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Can Abercrombie Refuse to Hire a Muslim Teen Who Wears a Hijab? And Other Cases the Supreme Court Will Take Up This Year.

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Photo Credit: NewscomThe Supreme Court’s 2014-2015 term officially begins next Monday. On Thursday, the justices added eleven cases to their docket. Here are the noteworthy additions:

EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores: Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers may not discriminate based on race, color, religion or national origin in the hiring or firing of employees. Thus, employers must reasonably accommodate the religious practices of their employees or prospective employees, unless such an accommodation would cause an “undue hardship.” The EEOC filed suit against Abercrombie for refusing to hire a Muslim teenager who applied to be a model because wearing a hijab conflicted with the store’s style guidelines for their models. The issue before the Supreme Court is whether Abercrombie is liable under Title VII only if it received explicit notice from the job applicant that their style guidelines conflicted with her religious beliefs.

Ohio v. Clark: The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause requires that a criminal defendant has the right to “be confronted with the witnesses against him.” In every state, teachers have a legal obligation to report suspected child abuse to the authorities. Are any statements made by a child to a teacher considered “testimonial,” making them subject to the Confrontation Clause at trial? In this case, the trial court determined that the child victim could not testify and admitted evidence of the child’s statements to his teacher, but an appellate court reversed, finding this violated the defendant’s constitutional rights. This presents the Supreme Court with an opportunity to further define the contours of the Confrontation Clause.

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Religious Liberty on Trial Before the Supreme Court

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Photo Credit: Patriot Post

Photo Credit: Patriot Post

The Affordable Care Act is the law that keeps on giving. Last time it was before the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts validated the horror that is ObamaCare when he declared the individual mandate penalty to be a tax, and thus within the constitutional power of Congress to create. Tuesday, the Supremes heard another challenge to the law in the form of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius – both cases dealing with mandates and religious liberty.

Hobby Lobby is an arts and crafts chain owned by evangelical Christians. With more than 13,000 employees, the company faces potential fines of almost $475 million a year if it fails to comply with ObamaCare’s demands. Conestoga Wood Specialties is a kitchen cabinet manufacturer owned by Mennonites, and, with almost 1,000 employees, it faces penalties of $35 million per year for failure to comply. The owners of both companies contend that complying with ObamaCare’s mandate that employer-provided health insurance cover contraceptives – even more specifically the mandate that coverage include abortifacients – would force them to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. More than 300 plaintiffs in over 90 lawsuits have joined them in the fight.

The suit pits the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) against ObamaCare. Under RFRA, the government may not substantially burden the free exercise of religion unless it can show that the burden advances a compelling interest using the least restrictive means of achieving that interest. (This is the federal law that is mirrored in Arizona, the amendment of which was the subject of the kerfuffle there last month.)

The Obama administration argues that business owners from the corner dry cleaner to corporate giants like Exxon give up their constitutional right to exercise their religion when they establish a business. And in essence, leftists want the government to stay out of their bedroom, but they want taxpayers and employers to pay for what happens in it.

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Hobby Lobby Appeals to Supreme Court to Stop Obama Admin From Forcing it to Obey HHS Mandate

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesChristian craft store Hobby Lobby today filed papers with the Supreme Court asking it to take it case against the Obama administration, which is attempting to make it comply with the HHS mandate that compels religious companies to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs for their employees.

In July, a federal court granted Hobby Lobby a preliminary injunction against the HHS abortion-drug mandate. The injunction prevented the Obama administration from enforcing the mandate against the Christian company, but the Obama administration appealed that ruling recently. The government’s appeal makes it highly likely that the Supreme Court will decide the issue in the upcoming term.

The Obama administration submitted papers in September and Hobby Lobby filed its own papers today.

Hobby Lobby asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review its case and decide whether the Green family will be required to provide and pay for life-terminating drugs and devices in violation of their religious beliefs, according to an email from its attorneys to LifeNews.

“Hobby Lobby’s case raises important questions about who can enjoy religious freedom,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and lead lawyer for Hobby Lobby. “Right now, some courts recognize the rights of business owners like the Green family, and others do not. Religious freedom is too important to be left to chance. The Supreme Court should take this case and protect religious freedom for the Green family and Hobby Lobby.”

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Campaign Contributions, Recess Appointments Slated for Supreme Court

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Photo Credit: APThe Supreme Court is beginning a new term with topics that offer the court’s conservative majority the chance to move aggressively to undo limits on campaign contributions, rule on presidential recess appointments and allow for more government-sanctioned prayer.

Assuming the government shutdown doesn’t get in their way, the justices also will deal with a case that goes to the heart of the partisan impasse in Washington: whether and when the president may use recess appointments to fill key positions without Senate confirmation.

The court was unaffected for the first few days of the government shutdown and there was no expectation that arguments set for October would have to be rescheduled.

The new term that starts Monday may be short on the sort of high-profile battles over health care and gay marriage that marked the past two years. But several cases ask the court to overrule prior decisions — bold action in an institution that relies on the power of precedent.

“There are an unusual number of cases going right to hot-button cultural issues and aggressive briefing on the conservative side asking precedents to be overruled,” said Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris, who served in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.

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Defunding: The Framers’ Remedy for Presidential Lawlessness
 


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Photo Credit: American Spectator President Obama does not have the authority to choose which parts of the law are enforced. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against President Richard Nixon’s inflated claims that he could selectively carry out the law. But going to court to keep presidents in line is slow and necessitates finding litigants to sue the president. The framers gave Congress a more practical way to resist a power-hungry president: defunding. Defunding is precisely what members of Congress are supposed to do when a president breaks the law. It’s checks and balances in action. Two centuries ago, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution James Madison declared in Federalist No. 58 that Congress’s authority over spending is the “most complete and effectual tool” to stop a president from grabbing more power than the Constitution allows.


