I'm Elizabeth Slattery and welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

Today I'm joined again by my colleague John Michael Seidler. Welcome back. Thanks, Elizabeth. This week, we're recapping a oral arguments, and Elizabeth chats with the infamous John U.

Infamous indeed. The Supreme Court is officially back. Before we get into the orders and arguments from this week, here's a brief update on the Kavanaugh Confirmation Circus.

Since our last episode, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to report Kavanaugh out of committee by a vote of 11 to 10.

Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona conditioned his support on the FBI reopening its background investigation.

The FBI has now concluded the investigation, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed cloture setting up, setting the stage for a vote in the coming days.

So perhaps by our next episode, this saga will have come to its conclusion.

But moving on to the Supreme Court, what's happening?

Yeah, on Monday, the court issued its orders from the Long Conference, including 65 pages of denials.

It also granted the Solicitor General's motions for divided argument in several cases coming up

and called for the SG to file a brief expressing the views of the United States in a number of cases.

There were no new grants, but I suppose we could get some next week or the week after that.

So turning to this week's oral arguments, the court kicked off the week with the dusky gopher frog. Jam, what were some of the highlights from that argument?

Sure. So we've discussed this case before, and again, it involves the U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Service's designation of privately owned property in Louisiana as the critical habitat of the

dusky gopher frog, which happens to live across several rivers and highways,

50 miles away in Mississippi, and there's nowhere to be seen in Louisiana on this land.

There were really two questions involved here.

The first is just how far can the agency go in determining critical habitat of species.

And the second was, are those designations, or at least as part of them, is the agency's

decision not to exclude private property from critical hazard designations based at least

in part on an economic analysis that they have to do, subject to judicial review.

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