet within a few years, Madison had come to believe that the system he did so much to design was vulnerable to subversion. The checks and balances written into the Constitution were not enough to withstand a powerful president like George Washington if he was backed by an organized political party with a monarchic ideology. The only possible check on partisan power, Madison came to believe, was the people, voting en masse to restore their liberties. With Thomas Jefferson, he formed the first Republican Party (sometimes called the Democratic-Republicans) to fight the Federalists of Washington and Alexander Hamilton. In 1800, when the Republicans won, Madison and Jefferson saw it as a moment of salvation. The people had restored the constitutional balance when the Constitution itself could not. The first lesson for 2020 is obvious: The only way Trump’s constant attacks on the Constitution can now be repudiated is by voting him out. The people can do what the courts and Congress could not or would not. They alone can send the message that Trump’s sustained and systematic attack on our institutions is dangerous, wrong and anathema to small-r republicanism. It’s not inevitable that the people will save the Republic. Madison understood that a republic could only survive if the people possess political virtue.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Over the past few weeks on Deep Background, in addition to our regular show, we’re bringing you a special five-part series about the Supreme Court's dramatic rightward turn. In this fifth and final installment of Deep Bench, how this summer the Supreme Court's rulings revealed ideological rifts within the Federalist Society, rifts that could be large enough to eventually cause the organization to break apart.

President Trump has spent the run-up to next week’s election touting himself as the finest steward of the nation’s air and water in generations. “Who would have thought,” he boasted during one stop in Florida, “Trump is the great environmentalist?” But over the course of nearly four years, his administration has steadily loosened oversight of polluting industries, eroded protections for endangered wildlife and stymied Obama-era efforts to address the globe’s most daunting environmental threat: climate change. A Washington Post analysis has found that as Trump’s first term winds to a close, he has weakened or wiped out more than 125 rules and policies aimed at protecting the nation’s air, water and land, with 40 more rollbacks underway...Democrats are already planning how they would revive environmental regulation if they win the White House. Biden has pledged to take executive action to block projects such as the Keystone XL oil pipeline and Alaska’s controversial Pebble Mine, and to rejoin the Paris climate accord to help combat global warming. But overhauling many of the rules altered under Trump would take years, and clawing back oil and gas leases would be nearly impossible. If Trump wins reelection, however, he and his deputies will probably try to shrink the federal government’s environmental role further, cement policy changes into law and finalize dozens of rollbacks they are working on now, said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “Given the opportunity for a second term, they will initiate and detonate everything they’ve set up,” she said. “We will see even more dramatic action now that all the groundwork is set.”

An op-ed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Over the past few months, election lawyers who litigate in the Supreme Court have hit the jackpot. The court has decided one election-related case after another — more than a dozen, in total, since the pandemic began. Among other things, the court barred Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots postmarked after April’s primary Election Day, required Alabamians and South Carolinians to find witnesses for their mail-in ballots, and stopped Idaho from accepting digital signatures for ballot initiatives. Just this past week, the court also held that Wisconsin can’t tally mail-in ballots returned after the general election on Tuesday, while North Carolina and Pennsylvania can (for now). But the court didn’t have to resolve any of these voting disputes. And it shouldn’t have resolved them. By intervening so often, the Supreme Court has become a body that corrects perceived lower-court errors, not one that decides major legal issues. By stepping in without explaining its actions, it has tarnished its institutional legitimacy. And by proceeding in haste, the court has made factual and legal mistakes — bad, not just unnecessary, law. All the recent electoral cases have deviated from the court’s normal procedure, the one used for its regular “merits” docket. Ordinarily, after a lower court (generally a federal appeals court or a state supreme court) has reached a final judgment, the losing party may file a certiorari petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case. The court grants only about 1 percent of these requests. When it does, written briefing unfolds over several months, followed by an oral argument. After the argument, the court usually takes several more months to announce its decision, which is signed and reasoned, often at great length. In contrast, the cases about the 2020 election have been part of the court’s “shadow” docket. They haven’t arrived at the Supreme Court through cert petitions. Instead, their vehicles have been emergency applications filed with the court before lower-court proceedings have even finished.

