Supreme Court faces historic case backlog as fractious term comes to an end
Amid signs of internal discord, the U.S. Supreme Court is waiting until the bitter end to do the largest share of its work in more than 70 years.
The court is due to issue 33 opinions, a whopping 53% of its expected total in argued cases, as its 2021-22 term comes to an end in the next month. Among those will be rulings that could effectively render abortion illegal in two dozen states and mean more handguns on the streets.
The historic backlog — the biggest in percentage terms since at least 1950, according to empiricalscotus.com founder Adam Feldman — comes as the justices and their law clerks deal with an investigation into the leak of a draft opinion overturning the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling. All told, it’s a formula for what could be a momentous and rancorous final month.
“June is invariably a hectic and contentious time at the court,” said Greg Garre, a Washington appellate lawyer who served as solicitor general under then-President George W. Bush. “And in that sense, this June will be no different. But the storm clouds obviously look more severe in terms of what could lie ahead.”
—Bloomberg News
‘Confronting the trauma of our history.’ Booker campaign video invokes lynching with noose
A striking new digital video by Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker uses a noose around his own neck to highlight Sen. Rand Paul’s temporary blockage of an anti-lynching law.
“I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate,” Booker says in the video rolled out Wednesday. “My opponent, the very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who single-handedly blocked an anti-lynching act from being federal law.”
The Booker campaign said the ad is running digitally and being shared on the campaign’s social media platforms, but it is unclear how much money is being allocated to distribute the evocative spot.
It runs a total of one minute and 12 seconds which is an unconventional running time for campaign ads that are usually made in 15-second, 30-second or minute long frames.
—McClatchy Washington Bureau
$5 million of ancient art destroyed at Dallas museum in overnight break-in
DALLAS — A man who broke into the Dallas Museum of Art on Wednesday night caused roughly $5.153 million in damage, destroying property including three ancient Greek objects before he was arrested, Dallas police said.
Brian Hernandez, 21, approached the museum’s glass entrance doors with a metal chair at about 9:40 p.m. Central time, and began destroying objects once inside, police said.
Hernandez broke into a glass display case and shattered a sixth-century B.C. Greek amphora — a type of ceramic vase — and a Greek pot from 450 B.C. The pieces together were valued at approximately $5 million, police said, based on information from the DMA’s security and operations director, Kenneth Bennett. They noted that estimates could change after a final assessment by a curator and the museum’s insurers.
He also is accused of destroying a 550-530 B.C. bowl that was valued at $100,000. Police said he broke into a display case, picked up a ceramic Caddo effigy bottle depicting an alligator gar and slammed it to the ground, shattering it. The piece was valued at $10,000.
“This was an isolated incident perpetrated by one individual acting alone, whose intent was not theft of art or any objects on view,” museum officials said in a statement Thursday. “However, some works of art were damaged, and we are still in the process of assessing the extent of the damages.”
—The Dallas Morning News
‘Putin-linked’ yachts, Russian billionaires are hit with new US sanctions
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury Department announced a new round of sanctions targeting what it said were yachts linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as allies of the leader, in the latest set of penalties over the war in Ukraine.
Billionaire Alexey Mordashov, the majority owner of Severstal PJSC, Russia’s fourth-biggest steelmaker, was also hit with State Department sanctions, Treasury said.
The Russian-flagged yacht Graceful and the Olympia, which flies a Cayman Islands flag, were among the vessels identified in the latest tranche of sanctions, according to a Treasury statement on Thursday. Putin and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko traveled together on one of the ships on the Black Sea in 2021, Treasury said.
The sanctions, which were aimed at a number of other ships, planes and individuals as well, continue to focus on Russia’s elites in a bid to pressure Putin to rethink his war in Ukraine. With the conflict into its fourth month, however, such moves appear to have had little influence on the Russian leader.
—Bloomberg News
