Tag: Justice Neil Gorsuch
We Can Be Framers Too
The recent set of watershed Supreme Court opinions pulsates with the language of democratic accountability. Dobbs v. Jackson, overruling Roe v. Wade, makes its refrain the promise to “return” the abortion question “to the people and their elected representatives.” Concurring in West Virginia v. EPA, which restricts regulators’ ability to decarbonize the electricity grid, Justice Neil Gorsuch explained that the point of the decision was to keep power in the hands of “the people’s representatives” rather than
The Supreme Court Is Kicking God Back Into School
Religious conservatives have been fighting for years to get prayer back into America’s schools, and this year, the Supreme Court gave them what they wanted. In Kennedy v. Bremerton, the six conservative justices affirmed a coach’s right to offer a prayer after a football game.
But what is really astonishing is that this decision will over time prove to be less monumental than the Court’s other big religion decision this term. In Maine’s Carson v. Makin, the Court
‘There’s So Much That’s Not in the Constitution’
During oral argument at the Supreme Court in December over Mississippi’s abortion ban, Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid bare a fundamental truth: “There’s so much that’s not in the Constitution.”
Her point is a deep one, and salient to the abortion debate: The text of the Constitution does not explicitly affirm the right to abortion; no one disagrees with that. But the Constitution protects far more than what it literally describes. Unwritten ideas necessarily guide even the strictest readings of the
The Conservative Justices Have Drunk the Anti-Vaxx Kool Aid
If you read the legal language in the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which authorizes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to act in an emergency capacity when workers face “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards,” and when “such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger,” you might think that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate stood a good chance of surviving the Supreme Court’s