The morning read for Thursday, September 18

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:

• Republican bill would fund extra security for Supreme Court but omits lower court judges (Lawrence Hurley and Sahil Kapur, NBC News) — With threats against them on the rise, federal judges are seeking additional security funds, but it’s not yet clear if they’ll all be successful, according to NBC News. A new proposal from House Republicans would give Supreme Court justices $28 million in security funds, but it doesn’t address a request for such funds from lower court judges. The funds being sought would make it possible to add “security cameras and metal detectors” to courthouses in need of security upgrades, said federal appeals Judge Amy St. Eve, who serves on the budget committee for the U.S. Judicial Conference, the judiciary’s policy arm.
• Will the Supreme Court treat Trump’s tariffs like Biden’s policies? (Maureen Groppe, USA Today) — In recent cases on student loan forgiveness and a pandemic-era eviction moratorium, the Supreme Court held that the Biden administration had exceeded the authority given to it by Congress. In the near future, it could draw the same conclusion in the dispute over the Trump administration’s tariffs, according to USA Today. “It will be interesting to see how those same principles [on presidential authority] are applied in this context where you have a Republican president with a major policy initiative,” said Roman Martinez, a veteran Supreme Court lawyer.
• Here are the Supreme Court precedents that targeting ‘hate speech’ would violate (John Fritze and Devan Cole, CNN) — Attorney General Pam Bondi faced pushback this week for saying that the Justice Department would prosecute hate speech. She has since asserted that “[f]reedom of speech is sacred” and said that her office’s concern is comments that incite violence, but some legal experts believe even those new comments are problematic, according to CNN. “Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment expert and law professor at UCLA, said that Bondi’s statements appeared to ‘fuzz over’ the careful lines the justices have long drawn around protected speech. ‘The Supreme Court,’ Volokh predicted, ‘will have none of that.’”
• Army veteran who burned American flag near White House pleads not guilty to federal charges (Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press) — An Army veteran who was arrested last month while burning a flag to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on flag burning pleaded not guilty Wednesday to “charges of igniting a fire in an undesignated area and lighting a fire causing damage to property or park resources,” according to the Associated Press. A judge gave Jan Carey and his team, who have accused the Trump administration of using the charges to “stifle free speech and dissent,” until Oct. 17 “to file a motion to dismiss the case on constitutional grounds.” The Supreme Court has previously ruled that flag burning is a protected form of expression under certain circumstances, but the Trump administration does not believe the charges against Carey violate that precedent. “Although we respect the First Amendment, there is a law that prohibits the burning of anything, including a flag, on federal property,” Tim Lauer, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office, said in a statement.
• Here We Go Again: Another Cake Baker Gets Targeted (Ed Whelan, National Review) — In a post for the National Review’s Bench Memos blog, constitutional scholar Ed Whelan called on the Supreme Court to take up the case of Cathy Miller, a baker in California who, for religious reasons, does not want to design and sell custom wedding cakes for same-sex weddings. The justices heard a similar case during the 2017-18 term and ultimately ruled for a Christian baker named Jack Phillips, but the lessons of that decision and others like it don’t seem to have sunk in yet, according to Whelan. “California and the California courts should not be allowed to simply evade the Court’s rulings over many years just to score political points by punishing religious believers. The only way the cake wars are going to end is if the Court makes them end.”