U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

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.

@RedState
Republicans Should Confirm Merrick Garland ASAP. bit.ly/1NVLxkB

lol

The Good Ship Trump already is sinking, eh?

Don't always like Toobin's commentary on the Supreme Court, but here he is agreeing with many re oral arguments at the McDonnell case.

As in Citizens United, the Justices appeared heading toward requiring a specific and obvious quid pro quo—a formalism that ignored the workings of the real world. Campaign contributors and favor-seekers, as well as the recipients of their largesse, don’t need to be explicit about their corrupt bargains. But the Supreme Court, worried about the tender vulnerabilities of the fat cats and their prey, seems to be requiring a mindless (and unlikely) spelling-out of the details. The logical result is a deregulation of corruption, which a victory for McDonnell will only accelerate.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-supreme-court-gets-ready-to-legalize-corruption

Breyer was in the minority in Citizen's United, yet he seemingly joined the 4 remaining conservatives in the McDonnell arguments. I wonder if any analysis has gone into more detail regarding Breyer.

it seems like the court needs to find that a literal sack of cash with a dollar sign on it was exchanged for political favors, otherwise its totally cool.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/justices-send-obamacare-contraception-case-back-to-lower-courts/2016/05/16/84e5d6da-1b72-11e6-9c81-4be1c14fb8c8_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_court-11am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

A shorthanded Supreme Court declined Monday to decide challenges to an Affordable Care Act requirement about providing contraceptive coverage, saying that there was a possibility of compromise between religious objectors and the government.

The court punted the issue back to lower courts, and said its unanimous ruling “expresses no view on the merits of the cases.”

In the unsigned opinion, the court emphasized: “In particular, the Court does not decide whether petitioners’ religious exercise has been substantially burdened, whether the Government has a compelling interest, or whether the current regulations are the least restrictive means of serving that interest.”

The unanimous, three-page decision maintains the status quo, and indicates that the court — evenly divided along ideological lines following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia — could not reach agreement.

A week after oral arguments in the case, the justices took the highly unusual step of floating its own compromise about how to resolve the case, and asked the parties to weigh in.

“Both petitioners and the government now confirm that such an option is feasible,”said the opinion, a summary of which was read from the bench by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Women’s rights groups, which had won the vast majority of cases in the lower courts, worried that the court’s action was a setback.

“We are disappointed that the Court did not resolve once and for all whether the religious beliefs of religiously-affiliated non-profit employers can block women’s seamless access to birth control,” said Gretchen Borchelt, vice president of the National Women’s Law Center. “Eight of nine circuit courts of appeals have already upheld women’s access to birth control no matter where they work. We are confident that the government’s birth control accommodation once again will prevail.”

Lawyers representing the challengers saw the decision as a positive sign.

“The Supreme Court was right to protect the Christian colleges and other groups from not having to pay fines or fill out forms authorizing the objectionable coverage,” said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel David Cortman. “The government has many other ways to ensure women are able to obtain these drugs without forcing people of faith to participate in acts that violate their deepest convictions. We look forward to addressing the remaining details as we advance these cases in the lower courts.”

thanks, Nino!

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/23/politics/supreme-court-racial-discrimination/index.html?adkey=bn

7-1

I am DYiNG to know who the 1 was

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/05/23/supreme-court-race-black-jury-discrimination-death-penalty/78642468/

Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's lone African American member, cast the lone dissent. "Foster's new evidence does not justify this court's reassessment of who was telling the truth nearly three decades removed from voir dire," he said.

I KNEW IT

damn

ice cold

When that guy goes he won't even get the sort of anti-fanfare that Scalia earned. He's just a sociopathic personality-free asshole.

america's carbuncle

carbuncle sam

you know what they say: when you've lost Alito, you throw a party

never forget: this man replaced Thurgood Marshall.