For justices, it’s decision time again
Rulings to come on unions, gay rights, gerrymandering
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is heading into the final month of its term, facing decisions on gerrymandering, unions, gay rights, abortion and President Donald Trump’s travel ban.
This term’s best-known case is a culture wars clash that pits equal rights for gay customers against a claim of religious liberty.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court will decide whether certain store owners are entitled to an exemption from a state’s anti-discrimination law because of their religious beliefs.
It began in 2012 when Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker and a conservative Christian, refused to make a wedding cake for same-sex couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins. Colorado, like more than 20 other
states, requires businesses that are open to the public to provide “full and equal” service to all customers regardless of sexual orientation.
Phillips appealed on free speech grounds, arguing that designing a custom cake is a form of expression. The court’s conservatives, including Justice Anthony Kennedy, suggested during arguments that the owner may have been a victim of bias against religion.
The outcome could indicate how willing the justices are to carve out exceptions to anti-discrimination laws; that’s something the court has refused to do in the areas of race and sex.
The result was hard to predict based on arguments in December. But however the justices rule, it won’t be their last word on the topic.
Religious conservatives have gotten a big boost from the Trump administration, which has taken a more restrictive view of LGBT rights and intervened on their side in several cases, including Phillips’.
Several legal disputes are pending over wedding services, similar to the Phillips case. Video producers, graphic artists and florists are among business owners who say they oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds and don’t want to participate in same-sex weddings. They live in the states that have anti-discrimination laws that specifically include gay and lesbian people.
The Colorado case is one of three major cases that feature a “compelled speech” claim from conservatives who object to liberal state laws.
The justices are expected to announce decisions between now and the end of June, and then adjourn for the summer.
The other major pending cases concern:
Partisan gerrymandering: The court will decide a political line-drawing dispute that could determine which party controls Congress and many state legislatures in the decade ahead. At issue is whether state lawmakers may deliberately redraw election districts to ensure that a particular party controls most of the seats, even when most voters cast ballots for the other party. In the past, the court has struck down districts drawn along racial lines, but it has never struck down an election map because it was unfairly partisan. The justices are set to decide two cases on the issue. One from Wisconsin (Gill v. Whitford) challenges a statewide map that assured Republicans at least 60 percent of the seats in its state House. The other, from Maryland (Benisek v. Lamone), challenges a successful Democratic scheme to transform a Republicanheld congressional district into a solidly Democratic one by shifting tens of thousands of voters.
Unions and public workers: The court will decide whether teachers, police and other public employees in California, New York and 20 other mostly Democratic states can be required by law to pay a “fair share fee” to cover the cost of collective bargaining even if they don’t belong to a union. The justices upheld such contracts in 1977, but said then that employees did not have to pay for the union’s political spending. Anti-union advocates say the court now should rule that forced fees violate the First Amendment because they require some employees to support a group whose views they may oppose. The conservative justices signaled they are likely to rule for the challengers in a case from Illinois and deal a blow to the public sector unions that traditionally support Democrats. (Janus v. ASCME)
Travel ban: The court will decide whether Trump has the power to bar immigrants from several Muslim-majority nations. The controversy over Trump’s travel ban erupted during his first week in the White House, and his orders were repeatedly blocked by judges on the West Coast and East Coast. They ruled his orders were unconstitutional because they discriminated against Muslims. Others said he overstepped his authority under U.S. immigration laws. But the Supreme Court allowed the latest version of Trump’s order to go into effect in December, and the justices sounded ready to uphold it during arguments in April. (Trump v. Hawaii)
Cellphones and privacy: The court will decide whether police must obtain a search warrant based on “probable cause” before they obtain data from a cellphone company that would allow them to track a suspect’s movements for days or weeks at a time. Privacy advocates agree on the need for warrants but investigators say they sometimes need the data to identify a crime suspect or a terrorist. (Carpenter v. United States)
Online merchants and sales taxes: The court will decide whether internet merchants can be required to collect sales taxes for all the states and thousands of municipalities where their customers live. It is a $10-billion-dollar-a-year issue for states, a potential headache for small-scale merchants and a matter of basic fairness for traditional retail stores, who must collect such taxes. In 1992, in the era of mail-order catalogs, the court ruled it was unconstitutional to impose such a tax-collecting duty on merchants who had no stores or “physical presence” in a state. In South Dakota v. Wayfair, the states say the justices should overturn that ruling.
Voting rolls and purges: The court will decide whether states can remove people from the voting rolls if they fail to cast a ballot for two years and do not respond to several notices in the mail. Ohio says it wants to clean up its voting rolls, but civil rights lawyers said the state has wrongly removed thousands of registered voters. And they point to a federal law that says voters may not be dropped simply because of a failure to vote. (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute)