Biden Threatens to Veto Bill to Add More Federal Judges

WASHINGTON -- Congress approved a bill last week to add 66 new federal judgeships across the nation but might have acted too late to avoid a veto.

President Joe Biden initially supported the bill when the Senate approved it in August. At the time, Kamala Harris was leading in some polls, meaning Democrats were most likely to be empowered to nominate the new judges next year.

Then Donald Trump won the election, meaning the appointments will shift to Republicans.

Biden’s veto threat appears to be timed to prevent Trump from gaining the right to make the appointments.

In the first major expansion of the federal judiciary in more than three decades, 25 federal court districts would get more judges under the Judges Act.

The bill passed the Senate unanimously during the summer in a rare show of bipartisanship. The House passed it by a smaller margin last week.

A spokesman for Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, explained Democrats’ change of opinion.

“The Senate passed the bill in early August, and the House had plenty of time to take it up before November. Instead, House Republicans stonewalled bipartisan efforts to move the legislation, and it changed the political environment completely,” a statement from Durbin’s office said.

No one disputes the need for more judges. The Judicial Conference reported this year that in the past two decades, the number of civil cases pending for more than three years in federal courts increased 346 percent. The Judicial Conference is the policymaking branch of federal courts.

If Biden vetoes the Judges Act, it could be reintroduced next year but with a likelihood of significant differences.

Republicans would control the House, the Senate and the presidency. They are pledging big changes to the judicial branch of government, beginning with the FBI and continuing into the court system.

The issue bears special significance for the District of Columbia, which is suffering from a shortage of judges. Fifteen percent of the 62 judgeships allocated by Congress to the District of Columbia are vacant.

Each of the D.C. judges must be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. If they are appointed by Trump, the D.C. judiciary would most likely shift to a more Republican posture.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.

Supreme Court Allows School Policy That Whites and Asians Say is Biased

The Supreme Court declined last week to hear a case to decide whether three elite Boston public schools violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by trying to ensure racial diversity with an admissions policy based on zip codes of applicants.

By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision saying there is no evidence of an intent to discriminate in the admissions policy.

The dispute bears strong similarities to a case in Alexandria, Va., in which the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology revamped its admissions policy in 2020. 

The new policy dropped standardized test requirements and put a higher emphasis on “experience factors.” They included applicants’ household income and whether they come from middle schools that were historically underrepresented at the high school.

Parents of Asian American students sued, saying the policy had a disparate impact that excluded some of their children from the school.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the policy. The Supreme Court declined to review it.

In the Boston case, a group of parents claimed the policy demonstrated bias against white and Asian students, as evidenced by a drop in their enrollment at the schools.

The Boston case is the latest example of schools experimenting with race-neutral admissions policies after the Supreme Court ended university affirmative action programs last year in the case of Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.

Instead of basing admissions largely on entrance exam scores, the Boston schools also consider family incomes and the neighborhoods where applicants live in an effort to give them equal opportunities.

The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence argued the policies might not explicitly mention race as a factor but they had the effect of discriminating.The group sued on behalf of five unidentified students.

A federal judge ruled the admissions policies of the Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School and John D. O'Bryant School were justified under the Supreme Court’s ruling abolishing affirmative action. The First Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, which brought the case on appeal to the Supreme Court.

The schools changed their admissions policy in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic prevented them from administering entrance exams. Instead, they set quotas to select applicants from certain zip codes and then ranked them based on family incomes and grade point averages.

The percentage of white and Asian students fell at the three schools from 69 percent to 41 percent after the policy was adopted, according to undisputed plaintiffs’ court filings. 

In ruling for the schools, U.S. District Court Judge William Kayatta wrote, "And the Coalition offers no evidence that geography, family income, and GPA were in any way unreasonable or invalid as selection criteria for public-school admissions programs."

Conservative Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented in the decision to let the lower court ruling stand.

Alito wrote in his dissent that there was “overwhelming” evidence of racial discrimination in an apparent violation of the 14th Amendment.

The relevant case is Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp v. The School Committee of the City of Boston in the U.S. Supreme Court.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.

Biden Administration Asks Supreme Court to Reject Oil Companies’ Climate Change Case

The Biden administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow local governments to continue suing oil companies they accuse of deceiving the public about their fuels contributing to climate change.

The oil companies and Republican state attorneys general are trying to block the lawsuits.

The leading case is a petition to the Supreme Court by oil companies that lost a lawsuit to the city of Honolulu. Hawaiian officials accused the companies of violating state laws against nuisance, failure to warn consumers and trespass.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed a brief last week asking the Supreme Court to side with Hawaii.

