“it is a unanimous opinion, joined in full by the Court’s Democratic appointees, that does little more than repudiate a single line in a 1977 Supreme Court decision that virtually everyone thinks was a mistake.”
…
“the decision in Groff v. DeJoy announces a new rule that will govern employees who seek an accommodation for their religious beliefs from their employer. Because requests for such accommodations are fairly common, that means that Groff will likely lead to a rush of lawsuits, at least in the short term, as courts try to figure out how to apply Groff’s new rule to individual cases.
Groff’s new rule states that religious accommodation requests should be granted unless they impose a “hardship” on the employer that “would be substantial in the context of an employer’s business.” This highly flexible new rule might potentially be used by far-right judges to give religious conservatives an unfair upper hand in disputes with their employer’s human resources department. Such is the price of vague legal rules.
That said, the actual holding of Groff — that most requests for religious accommodations should be granted, and that an employer cannot dodge this obligation because it might impose minimal costs on the employer — is largely benign. Indeed, it is likely to benefit many employees who make reasonable requests for accommodations that might have been denied under an earlier, less employee-friendly rule.
It will be up to the Supreme Court, in other words, to ensure that Groff does not allow rogue judges to disrupt the workplace. But the actual legal rule announced by Groff is a sensible one that should be applied fairly by most judges.”
“Roberts’s attempts to make the Heroes Act mean something other than what it says are at times confusing and difficult to parse. But it basically boils down to this: In order to provide for the particular mix of student loan relief prescribed by the Biden administration’s policy, the secretary had to both “waive” some student loan obligations and “modify” others. That is, the policy only works if the secretary has the power to outright eliminate some obligations, while merely making changes to others.
The chief’s primary attack on the Heroes Act’s statutory language is that he reads the word “modify” too narrowly to permit these changes. As he writes, the word “modify” “carries ‘a connotation of increment or limitation,’ and must be read to mean ‘to change moderately or in minor fashion.’” And then he faults the Biden administration for doing too much, attempting to “transform” student loan obligations instead of merely making “modest adjustments.””
…
““In the HEROES Act,” Kagan notes, “the dominant piece of context is that ‘modify’ does not stand alone. It is one part of a couplet: ‘waive or modify.’” The word “waive” moreover means “eliminate,” so Congress explicitly gave the secretary the power to simply wipe away student loan obligations altogether.”
…
“Perhaps recognizing that his attempts to parse the text of the Heroes Act may not be entirely persuasive, Roberts’s opinion also offers an alternative reason to strike down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program — something known as the “major questions doctrine.”
Briefly, the major questions doctrine states that the Court expects “Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” And, as Roberts writes, there’s little question that this student loans policy, which could forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans, involves matters of great significance.
But the most important thing to understand about the major questions doctrine is that it is completely made up. It appears nowhere in the Constitution, and nowhere in any statute, and was invented largely by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. It is true that the Supreme Court has invoked this made-up doctrine several times in the recent past — mostly in opinions joined entirely by Republican-appointed justices who wished to strike down policies pushed by Democratic presidents — but, in relying on this fabricated legal doctrine one more time, Roberts effectively cites past power grabs by the justices to justify a new power grab.
And even if you accept the major questions doctrine as legitimate, it’s not clear why Biden’s student loans program still should not be upheld. The doctrine merely states that Congress must “speak clearly” if it wishes to delegate significant authority to a federal agency. And, for the reasons explained in the previous section, Congress spoke quite clearly when it wrote the Heroes Act.”
“A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ first-in-the-nation ban on gender-affirming care for children as unconstitutional.., the first ruling to overturn such a prohibition as a growing number of Republican-led states adopt similar restrictions.
U.S. District Judge Jay Moody issued a permanent injunction against the Arkansas law, which would have prohibited doctors from providing gender-affirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18.”
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“Moody ruled that the prohibition violated the due process and equal protection rights of transgender youth and families. He said the law also violated the First Amendment rights of medical providers by prohibiting them from referring patients elsewhere.
“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” Moody wrote in his ruling.”
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“The ruling affects only the Arkansas ban but may carry implications for the fates of similar prohibitions, or discourage attempts to enact them, in other states.”
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” At least 19 other states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors following Arkansas’ law”
“Five years ago, a federal court issued a crucial ruling. People experiencing homelessness, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.
