A Catholic adoption agency is not entitled to a contract with the city of Philadelphia because the Catholic organization refuses to make referrals of children for adoption or fostering to same sex couples, the Third Circuit has decided in Fulton v. Philadelphia. Notre Dame law prof Rick Garnett [below] thinks Philadelphia should grant an exemption from its general anti-discrimination law. He welcomes the Supreme Court's decision to review the case. Noteworthy is that the Catholic church is free to pursue its practice - but is not entitled to a City contract. That could change if the four conservative Catholics (and one Episcopalian ally) decide to overturn the principle that laws of general applicability trump religious belief. I discuss some of those issues HERE. For me the tragedy is that an adoption agency should dress up as an act of faith adherence to the Catholic Catechism [at 2357] which dismisses homosexuals as "intrinsically disordered". That view if embraced by all would have orphaned New York Hudson Valley Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney's three children.
- GWC
My husband & I have been raising kids for 27 years. Our eldest came to us when he was almost 3. His mom OD’d & his dad went to jail. There was no one to take care of this little boy, so we did. When you discriminate against LGBTQ couples, you deprive kids like mine of good homes. pic.twitter.com/n7d8VRAwnB
Philadelphia has "targeted" Catholic adoption agency for refusal to refer to same sex couples Notre Dame Professor Rick Garnett argues that the agency is entitle to "exemption" from the City's broad non-discrimination requirement.https://t.co/gVb6QDVfhn via @business
“I just don’t know how they cannot recuse themselves for anything Trump or Trump-related” - Donald Trump speaking of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Ginsburg
There has rarely been a juror so tainted as the forewoman in the Roger Stone case. Look at her background. She never revealed her hatred of “Trump” and Stone. She was totally biased, as is the judge. Roger wasn’t even working on my campaign. Miscarriage of justice. Sad to watch!
In restrained but firm language two leading bar associations have called attention to Donald Trump's attacks on the judicial system The Philadelphia Bar declared in a recent statement“Recently, we have seen a course of conduct, including communications meant to exert undue influence on the judiciary, that seems intent on undermining the rule of law and disrupting the system of checks and balances. Such attacks are dangerous in the extreme. We cannot allow them to continue.
“We call for an end to these unwarranted attacks on the judiciary and for all Americans to speak up in defense of the Constitution and our democratic principles."
In similarly constrained language the Pennsylvania Bar Association declared:
"The integrity of our system of justice requires that this equal branch of government be free from outside influence. In particular, we must assure that the independence of the judiciary is always respected and never diminished.”
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a hugely consequentialcase that could fundamentally change the rules governing when people with religious objections to a law may ignore that law.
Fulton asks whether religious organizations that contract with Philadelphia to help place foster children in homes have a First Amendment right to discriminate against same-sex couples. It is also the first case the Supreme Court will hear where a religious group claims the right to violate a ban on discrimination since Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation gave reliably conservative Republicans a majority on the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs in Fulton include Catholic Social Services (CSS), an organization that used to contract with the city to help find foster placements for children but that effectively lost that contract after it refused to comply with the ban on discrimination. CSS claims it has a First Amendment right to continue to do business with the city even if it refuses to comply with the city’s anti-discrimination rules.
Fulton is a significant escalation from most of the Supreme Court’s previous cases asking when religious people may seek an exemption from the law. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission(2018), for example, the Supreme Court considered whether the law could prevent a private business owner from discriminating against a same-sex couple (the Court ruled in favor of the business owner, but on narrow grounds).
Fulton, by contrast, is a case about government services. The city of Philadelphia decided to contract with private organizations to help it provide a public service — placement of children in foster homes. If the city chose to provide this service entirely in house, it could certainly refuse to discriminate against same-sex couples. The question in Fulton is whether the city loses much of its power to control its own public services when it contracts some of those services to religious entities.
A decision for the plaintiffs in Fulton, moreover, could have implications that stretch well beyond foster care. The Fulton case involves an especially sympathetic plaintiff: a Catholic organization that helps vulnerable children find homes. But if the Supreme Court rules in favor of that plaintiff, it could potentially establish that a wide range of government contractors, from social service providers to military contractors, may discriminate if the company’s owners claim a religious justification for that discrimination.---KEEP READING--
Few lawyers would accuse the Immigration and Nationality Act of being well drafted. The current law was enacted in 1952, but includes bits and pieces dating back to the founding era, along with major new features that are not always well integrated into the whole. In addition to evoking memories of a time when congressional relief for unauthorized migrants was more possible, United States v. Sineneng-Smith offers a master class in interpreting a creaky, complex statutory structure.
Put simply, the issue is this. 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) imposes criminal penalties on any person who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence in is or will be in violation of law.”
Is this, as the government argues with the support of a single amicus brief, a narrow provision prohibiting criminal solicitation and aiding and abetting? Or is it, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found and a range of amici argue, a constitutionally overbroad statute criminalizing a wide range of protected expression, including political speech, attorney representation, charitable and religious counseling, support and outreach, and grandmothers urging their foreign-born grandchildren not to leave them?
