National Roundup

Washington
Presiding justice: RBG officiates family friend’s wedding
WASHINGTON (AP) — A tweet Monday from a new bride brought the first sighting of ailing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in months — officiating at an outdoor wedding Sunday.

The photo of the 87-year-old Ginsburg, who announced in July she is being treated for cancer, shows her during the wedding ceremony Sunday of Barb Solish and Danny Kazin, according to Solish’s Twitter feed.

“2020 has been rough, but yesterday was Supreme,” Solish tweeted.

In the photo, Ginsburg is wearing her judicial robe with a decorative black-and-white embroidered collar.

The justice is a close friend of one of the families and the festivities took place outdoors at a private residence, court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said. Solish noted on Twitter that both she and her husband “tested negative” before the ceremony, presumably for COVID-19.

Ginsburg and the rest of the court essentially disappeared from view when the court in March was closed to the public because of the virus outbreak. The justices began meeting by telephone and held arguments by phone in May, their voices but not their images available to the public.

The court handed down opinions  into the middle of July, but the justices did not take the bench to announce their decisions as they customarily do. Rather, opinions were posted online.
Shortly after the court finished its work for the summer, Ginsburg announced she was undergoing chemotherapy to treat lesions on her liver. It’s the fifth time she’s dealt with cancer in the past 20 years. At the same time, she said she would continue to serve on the court.

Kazin works for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Solish is at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

California
Judge blocks asylum screening by border agents
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge on Monday blocked U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees from conducting the initial screening for people seeking asylum, dealing a setback to one of the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in asylum.

The nationwide injunction will likely have little, if any, immediate impact because the government has effectively suspended asylum during the coronavirus pandemic, citing public health concerns.

The Trump administration argued that designated CBP employees are trained comparably to asylum officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another agency within the Homeland Security Department. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington disagreed.

“Poppycock!” he wrote in a 22-page decision. “The training requirements cited in the government’s declaration do not come close to being ‘comparable’ to the training requirements of full asylum officers.”

Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said CBP employees get two to five weeks of distance and in-person training, while asylum officers get at least nine weeks of formal training.

Leon also cast doubt on whether CBP, a law enforcement agency that includes the Border Patrol, could do screenings in a non-adversarial manner, as regulations require.

Representatives of the Homeland Security and Justice Departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it does not comment on pending litigation.

Lawyers for mothers and their children from Mexico, Ecuador and Honduras who failed the screening — known as a “credible fear” interview, in which they must persuade officials they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country — argued that CBP employees were not authorized to do the work and lacked training.

“This decision puts an end to the sham process of using adversarial Border Patrol agents to conduct highly sensitive interviews with asylum-seekers,” said Julie Carpenter, an attorney for the Tahirih Justice Center, which sued on behalf of asylum-seekers.

The judge didn’t address other arguments, including that the measure was invalid because CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan is serving in an acting capacity and lacks authority under federal law.

The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, said earlier this month that the Homeland Security Department’s top two officials, also in acting roles, are ineligible to run the agency because they improperly appointed under federal law.

Homeland Security strongly disagreed. Trump nominated Chad Wolf, the acting secretary, to the permanent job last week.

CBP training began last year, and as of February, 91 employees were doing initial screenings, according to a report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. They approved 37% of people over a 12-month period that ended in May, compared with 64% by USCIS asylum officers.


Washington
Appeals court again rules out House subpoena for McGahn
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court panel on Monday again threw out a lawsuit by House Democrats to compel former White House counsel Don McGahn to appear before a congressional committee.

In a 2-1 ruling, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that the House of Representatives lacks the authority under the Constitution or federal law to ask courts to enforce a subpoena against an executive branch official.

The latest decision comes weeks after the full appeals court rejected the panel’s initial ruling that would have ended the court fight over whether McGahn must testify before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation of potential obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would ask the full appeals court to step in and again revive the lawsuit.

Court cases over the testimony of presidential advisers are rare because the White House and Congress typically reach an agreement. But Trump directed McGahn not to appear and the Democratic-controlled House filed suit to enforce the subpoena that was first issued in April 2019.

With time running out on the current House session, which ends on Jan. 3, the prospect that McGahn would have to testify already was remote.

House lawmakers had sought McGahn’s testimony because he was a vital witness for Mueller, whose report detailed the president’s outrage over the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s efforts to curtail it.