Sherry Chandler » Your Supreme Court in Action

Your Supreme Court in Action

Think Progress has a nice précis of the Supremes decisions this week:

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Bush administration, corporations, and a “pro-life” group in a series of decisions announced today, reaffirming the conservative, business-friendly bent the Court has taken under Chief Justice John Roberts

The findings were weakened the campaign finance reform bill and the EPA’s protection of endangered species but found in favor of government funding of faith-based organizations. Oh yes, and against a banner-waving high school student.

“Bong hits for Jesus” “Bong hits 4 Jesus” is not protected free speech but defamatory campaign ads by Wisconsin Right to Life are. For an analysis of what this means, I recommend, as always, Dahlia Lithwick:

I look out at the landscape and all I can see if 5-4, 5-4, 5-4 as far as the eye can see. Samuel Alito and John Roberts, hand in hand, are claiming not to be overruling the cases they are either overruling or rendering nonsensical. (”Look how moderate we are!”) And Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are Jonesing to go ahead and overrule everything in their path. Anthony Kennedy, completely in the thrall of all of them, it seems, is doing whatever it is he is doing.

Before we get to the merits of both Hein (the faith-based case) and FEC v. WRTL (the campaign finance case), let’s start by squaring the forest with the trees here. What we are looking at is a sea change at the high court, a sea change that is going to happen in a hundred small waves of 5-4, 5-4, 5-4. Don’t today’s overrulings by not quite overruling look like Alito’s original plan for Roe? Don’t bother to kill the old precedent, just hollow it out from the inside and hope nobody notices?

Ending with a comment from Steve Benen:

Ultimately, the high court sided with conservative interests across the board. In each instance, the ruling was 5 to 4, and the minority was made up of the same four left-leaning justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens). Alito wrote two of the opinions, and Roberts wrote the other two.

Had Kerry won Ohio in 2004, the right probably would have lost in each of these cases. I guess it’s one of those elections-have-consequences moments, isn’t it?

Postscript: I have a new post up at The Peace Tree.

Related posts:

    Thoughts on Roe V Wade
    A lawless decision
    A dip into politics
    Importance of women on the court
    We don’t play on half the court no more

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Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 Current Events Trackback URL for this entry

3 Comments

  • 1. David replies at 27th June 2007, 5:07 am :

    Heard Jesus liked a little wine. Don’t know about the bong but if He made it it’s good

  • 2. sherry replies at 27th June 2007, 5:45 am :

    Well, now, you see David, this was just Roberts’s contention: that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” promotes drug use. Whereas John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissent said this:

    “To the extent the court independently finds that ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’ objectively amounts to the advocacy of illegal drug use — in other words, that it can most reasonably be interpreted as such — that conclusion practically refutes itself. This is a nonsense message, not advocacy.”

    Even the Washington Post, which has seemed to side with the Bushies on most everything, thinks this one was a bad decision:

    A more serious objection concerns the chief justice’s expansion of the kinds of speech that can be restricted in school. As Justice Stephen G. Breyer noted, the fact that illegal drugs are harmful to students is not a sufficient explanation for banning a broad category of campus expression. The same reasoning can apply to any number of contentious issues. In addition, Mr. Roberts’s language suggested that the stated policies of local school boards or other relevant governmental entities should determine in part whether expressing a particular view is permissible at school. Two members of the majority — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Anthony M. Kennedy — explicitly rejected that argument in a concurring opinion, so the court’s decision did not enshrine it. But the principle is nonetheless disturbing and, if applied in different cases later, has the potential to shut down student speech on a range of controversial subjects.

    Issues of drug use and drug policy are matters of serious contention. High school students must be able to debate them frankly — and that might even involve students taking the position that bong hits are not that bad.

  • 3. Alan Bender replies at 27th June 2007, 11:09 pm :

    David you would enjoy this:

    Jesus was a stoner!

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