Tag Archives: Justices

U.S. Supreme Court conservatives lean toward shielding religious schools from suits

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) – Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled sympathy on Monday toward a bid by two Catholic elementary schools in California to avoid discrimination lawsuits by former teachers in a case that could make it harder to hold religious institutions liable in employment disputes.

In more than 90 minutes of arguments heard by teleconference due to the coronavirus pandemic, the justices struggled over how courts can determine when a religious entity must face an employee’s civil rights lawsuit and when it is immune because of protections previously recognized by the high court.

Conservative justices asked questions indicating support for shielding the schools from such litigation. Liberal justices seemed to lean toward the teachers. The court has a 5-4 conservative majority. President Donald Trump’s administration sided with the schools.

A ruling favoring of the Catholic schools could strip more than 300,000 lay teachers working in religious schools of employment law protections and could impact industries including nurses in Catholic hospitals, the plaintiffs said.

Teachers Agnes Morrissey-Berru and Kristen Biel accused the schools of firing them due to discrimination. Morrissey-Berru accused her school of age discrimination. Biel accused hers of discrimination based on disability stemming from breast cancer treatment. Biel died last year after a five-year battle with the disease.

At issue is the breadth of a “ministerial exception” that protects religious organizations from employee suits alleging violations of laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employers from discriminating against employees on grounds including sex, race, national origin and religion.

In a 2012 ruling, the Supreme Court recognized the ministerial exception under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom. The exception, meant to prevent government interference with religion, restricts discrimination lawsuits by certain employees if they hold a ministerial role.

The justices in that case left unresolved how to decide when an employee qualifies for this ministerial role, a thorny question that the justices struggled with on Monday.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas offered hypothetical examples such as a chemistry teacher who starts class with a “Hail Mary” prayer, a chemistry teacher who is also a nun and a lay teacher who teaches religion.

“I don’t see what standards a secular court would use to determine which of those is an important … religious duty or function,” Thomas said.

Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she found it “very disturbing” if a person could be fired or refused a job for any reason “that has nothing to with religion.”

Morrissey-Berru sued Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach after being told in 2015, just before her 65th birthday, that her contract would not be renewed. Biel sued St. James School in Torrance after she said she was dismissed when she requested time off to undergo surgery and chemotherapy for her cancer. Her husband has continued the litigation on her behalf.

Both private schools operate under the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Morrissey-Berru and Biel taught their students religion several days a week in addition to secular subjects.

Federal judges concluded that the ministerial exception barred both claims. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently ruled that both lawsuits could proceed.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

With liberal bloc aging, Trump may get more Supreme Court appointments

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With 86-year-old liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enduring a series of health scares, the question of whether President Donald Trump will get to make yet another U.S. Supreme Court appointment before the 2020 election lingers as the nine justices prepare to begin their new term next week.

The justices, set to hold a private conference on Tuesday to discuss taking new cases after a three-month summer break, open their next nine-month term on Monday, with arguments pending in the coming weeks in major cases involving gay and transgender rights, immigration and other issues.

Trump, who took office in 2017 and is seeking re-election next year, already has appointed two justices – conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch – who have pushed the court further to the right.

The court has a 5-4 conservative majority, and two of the four liberal justices are over 80 years old, including Stephen Breyer, who turned 81 last month. Ginsburg, a justice since 1993, underwent radiation therapy in August to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas after having two cancerous nodules in her left lung removed last December.

The stakes could not be higher for the Supreme Court.

With Trump’s fellow Republicans in control of the Senate, which wields confirmation power over federal judicial nominations, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is well placed to push through another Trump Supreme Court appointment even if the vacancy arises close to the November 2020 election.

If Trump, running for re-election, were to win a second four-year term next year, he potentially would be able to replace both Ginsburg and Breyer, leaving the court with a rock-solid 7-2 conservative majority, possibly for decades to come. That could mean a rightward shift on numerous matters including abortion restrictions, expanding gun rights, blunting the advance of LGBT rights, maintaining the death penalty and bolstering the interests of corporations.

McConnell, who has made confirmation of Trump judicial appointees a paramount priority, made clear his intentions when asked in May at an event in his home state of Kentucky what he would do if a Supreme Court vacancy arose in 2020.

“Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell said.

McConnell in 2016 refused to allow the Senate to act when Democratic former President Barack Obama nominated federal appellate judge Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy created by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia – a move Democrats have described as the theft of a Supreme Court seat.

In justifying their inaction on Garland, McConnell and other Republicans argued that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee during a presidential election year. Trump won the 2016 election and in 2017 named Gorsuch to replace Scalia.

‘ON MY WAY’

Ginsburg, who previously underwent treatment for colon cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009, is expected to be on the bench when the new term opens.

“I am on my way to being very well,” Ginsburg said on Aug. 31 during an appearance at a Washington event.

The diminutive and frail-looking justice also appeared in recent weeks alongside Justice Sonia Sotomayor at an event celebrating retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 89, the first woman to serve on the court.

Compared to Ginsburg, who was a pioneering women’s rights lawyer before becoming a justice and has become something of an icon to American liberals, Breyer keeps a lower profile. His most recent public appearance was in London on Sept. 16. He is not known to have had any health scares since a bicycle fall in 2013 in which he fractured a shoulder.

Former senior Republican Senate aide Mike Davis, who runs a group called the Article III Project that he set up to support Trump’s judicial nominations, said he would expect Republicans to be energized by any potential election-year vacancy. But Davis said he also would expect Democrats to put up a fight.

“If people thought that Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight was ugly, just wait until the next one,” Davis said, referring to contentious Senate hearings in which Kavanaugh denied allegations of decades-old sexual misconduct.

No president since Republican Ronald Reagan has appointed more than two justices to the Supreme Court. Reagan named three in his eight years as president, from 1981 to 1989. The last president to have had more than two Supreme Court appointments in his first term in office was Republican President Richard Nixon, who named four in that term running from 1969 to 1973.

Since Nixon was first elected, Republican presidents have filled 14 of the 18 Supreme Court vacancies that have arisen.

Liberal activists are resigned to the idea that Republicans would seize on any opening to expand the court’s conservative majority, even if a vacancy occurs close to the 2020 election.

“They would jump at the chance to make it (the conservative majority) 6-3. I don’t think it matters to them. It’s a raw power grab on their part,” said Christopher Kang, chief counsel at the liberal legal activist group Demand Justice.

If Senate Republicans push through a nomination – in particular in a scenario in which a Trump selection is confirmed after he loses the election but before a new president takes office – it would build momentum among Democrats for an idea promoted by some liberals for adding more seats to the court to loosen the conservative stranglehold, Kang said.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung and Richard Cowan; Editing by Will Dunham)