Millions of Americans are awaiting the imminent release of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion case, which is expected to junk Roe v. Wade after half a century of it poisoning the U.S. constitutional order.
But Dobbs isn’t the only decision the Court is releasing this summer, and on Wednesday, Americans got another reminder that the Court is anything but an anti-woke bulwark.
On Wednesday morning, the Court delivered its ruling in the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo v. Texas case. The case is one of countless disputes over the exact rights that Indian tribes have to ignore state laws on their reservations. When the Ysleta tribe came under federal jurisdiction close to forty years ago, it was done with the understanding that the tribe would not use its new federal status to open casinos with slot machines and other forms of high-stakes gambling illegal under Texas law. But later, the Ysleta reneged on this understanding, and sought to create casinos by calling their slot machines “electronic bingo.”…
Besides throwing Oklahoma into chaos as vengeance for the Trail of Tears, Gorsuch also joined court liberals to rule that non-unanimous jury convictions in criminal cases are illegal. Gorsuch’s reasoning was that, because lawmakers had racist thoughts a century ago when enabling such verdicts, the practice had to be unconstitutional. In 2018, Gorsuch joined four liberals to rule that a Trump Admin policy making it easier to deport illegal immigrants was “unconstitutionally vague.” And in 2020, Gorsuch authored the largest expansion of federal civil rights law in decades, ruling that when the 1964 Civil Rights Act barred discrimination on the basis of “sex,” it somehow also barred discrimination based on sexual orientation or “gender identity,” something nobody in 1964 had ever heard of. Read more…
