Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”

The decision, most of which was leaked in early May, means that abortion rights will be rolled back in nearly half of the states immediately, with more restrictions likely to follow. For all practical purposes, abortion will not be available in large swaths of the country. The decision may well mean too that the court itself, as well as the abortion question, will become a focal point in the upcoming fall elections and in the fall and thereafter.

Joining the Alito opinion were Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush, and the three Trump appointees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush, concurred in the judgment only, and would have limited the decision to upholding the Mississippi law at issue in the case, which banned abortions after 15 weeks.

Dissenting were Justices Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama.

“With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent,” they wrote.

Alito’s opinion is a tour de force of the various criticisms of Roe that have long existed in academia
Indeed, the 78-page opinion, which has a 30-page appendix, seemingly leaves no authority uncited as support for the proposition that there is no inherent right to privacy or personal autonomy in various provisions of the Constitution — and similarly, no evidence that peoples’ reliance on the court’s abortion precedents over the past half century should matter.

Alito pointed for instance, to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that upheld the central holding of Roe and was written by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, all Republican appointees to the court. Alito pointed to language in the Casey opinion that he said “conceded” reliance interests were not really implicated because contraception could prevent almost all unplanned pregnancies.

In fact, though, that 1992 opinion went on to dismiss that very argument as “unrealistic,” because it “refuse[s] to face the fact” that for decades “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices … in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” Not exactly the concession that Alito described.

It is not unusual for justices to cherry pick quotes but not so out of context and not from former colleagues who are still alive and privately, not amused at all.

In the end, though, Alito’s opinion has a larger objective, perhaps multiple objectives.

Writing for the majority, he said forthrightly that abortion is a matter to be decided by states and the voters in the states. “We hold,” he wrote, that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.” As to what standard the courts should apply in the event that a state regulation is challenged, Alito said any state regulation of abortion is presumptively valid and “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought” it was serving “legitimate state interests,” including “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development.” In addition, he noted, states are entitled to regulate abortion to eliminate “gruesome and barbaric” medical procedures; to “preserve the integrity of the medical profession”; and to prevent discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability, including barring abortion in cases of fetal abnormality.

Ultimately, the translation of all that is that states appear to be completely free to ban abortions for any reason.

Near the end of the opinion, Alito sought to allay fears about the wide-ranging nature of his opinion. “To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion. ”

But in his concurrent opinion, Justice Thomas said the legal rationale for Friday’s decision could be applied to overturn other major cases, including those that legalized gay marriage.

“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” he wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous.'”

The court’s liberals noted that Thomas’s language cast doubts on Alito’s majority opinion that said the court’s decision did not mean that cases like Obergefell would be affected.

“The first problem with the majority’s account comes from Justice Thomas’s concurrence—which makes clear he is not with the program,” they wrote. “In saying that nothing in today’s opinion casts doubt on non-abortion precedents, Justice Thomas explains, he means only that they are not at issue in this very case.”

The next steps on abortion across the country would play out in a variety of ways, almost all of them resulting in abortion bans.

Several states — among them Mississippi, North Carolina, and Wisconsin — still have decades-old abortion bans on their books; with Roe overturned, those states could revert to a pre-Roe environment. Officials in such states could seek to enforce old laws, or ask the courts to reinstate them. For example, a Michigan law dating back to 1931 would make abortion a felony. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has been working to try to block that law.

A cascade of newly active state laws
Another path to banning abortion involves “trigger bans,” newer laws pushed through by anti-abortion rights legislators in many states in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s action. Some 15 states – in the South, West and Midwest – have such laws in place, according to CRR and Guttmacher, but they fall into different categories.

Some states will act quickly to ban abortion. According to a new analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, South Dakota, Kentucky and Louisiana have laws in place that lawmakers designed explicitly to take effect immediately upon the fall of the Roe precedent. Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas – where most abortions are already illegal after about six weeks of pregnancy – have similar laws, which would take effect after 30 days. Guttmacher says seven other “trigger ban” states have laws that would require state officials such as governors or attorneys general to take action to implement them.

“We have been talking to all of those about acting immediately,” Liebel told NPR. “So when that happens, let’s be ready. How do you get that back into play?”

In recent years, many states also have passed gestational bans prohibiting abortion at various stages of pregnancy. Courts have blocked many of those laws in response to legal challenges, including laws in Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho that ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Now those laws may take effect immediately. So too, could a law recently enacted in Oklahoma, that makes performing abortion a felony punishable by time in prison.

“It will be a tremendous change in an incredibly short period of time,” said Julie Rikelman, senior director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Rikelman argued the Center’s challenge to Mississippi’s abortion ban at Supreme Court this term.

A host of other restrictions could limit where, by whom, and under what conditions abortion can be provided. Some examples include laws requiring parental notification or consent for abortions involving patients who are minors; and other health regulations for doctors and clinics that many medical groups say are unnecessary, expensive, and difficult to comply with.

Finally, Liebel said some governors may consider calling special sessions to pass new legislation in response to Friday’s ruling.

