Supreme Court divided over approving first religious charter school

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Friday morning read:

• Trump asks Supreme Court to end deportation protections for Venezuelans in the US (John Fritze, CNN)
• Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply condemns Trump’s attacks on judges (Josh Gerstein, Politico)
• The Conservative Case Against Trump’s Latest Power Grab (Amit Agarwal, The Bulwark)
• The Supreme Court Is Declaring War on Secularism (Matt Ford, The New Republic)
• DOJ Urges Supreme Court to Hear Hawaii ‘Gun-Free Zone’ Case (Stephen Gutowski, The Reload)

A group of transgender service members urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to leave in place an order by a federal judge that bars the government from enforcing a policy that would prohibit them from serving in the U.S. military. Putting the order on hold, they told the justices, would “upend the status quo by allowing the government to immediately begin discharging thousands of transgender servicemembers, including” the plaintiffs in this case, “thereby ending distinguished careers and gouging holes in military units” 

The Trump administration came to the court last week, asking the justices to put the order on hold while the service members’ challenge to the policy continues in the lower courts. The order, it said, had usurped the executive branch’s “authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces.” 

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that an air traffic controller who was called up to serve on active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard “during a national emergency” is entitled to have the government pay him the difference between his civilian salary and his military pay, without having to show that his service was connected to a specific emergency. 

By a vote of 5-4, the court rejected the government’s narrower interpretation of the law at issue in the case, which would make it harder for reservists like Coast Guard reservist Nick Feliciano to recover differential pay. The justices splintered in an unusual line-up, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor joining four of her more conservative colleagues – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – in the majority. 

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:

• Supreme Court’s conservatives lean toward allowing country’s first religious public charter school (Lawrence Hurley, NBC News)
• Divided Supreme Court weighs effort to create nation’s first religious charter school (Melissa Quinn, CBS News)
• US Supreme Court resolves pay fight in favor of federal workers who also are military reservists (The Associated Press)
• The Supreme Court Could Unleash Chaos on the Economy (Ankush Khardori, Politico)
• Guns drawn, the FBI barged into the wrong house. Supreme Court justice calls it ‘ridiculous’ (Bart Jansen, USA Today)

Another day at the Supreme Court and, suitable for the way this term has gone, another case that pretty clearly does not belong before the court. The justices granted review in Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Davis to decide whether a district court can certify a class action that includes claimants who in fact have not suffered any cognizable injury. Here, for example, a group of blind individuals filed suit against Labcorp when it installed automated check-in kiosks in its facilities in the COVID-19 era. The class contends that the kiosks discriminate against the blind, and the parties spent a lot of time in the district court arguing about the suitable bounds of the class. At one point, the court defined a class that excluded all who did not know about or did not want to use the kiosk, on the theory that they were not injured. Later, the district court modified the definition to include everybody who came into a clinic, whether they did or did not want to use the kiosk.