Few lawyers would accuse the Immigration and Nationality Act of being well drafted. The current law was enacted in 1952, but includes bits and pieces dating back to the founding era, along with major new features that are not always well integrated into the whole. In addition to evoking memories of a time when congressional relief for unauthorized migrants was more possible, United States v. Sineneng-Smith offers a master class in interpreting a creaky, complex statutory structure.
Put simply, the issue is this. 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) imposes criminal penalties on any person who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence in is or will be in violation of law.”
Is this, as the government argues with the support of a single amicus brief, a narrow provision prohibiting criminal solicitation and aiding and abetting? Or is it, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found and a range of amici argue, a constitutionally overbroad statute criminalizing a wide range of protected expression, including political speech, attorney representation, charitable and religious counseling, support and outreach, and grandmothers urging their foreign-born grandchildren not to leave them?
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
In this important article Joshua Geltzer ( Director of Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection) draws attention to the neglected Section 2 of the 14th Amendment which would reduce the representation of states which suppressed the (male) vote. That of course meant mainly African Americans' Had the principled been vindicated we would have a very different country. See also Eric Foner's recently published The Second Founding. The Lost 110 Words of Our Constitution by Joshua Geltzer (Georgetown Law)
This essay by Stephen Vladeck (U Texas Law) provides the backup for Justice Sonia Sotomayor's recent dissent from the stay of an order blocking a particularly outrageous Trump Rule: barring admission to the US of anyone who might some day seek a public benefit. Sotomayor accuses the Supreme Court of being a doormat for the Trump administration's frequent requests to stay adverse orders below - a remedy infrequently granted until now when an aggressive administration meets a very sympathetic court. - gwc Torts Today: The Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket - Harvard Law Review
When a law of general application (such as the ban on use of the hallucinogen peyote) falls hard on persons who have long used it in their religious rituals, the general law nonetheless survives. That is the principle declared by Antonin Scalia in Employment Division v. Smith (1990). Last May I warned in a long opinion piece that those principles might not survive if the Kavanaugh and Gorsuch-enhanced conservative majority got their hands on Fulton and Catholic Social Services v. Philadelphia. The City refused to renew an adoption services contract because the Catholic organization, citing the Church's Catechism, refused to place foster children with same-sex couples. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (at 2357) regards homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered", a violation of natural law, and says that homosexuals are "called to chastity". That time of reckoning has come. The US Supreme Court today granted cert in response to a petition by the conservative Becket Fund which represents Catholic Social Services. It argues that Employment Division v. Smith should be "replaced". Philadelphia's refusal to contract with CSS "excludes" it from participation in the adoption system. But it is the loss of government funding that is at stake, not the right to offer adoption services as a purely private charity. As a matter of `forward precedent' the fear is that if a publicly funded adoption agency need not comply with a non-discrimination ordinance who else might avoid such strictures?
- GWC
Justices to take up case involving faith-based adoption agencies and same-sex couples - SCOTUSblog
by Amy Howe The Supreme Court returned from its winter recess today with just one new grant from last week’s private conference, but the newest addition to the court’s merits docket is a significant one. Next term the justices will hear oral argument inFulton v. City of Philadelphia, a challenge by several foster parents and Catholic Social Services to the city’s policy of cutting off referrals of foster children to CSS for placement because the agency would not certify same-sex couples as foster parents. After they lost in the lower courts, the challengers went to the Supreme Court, where they asked the justices to weigh in on three questions: what kind of showing plaintiffs must make to succeed on this kind of religious discrimination claim; whether the Supreme Court should reconsider its 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith, holding that the government can enforce laws that burden religious beliefs or practices as long as the laws are “neutral” or “generally applicable”; and whether the government violates the First Amendment when it makes participation by a religious social-services agency in the foster-care system contingent on actions and statements by the agency that conflict with the agency’s religious beliefs.
The NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) held a one-day session on Monday, February 24 and adopted two decisions that we will discuss below. It is worth mentioning that 57 legislators “attended” the session via videoconferencing (113 others showed up in person), and they voted by a show of hands in lieu of the usual electronic voting system.
To start, the NPCSC decided to postpone the NPC’s 2020 annual session “as appropriate” and to announce a new date separately. Since the NPCSC is unlikely to reconvene by the end of the month, it thus seems that it will have to break one of the NPC’s procedural rules. As we previously concluded, those rules would require that the NPCSC decide on a new date on Monday (assuming it wouldn’t meet again in February) and that the new date fall between March 24 and March 31 inclusive. The upshot of the NPCSC’s indecision today is either that the NPCSC wouldn’t meet by the end of March, or that the delegates wouldn’t have one month’s notice of the new start date.
We expect the NPCSC to convene a special session in early to mid-March to set a new date for this year’s NPC session.
