Figure I'd start the annual thread. Feel free to report on your faves for this year.
It's a year for surprises, at least as far as which justices are voting together...
quote:
The Supreme Court on Monday found that a criminal defendant can be sentenced for violating his supervised release, even if the release expires while he is incarcerated ahead of facing new charges.
The justices, divided in the 5-4 decision, ruled against Jason Mont's argument that a district court shouldn't be able to charge him for violating his release because the term had expired at the time of the new sentencing.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh in the majority. Justice Neil Gorsuch joined liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan in opposing the decision.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday in a closely watched “double jeopardy” case, issuing a decision that preserves states’ power to limit the impact of future pardons by President Donald Trump or his successors.
In a 7-2 ruling, the justices declined to disturb a longstanding legal principle known as dual sovereignty, which allows state governments to bring their own charges against defendants already tried or convicted in federal court, or vice versa.
On Monday, the United States Supreme Court ruled to uphold a lower court ruling striking down Virginia's 2011 House of Delegates map as racially gerrymandered, a remapping of Virginia congressional districts on racial lines that weakened the clout of black voters and violated the U.S. Constitution.
The justices, in a 5-4 decision, sidestepped a ruling on the merits of the case itself, not taking a position on whether the lower court was correct in striking down a 2011 Virginia House of Delegates map on the grounds that it constituted a racial gerrymander.
They instead found that the Republican-led state House of Delegates lacked the necessary legal standing to appeal a lower court ruling that invalidated 11 state House districts for racial discrimination.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dealt a partial victory to the owners of an Oregon bakery who were fined for refusing to provide a cake for a lesbian commitment ceremony.
The justices wiped out lower court rulings against the bakers and sent the case back for another round of hearings.
The legal dispute raised the same issues that arose a year ago in the case of a Colorado baker who refused to provide a custom cake to celebrate the wedding of two men. That baker, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake, said it would require him to act against his religious views and violate his right of free speech.
The court failed then to resolve the central issues in his case, ruling instead on narrow grounds unique to him. Religiously affiliated groups were hoping the justices would use the Oregon case to answer the hard questions it avoided last year. But sending the case back to the lower courts, with instructions to reconsider their rulings in light of the Colorado case, gives the lower courts very little to go on.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a 40-foot World War I memorial cross can stay on public land at a Maryland intersection.
The cross "has become a prominent community landmark, and its removal or radical alteration at this date would be seen by many not as a neutral act but as the manifestation of a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions," the court wrote.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that "contrary to respondents' intimations, there is no evidence of discriminatory intent in the selection of the design of the memorial or the decision of a Maryland commission to maintain it. The Religion Clause of the Constitution aims to foster a society in which people of all beliefs can live together harmoniously, and the presence of the Bladensburg Cross on the land where it has stood for so many years is fully consistent with that aim."
The decision was 7 to 2, but it had multiple parts and not all of the seven agreeing on every aspect. It reverses a lower court ruling that said the memorial is unconstitutional because it is on public land and maintained at taxpayer expense. The high court's ruling is a major victory for religious groups and the American Legion, which warned that if this cross had to be moved, so too would other crosses that serve as war memorials.
Alito argued that the cross had essentially become secular. He invoked the history of World War I memorials. Noting the rows and rows of crosses and Stars of David at cemeteries in Europe that memorialized those who died in that war, he said that established in people's minds the idea of crosses as war memorials back then.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in dissent, disagreed with Alito's history. She noted that it's clear what the purpose and meaning of the cross was from the start — it was religious. She argued Americans knew what it meant then and know what it means now.
"Decades ago," Ginsburg wrote, "this Court recognized that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution demands governmental neutrality among religious faiths, and between religion and nonreligion. ... Numerous times since, the Court has reaffirmed the Constitution's commitment to neutrality. Today the Court erodes that neutrality commitment, diminishing precedent designed to preserve individual liberty and civic harmony in favor of a 'presumption of constitutionality for longstanding monuments, symbols, and practices.' "
She adds, "The Latin cross is the foremost symbol of the Christian faith, embodying the 'central theological claim of Christianity: that the son of God died on the cross, that he rose from the dead, and that his death and resurrection offer the possibility of eternal life.' ... Precisely because the cross symbolizes these sectarian beliefs, it is a common marker for the graves of Christian soldiers. For the same reason, using the cross as a war memorial does not transform it into a secular symbol, as the Courts of Appeals have uniformly recognized."
The cross "has become a prominent community landmark, and its removal or radical alteration at this date would be seen by many not as a neutral act but as the manifestation of a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions," the court wrote.
That's curious. I haven't read the rest of their argument, but this seems like it leaves room to declare an identical monument unconstitutional if it were put up tomorrow.
-------------------------------- If you think looting is bad wait until I tell you about civil forfeiture.
Posts: 33811 | Location: On the Hudson | Registered: 20 April 2005
Opinion analysis: No role for courts in partisan gerrymandering
The Supreme Court issued a decision today that could have a significant and long-term effect on elections and legislatures across the country. By a vote of 5-4, the justices ruled that courts should stay out of disputes over partisan gerrymandering – that is, allegations that redistricting maps were drawn to favor one political party at another’s expense. The practice of partisan gerrymandering may be distasteful, the court concluded, but it is a problem that politicians and the political process, rather than courts, should solve.
The justices have struggled with the issue of partisan gerrymandering for years. Just last year, they sent two partisan-gerrymandering challenges – including an earlier iteration of the Maryland case – back to the lower courts without ruling on whether the maps were in fact the result of partisan gerrymandering. In one case, a challenge to the redistricting plan that Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature drew for the state’s general assembly in 2011, the justices gave the plaintiffs another opportunity to show that they had a legal right, known as standing, to challenge the entire Wisconsin map. And in the Maryland case, the justices explained, the dispute was still in its early stages. Therefore, the question for the Supreme Court was not whether the district court’s decision allowing the state to use the current map for now was wrong, but instead was whether it was so wrong that it was unreasonable – which, the court concluded, it was not.
Opinion analysis: Court orders do-over on citizenship question in census case
The fate of a question about citizenship on the 2020 census remains up in the air today. Although the Trump administration had hoped that the Supreme Court would clear the way for it to include such a question, the justices instead sent the issue back to the Department of Commerce. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in ruling that the justification that the government offered at the time for including the citizenship question was just a pretext. The decision left open the possibility that the Trump administration could try again to add the citizenship question, but the clock is ticking: The government has repeatedly told the justices, in urging them to resolve the case quickly, that it needs to finalize the census questionnaire by the end of this month.
The 86-year-old Ginsburg seemed to be handing the liberal torch off to Justice Elena Kagan, assigning her important majority and dissenting opinions. As the senior justice, Ginsburg assigns opinions when the chief justice, who normally assigns opinions, is not in the majority and she is. Her decision assignments seemed both strategic and generous — she gave important writing assignments not just to Kagan but to both Trump appointees, when they provided deciding votes in closely divided cases.
There's a nuance there that they failed to acknowledge. The assignment of opinions sometimes they're negotiated. A fifth vote may insist that they'll be a fifth vote if they get to write the opinion.
