The U.S.
Supreme Court’s conservative majority is back to being the conservative
majority again.
Two years after the court
upheld President Barack Obama’s health-care law and a year after it bolstered
gay rights, the five Republican-appointed justices are voting together again in
the highest-profile cases.
In recent weeks that
group, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has joined to loosen campaign-finance
limits, back government-sponsored prayer and let states ban racial preferences.
Now, as the court enters the final month-and-a-half of its term, those justices
may unite in cases involving contraception, abortion protests and separation of
powers.
“When he’s got the votes,
it seems Roberts can move the law exactly as quickly as he wants,” said
Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel of the Constitutional Accountability Center and a frequent critic of the Roberts court.
Roberts, 59, now in his
ninth year as chief justice, has presided over legal shifts on a host of
issues. The court has jettisoned longstanding legal protections for racial
minorities; allowed unlimited corporate and union spending on political campaigns;
given companies more power to force arbitration of consumer and employee
grievances; and shifted power away from the federal government to the states.
For the most part, those
rulings featured the same five- justice majority on the nine-member court:
Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
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