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Yahoo
05-08-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court just revealed its plan to make gerrymandering even worse
One of the biggest mysteries that has emerged from the Trump-era Supreme Court is the 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan. In Milligan, two of the Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — voted with the Court's Democratic minority to strike down Alabama's racially gerrymandered congressional maps, ordering the state to redraw those maps to include an additional district with a Black majority. As Roberts emphasized in his opinion for the Court in Milligan, a lower court that also struck down these maps 'faithfully applied our precedents.' But the Roberts Court frequently overrules or ignores precedents that interpret the Voting Rights Act — the federal law at issue in Milligan — to do more than block the most egregious forms of Jim Crow-like voter suppression. And the Court's Republican majority is normally hostile to lawsuits challenging gerrymanders of any kind. Most notably, in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Republican justices held that federal courts may not hear suits challenging partisan gerrymanders. Among other things, Rucho enables tactics like Texas Republicans' current plans to redraw that state's congressional maps to maximize GOP power in Congress. So why did two Republican justices break with their previous skepticism of gerrymandering suits in the Milligan case? A new order that the Supreme Court handed down Friday evening appears to answer that question. The new order, in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, suggests that the Court's decision in Milligan was merely a minor detour, and that Roberts and Kavanaugh's votes in Milligan were largely driven by unwise legal decisions by Alabama's lawyers. The legal issues in the Callais case are virtually identical to the ones presented in Milligan, but the Court's new order indicates it is likely to use Callais to strike down the Voting Rights Act's safeguards against gerrymandering altogether. The Callais order, in other words, doesn't simply suggest that Milligan was a one-off decision that is unlikely to be repeated. It also suggests that the Court's Republican majority will resume its laissez-faire approach to gerrymandering, just as the redistricting wars appear to be heating up. A brief history of the Supreme Court's approach to gerrymandering Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of lawsuits alleging that a legislative map is illegally gerrymandered. Partisan gerrymandering suits claim that a map was drawn to maximize one major political party's power at the expense of the other. Racial gerrymandering suits, meanwhile, allege that a state's legislative maps improperly dilute the voting power of voters of a particular race. Prior to Rucho, the Court imposed minimal — but not entirely nonexistent — limits on partisan gerrymandering. It has historically been more aggressive in policing racial gerrymanders. The Supreme Court held in Davis v. Bandemer (1986) that federal courts may hear claims alleging that a state's maps are so egregiously partisan that they amount to unconstitutional discrimination. The idea is that maps that intentionally inflate Democratic voters' power, while minimizing Republican voters' power (or vice-versa) violate the Constitution's guarantee that all voters should have an equal say in elections. Notably, however, no five justices agreed to a single legal standard that would allow courts to determine which maps are illegal partisan gerrymanders in Davis. Nor did a majority of the Court set such a standard in later lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders. In Rucho, the Republican justices essentially announced that the Court would give up its quest to find such a standard. A few years later, in Alexander v. NAACP (2024), those justices went even further, declaring that 'as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.' Though Davis's limits on partisan gerrymandering were always fuzzy, it is likely that this ambiguity deterred at least some states from enacting extreme gerrymanders that might have caused the courts to intervene. At the very least, Rucho changed how states litigate gerrymandering suits. Before Rucho, states accused of gerrymandering would often try to offer another explanation for why their maps benefited one party or the other. Now, they will openly state in their briefs that they drew maps for partisan reasons — confident that federal judges will do nothing, despite these confessions. Historically, however, the Court has imposed more concrete limits on racial gerrymanders. In Milligan, for example, the Court struck down Alabama congressional maps that would have given Black voters a majority in just one of the state's seven districts (or 14 percent of the districts), despite the fact that Black people make up about 27 percent of the state's population. The Court ordered the state to draw new maps with two Black-majority districts. The linchpin of Milligan and similar cases is the Court's decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), which laid out the rules governing when an alleged racial gerrymander violates the Voting Rights Act (which broadly prohibits race discrimination in elections). The framework laid out in Gingles is notoriously complicated, but it turns on whether voters in a particular state vote in racially cohesive blocs. Thus, for example, in a state where the white majority supports Republicans nearly all of the time, while the Black minority supports Democrats nearly all of the time, Gingles sometimes requires courts to redraw the state's maps to ensure that the Black minority is adequately represented. This is because, in such a state, the white majority can wield its near-unanimous support for Republicans to cut Black voters (and Democrats) out of power altogether. In a different state, where both Black and white voters sometimes vote for either party, Gingles tells courts to stay out of redistricting. Black voters, after all, are United States citizens who have as much of