More legal uncertainty
Legal experts say the court’s decision will pose new questions for other courts to deal with – questions about how to apply the specific language of the final ruling to individual state laws.

If Roe is indeed overturned or substantially rolled back, Rikelman, the Center for Reproductive rights attorney, predicts “legal chaos” in states across the country in the immediate aftermath of the decision.

“I think what we will see is far more litigation in the federal courts – not less litigation,” Rikelman said.

Some states such as Texas and Oklahoma have multiple abortion restrictions on the books, raising potential questions about which ones would be valid. Those laws each include different provisions and carry different penalties, adding to the potential confusion and prompting additional litigation in state and federal courts.

Liebel, with SBA Pro-Life America, acknowledged that more legal battles are likely.

“That’s gonna take us back, frankly, to where we always have been. Each side tries to put their big toe right on that line and push the envelope,” Liebel said.

Battles in state courts are also likely. Some state constitutions may offer protections for abortion rights notwithstanding the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In Florida, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union and other reproductive rights groups are challenging a 15-week abortion ban modeled on Mississippi’s law, on the grounds that it violates privacy rights protections guaranteed in Florida’s state constitution.

Even without overturning Roe, Rikelman points to the Texas law known as S.B. 8, which took effect in September. The law, which has spawned several copycat proposals in other states, including Oklahoma, relies on individuals filing civil lawsuits to enforce an abortion ban.

Interstate enforcement battles
Abortion bans in restrictive states will likely bleed over to states that protect abortion rights as well, Rikelman said. She notes that some state lawmakers are trying to prohibit people in other states from providing abortions to their residents.

“What we are seeing already are states and state legislators impacting even people’s ability to access abortion in places where it would remain legal,” she said.

For example, an omnibus abortion law passed by a Republican supermajority in Kentucky earlier this year includes a host of new requirements for dispensing medication abortion pills, and a provision for extraditing people from other states who illegally provide abortion pills to Kentuckians. It’s unclear how enforceable those types of laws would be.

Meanwhile, some states are trying to expand access to abortion in preparation for more patients traveling from restrictive states for procedures. Connecticut lawmakers passed legislation this year designed to protect abortion providers from out-of-state lawsuits.

“This just raises a whole host of issues,” Rikelman said. “All of those different disputes will have to be worked out in the courts” including, potentially, in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even as abortions have now become far more restricted overall, the Guttmacher Institute reports that the long-term decline in abortions has reversed. In 2020, there were 930,160 abortions in the U.S., an increase of 8 percent more abortions than in 2017. The Institute also said that at the same time, fewer people were getting pregnant and among those who did, a larger proportion chose to have an abortion.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1102305878/supreme-court-abortion-roe-v-wade-decision-overturn

The post Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Updated at 7:51 p.m. ET

The Trump administration can end counting for the 2020 census after the Supreme Court approved a request to suspend a lower court order that extended the count’s schedule.

The high court’s order on Tuesday, following an emergency request the Justice Department made last week, helps clear the way for President Trump to try to alter the count while in office by excluding unauthorized immigrants from the numbers used to reallocate congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next 10 years.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter from the unsigned court order.

In a statement, Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the attorneys who helped bring the lawsuit to extend the census schedule, noted that the order “will result in irreversible damage” despite the challengers’ efforts to “secure more time on the clock to achieve a fair and accurate count.”

Governor Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community — one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs — called the ruling “a bitter pill for us to swallow here on the Reservation” in Arizona.

“With no explanation or rationale, a majority simply decided that our people do not deserve to be counted, thus continuing a long history of leaving Indian peoples at the margins of the U.S. society at large and economy,” Lewis said in a statement.

The Census Bureau’s public information office did not immediately respond to NPR’s questions about when it plans to conclude door-knocking efforts at unresponsive households. It is also not clear when it will stop accepting responses online at My2020Census.gov, over the phone or through the mail.

Sadik Huseny, a plaintiffs’ attorney with the law firm Latham & Watkins, said in a statement that the challengers “remain focused on ensuring that the Bureau’s data collections, and whatever data processing timelines the Bureau may implement, are consistent with the Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act]’s standards for reasoned decision making.”

The court’s ruling is the latest turn in a roller coaster of a legal fight over the timeline for the count. Last-minute changes by the Census Bureau and its skirting of an earlier court order for the count have left local communities and the bureau’s workers across the U.S. unsure of how much longer they can take part in a national headcount already upended by the coronavirus pandemic.

Lower courts previously ordered the administration to keep counting through Oct. 31, reverting to an extended schedule that Trump officials had first proposed in April in response to delays caused by the pandemic and then abruptly decided to abandon in July.

More time, judges have ruled, would give the bureau a better chance of getting an accurate and complete count of the country’s residents, which is used to determine how political representation and federal funding are distributed among the states over the next decade.

Justice Department attorneys say the Census Bureau is under pressure to meet a legal deadline of Dec. 31 for reporting to the president the first set of census results — the latest state population counts that determine each state’s share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. The numbers, in turn, also determine how many Electoral College votes each state has to determine who becomes the U.S. president in 2024 and 2028.

