Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump made no bones about his intent to appoint justices who’d overturn Roe. He delivered on that promise, with the help of Republicans laser-focused on cementing the court’s conservative majority. All three of Trump’s appointees were in the majority in Friday’s 5-4 decision. Now the fight over abortion — and, troublingly, other privacy issues — is being kicked to the states. Justice Clarence Thomas raised the prospect of a broadening social war in his concurring opinion Friday reversing Roe. “We should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” Thomas wrote, raising fears the high court could use the same justification to overturn rights to contraception and same-sex relations.

Voters don’t have a choice over Supreme Court nominees. But they do have a vote for governor, senator and president. And Friday’s opinion underscores how important state legislative races have become. This ruling is a travesty that will bring untold danger and hardship. It also identifies where the battlegrounds lie for preserving rights in America.

I don’t know how they interpret progress.

Re: Region Philbis (Post 7237772)
I think it's a result of being a new country.

You don't have a lot of History so you become unhealthily attached to what you do have.

By enshrining a constitutional “right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen all but guarantees more guns on streets already bristling with them. It ushers in a world that many people will not be happy to inhabit. But the conservative justices are already living in that world. A dark and cynical view of society runs through their opinions and the questions they asked at oral argument. Danger lurks behind every corner, threatening to lunge at our heels, and the best we can do is arm up. It’s a Wild West worldview in the guise of an originalist, text-bound decision.

Bruen strikes down a New York law, the Sullivan Act of 1911, that required applicants to show a special need for self-protection before getting a license to publicly carry a gun. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas presents the case as a direct descendant of Heller v. D.C., the Supreme Court decision from 2008 that first established an individual right to bear arms. The Court in that decision interpreted the Second Amendment to broadly guarantee a right to “possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” but it concentrated on securing that right within the gun owner’s home, “where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute.” In Heller, the conservative justices had a particular menace in mind that Americans needed to defend themselves against: the home intruder. In Bruen, by contrast, the menace is pervasive and diffuse.

Gun rights must be extended from the home to public spaces, Justice Thomas writes, because “confrontation can surely take place outside the home” and indeed “many Americans hazard greater danger outside the home than in it.” For this, he cites a Seventh Circuit case from 2012 recognizing a right to bear arms in public, in which Judge Richard Posner wrote that “a Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower.” (Posner’s point there was that residents of twenty-first century Illinois still faced dangers that require self-defense, though no longer posed by “hostile Indians.”)

Justice Alito’s concurring opinion draws the hazards of public life in even brighter lines. In one particularly vague provocation, he writes that “many people face a serious risk of lethal violence when they venture outside their homes.” He goes on, in the language of 1990s fear-mongering, to speculate: “No one apparently knows how many of the 400 million privately held guns [in the US] are in the hands of criminals, but there can be little doubt that many muggers and rapists are armed and are undeterred by the Sullivan Law.” Some people, he says, “must traverse dark and dangerous streets in order to reach their homes” and “some of these people reasonably believe that unless they can brandish or, if necessary, use a handgun in the case of attack, they may be murdered, raped, or suffer some other serious injury.”

At oral argument, Justice Alito pressed New York’s Solicitor General to confirm that “there are a lot of armed people on the streets of New York and in the subways late at night right now.” When she said she did not know how many armed people were on the subways late at night, he pressed on: “All these people with illegal guns, they’re on the subway… they’re walking around the streets, but the ordinary hard-working, law-abiding people I mentioned, no, they can’t be armed?” Justice Kavanaugh, twisting an earlier statement from the Solicitor General that rapes and robberies happen on deserted bike paths, said that “there are a lot of serious violent crimes on running paths.” When Justice Sotomayor asked Paul Clement, the attorney challenging the law, whether the two clients at the heart of the case from rural New York really had a need for self-defense in public places, he responded that the client might have to drive to a country road at night and help a relative with a change of tire, suggesting that he could be attacked while doing so.

Streets, sidewalks, country roads, and running paths are transformed here from shared, communal spaces into hostile sites of potential violence. In striking down New York’s requirement, Thomas explains that the Constitution must be understood to guarantee the right to carry guns in public not just to people with a specific need for self-protection but to all citizens with “ordinary self-defense needs.” Since the Constitution guarantees rights equally, the Court’s implication is that all of us have a need for armed self-defense, just by living with one another.

Even while some of the justices’ examples of threats are distressingly vivid, though, there is something unreal about Bruen’s treatment of what it really means to give people guns to defend against those threats. No time is spent wondering what happens when a person with a firearm is actually attacked while traversing a dark and dangerous street, or when someone on a subway thinks they’re being mugged. Even the language the majority uses, guaranteeing the right to arms “in case of confrontation,” is sanitized, unspecific, and polite. The specter of legally justified murders, accidents, and manslaughters grimly haunts the decision. The scariest part of the story Bruen tells about the ugly world we live in is that the conservatives have changed the law in a way that will vindicate their cynical view of humanity. We will all become more afraid of one another, and reasonably so.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Republican candidate for governor in Arkansas:
"We're going to make sure that a child is just as safe in a womb as they are in a classroom."
In May, 19 primary school children were shot dead in Texas in their classroom. A day before his abortion ruling, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court had relaxed gun laws nationwide.

When they are still in the womb they don't have to practice the "Hid from Shooters Drill". Thank you Sarah, what a champ.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a former Washington state high school football coach had a right to pray on the field immediately after games.

The 6-3 ruling was a victory for Joseph Kennedy, who claimed that the Bremerton School District violated his religious freedom by telling him he couldn’t pray so publicly after the games. The district said it was trying to avoid the appearance that the school was endorsing a religious point of view.

"Both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect expressions like Mr. Kennedy’s," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. "Nor does a proper understanding of the Amendment’s Establishment Clause require the government to single out private religious speech for special disfavor. The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike."

In recent years, a more conservative Supreme Court has been inclined to view government actions it once considered to be neutral and necessary to maintain separation of church and state as hostile to religious expression.

One issue in the case was whether the coach’s decision to pray in such a prominent place, on the 50-yard line, amounted to a private moment of giving thanks or a public demonstration of his religious faith that his players may have felt compelled to join.

Kennedy urged the Supreme Court to find that he was acting on his own behalf, expressing his own religious views, not speaking as a mouthpiece for the school. But the school district said the students on the football team looked up to their coach and felt coerced into doing as he did.

In a dissent joined by the two other liberal justices, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court "consistently has recognized that school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible" and said the ruling did a "disservice" to schools, students and "the nation's longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state.”

"Today’s decision is particularly misguided because it elevates the religious rights of a school official, who voluntarily accepted public employment and the limits that public employment entails, over those of his students, who are required to attend school and who this Court has long recognized are particularly vulnerable and deserving of protection," Sotomayor wrote. "In doing so, the Court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing States to entangle themselves with religion, with all of our rights hanging in the balance."