Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court sidestepped a decision on when partisan gerrymandering goes too far, ruling against the challengers of a Republican-drawn map in WI and a Democratic redistricting in MD. The rulings in the separate cases once again put off a decision on when courts can find that partisan efforts to keep parties in power goes so far as to be unconstitutional. But the court again left open a path for such challenges. It was a technical resolution of what has seemed to hold the promise of being a landmark decision about extreme efforts to give one party advantage over another.

A new era of cutting-age technology begins Nov 13 at the United States Supreme Court, as the public for the first time will be able to access briefs and other case documents on the court’s website. Unimpressed? Perhaps the reader, in the waning second decade of the 21st century, thinks such an innovation might have been implemented, say, many years ago, as it was for the rest of the federal courts. “The courts will often choose to be late to the harvest of American ingenuity,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote when announcing the online project at the end of 2014.

President Trump’s Twitter assault on the “so-called judge” who put a nationwide hold on the president’s executive order on immigration has motivated Democrats to challenge Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch, on an important but elusive issue. Is Judge Gorsuch independent enough, they ask, to stand up to the president who picked him?

As the legal battle over Trump’s immigration directive shows, Gorsuch’s nomination lands at a time when the Supreme Court is likely to be called upon to review what Trump already has shown to be a broad reliance on executive power. It is difficult for appeals court judges such as Gorsuch to point to past decisions to demonstrate independence, and few are called upon to make definitive rulings on a president’s powers.