The 2018 decision in Martin v. Boise did not create the homelessness crisis, which researchers attribute primarily to the lack of affordable housing. The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping on the streets, in parks, in abandoned buildings or train stations, or anywhere not meant for humans to live — was rising before the decision.
But as the number of unsheltered homeless people continued to grow over the past half-decade, the Martin decision has become a pivotal factor in shaping how cities respond to the very visible problem of tent encampments, particularly on the West Coast. While the case never gained huge name recognition, it undergirds the policy and politics of homelessness in 2023. So much of the fight about how to address homelessness today is, at this point, a fight about Martin.”
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“Martin’s impact can be seen most clearly out West. Just before Christmas 2022, for example, a district judge cited Martin when she ruled that San Francisco can no longer enforce encampment sweeps — meaning clear out homeless individuals and their property from an outdoor area — since the city lacks enough shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness to move into. San Francisco appealed the decision, arguing it’s “unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation.”
In Phoenix, Arizona, residents and business owners filed a lawsuit last summer against the city for allowing a downtown homeless encampment to grow with nearly 1,000 people, but a federal judge — echoing Martin — barred Phoenix in December from conducting sweeps if there are more homeless people than shelter beds available. A competing decision issued in March by a state judge ordered Phoenix officials to clean up the “public nuisance” at the encampment by July 10, arguing the city has “erroneously” applied Martin to date.
In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, officials have scrambled to revise their local camping ordinance to be a “daytime” camping ban from 8 am to 8 pm instead, in recognition that any total camping ban is likely illegal under Martin.
Supporters of a more “get tough” approach to encampments say the social and political costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too high, and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is untenable, both morally and politically. Some think officials are getting complacent in relying on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.”
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“Unsheltered homelessness has risen sharply over the last seven years, and at a faster rate than homelessness overall. Unsheltered homeless people now account for 40 percent of all homeless people in the country, up from 31 percent in 2015.
Political pressure has mounted to respond to this growing problem of people sleeping in alleys, parks, and train stations. While it’s not clear this would be legal under Martin, a number of cities have turned to the idea of so-called sanctioned encampments, or legalized campsites. These are effectively designated areas where unhoused individuals can live outside, and some come with varying degrees of public services, like bathrooms, power outlets, medical care, and on-site case management.
In Portland, Oregon, lawmakers voted in November to create several large sanctioned campsites for homeless individuals, and ban the more than 700 other encampments spread across the city. Austin, Texas, has operated one sanctioned encampment of so-called “tiny homes” since 2019, on a seven-acre plot of asphalt near the airport. Denver, Colorado, is also moving to make its so-called “managed campsites” from the pandemic a permanent homelessness response tool.
The trade-off for legalized campsites, however, is that sleeping outside anywhere else in a city would then be illegal.”
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“Some advocates have taken a firm stance against the idea; they see sanctioned encampments as a means to segregate and criminalize unhoused people and effectively kick the can down the road by not finding them permanent housing.”
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“other cities with fewer available housing options say sanctioned encampments represent a decent interim solution, and maybe even better for unhoused residents compared to scattered campsites if cities can more effectively target social services to those corralled together.
Legalized campsites can also have a lower barrier to entry than many existing shelters, so supporters are framing them as a harm-reduction approach to homelessness.”
“after ProPublica revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas frequently takes lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, Thomas attempted to defend himself by claiming that this sort of “personal hospitality from close personal friends” is fine because Crow “did not have business before the court.”
As it turns out, that’s not true. As Bloomberg reports, the Supreme Court — including Justice Thomas — did briefly consider a $25 million copyright dispute involving a company that Crow was a partial owner of in 2005. At that point, Crow had already given a number of gifts to Thomas, including a $19,000 Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass.
As ProPublica later revealed, Crow even paid for the private school education of Thomas’s grandnephew, who Thomas said he is raising “as a son.” That includes tuition at a boarding school that charged more than $6,000 a month.
Similarly, if the rule is that justices must be extra careful when dealing with people who have business before the Supreme Court, then Justice Neil Gorsuch may also have violated this rule. According to Politico, a tract of land that Gorsuch owned with two other individuals was on the market for nearly two years before it found a buyer — nine days after Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The buyer was the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, a massive law firm that frequently practices before the Supreme Court.
As Politico notes, “such a sale would raise ethical problems for officials serving in many other branches of government,” but the rules governing the justices are particularly lax.
There is a federal statute which requires all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, to recuse themselves from any case “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” but there is no effective enforcement mechanism to apply this vague law to a Supreme Court justice.
