U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

i wonder what line of bull mcconnell will come up with when they obstruct a clinton nominee next year. "it's totally different this time. different, yet the same."

"ginsburg will def retire during clinton's first term but her replacement is unlikely to shift the court significantly to the left, which is the issue at stake here. "

Not really at stake here tho.

wondered what ILE woulda been like had the internet been around for the Bork hearings

hopefully lots swedish chef jokes

probably just as unbearable

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/176729/judge-bork-martinis-kathryn-jean-lopez

The Garland choice may have been influenced from Obama wanting to be remembered as being a uniter. i'd consider this a bad thing -- leaders should base their choices on improving the world, not their image. like that ever happens.

otherwise this was a problem for game theory: you have a shortlist of choices and the opposition responses can be estimated. hand it over to a math program and get an answer.

I think people underestimate the effects of conservative criminal procedure jurisprudence -- which plenty of "liberal" justices have engaged in -- on people who are not directly involved in criminal justice. But we'll all continue to find out if we're paying attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/24/us/politics/supreme-court-case-on-contraceptives-mandate-may-offer-little-closure.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

ughhhh

former Dubya Admin ethics lawyer had an op in the NYT today saying W wd've nominated Garland as a consensus pick

The dudes are not any more enlightened than when Nino was cracking jokes.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/scotus-zubik-healthcare

Despite Garland's mostly moderate record, Republicans, led by the NRA, have turned him into anti-gun extremist whom they have to oppose. Washington Post's Daily 202 column talks about how the right are still motivated not to give him a hearing:

every poll shows that majorities of Wisconsinites and Americans want Garland to get a hearing and an up-or-down vote. But these don’t capture the intensity gap that’s apparent on the ground. A Marquette University law school poll conducted last month, before Obama named Garland, found that 51 percent of Wisconsin voters thought the Senate should hold hearings and vote, while 40 percent say Congress should hold off until 2017. But two-thirds of Johnson’s supporters supported inaction, while 28 percent said there should be hearings and a vote.
-- Even before Scalia’s unexpected death, the National Rifle Association planned to make Supreme Court nominations a central focus of its 2016 messaging. The vacancy will feature prominently in paid media this fall, but for now the group has been sending action alerts to its members urging them to call Johnson’s office and attend his town halls. Officials say they’re putting pressure on senators in both parties but stress that they’re willing to put pressure on any Republican who wavers.

This argument is still out there too:

By opting for a mild-mannered white man who has been careful not to leave a paper trail – and by all accounts is more of a technocrat than an ideologue – Obama made a choice that makes it less likely his own base will fight for his nominee. If he had picked an African American, a Latino or even an Asian candidate – and especially a woman – he could have helped energize the coalition that got him reelected in 2012 and arguably pushed his nominee onto the court.
Instead, he picked a former prosecutor known for siding with the government on criminal justice issues more than his Democratic counterparts – something that appears to be deterring the Black Lives Matter movement from going all-in. Now Democrats are divided about whether or not they’d be okay with Garland being confirmed during a lame-duck session or if Clinton should get to choose, with some liberals calling on Obama to withdraw his pick if Hillary wins and the White House insisting he’d do no such thing.

Stunning deployment of 'arguably', 10/10

"former Dubya Admin ethics lawyer had an op in the NYT today saying W wd've nominated Garland as a consensus pick"

That's a line of ****shit. He would most certainly not have done that.

****shit!

Exacta-****-ing-lute-ly!

hey Garland is pro-Citz United, so enough o that ****ing ****!

While Judge Garland unhesitatingly extended Citizens United when he believed its logic compelled him to do so, he was unwilling to push further than it required. In July, writing for a unanimous 11-member panel in Wagner v. Federal Election Commission, Judge Garland upheld a ban on campaign contributions from federal contractors, saying the interest in preventing corruption that survived Citizens United warranted the move.

xp say what? It was a UNANIMOUS ruling. Do you understand how precedent works?

forget it, Jake

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/28/11306422/supreme-court-prosecutors-career

4-4 tie in Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association: http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/03/opinion-analysis-result-but-no-guidance-on-public-unions-fees

And thank god for that. (Self-interest but this was the case most directly affecting my regular work.)

I know this stuff is real for a lot of people, and I know that not all cases will work out in favor of causes I value. But some part of me would like it if the current Court responded to the Republican nomination impasse by continually handing down nothing but 4-4 nondecisions until McConnell et al. budged on Garland.

I don't think that will make McConnell budge.

Meanwhile--

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-seeks-alternative-ways-to-deal-with-contraceptives-coverage/2016/03/29/4b6129f2-f5d7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_supree-240pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

The Supreme Court on Tuesday called for additional briefing on alternative ways that employees of religious organizations could receive contraceptive coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act without involving the organizations themselves.

