New Day for Pandemic Law

Advisory Opinions

The Dispatch

News, Government, Politics

4.7 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2020

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over Thanksgiving break, the Supreme Court struck down New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s strict coronavirus related occupancy limits to 10 or 25 worshipers in churches and synagogues located in orange and red zones in the state. In a 5-4 per curiam decision, the majority sided with Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel, who argued that Cuomo’s COVID-19 regulations treated houses of worship differently from comparable secular institutions, especially considering the religious plaintiffs in question went above and beyond in preventing COVID-19 outbreaks within their doors. “From the standpoint of the plaintiffs,” David argues, “it’s sort of a double whammy of good facts. One, expressions of animus from public officials and hypocrisy from public officials. And two, they’re coming to the court with clean hands.” Later in the episode, David and Sarah also dive into a host of abortion related lawsuits and the U.S. census case before ending with some thoughts on election litigation. Show Notes: -Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You ready?
0:02.0	I was born ready.
0:04.0	Welcome to the advisory opinions podcast. The first podcast ends our emergency pod one week ago today.
0:27.0	And the first work I've done in days, Sarah, days.
0:33.0	We actually took Thanksgiving off. Good for us.
0:36.0	Yes. Yes. I was we're just talking in the green room before recording that this was the first Sunday that there was no Sunday newsletter in since October of 2019.
0:46.0	So that's how committed I was to time off.
0:50.0	And it was hard to get going this morning except except the knowledge that Sarah, this may come as some surprise to you.
0:58.0	It will not come as a surprise to listeners, but this might be the most powerful podcast in America.
1:05.0	Why do you say that David?
1:07.0	Well, I mean, let's look at the empirical evidence.
1:10.0	So we've had a lot of discussion on this podcast, for example, of the concept of don't dump Trump, but don't burn down the whole GOP.
1:20.0	Right. We've had that kind of conversation. And that's what's happened.
1:24.0	Now, I would say that that's probably unrelated to the podcast, you know, that that's a little much to assume that the listenership executed on that plan with to perfection and at scale.
1:35.0	But then, but then, you know, we've been talking a lot about this whole concept of pandemic law.
1:42.0	And that is it now time in the course of this pandemic for the court to apply conventional levels of legal scrutiny to constitutional claims.
1:52.0	We've been talking about that. We've been writing about that. And what happened?
1:57.0	The court just had a decision, five, four, really kind of five, three, one, that applied normal levels of constitutional scrutiny to a key constitutional claim in the middle of a pandemic involving a church's and synagogue in New York.
2:13.0	And there's only one logical conclusion here.
2:16.0	And that is lots of people are taking their cues from this podcast.
2:21.0	We should dive into that case. That is, yes, that is, I mean, we did not do an emergency podcast, but we could have.
2:28.0	Oh, yeah, we could have. Yeah. So let's map out what we're going to do today.
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