United States

The Merrick Garland nomination and Supreme Court rulings on public unions, affirmative action, and abortion

Also in March 2016, Obama nominated judicial moderate Merrick Garland to take the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the death of staunch conservative Antonin Scalia. However, Senate Republicans had already vowed not to hold confirmation hearings for any new justice until after the 2016 presidential election. As a result, a trio of important rulings were decided without a full bench. On March 29, in its ruling on the most important labour-law case brought before it in decades, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the court reached a 4–4 tie that preserved the right of public unions to charge agency fees (charges to nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining and other nonpolitical union activities from which nonmembers benefit). Ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin on June 23, the court voted 4–3 (with one justice recused) to affirm an appellate court decision that had endorsed the race-conscious admissions policy of the university as consistent with the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The decision represented an important victory for advocates of affirmative action. Finally, on June 27, 2016, by a 5–3 vote in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court invalidated two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state, purportedly in the interest of protecting women’s health. The court ruled that the two provisions placed an “impermissible obstacle” to women seeking an abortion in Texas, in violation of the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), which had prohibited “substantial obstacle[s] in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability,” including “[u]nnecessary health regulations,” as an “undue burden” on the right to abortion.

Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt decisionAbortion rights activists rejoicing in front of the Supreme Court, June 27, 2016, after the court decided in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt to invalidate two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state.J. Scott Applewhite/AP Images