GOOGLE SAYS NO NEED FOR SCOTUS REVIEW | The Great Debate On Pregnancy Centers’ Free Speech | NATIONWIDE SCHOOL WALKOUT TO PROTEST GUNS TOMORROW
March 13, 2018
PAY UP OR PUT UP
|Lawrence Hurley with Reuters reports on the SCOTUS case out of South Dakota that addresses whether online retailers should be required to collect sales taxes even in states where they have no physical presence. Hurley reports, “A ruling in favor of South Dakota could funnel up to $13 billion a year of new tax revenues into the coffers of affected U.S. state governments, according to a 2017 federal government report. It would also make it harder for consumers to find deals online where they can avoid paying sales tax.”
GOOGLE ON
|Tech giant Google Inc. told the Supreme Court last week that there is no need for the justices to review its $8.5 million settlement of a privacy class action in which $5.3 million of the funds went to third parties and none to the members of the class. The Supreme Court has not yet decided if it will take on the case, nor has it scheduled a conference date to discuss it.
TOP-ED
|Elissa Graves opines in The Sacramento Bee that the Supreme Court should uphold free speech of pro-life pregnancy centers. Her piece responds to a recent column from ERWIN CHEMERISNKY in which he argued that the high court should rather uphold the California law that compels pregnancy centers to engage in speech about abortion. Graves writes, “The core of this case is that the government is forcing non-profit pro-life pregnancy centers – which provide their services for free – to engage in speech contrary to their very reason for existence. The Supreme Court should uphold the right of these centers to be free from government-coerced speech.”
WALKING ON BROKEN GLASS
|Tomorrow, students across the nation will walk out of their schools in remembrance of the seventeen victims of the Parkland, FL shooting. It’s both an act of defiance to protest gun policies and a call for a ban on assault weapons and expanded background checks. But Cory Turner and Clare Lombardo with NPR point out that this is no ordinary walkout because it draws on the tension of students’ free speech rights and schools’ legal obligations. “‘It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’ So wrote a 7-2 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, after hearing the case of Mary Beth Tinker. The Des Moines teenager had worn a black armband to school, in protest of the Vietnam War, and school leaders suspended her for it. The Court sided with Tinker because, the justices reasoned, her protest did not ‘materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.’ A walkout, though, is no armband, and likely exceeds students’ free speech protections.”
OTHER NEWS
The NRA's Long Game On Long Guns
Slate“The NRA will almost certainly lose its Florida lawsuit within the next few months. But by that point, the legal challenge will have already served its purpose: to create the false impression that laws like the one Scott just signed are constitutionally dubious. The NRA likely hopes that by the time the judiciary has approved this Florida law, momentum for federal gun control legislation will have slowed. And then, having bought all the time it needed, the NRA should be able to coax Trump into abandoning his raise-the-age policy altogether.”
Is One Of The Pennsylvania Voting Cases Doomed?
Constitution Daily“Even as the Supreme Court takes more time than expected to decide its part in the constitutional controversy over how voting is to be done this year for the 18 House of Representatives members from Pennsylvania, a federal trial court in Harrisburg, PA, is pondering a complex question of states’ rights that could end the case there without a decision on who wins.”