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Two major Supreme Court decisions came down on Friday. One of them revolved around religious freedom. The other one revolved around Joe Biden’s decision to bail out all student loans in the United States. Both decisions came down in the correct direction. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for 303 Creative v. Elenis. The case concerned the question of whether a religious website designer could be forced to create a website on behalf of a same-sex wedding. At first glance, this sounds exactly like the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which a baker was asked to bake a cake for a gay wedding and he refused. The Supreme Court said, “That’s artistic expression.” The question was how broadly that standard would apply — to what level of services would that apply? There are essentially two issues in American law currently in conflict. On the one hand, you have the public accommodations law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; on the other hand, you have freedom of association and freedom of speech. Latest Releases: |
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I have suggested before that the “public accommodations” provisions of the Civil Rights Act are wrongheaded, that they are a constitutional overstep. They essentially say that if you act in business, then you “cannot discriminate.” That was written for a good reason: For example, it made sure that black people could stay in hotels and people who operated hotels couldn’t bar black people from staying in them. The motivations for the law were good. But the problem was that the law was overbroad because it also permitted the government to dictate exactly whom you must do business with. This is really important. If you’re a religious person, you’re not just religious in your church. You’re not just religious in your home. You’re religious in how you practice your business. Cases like this come up all the time where people want their messages purveyed by business providers. And business providers do, in fact, have a right to say, “I don’t wish to purvey that message.” Gorsuch begins the opinion by saying: Like many States, Colorado has a law forbidding businesses from engaging in discrimination when they sell goods and services to the public. Laws along these lines have done much to secure the civil rights of all Americans. But in this particular case Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms. It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe. The question we face is whether that course violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. One of the points the majority made here was that the plaintiff in this particular case, the website designer, was quite willing to work with all people regardless of classification, such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender. She would gladly create custom graphics and websites for clients of any sexual orientation. 
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But that’s not what was being asked of her. It wasn’t, “Make a wedding website for this gay guy.” It was, “Make a gay wedding website.” As soon as the government says that they can compel certain types of speech, that means that they can compel all types of speech. This court recognized that no public accommodations law is immune from the demands of the Constitution. Somebody went after me on Twitter for all this. This person basically said, “Well, how would you feel if somebody rejected you because you went in there and wanted some sort of Jewish message written on a cake?” I responded that I would feel pretty good because that would be America. I could then walk across the street to a kosher bakery where they would do exactly what I wanted them to do. The other SCOTUS decision struck down Joe Biden’s attempt to cram down a student loan bailout. He does not have authority under the law in the United States to declare student loans are subsidized by the federal government and no one has to pay them back. If Congress had chosen to give that authority to the executive branch, they could have done so. They clearly did not. Biden’s Secretary of Education asserted that the Heroes Act granted him the authority to cancel $430 billion in student loan principal. The Court disagreed. Latest Episode: |
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President Biden reacted by saying the Court misinterpreted the Constitution. Joe Biden never had this authority. He was lying when he said he had the authority. He’s going to suggest that the federal government will just delay referring any defaulted loans for enforcement. But of course, eventually they’ll be forced to actually do what they’re supposed to do under the law. All of this is leading up to another assault on the Supreme Court itself by the Left. The way this works is that when the Left doesn’t like the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is an evil institution that must be overthrown; when they do like the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is the only institution that needs to exist. Ben Shapiro |
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