Fundamental rights could depend on your ZIP code
By Ronald Brownstein / Bloomberg Opinion
One of the most powerful trends in modern politics is the growing separation between red and blue states. Now, the Supreme Court looks poised to widen that chasm.
Over roughly the past decade, virtually all Republican-controlled states have rolled back rights and liberties across a broad front: banning abortion; restricting voting rights; censoring how teachers can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation; and prohibiting transition care for transgender minors. No Democratic-leaning state has done any of those things. The result is the greatest gulf since the era of Jim Crow state-sponsored segregation between the rights guaranteed in some states and denied in others.
The Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority has abetted this separation. Its decisions eviscerating federal oversight of state voting rules (in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case) and rescinding the national right to abortion (in 2022’s Dobbs decision) freed red states to lurch right on both fronts. In oral arguments this month, the GOP-appointed justices appeared ready to push the states apart in a new way: by restricting federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions.
Concern about nationwide injunctions has been growing in both parties. Such injunctions remained relatively rare during the two-term presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but Trump faced 64 of them in his first term and Joe Biden 14 in his first three years in office, according to a Harvard Law Review tabulation. Through the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, federal courts have already imposed 25 nationwide injunctions against him.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-fundamental-rights-should-depend-on-your-zip-code/