In its late-June flurry, the Supreme Court ballooned the Second Amendment, crippled the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to address climate change, and scrapped the constitutional right to abortion. These rulings — especially the chaos-inducing overruling of Roe v. Wade — have dominated the headlines. Meanwhile another seismic change to American law has flown under the radar: the six-justice conservative majority’s campaign to tear down what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation between church and state.” Why did Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (involving a praying football coach), and Carson v. Makin (a school funding case) ruffle fewer feathers? It seems to have been by design. The conservative bloc did not undermine the first 10 words of the Bill of Rights — ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — with anything like the glee or precision with which Justice Samuel Alito shredded abortion rights. Rather than renounce its Establishment Clause precedents as “egregiously wrong from the start” (as Alito did for Roe), the conservative bloc presented Kennedy and Carson as unremarkable decisions flowing ineluctably from precedent. These decisions are no such thing. Kennedy and Carson do not respect prior rulings; they effectively abandon at least […]
