Good morning. The Roberts court has ruled in favor of religious groups in more than eight in 10 cases it has heard. |
 | | The Supreme Court rejected a ban on aid for religious schools in Maine.Samuel Corum for The New York Times |
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The Supreme Court has become the most pro-religion it's been since at least the 1950s, and it appears to include the six most pro-religion justices since at least World War II. |
 | | Sources: Lee Epstein, Washington University in St. Louis; Eric Posner, University of Chicago |
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Yesterday's ruling pushed the win rate for religious groups even higher, to 85 percent, said Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who uncovered the trend for a forthcoming Supreme Court Review study she co-wrote with Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor. |
Today's newsletter explains how the court has come to prioritize religious liberty and what the Maine ruling suggests about the court's future. |
How did the court end up with such a robust pro-religion majority? It's a story of selection and succession. |
Over the past few decades, the rise of the religious right has made religious freedom a political priority for Republicans. That shift has corresponded with nominations by Republican presidents of justices who favor religious groups even more frequently than previous conservative justices. |
Republican-appointed justices also have a better track record of timing their retirements to ensure that a Republican president will name their successor, as David Leonhardt has written in this newsletter. The Roberts court includes justices who are more apt than their Republican-appointed predecessors to favor religious groups, according to Epstein and Posner: Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh — who benefited from well-timed departures — as well as Neil Gorsuch and Roberts himself. |
Another pattern has contributed: Republican presidents choosing successors to justices appointed by Democrats. Clarence Thomas, one of the court's staunchest advocates of religious liberty, replaced a liberal icon in Thurgood Marshall, as did Amy Coney Barrett, who took over Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat in 2020. If Barrett shares her conservative colleagues' outlook on religious freedom — and yesterday's ruling is the latest evidence that she does — it will further cement the Roberts court's pro-religion turn. |
"The Roberts court was pretty pro-religion even before the Trump administration," Epstein told me. "The trend will continue, if not accelerate." |
When the interests of governments and religious groups clash, the Roberts court tends to side with the religious groups. Yesterday's ruling fits that pattern. |
The case, Carson v. Makin, concerned a Maine program that let rural residents who lived far from a public school attend a private school using taxpayer dollars, so long as that school was "nonsectarian." Families who wanted to send their children to Christian schools challenged the program, arguing that excluding religious schools violated their right to exercise their faith. |
 | | Olivia Carson, left, and her mother, Amy, were among the families that challenged Maine's law.Gabor Degre/The Bangor Daily News, via Associated Press |
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The court sided with them, saying the Maine program amounted to unconstitutional "discrimination against religion." Roberts wrote for the majority, which included every Republican-appointed justice. |
The court's three Democratic appointees dissented. "This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. |
Broadly, these rulings have allowed for a much larger role for religion in public life, my colleague Adam Liptak, who covers the court, wrote yesterday. |
"The court led by Chief Justice Roberts has been and will continue to be exceptionally receptive to claims of religious freedom," Adam says. |
 | | Witnesses were sworn in during the hearing yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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- The Jan. 6 committee presented evidence that Donald Trump had been closely involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election using fake electors.
- Republican lawmakers were also linked: Representative Andy Biggs asked Arizona's House speaker to overturn results, and an aide to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin sought to deliver a list of fake electors to Mike Pence.
- The Arizona speaker, Rusty Bowers, said that Trump's allies had produced no evidence of a stolen election but urged him to go along with the claims anyway.
- Officials testified about the harassment they had received from Trump's supporters. One Georgia election worker said that she was still afraid to visit the grocery store.
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- Katie Britt, whom Donald Trump endorsed after un-endorsing Representative Mo Brooks, trounced Brooks in the Alabama Senate primary runoff.
- Vernon Jones and Jake Evans, two Trump-backed House candidates in Georgia, lost their runoffs.
- Bee Nguyen won the Democratic nomination for Georgia's secretary of state. She will face the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, who yesterday debunked Trump's voter-fraud claims to the Jan. 6 committee.
- Here are more takeaways and results.
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 | | Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region yesterday.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times |
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Tip: A duckling will imprint soon after hatching — ideally on its mother, but possibly on you. |
Lives Lived: Clela Rorex issued a marriage license to a same-sex Colorado couple in 1975, becoming a target for hate mail and a hero in the gay-rights movement. She died at 78. |
 | | Angel Jimenez in La Piraña Lechonera, his Bronx food trailer.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times |
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When the Times restaurant critic Pete Wells brought back his reviews in fall 2020 after a pandemic pause, he omitted a key element: the star ratings. "The time just wasn't right for the stars," Emily Weinstein, The Times's Food and Cooking editor, told The Morning. |
But as New Yorkers return to restaurants with some regularity, the stars are resuming, too. |
"As someone who always wants to know where to eat, I started to feel as though a punctuation mark was missing from the end of Pete's reviews, no matter how beautifully written or brilliantly argued they were," Emily said. "The stars are a service for our readers." |
The first starred review of the new era is for La Piraña Lechonera, a trailer in the South Bronx that serves Puerto Rican classics. The main attraction is the lechón, a heap of roast pork, dripping with fat and coated in crackling skin. Angel Jimenez runs the whole operation, shuttling between taking orders, frying tostones and whacking a machete onto the cutting board. Jimenez, Wells writes, is "the host of the best picnic in New York." |
 | | Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. |
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The pangram from yesterday's Spelling Bee was bigoted. Here is today's puzzle. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. |
Natasha Frost, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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