Utah Senator Mike Lee is taking a page out of Madison’s playbook. On July 17 Lee urged Congress to vote against any continuing resolution to fund the federal government after September 30 so long as it funds Obamacare. “Laws are supposed to be made by Congress, not…[by] the president, who has now amended Obamacare twice. Once by saying individuals have to comply with the law during their first year but employers don’t. Then in saying we aren’t even going to require people to prove their income.” Lee said that if the administration is not prepared to fully enforce Obamacare as enacted, it should agree to delay the entire law and remove its funding from the budget. Eleven fellow Republican Senators and at least 60 Republican House members have signed on to Lee’s defunding stance.

Lee’s constitutional case is air tight. Yet the Democratic Party and Obama’s supporters in the media are trying to label the defunding strategy “government sabotage,” “radicalism,” and “obstructionism.” They need a refresher course on the Constitution.

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Scalia: Judicial Activism a Cause of the Holocaust

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Photo Credit: The Higgs BosonU.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used the twin terrors of Nazi Germany and radical Islam to warn a Snowmass Village audience Saturday about the dangers of judicial activism.

Speaking to a gathering of the Utah State Bar Association at the Westin Resort in Snowmass Village, the longest-serving justice on the nation’s highest court lamented a trend among federal judges, including his colleagues on the Supreme Court, to read and interpret the U.S. Constitution as a “living document” that changes over time…

When judges begin to reinterpret founding documents like the Constitution and make value-laden decisions about individual rights and liberties, Scalia said, they distort the workings of a democratic society. The title of Scalia’s talk, “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” underscores his point that societal decisions about morality and human rights — most of which have no right or wrong answers — should be made in the political arena and not by the courts…

Scalia cited numerous issues that have been thrown to the courts — a woman’s right to an abortion, society’s right to execute someone for a crime, whether “homosexual sodomy” ought to be allowed — and claimed that judges are unqualified to answer them. Medical doctors, engineers, ethicists and even “Joe Six Pack” would be just as qualified as a legal professional to settle some issues that have come before the high court…

Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.

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Catholic Bishop: Supreme Court ‘Giving Legal Protection to an Intrinsic Evil’

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Photo Credit: APBishop Thomas John Paprocki, leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, Ill., says the U.S. Supreme Court is giving “legal protection to intrinsic evil” in its decisions late last month that advanced the cause of legalized same-sex “marriage” in the United States.

“As in the case of Roe v. Wade striking down abortion laws forty years ago, the United States Supreme Court has again usurped its legitimate prerogative through a raw exercise of judicial power by giving legal protection to an intrinsic evil, this time by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in the case of U.S. v. Windsor and in refusing to take up the defense of Proposition 8 in California in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry.

“These hollow decisions are absolutely devoid of moral authority,” said the bishop. “It is becoming increasingly and abundantly clear that what secular law now calls “marriage” has no semblance to the sacred institution of Holy Matrimony. People of faith are called to reject the redefinition of marriage and bear witness to the truth of Holy Matrimony as a lasting, loving and life-giving union between one man and one woman.”

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Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Decision Shows Roe Should be Overturned

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Photo Credit: APWhen the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on June 25, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that Congress’s actions may not be “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”

“Our country has changed,” he wrote. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

Ironically, Roe v. Wade turned 40 this year.

And in the decades since the decision was handed down, our medical knowledge — particularly that which is prenatal in nature — has changed. In fact, that knowledge has changed so much that much of what was regarded as “fact” 40 years ago has “no logical relationship to [prenatal knowledge in] the present day.”

For example, 40 years ago, many Americans were able to abide the legalization of abortion by thinking of the unborn child as a mass of DNA or a bundle of cells that felt no pain and lacked cognition.

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Same-Sex Couples Flood Immigration Offices For Visas

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Kori Kirkbride didn’t get that immediate feeling of joy and relief when she heard the Supreme Court had struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.

Instead, it hit after she talked to her attorney, and found out that the court’s decision will allow her Polish wife, Kasia Kurzatkowska, to apply for a green card, putting an end to a heart-wrenching seven years in which the two have been periodically separated by immigration laws.

“When we sat with our attorney, it became real,” said Kirkbride, 40, of Walnut Creek, Calif. “Waiting for this decision was like waiting to find out if you are pregnant – your whole life can change if you are. Now, we can have a future and buy a house, and have a child.”

Kirkbride and Kurzatkowska are among an estimated 26,000 same-sex couples in the U.S. with one partner who is not a U.S. citizen. Under the law, a subset of these couples – those who are married or considering marriage – had been prevented from applying for green cards for their spouses or fiances.

In the last decade, some of those non-citizens have been deported, even though they were legally married. Many others have been in a legal limbo, with one partner living undocumented in the United States. Some couples have left the country entirely to be somewhere they can both work and live legally.

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Allen West: Time to Teach Obama ‘Lesson Our Forefathers Taught King George III’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Former Rep. Allen B. West had some harsh words for President Obama and the Supreme Court on Sunday night, taking to Facebook to express his disdain for the court’s decision on Proposition 8.

“This week we’ll celebrate the 237th anniversary of our independence. But are we a free people?” Mr. West, a Florida Republican, asked.

“SCOTUS made an ill-conceived ruling believing the choice of sexual behavior should trump the people’s referendum. We are free to love anyone or anything we desire in America, but that does not correlate to rights beyond the unalienable ones Jefferson articulated 237 years ago.

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