Transcript
STUART TAYLOR: Adam Liptak of the New York Times, who is a great reporter, rained on our parade a bit yesterday when he wrote that the coming Supreme Court term is a “buffet with no entrees”. That may be true in the sense that the Court hasn’t yet agreed this year to hear any of the blockbuster cases on abortion, affirmative action preferences, gay rights, religion, presidential power, campaign finance, those sorts of things that have been the staples of liberal-conservative brawling in recent years.
But when our two panelists and I were deciding which of the dozens of cases the Court has agreed to decide this year, to discuss, we found an embarrassment of riches in terms of fascinating clashes that will probably prompt a reasonable amount of liberal-conservative brawling on issues such as the following: whether the Attorney General and the FBI Director can be held personally liable for mistreatment of hundreds of innocent Muslims who were rounded up and imprisoned on immigration and other charges in the months after 9/11; whether the Federal Communications Commission can penalize broadcasting of so-called fleeting expletives, dirty words, which I will leave it to our panelists to tell you about. Conflicts between state and federal regulatory power in cases involving horrible personal injuries caused by pharmaceuticals and cigarettes; a clash between the navy’s need to use sonar in training exercises and environmentalists worries that the sonar is harming whales and other marine mammals; whether the Environmental Protection Agency can weigh costs against benefits in enforcing the Clean Water Act; and a variety of contentious issues involving campaign spending, speech, and voting rights.
Perhaps the biggest of them is whether states in the Old South and other communities with a history of racial discrimination in voting have reformed it to a point that they can no longer be required, constitutionally required to clear all changes in voting rules with the Justice Department.
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