Good morning! Welcome to our live blog. The federal government is closed, but the Supreme Court is open.
I am unfortunately not at the Court because of the weather, but we will do our best.
Good morning blogosphere.
One box of opinions today, apparently. The number of boxes is a rough proxy for the number of opinions.
CNN's Ariane de Vogue reports on Twitter that there is just one box today.
For those of you who are new here, the number of boxes is a rough proxy for the number of opinions that we expect. It's not perfect, however, because opinions can be very short or very long, which would skew the count.
We have the first opinion -- Ayestas v. Davis.
It is by Alito, and it is unanimous -- although Sotomayor concurs, joined by Ginsburg.
This is a capital case out of Texas, in which the inmate argued that he was wrongfully denied funding for investigative services needed to prove that he was entitled to federal habeas relief.
He sought funding under a federal law that makes funds available if they are "reasonably necessary," but he was denied the money. The Court today holds that the lower courts applied the wrong legal standard and sends the case back for additional proceedings.
Second and final opinion is in Marinello v. United States.
It is by Breyer, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Gorsuch.
Thomas dissents, joined by Alito.
That means 7-2, although those of you who follow me on Twitter know that my math is sometimes suspect.
The decision is reversed and remanded.
The Court holds that to convict someone under the Omnibus Clause, which bars someone from obstructing the administration of the Internal Revenue Code, the government must prove that the defendant was aware of a pending tax-related proceeding or could reasonably foresee that such a proceeding would begin.
"In our view," Breyer writes, the term "due administration" of the tax code "does not cover routine administrative procedures that are near-universally applied to all taxpayers, such as the ordinary processing of income tax returns. Rather, the clause as a whole refers to specific interference with targeted governmental tax-related proceedings, such as a particular investigation or audit."
The Sotomayor concurrence in Ayestas argues that the petitioner should win on the issue the Court remanded to the Fifth Circuit (application of the correct standard in a funding-for-investigation question in a capital case); the Thomas dissent in Marinello argues that the Omnibus Clause has a broader effect and criminalizes obstruction even if you don't know about a pending case, audit, etc.
That is all for today. As I wrote earlier, we could get opinions next Tuesday and/or Wednesday, but we won't know until Friday.
To be clear, no sports betting case today.
We are still waiting on three cases from October: Epic Systems v. Lewis, Sessions v. Dimaya, and Jesner v. Arab Bank.
That's all the opinions for today, folks. I'll hang out and answer questions for a few minutes.
Ayestas was argued on October 30 but was technically part of the November sitting.
Okay, that's all for me for today. Thanks so much for joining us, and hopefully we will be back here again next week.
Hi all, that's all we've got for live-blogging this morning. We may be back next week -- we'll know on Friday.
Submit Event