a right to choose their leaders as anyone else. So, if they choose to be represented by a white Republican in a free and fair election, that's their choice and the courts should honor it. Because Gingles only kicks in when an electorate's racial demographics closely match its partisan voting patterns, it places some practical limits on both partisan and racial gerrymandering. In Milligan, for example, Alabama was not able to draw maps that maximized Republican voting power because doing so required the state to dilute Black voting power. So, even though Rucho prevents lawsuits that challenge partisan gerrymandering directly, Gingles sometimes allows suits which target it indirectly by alleging that a partisan gerrymander is also an impermissible racial gerrymander. But now the Court is signaling that it is likely to overrule Gingles and abolish suits alleging that racial gerrymanders violate the Voting Rights Act altogether. So what's the deal with the Court's new order in Callais? The Callais case is virtually identical to Milligan — indeed, the cases are so similar that Louisiana said in a brief to the justices that Callais 'presents the same question' as the Alabama redistricting case. Before the Callais case reached the justices, a lower court determined that Louisiana's congressional maps violate Gingles, and ordered the state to draw an additional Black-majority district. Nevertheless, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Callais last March, all six of the Republican justices appeared to disagree with this lower court's decision — although the lower court's decision merely applied the same legal rules that the Supreme Court applied two years earlier in Milligan. Then, at the end of June, the Court issued a brief order announcing that it would hold an unusual second oral argument in Callais, and that it would seek additional briefing from the parties in this case. On Friday, the Court issued a new order laying out what these parties should address in those briefs. Those briefs should examine whether the lower court order requiring Louisiana to draw an additional Black-majority district 'violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.' The justices, in other words, want briefing on whether Gingles — and the Voting Rights Act's safeguards against racial gerrymandering more broadly — are unconstitutional. This suggestion that the Voting Rights Act may be unconstitutional — or, at least, that it violates the Republican justices' vision of the Constitution — should not surprise anyone who has followed the Court's voting rights cases. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Republican justices neutralized a different provision of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of racist election practices to 'preclear' new election laws with federal officials before they take effect. The Court's Republican majority labeled this provision 'strong medicine' that could be justified to combat the kind of widespread racial voting discrimination that existed during Jim Crow. But they argued that the United States was not racist enough in 2013 to justify letting preclearance remain in place. 'There is no denying,' Roberts wrote for the Court in Shelby County, 'that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.' Although Kavanaugh joined nearly all of the majority opinion in Milligan, he also wrote a separate opinion indicating that he wanted to extend Shelby County to gerrymandering cases in a future ruling. 'Even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under [the Voting Rights Act] for some period of time,' Kavanaugh wrote, 'the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.' Gingles also suggests that Voting Rights Act suits challenging racial gerrymanders should eventually cease to exist. If the electorate ceases to be racially polarized — something that appears to be slowly happening — then Gingles plaintiffs will no longer be able to win cases, and the federal judiciary's role in redistricting will diminish. But Kavanaugh seems to be impatient to end these suits while many states remain racially polarized. Read in the context of Kavanaugh's Milligan opinion, in other words, the new Callais order suggests that a majority of the justices have decided the Voting Rights Act's safeguards against racial gerrymandering have reached their expiration date, and they are looking for arguments to justify striking them down. It now looks like Milligan was Gingles's last gasp. The Republican justices remain hostile both to the Voting Rights Act and toward gerrymandering suits more broadly. And they appear very likely to use Callais to remove one of the few remaining safeguards against gerrymanders.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Justice Amy Coney Barrett defies expectations as 'center figure' on Supreme Court
When President Donald Trump appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court weeks before the 2020 election, outraged liberals attacked her as a right-wing ideologue while elated conservatives swooned over the promotion of a protégé of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Five years later, the court's junior conservative justice has surprised legal advocates on both ends of the spectrum, defying initial expectations, staking out independent ground, and at times conspicuously breaking with the Republican president who put her on the bench. As the court prepares to hand down its most consequential rulings of the year by the end of June, Barrett is widely viewed as a pivotal vote to watch. "Justice Barrett has emerged as the center figure, the swing justice, on the current Roberts Court," said Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Noah Feldman, who does not share Barrett's judicial philosophy but supported her confirmation. "Justice Barrett is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who is deeply committed to rule-of-law principles," said Feldman. "The reason she's ended up at the center of this court is that the arch-conservatives are so reactionary, so far to the right." When the court unanimously blocked Colorado from kicking Trump off the 2024 presidential