"Henchmen" implies that they have a personal relationship with him, a friendship of sorts. Not a friendship of equals, but definitely some affection and regard running back and forth. Possibly even trust.
I say these fake electors are better called "minions." Perhaps "pawns." Expendable, given a job to do, and certainly not worth protecting.
I think the Grand Order of things goes from "Lieutenants" to "Henchmen" to "Minions" to "Pawns."
Well, maybe this is that scenario, and I needn't complain about it being unrealistic, because it's real.
https://www.9and10news.com/2023/07/11/traverse-city-hair-salon-no-longer-servicing-lgbtq-members/
It's pretty clear that the business owner here is invoking freedom of speech; religion isn't mentioned in the report at all. So here we see another request for a free speech exception to anti-discrimination laws. And one delivered with insulting contempt to boot.
To be sure, the fact that Mr. Smith and his co-plaintiffs sought to practice a Native religion was a factor in why he lost. This was widely assumed to be true at the time the case was handed down (which was when I was preparing to go to law school and studying constitutional law as a political phenomenon at the undergraduate level).
As a general matter I agree with Justice Scalia in Smith that the notion that one's religion does not enable one to "become a law unto himself." Interesting indeed is this passage:
The only decisions in which we have held that the First Amendment bars application of a neutral, generally applicable law to religiously motivated action have involved not the Free Exercise Clause alone, but the Free Exercise Clause in conjunction with other constitutional protections, such as freedom of speech and of the press, see Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. at 304, 310 U. S. 307 (invalidating a licensing system for religious and charitable solicitations under which the administrator had discretion to deny a license to any cause he deemed nonreligious); Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U. S. 105 (1943) (invalidating a flat tax on solicitation as applied to the dissemination of religious ideas); Follett v. McCormick, 321 U. S. 573 (1944) (same), or the right of parents, acknowledged in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925), to direct the education of their children, see Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205 (1972) (invalidating compulsory school attendance laws as applied to Amish parents who refused on religious grounds to send their children to school).
494 U.S. at 881.
Here, in 303 Creative, the Court pretends that its decision is all about speech and religion is simply on the periphery. But we don't know what speech it is that the state would theoretically be compelling Ms. Smith to engage in, beyond that it would have somehow involved an implicit approval in some fashion of same-sex marriages, or at least of a particular same-sex marriage. We don't know if that speech would be religious or not. But we do know that her objection to that theoretical speech was motivated by her personal religious beliefs. Which is why I resist the notion that this case is solely about speech. I mean, I agree with you that the majority opinion nowhere invokes the Free Exercise Clause so on the face of it you're correct to say that it's just about compelled speech.
But I have a hard time conjuring up any sort of realistic compelled speech scenario where this newly-announced wrinkle in the law would not involve religious belief.
And you know how this sort of thing is supposed to work better than I do. In circumstances like this, what is supposed to happen is a balancing test, or a set of defined standards. A tool the courts use to test whether or not something appears constitutional protected. The Supreme Court literally just clarified one of those with religious accommodation this very session!
So what is the standard here? What are the important aspects? Where are the lines drawn, how do the sides weigh various rights against each other?
This is my core complaint. As I wrote in the OP the specific result with these specific facts may well be the right one.
When we don't see a rule, a balancing test, and only see a specific result with a specific set of facts, it falls to legal analysts, often academics first and practitioners following per the vicissitudes of their client's practical needs, to tease out a rule from the corpus of caselaw.
So far, the trend I see is what I announced in the OP: socially conservative Christians seem to win cases where they ask for exceptions to generally-applicable laws, and other kinds of plaintiffs do not. Perhaps there is some other trend, some other thing in common that I have overlooked. Maybe that other thing is actually principled and not driven by the majority bloc's affinity towards these plaintiffs based on their identity.
If so, I haven't seen it yet but I'd welcome analysis from someone else suggesting that there is something more principled going on here.
Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976). I suppose you could argue that Craig was wrongly-decided for the reasons just stated, but I don't even see Clarence Thomas trying to go there.
