Israel, U.S. Supreme Court

Will Lewis, Washington Post’s CEO and publisher, faces more negative media coverage with the revelation that he advised former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his officials to destroy evidence about Johnson’s violations during the pandemic. Lewis’ advice contradicted an email to staff ordering them to not delete material relevant to the probe of breaking Covid lockdown rules. He received a knighthood for his assistance. Lewis friendship with Johnson extended to paying him £250,000 a year for a weekly column to the conservative Telegraph while Lewis was editor.

For this revelation, as well as his other coverups while working for Rupert Murdoch’s British media, two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists at WaPo, Associate Editor Davi Maraniss working for the newspaper for almost five decades and Scott Higham, called for Lewis’ departure. Newsroom morale has plunged as staffers worry about Lewis’ conduct and the newspaper’s future direction under his leadership. Some are looking for other jobs.

Earlier this week, Biden top officials canceled a strategic meeting on Thursday about Iran with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, protesting his video claiming the U.S. was withholding military aid. Israeli officials were already en route to Washington. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that only one weapons shipment was paused while billions of dollars of weapons had continued. In March, Netanyahu cancelled another meeting because the U.S. didn’t veto a UN  Security Council resolution including a reference to a ceasefire in Gaza.

The public disagreement continued on Thursday with Netanyahu saying he’s “ready to suffer personal attacks” in exchange for U.S. weapons. Biden repeated that he wasn’t withholding weapons. The U.S. sent billions of dollars in weapons to Israel except for one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs paused after Biden’s publicly expressed concern the imprecise munitions could be used in the southern Gazan city of Rafah and other areas heavily populated by civilians. Officials from both nations met on Thursday to discuss Israel’s war, and the U.S. said that the meeting about Iran was only postponed.

Netanyahu is also arguing with the Israeli military. He wants Hamas eliminated, but the army stated that Hamas is an idea that cannot be eradicated and believing it can be forced to disappear are wrong. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant agreed with the defense establishment that Israel’s lack of political strategy in Gaza will allow Hamas to regroup. Former war cabinet members Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot resigned after Netanyahu failed to adopt a postwar plan for Gaza. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has more support from Israelis, 74 percent, than of Netanyahu, 51 percent.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dropped four more opinions, leaving another 17 before the end of the session in under two weeks:

Moore v. U.S.: Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority of 7, stated that U.S. taxpayers owning shares in foreign corporations can constitutionally be charged a one-time tax on their share because of the GOP 2017 tax law known as the “mandatory repatriation tax.” He declared ruling against the law for the defendant would render “vast swaths of the Internal Revenue Code unconstitutional” and “deprive the U.S. Government and the American people of trillions in lost tax revenue.” Challengers tried to avoid paying a one-time $15,000 in taxes, predicted to cost $300 billion in ten years. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Chaverini v. City of Napoleon, Ohio: Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the Fourth Amendment permits a pretrial detention as an unreasonable seizure and thus illegal unless based on probable cause. The decision rejected the 6^th Circuit Court’s decision that police officers are immune from liability for making baseless charges if they also brought a valid charge against the same person at the same time. In his dissent, Thomas, joined by Alito, used his objection to the 2022 decision in Thomas v. Clark in his objection to the majority opinion that former criminal defendants who sue law enforcement for wrongful arrest don’t need to prove they were innocent, only that their prosecution ended without conviction. Gorsuch wrote a separate dissent.

Diaz v. United States: Thomas wrote for the majority of six that the court allows testimony that “most people” doing something can convict a person. Diaz claimed that she was used as a blind mule to take drugs across the border because she didn’t know they were in the car she was driving, but a DHS special agent claimed she knew what she was doing because “most people” do. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson voted with the majority against her two progressive colleagues, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, who joined Gorsuch. He scolded the majority for ruling against Delilah Guadalupe Diaz for ignoring a federal evidence rule directing that expert witnesses “must not state an opinion about whether the defendant did or did not have a mental state or condition that constitutes an element of the crime charged.” Gorsuch accused him of “the convenient ability to read minds.”

Gonzalez v. Trevino: justices sent the case back to the 5^th Circuit Court because it failed to appropriately evaluate retaliatory arrest. Former Texas city council member Sylvia Gonzalez maintained that her 2019 arrest for tampering with government records was retaliation for criticizing of Castle Hills city manager. She claimed she was the only person charged in the previous 10 years for temporarily misplacing government documents. A brief unsigned opinion reinstated Gonzalez’s claim and stated that the lower court construed their ruling too narrowly. Thomas dissented.

The Senate is working to clean up the Supreme Court’s mess that permits bump stocks on semi-automatic style rifles so they will have the firing ability of machine guns. Alito wrote, “Congress can act,” and a bipartisan group of senators hope to do that. Twenty co-sponsors joined the original three, two Democrats and a Republican. The high court ruling was based on semantics, not the Second Amendment, and a bump stock killed 58 people and injured another 800 in a few minutes during a Las Vegas massacre. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pointed out DDT, while he was in the White House, and many Republicans supported the overturned directive against bump stocks.

Louisiana has passed a new law, likely to be argued in the Supreme Court. It mandates a copy of the Ten Commandments accompanied by a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.” At the signing, GOP Gov. Jeff Landry said:

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”

Also at the signing, Landry ignored a child directly behind him who seemed to faint and fall to the floor. Others tried to help her, but just continued his speech and signed the bill. (Video here.) Landry turned down $71 million in federal assistance to feed children in poverty-stricken families. His signing was four days before Juneteenth, and two of the commandments, which advocates consider “guidelines” and “a moral code for living, accept slavery. Yet they don’t ban rape, child molestation, and other child abuse.

Newly elected, Landry bragged that he couldn’t wait to be sued when he signed a bill requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in every K-12 classroom. Thus far the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Freedom from Religion, and ACLU promise to fulfill Landry’s wish for a lawsuit.

In 1980, the US Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down the Kentucky law requiring that the document be displayed in elementary and high schools. According to that opinion, the Ten Commandments “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature.” Also noted was that the documentmade references to worshipping God including observing the Sabbath day.

Republicans hope that the 2022 case Kennedy v. Bremerton, allowing a football coach to pray on the field after games, gives a precedent for the mandated posting of the Ten Commandments. In this case, however, Gorsuch, writing for the majority, “misrepresented” the facts to persuade the public that the Supreme Court was right. Gorsuch wrote the fabrication that the coach “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.” Photographic evidence proves that the prayers were immediately after games on the 50-yard line while the crowd was there. The coach was often joined by his players, members of the opposing team, and the general public. A parent reported that his son “felt compelled to participate” for fear “he wouldn’t get to play as much.” Ian Millhiser also wrote:

“Kennedy engaged in very public prayer sessions, and did so while acting as an official representative of a public school…. After he was ordered to cease this activity, Kennedy went on a media tour that seemed designed to turn his supposedly ‘quiet prayers’ into a public political spectacle.”

Gorsuch’s goal was to overturn Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Constitutional prohibition of “the establishment of religion.” Succeeding in that, he still needs to face Lee v. Weisman (1992) prohibiting public schools from coercing students into religious exercise. Then Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that “subtle and indirect” coercion “can be as real as any overt compulsion.”

Louisiana already ranks 47 in education, but its new law has made Texas brave. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick promised the state would also pass a requirement to post the religious saying in all classrooms.

Legal experts purport that decisions are slow to come out of the high court year because justices are fighting. The variety of liaisons above prove differences of opinion not always dependant on ideology, making the next 17 opinions more difficult to guess.