ballot, Barrett wrote separately to chide her conservative colleagues for a ruling she called unnecessarily broad and to admonish the liberals for issuing a statement she said was strident in tone. "Writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up," she wrote. Barrett signed on to the historic opinion that that granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal charges for his role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but broke with the other conservative justices to insist the president could still be prosecuted for some attempts to meddle in the electoral vote. And, in a high stakes dispute over the nation's first religious charter school, a long-sought goal among religious conservatives and backed by the White House, Barrett recused herself from the case without explanation. The resulting 4-4 tie among the justices helped give liberal opponents of the school a win. "She's not just following the partisan political winds. She's not just following the latest fashions in judging. She's following what she thinks of as fundamental principles of legal judgment which she's gotten from the late Justice Scalia, who was her old mentor," Feldman said. To be sure, Barrett has played a key part in dramatic rightward shifts in American law, voting to overrule Roe v. Wade, end affirmative action, limit the power of federal agencies, and expand the rights of gun owners. But she's also taken positions that her critics have found inconsistent and unprincipled. When Trump made emergency appeals to the high court earlier this year seeking to override lower court orders, Barrett joined Chief Justice John Roberts and all three liberal justices in narrow 5-4 decisions that denied the president relief. In January, she voted to reject Trump's bid to delay sentencing for his New York felony conviction ahead of the inauguration, and later, voted to force the administration to pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign aid money that Trump had wanted frozen. In a similar but separate case involving Trump's freeze on federal education grants for state teacher training, Barrett took the president's side, overriding a district court order that the grants continue. "She is probably a little bit more moderate, a little more hesitant than other people may have predicted," said Josh Blackman, a prominent conservative constitutional scholar at South Texas College of Law, who was critical of Barrett's nomination from the start and now believes she should step down. MAGA movement loyalists have increasingly lashed out at Barrett, some branding her a "DEI judge" and a "DEI appointee." Mike Davis, conservative lawyer and close Trump ally, has repeatedly called Barrett a "rattled law professor with her head up her ass." Former Fox anchor and commentator Megyn Kelly said she worries Barrett is "a little squishy." "Please, Donald Trump, make sure you find a Scalia as our next Supreme Court justice if you get to appoint one," implored podcaster Glenn Beck in March. MORE: MAGA rage against Justice Barrett has been brewing: ANALYSIS Sources close to Trump have told ABC News that the president has heard the discontent and is frustrated that Barrett and his other high court nominees -- Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh -- have not more aggressively defended his second-term agenda. "I think she's brilliant. I think she was an excellent law professor. I don't know if she is approaching the job with the sort of consistency and sort of backbone that you would want from a Supreme Court justice," said Blackman. Going further, some of Barrett's critics claim the breaks with Trump have become personal, pointing to the justice's facial expression during an encounter with the president in the House chamber following his joint address to Congress in March. Video of that moment went viral online. "That look to me was a strange look," said Patrick Bet-David, a right-wing commentator and host of the PBD podcast. "Maybe we're reading into it, maybe there's nothing there. But it was kinda weird how she looked at the president." Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist turned host of the "War Room" podcast, said the look was "about as close to stink eye as you can get. I've had a couple of my ex-wives look at me like that." Justice Barrett did not respond to ABC News' request for comment, but her friends and former colleagues say the criticism of her rulings -- and facial expressions -- is unfair and overblown. "There's nothing in her work as a justice that is incongruous with what we knew from her scholarly career, or from the confirmation proceedings," said Rick Garnett, a close Barrett friend, former neighbor, and Notre Dame law school colleague. Justice Barrett has most often aligned with fellow Trump appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh (90% of the time) and least aligned with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor (63% of the time) in votes on cases argued before the court, according to data compiled by Adam Feldman, creator and author of Empirical SCOTUS blog. "There are some people on both sides of the aisle, I suppose, whose understanding of a judge is -- a good judge is the one who always gives you what you want," said Garnett. "That's not my understanding of a judge, and I don't think that's ever been what, you know, most Americans want judges to be." Still, many Republicans are haunted by some of the party's past picks for the high court who later morphed into frequent votes for the left rather than the right. Some have likened Barrett to the late Justice David Souter, who was appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush and later branded a turncoat. "There's really no comparison to be made between [Barrett] and Justice Souter except for the fact that each of them is being consistent to the judicial philosophy they brought to the bench," said Feldman, a former Souter clerk who worked at the court alongside Barrett when she clerked for Justice Scalia. Both critics and admirers of Justice Barrett say they see hallmarks of her near-decade experience as a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. To Blackman, Barrett