Legal Eagles

At the end of the day, they did their jobs:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another Obama appointee, wrote the opinion in Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, defending a Catholic nonprofit from Wisconsin’s attempt to tax it. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Joe Biden appointee, wrote the opinion in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, upholding the rights of a straight woman (Marlene Ames) who claimed her employer discriminated against her because she wasn’t gay. The Supreme Court’s decision to release this trifecta of heartening rulings, each one unanimous and each one written by a different liberal justice, seems an intentional statement of solidarity, but I fear something else might be happening behind the scenes. The justices don’t always see eye-to-eye, but in these cases, at least, they all agreed to uphold the plain text of the law, following the tenets of judicial originalism—or so it seems.

In the long run, the law still matters at the highest court in the land...