Supreme Court Prepares to Take On Politically Charged Cases
WASHINGTON — The last Supreme Court term ended with liberal victories, conservative disarray and bruised relations among the justices. The new one, which starts on Monday, marks the start of Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts Jr.’s second decade on the court and will reveal whether the last term’s leftward drift and acrimony were anomalies or something more lasting.
The court will decide major cases on politically charged issues, includingthe fate of public unions and affirmative action in higher education. It will most probably hear its first major abortion case since 2007 and will revisit the clash between religious liberty and contraception coverage.
It will consider three cases that could make it harder for workers and consumers to band together in class actions. And it will hear cases on the death penalty, a topic that twice led to unusually sharp and bitter exchanges on the bench last term, after Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. accused opponents of capital punishment of pursuing a “guerrilla war” against executions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded that supporters of the death penalty would be content to allow condemned inmates to be burned alive.
Some of last term’s opinions were unusually barbed even by the standards of Justice Antonin Scalia. Dissenting from the decision establishing a right to same-sex marriage, Justice Scalia called Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion pretentious, egotistic and incoherent.
Chief Justice Roberts, who has said that he hopes to guide his court toward modest and unanimous rulings, cannot have enjoyed the rancor. Nor was his summer brightened by attacks on him from Republican presidential candidates unhappy with his sustaining of the Affordable Care Act for the second time.
The new term’s biggest rulings will land in June, as the 2016 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, and they will help shape the political debate.
“Constitutional law and politics are certainly not the same thing, but they are interrelated, never more so than in a presidential election year that will likely determine who gets to appoint the next justice or two or three,” saidVikram D. Amar, dean of the University of Illinois College of Law.
By the time the next president is inaugurated, Justice Stephen G. Breyer will be 78, Justices Scalia and Kennedy will be 80, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 83.
“This coming term will again put into focus that the court is divided along partisan lines and that the 2016 presidential elections will be hugely consequential in shaping constitutional and other law for perhaps a Supreme Court Prepares to Take On Politically Charged Cases - The New York Times:
Olympia’s Freedom Foundation has unions in its sights
An employee in a unionized workplace in Washington has had few options if, like Mary Jane Aurdal-Olson, she didn’t want to contribute money to a labor union.
Workers must pay a share of the cost of bargaining, since every worker is supposed to benefit from the improvements a union secures.
But that principle is under fire. The U.S. Supreme Court cracked the door last year for some employees to withhold their money and in the court term that starts Monday it might swing the door wide open. At least one union branch in Washington has taken a financial hit in the wake of the 2014 decision.
An Olympia-based conservative group is trying to ensure the rulings hit home. The Freedom Foundation helped Aurdal-Olson stop her paycheck deduction and has campaigned via phone, mail, airwaves and doorsteps to encourage other dissenters.
It’s part of a strategy targeting unions — especially SEIU, one of the largest spenders in Washington elections — on multiple fronts. The foundation has seen sporadic success, including a recent decision by the state’s Democratic attorney general to sue one SEIU branch and a finding made public Friday by campaign-finance investigators that could lead to pursuit of a second branch.
Foundation CEO Tom McCabe took the helm nearly two years ago and brought an aggressive mentality from a previous job leading attacks on Democrats at the big-spending state home http://www.theolympian.com/news/local/politics-government/article37688049.html
