The Supreme Court today

The Supreme Court ruled today to allow the Navy to continue using sonar in military training exercises and not to block those exercises out of concern for how sonar might damage marine wildlife.

Roberts wrote that “the Navy’s need to conduct realistic training with active sonar to respond to the threat posed by enemy submarines plainly outweighs” the environmental concerns raised by advocacy groups. “We do not discount the importance of [the challengers’] ecological, scientific, and recreational interest in marine mammals,” the opinion remarked.

It added: “Of course, military interests do not always trump other considerations, and we have not held that they do. In this case, however, the proper determination of where the public interest lies does not strike us as a close question.”

And they decided the case rather quickly in a little over a month so that the Navy could continue training exercises.

And in the case of the little religion that sued to be able to put up a monument to the Seven Aphorisms that it claims Moses really brought down from Mount Sinai, the Court doesn't seem exactly ready to buy the argument that the town has to put up the Seven Aphorisms Monument. Of course, it's always risky to read tea leaves based on the questions asked in oral argument. This is the case involving the Utah town that has had a monument to the Ten Commandments since 1971. The 10th Circuit (natch!) had ruled that once the town put up the Ten Commandments monument that a private group had donated that they had created a public forum and couldn't discriminate against any religious group that wanted to put up its own monument. As Lyle Denniston summarizes for ScotusBlog, there seems to be some debate as to whether this is a Freedom of Speech issue or a Freedom of Religion.

Part — perhaps most — of the Court’s difficulty in pursuing a flexible basis for deciding the case was that standing before the Court were three lawyers each of whom argued for a simple, mainly label-driven outcome. One said mere acceptance of a monument, whatever its message, turns it into “government speech.” One said the choice of monuments is simply what “government as curator” does, as in selecting paintings for a museum. And one said that a public park is a “public forum,” so monuments can’t be accepted or rejected for display there on the basis of what they say.

The WSJ Supreme Court reporter predicts a fractured decision that basically allows the Ten Commandments monument to stay and reverses the 10th Circuit (natch!) ruling that said they also had to put up the Summum monument. Predicting a fractured ruling doesn't require going out on a limb. Predicting a reversal of the 10th Circuit also doesn't demand a crystal ball.

I appreciate Justice Kennedy's question.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy spoke disparagingly, saying “this case is an example of the tyranny of labels.” He also wondered somewhat forlornly: “Does the law always require us to adopt an all-or-nothing position?….Do we have to decide this case that it’s all or nothing?”

Few issues are clear-cut enough to be all or nothing. I would like the Court to leave this basically to the discretion of the local government to decide what they want to put up in their park and not have the courts enter into such a question.

Today in my AP Government class, we were reading through the Constitution and going over a scavenger hunt that I give them to answer questions about what's in the document. One of the questions they had to answer is which body has the power to add more federal courts or seats on the courts - the answer is Congress. And it occurred to me that another danger we could run if the Democrats got a filibuster-proof Senate is that they might decide to either add another appellate court or add more seats to the ones that are there now so that Obama would have the opportunity to stack the courts even more. They could argue that they are doing it all to alleviate overburdening of the federal courts in light of increased caseloads and populations. One more reason to worry about what is going on in Minnesota. If the thought of Al Franken in the Senate appalls you, you can go here to contribute to Norm Coleman's efforts to fight efforts by the Franken campaign to try to pry this seat away from Coleman.

UPDATE: In Dahlia Litwick's summary of the case for Slate, she notes that part of the problem is that the Supreme Court has issued an inexplicable thicket of rulings on when religious displays are possible in public places and when they're not. When we have a nexus of those Establishment cases with Free Speech cases, we get a mess.

And thus we arrive at the Fifth (and final) Aphorism for Religion Cases: Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals. In fact, after this morning's wild constitutional ride, anyone searching for clear, cogent rules need look no further than my favorite Summum aphorism: Everything vibrates.