We know how this is going to end, right? Secret Service knows who it is right now. They're going to sit down with that person about 4:00 today with the Chief of Staff, who will tell the person "Good luck with your private sector job, we'll have a nice picture of you shaking hands with the President on your last day a week from today. Don't, ah, don't actually try to say anything to him other than how much you enjoyed working here. Oh, and totally unrelated, we're never going to identify whose cocaine that was that's been giving us a bloody nose all week. Just not enough clues, gosh darn it. Anyway, just wanted to tell you how it was all going to work out."
From the majority slip opinion, pgs 1-2 (cleaned up):
As she envisions it, her websites will provide couples with text, graphic arts, and videos to “celebrate” and “convey” the “details” of their “unique love story.” ... websites will discuss how the couple met, explain their backgrounds, families, and future plans, and provide information about their upcoming wedding. All of the text and graphics on these websites will be “original,” “customized,” and “tailored” creations. The websites will be “expressive in nature,” designed “to communicate a particular message.” Viewers will know, too, “that the websites are Ms. Smith’s original artwork,” for the name of the company she owns and operates by herself will
be displayed on every one.
From this I'm pretty sure that graphic design alone is enough to count as Smith's own expression. The mere design of the template that the client uses to plug in their information about their "unique love story" is probably enough.* Font selection would probably be enough.
IMHO, this Court would have found anything that Smith did to be "creative" or "expressive," and therefore called it compelled speech. What a future Court might do, though, hard to say. After all, we know that "stare decisis is for suckers." (See pg. 19, dissenting opinion.)
* Maybe I'm being cynical here but just how "unique" are these stories? "We met in a bar." "We get set up by a friend." "We started having an affair while he was still married to someone else."
As I wrote in the OP, we were assured nine years ago in a majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that OF COURSE the carving-out of a religious exception to the PPACA would never result in similar reasoning to later poke a similar hole in anti-discrimination law. Three Justices (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito) voted in the majority of both cases. ...Maybe they just forgot?
This is precisely the explanation I was looking for! The idea that space-time ripples is itself mind-bending; the idea that it is happening right now to my body and things around it even more so. (Of course, if the ripple is smaller than a proton, it's perhaps no wonder that it isn't ever noticed.)
I've my own piece mostly done but for some polish just up and published; sorry editors but it seems like it ought to go up immediately while the controversy is still fresh. Why has no one mentioned the Declaratory Relief Act?
I will write a piece about 303 Creative under separate cover.
I note here that I am much less optimistic about both the short- and long-term impacts of the Havard and UNC cases abolishing affirmative action. In the short run, we will certainly see universities looking to maintain diversity within the student body through means that are not race-explicit. As they should -- a diverse student body offers students a qualitatively different educational experience than a monochromatic one; people of different racial backgrounds experience the social environment of the United States differently from one another and it is particularly important that members of the majority, favored group learn what those other experiences are like if we are to move towards our shared aspirational goal of meaningfully real equality.
But if you think that challenges to admissions practices are going to come to an end once and for all now that these cases have given conservatives their long-anticipated victory against affirmative action, you are hopelessly naive.
One of the likeliest ways for a public school like UNC to reach towards diversity, for instance, would be to re-interpret its mandate. UNC is charged with providing higher education to some percentage of North Carolina's graduating high school students. Let's say that's 10% although I don't know if that's exactly the right number. You could say that means the 10% of students who score highest on some multiple of grade point average and SAT score in North Carolina. But you could also say that means the top 10% of students in each individual school in North Carolina. That'd probably diversify the student body there even further.
And if UNC did that, you'd better believe that some privileged parent of some privileged kid would come along and say "This is an obvious workaround of the no-more-affirmative-action rule," because it would be an obvious workaround of the no-more-affirmative-action rule, and it would result in the kid who comes from a privileged class not getting in to UNC and that spot instead going to a student with a lower GPA-SAT multiple. Boom. Now we're challenging every pro-diversity rule as "affirmative action by proxy," and that's what the future looks like. Carve that in stone, it's going to happen.
So I don't see this case as alleviating racial tensions vis-a-vis college admissions. It's going to aggravate them. The problem for the conservative activists who conceive of and fund and staff and populate these efforts to change who gets access to higher education is not methodology. The problem is the result.
There's a school of thought that the Framers thought impeachments would be frequent and most of them successful. Which seems inconsistent with their notion that only the best men would take high office, but which is reconcilable if they were thinking about revenge impeachments in search of justifications.
