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| Happy Monday, OnPolitics readers! |
| Seventeen months after the high court convened by telephone for the first time in its 230-year history due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Supreme Court returned to the courtroom today. |
| Most of them, anyway. Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday and took part remotely. |
| With their busy schedule, the Supreme Court has already declined to hear two cases, one requiring sex offenders to carry IDs and another challenging a Wisconsin law that bans state residents who have been convicted of felonies from owning handguns for the rest of their lives. |
| It's Amy and Mabinty, with the day's top news. |
A look ahead at SCOTUS' explosive case docket |
| The justices are hitting the ground running with a docket full of controversial issues such as abortion, gun rights and the death penalty. |
| Mississippi's ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy is by far the most heated case before the court, where a six-member conservative majority will have a crack at undermining and possibly overturning the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that created a constitutional right to abortion or a subsequent case in 1992 that protected that right up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy. |
| The justices will also wade into legal disputes over the right to carry handguns outside the home, when officials may approve regulations that affect religion, whether the government may keep the existence of CIA "black sites" a secret and whether to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. |
| Will partisan politics impact the court? Some people, like Justice Amy Coney Barrett, argue that the Supreme Court isn't "a bunch of partisan hacks." Others are interested to see exactly how the justices will interpret the law. |
| "This term is going to tell us a lot," Kannon Shanmugam, an appellate attorney who has argued dozens of cases at the Supreme Court, said at a Federalist Society conference. The court will consider "the areas of public constitutional law that I think in many ways tell us the most about how justices look at the law." |
Real quick: Stories you might have missed |
| • | Is he going to run in 2024? Donald Trump's favorability ratings are his highest in any Iowa Poll. | | • | Some #YangGang news: Former Democratic presidential candidate and New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang is no longer a registered Democrat. | | • | The Trump-Twitter showdown continues: Trump has asked a federal judge in Florida to force Twitter to restore his account. | | • | Florida's First Lady diagnosed with breast cancer: Casey DeSantis, wife to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is battling breast cancer. "Casey is a true fighter, and she will never, never, never give up," the governor wrote. | | • | Military suicides on the rise: The Pentagon's annual report on suicide found that soldiers died by suicide at the rate of 36.4 per 100,000 in 2020, up from 29.9 two years before. | |
Democrats still haggling over infrastructure |
| A group of moderate Democrats is holding out as lawmakers across the party resolved themselves to passing two pieces of legislation critical to President Joe Biden's agenda. |
| "People will be disappointed. People will not get everything they want. That is the art of legislating, but the goal here is to get both bills, and we're going to fight until we get both bills," Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to Biden, told NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday. |
| What's the holdup? Democratic leaders are searching for ways to ensure that both moderates and liberals are satisfied by the final deals on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion budget package, which they want to pass together. |
| Though a majority of Democratic lawmakers and the president support both bills, the party's razor-thin majorities in both chambers of Congress mean that any small group of lawmakers could jeopardize the passage of a bill. |
| What's next? The White House has communicated with lawmakers over both packages for months. Initially content to let congressional Democratic leaders steer negotiations, Biden has begun playing a larger role in trying to ensure the passage of his agenda. |
| "I believe I can get this done. I believe, when the American people are aware of what's in it, we can get it done," Biden said before boarding Marine One on Saturday. |
| That's not all Congress is trying to figure out: Biden called Monday for a Senate vote this week on raising the country's debt limit, saying opposition from Republicans could create "a self-inflicted wound that takes our economy over a cliff." |
| "A meteor is headed to crash into our economy," Biden said. He told Republicans: "Just get out of the way, so you don't destroy it." |
| Happy National Taco Day! 🌮 — Amy and Mabinty |
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