Abortion, guns and religion, a major change in the law in any one of these areas would have made for a fateful Supreme Court term.
Its remaining opinions issued, the court began its summer recess Thursday, and the justices will next return to the courtroom in October.
The remarkable week at the end of June in which the guns, abortion, religion and environmental cases were decided at least partially obscured other notable events, some of them troubling. Kavanaugh is one of three Trump appointees along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett who fortified the right side of the court. Greg Garre, who served as former President George W. Bush's top Supreme Court lawyer, said when the court began its term in October “the biggest question was not so much which direction the court was headed in, but how fast it was going. The term answers that question pretty resoundingly, which is fast.
Abortion is just one of several areas in which Thomas is prepared to jettison court precedents. The justices interred a second of their decisions, Lemon v. Kurtzman, in ruling for a high school football coach's right pray on the 50-yard line following games. It's not clear, though, that other justices are as comfortable as Thomas in overturning past decisions.
Justices on courts past have acknowledged a concern about public perception. As recently as last September, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks." Barrett spoke in at a center named for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who engineered her rapid confirmation in 2020 and was sitting on the stage near the justice.
In 18 decisions, at least five conservative justices joined to form a majority and all three liberals were in dissent, roughly 30% of all the cases the court heard in its term that began last October.— Made it harder for people to sue state and federal authorities for violations of constitutional rights.
The justices will hear arguments in the Alabama case in October, among several high-profile cases involving race or elections, or both.