Public Schools and Parent Options

The Supreme Court ruled that parents could, indeed, opt their children out of parts of public school curricula that violated those parents’ religious belief. In Mahmoud, et al. v Taylor, et al., the Court held

the public-school system in Montgomery County, Md, had placed “an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion,” according to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.
“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill[.]”

The three “liberal” Justices demurred:

Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools[.]

The problem isn’t that chaotic, however:

Some parents from several religious backgrounds—Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox—objected to [a collection of books with LGBTQ themes and characters]. The school board said in court filings that it initially tried to accommodate opt-out requests, but doing so became “unworkably disruptive” due to “unsustainably high numbers of absent students.”

In other words, the school board was inconvenienced by not being able to dictate to parents how the school board would treat those parents’ children. Never mind that the objections were so widespread that the school board was unable to impose its will on all but a relative few. That clear cut a separation is hardly chaotic.

The chaos about which those three Justices bleated was caused by the school board and would be caused by other school boards who object to parents not meekly rolling over and kowtowing to the Know Betters of school boards more interested in their Leftist ideologies than they are in teaching the parents’ children.

These three Justices know this. They claim to worry about Court decisions deprecating respect for our court system, but it’s attitudes like those of these three that lead to that deprecation.

An aside: such chaos as might occur from enforcing parental rights, religious and otherwise, would be virtually eliminated were State and Federal governments to get out of the way of school choice, illustrated by voucher and charter schools, parochial schools, and home schooling. Parents could freely exercise their [religious beliefs] vis-à-vis the parameters of their children’s education if they had unfettered access to such a range.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

A Noble Man

The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.

Judicial Inconvenience

A prison inmate went without his heart medication for a week, had a heart attack, and died. The 6th Circuit ruled no Qualified Immunity for the nurse who didn’t, per the Institute for Justice‘s 27 June newsletter, call his pharmacy to verify his prescriptions or take 10 minutes to get the necessary release form filled out for getting his prescription filled out.

The dissenting judge in the panel beefed (IJ paraphrase),

Now everyone in CA6 who dies in jail because they were briefly without their medication has a constitutional claim.

Sorry, Judge, the convenience of you or your court is no excuse for denying even a prisoner his due, and it’s no excuse for not holding materially accountable those prison officials who deny a prisoner his due.

The Circuit opinion and dissent can be read here.

Artificial Hysteria

The Supreme Court earlier this week stayed a district court’s order blocking the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens to countries that are not the home countries of those illegal aliens. The activist Justices on the Court demurred. The Court’s stay does not address the underlying case; it merely allows the administration to proceed while that case makes its way through our court system. It’s the nature of their demurral that’s instructive here, though.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the dissenters,

Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled[.]

This over-the-top manufactured hysteria by the activist Justices does the Court no good at all. In an environment where many begin to question the legitimacy of the Court, Sotomayor’s excessive hype is the sort of thing fueling that question.

Judge Shopping

A Wall Street Journal editorial correctly decried this, and a letter writer to the news outlet’s Letters section correctly included the Northern District of Texas as a particular judge shopping target for bringing suits convenient to the Trump administration. The letter writer also pointed out that, as an attempt to mitigate, if not eliminate judge shopping, the Judicial Conference of the United States, strongly discourag[ed] the practice, and some Federal districts changed their rules to enhance random assignments of their judges—but those rules are District by District.

Lost in this kerfuffle (cynically so, say I given that judges as a group surely know better) is a nation-wide requirement of centuries-long standing [emphasis added]:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed….

And

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved….

For those of you following along at home, those are from our Constitution’s 6th and 7th Amendments, respectively.

For the quibblers of the lawyer class, the latter is easily extensible by statute to explicitly require the civil suit to occur in the State and district wherein the [cause of the tort] shall have [first occurred].

The ability of Congress to make such a thing explicit is in this nation-wide requirement of equally centuries-long standing:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

The District courts, as creatures of Congress, have their jurisdictional authorities set by Congress. This Congressional power over jurisdictional authority extends to the Supreme Court [emphasis added]:

…the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Again, for those of you following along at home, those are from our Constitution’s Art III, Sect 1, and Art III, Sect 2, respectively.

All that’s required to eliminate judge-shopping is a renewed respect for and enforcement of our Constitution.