Arguing that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unconstitutionally seized the power to draw new congressional districts away from the state legislature, the two top Republican lawmakers in the state returned to the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday night with a plea to block the judge-drawn map.   The new request was filed 16 days after a similar plea… Read More

The Supreme Court on Tuesday chose to put off until Friday at the earliest its reaction to the Trump Administration appeal seeking approval for its plan to end the “DACA” program that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation.   The case, involving the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” program, is now scheduled for discussion at a… Read More

Claiming full authority to do so, a deeply divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court drew up and released on Monday its own new map of congressional election districts – one that experts calculated would give Democratic candidates a realistic chance of picking up three or more seats than they have been able to win in the past… Read More

On Friday evening, the Supreme Court closed up shop for the holiday weekend without doing anything about DACA – that is, the Trump Administration’s appeal seeking review of its decision to shut down the program of “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.”  That program, in effect for well over five years, has allowed nearly 800,000 young… Read More

Using President Trump’s own words against him, a federal appeals court on Thursday added a second legal defeat for the White House’s latest attempt to bar the entry into the U.S. of people from six Muslim-majority nations.  A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the President’s purpose in issuing the… Read More

Just days before the Supreme Court is to consider getting involved in the deepening controversy over the legal fate of nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who have grown up in this country, a second federal judge has ordered the Trump Administration not to end next month their protection against deportation.   In a 55-page ruling Tuesday, U.S. District… Read More

Pennsylvania Governor Thomas W. Wolf told the state’s Supreme Court on Tuesday that a new Republican-drawn map of election districts for the 18-member Pennsylvania delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives does not satisfy the mandate of the state court to avoid partisan gerrymandering.  Like the 2011 map that the state’s highest court struck down… Read More

Continuing to work through a series of disputes on “partisan gerrymandering,” the Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to add a third case to its review of that issue in the current term.  Over two Justices’ dissents, the Court refused to put on a fast track a case testing the constitutionality of a North Carolina congressional… Read More

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling striking down a state legislature’s district-defining map for this year’s congressional elections in the state cleared a potential legal hurdle Monday when Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., refused to block that decision. Alito gave no reason for rejecting a postponement request by state GOP legislative leaders but his… Read More

The Constitution has had an Elections Clause since it first went into effect in 1789, but the Supreme Court has rarely given an interpretation of its meaning. But what the Supreme Court has said creates a dilemma for the Justices as they decide soon what to do about the claim that Pennsylvania’s state legislature engaged… Read More