Writing at the New York Review of Books blog, noted constitutional law professor and scholar Ronald Dworkin takes on the Roberts Court for its recent ruling in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn and other recent decisions that have undermined the principle of taxpayer standing to bring suit for church-state violations. Arguing that the court's conservative majority is bent on removing protections that keep government from supporting religion, despite the court's own precedent, Dworkin says they are forced to resort to "silly distinctions", "embarrassing claims", and otherwise "bad arguments." Here's a snippet calling out Justice Kennedy:
As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her devastating dissent, since the Flast decision the Supreme Court had several times accepted, without comment, that ordinary taxpayers have standing to challenge tax advantages that benefit religious organizations…. Kennedy replied that since all the parties and the justices had just assumed, in these past cases, that the Flast exception applied when tax credits rather than direct expenditures were challenged, the Court had not actually ruled on the issue, so he was free to disregard all those decisions. But the Court had had to accept that the taxpayers had standing in these cases in order to accept jurisdiction, so of course the Court’s decisions count as precedents. The fact that all the parties in those cases thought Kennedy’s distinction between direct expenditures and tax credits too silly even to mention should have given him pause, not comfort.
Read the whole thing.
