In April, I wrote about a legal challenge to Obamacare in which opponents had argued that the text of the ACA law only allowed state health exchanges to provide subsidies for the health insurance premiums and that the federal government should not have been allowed to provide subsidies through its own exchanges in those states that decided against setting up their own exchanges.
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The Daily Show commented on the Hobby Lobby case and had as their guest Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the implications of that case and also the inconsistent way that the US Supreme Court views free speech rights and buffer zones.
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While the majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case argued that it was a limited decision affecting a narrow class of companies, it seems to be part of a general strategy of the US Supreme Court to slowly but steadily encroach on the rights or women and workers for the benefit of corporations.
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There was another important 5-4 ruling yesterday in the case of Harris v. Quinn, where the US Supreme Court dealt a blow to unions by saying that public employees cannot routinely be required to join labor unions or to support them by paying dues. (You can read more on that case here and here and here.)
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It looks like Hobby Lobby has won its case. In a 5-4 decision along the usual lines (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy, all of whom are Catholics by the way), the court said that ‘closely held corporations’ (a specific type of for-profit corporation) each owned and controlled by members of a single family cannot be forced to provide contraception coverage for its employees and should be given the same accommodations as the government gave nonprofit organizations.
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Readers may recall the interesting case involving a company called Aereo that was marketing a small antenna that can be connected to your mobile device. That antenna was linked to an transmitter at Aereo that picked up programming that is being broadcast over the air by the TV networks. In other words, you can watch broadcast TV anywhere without a TV and can even record and save the programs for later viewing. TV stations sued, saying that these retransmissions were violating their copyright.
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Today is the first anniversary of the landmark ruling United States v. Windsor that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional and opened the floodgates to a large number of court cases that have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. So far 14 District Courts have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage (with Indiana joining them yesterday) and other courts have ruled favorably on related aspects of same-sex marriage, such as whether states that do not allow it must respect the marriages of those who were legally married in other states. There has not been a single defeat.
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The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that police cannot search one’s cell phone without a warrant. This is a good decision that puts at least some brake on the invasion of privacy by the government.
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I have railed against the abuse of the US government’s notorious ‘No Fly List’, where the government keeps a secret list that tells airlines not to let people fly without telling them why they have been forbidden, what they need to do to get their names removed, nor even (in the early days) that they have such a list at all. This is such an arbitrary abuse of government power and due process that it boggles the mind
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In the last year, ever since the US Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor last summer, advocates for the legalization of same-sex marriage have won one victory after another in federal and state courts. But the real test will come when the Appeals Courts around the country rule on the appeals against the lower court verdicts.
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