Amy Coney Barrett Has Officially Joined the Conservative Wing of the Supreme Court
By: Caren White
Tags: Government, Supreme Court, Religion, Politics, Census

Politics

Amy Coney Barrett Has Officially Joined the Conservative Wing of the Supreme Court

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has begun to make herself felt on the Supreme Court. In a decision last Wednesday, she joined the four conservative justices to strike down a mandate that restricted attendance at religious services in New York due to the pandemic.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York State had set limits on the number of congregants at religious services to prevent the spread of the virus. Previous limits set in California and Nevada had been upheld by the lower courts.

A new case was brought by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn opposing limits set by Cuomo that argued that they were discrimination against religion because no limits had been set on the number of people who could be inside of grocery stores and pet stores.

All five justices decided the case on the basis of religion, rather than public health claiming that restricting the number of worshipers was a violation of their First Amendment freedom of religion.

That is patently ridiculous.

The reason the limits were set on religious gatherings is because they involve large numbers of people seated indoors who are singing and chanting together for an hour or more and who must ingress and egress from one exit. This results in longer exposure time to the virus than people who are moving around a store while wearing masks and who usually have more than one exit to use when entering and leaving the premises.

Next up on the SCOTUS docket are arguments in a case involving the census. The Trump administration wants to exclude persons who are in the country illegally from being counted. This flies in the face of centuries of practice that counted everyone, no matter their immigration status.

What is at issue here is Congressional representation. The census decides how congressional seats are apportioned. States with larger populations have larger delegations. If Trump can successfully remove illegal immigrants from the count, then he can cut the size of the Congressional delegations from states with large populations of undocumented immigrants.

Blue states tend to have the most immigrants, legal and illegal, so reducing the size of their delegations will reduce their influence and voting power in the House. The census is only performed every ten years so the reduced delegations will be frozen for the next decade.

This is becoming known as the Tyranny of the Minority. Trump’s base is mainly composed of older whites and whites who lack a college education. Both groups are rapidly becoming outnumbered by minorities.

To maintain their power in the country they are resorting to desperate measures such as gerrymandering and voter suppression. Now they are adding not counting undocumented immigrants in the census to their repertoire.

Having appointed three ultra-conservative justices to the Supreme Court, Trump is ensuring that the tyranny of the minority will continue for many years to come, resulting in fewer rights for everyone.