seeks out a clear theory to justify her position on a given case. "Academics like theories. They want things to be explained where every facet of a case is understood. Barrett wants that from lawyers [arguing a case]," he said. Garnett, a law professor and former Barrett colleague, said her writings reflect a desire to educate the audience. "I had a chance to observe her as a teacher and a scholar and a faculty member for a long time, and in my view," he said, "the opinions are extremely well-executed and easy to read, which is not a surprise." This September, Barrett will release her first book as a justice, promising to "pull back the curtain on judicial process, as well as on her path to the court," according to an announcement by publisher Sentinel Books. It will be titled "Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution." Barrett has also increasingly used occasional public appearances as an opportunity to cultivate her public image, appearing alongside the court's senior liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an apparent attempt to shore up opinion of the court and promote civility. "I know that justice Sotomayor respects me and we have affection for one another -- I respect her very much -- even when we disagree deeply about the merits." Barrett said last year at a joint event at George Washington University. As for President Trump, respect for Barrett remains his public position on her tenure, despite any private misgivings, likely because he still needs her vote in the ongoing legal onslaught against his second-term agenda. "She's a very good woman. She's very smart," Trump said when asked in March about the right-wing attacks on Barrett. In the coming days, Barrett and the high court will hand down opinions in cases that have significant implications for Trump and his priorities, including a decision on an executive order ending birthright citizenship and three nationwide injunctions issued by district court judges to block it.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
5 Points On Boasberg's Big Alien Enemies Act Ruling
After being mostly scuttled by the Supreme Court, the original Alien Enemies Act case has re-entered the conversation. While the high court took most of the Alien Enemies Act challenges out of the hands of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. and distributed them to the individual judicial districts where Venezuelan nationals are being detained under the act, it left unresolved the fate of the deportees already removed to CECOT in El Salvador. In a significant ruling yesterday, Boasberg concluded that the CECOT detainees were denied due process when they were removed March 15. He ordered the Trump administration to propose a plan within a week for how to 'facilitate' giving the detainees the due process they were denied. While President Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was itself historic and the cases challenging his proclamation are testing the robustness of due process, the real import of these cases is that they are where the executive branch is threatening to and in fact is running roughshod over the judicial branch. In defying court orders, including to 'facilitate' the return of other wrongfully deported foreign nationals, the Trump administration has provoked a constitutional clash, practically daring the judicial branch to try to stop it. Boasberg's decision sets up another potential focal point for that constitutional clash. Here are 5 points on how Boasberg's ruling anticipates that confrontation: Boasberg's ruling wasn't a complete victory for the CECOT detainees. He found it unlikely that they would win their habeas corpus claims. For the detainees to prevail on the habeas claim, they had to show that they were in the 'constructive custody' of the United States, meaning under U.S. control or held at its behest. It's troubling that Boasberg was unconvinced on this point and even he seemed troubled by it, but by taking it off the table, he eliminates one ripe avenue of appeal for the government. By grounding his ruling in the due process clause of the 5th Amendment instead, he aligned with the Supreme Court's recent strong defense of due process in this very case. And in the end, he winds up at roughly the same place because he concluded that the remedy for violating the detainees due process was to allow them the chance to pursue the habeas claims they were denied in the first place. Boasberg seems keenly aware that this Supreme Court is going to give maximum deference to the executive branch. I suspect that's one reason he effectively sidestepped the 'constructive custody' issue. The Roberts Court isn't going to get involved in foreign policy by ordering the administration to make demands on El Salvador, and so Boasberg is walking a fine line. 'Although the Court is mindful that such a remedy may implicate sensitive diplomatic or national-security concerns within the exclusive province of the Executive Branch, it also has a constitutional duty to provide a remedy that will 'make good the wrong done,'' Boasberg wrote. In open court previously, Boasberg had mused about how due process could be provided without having to return the detainees to the United States. In his written opinion, Boasberg said that facilitating a return of the CECOT detainees is 'not necessarily' the only presumed remedy for the due process violation. Boasberg was vague about what kind of process he was looking for to provide the detainees with their denied due process. 