The new order could mean that the court is deadlocked on the case, which was argued last week.
...In the order, the court directed both sides to file briefs that “address whether and how contraceptive coverage may be obtained by petitioners’ employees through petitioners’ insurance companies, but in a way that does not require any involvement of petitioners beyond their own decision to provide health insurance without contraceptive coverage to their employees.”

The court went into unusual specificity in asking the parties to address how that could happen, and made a suggestion.

It said the groups could contract to provide health insurance for their employees but inform the insurance company that they did not want the plan to include contraceptive coverage that they found objectionable.

Then the insurance company could “separately notify petitioners’ employees that the insurance company will provide cost-free contraceptive coverage, and that such coverage is not paid for by petitioners and is not provided through petitioners’ health plan.”

all this bullshit to not offend these nuns precious sensibilities. separation of church and state rip.

It was a UNANIMOUS ruling. Do you understand how precedent works?

mea culpa on that one

https://themuslimtimesdotinfodotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/four-horsemen-apocalypse.jpg

very good, one in a row

Fascinating case with unusual alliances.

The government may not freeze assets needed to pay criminal defense lawyers if the assets are not linked to a crime, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a 5-to-3 decision that scrambled the usual alliances.

The case arose from the prosecution of Sila Luis, a Florida woman, on charges of Medicare fraud that, according to the government, involved $45 million in charges for unneeded or nonexistent services. Almost all of Ms. Luis’s profits from the fraud, prosecutors said, had been spent by the time charges were filed.

Prosecutors instead asked a judge to freeze $2 million of Ms. Luis’s funds that were not connected to the suspected fraud, saying the money would be used to pay fines and provide restitution should she be convicted. Ms. Luis said she needed the money to pay her lawyers.

The judge issued an order freezing her assets. That order, the Supreme Court ruled, violated her Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in a plurality opinion also signed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, said the case was simple.

The government can seize, Justice Breyer wrote, “a robber’s loot, a drug seller’s cocaine, a burglar’s tools, or other property associated with the planning, implementing, or concealing of a crime.”

But it cannot, he said, freeze money or other assets unconnected to the crime.

this looked like cut and dried Sixth Amendment violation to me but whatevs

money is fungible; how does one assign the money she spent to the fraud while keeping the rest of her money unconnected?

yeah that seems to be what kagan is arguing

That's what Kagan implies, I think

xpost

any blow against civil forfeiture's OK by me.

Whoa.

Not as sweeping as we'd like but damn.

I meant to post that this morning. I think it would have been 9-0 had Scalia not died.

very interesting

http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/opinion-analysis-leaving-a-constitutional-ideal-still-undefined/

Hmmmm---

Two of the eight Justices were clearly not satisfied with the rhetoric and some of the implications of Justice Ginsburg’s opinion, and only joined in the outcome. Those were Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Clarence Thomas, each of whom wrote separately. Thomas also joined most of Alito’s opinion.

Had Justice Ginsburg not held five colleagues in support of what her opinion actually said in the end, two — perhaps Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — might have abandoned the common result. The result then might have been that the Court would have split four to four, settling nothing and releasing no opinion at all while leaving intact a three-judge federal district court’s ruling that Texas had the authority to base its state legislative seats on a division of the total population of Texas.

Scott Lemieux:

But this doesn’t settle the issue politically. The Supreme Court said that states are not required to apportion legislative district by voters, but it didn’t forbid the practice either. It is very likely that some conservative legislatures will do exactly this in 2020, when the next Census rolls around.

Samuel Alito, the preeminent strategic mind among the conservatives on the Supreme Court, drew a handy road map for any state legislatures that are so inclined. In a concurring opinion, Alito rejected the argument advanced by the Obama administration that the “one person, one vote” standard requires the drawing of legislative districts that are roughly equal in population. Alito called the argument “meretricious.” He claimed that the decision of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment to apportion the House of Representatives by total population was merely power politics that did not reflect any broader theory of representation. He was quite clear that states should be free to apportion by either total population or voters.

Alito’s concurrence made it apparent that such states would have his support. But he did not go as far as Justice Clarence Thomas, who tackled the “one person, one vote” principle head-on in his own concurrence.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/06/473228688/plan-for-antonin-scalia-school-of-law-is-tweaked-over-unfortunate-acronym

the link is enough to generate the lol

i love this story perhaps more than i should

baahaahaha

amazing how that story goes into contortions to avoid quoting the ASSoL jokes

Conservatives want Mike Lee on SCOTUS.

http://dailysignal.com/2016/03/30/the-next-supreme-court-justice/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/04/07/daily-202-key-conservatives-pushing-mike-lee-for-the-supreme-court/5705472c981b92a22ddc6367/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_daily202-915am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

No surprise, conservatives are not pushing to put a moderate on the Supreme Court if Republicans win

I just posted that!

Utah’s senior senator, Orrin Hatch, who is not as conservative as Lee, got elected in 1976.

Jeeps, how conservative is Lee?

More importantly, why do people call Trump "The Donald?" That's stupid, they should stop.