Hello! And welcome to the final edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for this Supreme Court term. It ended in a familiar place, with the Republican majority exercising its will over the country in a series of party-line votes.
President Joe Biden joined the show on Thursday, where he sounded the alarm on the court and some of its recent decisions. In his first live, sit-down interview since taking office, the president told Nicolle this court was "not normal" but stood firm against expanding it, fearing doing so would "politicize" the court. Of course, that ship sailed long ago.
And that was before the GOP Supreme Court struck down his administration's student loan forgiveness plan on Friday. In a 6-3 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that the federal government overstepped in trying to cancel billions of dollars in debt for millions of borrowers. Justice Elena Kagan's dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, pointed out that it was the majority that overreached – both in granting red states legal standing to sue and in striking down the plan.
The same six-justice supermajority on Friday gave businesses license to reject LGBTQ customers. This time it was Justice Neil Gorsuch — as I predicted — writing for the Republicans. The majority, framing the case as a matter of free speech, blocked the state of Colorado from forcing a website designer to provide "expressive" services for same-sex marriages.
In her dissent, Sotomayor observed the decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis was a shameful milestone: "Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class." And of course, no one asked the woman at the center of the case, Lorie Smith, to make a same-sex wedding website, anyway — making the court's ruling a sham as well as a shame.
Hitting another low on Thursday, the court gutted affirmative action in higher education, voting along predictable partisan lines. Roberts wrote the majority opinion espousing his ignorant "colorblind" view of the Constitution. Harvard and the University of North Carolina's race-conscious admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, he wrote. In a perverse twist, the majority relied on the landmark school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education — a 1954 decision which, obviously, took race into account to integrate schools.
The Democratic appointees did well to highlight this perversion in dissents that spanned nearly 100 pages total. Sotomayor called out the majority for its "revisionist history" and Jackson blasted the majority's "let-them-eat-cake obliviousness." As she aptly noted, "deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life."
On a relatively more hopeful note, a bipartisan 6-3 majority — also led by Roberts — declined to embrace the extreme "independent state legislature" elections theory. Had the court done so in Moore v. Harper on Tuesday, it would have opened the door to GOP state legislatures going rogue in setting federal election rules without the legal equivalent of adult supervision. Yet, relatively may be the key word here, as MSNBC columnist Jessica Levinson explained that, while averting a full-fledged disaster, "the chief justice also laid landmines for future elections by recalling the court's infamous ruling in Bush v. Gore."
As the justices break for summer, you might see emergency appeals surface on the court's shadow docket. And while the calendar is still filling out for the next term, which begins in October, we know the justices are already set to hear important cases affecting voting rights, environmental regulations and more, with a crucial gun case added to next term's docket on Friday.
That addition came as part of an end of term orders list, which included the denial of a capital case the court rejected over Democratic dissent. "Because this Court refuses to intervene, a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race," Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. Another term ends but the same story continues.