'Exactly what such facilitation must entail will be determined in future proceedings,' he wrote. His invitation to the government to propose a process invites some sort of remote habeas proceeding. But in the short term it may not matter because the Trump administration will almost certainly appeal Boasberg's preliminary injunction to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and ask it to pause the case so that it doesn't have to propose a plan for giving the detainees belated due process, before the deadline Boasberg set for next week. From there, the case is a sure bet to go to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the CECOT detainees, who are approaching the three-month mark of their confinement there, will remain in indefinite custody. Plaintiffs typically must post an Injunction bond, which is intended to make defendants whole if it turns out the injunction was improperly granted. It's common for judges to waive an injunction bond when the injunction is against the federal government. I was left wondering whether Boasberg set a nominal bond of $1 here to sidestep the yet-to-pass House GOP's reconciliation bill which contains a provision that would prohibit federal judges from enforcing contempt citations unless a bond was posted when an injunction was issued. No way to confirm Boasberg's intentions, but it caught my eye. In his opinion, Boasberg highlights more than once the Trump administration's poor conduct in this case from the beginning. You'll recall he already found probable cause that the administration violated his order when it proceeded with the deportations on March 15 and didn't turn the planes around. He references his contempt of court inquiry in the opinion. All of which serves as good reminder that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals placed an administrative stay on the contempt of court inquiry more than six weeks ago. It's been fully briefed since April 28. And still no ruling from the appeals court. Meanwhile, several other courts have begun incipient contempt of court proceedings against the administration in other Alien Enemies Act cases and adjacent 'facilitate' cases. It's not at all clear what is taking the D.C. Circuit so long.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court Just Handed A Match To An Arsonist
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. In a tumultuous week that marked four months since Donald Trump's second inauguration, nothing will have as long-lasting and damaging an effect on American democracy as the Supreme Court's decision yesterday to upend 90 years of its own precedent and strip independent agencies of their independence. The high court's six-justice conservative majority fundamentally altered the structural balance of power among the branches of the federal government. It handed vast new power to the White House to put politics above expertise, partisanship above reason, and power over principle. All of that would have been bad enough at any other time, but the Roberts Court just handed a match to a confirmed arsonist in Donald Trump. As bad as the first four months of his second term have been, it was not enough to dislodge the conservative justices from their ideological attachment to the radical theory of a unitary executive. The immediate result of their decision will be to enable and encourage Trump's rampage across federal government to bring it to heel to his whims in dramatic and disturbing ways. But it also tilts the playing field of American politics in profound but often imperceptible ways that will persist for decades. One wonders how independent agencies will even function. They were created and have existed over the course of nearly a century under a certain set of assumptions about the importance of experts, consistency in policy-making, and insulation from partisan politics. What is their use or reason for being now if they're merely appendages of the White House doing its bidding? Political scientist Don Moynihan makes an insightful point about the impact of the Supreme Court's decision: With unitary executive theory, Congress cannot write robust new legislation that modernizes the civil service and stops politicization. A President could just ignore it. Even if Trump leaves office, and a new President looks to restore nonpartisan competence, their promises are only good for four or eight years before another President can come in and rip up the terms of their employment. And over time, why would even a good government President invest effort in restoring capacity if their successor can undermine it? With unitary executive theory, the public sector becomes permanently viewed as an unstable and chaotic workplace that we are seeing now. The most capable potential employees decide its not worth the bother, and the workforce becomes a mix of people who cannot get a job elsewhere, and short term political appointees. Last month, Todd Phillips warned of the intellectual dishonesty afoot if the Supreme Court did what it ultimately did do yesterday in overturning its Humphrey's Executor precedent while carving out a special exception for the Federal Reserve: 'In short, there is simply no principled way of ensuring the Fed's removal protections stand while striking down those of all other agencies.' Department of Education: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun of Massachusetts blocked massive layoffs at the department, concluding that they were a poorly camouflaged attempt by the Trump administration to unlawfully dismantle it. Voice of America: The Trump administration's silencing of the government broadcaster can continue after the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a stay pending appeal to remain in place. Gov't-wide: Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco extended her order blocking mass layoffs across 22 government agencies and reining in Trump administration efforts to dismantle some offices. Harvard: Harvard quickly filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration Friday morning challenging the Department of Homeland Security's revocation yesterday of the school's certification for admitting foreign students. 