She wrote that the “state law claims rested on the same theory of liability: that petitioners have known for decades that greenhouse gas emissions from the use of their fossil fuel products would contribute to climate change; that instead of warning consumers about those consequences, [the oil companies] engaged in deceptive marketing by concealing and mis-presenting the dangers of using their fossil fuel products.”

In recent years, Hawaii has endured rising sea levels encroaching on coastal communities, higher annual temperatures and shoreline erosion, all of it blamed on climate change.

The city of Honolulu’s lawsuit was filed in 2020 against Sunoco, Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron and Shell.

The Hawaii Supreme Court rejected the oil companies’ request to dismiss the lawsuit. The oil companies petitioned the Supreme Court last February.

In related cases, 19 Republican-led states are trying to prevent Democratic-led states from pursuing similar lawsuits against oil companies. The Democratic state lawsuits were filed by California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

In previous lawsuits, the District of Columbia and cities in Maryland have largely failed to win climate change lawsuits against oil companies.

The Republican attorneys general argue in the current case say the plaintiffs are indirectly trying to regulate the oil industry, which is an authority reserved to the federal government.

Their petition to the Supreme Court says “every state has a stake in the nation’s resources and the natural world. And any state’s actions to alter the composition of shared resources necessarily affects the other states. The only neutral authority that can fairly govern such matters is federal law.”

An attorney for Chevron said in a statement that Supreme Court review was appropriate "to prevent pointless harm to our nation’s energy security."

Prelogar argued in her brief the cases should stay in state courts rather than being subjected to Supreme Court intervention. The lawsuits are based on state law claims, not federal law, she said.

Prelogar added her brief to the case at the request of the Supreme Court.

The relevant cases before the U.S. Supreme Court are Sunoco v. City and County of Honolulu and Alabama v. California.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.

Judge Drops Contempt Charge for Attorney’s Schedule Snafu

A judge in Alexandria last week dropped a contempt of court charge against a public defender in her third trimester of a pregnancy after deciding a scheduling mishap caused her to miss a hearing.

Otherwise, Sameera Ali faced up to 10 days in jail and a $250 fine.

She is a private attorney who sometimes accepts public defender cases referred to her by the court. She missed a hearing while representing a teenager charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.

She had told a court clerk who asked her to represent the teenager on Nov. 8 that she could take the case only if it could be rescheduled from Nov. 19. She said she had a conflicting court appointment in Fairfax County the same day.

Instead, the clerk called her the day before the Nov. 19 hearing and told her it could not be rescheduled.

When she missed the hearing, Judge Thomas K. Cullen of the Alexandria Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court filed a civil contempt charge against her.

At the contempt hearing last week, Cullen explained that he was trying to comply with a Virginia law that required preliminary hearings for juveniles within 21 days after being arrested. The teenaged defendant was arrested Nov. 1.

After expressing frustration with Ali’s schedule conflict, he said, “It does not appear to me that this was willful, so I’m dismissing the ‘show cause.’ It appears to the court that there were a series of errors.”

The case attracted the attention of Northern Virginia attorneys who warned about a chilling effect on indigent clients’ Sixth Amendment right to representation by counsel.

They said a contempt citation for Ali would discourage lawyers in private practice from representing criminal defendants who cannot afford an attorney.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.

Lawyer for Defense Secretary Nominee Threatens to Sue Sexual Assault Accuser

The Arlington-based lawyer for defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth is being called out for what appears to be a threat he made to a whistleblower.

Tim Parlatore told CNN that he might sue a woman who accused Hegseth of sexual assault if the Senate declines to confirm him as defense secretary.

Referring to a nondisclosure agreement Hegseth obtained from a woman who believes she was drugged and sexually assaulted, Parlatore said in an interview, “Quite frankly, with the violation of the agreement, if he is not confirmed as secretary of defense, we may still bring a civil extortion claim against her.”

A Monterey, Calif., police report says that in 2017 a woman said she met Hegseth at a party after a political event but that her memory is unclear, other than that she woke up in a hotel room with Hegseth.

She told police Hegseth took her phone and prevented her from leaving. She said she thinks Hegseth raped and possibly drugged her. No charges were filed in the case.

Hegseth denies the allegations. He says he had a consensual affair with a woman but paid her to sign a nondisclosure agreement to resolve any potential disputes.

Parlatore told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that if that “causes him to lose his future employment opportunities, then yes, that is something that is worth bringing a lawsuit against.”

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Parlatore appeared to be “threatening or intimidating a potential witness.” He called the apparent threat “reprehensible.”

As a backlash against Hegseth grows in Congress, President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an alternative.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.