The Supreme Court's historic week

While everyone's heard about the SCOTUS ruling on Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Dobbs was hardly the only major case decided last week. At stake in Carson v. Makin was "Maine’s exclusion of funds from religious schools in a school-choice program." Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion.

In it, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that while "a state need not subsidize private education", he also wrote that "once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."

To disqualify it on religious grounds would be the personification of discrimination.

Then there's the Second Amendment case titled New York Rifle & Pistol Inc. v. Bruen. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion. In the majority opinion, Justice Thomas wrote that "New York’s law violated the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment — which says citizens have a right to equal protection under the law — because it 'prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms' as authorized by the Second Amendment." Reaction to the majority opinion was predictable:

President Joe Biden said he was "deeply disappointed" in the ruling, which he argued, "contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all." Citing the "horrific attacks in Buffalo and Uvalde," Biden urged states to pass "commonsense" gun regulation "to make their citizens and communities safer from gun violence.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said, "This decision isn’t just reckless, it's reprehensible."

Hochul said that because "the federal government will not have sweeping laws to protect us ... our states and our governors have a moral responsibility to do what we can and have laws that protect our citizens because of what is going on — the insanity of the gun culture that has possessed everyone all the way up to the Supreme Court."

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said, "This decision has made every single one of us less safe from gun violence."

Adams also said this:

Mayor Adams should wake up. He said that the ruling would turn "New York into the wild, wild west." Hasn't he noticed that people are already calling New York "the world's largest gun range."

Finally, there's the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and Casey. Majority opinion is found here.

Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives. Pp. 8–79.

(a) The critical question is whether the Constitution, properly understood, confers a right to obtain an abortion. Casey’s controlling opinion skipped over that question and reaffirmed Roe solely on the basis of stare decisis. A proper application of stare decisis, however, requires an assessment of the strength of the grounds on which Roe was based. The Court therefore turns to the question that the Casey plurality did not consider. Pp. 8–32.

This was a purely political decision in 1973. The Supreme Court didn't have the authority to take this issue from the political process at the state level. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke in 1992 that SCOTUS had interrupted a political process that would've prevented the half-century of division. Last week represented quite the trifecta for constitutionalists. The Supreme Court struck down Roe without making abortion illegal, instead returning that decision to the 50 states. SCOTUS also said that abortion is a political issue, not a constitutional right. That's obvious since abortion isn't found in the Constitution.