Photo credit: SAUL LOEB – Getty Images Clarence Thomas, layer of land mines in settled law, has managed to do it again. Perhaps that’s going to be his most lasting legacy as part of the Trumpist Supreme Court: setting the explosives in place to be detonated later by whatever larval Scalias are currently gestating in the greenhouses and terrariums of the Federalist Society. (And, it should be noted, Thomas is not alone in placing IEDs in American law that are guaranteed to detonate some day. As Ian Millhiser points out, Justice Neil Gorsuch buried one in another case that might well take out the entire administrative apparatus of the executive branch as it has developed since the New Deal, if and when the Court gets a case that will touch the device off.) On Thursday, the Supreme Court decided, in the case of American Legion v. American Humanist , that a 40-foot cross erected on public lands in Maryland as a memorial to the dead of World War I was not in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion of the 7-2 majority, an opinion that seems to be based on […]