Since May, however, career officials at the bureau have warned that the agency can no longer meet the Dec. 31 reporting deadline because of the pandemic. Judges in lower courts have also noted that the national counts from the years 1810 through 1840 were delivered late and Congress later stepped in to approve deadline extensions.

In her dissenting opinion, Sotomayor wrote that “meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress.”

Still, if the commerce secretary, who oversees the bureau, were to present the new state counts to the White House by Dec. 31, that would ensure that even if Trump did not win reelection, he could attempt to carry out the unprecedented change he wants to make to who is counted when determining the reallocation of House seats.

Despite the Constitution’s requirement to include the “whole number of persons in each state” and the president’s limited authority over the census, Trump wants to try to exclude unauthorized immigrants from those numbers.

That effort has sparked another legal fight that is also before the Supreme Court. On Friday, the court is set to discuss whether to hear oral arguments for that case in December.

Click here to see  Supreme Court Order on Application for Stay

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/13/921428056/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-end-census-early

The post Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration To End Census Early first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple. The court’s decision was narrow, and it left open the larger question of whether a business can discriminate against gay men and lesbians based on rights protected by the First Amendment.

The court passed on an opportunity to either bolster the right to same-sex marriage or explain how far the government can go in regulating businesses run on religious principles. Instead, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion turned on the argument that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which originally ruled against the baker, had been shown to be hostile to religion because of the remarks of one of its members.

At the same time, Justice Kennedy strongly reaffirmed protections for gay rights.

“The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” he wrote, “all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

Justice Kennedy often casts the deciding vote in closely divided cases on major social issues. When the court agreed to hear the Colorado case last June, it seemed to present him with a stark choice between two of his core commitments. On the one hand, Justice Kennedy has written every major Supreme Court decision protecting gay men and lesbians. On the other, he is the court’s most ardent defender of free speech.

On Monday, Justice Kennedy chose a third path, one that seemed to apply only to the case before the court.

Writing for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision, he said the Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against the baker, Jack Phillips, had been infected by religious animus. He cited what he said were “inappropriate and dismissive comments” from one commissioner in saying that the panel had acted inappropriately and that its decision should be overturned.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

That passage echoed his plea for tolerance in his majority opinion in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In that decision, he called for “an open and searching debate” between those who opposed same-sex marriage on religious grounds and those who considered such unions “proper or indeed essential.”

When the Colorado case was argued in December, Justice Kennedy seemed frustrated with the main choices available to him and hinted that he was looking for an off ramp. His questions suggested that his vote had not been among the four that had been needed to add the case to the court’s docket.

The breadth of the court’s majority was a testament to the narrowness of the decision’s reasoning. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas voted with the majority but would have adopted broader reasons.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.

The case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, No. 16-111, arose from a brief encounter in 2012, when David Mullins and Charlie Craig visited Mr. Phillips’s bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colo. The two men were going to be married in Massachusetts, and they were looking for a wedding cake for a reception in Colorado.

Mr. Phillips turned them down, saying he would not use his talents to convey a message of support for same-sex marriage at odds with his religious faith. Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig said they were humiliated by Mr. Phillips’s refusal to serve them, and they filed a complaint with Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission, saying that Mr. Phillips had violated a state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig won before the commission and in the state courts.

The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down. The court added that people seeing the cake would not understand Mr. Phillips to be making a statement and that he remained free to say what he liked about same-sex marriage in other settings.

Though the case was mostly litigated on free speech grounds, Justice Kennedy’s opinion barely discussed the issue. Instead, he focused on what he said were flaws in the proceedings before the commission. Members of the panel, he wrote, had acted with “clear and impermissible hostility” to sincerely held religious beliefs.

One commissioner in particular, Justice Kennedy wrote, had crossed the line in saying that “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust.”

Justice Kennedy wrote that “this sentiment is inappropriate for a commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.”

In dissent, Justice Ginsburg said that a few stray remarks were not enough to justify a ruling in Mr. Phillips’s favor.

“What prejudice infected the determinations of the adjudicators in the case before and after the commission?” Justice Ginsburg asked. “The court does not say.”

Justice Kennedy wrote that the commission had also acted inconsistently in cases involving an opponent of same-sex marriage, “concluding on at least three occasions that a baker acted lawfully in declining to create cakes with decorations that demeaned gay persons or gay marriages.”

Protesters outside the Supreme Court after the ruling, which one gay rights group said “offered dangerous encouragement to those who would deny civil rights to L.G.B.T. people.”Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

In dueling concurring opinions, two sets of justices debated how central that last observation was to the court’s decision. Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Breyer, said such differing treatment could be justified. Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Alito, disagreed, saying that “the two cases share all legally salient features.”

In another concurring opinion, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, said he would have ruled in favor of Mr. Phillips on free speech grounds. Mr. Phillips’s cakes are artistic expression worthy of First Amendment protection, Justice Thomas wrote, and requiring him to endorse marriages at odds with his faith violated his constitutional rights.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court-sides-with-baker-who-turned-away-gay-couple.html

The post In Narrow Decision, Supreme Court Sides With Baker Who Turned Away Gay Couple first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.