Midnight Ruling Exposes Rifts at a Supreme Court Transformed by Trump.
The justices issued six opinions, several of them unusually bitter, in upholding challenges from churches and synagogues to state pandemic restrictions on religious services.
'A few minutes before midnight on Wednesday, the nation got its first glimpse of how profoundly President Trump had transformed the Supreme Court.
Just months ago, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was at the peak of his power, holding the controlling vote in closely divided cases and almost never finding himself in dissent. But the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett late last month, which put a staunch conservative in the seat formerly held by the liberal mainstay, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, meant that it was only a matter of time before the chief justice’s leadership would be tested.
On Wednesday, Justice Barrett dealt the chief justice a body blow. She cast the decisive vote in a 5-to-4 ruling that rejected restrictions on religious services in New York imposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to combat the coronavirus, shoving the chief justice into dissent with the court’s three remaining liberals. It was one of six opinions the court issued on Wednesday, spanning 33 pages and opening a window on a court in turmoil.
The ruling was at odds with earlier ones in cases from California and Nevada issued before Justice Ginsburg’s death in September. Those decisions upheld restrictions on church services by 5-to-4 votes, with Chief Justice Roberts in the majority. . .
The ruling issued late Wednesday night said that Mr. Cuomo’s strict virus restrictions — capping attendance at religious services at 10 people in “red zones” where risk was highest, and at 25 in slightly less dangerous “orange zones” — violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. . .
The majority opinion said less restrictive measures would work.
“Among other things, the maximum attendance at a religious service could be tied to the size of the church or synagogue,” the opinion said. “It is hard to believe that admitting more than 10 people to a 1,000-seat church or 400-seat synagogue would create a more serious health risk than the many other activities that the state allows.”
The opinion said the state had treated secular businesses more favorably than houses of worship. . .
The most notable signed opinion came from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first appointee. His concurrence was bitter, slashing and triumphant, and it took aim at Chief Justice Roberts, whose concurring opinion in the California case in May had been relied on by courts around the nation to assess the constitutionality of restrictions prompted by the pandemic. . .
“We may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “Things never go well when we do.”
Chief Justice Roberts responded, in a tone suggesting that his patience was being tested, that there was no need to act because Mr. Cuomo had, for the time being, lifted the restrictions.
“Numerical capacity limits of 10 and 25 people, depending on the applicable zone, do seem unduly restrictive,” he wrote. “And it may well be that such restrictions violate the Free Exercise Clause. It is not necessary, however, for us to rule on that serious and difficult question at this time.”
The court’s three liberal members were to varying degrees prepared to support the restrictions. Chief Justice Roberts made a point of defending his colleagues from Justice Gorsuch’s attacks, saying they were operating in good faith.
“To be clear,” the chief justice wrote, quoting from Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, “I do not regard my dissenting colleagues as ‘cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,’ yielding to ‘a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis,’ or ‘sheltering in place when the Constitution is under attack.’ They simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said the majority was being reckless. “Justices of this court play a deadly game,” she wrote, “in second-guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/us/rifts-supreme-court-trump.html
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Cuomo Attacks Supreme Court’s Emboldened Majority Over Virus Ruling.
“You have a different court, and I think that was the statement the court was making,” the governor said after a 5-4 decision barring restrictions on religious services.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo accused the U.S. Supreme Court of political partisanship on Thursday after the justices narrowly rejected his coronavirus-based restrictions on religious services. He played down the impact of the ruling, suggesting that it was a reflection of the court’s emboldened new conservative majority.
Regardless of the governor’s interpretation, the decision by the Supreme Court late on Wednesday to suspend the 10- and 25-person capacity limitations on churches and other houses of worship in New York would seem to be a sharp rebuke to Mr. Cuomo, who had previously won a series of legal battles over his emergency powers.
“You have a different court, and I think that was the statement that the court was making,” the governor said, noting worries in some quarters after President Trump nominated three conservative justices on the Supreme Court in the past four years. “We know who he appointed to the court. We know their ideology.”
Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, insisted that the 5-4 decision “doesn’t have any practical effect” because the restrictions on religious services in Brooklyn, as well as similar ones in Queens and the city’s northern suburbs, had since been eased after the positive test rates in those areas had declined.
But less stringent capacity restrictions, also rejected by the Supreme Court’s decision, are still in place in six other counties, including in Staten Island.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/nyregion/supreme-court-churches-religious-gatherings.html
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