WASHINGTON-
Abortion, Guns, and Religion: A major law change in any of these areas would have resulted in a fateful stint on the US Supreme Court. In their first full term together, the court’s conservative majority ruled on all three and issued other important decisions that limit the regulatory powers of the government.
And it has signaled no plans to slow down.
With former President Donald Trump’s appointees in their 50s, the six-justice conservative majority appears poised to maintain control of the court for years, if not decades, to come.
“This has been a revolutionary term in many ways,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas. “The court has massively changed constitutional law in really important ways.”
With the remaining opinions issued, the court began its summer recess on Thursday and the justices will return to the courtroom in October.
Overturn Roe v. Wade and ending a nearly half-century guarantee of abortion rights had the most immediate impact, shutting down or severely restricting abortions in about a dozen states within days of the decision.
By expanding gun rights and finding religious discrimination in two cases, the judges also made it harder to uphold gun control laws and lower barriers to religion in public life.
Placing important new limits on regulatory authority, they curbed the government’s ability to combat climate change and blocked an effort by the Biden administration to vaccinate workers at big businesses against COVID-19.
The remarkable week in late June in which gun, abortion, religion and environmental cases were decided overshadowed, at least partially, other notable events, some of them worrying.
New Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in Thursday as the first black woman on the court. She replaced outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, who served nearly 28 years, a change that will not change the balance between liberals and conservatives on the court.
In early May, the court had to deal with the unprecedented leak of a draft ruling in the abortion case. Chief Justice John Roberts almost immediately ordered an investigation, which the court has said nothing about since. Shortly afterward, workers surrounded the field with 8-foot-high fencing in response to safety concerns. In June, police arrested a gunman late at night near Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland and charged him with attempted murder of the judge.
Kavanaugh is one of three Trump appointees along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett who have strengthened the right side of the court. Greg Garre, who served as President George W. Bush’s chief Supreme Court counsel, said that when the court began its term in October, “the biggest question was not so much which way the court was headed, but how I was going fast.” answers that question pretty bluntly, which is quick.”
The speed also revealed that the Chief Justice no longer has control over the court he occupied when he was one of five, not six, Conservatives, Garre said.
Roberts, who favors a more incremental approach that could reinforce the perception of the court as an apolitical institution, sharply broke with other conservatives on the abortion case, writing that it was unnecessary to unseat Roe, which he called a “serious shake” for the legal system. On the other hand, he was part of all the other ideologically divided majorities.
If last year revealed limits on the Chief Justice’s influence, it also showed the influence of Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s longest-serving member. He wrote the decision expanding gun rights and the abortion case marked the culmination of his 30-year Supreme Court effort to get rid of Roe, who had stood since 1973.
Abortion is just one of several areas where Thomas is keen to throw off court precedent. The justices buried a second of his decisions, Lemon v. Kurtzman, ruling in favor of a high school football coach’s right to pray at the 50-yard line after games. However, it is not clear that other justices are as comfortable as Thomas in overturning past decisions.
The abortion and gun cases also seemed contradictory to some critics in that the court gave states authority over the most personal decisions, but limited state power to regulate guns. However, one distinction made by the majorities in those cases is that the Constitution explicitly mentions weapons, but not abortion.
Those decisions don’t seem particularly popular with the public, according to opinion polls. Polls show a sharp drop in the court’s approval rating and in people’s trust in the court as an institution.
Previous court judges have acknowledged their concern about public perception. As recently as last September, Judge Amy Coney Barrett said, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not made up of a bunch of partisan hackers.” Barrett spoke at a center named after Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who engineered his speedy confirmation in 2020 and was sitting onstage near the judge.
But conservatives, minus Roberts, dismissed any concerns about perception in the abortion case, said Grove, a professor at the University of Texas.
Judge Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion that “not only are we not going to focus on that, we should not focus on that,” he said. “I’m sympathetic as an academic, but I was surprised to see that coming from so many real-world judges.”
Liberal justices, however, repeatedly wrote that the court’s aggressiveness in this epic term was damaging the institution. Judge Sonia Sotomayor described her fellow judges as “a restless and newly constituted Court.” Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent on abortion, wrote: “The Court is changing course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.”
In 18 decisions, at least five conservative justices joined to form a majority and all three liberals disagreed, roughly 30 percent of all cases the court heard in its term that began last October.
Among these, the court also:
- It made it more difficult for people to sue state and federal authorities for violations of constitutional rights.
- He raised the bar for defendants who claim their rights were violated, ruling against a Michigan man who was chained at trial.
- Limited how some death row inmates and others sentenced to long prison terms can file claims that their attorneys did a poor job of representing them.
In emergency appeals, also called “shadow” court filings because justices often provide little or no explanation for their actions, conservatives ordered the use of congressional districts for this year’s elections in Alabama and Louisiana to even though lower federal courts have determined that he likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of black voters.
The justices will hear arguments in the Alabama case in October, among several high-profile cases related to race or elections, or both.
Furthermore, when the justices resume hearing arguments, the use of race as a factor in college admission is on the table, just six years after the court reaffirmed its permissibility. And the court will consider a controversial Republican-led appeal that would vastly increase state lawmakers’ power over federal elections, at the expense of state courts.
These and other cases on the intersection of LGBTQ and religious rights and another major environmental case related to development and water pollution are likely to lead to ideologically divided decisions.
Khiara Bridges, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, law school, drew a link between the right to vote and abortion cases. In the latter, Alito wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that abortion should be decided by elected officials, not judges.
“I find it incredibly disingenuous for Alito to suggest that all Dobbs is doing is putting this question back up to the states and that people can fight in the state over whether to protect fetal life or the interest of the pregnant person,” Bridges said. . “But that same court is actively involved in making sure that states can disenfranchise people.”
Bridges also said the results lined up almost perfectly with the Republicans’ political goals. “Whatever the GOP wants, the GOP is going to come out of the currently constituted court,” he said.
Defenders of the court’s decisions said the criticism misses the mark because it confuses policy with law. “Supreme Court decisions are often not about what the policy should be, but rather who (or what level of government or what institution) should make the policy,” the Princeton University political scientist wrote on Twitter. , RobertGeorge.
For now, there is no sign that the justices or the Republican and conservative interests that have brought so many of the high-profile cases to court intend to set their sails, Grove said.
That’s in part because there’s no realistic prospect of judicial reforms that limit the cases justices can hear, impose term limits or increase the size of the Supreme Court, said Grove, who served on the bipartisan reform commission. Justices of the Supreme Court of President Joe Biden.
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Associated Press writer Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.