The Left might hate the Supreme Court, but it’s the Left that keeps the court in business by shoving its strange obsessions onto its docket. For this new term that begins Monday, the Left has forced the court to confront its obsessions with child “sex changes,” banning guns, and protecting pornographers from laws that keep their products away from children.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Left has also forced the court to confront, yet again, its strange obsession with replacing democracy with bureaucracy.
First Up, Child Sex Changes
The case is called United States v. Skrmetti, and it involves a Tennessee law that bans giving children hormone treatments or genital surgeries to change a child’s body to match his or her chosen “gender identity.” That is, giving testosterone to and cutting off the breasts of girls who think they’re boys, and giving estrogen to and cutting off the penises of boys who think they’re girls.
Barbaric stuff, and Tennessee has wisely pumped the brakes on this left-wing obsession given the terrible risks that scientific research shows is associated with these drugs and surgeries. But the Biden-Harris administration has sued Tennessee claiming that children have a constitutional right to get hormones and genital surgeries if they feel like they were born the wrong sex.
You can read the Constitution all day long but you won’t find this strange new inalienable right in it, but if the court agrees with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, no state will be able to pump the brakes on this dangerous new obsession.
Next Up, Spooky Guns
Americans have been handcrafting their own guns for hundreds of years. And for all those hundreds of years, nobody ever thought it was illegal. Even Democrats thought it was legal until just recently.
What changed? Well, the Biden-Harris administration realized that it might be able to end this ancient tradition by deploying a slur. What were once handcrafted guns are now “ghost guns,” and with a name that spooky, they must be banned.
The problem, says the administration in Garland v. VanDerStok, is that these guns can’t be traced by the federal government. This, the administration assures us, is an “acute threat to public safety.” But there’s little evidence of that. It’s expensive, difficult, and time consuming to handcraft a gun, so criminals typically buy or steal them instead. But leftist feelings don’t care about the facts; they just want all the guns gone.
Fearmongering is the strategy they’ve settled on to do it. A Supreme Court decision upholding this ancient American tradition, they say, would “flood” our communities with “untraceable ghost guns” that would “endanger the public and thwart law-enforcement efforts to solve violent crimes.”
The liberal justices will surely be fearmongered into upholding the administration’s ban on spooky guns, but the other justices seem to be made of sterner stuff.
After That, Pornography
The case is Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, but don’t get confused by the plaintiff’s name. This case doesn’t involve a noble fight against Big Tech censorship or a righteous stand against a screaming campus mob. No, this case is brought by pornographers hiding their smut behind the banner of free speech.
Pornography rots brains, especially children’s brains, so Texas joined 19 other states and prudently passed a law saying that pornographic websites must verify that their users are over 18 years old. Texas, being a free state, wanted to strike the balance of allowing adults the freedom to make the self-destructive choice of watching pornography while protecting children who are too immature to fully appreciate the consequences of that choice.
But a trade association of pornographers calling themselves the Free Speech Coalition argued that the law interferes with “adults’ access to constitutionally protected expression.” They claim that requiring adults to provide their identifying information on a pornographic website raises “privacy concerns.”
The court will probably not resolve the whole case at this point but will decide what level of judicial review the law gets when it gets remanded back to the lower court for a decision. Texas wants the law to get “rational-basis review,” which means the law will survive if Texas can show some rational reason for it, like protecting children’s brains from the rotting effects of porn. The pornographers, on the other hand, want “strict scrutiny,” which means the law will most likely be struck down because of First Amendment concerns.
How this case gets decided under established precedents is uncertain, and the uncertainty is increased because in recent years, the court has been moving away from these different levels of scrutiny and toward an approach more faithful to history and tradition. On that front, there is no history or tradition of denying states the power to protect children from porn.
Finally, Deep State Shenanigans
The Biden-Harris administration is obsessed with telling us that anyone who disagrees with it hates democracy. But at the same time, members of the administration are obsessed with doing end-runs around Congress and local elected governments to impose their will on the country.
Their latest end-run is so egregious that even San Francisco is fighting back. The case is San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which a super-lefty presidential administration has gotten on the last nerve of a super-lefty city.
The case involves the way that the Environmental Protection Agency regulates water pollution. In the past, the EPA gave local governments specific pollutant target levels. If the local governments allowed pollution levels to exceed those targets, the EPA would fine them huge amounts of money. Those fines could be relatively easily avoided, however, because the specific levels let local governments know exactly how much was too much, and if they stayed under those levels, they were considered in compliance.
But then the federal bureaucrats realized that they could wield the EPA like a climate cudgel if they did not give local governments specific targets. Instead, they told local governments to avoid “causing or contributing to exceedances of water quality standards.”
What does that mean? Whatever the administration wants it to mean. San Francisco asked the EPA, “How do we comply with that?” And the EPA replied, “By complying.” Clear as mud.
As well-ensconced on the “climate-crisis” bandwagon as San Francisco is, it still has one foot on the “we-don’t-like-arbitrary-government” bandwagon, so it sued. It’ll probably win, and the Biden-Harris administration will add yet another well-deserved loss to its already impressive loss record.
More to Come
The court is still taking cases for its new term, and there will be many more exciting ones added to the docket in the coming weeks. So, stay tuned.