Hello! And welcome to another edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter.
We're still waiting for the Supreme Court to decide some of the term's biggest cases, including ones on affirmative action and student debt relief. Those critical appeals may well be leading next week's newsletter. After this week there are 18 cases left to decide this term. The justices usually wrap up in late June, but they could go into July if they want.
Following last week's surprise ruling in the Voting Rights Act case from Alabama (the court upholding voting rights was the surprise), the justices issued another welcomed decision Thursday in a closely watched appeal. That's Haaland v. Brackeen, which upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 law meant to preserve tribal life by giving preference to Native Americans in adoption and foster care proceedings for Native children.
You know a case is "complicated" when a Supreme Court justice describes it that way in the intro of her opinion, as Amy Coney Barrett did. "But the bottom line is that we reject all of petitioners' challenges to the statute, some on the merits and others for lack of standing," she wrote, affirming congressional authority to have passed the law, known as ICWA for short, in a 7-2 opinion. The two dissenters who would have sided with Texas and others challenging the law? The same pair we saw dissenting from pro-civil rights rulings last week: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
And you may have heard rumblings about a Supreme Court case dealing with venue — meaning, where a crime is charged — that somehow relates to special counsel Jack Smith's decision to charge Donald Trump in Florida instead of Washington. I actually don't think there's much of a connection there in that case that decided Thursday. But as MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann posited, the special counsel may also want to bring classified documents-related charges against Trump outside of Florida in any event — possibly in New Jersey.
What we do know is that Trump was arraigned on his federal indictment in Florida this week. For those keeping score, that's his first federal indictment and his second overall (the New York hush money case was his first), with more that could come at the state (Georgia) and federal (Jan. 6) levels. And don't expect Judge Aileen Cannon to be kicked off the Florida case — not yet, anyway. For that to happen, the Trump appointee will probably have to do something bonkers in the criminal case like she did in the prior special master litigation, in which she tried to stall the investigation for Trump before he was charged.
We'll be keeping a close eye on the docket in United States v. Trump for any hints into how Cannon handles the historic prosecution. Even otherwise mundane steps like scheduling take on exceeding significance in this case where timing is everything as the 2024 election, which could scuttle the case, looms. Brandon Van Grack, a national security lawyer who was a prosecutor on special counsel Robert Mueller's team, told Nicolle that he thought the DOJ could bring this case by the end of the year. Will Cannon stand in the way?
