Supreme Court

Norma Ramirez 4-16-2020

Photo courtesy Norma Ramirez

I have been called “illegal” most of my life. Coming to the United States without legal authorization somehow made me “illegal,” less than, and undeserving of basic human rights. To cope with it, I bought into the lie of merit: If I simply worked hard enough and did all the “right” things, I would become worthy. I always strived to be “good” — to not break any laws and to focus on school. But still — my worthiness never came.

Conor M. Kelly 1-22-2020

Illustration by Michael George Haddad

ON A COLD January day in 2010, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens felt so strongly about the dangers of corruption that he delivered a rare oral dissent in the Citizens United case. Decrying the majority’s “crabbed view of corruption” that focused on quid pro quo arrangements exclusively, Justice Stevens countered, “There are threats of corruption that are far more destructive to democratic society than the odd bribe. Yet the majority’s understanding of corruption would leave lawmakers impotent to address all but the most discrete abuses.”

In retrospect, the striking thing from that winter morning was not so much the existence of Steven’s oral dissent (though notable), but the basic agreement on all sides. No one on the court contested the idea that corruption poses a threat to “democratic society.” The majority and the minority simply split on whether the specific practice at issue constituted a form of corruption.

Ten years later, we cannot take the same presupposition for granted. Instead of identifying corruption as a danger to the republic, we are all too ready to treat it as an inescapable part of American life. Indeed, the rationalizations have now become as predictable as they are depressing: It may be distasteful, but both sides do it. It is a necessary evil. Get over it.

Protesters gather at the Supreme Court demanding DACA protections Nov. 11, 2019. Photo by Candace Sanders / Sojourners

“Because of that program, I was able to buy a home, get a job and pursue a career,” Leezia Dhalla, who came to the U.S. with her family in 1996, at the age of six, said in an interview. Dhalla, who was among thousands of DACA supporters rallying outside the Supreme Court, said her family became undocumented because a lawyer mishandled their paperwork.

Candace Sanders 11-12-2019

Image via Candace Sanders/Sojourners 

The DACA oral arguments drew thousands of protesters, DACA recipients, faith leaders, and organizers to the steps of the Supreme Court.

Pens are available at an even to mark the one-year-out launch of the 2020 census efforts in Boston,  April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

In a stinging defeat for President Donald Trump, his administration ended its effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. census, saying that it will begin printing forms that do not include the contentious query. But, nevertheless, Trump later indicated he would still try to get the "most vital" question included on the questionnaire.

A protester holds a sign outside the U.S. Supreme Court where the court decides on the citizenship question. June 27, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The right to be counted is at the foundation of our faith and our democracy. In Matthew 18:12–14) and Luke (Luke 15:3–7) Jesus tells the iconic parable about the lost sheep. A man, who owns 100 sheep, goes to great lengths to find one missing sheep out of the 100 and when he finally recovers the lost sheep, he is happier about the one sheep that is found than the 99 who are safe. The parable speaks volumes about the degree to which God shows a particular concern and attention around anyone who is lost or falls in harm way. In a similar vein, we should be alarmed and equally committed when one person is miscounted or disregarded in our society. Our democracy loses its integrity and legitimacy when people and communities are made invisible and further marginalized by undercounting in the census.

Image via REUTERS/Chris Keane

The ruling, authored by Chief justice John Roberts, delivered a huge setback to election reformers who had hoped the court would intervene over a growing trend in which parties that control state legislatures use the electoral district line-drawing process to cement their grip on power and dilute the voting power of people who support the rival party.

A concrete cross commemorating servicemen killed in World War 1 in Bladensburg, Md. Feb. 11, 2019.REUTERS/Lawrence Hurley

While the Establishment Clause's scope is a matter of dispute, most Supreme Court experts predict the challenge to the Peace Cross will fail, with the justices potentially setting a new precedent allowing greater government involvement in religious expression.

The flag of diversity flutters at the U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica June 3, 2016. REUTERS/Juan Carlos Ulate/File Photo

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Donald Trump enforce his policy barring certain transgender people from joining or staying in the military as the justices put on hold lower court rulings blocking the plan on constitutional grounds. 

Jim Wallis 10-11-2018

Photo by Randy Colas on Unsplash

Of course the system is rigged — systems are always rigged to protect the wealth, power, and self-interest of those who created them, those who benefit from them. That’s not hyperbole; that’s reality, that’s human nature, and that’s what the Bible calls sin. And that’s why systems need to be held accountable — to the common good rather than just the system makers and controllers. And that’s why Jesus calls us to protect, in particular, "the least of these" who are most vulnerable to the systems' exploitation. This is why defending systems that just maintain the powerful’s own self-interest while neglecting the interests of others, especially the most vulnerable, is not just bad politics — it’s bad theology.

Anna Sutterer 10-04-2018

Photo by Kayla Lattimore / Sojourners

Rain and a palpable heaviness covered the Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford hearings last week. This afternoon, Cancel Kavanaugh: Believe Survivors marchers perspired under a hot sun while they shouted resistance to the Supreme Court nominee.

Photo by Rachel Moore / Unsplash.com

Twenty-seven years ago, as an African-American female clergy leader and legislative advocate, I operated in two worlds dominated by male power – religion and politics. I watched Anita Hill sit with the same quiet dignity as Rosa Parks resisting racial segregation on an Alabama bus by refusing to give up her seat to a white man. Rosa Parks went to jail. Anita Hill watched as Clarence Thomas was voted onto the U.S. Supreme Court. For both women, it looked like the dominion of male power had won.

