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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement last week, a move that gives President Joe Biden his first chance to shape the future of the court. <\/p>\n
Biden has reaffirmed his commitment to appointing a Black, female justice, which means that his decision will be historic no matter which specific person he picks. There have only been two Black justices since the court\u2019s founding in 1789, and both of them were\/are men. <\/p>\n
However, you\u2019re not alone if you\u2019re feeling like Biden\u2019s selection won\u2019t matter much in the short term. The fact that a Democratic president is replacing a liberal, rather than a conservative, justice means that the overall ideological balance of the court won\u2019t change. <\/p>\n
Conservatives will maintain their 6-3 majority and keep the upper hand in debates over what cases to hear and how to rule. In many battles, liberals\u2019 options will be limited to writing a scathing dissent or forging an unlikely compromise. <\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve followed my reporting on religious freedom cases in recent years, you\u2019ll know that Breyer has been partial to that latter approach. He, as well as Justice Elena Kagan, often partner with their more conservative colleagues to rule in favor of people of faith. <\/p>\n
I wrote about that trend last summer in an article that considered whether conservatives \u2014 or the court as a whole \u2014 are biased in favor of faith-related claims<\/a>. I noted that Breyer and Kagan joined with conservatives nine of the 13 times the court ruled in favor of religious freedom from 2006 to 2020. <\/p>\n In doing so, Breyer and Kagan pulled the rest of the majority toward the middle. Their commitment to compromise helps explain why the court\u2019s faith-related rulings are more often narrow and context-specific than shocking and broad. <\/p>\n When you consider Breyer\u2019s legacy from this angle, Biden\u2019s choice becomes more significant. The president has to decide whether he wants someone who will follow in Breyer\u2019s path and seek compromises or promote liberal beliefs at any cost. <\/p>\n \u201cA more-liberal nominee will make the court more conservative. A more middle-of-the-road justice can keep the court closer to the center,\u201d said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, to Politico<\/a>. <\/p>\n In the same article, William Araiza, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, pointed out that if Biden chooses the first of those two paths it would increase the likelihood that faith-related rulings are split along ideological lines. <\/p>\n \u201c(Breyer) was more willing than his fellow liberals to allow governments to display religious items, such as Ten Commandments monuments. A new justice more insistent on maintaining the church-state divide might vote against the government in cases where Breyer might have accommodated it, even if that change likely won\u2019t prove decisive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In other words, this might be the last term for a while that we see unanimous or 8-1 rulings on most religious freedom issues. Breyer is going to finish out the court\u2019s current set of cases \u2014 including battles over spiritual advisers for death row inmates<\/a> and government surveillance of Muslims<\/a> \u2014 before beginning his retirement.<\/p>\n Last Thursday marked five years since then-President Donald Trump first implemented a ban on travel to the U.S. from a handful of Muslim-majority countries. That ban, which is often referred to simply as the travel ban or Muslim ban, fueled protests at airports across the country and a legal battle that made it all the way to the Supreme Court<\/a>. <\/p>\n The Trump administration amended the ban, including the list of affected countries, multiple times in response to pushback, but consistently argued that the policy was inspired by national security concerns rather than anti-Muslim bias. The Supreme Court accepted this claim in a 2018 ruling upholding the policy over the objections of a wide variety of civil rights groups and religious organizations. <\/p>\n Although President Joe Biden<\/a> repealed the travel ban just hours after taking office in January 2021, it continues to affect Muslims in the U.S. and around the world, according to recent coverage from HuffPost<\/a>. \u201cMany families have not yet been reunited,\u201d the article said.<\/p>\n Participants in the March for Life that took place in Washington, D.C., earlier this month faced pushback from more than counter-protesters who support abortion rights. Several marchers reported getting into shouting matches with white supremacists and neo-Nazis<\/a> who also support the anti-abortion cause. \u201cHow beautiful would it have been, if when these white supremacist groups come out here, organizing this little clump over on the sidewalk, if we were all screaming at them, \u2018Get out! Get out! Racism has no place here!,\u2019\u201d said Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa about her March for Life experience to America magazine. <\/p>\n As I\u2019ve mentioned before in this newsletter, prayer apps are a big business that\u2019s getting bigger. Americans increasingly turn to virtual message boards to share their thoughts and concerns. In an illuminating (and somewhat horrifying) report, BuzzFeed News explores the privacy concerns<\/a> created by this trend. Prayer apps are generally just as willing to sell user data as other types of apps, the article said. <\/p>\n Col. Khallid Shabazz is an Army chaplain, a Muslim convert and one of TikTok\u2019s most unexpected stars<\/a>. Religion News Service recently spoke with him about what brought him to the social media app and what it\u2019s like to be a Muslim soldier. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve been playing (and loving) the computer game Wordle<\/a> for more than three weeks now. It\u2019s fun to have a brain teaser to look forward to each day and \u2014 as I realized while reading a recent Washington Post piece about the game \u2014 it\u2019s also good for my soul<\/a>. <\/p>\n
\nFresh off the press<\/h3>\n
\nTerm of the week: Muslim ban<\/h3>\n
\nWhat I\u2019m reading …<\/h3>\n
\nOdds and ends<\/h3>\n