Whether this is correct or not, I'm generally glad that we have reserved impeachments, especially impeachments of Presidents, for things that are actual crimes and then only for very serious ones.
There isn't much to do about it if a fringe of one party insists that an official of the other party is high criming and misdemeanoring in office by simply having defeated their nominee. Nor is there much to do about it if members of one party, when confronted with direct admissions of the high criming and misdemeanoring, nevertheless still vote to acquit. These are political decisions, not necessarily legal ones.
So what makes the image of a Jim Jordan dispensing articles of impeachment like Oprah Winfrey on Toyota Day so weird is that he surely knows his efforts are going to fail. Not even most Republicans are on board with any of it. And even if he could accomplish the medium-difficulty task of bullying Speaker McCarthy into giving Jordan his lunch money pushing articles through the House to a floor vote on the hopes that a straight party-line vote would pass them, he knows they haven't a prayer of getting two-thirds of the votes in the Senate absent evidence even more compelling than a transcribed admission that the impeached official sought a personal favor in exchange for discharging a mandatory duty or actually tried to start a riot at the Capitol to disrupt official proceedings and illegally hang on to power beyond expiration of his term on live television.
It's not clear who made this thing up. It seems pretty clear that an actual web designer would a) not be very likely to hire someone else to design his own wedding website; b) would probably not be planning his wedding to a man while still married to a woman; and c) the inquiry came at a strange time with respect to the filing of the lawsuit, specifically, the day AFTER it was filed, despite d) the plaintiff never having done a wedding website before and not advertising to attra ct that sort of business.
If you're looking at all that and saying "Yeah, that COULD be a weird coincidence but come on, this was totally fabricated," I agree with you.
Jaybird's reference to the ChatGPT thing is on point. That was a Rule 11(b) violation and there's a lot of discretion in how that sanction comes down. The idea is to punish as a deterrent to others.
This could also be a referral to a state bar disciplinary panel. I like to say that lawyers really only get in serious disbarment trouble for three things: having sex with their clients, stealing from their clients, and lying to the court. This would be "lying to the court."
(ETA: There are dozens of perjury prosecutions nationwide every year. Please note I said "dozens," not "hundreds.")
Groff winds up unanimously ruling for the petitioner. The de minimis standard is gone, let us move boldly forward into the new era of "substantial cost." (Context: measuring when a religious accommodation becomes an "undue burden" on an employer.)
Unanimity on that case took me by surprise until I saw that no one -- not the respo dent, not the government-- was arguing to keep the old standard.
AA got the axe, as was widely predicted. A tiny sliver of it remains, but not enough to matter.
Still up: student loans and gay wedding websites. On that last case, I favor an expansive reading of the standing requirement of Article III. But I have to disapprove of "someone just making shit up and filing a constitutional challenge based on that." https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court
FedSoc legal conservatives used to say that it was not the role of the courts to measure what makes sense for the country at a given point in time, that's a legislative function. The unchanging Constitution merely sets boundaries on what is permissible for a legislature to do, and it is up to legislatures to do them, or not, responsive to the popular will. Hell, Antonin Scalia preached that doctrine until his dying day.
The majority bloc of SCOTUS today still talks that talk at their fancy banquets (that have recently been put under a wee bit of public scrutiny to their great discomfort), but they do not walk the walk when they actually write their opinions.
We ought be very wary of suggestions that any sort of significant power exercised by any segment of government is not subject to checks and balances. The Independent State Legislature doctrine would have been exactly that: removal of any check or balance on legislatures already empowered to engage in partisan gerrymandering. And as a reminder: partisan gerrymandering is bad because it insulates political decision-makers from political pressure being applied against them by voters.
This includes judicial review: the law resulting from sufficiently disagreeable judicial decisions normally ought be subject to subsequent statutory alteration. This has happened many times in our lifetime: within my own legal discipline, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 stautorily overruled SCOTUS in a series of cases from 1989; the Religious Freedom Restoration Act statutorily overruled SCOTUS in Employment Division v. Smith; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act overruled the SCOTUS case in which Ms. Ledbetter had lost an argument regarding computing the quantum of damages in an Equal Pay Act claim.
