Gorsuch gives conservatives edge in first full term with Supreme Court
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s first full term on the U.S. Supreme Court promises to show just how much was at stake with his appointment.
The term that opens Monday is full of ideologically divisive cases that could turn on a single vote, starting with arguments over worker class-action lawsuits and political gerrymandering of election districts. The court will consider whether gay rights must yield to business owners’ religious beliefs, and the justices on Thursday added a fight over mandatory union fees paid by government workers.
The term “will be momentous,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted this month in a speech at Georgetown University Law Center.
It might also be a conservative rout, given President Donald Trump’s selection of Gorsuch to fill what ended up being a 14-month vacancy. Gorsuch took a seat Democrats had tried to fill with Judge Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama’s nominee who never got a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. Since he was confirmed in April, Gorsuch has aligned himself with the court’s conservative wing.
Gorsuch’s presence could make the difference in many of the court’s biggest cases in the nine-month term.
The Supreme Court has never struck down a voting map as being so partisan it violates the Constitution. Critics of gerrymandering hope a case over a Republican-drawn Wisconsin map will provide the occasion.
Wisconsin Democrats say the map virtually assures Republicans will maintain a majority in the state Assembly, even if they lose the statewide popular vote as they did in 2012.
The pivotal vote belongs to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who said in 2004 that he wouldn’t preclude partisan-gerrymandering lawsuits but hadn’t yet seen a manageable test to determine how much politics was too much. The Democrats are proposing a test that relies in part on statistical analyses of voting patterns.
What began as a brief discussion about a wedding cake has grown into a Supreme Court dispute between some of the nation’s most cherished values. On one side are Charlie Craig and David Mullins, who were turned away when they visited a Colorado bakery to order a cake for their wedding. On the other is Jack Phillips, a baker who says he can’t create a cake for a gay wedding without violating his religious beliefs.
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission said Phillips violated a state law that bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by businesses that sell to the public. Phillips says his constitutional speech and religious rights are being infringed.
Kennedy, a champion of free speech and gay rights, will again be at the center of the debate and likely to cast the deciding vote.
The court will take up a test of digital privacy when it considers whether prosecutors need a warrant to get mobile-phone tower records that include months of information about a person’s location.
Timothy Carpenter is seeking to overturn his conviction for taking part in nine armed robberies in the Detroit area. At trial, prosecutors used phone data to show Carpenter was near the site of each robbery when it occurred.
Critics say prosecutors are able to get massive amounts of data without having to meet the “probable cause” standards for a search warrant. The largest telecommunications providers receive tens of thousands of requests for location information a year under the 1986 Stored Communications Act, which doesn’t require a warrant.
“I think this is the most consequential case that’s currently on the court’s docket,” said Kannon Shanmugam, a Washington lawyer at Williams & Connolly.
It also could be the best candidate to cut across the court’s ideological divide. The court under Chief Justice John Roberts has been broadly protective of digital privacy rights, as in a unanimous 2014 ruling that said police usually must get a warrant before searching the mobile phone of a person being arrested.