Louisiana's Ten Commandments law struck down by US appeals court
June 20 (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Friday blocked Louisiana from enforcing a law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms of the state's public schools and universities.
Calling the law "plainly unconstitutional," a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans unanimously upheld a November 2024 ruling by a lower court judge who enjoined the law's enforcement.
It is a victory for parents and students who accused Louisiana of trampling on their religious rights, and a defeat for Republicans and conservative groups trying to make expressions of faith more prominent in society.
The appeals court is widely considered among the country's most conservative, though two judges on Friday's panel were appointed by Democratic presidents.
According to published reports, Louisiana's Republican attorney general, Liz Murrill, will ask the full appeals court and perhaps eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to review the case.
Murrill's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nine families, including several clergy, with children in public schools sued to block the law, saying it violated the First Amendment prohibition against state establishment of religion.
"We are grateful for this decision, which honors the religious diversity and religious-freedom rights of public school families across Louisiana," said Darcy Roake, a Unitarian Universalist minister who with her Jewish husband Adrian Van Young is among the plaintiffs.
Louisiana's law requires the display of posters or framed versions of the Ten Commandments that are at least 11 inches by 14 inches, with the Commandments being the "central focus" and printed in a large, easy-to-read font.
The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry, covers K-12 schools and state-funded colleges, and was scheduled to take effect on January 1.
In Friday's decision, Circuit Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez cited a 1980 Supreme Court decision, Stone v. Graham, that struck down a Kentucky law requiring similar displays of the Ten Commandments because it had no "secular legislative purpose."
Louisiana said the Stone decision no longer applied because it relied on a precedent that the Supreme Court has disavowed.
It also said that even if Stone applied, Louisiana's case differed because schools could display the Ten Commandments with documents such as the Declaration of Independence, reflecting a secular "historical and educational" purpose.
Ramirez, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, nonetheless cited several legislators who expressed religion-based justifications for Louisiana's law. These included that the Ten Commandments were "God's law," and that opponents were waging an "attack" on Christianity.
"If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments," Ramirez wrote, quoting the Stone decision. "This is not a permissible state objective."
Ramirez also rejected Louisiana's argument that the Supreme Court's 2022 decision favoring a Washington state high school football coach who prayed with players at the 50-yard line after games required upholding the Ten Commandments law.
She said this was in part because the Washington case primarily concerned First Amendment provisions governing free speech and the free exercise of religion.
Louisiana was the first U.S. state requiring displays of the Ten Commandments since the Kentucky law was struck down.
The case is Roake et al v Brumley et al, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-30706.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Mahmoud Khalil, pro-Palestinian activist, released after 104 days
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist detained by the Trump administration over his ties to student protests, has been released from immigration detention after 104 days. The former Columbia University student became a symbol of the president's clampdown on campus demonstrations when he was arrested and threatened with deportation. On Friday a federal judge ruled Khalil, a green card holder married to an American, must be released on bail. He walked free from a detention centre in Louisiana and said he wanted to hug his wife and newborn son. 'Justice prevailed, but it's very long overdue,' Khalil said while wearing a keffiyeh, a black and white headscarf which has become a symbol of solidarity with Palestine. 'This shouldn't have taken three months.' He is expected to travel to New York to reunite with his family. Khalil was detained outside his apartment in New York in March over his ties to the student protests and encampments at Columbia that later spread to colleges across the nation. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that he should be deported and that his participation in 'antisemitic protests' posed a national security threat. Khalil and his supporters maintain he is innocent and that he took part in legitimate protests. He missed the birth of his son while detained. District Judge Michael Farbiarz said it would be 'highly, highly unusual' for the government to continue detaining a legal US resident who was not a flight risk and who had not been accused of violence. 'Petitioner is not a flight risk, and the evidence presented is that he is not a danger to the community,' he said. 'Period, full stop.' After leaving detention Khalil condemned the White House's immigration policies. 'The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanise everyone here,' he said of the immigrants still behind bars. 'Whether you are a US citizen, an immigrant or just a person on this land, doesn't mean that you are less of a human.' Under the terms of his release Khalil had to surrender his passport and cannot travel internationally. He can however travel within the country including to New York and Michigan to visit family, New Jersey and Louisiana for court appearances and Washington to lobby Congress.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Middle East situation ‘perilous', says Lammy amid calls for more talks
The situation in the Middle East is 'perilous', the Foreign Secretary said as he urged Iran to negotiate with the US. David Lammy flew from Washington to Geneva on Friday to meet Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi alongside his French and German counterparts as the UK continued to press for a diplomatic solution to the Middle East crisis. The talks followed US President Donald Trump's announcement that he would delay a decision on joining Israeli strikes against Iran for up to two weeks. Speaking after the meeting, Mr Lammy told reporters: 'It is still clear to me, as President Trump indicated yesterday, that there is a window of within two weeks where we can see a diplomatic solution.' Urging Iran to 'take that off ramp' and talk to the Americans, he said: 'We have a window of time. This is perilous and deadly serious.' He added that the US and Europe were pushing for Iran to agree to zero enrichment of uranium as a 'starting point' for negotiations. But Mr Araghchi said Iran would not negotiate with the US as long as Israel continued to carry out airstrikes against the country, and insisted his country's nuclear programme was entirely peaceful. Both sides continued to exchange fire on Friday, with Iranian missiles targeting the city of Haifa while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tel Aviv's military operation would continue 'for as long as it takes'. Meanwhile, the UK Government has announced it will use charter flights to evacuate Britons stranded in Israel once the country's airspace reopens. Mr Lammy said work is under way to provide the flights 'based on levels of demand' from UK citizens who want to leave the region. The move follows criticism of the Foreign Office's initial response, which saw family members of embassy staff evacuated while UK citizens were not advised to leave and told to follow local guidance. The Government said the move to temporarily withdraw family members had been a 'precautionary measure'. On Friday, the Foreign Office announced that UK staff had also been evacuated from Iran, with the embassy continuing to operate remotely. But the Government continues to advise British nationals in the region to follow local advice, rather than urging them to leave. The US evacuated 79 staff and families from the embassy in Israel on Friday local time, according to the Associated Press. Mr Trump told reporters his national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard was 'wrong' when she told lawmakers in March that US intelligence officials did not believe Iran had been building a nuclear weapon. The president also suggested it would be 'very hard to stop' Israeli strikes on Iran to negotiate a ceasefire.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Trump attack on Left-wing bias on TV sparks ‘constitutional crisis'
Elon Musk may have stepped aside, but Donald Trump still has a Doge problem. The US president's plan to run a scythe through up to $425bn (£316bn) of government spending could be gutted or even vetoed in the Senate, where just a few rebel Republicans could scupper the cuts. But Trump and Russell Vought, his budget tsar, have hatched a scheme, called a 'pocket rescission', that might keep the Doge (department of government efficiency) dream on track. And it could even shift the constitutional balance of power between president and Congress towards a testy Trump. It's a high-risk, high-stakes strategy. The outcome will determine whether the Doge spending reductions can go ahead, helping to pay for Trump's 'big, beautiful' tax cuts without blowing out the budget and rattling the bond markets. But the unprecedented procedure takes the White House and Capitol Hill into uncharted legal waters. So it is likely to end up in the courts – joining a raft of litigation that will either reinforce the institutional checks on the president's power or unleash him. 'It's a challenge to Congress,' says Sarah Binder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University. 'I don't like to throw around the term 'constitutional crisis', but it's not a great position for lawmakers and institutions.' Under the constitution, Congress has the so-called power of the purse, meaning that lawmakers, not the president, are the final arbiter of what the government spends or does not spend. If the president wants to cut funding or programmes that Congress has already authorised, his only option is to launch a rescission procedure – a formal request for the cuts, which both houses of Congress must approve. The rescission process was introduced in a law called the Impoundment Control Act, which had the overall aim of making it hard for Richard Nixon, the then-president, and his successors from delaying or withholding funds once Congress had green-lighted them. Rescission has seldom been used. Ronald Reagan used it to secure $15.2bn of spending cuts as president in the early 1980s, but later in the decade, Congress tended to ignore or refuse his rescission messages. Trump tried it on with a $15bn-plus request in his first term, but was stymied in the Senate. The Democrats then got control of Congress in the midterms and pushed back another $27bn salvo. Now Trump is trying again. The initial proposal – Vought says it will be 'the first of many' – is to scuttle $9.4bn of spending on public broadcasters and international aid programmes. This rescission was flagged back in March but formally put to Congress only this month. In an executive order early last month, Trump said he wanted to terminate all public funding of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which accounts for about $1bn of this first rescission package. 'Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens,' Trump said. 'Today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.' The White House has until July 18 to persuade Congress. The rescission scraped through the House of Representatives by 214 votes to 212, but the Senate is the real test. If just four Republicans in the 100-seat upper house swap sides, the spending stays in place. It's not looking promising for Trump. Several Republicans have already voiced concern about at least some of the cuts. The dissenters include Senator Susan Collins, who chairs an influential Senate finance committee that will consider the cuts at a session on June 25. There could be fireworks. Vought will appear before the committee and, in recent weeks, he has started airing the possibility of bypassing Congress altogether through an untested and almost unknown variant of rescission: the so-called pocket rescission. 'It's a provision that has been rarely used, but it is there,' Vought told CNN. 'And we intend to use all of these tools.' The trick with the pocket rescission is to make the request to Congress right before the end of the fiscal year, which runs to Sept 30. The White House reckons that the Impoundment Control Act's wording creates a loophole: if Congress does not act on the request before Sept 30, then even if the window is well short of 45 days the spending approval will lapse automatically on that date. The case for pocket rescissions was made recently by Wade Miller, of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a Right-wing think tank. 'A rescission is a viable tool for carrying out the broader political mandate to curb unnecessary spending,' he wrote in a briefing paper. 'If the executive branch decides to use this process, the deployment of a rescission with fewer than 45 days remaining in the fiscal year is a statutorily and constitutionally valid strategy.' The CRA was set up by Vought himself, after he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the final six months of Trump's first term. He returned to the White House with the president this January, in the same role. But other Washington think tanks trenchantly oppose the CRA's position. 'Calling it a pocket rescission implies that it's like an actual functional tool under the law, in a way that it's actually not. It is a strategy that the person who is running the Office of Management and Budget has articulated to evade the law,' says Cerin Lindgrensavage, a lawyer at Protect Democracy. She says the whole purpose of the Impoundment Control Act was to stop any presidential ploy to skirt its strictures. 'One of the reasons why they might want to do this is because they're afraid they don't have the votes to actually make the cuts the legal way.' Binder, from Brookings, says that the Act doesn't explicitly deal with what happens if a president makes the request right before the end of the fiscal year. 'There's certainly room here for an aggressive Office of Management and Budget and an aggressive administration to try to stretch – others might say manipulate – the silence in the budget law,' she says. 'But the logic of the matter suggests that pocket rescissions are not legal under the Act and I would imagine there's a strong argument that they are unconstitutional under Congress's power of the purse.' Binder suspects Vought is looking to get a test case into the courts. Given there could be a constitutional principle at stake, it could go all the way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of judges are Republican appointees. In the meantime, litigants could get restraining orders or injunctions to prevent the Doge cuts. But they can't necessarily get the White House to respect these. The stage is set for a constitutional showdown. The question is whether Trump and Vought will really pull the trigger. And then, whether the weapon will actually work.
