SCOTUS inviting conservatives to 'test new legal theories' with long-shot lawsuits: legal analyst
The U.S. Supreme Court's latest rulings are an open invitation to conservatives to file seemingly frivolous lawsuits to advance their shared right-wing agenda, according to CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck.
The court ruled in favor of a Christian web developer who wished to discriminate against same-sex couples and struck down President Joe Biden's student debt relief, one day after restricting affirmative action in college admissions, and Vladeck said their decisions would embolden other conservatives.
"It's not a curveball, but it is a scenario that I don't want to play out in my head, but I think that we are already seeing aggressive moves by a number of red states to interfere with the rights of transgender individuals and deny transgender affirming medical care, especially to children, I think that's going to be something to get litigated up to the Supreme Court in the coming months," Vladeck said. "But the real problem with how active the court isn't any particular wish list, it's that now everything has become unstable."
"The destabilizing of the effect of these rulings is perhaps the most important theme, because now it is going to enable and it will incentivize folks to bring lawsuits that they may not have brought five or 10 years ago, and hope to test out legal theories that might not have had any shot of succeeding five or 1- years ago, because it is not the bottom lines of the cases," Vladeck continued. "I hate to be the nerdy law professor here, but the court is reaching out the get to the bottom lines to where there are pretty serious objections to whether these are even proper parties here, in the wedding web designer case, and whether Missouri is the proper party in the student loan case."
"The court is signaling to lower courts and conservative activists that we will stretch our procedural rules to reach substantive outcomes that you might want us to reach, and therefore, you have nothing to lose in going into your nearest friendly district court and trying new things out," Vladeck added. "The worst thing that happens is that you will lose in the Supreme Court, and if the last couple of weeks have taught us anything, yeah, they're going to lose some and they're also going to win some. That is the real issue here, is how much this puts everything back on the table that we have for so long taken to be a given in how we structure out society."
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