Da’Shawn Mosley 10-01-2018

John S. Adams silhouetted in the Montana Capitol building. Photo courtesy Dark Money

From the start of his bid for the Oval Office to now, the 45th president of the United States has drawn plenty of accusations of illegal activity for his finances and the funds of his companies. Many of us have paid close attention to the developments of investigations into this money, watching cable news and following journalists we trust on Twitter. But perhaps we should also turn our attention to other areas of our government, look beyond the executive branch to search for signs of money and politics intermingling in nefarious ways.

Lisa Sharon Harper 9-25-2018
AFTER JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, I was gripped with grief for my nieces, nephews, and their children and for the unborn. Why? Because as an African-American evangelical woman, I knew that a more firmly conservative Supreme Court would likely continue to roll back civil rights protections, making African Americans and other people of color more vulnerable, physically and economically.
 
At the same time, even though ending abortion has been proclaimed as a key goal by the conservative movement, their strategy to do so is poised to fail because it ignores the link between poverty and abortion in our country, both of which are also affected by access to equal rights and opportunity for all. And, truth be told, because ending abortion was never their real goal.
 
Conservatives have argued that to reduce or end abortion in the United States, the country must outlaw it. The strategy has been to tip the balance of the Supreme Court so that politically conservative judges are the majority. When in power, so the plan goes, conservative justices will overturn the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade and the U.S. will outlaw and therefore be rid of abortion. But that strategy was crafted by conservatives intent on exploiting differences of belief in U.S. society regarding “hot-button” issues—including abortion, guns, separation of church and state, LGBTQ+ rights, and censorship—to achieve po-litical goals much broader than ethical concern about abortion.
 
As Randall Balmer explains in his seminal analysis of the Religious Right, Thy Kingdom Come, early 1980s evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker, in partnership with political strategists including Paul Weyrich, aimed to leverage evangelical faith communities to build the conservative political movement, with the goal of pushing back against the gains of the civil rights era through a weakened federal government, few taxes (at least for the better off), and an expansive military. After a failed attempt to prohibit interracial marriage and protect segregation in the case of Bob Jones University v. United States, they shifted tactics. They turned their attention to abortion.
 
From ‘war on poverty’ to ‘war on drugs’
Something else shifted in the 1970s and ’80s. President Richard Nixon declared a so-called war on drugs in 1971 and trans-ferred resources from President Johnson’s “war on poverty” to federal drug control agencies. In 2016, Dan Baum wrote in Harper’s about a 1994 interview he did with top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman in which Ehrlichman confessed that the policy was not really about containing drugs. It was aimed at undercutting Nixon’s key “enemies,” African-American people and anti-Vietnam War protesters.
David F. Potter 9-25-2018

Photo by Tiago Felipe Ferreira on Unsplash

Women have the right to live free from violation to their bodies. There is nothing profound about this statement. I want to believe it holds no hint of hyperbole, that this is a commonly held belief, that it is in fact true But in light of the rhetoric circulating in recent weeks, I’m not so sure.

Lisa Sharon Harper 7-25-2018

FILE PHOTO: The U.S. Supreme Court is seen as the court nears the end of its term. June 11, 2018. REUTERS/Erin Schaff/File Photo

We don’t often think of our current-day allegiances existing within decades, even centuries, of struggle. Sometimes they do. With the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, President Donald Trump has pushed our nation to an existential point of decision about who we are and who we will be for at least the next two to three generations.

FILE PHOTO: Brett Kavanaugh speaks, moments after being sworn-in at a Rose Garden ceremony in 2006 at the White House, June 1, 2006. REUTERS/Larry Downing/File Photo

President Donald Trump has chosen conservative federal appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee for U.S. Supreme Court Justice, NBC News reported on Monday, just before the official White House announcement.

Kavanaugh would replaced retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy if confirmed by the U.S. Senate. 

International passengers arrive at Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Va. June 26, 2017. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

The decision to uphold President Donald Trump’s callous Muslim ban will be remembered in history alongside other cases where the highest court in the land failed deeply and shamefully to deliver justice, like Dred Scott when SCOTUS denied citizenship to anyone of African descent and Korematsu when SCOTUS upheld internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Trees cast shadows outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, U.S., June 25, 2018. REUTERS/Toya Sarno Jordan

The 5-4 ruling, with the court's five conservatives in the majority, ends for now a fierce fight in the courts over whether the policy represented an unlawful Muslim ban. Trump can now claim vindication after lower courts had blocked his travel ban announced in September, as well as two prior versions, in legal challenges brought by the state of Hawaii and others.

The Editors 4-25-2018

IN THE TERM that begins this fall, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The nine justices will decide: Is a baker with sincerely held religious objections to same-sex marriage obliged—by anti-discrimination laws—to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple?

But underneath the frosting, the case exemplifies a much broader conversation in which religious liberty is pitted against civil liberties. In this ongoing fight, sides are often split down partisan lines, with conservatives championing religious liberty and liberals defending civil rights.

This religious-freedom-vs.-civil-liberties split is frustrating to many. After all, religious liberty isn’t just for conservatives; the First Amendment offers important protections to all people of faith, from Muslims who seek permits to build mosques to Christians who are conscientious objectors to war. At the same time, we care deeply about civil rights, especially in an era when so many Americans face discrimination because of their gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity. In a nutshell, we want to support religious freedom for all while also protecting the civil liberties of LGBTQ folks and other minorities. But is that even possible?

Baptist minister and constitutional lawyer Oliver Thomas is optimistic, but not naive. In “Clash of Liberties,” he explains how religious liberty laws morphed from bipartisan efforts to ensure religious liberty for all into tools used by conservatives and liberals alike to press their own advantage. If we’re serious about protecting both, Thomas writes, we’re going to have to do something that’s easier said than done: lay aside our ideological differences and work for the common good.