There’s a media phenomenon the old-time blogger Mickey Kaus calls “overism”: articles in the week before the election whose premise is that even before the votes are counted, we know the winner — in this case, Joe Biden. I plead guilty to writing a column with that tacit premise. I spent last week asking leading figures in media to indulge in the accursed practice of speculating about the consequences of an election that isn’t over yet. They all read the same polls as you do and think that President Trump will probably lose. But many leaders in news and media have been holding their breaths for the election — and planning everything from retirements to significant shifts in strategy for the months to come, whoever wins. President Trump, after all, succeeded in making the old media great again, in part through his obsession with it. His riveting show allowed much of the television news business, in particular, to put off reckoning with the technological shifts — toward mobile devices and on-demand consumption —  that have changed all of our lives. But now, change is in the air across a news landscape that has revolved around the president... The battles over speech and censorship, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci tweeted recently, are becoming “attention wars.” As recently as last week, senators were dragging in tech executives to complain about individual tweets, but the arguments are about to turn more consequential. The platforms are increasingly being pushed to disclose how content travels and why — not just what they leave up and what they take down. “We’re in this brave new world of content moderation that’s outside the take-down/leave-up false binary,” said Evelyn Douek, an expert on the subject and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. In practice, Twitter, Facebook and the other big platforms are facing two sources of pressure.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and Steven V. Mazie: After handing down orders in a spate of challenges to states' efforts to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic, the Supreme Court is catching its breath. But the pause may be short-lived. In several opinions that conservative justices have issued over the past week, a radical idea is rising from the ashes, resurrecting language from one of the most fraught decisions in the court’s history. Four justices — Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas — have resuscitated a half-baked theory three justices espoused in Bush v. Gore to let Republicans trash ballots after Election Day. Chief Justice John Roberts has not joined his four colleagues in this misadventure. But if the recently seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett sides with the quartet, America could be in for a battle that makes Bush v. Gore look tame. By shutting down a recount in Florida that could have put Al Gore over the top in the 2000 election, the Supreme Court effectively handed George W. Bush the keys to the White House. The majority reasoned that disparate methods for interpreting the infamous “hanging chads” on Florida’s punch-ballots denied the state’s voters the equal protection of the laws, violating the 14th Amendment. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined only by Scalia and Thomas, would have gone further. In a concurring opinion, he scolded Florida’s Supreme Court for misapplying the state’s election law. He leaned on the electors clause of the Constitution, which says “each State shall appoint” its slate of presidential electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” By meddling with what Florida’s legislature had done, Rehnquist concluded, its highest court had violated the Constitution.

Biden's stance on fracking has been all over the news; that the Democratic presidential candidate would prohibit the practice on federal land, while allowing current permits to continue. The presidential election is also expected to impact U.S. coal markets - either way it breaks. Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim spoke with Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School's environmental and energy law program, about what that might look like. Caitlin McCoy: “It's almost hard to describe what the potential impact of a Biden administration is without the contrast, I think of a potential Trump administration, because I think... I don't want to sound insensitive, because I know that people's jobs and livelihoods are at stake. And it's really easy for people who don't live in communities that currently depend on coal mining, to just say, ‘for the sake of climate, we have to stop using coal.’ And that said, the writing is on the wall and it has been for a while now. And the market forces that we've seen at play under the Trump administration have been really powerful despite what the Trump administration has done to try to preserve demand for coal. So, I really think the big difference in a potential Biden administration and a second term Trump administration comes in this, in this sort of sense that, I think Trump would essentially leave the industry to just kind of wither on its own, which is somewhat what he's done over the last four years. Yes, there have been actions that have lowered compliance costs and loosened requirements a little bit. But there hasn't really been any big action by the Trump administration to revive demand for coal or to actively support coal mining. And so I think really, the big difference is that a Biden administration will seek to, as Biden has said, accelerate the transition away from coal.”

Colorado will send roughly 435,000 people a one-time stimulus payment of $375 as a way to help them weather the effects of the coronavirus crisis in lieu of additional federal aid. In all, more than $163 million is expected to be distributed by the state...The money will be sent out in early December, according to the governor’s office. Polis signed an executive order making the payments possible and announced the action on Wednesday afternoon, less than a week before Election Day. Coloradans eligible for the payments include anyone who received at least $1 in unemployment compensation between March 15 and Oct. 24 and were eligible for a weekly jobless benefit between $25 and $500 during that period. The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment estimates that 65% of all unemployment claimants since March 15 will receive the payments. The aid is only expected to be given to people who are or were earning less than $52,000 a year...Last month, the state’s unemployment rate was 6.4%. Housing advocates celebrated the news on Wednesday. “For people who are struggling to pay their rent and put food on the table, cash assistance is essential and incredibly helpful,” said Sam Gilman ‘22, cofounder of the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, which has provided assistance and legal advice to tenants facing evictions in Colorado since March. “We need consistent cash assistance and perhaps only the federal government can provide that. But it’s important and I appreciate seeing the state do what it can at this moment.”