GOLDEN TICKET: SUPREME COURT EXTENDS VOUCHERS TO RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS – KEVIN DALEY. JUNE 21, 2022
The Supreme Court said Tuesday that states must include religious institutions in school voucher programs, an important victory for school choice advocates. In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that authorities in Maine are violating the First Amendment by excluding religious schools from a program that offers tuition assistance for students to attend private schools. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion over dissents from Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. "There is nothing neutral about Maine’s program," Roberts wrote. "The state pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion."
Tuesday’s decision does not require taxpayer funding for religious schools. It stands for a modest proposition—states aren’t required to provide vouchers for school choice. But if they do so, they cannot exclude religious schools.
Teachers’ unions and the National School Board Association (NSBA) warned that a loss for Maine authorities would embolden religious extremists around the country…The case is…Carson v. Makin.
SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS HS FOOTBALL COACH'S RIGHT TO PRAY – 27 JUNE 2022
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday expanded the religious rights of government employees by ruling in favor of a Christian former public high school football coach in Washington state who sued after being suspended from his job for refusing to stop leading prayers with players on the field after games. The justices in a 6-3 decision sided with Joseph Kennedy, who until 2015 was a part-time assistant football coach in the city of Bremerton...
SECOND AMENDMENT – A WELL-REGULATED MILITIA, BEING NECESSARY TO THE SECURITY OF A FREE STATE, THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
SUPREME COURT SAYS CONSTITUTION PROTECTS RIGHT TO CARRY A GUN OUTSIDE THE HOME – BY ARIANE DE VOGUE AND TIERNEY SNEED, JUNE 23, 2022
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a New York gun law enacted more than a century ago that places restrictions on carrying a concealed handgun outside the home -- an opinion marking the widest expansion of gun rights in a decade.
"Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State's licensing regime violates the Constitution," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court's 6-3 majority…In his opinion, Thomas said that going forward the government "may not simply posit that the regulation promotes and important interest," instead he said the judges must look to text and history when deciding whether a law passes muster.
ABORTION
SUPREME COURT OVERTURNS ROE V. WADE, LEAVES ISSUE UP TO STATES – CALLIE PATTESON AND SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN. JUNE 24, 2022
The US Supreme Court has overturned its 49-year-old landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the US, upholding a Mississippi law banning the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy – and leaving the issue up to each of the 50 states. Friday’s opinion by Justice Samuel Alito also overturned a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the court found that state laws restricting abortion should not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking the procedure.
“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”… “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote…“Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”… Alito was joined in his opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas, Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts filed separate opinions concurring in Alito’s judgment. In his concurrence, Roberts questioned whether overturning Roe and Casey was necessary to uphold the Mississippi abortion law, writing that Alito’s opinion was “thoughtful and thorough, but those virtues cannot compensate for the fact that its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.” “Ample evidence thus suggests that a 15-week ban provides sufficient time, absent rare circumstances, for a woman ‘to decide for herself’ whether to terminate her pregnancy,” the chief justice went on before adding that both Alito’s opinion and the dissent by liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan “display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share.”
In his concurrence, Kavanaugh stated: “Because the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion, this Court also must be scrupulously neutral. The nine unelected Members of this Court do not possess the constitutional authority to override the democratic process and to decree either a pro-life or a pro-choice abortion policy for all 330 million people in the United States. “Instead of adhering to the Constitution’s neutrality, the Court in Roe took sides on the issue and unilaterally decreed that abortion was legal throughout the United States up to the point of viability (about 24 weeks of pregnancy),” Kavanaugh went on. “The Court’s decision today properly returns the Court to a position of neutrality and restores the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government established by the Constitution.”
Kavanaugh also agreed with Alito that Friday’s decision does not affect past Supreme Court decisions legalizing interracial and same-sex marriage or enshrining the right to use contraception — as abortion advocates had warned after the draft opinion leaked. “[W]e emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito wrote. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Thomas disagreed, writing in his concurrence that the court should review those precedents and all decisions like Roe and Casey that based on the legal theory of “substantive due process,” which states that rights not enumerated in the Constitution are protected by the 5th and 14th Amendments. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,'” Thomas wrote, “we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
