U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

"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.

it's been his nickname for decades

Lee is considered a Serious Constitutional Scholar.

which means he's as dumb as a bag of hay

From the section on Lee in a People for the American Way analysis item:

http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-rogues-gallery-right-wing-candidates-have-dangerous-agenda-for-america-and-could-tu?_ga=1.140591730.1501181851.1460051369

He wants to eliminate capital gains taxes and make the current tax system more regressive – more reliant on lower income taxpayers – and says his favorite approach to taxation would actually be to repeal the 16th amendment altogether, strip the federal government of the power to tax income, and leave it to the states to determine how they would tax their own citizens to pay for the limited federal government that would be left.

Hes a constitutional lawyer whod like to make lots of changes to the Constitution: he has said he supports repeal of the 17th Amendment, which calls for popular election of U S Senators; he wants to "clarify" the 14th Amendment through legislation to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are not citizens or legal residents; he wants to amend the Constitution to require a balanced federal budget and to impose congressional term limits.

iow, he wants a return to the 1870s, with a few extra regressive additions even that decade did not have the benefits of.

is he down with stripping the population of directly electing senators too

yes

he has said he supports repeal of the 17th Amendment, which calls for popular election of U S Senators

Michael Waldman's new The Fight to Vote includes a chapter on the history of the 17th Amendment and the modern conservative movement's attempt to repeal it.

whoa thats real xp

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/immigration-case-hearings

Should Texas even have standing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHwVBirqD2s

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/supreme_court_dispatches/2016/04/the_supreme_court_might_let_bob_mcdonnell_off_the_hook.html

Looks like Breyer will vote with conservative Justices in giving sympathetic "vague" reading to corruption law, plus claiming everyone does it (accepts gifts from folks who want something). No such sympathy for most non-governors when laws are vague

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mcdonnell-conviction-should-stand/2016/04/22/53960d50-0350-11e6-9203-7b8670959b88_story.html

McDonnell’s constitutional argument trivializes the First Amendment. There may be legitimate constitutional concerns in a bribery case involving campaign contributions, but that’s not this case. It’s hard to see the Madisonian virtue in protecting the “right” of Williams secretly to buy McDonnell a Rolex or to take his wife shopping at Louis Vuitton in exchange for political favors.

This is the same legal theory that Jeff Skilling of Enron won on appeal but was remanded and deemed harmless error by the fifth circuit.