On “Trump Says He Is Target of Investigation, No, The Other One”
"Henchmen" implies that they have a personal relationship with him, a friendship of sorts. Not a friendship of equals, but definitely some affection and regard running back and forth. Possibly even trust.
I say these fake electors are better called "minions." Perhaps "pawns." Expendable, given a job to do, and certainly not worth protecting.
I think the Grand Order of things goes from "Lieutenants" to "Henchmen" to "Minions" to "Pawns."
On “The Disturbing New Labor Trend: Skilljacking”
OMG this is top tier satire. Excellent work, Will Truman! I could so easily imagine coming across this on LinkedIn and no one batting an eye.
On “The First GOP Primary Poll That Matters (For Getting On Debate Stage)”
Not on Team Vivek, I see. (LOL.)
"
Right. The rejoinder to your question is, who (other than DeSantis) did you have in mind?
On “A Paucity Of Limits, By Stipulation: 303 Creative v Elenis”
Well, maybe this is that scenario, and I needn't complain about it being unrealistic, because it's real.
https://www.9and10news.com/2023/07/11/traverse-city-hair-salon-no-longer-servicing-lgbtq-members/
It's pretty clear that the business owner here is invoking freedom of speech; religion isn't mentioned in the report at all. So here we see another request for a free speech exception to anti-discrimination laws. And one delivered with insulting contempt to boot.
On “AITA For Not Telling My Girlfriend About My Hobby?”
Super. Thanks, man.
On “DeSantis is Fading”
The nomination will likely be sewn up by mid-March. But that's still eight months away. A lot can happen in eight months.
On “AITA For Not Telling My Girlfriend About My Hobby?”
...I don't get it. Is this about some celebrity? Is it about Elon Musk?
On “A Paucity Of Limits, By Stipulation: 303 Creative v Elenis”
To be sure, the fact that Mr. Smith and his co-plaintiffs sought to practice a Native religion was a factor in why he lost. This was widely assumed to be true at the time the case was handed down (which was when I was preparing to go to law school and studying constitutional law as a political phenomenon at the undergraduate level).
As a general matter I agree with Justice Scalia in Smith that the notion that one's religion does not enable one to "become a law unto himself." Interesting indeed is this passage:
494 U.S. at 881.
Here, in 303 Creative, the Court pretends that its decision is all about speech and religion is simply on the periphery. But we don't know what speech it is that the state would theoretically be compelling Ms. Smith to engage in, beyond that it would have somehow involved an implicit approval in some fashion of same-sex marriages, or at least of a particular same-sex marriage. We don't know if that speech would be religious or not. But we do know that her objection to that theoretical speech was motivated by her personal religious beliefs. Which is why I resist the notion that this case is solely about speech. I mean, I agree with you that the majority opinion nowhere invokes the Free Exercise Clause so on the face of it you're correct to say that it's just about compelled speech.
But I have a hard time conjuring up any sort of realistic compelled speech scenario where this newly-announced wrinkle in the law would not involve religious belief.
"
This is my core complaint. As I wrote in the OP the specific result with these specific facts may well be the right one.
When we don't see a rule, a balancing test, and only see a specific result with a specific set of facts, it falls to legal analysts, often academics first and practitioners following per the vicissitudes of their client's practical needs, to tease out a rule from the corpus of caselaw.
So far, the trend I see is what I announced in the OP: socially conservative Christians seem to win cases where they ask for exceptions to generally-applicable laws, and other kinds of plaintiffs do not. Perhaps there is some other trend, some other thing in common that I have overlooked. Maybe that other thing is actually principled and not driven by the majority bloc's affinity towards these plaintiffs based on their identity.
If so, I haven't seen it yet but I'd welcome analysis from someone else suggesting that there is something more principled going on here.
"
Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976). I suppose you could argue that Craig was wrongly-decided for the reasons just stated, but I don't even see Clarence Thomas trying to go there.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/3/2023”
We know how this is going to end, right? Secret Service knows who it is right now. They're going to sit down with that person about 4:00 today with the Chief of Staff, who will tell the person "Good luck with your private sector job, we'll have a nice picture of you shaking hands with the President on your last day a week from today. Don't, ah, don't actually try to say anything to him other than how much you enjoyed working here. Oh, and totally unrelated, we're never going to identify whose cocaine that was that's been giving us a bloody nose all week. Just not enough clues, gosh darn it. Anyway, just wanted to tell you how it was all going to work out."
