By John Daniel Davidson
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Americans are beginning to lose confidence in the Supreme
Court. Traditionally, the court has been unique among our political
institutions in that Americans tend to have more confidence in it than they do
in Congress or the presidency. Indeed, for decades the judiciary as a whole has
enjoyed greater public trust than the other branches of government.
That’s beginning to change. Last fall, the court’s
disapproval rating hit a new high of 50 percent, continuing a long decline from
favorable opinion ratings as high as 77 percent in the 1990s. Such ratings have
of course always been somewhat partisan. Republican views of the court
plummeted after recent decisions on same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care
Act, while Democrats’ opinion of the court improved.
But something beyond mere partisanship is at play.
Americans increasingly view the Supreme Court not as a revered body of judges
considering questions of law, but as ideologues engaged at the front lines of
America’s culture wars. Last year, a Pew poll noted a major shift in how
Americans view the Supreme Court’s ideology, with nearly as many respondents
saying the court is liberal (36 percent) as it is middle-of-the-road (39
percent). At the same time, the number of those who say the court is
conservative (18 percent) declined sharply to its lowest point since 2007.
Monday’s raft of contradictory opinions helps explain why
this is happening. If Americans increasingly don’t believe the Supreme Court
cares all that much about matters of law, perhaps it’s because the court’s
rulings increasingly appear to be motivated by politics and preferred policy
outcomes rather than the rule of law or even consistent legal reasoning. Taken
together, the Monday decisions make clear that the court’s liberal majority
favors some rights over others, and will say just about anything to achieve the
outcome it desires.
The Non-Logic of
the Court’s Abortion Decision
Consider the big abortion ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which blocked parts of a Texas
law designed to impose more stringent regulations on abortion clinics.
Specifically, it blocked two provisions of the 2013 Texas law, one that
required abortion clinics to meet the standards of an ambulatory surgery center
and one that required physicians performing abortions to have admitting
privileges at a nearby (within 30 miles) hospital.
These requirements no doubt held abortion clinics to a
higher standard of care than previous state regulations did. But of course that
was the point, even if it meant some clinics would have to close, as some
subsequently did. The Texas legislature passed the law in the wake of the trial
of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist who ran a veritable house of horrors,
severing the spines of infants after they were born, clogging toilets with
human remains, operating on women with dirty instruments, and actually
butchering mothers and children alike. In May 2013, a jury convicted Gosnell on
three counts of murder, one count of involuntary manslaughter, and numerous
lesser counts. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of
parole.
The timing of his conviction is important. The Texas law
was introduced in a special legislative session called after Gosnell’s trial
and conviction, in June 2013. Lawmakers explained at the time that the new
regulations were to ensure something like Gosnell never happened in Texas. That
of course is the entire point of a lawmaking body, to decide how best to
protect the lives and liberties of the people in its jurisdiction.
In its ruling Monday, the majority opinion by Justice
Breyer conceded “Gosnell’s behavior was terribly wrong.” But then Breyer made
an astonishing claim that seemingly repudiates every regulatory scheme from gun
control laws to speed limits. As bad as Gosnell was, Breyer wrote, “there is no
reason to believe that an extra layer of regulation would have affected that
behavior. Determined wrongdoers, already ignoring existing statutes and safety
measures, are unlikely to be convinced to adopt safe practices by a new overlay
of regulations.”
With legal reasoning like that, it’s hard to believe the
Supreme Court would uphold state regulations on just about anything. Yet the
majority justified its position on the basis that the Texas rules amounted to
an “undue burden” on women exercising their right to an abortion. In a
blistering dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas attacked the very basis of the
majority’s logic:
The majority’s furtive
reconfiguration of the standard of scrutiny applicable to abortion restrictions
also points to a deeper problem. The undue-burden standard is just one variant
of the Court’s tiers-of-scrutiny approach to constitutional adjudication. And
the label the Court affixes to its level of scrutiny in assessing whether the
government can restrict a given right—be it ‘rational basis,’ intermediate,
strict, or something else—is increasingly a meaningless formalism. As the Court
applies whatever standard it likes to any given case, nothing but empty words
separates our constitutional decisions from judicial fiat.