The Supreme Court voted along party lines Friday evening to allow a Trump administration rule restricting low-income immigrants’ ability to enter the US to take full effect. All four of the Court’s Democratic appointees dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a sharply worded dissenting opinion accusing her Court of “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the Trump administration.
“It is hard to say what is more troubling,” Sotomayor wrote. “That the government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.”
The Court’s decision in Wolf v. Cook County is a significant development in and of itself because of its potential impact on millions of immigrants.Last August, the Trump administration announced a new rule governing who would be classified as a “public charge” — essentially someone reliant on government aid programs — and thus potentially unable to enter the United States, extend their visa, or obtain a green card. The new rule gives immigration officials leeway to turn away immigrants deemed “likely to be a public charge,” based on a wide range of factors including use of certain public benefits and English language skills.
As much as 69 percent of the more than 5 million individuals who received a green card over the past five years have at least one negative factor against them under the new rule, and thus might have been denied immigration benefits had the new rule been in effect.
Sotomayor is concerned the Supreme Court is granting too many stays — and for good reason
Sotomayor’s dissent focuses less on the question of whether the Trump administration's public charge rule is legal, and more on what she describes as a “now-familiar pattern” in the administration’s interactions with the Supreme Court.
At least two lower courts handed down orders blocking the new public charge rule — one of those decisions blocked the rule across the country, while the other blocked it only in Illinois. Last month, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 along familiar partisan lines to stay the lower court order blocking the rule on a nationwide basis. Friday’s order stays the decision blocking it in Illinois.
Until recently, it was extraordinarily unusual for the government to seek such a stay from the justices while a case was still winding its way through lower courts. As Sotomayor warned in a dissenting opinion last September, “granting a stay pending appeal should be an ‘extraordinary’ act. Unfortunately, it appears the Government has treated this exceptional mechanism as a new normal.”
According to a recent paper by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, “in less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone)” — and Vladeck’s paper did not include the Trump administration's two applications in the public charge cases. By comparison, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications — averaging one every other Term.”
The Trump administration, moreover, has a high win rate when it seeks extraordinary relief from the Supreme Court. It’s achieved a partial or full victory in about 65 percent of the cases where it asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block a lower court’s opinion.
Convenient amnesia was an important byproduct of the now dominant view of how to overcome the effects of two hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of legally sanctioned discrimination against African Americans and anyone not "white". Post World War II people like my family benefited from the "GI Bill" - the comprehensive set of federal benefits that built the suburbs. Free public colleges, stipends, and government insured VA mortgages for the full purchase price of a newly built single family home. For whites only due to a Federal Housing Administration requirement of racially harmonious communities. Orlando Patterson aptly labels that "white affirmative action". I was a beneficiary of that program, growing up on Long Island in the archetypal post-war 100% white suburb of Levittown, New York.
The United States Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that separate was not equal. It's directive to dismantle segregation "with all deliberate speed" was met with massive resistance across the south. Conservative Democrats like Georgia federal appeals judge Griffin Bell opposed "affirmative action", arguing that it was, like prohibition, doomed to fail in the face of cultural resistance. The Supreme Court. bolstered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, briefly embraced affirmative action, demanding in Green v,. New Kent County (1968) that the dual school system and its effects be eliminated "root and branch". School busing and other remedies were endorsed by the Supreme Court in Charlotte, N.C. in 1971, when the majority managed to enlist Nixon's Chief Justice Warren Burger.
But that was the high point. White cultural resistance in the suburbs of Detroit and the City of Boston were fatal to public school integration plans in the "de facto" "voluntarily segregated" northern schools. Courts could not demand affirmative action if it crossed local school district lines, said Chief Justice Warren Burger in Milliken v. Bradley the 1974 decision voiding a desegregation order encompassing metropolitan Detroit. So-called "white flight" was treated as a voluntary cultural phenomenon (viz. soon to be President Jimmy Carter's Attorney General Griffin Bell) beyond the reach of the courts and of the equal protection principles of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Since then affirmative action has hung on by a thread, abjured as a remedy - except for formal legal segregation - a narrow slot remained. It was carved by the concurring opinion of former railroad lawyer Lewis Powell in Bakke v. Board of Regents. (1977) "Diversity", he wrote, was a legitimate objective in higher education. That thin reed is all that has survived the scrutiny of a Supreme Court which repudiates compensation for centuries of slavery and legal apartheid and "white affirmative action". Even voluntary efforts to achieve integration were repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts for a plurality in Parents Concerned v. Seattle. The way to stop discrimination by race is to stop discriminating by race, he wrote in a maxim sure to appear in his obituary along with the balls and strikes metaphor that helped him win confirmation by the Senate.
I'll let Melvin Urofsky and his brilliant reviewer Orlando Patterson take it from here. - GWC
Attend meeting online,
Wear masks,
No date was announced for NPC meeting.
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