Justices urged to deny Trump plea to enforce full travel ban
WASHINGTON (AP) — Challengers to the Trump administration’s latest travel ban on visitors from six mostly Muslim countries are urging the Supreme Court to reject the administration’s plea to be allowed to fully enforce the ban.
Federal courts have prevented President Donald Trump’s administration from banning people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen who can claim a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the United States. Courts have said grandparents, cousins and other relatives count among the close relationships that are required.
Last week, the administration said blocking the full ban was causing “irreparable harm” because the policy is based on legitimate national security and foreign policy concerns.
But the challengers said in court papers filed Tuesday that the Supreme Court rejected a similar request from the administration last summer involving an earlier version of the travel ban that was making its way through the courts.
Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin told the court that “the justification for that dramatic relief has only weakened” because the latest travel ban, unlike its two predecessors, is permanent.
In lawsuits filed in Hawaii and Maryland, federal courts said the updated travel ban that Trump announced in September violated federal immigration law. The travel policy also applies to travelers from North Korea and to some Venezuelan government officials and their families, but the lawsuits did not challenge those restrictions.
Arguments are scheduled for Dec. 6 before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle. The Maryland case is due to be argued before the full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Dec. 8 in Richmond, Virginia.
Supreme Court wrestles with whistleblower protection issue
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed reluctant to broadly apply whistleblower protections passed by Congress following the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting those particular protections only apply to people who report problems to the government.
The question the justices were wrestling with involves the Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress passed to restrain banks from the kind of practices that many blamed for the 2008 financial crisis. Part of the law protects people who report legal violations to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from being fired, demoted or harassed.
The court is being asked to decide whether employees who report problems to their company’s management but not the commission also qualify for protections under the Dodd-Frank Act.
The Trump administration is arguing that they do qualify for protection, and the commission said the same in a 2011 rule. Businesses oppose that reading of the law.
In court Tuesday, a number of justices suggested that the Dodd-Frank Act’s text indicates that whistleblower protections don’t extend beyond people who report problems to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Justice Neil Gorsuch said the “plain language” of the law makes that obvious.
“How much clearer could Congress have been?” he asked.
The justices discussed the fact that people who report issues to their company’s management are still protected against retaliation under an older law, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The two laws differ in a number of ways, however, including how long people have to bring a lawsuit and the amount of money they can get in compensation.
The case comes to the high court when the Trump administration has already laid out changes it wants to make to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which the administration believes went too far and has hurt economic growth. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the law as a “disaster” and has promised to do “a big number” on it.
The case the court was taking up involves Paul Somers, who worked for San Francisco-based Digital Realty Trust Inc., a real-estate investment trust that owns data centers worldwide.
Somers was the company’s second in command in Singapore when he made accusations to senior managers that his boss had hidden millions of dollars in cost overruns, granted no-bid contracts and made payments to friends, among other things. Somers was fired in 2014 after making the allegations. He sued, saying his firing was a retaliation that violated the Dodd-Frank Act. He also alleged he had been discriminated against for being gay.
Lower courts have sided with Somers, saying he was entitled to whistleblower protections even though he didn’t disclose his allegations to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The case is 16-1276, Digital Realty Trust Inc. v. Somers.
For second time this year, Supreme Court suspends wrong guy
WASHINGTON (AP) — Jim Robbins’ seven years of service at the Supreme Court was not enough to keep him from the being the second lawyer this year who was mistakenly suspended from the court’s prestigious bar.
“They suspended me?” a surprised Robbins asked with a chuckle Tuesday from his home outside San Francisco.
They did, but they didn’t mean to.
The court acknowledged Monday that it had confused another James A. Robbins, a New York lawyer who tried to cover up his loss of a client’s will, with the former Supreme Court employee.
In May, the court mixed up a lawyer who was convicted of drunken driving with the incoming president of the Massachusetts state bar.
Anyone who argues in front of the Supreme Court must be a member of its bar, but few of the nearly 4,000 lawyers on average who join the bar each year ever argue a case there. Bar members get a certificate suitable for framing, a credential for their resume and the chance to join a shorter line for lawyers who want to see Supreme Court arguments.
The court has a process for verifying whether lawyers who commit crimes or are disciplined where they work also are members of the Supreme Court bar.
But the process is not error-proof, even at an institution that has the final word on matters of law in the U.S.
The Supreme Court receives discipline notices from courts around the country and compares those lists with the roster of lawyers who can practice in front of the justices. When there’s a match, the court initiates its own disbarment proceeding, which begins with a suspension and an order to explain why the lawyer should not be kicked out of the Supreme Court bar.
The court clerk’s office belatedly discovered that the New York Robbins was not a Supreme Court bar member, court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.
The California Robbins recalled his admission to the high court bar in 1981, at the request of then Solicitor General Wade McCree Jr. He served on the business side of the court in the early 1980s, when Warren Burger was chief justice, and has never argued a high court case.
But neither has Robbins been entirely forgotten at the Supreme Court.
“He hired me,” Arberg said, after a reporter told her that the unsuspended Robbins once worked at the court.
