Sitting on cases: Supreme Court leaves major conservative issues waiting, including on abortion and guns.
Justices may not take on abortion rights, gun issues
WASHINGTON – When Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett took her seat on the Supreme Court in October, Democrats openly fretted about a lopsided conservative court unwinding years of precedent on abortion, gun control and other divisive issues.
But rather than handing conservatives a string of victories, the justices have – so far – left advocates on the right grasping for answers about why a number of pending challenges dealing with some of the nation’s biggest controversies have languished.
From an abortion case out of Mississippi to a scorching dispute between Texas and California pitting religious freedom against gay rights, the justices are sitting on several contentious issues that will now wait until this fall – at the earliest – to get a hearing, assuming the court takes the cases at all.
“There’s always a reason to kick the can down the road,” lamented Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “These issues linger and fester if they don’t come to any sort of resolution. That’s sort of where we are.”
When former President Donald Trump nominated Barrett in September, Democrats warned her confirmation would tilt the court to the “far right,” noting it would have a 6-3 split between conservatives and liberals for the first time in decades. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the chamber’s Democratic leader, said Barrett’s confirmation would “alter the lives and freedoms of the American people while they stood in line to vote.”
But in the months since then the court’s approach has been far less dramatic. It sided with churches and synagogues challenging COVID-19 restrictions but dismissed a battery of appeals by Trump and his allies seeking to change the outcome of the 2020 election. It jettisoned some controversial matters left over from the Trump administration and sidestepped others.
Of 13 signed opinions published by the court so far this year, all but one have put conservatives and liberals together in the majority that decided the case.
Here’s a look at some of the red hot appeals waiting in the wings of the Supreme Court’s docket.
Easily the most closely watched pending litigation at the court deals with Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Many conservatives for more than a generation have sought to either overturn the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide or at least chip away at it. Some see the Mississippi case as the first real test of the court’s resolve on the issue.
The Supreme Court is also sitting on a dispute this term between the nation’s two most populous and perhaps most politically disparate states: California and Texas. The case once again underscores a tension in the law between religious liberty and gay rights.
California approved a state law in 2016 prohibiting taxpayer-funded travel to states that don’t explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Texas allows foster-care and adoption agencies to deny same-sex couples as parents if they object on religious grounds.
California says it’s within bounds to set policies on using taxpayer money.