Abortion, Birth Control, Race Top Supreme Court’s Agenda

The last election year in which the court had so many justices in their 70s and 80s was 1988. Affirmative action and union fees have been at the court in recent terms and the justices’ positions are more or less known.

Religious liberties: Are religious colleges and nonprofits exempt from contraceptives mandates under the Affordable Care Act?

In any year, both of these cases would inspire political scrutiny, but with a presidential election underway, you can probably expect even more voices speaking up than usual. He wrote the decision last term that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples nationwide. Ted Cruz called Roberts’ appointment to the court a mistake. In a Republican presidential debate last month, Texas Sen.

The justices maintain they are not beholden to political sentiment.

The talk about filling vacancies was more than mere casual banter because the oldest member of the court is 82-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and three of her colleagues are in their late 70s – Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Kennedy.

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese and 68 prominent conservatives issued a memo Friday that mentions Alito, Scalia and Thomas as the kind of justices the next Republican president should fight for. It was not long ago that Republican appointees like justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter routinely voted with the court’s liberal wing. But, the job of the chief justice is, among other things, to guard the independence of the judiciary and to preserve the court’s institutional role as a dispassionate arbiter of the nation’s laws and the Constitution.

“The story of the last term is that the left side of the court did a lot of winning”, said Irving Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown’s Supreme Court Institute.

In the Texas case, the justices will decide whether urban, often Hispanic voters get too much voting power because of the way state legislative districts are drawn in a case that could end up giving more clout to rural Republican voters.

The new case takes aim at a compromise fashioned by the court in 1977 in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. Unions respond that the case is a First Amendment Trojan horse created to further weaken the power of organized labor.

Affirmative action: May a state university give a preference to qualified black and Latino applicants, or does such a “race conscious” admissions policy violate the equal-protection right of a white applicant? The school does use race as a factor in admissions. The court’s return to the subject after an appeals court sustained the hybrid plan has struck many supporters of affirmative action as an ominous sign. It has not yet arrived, and it is hardly clear that a majority would be receptive to such a challenge.

There is a strong likelihood that the court will revisit the abortion question, as well as the issue of birth control coverage under Obamacare. That seems about to change.

Brianne Gorod, who has written about Roberts’ tenure on the court for the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said Roberts remains reliably conservative in most areas and “has voted to move the law sharply to the right” on issues of race and access to the courts, among others. Abortion providers, backed by major medical organizations, counter that the regulations are unnecessary and that the law is in fact aimed at making abortions hard to obtain. According to NPR, 24 states have regulations similar to the one in Texas. In 2013, the state passed a law that required doctors who perform abortions to have privileges at a nearby hospital and set stricter standards for abortion clinics.

An appeals court largely upheld the contested provisions, but the Supreme Court in June, by a 5-to-4 vote, stepped in to block the ruling while it considered whether to hear the case.