#scotus ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, ruling in Kennedy v. Braidwood that health insurance companies must continue covering preventive services recommended by a federal task force — including HIV prevention medication, cancer screenings, and vaccines. The case challenged the United States Preventive Services Task Force’s preventive care ratings that require health insurance plans to cover recommended preventive services under the ACA. At issue was whether insurers could be compelled to cover services such as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which prevents HIV transmission. Public health experts say PrEP access is especially vital for Black and Latine gay and bisexual men and transgender women, who are disproportionately impacted by HIV.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal from Apaches who are fighting to halt a massive copper mining project on federal land in Arizona that they hold sacred. The justices left in place lower court decisions allowing the transfer of the Tonto National Forest land, known as Oak Flat, to Resolution Copper, which plans to mine what it says is the second-largest known copper deposit in the world. The Trump administration has said it will push to complete the transfer.

“Civil asset forfeiture” is the legal euphemism for when the cops steal your stuff. In this country, if you are stopped or arrested, the police can take all the personal property you have on you and call it “incident to the arrest.” That property can include your phone or your legally purchased guns, and it almost always includes your car. When cops decide to help themselves to your property, they can do it without a warrant, without securing a conviction, without even charging you with a crime. Once they’ve taken it, the cops then force people to engage in a long legal fight to get their stuff back. Often, the value of the property stolen by the government is less than the cost of lawyers needed to fight the government. There’s no right to public counsel when the cops steal from you, so most people can’t afford to fight them, never get their stuff back, and the cops end up selling it for profit. Civil forfeiture is a booming business and has become a key source of income for some cities and entire states. According to “Policing for Profit,” a report from the Institute for Justice, federal, state, and local governments made $68.8 billion from civil forfeiture between 2000 and 2019. Most people I know think that civil forfeiture should be unconstitutional as a point-and-click violation of the Due Process clause. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments both say that we should not be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Civil forfeiture is literally depriving people of their property with no process at all. Unfortunately, most people I know are not on the Supreme Court. On Thursday, the six unelected Republicans who rule this country said that civil forfeiture can continue to happen so long as the government eventually provides a hearing, even if the hearing takes place long after the theft and most people can’t afford to appeal.

The Supreme Court on Thursday preserved the system that gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children, rejecting a broad attack from some Republican-led states and white families who argued it is based on race. The court left in place the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which was enacted to address concerns that Native children were being separated from their families and, too frequently, placed in non-Native homes. Tribal leaders have backed the law as a means of preserving their families, traditions and cultures. The “issues are complicated” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a seven-justice majority, but the “bottom line is that we reject all of petitioners’ challenges to the statute.” -Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with Alito writing that the decision “disserves the rights and interests of these children.”

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On Thursday, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that is a massive attack on the right of workers to strike. By an 8-1 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing an employer to file a lawsuit and recover monetary compensation for “damages” incurred as a result of a strike. Existing labor law requires striking workers to take “reasonable precautions” to protect the employer’s property from being unnecessarily damaged by a sudden work stoppage. In its decision Thursday, the Supreme Court invoked and expanded this concept to such an extent that it would, taken to its logical conclusion, make any strike illegal if it causes any harm to the company’s bottom line. Damaging the company’s bottom line to the maximum extent possible utilizing the power of the organized rank and file is, of course, the whole point of a strike, which is a fundamental democratic right and an essential form of workers’ collective self-defense. In her dissenting opinion, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole justice to vote against the decision, suggested that the issue in the case was nothing less than whether workers are legally free or whether they are “indentured servants,” who can be prohibited by law from putting down their tools. “Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master,” Jackson wrote. Existing labor law, she continued, protects the right of workers to a “collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor.”