Back in 2014, I wrote about an interesting legal case out of Los Angeles where a new county seal was being proposed that would put a cross on the roof of an image of a church on the existing county seal. The case was interesting because of the role that history played in it and I discussed the legal aspects of it in that earlier post and will not repeat them here.
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The US Supreme Court issued an important unanimous 8-0 ruling today in a case involving voting rights. States are required to draw electoral districts that have roughly equal numbers of people. The question is whether the ‘people’ who count should be every resident (even those who cannot vote) or just eligible voters. The former has been the universal practice, since the argument has been that government serves everyone, voters and non-voters alike.
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On February 16, I wrote about a case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association that had been heard before the US Supreme Court that threatened the existence of trade unions because it challenged a long-standing 1977 precedent. That earlier case named Abood v. Detroit Board of Education allowed unions to collect fees from non-union members to cover the costs incurred in contract negotiations and enforcement that also benefited non-union members.
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The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a very important case involving Obamacare, religion, and contraception. This case does not challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare itself, although the religious groups bringing the suit and its conservative backers had hoped it would. After the Supreme Court twice ruled earlier upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, it turned down efforts to turn this into a third attempt.
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President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court. Garland seems to be a well-respected jurist, by all accounts not particularly ideological in any clearly identifiable way but instead someone who will bring a proper degree of thoughtfulness to the weighty matters the court deals with.
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The members of the US Supreme Court and high elected officials get good salaries and many perks of the job. For example, the salary of the Chief Justice is $258,100 while that of the associate justices is $246,800. This should enable them to live quite comfortably even in the pricey Washington, DC area. What it does not allow for is the ability to live like the millionaire class.
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After the Alabama state supreme court threw in the towel last Friday and ended their opposition to the US Supreme Court decision banning same-sex marriage, yesterday saw the state supreme court suffer another setback, this time being directly rebuked by the US Supreme Court in an adoption case involving a lesbian couple.
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The state of Alabama has been one of the holdouts against same-sex marriage despite the US Supreme Court ruling in June 2015 nullifying all state bans against it. The state’s chief justice Roy Moore has been adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and on March 3, 2015, before the US Supreme Court’s ruling, the state’s supreme court (with only one justice in dissent) had barred all the state probate court judges from issuing such licenses.
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In the US someone can set up a bogus church and proceed to fleece people by getting them to donate money, even what they cannot afford. Those donations are tax deductible and the pastors get to live the high life with fancy houses, private jets and the like at our expense. The government will not touch them because as soon as they do, people will scream ‘religious persecution’.
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The death of Antonin Scalia has cost Dow Chemical corporation about a billion dollars. As David Dayen explains:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was worth billions of dollars to corporate America, if a Dow Chemical settlement made public Friday is any indication.
Dow was in the midst of appealing a $1.06 billion class-action antitrust ruling, after a jury found that it had conspired with other chemical companies to fix prices for urethane, a material used in furniture and appliances.
But because of Scalia’s death and the sudden unlikelihood of finding five votes on the Supreme Court to overturn the case, Dow decided to settle for $835 million, the bulk of the original award.