Religion and the lawbreaking Supreme Court | The Hill – Column

Lawyers sometimes irritate other people with their persnicketiness about technicalities.  But scrupulousness about legal detail is what gives courts their authority. It is big news if the Supreme Court ignores statutory limits on its own power. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has repeatedly issued orders without legal authorization. This was particularly…

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The phony rape exception to abortion bans | The Hill – Column

  Now that the Supreme Court permits states to outlaw abortion, Republican state legislators are bitterly split over whether abortion bans should include exceptions in cases of rape. This is a pointless political fight. Laws forbidding abortion often force women to bear their rapists’ babies. If you don’t want to do that, don’t support abortion prohibitions. For many…

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The Supreme Court’s squandered opportunity | The Hill – Column

  In 2022 the Supreme Court threw away an opportunity to ameliorate the toxic polarization of America. After the unseemly gamesmanship that led to the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, the new conservative majority should have looked for opportunities to, as Barrett said shortly after her confirmation, “convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch…

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The continuing, destructive power of libertarianism | The Hill – Column

At a recent conference on conservative philosophy, I told another professor that I’d just written a critical history of libertarianism. “You’re too late,” he said. “After Trump, libertarianism is dead in American politics.” Would that it were so. The Libertarian Party is indeed in deep trouble, torn apart by factionalism. Despite the increasing ubiquity of communitarian, nationalist rhetoric, however,…

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The abortion emergency in the federal courts | The Hill Column

  It is now notorious that the criminalization of abortion, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, doesn’t do much to lower the abortion rate but has had devastating effects on the ability of doctors to treat pregnancies that go wrong.  Horror stories accumulate. Opponents of abortion have claimed that the press has exaggerated the…

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Religion and the wrong defense of abortion rights | The Hill Column

  It is commonly claimed that restrictions on abortion illegitimately impose some people’s religious beliefs on the rest of us. This is the wrong way to defend abortion rights. It implies that religious motives have no legitimate place in lawmaking. In fact, we all have normative commitments that we have trouble articulating – you could call them matters of…

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Climate change and the Supreme Court’s version of police abolitionism — The Hill Column

    West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which in June gutted the Biden administration’s ability to reduce the electrical power industry’s carbon emissions, may be the Supreme Court’s most reckless and lawless decision (in an extremely competitive field). The court comes close to anarchism, crippling Congress’s capacity to protect the country from disaster and undermining the…

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The neglected common ground on abortion — The Hill Column

  Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in American politics, made even more toxic by the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t need to be. Pro-life and pro-choice people should be able to agree on policies that would actually reduce the abortion rate. To accomplish that, though, opponents of…

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The Supreme Court and the new religious aristocracy — The Hill Column

The Supreme Court has effectively authorized schoolteachers to pressure their students to pray. Kennedy v. Bremerton held that football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to engage in what Justice Neil Gorsuch called a “short, private, personal prayer” on the 50-yard line after games. The court held that forbidding that prayer improperly discriminated on the basis of religion,…

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