JUSTICES COULDN’T GET THEIR HEADS OUT OF THE TOILET | Kagan Took A Page Out Of Scalia’s Book | Could SCOTUS Soon Kill the Voting Rights Act Entirely?
October 10, 2019
GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE TOILET
|Masha Gessen with The New Yorker reports that when the Supreme Court tackled cases regarding LGBTQ rights earlier this week, justices kept honing in on bathrooms. “[CHIEF] JUSTICE ROBERTS wanted to talk about bathrooms. JUSTICE GORSUCH wanted to talk about bathrooms.” Even JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR wanted to talk about bathrooms (she was the first to raise the subject). “There were hundreds of trans and non-trans activists outside the courthouse—a hundred people were arrested—and there were trans and nonbinary people in the courtroom. We were there to hear a progressive Justice casually mention how uncomfortable our presence made women in their restrooms. I have no doubt that Sotomayor said this without malice—and without thinking that actual trans people were hearing her. But there was Chase Strangio, an A.C.L.U. attorney and transgender man, sitting in the chamber wearing his dress-code-compliant coat and tie. There was Laverne Cox, a star of ‘Orange Is the New Black.’ Later, on the steps of the courthouse, Cox pointed out that she had gone to the women’s room in the building and the world had not ended.”
POTTY TALK
|“I listened to the Supreme Court argue about my rights as a trans person. I have never felt more frustrated.” That’s the headline from a piece by Katelyn Burns in Vox about the Supreme Court’s focus on bathroom usage, instead of LGBTQ employment rights. “It was frustrating to hear cisgender justices argue about bathrooms and religious exemptions when what was at stake was my right to earn a living. The consequences of their decision could affect not just my livelihood but millions of people in the LGBTQ community.”
MY HOW THE TABLES HAVE TURNED
|A funny little thing happened during the hearings of the LGBTQ cases: JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN endorsed a textualist approach, taking a page out of her hunting buddy’s book, the late JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA. Cristian Farias for NY Mag’s Intelligencer reports, “With the Trump administration all but abandoning textualist arguments in arguing that Congress never intended the words ‘because … of sex’ in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to encompass workplace discrimination against LGBTQ employees, she may have felt the need to remind everyone where she and most of her colleagues stood nowadays.” At one point Kagan said, “This is the usual kind of way in which we interpret statutes now. We look to laws. We don’t look to predictions. We don’t look to desires. We don’t look to wishes. We look to laws.” Scalia would have been proud, Farias writes.
KEEPING MUM
|Zoe Tillman with Buzzfeed reports on the lone question JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH asked during Tuesday’s arguments. She notes, “Civil rights advocates feared that Kavanaugh, as Trump’s second Supreme Court appointee, would move the court further to the right on a number of issues, including LGBTQ rights. But Kavanaugh gave no real clues about what he’s thinking during arguments on Tuesday.”
TOP-ED
|“Under the rules that normally govern the American judicial system, the Louisiana abortion law at the center of a case the Supreme Court added to its docket last week is flagrantly unconstitutional.” Linda Greenhouse with The New York Times makes clear her intentions with her latest piece: “My goal in this column is to make visible not only the stakes in the case but also Louisiana’s strategy for saving its law, the first of a wave of anti-abortion measures to reach a Supreme Court transformed by the retirement of JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY and the addition of two justices appointed by PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP.”
A FINAL, FATAL BLOW
|Mark Joseph Stern with Slate warns that the Supreme Court may soon “deal another, possibly fatal, blow” to the Voting Rights Act. SCOTUS previously left in place Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits any law that has the purpose or effect of abridging racial minorities’ right to vote. But Section 2 could be in trouble. Stern suggests, “The Supreme Court has said that the right to vote is ‘preservative of all rights.’ But it has spent much of the past 150 years either ignoring or facilitating disenfranchisement. The court has undermined the VRA, approved racial and partisan gerrymandering, upheld gratuitous voter ID laws, and greenlighted discriminatory voter purges. It came extremely close to robbing citizens of their ability to address gerrymandering and could still roll back progressive reforms. If the Supreme Court sabotages Section 2, it will only be the latest chapter in the judiciary’s subversion of voting rights.”
READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP?
|Richard Wolf with USA Today reports on the man in the middle of all present and future Supreme Court drama for this term: CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS. Wolf explains that if the House impeaches PRESIDENT TRUMP, the chief justice would have to play umpire in a Senate impeachment trial. And there’s one big thing he’d also have to deal with — something Supreme Court justices have resisted in their own day-to-day — television. “[It’s] the very thing that all the justices, certainly the chief, have not wanted to happen in the Supreme Court,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor and Roberts’ former roommate.