Seven Big Cases The Supreme Court Will Decide In June That Could Change America

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/06/02/3443553/eight-big-cases-the-supreme-court-will-decide-by-the-end-of-this-month/



Recess Appointments
On the eve of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, a case that could effectively eliminate the president’s constitutional authority to temporarily appoint government officials while the Senate is in recess, the Obama Administration’s position looked grim. In the lower courts, judges split entirely on partisan lines when they considered this issue — and there are five Republicans on the Supreme Court and only four Democrats. Yet the oral argument in Noel Canning went even worse for the administration than the partisan results in the lower courts would suggest. Clinton-appointed Justice Stephen Breyer said that he could not find anything in the Constitution that will “allow the president to overcome Senate resistance” to a nominee. Obama-appointed Justice Elena Kagan suggested that “it was the Senate’s job to decide” when it’s in recess.

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Harassment at Women’s Health Clinics
A Massachusetts law creates a 35-foot buffer zone around the entrances to abortion clinics that no one may enter unless they have legitimate business within the clinic or are just passing through to reach another destination. This law prevents abortion protesters, ranging from the plaintiffs in McCullen v. Coakley — who claim that they “try to engage women who may be seeking abortions in close, kind, personal communication, with calm voices, caring demeanor, and eye contact” — to much more aggressive opponents of abortion from getting in the way of women seeking care within the clinic. They also make it harder for clinic workers to become victims of violence. According to one abortion rights activist, “[w]hat began as peaceful protests in the 1970s escalated to blockading clinic entrances, arsons and bombings, acid attacks, stalking and kidnapping doctors and their families, and even murdering reproductive health care staff.”

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Cell Phone Searches
As a general rule, the police must obtain a warrant before they can search a person’s possessions. One long-standing exception to this rule, however, is that police may make a warrantless “search incident to arrest” — that is, when a person is lawfully arrested, the police may search the person being arrested and anything they find on the person.

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Public Sector Unions
Public sector unions operate under two legal restrictions: they may not require non-members to fund the union’s political activity and they must bargain on behalf of every worker in a unionized shop — even if a particular worker does not belong to the union. Thus, the union may not encourage non-members to join by bargaining for benefits that only apply to union members. To recoup the costs of bargaining on behalf of non-members, however, the union may charge those non-members what are known as “agency fees.” These agency fees are now under attack in a lawsuit known as Harris v. Quinn.