The Overview (Tuesday, May 3)
The Overview (Tuesday, May 3)
A *major* leak from the Supreme Court, a profile of a contrarian commentator, and aspirational words for the American media
Greetings from finals week at John Brown University. Another semester is (nearly) in the books, as is my sixth year of teaching at JBU. And crazy as it is to think, thanks to my upcoming sabbatical I have taught my last class until 2023. I can’t wait to get to put all my energy behind my Uneasy Citizenship book, which my publisher is expecting at the end of this year.
In addition to finishing the book, I’m looking forward to the following over the next several months:
Sharing research on how attitudes toward groups affect people’s support for constitutional rights, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association
Presenting a paper on teaching during a climate of cultural and political tumult, at Calvin University’s annual Kuyers Institute Conference
Hosting the sixth annual Reimagining Faith and Public Life at John Brown University, this year featuring Jeff Bilbro and Bonnie Kristian
Visiting several of my colleagues’ classrooms in the Fall 2022 semester, to see how they teach their students
Taking a long-delayed-due-to-the-pandemic family vacation to Disneyland (sshhh, don’t tell our kids…)
Additionally, this summer I’ll be taking a break from these biweekly Overview newsletters, since I really do need to be spending most of my time on the aforementioned projects. But don’t unsubscribe! I will be using this space to share thoughts and ideas stemming from my book, hopefully once every couple of weeks or so.
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s the Tuesday, May 3 edition of The Overview:
1. Last night, reporters at Politico wrote on a major leak out of the U.S. Supreme Court: a draft opinion from the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which would overturn Roe v. Wade and its declaration of a constitutional right to abortion.
If this decision holds, it would not make abortion illegal across the country, but rather would return the issue of abortion (as a policy matter) to state governments. And while some of them (like my current home, Arkansas) would prohibit abortion in all but the rarest of occasions, others (like my former home, Oregon) would maintain the status quo.
People smarter than myself will comment on the legal earthquake this decision would bring to the American legal and political landscape. Still others will comment about the moral implications of this decision. But upon seeing this story, my first question was, “Who leaked this?”
For context, the Supreme Court’s deliberative process is famously guarded. The only people with direct knowledge of this process are the justices themselves, their clerks (young lawyers who serve as de facto assistants), and probably (again, it’s a guarded process!) some of the Court’s administrative support staff. That’s a very small circle of people with access to draft opinions like this — and, as others have noted, this is the first time anyone can remember where a draft opinion has leaked.
There’s little motivation for the Court’s administrative support staff to leak information to the press; these are career employees who cultivate close relationships with the justices, and anyone outed as a leaker would quickly be out of work. A similar lack of motivation applies to the Court’s clerks, who spend years and years to reach the mountaintop of a young lawyer’s career and who are virtually guaranteed to reap a significant windfall—in the form of a prestigious job and significant salary—after their one year clerkship ends. Risking all that to leak something to the press doesn’t make a lot of sense.
That brings us to the justices themselves. The men and women on the Court are open about their friendly relationships with one another, but this decision will likely be the Court’s most contentious in several decades. Perhaps an angry liberal justice leaked the opinion out of frustration with their conservative colleagues. Or perhaps there’s another explanation:
As a reminder, this draft opinion is just that: a draft. We’ll know soon enough—by the end of June at the latest—what the Court’s decision actually is. In the meantime, it’s hard to overstate just how big of a deal this leak is, not just for the legal and political question of abortion, but also for the Court’s internal workings.
2. The Deseret News recently interviewed Elizabeth Bruenig, who, Deseret said, “confounds the left and right.” Bruenig, a writer at the Atlantic and previously of the New York Times and Washington Post, is one of the more enigmatic commentators on religion, politics, and culture around. She is unabashedly Catholic and holistically pro-life, while economically finding herself “just left of Bernie Sanders.”
From the interview:
Deseret News: Many Americans see socialism and religion as mutually exclusive. But you claim both. How does that work?
Bruenig: I see them as coherent. During the Cold War, when Americans were forming their opinions about socialism, the conflict wasn’t as simple as the media often framed it. The Soviet Union practiced Soviet communism, which was atheistic. But there are other forms of socialism, like the democratic socialism we see in Scandinavia. Not only do Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark allow religion, but some of those countries even have compulsory taxes that fund their state churches. It’s not the only system for any country at any stage of development, but the United States has a wealthy, advanced economy, we’re industrialized, we have the technology, there’s no reason we can’t do this. And it would make the lives of some of our neediest people much better. I find a natural fit with a political system that ensures a dignified life for the very least among us. It seems extraordinarily obvious to me.
Bruenig also predicted that the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on abortion will be the single most interesting story at the intersection of religion and politics in America, especially since, “there’s going to be an enormous amount of unhappiness in the public, one way or the other.”
3. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for a Christian group that had been told it could not fly a Christian flag at Boston’s City Hall. Since 2005 nearly 300 flags had been allowed to fly on a designated flagpole outside City Hall, but in 2017 the City denied a group’s request to fly the Christian flag, citing concerns about the establishment of religion.
Writing for a unanimous, 9-0 Court, Justice Stephen Breyer—the liberal who is retiring at the end of this term—wrote that the City’s denial amounted to textbook viewpoint discrimination, something almost always prohibited in First Amendment cases:
Boston concedes that it denied Shurtleff ’s request solely because the Christian flag he asked to raise “promot[ed] a specific religion.” Under our precedents, and in view of our government-speech holding here, that refusal discriminated based on religious viewpoint and violated the Free Speech Clause.
Importantly, the Court clarified that the City permitting this group to fly its flag would not mean that the government is endorsing the flag’s message. The program is, essentially, an open forum for private speech on public property, alleviating any concern that the government is establishing the Christian religion.
4. Whitworth University professor (and excellent tweeter) Aaron Griffith spoke to the CCCU about his award-winning book, God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America. Griffith, this year’s winner of Redeemer University’s Emerging Public Intellectual Award, said there is an appetite in today’s political environment for criminal justice reform, an unusual prospect in an age of increased polarization:
When I talk to conservatives and when I talk to progressives about this, I’m often encouraged at how, whatever their political instincts, most people can look at the prison system itself today and realize there’s a problem. They realize there’s inefficiencies, disparities, inhumane things going on. And I think no matter who they voted for, there’s an interest in addressing that in some way. That’s good; Christians need to jump on that.
Griffith also talked about how he incorporates his research into his classes by taking students to local prisons. “Visiting local jails,” he said, “helps students understand that these systems of incarceration, funded by our tax dollars, are doing something, whether we interface with it or not.”
5. Finally, this past weekend marked the return of the White House Correspondents Dinner. I didn’t watch it, but I did see Trevor Noah’s closing remarks. They were poignant, aspirational, and a great reminder of the blessings of liberty we so often taken for granted in the United States of America:
In the words of the late philosopher and cultural observer Stan Lee, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s never too late for our media to rise to the occasion.