The Supreme Court concluded this term with a pair of completely arbitrary and capricious rulings, based on lies and controversies fabricated by far-right political actors, curtailing LGBTQ protections and rolling back the president’s student loan forgiveness program. Joe Biden. Both cases were deeply tainted with procedural flaws, but that was not going to stop the six far-right extremists in court from imposing their will. This illegitimate tribunal has once again caused untold future damage to this country. It must be stopped.
In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenisthe court took up a case raised by far-right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom based on a lie, then, in the words of Judge Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, used this case to “for the first time in its history, (grant) a business open to the public the constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. “It opens the door for public companies to decide they don’t want to serve LGBTQ couples, or interracial couples, or couples with disabilities, or members of churches they don’t like.
Plaintiff Lorie Smith insists she wants nothing more than to start a business creating custom wedding websites for heterosexual couples, but Colorado state anti-discrimination laws make it impossible for her. prevent it from doing so. She’s supposedly been making those plans for years, having filed in 2016, but never started the business. She was never sanctioned by the state for turning down an LGBTQ couple because her business didn’t exist. The case was first bolstered by an alleged investigation by a gay man, conveniently submitted just a day after the case was filed, which turned out to be a complete bogus.
Judge Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, acknowledged: “Although Ms Smith has laid the foundations for her new venture, she has yet to put her plans into action.” The business should not exist! There’s nothing to plead because she was never hurt, but this illegitimate court majority still took the case and used it to once again erode civil rights and roll back civil rights. equality gains.
The majority then announced, with an opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts, that it was reversing the student loan forgiveness program, granting a request by six Republican state attorneys general on behalf of a loan officer, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, that did not want to be used as a plaintiff. Without MOHELA, States had no standing to bring a complaint – they are not directly harmed.
Roberts and the majority were not going to mind that their plaintiff was an unwitting participant in this highly partisan scheme. “By law and function, MOHELA is an instrument of Missouri…The (debt forgiveness) plan will reduce MOHELA’s revenue, undermining its efforts to help Missouri students,” Roberts wrote. public service is necessarily a direct attack on Missouri itself.”
Never mind that in oral argument, the state admitted that MOHELA was not helping Missouri students because he hadn’t contributed to that fund in 15 years, and “said in its own financial documents that he does not plan to make any payments in the future. All this too was invented.
Judge Elana Kagan had none of that in her dissent. “The court’s first excess of power is to decide at all,” she wrote, saying states had no right to sue. “The plaintiffs in this case are six states that have no personal interest in the Secretary’s loan cancellation plan. They are classic ideological complainers: they think the plan is a very bad idea, but they are not worse off because the secretary differs.
And she leaves:
The law gives the secretary broad authority to grant emergency assistance to student borrowers, including changing the usual discharge rules. What the secretary has done fits perfectly into this delegation. But the Court forbids him to continue. As in other cases, the rules of the game change when Congress enacts broad delegations allowing agencies to take substantial regulatory action.
This, she says, “is not an appropriate role for a court. And it is a danger to a democratic order.” It earned a pearly rebuke from Roberts, who responded to her dissent by declaring it “harmful to this institution and to our country.”
The harm done to the establishment is entirely self-inflicted by Roberts and his ethically challenged majority. The court continues to take on wrong cases that don’t have to be heard and make arbitrary decisions based on their political whims, dressed in quirky fantasies. We have to stop it
This could include applying a code of ethicsthe legislation that the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider after the July recess and the measures recommended by the Brennan Center, such as limiting the terms of judges to 18 years and ensuring that each president gets two appointments to the court per presidential term. This would create a rotating core of justices, giving those whose terms had expired the ability to take on higher status and continue to serve on the Supreme Court or a lower court as needed.
All of that would be great, but what the country urgently needs is an expansion of the pitch to block this six-membered wrecking ball.
