The Clock Is Running Out

Time is growing short before the end of this Supreme Court tern which ends on June 29^th and they have a number of important rulings to be announced before then and one of them is…

Five rulings to watch at the Supreme Court
The Hill
By Lydia Wheeler
05/13/18

Interns will soon be sprinting down the steps of the Supreme Court to deliver printouts of rulings to TV anchors, something of an annual tradition at the highest court in the land.

The justices heard their last arguments in April and will start issuing rulings next week in the most closely watched cases of the term, which ends in late June.

The justices often save the biggest decisions for last — and this year is no exception.

Since October, the court has grappled with several hot-button issues, including free speech and equality, partisan gerrymandering and the legality of President Trump's controversial travel ban.

The cases that the article lists are,

Partisan gerrymandering
Sports betting
Free speech and abortion
Trump's travel ban

All are important cases and will affect our lives for generations to come but the one that will affect us the most is,

Wedding cake
The court also has yet to rule in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The case centers on Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Phillips argues he can’t be forced to make the cake under the state’s anti-discrimination laws. He says his cakes are an artistic expression of free speech and religion that’s protected by the First Amendment.

Making a cake for a gay wedding, he says, would send the message that he supports same-sex marriage when he is morally opposed as a Christian.

The case is seen as the next big fight for LGBT rights after the justices’ landmark ruling in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage.

“People in the LGBT community think this undermines Obergefell and LGBT rights if the court were to come down in favor of the baker,” said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond School of Law professor. “I think that’s an important question that’s at stake here.”

Civil rights advocates fear a ruling in favor of Phillips will give businesses a license to discriminate against LGBT people.

The case revolves around one justice… Justice Kennedy.

Why Justice Kennedy Exemplifies The Conflict Central To The Masterpiece Cakeshop Case
Colorado Public Radio
By Ryan Warner
May 22, 2018

The Supreme Court of the United States could hand down a decision in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case  any day now, addressing the tension between state law interpreted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and what baker Jack Phillips sees as an infringement of his First Amendment free speech rights. He refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple based on his religious beliefs.

Justice Anthony Kennedy exemplifies that tension seen at the heart of the case. New York Times reporter Adam Liptak has described Kennedy, "at once the court's most prominent defender of gay rights and its most committed supporter of free speech." His vote will also likely swing the decision in either direction.
[…]
In oral arguments, Kennedy was assertive in his concern for the impact the decision would have on the LGBT community.

"If you prevail, could the bakery put a sign in its window, 'We do not make cakes for gay weddings,'" Kennedy asked the counsel representing Masterpiece Cakeshop. "And you would not posit that an affront to the gay community?"

He is the fulcrum that it all hangs on, how he rules will determine if we will face religious discrimination or if discrimination cannot hide behind religion.

"There’s no greater judicial champion of gay rights than Kennedy," Liptak said.

But you can see Kennedy's equal dedication to free speech in his opinion for the Citizens United case.

"He's going to be tugged in different directions," Liptak said. "He is the vote you know you're going to get in every free speech case."

A poll finds that most people don’t want discrimination against us by businesses,
Most Americans Don’t Want Businesses To Discriminate Against LGBTQ People: Study

The majority of religious groups believe that small-business owners should serve all customers, regardless of sexual orientation.
Huffington Post Queer Voices
By Carol Kuruvilla
05/01/2018

As the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether business owners with religious objections should be allowed to refuse to serve LGBTQ customers, a majority of Americans — and a wide spectrum of religious denominations ― remain opposed to such faith-based service refusals.

Sixty percent of Americans oppose allowing a small-business owner in their state to refuse products or services to gay or lesbian people if doing so would violate the owner’s religious beliefs, according to the 2017 American Values Atlas, an annual survey from The Public Religion Research Institute. The survey of approximately 40,000 people in all 50 states, published on Tuesday, also found that Americans are increasingly supportive of LGBTQ rights almost three years since same-sex marriage was legalized across the United States.

Notably, most religious groups agreed that gay and lesbian people should not be discriminated against in the form of service-based refusals ― including black Protestants (65 percent), white mainline Protestants (60 percent), and white Catholics (59 percent). That objection was also strong among non-Christian groups, including Jews (70 percent) and Muslims (59 percent). Religiously-unaffiliated Americans, a growing demographic, strongly opposed the policy (72 percent).

Let’s hope that Justice Kennedy sides with us.

If they should rule in favor of bigotry then this opens a floodgate of law suits. I can see white supremacists bring cases that claim that they can discriminate against blacks because of religion or evangelical Christians saying that they can discriminate against Jews.

I can see a future where the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is torn to shreads.

You don’t think so? Well…

Federal Court Bench Gaining 'Originalists'
Hartford Courant
By Hugh Hewitt
May 27, 2018

Some day, conservative critics of President Donald Trump will have to reconcile their vehement opposition to him with their love of the Constitution. The latter is most definitely benefiting from the president's massive impact on the federal bench, one that extends far beyond Justice Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court, though by far the most important court, still only reviews 80 or so appeals court decisions per year. The appeals courts, however, are burdened with massive amounts of decision-making year-round. Federal appeals court judges completed 96,000 case "participations" in 2017. (A case participation means that one judge heard an oral argument or reviewed an appeal on briefs; thus, when a single appeal is heard before a panel of three judges, it is three participations.)
[…]
The Trump judges on the 5th Circuit and their new colleagues on other federal appeals benches across the land will be busy long into the future. Review the math presented above, and extend the trends into the future, including another 20 or so more federal circuit court confirmations expected this year. By 2019, Trump judges will be participating in more than 15,000 decisions every year, and almost all those decisions will be the law of the land. There will be no less than 400 crucial case votes and dozens of signed opinions, each year, every year for most of the Trump judges. If the judges sit for an average run of 20 years on the bench, that's 8,000 key votes per Trump-appointed judge.

Trump and his Republican cronies are stuffing the courts with narrow minded ideologue young judges who believe putting the Bible ahead of the Constitution.

The Republican senators refused to appoint any judges that president Obama nominated as a result there is a backlog of 127 federal judges including many Appeal Courts judges.

You don’t think this will affect us?

Well just look at this past two weeks, we had three court victories all by the courts and two of them were by the Appeals courts.