'This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,' DHS announced (the emphasis is in the original). Nationwide: U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of Oakland issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from revoking the legal status of foreign students en masse. Columbia: A trumped-up investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services accuses the school of violating civil rights law by 'acting with deliberate indifference' toward harassment against Jewish students. As the Trump administration weaponizes the government's investigative powers to target perceived political foes and people it doesn't like or agree with, editors and reporters can't continue to frame coverage of those investigations in the same way they always have. A couple of sample headlines from today: NYT: Regulators Are Investigating Whether Media Matters Colluded With Advertisers WSJ: Columbia Violated Students' Civil Rights, Government Investigation Finds Those framings only lend legitimacy to what is a dramatic departure from the legal and ethical strictures that bound government investigations in the past. Even in better times, journalists were often too deferential in their framing of investigations in ways that mirrored what prosecutors and law enforcement alleged. In the Trump era, the fact of the investigation is often more important than what it purports to investigate or uncover. The old ways of covering government investigation simply can't persist in these new conditions. Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina on the Trump FDA's decision to erect new hurdles for COVID vaccines for healthy people under the age of 65: On the surface, this sounds reasonable. After all, severe Covid-19 is far less common in healthy young people. Given growing immunity, real scientific questions exist about whether annual boosters are still warranted for everyone. And, yes, other countries do things differently. But beneath the surface, this move is deeply troubling. It bypasses the scientific systems built to answer these questions, replacing the public process in health policy with the opinions of two political appointees with chips on their shoulders. President Trump confirmed in a social media post that the deportation flight to South Sudan, which has been the focal point of an intense legal battle in federal court in Massachusetts this week, is parked in Djibouti. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay in the Alien Enemies Act case out of Houston, where U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison had issued a strongly worded order for the Trump administration to produce before midnight tonight detailed information about a Venezuelan man deported to El Salvador and not heard from since. A good analysis from Politico of how the Trump White House views losing in court on its lawless anti-immigration actions as still a win politically. Reuters: 'A hacker who breached the communications service used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month intercepted messages from a broader swathe of American officials than has previously been reported, according to a Reuters review, potentially raising the stakes of a breach that has already drawn questions about data security in the Trump administration.'
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court's latest case on religion in school could have far-reaching consequences
Can parents keep their kids from learning about evolution in public schools? What about books featuring wizards? What about pacifism? Feminism? Earth Day? There's seemingly no end to religious objections that one could make to various topics. That's relevant because the Supreme Court is hearing arguments Tuesday from Maryland parents who want to keep their elementary school kids from instruction involving gender and sexuality that they say bucks their beliefs. Technically, the plaintiffs of various faiths aren't trying to control what gets taught or to ban books. Rather, they're asking for notice and a chance to opt their kids out of certain instruction, in this case sparked by books featuring LGBTQ characters. So, what's the problem with that? After all, the Montgomery County school system previously allowed such 'opt-outs.' Lawyers for the school system told the justices that growing opt-out requests prompted three related concerns: 'high student absenteeism, the infeasibility of administering opt-outs across classrooms and schools, and the risk of exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.' They said the implications of the parents' position are drastic, accusing them of trying to 'unsettle a decades-old consensus that parents who choose to send their children to public school are not deprived of their right to freely exercise their religion simply because their children are exposed to curricular materials the parents find offensive.' Outside briefs from school groups highlight the potential impact beyond the particular facts of this case. One of them tells the justices that the idea behind keeping kindergartners from the books at issue here 'will also apply to the parents of a high-school or middle-school student who wish to prevent their ninth grader from being exposed to evolution or their sixth-grader being exposed to any pictures of girls who are not wearing a hijab.' Likewise, another brief lists an array of objections lodged around the country to various topics, such as interracial marriage, feminism, yoga, Earth Day, community service, magic, witches, wizards, evolution, vaccinations and more. Still, the parents say they face an 'impossible choice': subject their children to instruction against their beliefs or lose out on public education. They're represented by a religious liberty group and backed by the Trump administration. Representing the school system is WilmerHale, one of the law firms targeted by the administration's revenge orders. The firm has fought back on First Amendment grounds, thus far successfully. The parents in Tuesday's case, called Mahmoud v. Taylor, cite the amendment's religious freedom guarantee. That atmospheric element aside, religious claims have broadly fared well at the Roberts Court. And this latest case has the makings of one that could garner at least a majority of the justices' sympathies. Ultimately, it could wind up being not so much whether the religious side wins but where the court draws the line. That line-drawing consideration is an important one in many appeals but especially so here. Tuesday's hearing could shed light on what the court will do as the term nears its unofficial end, when the court usually publishes its final rulings by July. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration's legal cases. This article was originally published on