Meanwhile, while lower federal judges must comply with a lengthy Code of Conduct for United States Judges, the nine most powerful judges in the country are famously not bound by this code of conduct — although Chief Justice John Roberts has claimed that he and his colleagues “consult the Code of Conduct in assessing their ethical obligations.”
The result is that the nine most powerful officials in the United States of America — men and women with the power to repeal or rewrite any law, who serve for life, and who will never have to stand for election and justify their actions before the voters — may also be the least constrained officials in the federal government.
And much of the blame for this state of affairs rests with the Constitution itself.”
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“The last time Thomas’s relationship with this billionaire made national headlines was probably 2011, after a series of news stories described some of the expensive gifts Thomas received from Crow and from organizations affiliated with Crow. That same year, Chief Justice Roberts used his annual Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary to defiantly rebut calls to apply additional ethical rules to the justices.””
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“The Constitution gives Congress the power to create lower federal courts, Roberts argued, and that empowers Congress to help oversee them. The Supreme Court, by contrast, is created by the Constitution itself, and that suggests that Congress has less power to constrain the justices.”
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” there is no higher court than the Supreme Court, and thus nobody that can review a justice’s refusal to recuse from a case — Roberts wrote that this is “a consequence of the Constitution’s command that there be only ‘one supreme Court.’” And Roberts argued that it would be “undesirable” to allow a justice’s colleagues to review their decision not to recuse because the other justices “could affect the outcome of a case by selecting who among its Members may participate.””
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“The Constitution provides that federal judges shall “hold their offices during good behaviour,” a provision that’s widely understood to require a judge to be impeached before they can be removed from office. And the impeachment process requires two-thirds of the Senate to vote to remove a justice from office — meaning that, in the current Senate, 16 Republicans would need to vote to remove Thomas, even if the GOP-controlled House agreed to begin an impeachment proceeding against him in the first place.”
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“both parties have an extraordinary incentive to appoint ideologically reliable judges to the courts, and to protect them. Once a staunch conservative like Thomas (or Gorsuch) is in office, Republicans have an overwhelming incentive to keep that justice in his seat regardless of whether the justice behaves unethically.”
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” The entire system is set up, in other words, in a way that rewards political parties that treat the judiciary as a partisan prize. It encourages presidents to appoint reliable partisans to the Supreme Court whenever they get the chance to do so. And, because neither party is likely to control 67 Senate seats any time soon, it also gives each party a veto power over any attempt to remove a justice — even if that justice is corrupt.”
“Even as Fox acknowledges a judge’s determination that it repeatedly aired “false” allegations about Dominion, it claims to be upholding “the highest journalistic standards.” Surely that means it will set the record straight. Not according to The Hill’s Dominick Mastrangelo, who reports that a “source with knowledge of the Fox/Dominion settlement says the network will not be required to issue any on-air retractions or apologies as part of the deal.””
“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury trips from a major Republican donor — and failed to disclose them — for over two decades, according to a bombshell ProPublica report that was published in early April. A second ProPublica report revealed that the same donor’s company purchased a house and two vacant lots from Thomas, a financial exchange he also did not disclose. And a Washington Post investigation found Thomas has repeatedly claimed income from a real estate company that no longer exists.
Thomas’s lack of disclosure about these trips and property sales is a clear violation of government ethics law, according to legal experts. A mistake may be behind the issue with his income statements — a new company with a similar name was formed after the first’s dissolution. That error, however, is reflective of a pattern of shoddy adherence to disclosure rules that has Thomas and his commitment to ethical conduct under new scrutiny.
Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are required to disclose such gifts and transactions under the Ethics in Government Act, which establishes rules for federal officials regarding what’s acceptable. As detailed by the law, transportation gifts, and most real estate sales above $1,000, need to be disclosed.
The recent reports follow Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself from litigation related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, even as his wife, Ginni Thomas, played a direct role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results. More broadly, they serve as reminders that Supreme Court justices face limited oversight or accountability — and have long refused to publicly engage with calls for stricter ethics rules.
In the past, lodging and food provided on someone’s property have been exempted from disclosure requirements, but transportation, which Thomas accepted, has not been. Per ProPublica, the “extent and frequency” of gifts that Thomas received from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow — which included flights on private jets and trips on luxury yachts — have “no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.” The property sales that Thomas made would also not be exempted from such laws.”