On “A Paucity Of Limits, By Stipulation: 303 Creative v Elenis”
From the majority slip opinion, pgs 1-2 (cleaned up):
From this I'm pretty sure that graphic design alone is enough to count as Smith's own expression. The mere design of the template that the client uses to plug in their information about their "unique love story" is probably enough.* Font selection would probably be enough.
IMHO, this Court would have found anything that Smith did to be "creative" or "expressive," and therefore called it compelled speech. What a future Court might do, though, hard to say. After all, we know that "stare decisis is for suckers." (See pg. 19, dissenting opinion.)
* Maybe I'm being cynical here but just how "unique" are these stories? "We met in a bar." "We get set up by a friend." "We started having an affair while he was still married to someone else."
"
So we are assured.
As I wrote in the OP, we were assured nine years ago in a majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that OF COURSE the carving-out of a religious exception to the PPACA would never result in similar reasoning to later poke a similar hole in anti-discrimination law. Three Justices (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito) voted in the majority of both cases. ...Maybe they just forgot?
On “From Bloomberg: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending”
Seems a little silly to remove product that's already made.
On “Ripples in the Galaxy”
This is precisely the explanation I was looking for! The idea that space-time ripples is itself mind-bending; the idea that it is happening right now to my body and things around it even more so. (Of course, if the ripple is smaller than a proton, it's perhaps no wonder that it isn't ever noticed.)
On “Why the 303 Creative Decision Was Not About A Hypothetical”
I've my own piece
mostly done but for some polishjust up and published; sorry editors but it seems like it ought to go up immediately while the controversy is still fresh. Why has no one mentioned the Declaratory Relief Act?On “A Fantastic Week for Conservatives”
I will write a piece about 303 Creative under separate cover.
I note here that I am much less optimistic about both the short- and long-term impacts of the Havard and UNC cases abolishing affirmative action. In the short run, we will certainly see universities looking to maintain diversity within the student body through means that are not race-explicit. As they should -- a diverse student body offers students a qualitatively different educational experience than a monochromatic one; people of different racial backgrounds experience the social environment of the United States differently from one another and it is particularly important that members of the majority, favored group learn what those other experiences are like if we are to move towards our shared aspirational goal of meaningfully real equality.
But if you think that challenges to admissions practices are going to come to an end once and for all now that these cases have given conservatives their long-anticipated victory against affirmative action, you are hopelessly naive.
One of the likeliest ways for a public school like UNC to reach towards diversity, for instance, would be to re-interpret its mandate. UNC is charged with providing higher education to some percentage of North Carolina's graduating high school students. Let's say that's 10% although I don't know if that's exactly the right number. You could say that means the 10% of students who score highest on some multiple of grade point average and SAT score in North Carolina. But you could also say that means the top 10% of students in each individual school in North Carolina. That'd probably diversify the student body there even further.
And if UNC did that, you'd better believe that some privileged parent of some privileged kid would come along and say "This is an obvious workaround of the no-more-affirmative-action rule," because it would be an obvious workaround of the no-more-affirmative-action rule, and it would result in the kid who comes from a privileged class not getting in to UNC and that spot instead going to a student with a lower GPA-SAT multiple. Boom. Now we're challenging every pro-diversity rule as "affirmative action by proxy," and that's what the future looks like. Carve that in stone, it's going to happen.
So I don't see this case as alleviating racial tensions vis-a-vis college admissions. It's going to aggravate them. The problem for the conservative activists who conceive of and fund and staff and populate these efforts to change who gets access to higher education is not methodology. The problem is the result.
On “Impeachments for Everyone!”
There's a school of thought that the Framers thought impeachments would be frequent and most of them successful. Which seems inconsistent with their notion that only the best men would take high office, but which is reconcilable if they were thinking about revenge impeachments in search of justifications.
Whether this is correct or not, I'm generally glad that we have reserved impeachments, especially impeachments of Presidents, for things that are actual crimes and then only for very serious ones.