Thomas also noted that “the majority’s undue-burden
balancing approach risks ruling out even minor, previously valid infringements
on access to abortion.” The logical consequence of “second-guessing medical
evidence and making its own assessments of ‘quality of care’ issues,” Thomas
added, is that “the majority reappoints this Court as ‘the country’s ex officio
medical board with powers to disapprove medical and operative practices and
standards throughout the United States.’”
The Second
Amendment Is Now A Second-Class Right
The court would apply no such “undue-burden balancing
approach” to Second Amendment rights in a 6-2 decision involving two Maine men
who were barred from owning firearms under federal law because they were
convicted of misdemeanor assault under state law. Both petitioners argue the
Maine law did not require prosecutors to show that they intentionally used
force, and that because their crimes were reckless in nature, their convictions
should not bar them from owning firearms.
Thomas, joined by Justice Sotomayor, argued that reckless
behavior doesn’t rise to the level of malicious intent meant to trigger the
federal weapons ban. In a sole dissent, Thomas noted that the majority’s
reasoning “expands [the federal ban]’s sweep into patently unconstitutional
territory.” He then gave some poignant examples:
We treat no other constitutional
right so cavalierly. At oral argument the Government could not identify any
other fundamental constitutional right that a person could lose forever by a
single conviction for an infraction punishable only by a fine.
In enacting [the federal firearms law], Congress was not
worried about a husband dropping a plate on his wife’s foot or a parent
injuring her child by texting while driving. Congress was worried that family
members were abusing other family members through acts of violence and keeping
their guns by pleading down to misdemeanors… Instead, under the majority’s
approach, a parent who has a car accident because he sent a text message while
driving can lose his right to bear arms forever if his wife or child suffers
the slightest injury from the crash.
Religious Liberty
Isn’t Worth the Supreme Court’s Time
Treating some rights as more equal than others is now
endemic among Supreme Court justices. Consider a case the court declined to
hear this week, about a Washington state law that makes it illegal for
pharmacies to refuse to dispense medications for religious reasons. Justice
Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Thomas, wrote a
dissenting opinion warning that the court’s refusal to hear the case was an
“ominous sign” for religious liberty.
At issue in the case is whether privately owned
pharmacies can opt out of providing services or medicines that conflict with
the owner’s religious beliefs, such as contraceptives or emergency
abortifacients. In fact, the state regulation requiring pharmacies to provide
“morning-after” contraception is what the challengers in the case, a group of
Christian pharmacy owners, say violates their religious freedom. A federal
appeals court said the regulations rationally further the state’s interest in
“patient safety,” and left it at that, which was apparently good enough for
five Supreme Court justices.
“Circuit held that the regulations do not violate the
First Amendment, and this Court does not deem the case worthy of our time,”
Alito wrote. “If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated
in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have cause for great
concern.”
The Court Is
Sinking to the Level of Congress and the White House
So no wonder Americans are beginning to lose confidence
in the highest court in the land. Like our other branches of government, the
Supreme Court increasingly doesn’t take its duties and responsibilities
seriously. President Obama has accustomed us to such behavior. What are
Americans to conclude about their government when they see, in the aftermath of
a terrorist attack by an avowed follower of the Islamic State, that the president
will barely admit it was an “attack” at all, let alone an attack inspired by
and carried out in the name of ISIS.
Or when the best response congressional Democrats could
muster to the Orlando attack was to stage a campus-style “sit-in” on the floor
of the House—not to demand more robust action against ISIS, but to insist on
gun-control legislation that would undermine Americans’ constitutional rights
under the Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth amendments.
So it is now with the Supreme Court. On major, hot-button
social issues like gun control, Obamacare, abortion, and gay marriage, a
growing share of Americans don’t really believe the liberal justices of the
Supreme Court—and even some supposedly conservative justices—are all that
interested in the U.S. Constitution anymore.
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