By Jake Kaplan

Here are some of the legal news stories making headlines this week:

— President Trump continues to contest the results of the presidential election, despite all major news organizations calling the race for President-elect Joe Biden. The Trump campaign has lawsuits pending in at least five states and is seeking recounts in at least three. Meanwhile, Trump’s allies continue to allege that the election was stolen from the President due to widespread voter fraud despite providing no evidence to support these claims. On Tuesday, the New York Times published a report detailing reporters’ conversations with election officials in 45 states. In sum, the Times concluded that no major voting issues were reported, and local elections officials from both parties repeated that Americans should have faith in the integrity of the election. “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud,” said Minnesota’s Democratic Secretary of State, Steve Simon. Frank LaRose, the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio, said that “there’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections. The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”

— Despite Trump’s refusal to concede, the Biden team is forging ahead with the transition process. On Wednesday, Ronald Klain was named as White House chief of staff. Klain, an attorney by training, has for decades served as a top aide to Democrats in Washington. In the late 1980’s, fresh out of Harvard Law School, Klain went to work for Biden in his Senate office. In the Clinton years, he served as Chief of Staff to Attorney General Janet Reno, and later as Chief of Staff to Vice President Al Gore. He returned to government at the start of the Obama administration to head up then-Vice President Biden’s office. After Klain left Biden’s office, President Obama brought him back to the White House in 2014 to coordinate the government’s response to the Ebola crisis. He has also been a guest on Stay Tuned with Preet, where he discussed his long and varied career and weighed in on the Senate confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. According to Michael Scherer at the Washington Post, Biden’s selection of Klain as chief of staff “signals [a] rejection of Trump-era chaos” and shows Biden “intends to rely heavily on experience, competence and political agility after a Trump presidency that prized flashiness and personality.” 

— On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a COVID-19 advisory board. The group is made up of experienced doctors and scientists and will be chaired by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler, and Yale School of Medicine Associate Dean Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith. And, while world leaders continue to congratulate Biden on his victory, most Republicans in Congress have refused to do so. Since the Trump administration and the General Services Administration so far has declined to recognize Biden as President-elect, Biden is unable to receive the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) and access classified information. However, Republican Senator James Lankford (OK) said Wednesday that he would “step in” to give Biden intelligence briefings if Biden did not have access by Friday.

— On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that many fear puts the future of the Affordable Care Act in jeopardy. Democrats worried that the Court’s conservative majority would strike down the ACA in this latest challenge, which would result in millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions losing their health care. However, based on the justices’ questions during oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh look poised to join the Court’s liberal justices to preserve the bulk of the law based on the doctrine of severability — a legal theory in which the law as a whole can survive even if the Court strikes down one provision of the law. In this case, Roberts and Kavanaugh posited that the ACA can stand even if the Court finds the individual mandate, the requirement under the ACA that every American purchase health insurance, unconstitutional. According to Kavanaugh, “Looking at our severability precedents, it does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the Act in place.”