There isn't much to do about it if a fringe of one party insists that an official of the other party is high criming and misdemeanoring in office by simply having defeated their nominee. Nor is there much to do about it if members of one party, when confronted with direct admissions of the high criming and misdemeanoring, nevertheless still vote to acquit. These are political decisions, not necessarily legal ones.
So what makes the image of a Jim Jordan dispensing articles of impeachment like Oprah Winfrey on Toyota Day so weird is that he surely knows his efforts are going to fail. Not even most Republicans are on board with any of it. And even if he could accomplish the medium-difficulty task of bullying Speaker McCarthy intogiving Jordan his lunch money pushing articles through the House to a floor vote on the hopes that a straight party-line vote would pass them, he knows they haven't a prayer of getting two-thirds of the votes in the Senate absent evidence even more compelling than a transcribed admission that the impeached official sought a personal favor in exchange for discharging a mandatory duty or actually tried to start a riot at the Capitol to disrupt official proceedings and illegally hang on to power beyond expiration of his term on live television.
On “Open Mic for the week of 6/26/2023”
It's not clear who made this thing up. It seems pretty clear that an actual web designer would a) not be very likely to hire someone else to design his own wedding website; b) would probably not be planning his wedding to a man while still married to a woman; and c) the inquiry came at a strange time with respect to the filing of the lawsuit, specifically, the day AFTER it was filed, despite d) the plaintiff never having done a wedding website before and not advertising to attra ct that sort of business.
If you're looking at all that and saying "Yeah, that COULD be a weird coincidence but come on, this was totally fabricated," I agree with you.
Jaybird's reference to the ChatGPT thing is on point. That was a Rule 11(b) violation and there's a lot of discretion in how that sanction comes down. The idea is to punish as a deterrent to others.
This could also be a referral to a state bar disciplinary panel. I like to say that lawyers really only get in serious disbarment trouble for three things: having sex with their clients, stealing from their clients, and lying to the court. This would be "lying to the court."
(ETA: There are dozens of perjury prosecutions nationwide every year. Please note I said "dozens," not "hundreds.")
"
Groff winds up unanimously ruling for the petitioner. The de minimis standard is gone, let us move boldly forward into the new era of "substantial cost." (Context: measuring when a religious accommodation becomes an "undue burden" on an employer.)
Unanimity on that case took me by surprise until I saw that no one -- not the respo dent, not the government-- was arguing to keep the old standard.
AA got the axe, as was widely predicted. A tiny sliver of it remains, but not enough to matter.
Still up: student loans and gay wedding websites. On that last case, I favor an expansive reading of the standing requirement of Article III. But I have to disapprove of "someone just making shit up and filing a constitutional challenge based on that." https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court
"
FedSoc legal conservatives used to say that it was not the role of the courts to measure what makes sense for the country at a given point in time, that's a legislative function. The unchanging Constitution merely sets boundaries on what is permissible for a legislature to do, and it is up to legislatures to do them, or not, responsive to the popular will. Hell, Antonin Scalia preached that doctrine until his dying day.
The majority bloc of SCOTUS today still talks that talk at their fancy banquets (that have recently been put under a wee bit of public scrutiny to their great discomfort), but they do not walk the walk when they actually write their opinions.
"
...and having to pay rent, I'll speculate.
On “The Supreme Court Just Killed Independent State Legislature Theory”
We ought be very wary of suggestions that any sort of significant power exercised by any segment of government is not subject to checks and balances. The Independent State Legislature doctrine would have been exactly that: removal of any check or balance on legislatures already empowered to engage in partisan gerrymandering. And as a reminder: partisan gerrymandering is bad because it insulates political decision-makers from political pressure being applied against them by voters.
This includes judicial review: the law resulting from sufficiently disagreeable judicial decisions normally ought be subject to subsequent statutory alteration. This has happened many times in our lifetime: within my own legal discipline, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 stautorily overruled SCOTUS in a series of cases from 1989; the Religious Freedom Restoration Act statutorily overruled SCOTUS in Employment Division v. Smith; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act overruled the SCOTUS case in which Ms. Ledbetter had lost an argument regarding computing the quantum of damages in an Equal Pay Act claim.
On “The Unforgiving Sea: OceanGate, Titan, and Unforgiven Hubris”
As long as we keep giving this discourse oxygen, you can expect this sort of thing.