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Air - traffic Controllers Strike
Hoping to get the federal governement to raise their wages, give them a shorter work week, and provide better retirement benefits by disrupting the transportation system, thousands of PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) workers left work and went on strike. However, Ronald Reagan simply fired the workers under the grounds that they were forbidden by law from striking because they were federal employees. -
Equal Access Act
The Equal Access Act became law toward the end of Ronald Reagan's first term as president. The law made it to where groups of students had equal access to public secondary school facilities. It was especially supported by Christian groups with the hopes that students would start religious groups at school, which had been banned in many schools before this became law. -
Iran - Contra Scandal
Despite the Reagan administration's policy of not negotiating with terrorists, and a law passed in 1983 that banned sending funds to the Contras in Nicaragua, the U.S. sold weapons to Iran in 1985 in exchange for a promise that they would pressure for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and the administration used the money earned from the deal to support the Contras. -
Gramm - Rudman - Hollings Act
Senators Phil Gramm (TX), Warren Rudman (NH), and Ernest Hollings (SC) were the primary supporters of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, giving it the nickname "Gramm - Rudman - Hollings Act". The idea behind the act was to initiate spending cuts if the deficit went beyond the fixed deficit targets. It was the first contraint put on government spending. -
Westside Community School District v. Mergens
When a group of students tried to start an extracurricular Christian group at school and was refused by the school board, they sought out legal action. The Supreme Court ordered that the school's decision was unconstitutional, and illegal because of the Equal Access Act. The decision reinforced the Equal Access Act. -
Reno v. ACLU
The Supreme Court ruled that the 1996 Federal Communications Decency Act, which was created to protect minors from viewing sexual, obscene, and indecent messages or images, was unconstitutional because it violated the first ammendment's freedom of speech by making the definition of "indecent" too vague. -
Mitchell v. Helms
Chapter 2 of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981 states that the government should pay for educational materials and equipment to public and private schools "to implement secular, neutral, and nonideological" programs. Mary Helms, and other public school parents, thought that the government funding of private Catholic schools was in violation of the 1st Amendment's Establishment Clause. However, the Supreme Court ruled that they can aid religious groups in nonreligious ways. -
Bush v. Gore
In the 2000 presidential election, the votes were extremely close. Neither Bush nor Gore had the 271 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, and the deciding factor would be Florida's 25 electoral votes. The state's popular vote was so close that the state law ordered an automatic statewide recount of some of the votes. Bush requested that the Supreme Court review the plan, and it ended up finding it unconstitutional because the Equal Protection Clause guaruntees that no ballot be devalued