This morning the Supreme Court handed down five decisions, including a ruling that Arizona cannot require voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote by mail. The Court has yet to issue rulings on the big four: two on marriage equality, voting rights, and affirmative action.
While every Monday in June is known as decision day, the Court can decide to add more decision days to the calendar. There are 14 decisions left to be announced from this term: will the decision days go into July? “Having talked to officials here they just don’t know yet. In other words, it’s not like they have these decisions ready to go and they are just parceling them out bit by bit,” NBC’s Pete Williams said on Monday’s show. “It may surprise you to know they are not done…They know what the outcome of these cases are going to be…but they are still going back and forth…they are just not done yet and nobody knows when they will be done.”
For many of the decisions, Justice Kennedy seems to be the decider vote. “He’s our center vote right now,” Tom Goldstein a publisher at ScotusBlog.com, said on Monday’s show. “The thing to keep in mind with him about these upcoming cases is he’s a big believer in individualism. He doesn’t think about people as members of groups.”
Abby Borovitz