God save this honorable court

Last week, the Supreme Court ended its term with thunder and lightning. Gone are the days when the nation’s highest court ended its session largely without notice, with the justices quietly retreating to their summer seclusion. Over the last few decades, with so many huge and urgent questions at stake, the month of June has emerged as 30 days of judicial fireworks. This year was supposed to be different. It wasn’t. The last days of June brought landmark decisions, and that noise you heard was judicial thunder ... mixed with the sound of furious liberal lawyers throwing law books at the wall.

We can say it out loud: The Supreme Court ended the term with massive wins for parents, for the protection of minors, for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and for the more careful definition of the power of district court judges.

That last issue is undoubtedly the biggest of all. Last Friday the Court handed a big win to the presidency and to constitutional order. For the last generation or so, district court judges have limited the power of presidents by issuing injunctions against executive branch orders or policies and then extending those injunctions nationwide. This practice has been suspect from the beginning. Congress has approved 677 district judgeships for the federal courts. The key word here is district, defined geographically. Now remember that there are appellate courts above the district courts. The Courts of Appeal cover circuits, encompassing several districts. Their geographical assignment is larger (and really did originate in circuits ridden by judges on horseback). As any student who was even partially awake during high school knows, the Supreme Court stands at the top of the system, and its authority is nationwide.

That same semi-awake student probably also remembers the doctrine of the separation of powers, with three branches of national government—the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. It just doesn’t make sense that a single district court judge can issue an injunction against an executive branch order and then extend that injunction nationwide. Presidents of both parties have been frustrated by this imbalance and the Court reset the balance last Friday.

Two other decisions were big wins for parents. In a case from Maryland the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for a public school district to deny parents the right to “opt-out” their children from indoctrination by LGBTQ materials. Parents were outraged when the Montgomery County Public Schools eliminated such an opt-out provision for readings of books that were openly (and evangelistically) LGBTQ. The justices were again divided 6-3, and the Court was split along predictable ideological lines. Conservative justices stood together in this important ruling, which really does represent a significant win for both parental rights and moral sanity. It should tell us something that, in the oral arguments for the case, Justice Neil Gorsuch identified one character in this book for young children as “sex worker.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett quickly clarified: “It’s a drag queen.” Folks, I don’t think the founding fathers would have seen that one coming. Let’s just realize that we are talking about books for young children, and the LGBTQ activists scored big with the school district’s draconian act to deny parents the ability to pull their children out of such readings. It was the parents who scored big at the Supreme Court.

The liberal justices decried the decision as a means of undermining the very idea of the public schools. Of course, they intend for the public schools to be engines for producing little LGBTQ activists. Justice Sonia Sotomayor released a dissenting opinion in which she noted: “Today’s ruling threatens the very existence of public education.” The bigger issue, of course, is the fact that so much of public education has been taken over by progressives who are determined to see the “public” schools indoctrinate children in leftist ideologies and gender theories. The school system even had propaganda materials designed to help teachers in this process. The decision was a big win for parental rights, but it should also serve to open parental eyes to the threats to their children in these school systems.

Another big score for moral sanity came when the Court upheld the right of Texas to require age verification for persons accessing pornographic sites on the internet. The Court’s conservative majority again supported moral sanity in this case, backed up with sound constitutional argument. The State of Texas won, in part, by arguing that online purveyors of pornography should face at least some of the restrictions faced by “bricks-and-mortar” porn shops. Once again, parents won big and Texas showed real leadership by passing this legislation in order to protect minors.

In yet another urgently important decision, the Court affirmed the right of South Carolina to defund Planned Parenthood as a “health provider.” Though established law prevents most tax-payer funds from paying for abortion procedures, in South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order in 2018 that restricted state funds for health care so that Planned Parenthood no longer qualified. That organization prides itself on being the largest abortion system in the nation, and the funds it has taken from state health funding, though not designated for abortion procedures, undergirded Planned Parenthood’s ability to perform abortions. The Court ruled that patients do not have the right to sue when Medicaid funds are denied to Planned Parenthood. This was a landmark win for the cause of unborn life and Gov. Henry McMaster’s decisive action in South Carolina should show the way to other pro-life governors, even as Texas has shown the way on age-verification for pornography.

As I said, the Supreme Court ended its term with thunder—and with big wins for legal and moral sanity. Once again, we are reminded of the consequences that come with presidential elections. Had elections gone the other way, liberal justices would be the majority and these cases would have gone the other way. Just consider that cost and the scale of that disaster. In the language recited as every Supreme Court session begins: “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”