Everyone acknowledges that SCOTUS had a momentous term ending in June 2022. The Left highlighted they had no minds to lose when Dobbs v. Jackson was announced, even though they had months to prepare for the decision. That wasn’t the only case where the Left was supremely upset. The day before, The Court handed down the Bruen decision recognizing the second amendment is not a second class right and you don’t need a specific reason why you want to exercise any of your God-given rights. A third case that the Court handed down in late June was Kennedy v. Bremerton School District; the Kennedy case recognized that personal religious observances are protected from government discipline. The majority opinion in the Kennedy decision explicitly relied upon Shurtleff v. Boston; the Shurtleff opinion was released in May 2022. Those three decisions are still causing the Left unhappy times to this day.
After the Court’s term ended, Mr. Shurtleff raised the Christian flag in Boston on Aug 4, 2022 for a few hours, like so many other groups had done. A number of cities reevaluated their policies for flag-raising and similar activities; some of the articles explicitly named the Shurtleff decision. The city of Darien, CT was discussing modifying their policy, so they wouldn’t become the next Boston; the Alphabet Gang was mightily upset at the changed policy because it would disallow their flavored flag. Huntington Beach, CA amended their flag policy to permit only federal, State, local government and military flags on government property; on the Left Coast as well, the Left displayed they don’t have minds to lose.
Likewise, the Bruen Decision has shown the Left doesn’t like the new Court’s recent decisions. In addition to the cases that were sent back to the lower courts for them to reanalyze in light of Bruen, some of the laws, restricting carrying in wide swaths of public spaces, that were written post-Bruen have been halted from enforcement by the courts. Shortly after Bruen came down, a district Court in Texas ruled that age limits on the 2nd Amendment are unconstitutional. Much more recently, a district Court in Oklahoma ruled that marijuana users can’t be denied their 2nd Amendment rights. The 5th Circuit ruled recently that people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders are still permitted to possess weapons.
The Left is most apoplectic about that last decision from the 5th circuit; the 5th Circuit on page 13 of their order reasoned that civil and criminal proceedings are different and because the Founders recognized those differences in our Constitutional amendments, the 2nd Amendment can’t be taken away merely by following a civil process with a much lower standard of proof and no guarantee of counsel to assist. A criminal conviction requires that the State prove the defendant committed a legal violation beyond every reasonable doubt and not just a preponderance of the evidence, which is required for a civil case Lowering the standard to restrict your 2nd Amendment rights to be merely having a domestic violence restraining order, misdemeanor conviction, arrest, etc is just a different version of a red flag law and I don’t know any conservative who is a fan of red flag laws.
Finally, the case that has caused the Left the most heartburn from last term is the Dobbs decision. States Supreme Courts are now ruling in accordance with their state constitutions whether the right to privacy includes the right to kill the youngest among us. States are diverging on the question of whether abortion should be permitted in their State. Although the Justice Alito’s opinion recognized that this issue, as important as it is, is not a federal issue, that fact doesn’t stop federal officials from trying to implement a federal law on the topic.
Before the midterms, the Left wanted to use Sen Graham’s (R-SC) legislation of a 15 week nationwide ban in an attempt to win races, which netted them some successes, as evidenced by a Democrat led senate and not evenly split. After the midterms, Sens Murkowski (RINO-AK) and Collins (RINO-ME) would take the country the other way and would legalize child sacrifice until birth. No federal hook in the Constitution for either of these proposals exists. States are legalizing or banning it on their own. Reinserting the federal government into this issue would not help solve it in the least.
Aside from those in Congress, at least one federal judge believes she may have found a way to get the federal judiciary back into this issue. Her rationale is that because the Dobbs opinion didn’t address whether the 13th amendment applies to this issue, the prohibition on involuntary servitude and slavery should be enough to block restrictions on abortion. The problems with that rationale are numerous including from the Dobbs decision itself, which reads “Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State” and “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
Although this term is certain to have some big decisions, it’s helpful to recognize how three of the major decisions from last term are still making waves
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