U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

Yeah, I guess because this "we must wait until we have a new president to give the people a voice" shit is so new, and so transparent. I think they can stretch it out for a few months but not years at a time. Dunno why I think that. Perhaps I'm underestimating their dickishness. Fortunately in representative democracies, elections can (theoretically) punish dickishness

man alive, if they can continue they will, but it will be more difficult because their line since Scalia's death has been that the next president should choose his replacement. It will be tricky to shift to some new excuse after months of delays.

Nah, they'll just make up a new excuse to justify continued stonewalling. I mean, the Iraq!

Ultimately I see it as a matter of how highly they value a majority on the Supreme Court, which is very, very highly. Yes, they'll keep hating Hillary, but that hate is more the excuse than the reason. There is no single appointed position that matters more politically than a Supreme Court justice, and it's not even close. I mean the likely scenarios during the next term if they keep obstructing are:

1) one liberal dies or retires, 4-3 majority conservative court
2) one liberal and kennedy dies or retires, 3-3 divide, arguably still better off than they are now with the 4-4 split because there's no "moderate" Kennedy vote anymore that's likely to switch sides on key votes.
3) both breyer and RBG die or retire, 4-2 conservative majority

OTOH, I guess if Trump gives dems some gains in 2016 in the Senate, 2018 might be the Dem chance to get a majority. I guess if you really think SCOTUS obstruction is going to be a deciding factor in Senate races when you have a likely unpopular democratic president in office, obstruction risks tipping the balance and you're better off letting the president choose a "moderate." But SCOTUS is a big prize and I wouldn't underestimate what the current GOP will do to get it.

Again "we can't stretch credulity any further with our rhetoric" does not strike me as a likely thought to enter most GOP Senators' heads these days.

thing is, it's not at all out of the realm of possibility for the dems to get a majority in 2016

I imagine if it starts to look likely that will change the GOP's tune.

fwiw, I just looked it up and six is the minimum number of justices to hear a case. Did not know that.

Yeah, whether the current mess with Trump has freed Republicans to explore depths of shamelessness or just made their shamelessness more apparent, it's definitely solid precedent.

this prophecy is all too likely to come true. and the virulence of the hate will probably equal that shown to Obama.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Thursday, June 16, 2016 9:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the gop hasnt treated a dem president as legitimate since the 70s

Rumors going around that Thomas may retire after the election:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/end-of-conservative-supreme-court-clarence-thomas-may-be-next-to-leave/article/2594317

^if true, that would be a great blessing to country

Given the source it's presumably an effort to gin up conservative turnout rather than true.

agreed tho it's also weirdly believable

Thomas is weirdly weird. Scalia was his work buddy. Clarence feels lonesome and unappreciated now.

he is so emo

caveats:
1. Washington Examiner
2. "according to court watchers"

Looks like a conservative GOTV reminder to me.

trying to contemplate the mind the would rather drive an RV around the country with Ginny Thomas than hang out with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

weirdly plausible. the man never had any ideas of his own. with scalia gone, who does he have to tom for?

actually he's worse than Scalia

Ginni Thomas:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--WD1xIpL_--/18uzp5mrjo1x2jpg.jpg

weirdly plausible. the man never had any ideas of his own. with scalia gone, who does he have to tom for?

can we not do this

the man replaced THURGOOD MARSHALL on the court. not forgivable.

but if you want an apology for my word choice, it's yours.

it's really not just the word choice

fwiw his opinions often differed from Scalia's, and I'm really tired of reexplaining this to people who never actually read Supreme Court opinions but just like the idea that the black conservative guy must have been a lackey to the white conservative guy because no other possibility is fathomable

^^ yeah, this. We've had a flood of articles in the last decade on Thomas' jurisprudence. not to mention a bestseller by Jeffrey Tobin with a whole chapter dedicated to it.

I don't love having to defend him, but he has a distinct judicial philosophy that he is relatively consistent about. It's a weird and reactionary one that is arguably even more conservative and more constitutional-fundamentalist than Scalia's, but in any case he's not Scalia lite.

yup as Alfred notes in many ways he's been even worse than Scalia due to being even more of a bizarrely fanatical "purist"

for all his faults and inconsistencies, Scalia was nimble, he could take a scalpel to issues. whereas Thomas is more like a giant hammer.

in other news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/supreme-court-gun-control-semiautomatic-connecticut.html?_r=0

yeah on further reflection my inability to think of thomas in post-racial terms is more down to the thurgood marshall thing. the idea that george bush considered thomas a suitable replacement for the man who argued "brown" before the court speaks volumes about how white america thinks about race.

the whole sexual harassment thing doesn't help either, but i guess that's an entirely separate issue. still, his ability to embody both racial and gender injustice while simultaneously being the least impressive jurist on the court is impressive.

I don't know if I'd cosign on "least impressive" either, I'd have to really give it some thought.

Decision issued today written by Thomas for the 5 to 3 majority (Breyer joined the conservatives on this one)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/06/20/sonia_sotomayor_dissent_in_utah_v_strieff_takes_on_police_misconduct.html

Strieff itself involves a fairly simple question of constitutional law. Typically, when police illegally stop an individual on the street without reasonable suspicion, any fruits of that stop—such as the discovery of illegal drugs—must be suppressed in court, because the stop was “unreasonable seizure” under the Fourth Amendment. Strieff gave the justices an opportunity to affirm this constitutional rule. But instead, Justice Stephen Breyer joined the court’s four conservatives to add a huge loophole to that long-established doctrine. In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court found that if an officer illegally stops an individual then discovers an arrest warrant—even for an incredibly minor crime, like a traffic violation—the stop is legitimized, and any evidence seized can be used in court. The only restriction is when an officer engages in “flagrant police misconduct,” which the decision declines to define.

Sotomayor, who dominated oral arguments in Strieff, refused to let the majority get away with this Fourth Amendment diminution without a fight. In a stunning dissent, Sotomayor explains the startling breadth of the court’s decision. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong,” Sotomayor writes, in a dissent joined in part by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant.”

“Most striking about the Court’s opinion,” Sotomayor notes “is its insistence that the event here was ‘isolated,’ with ‘no indication that this unlawful stop was part of any systemic or recurrent police misconduct.’ ” But in truth, “nothing about this case is isolated.” Sotomayor then dives into the widespread police misconduct that has dominated headlines for several years, focusing on the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report to demonstrate that “outstanding warrants are surprisingly common.”

a further reminder that Breyer is unreliable on police procedural and Fourth Amendment case.

Also, wow:

By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

i.e. Sotomayor's dissent

I'm not a big Breyer fan, I find him unreliable in a lot of ways.

yeah that's a pretty tragic ruling

That Sotomayor dissent does something pretty sharp and important, which is find a way to get around all of the legalistic atomizing of individual microparts of the stop/search/seizure process and puts it all together as a sum total effect.

I don't know if I'd cosign on "least impressive" either, I'd have to really give it some thought.
― socka flocka-jones (man alive), Monday, June 20, 2016 11:19 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty much every legal expert i’ve ever read (in addition to everyone i know who is a lawyer) agrees that thomas is by far the lightweight on the current court and one of the great lightweights in the modern history of the S.C.
xposts

sotomayor is amazing. that ruling is awful. fuck a breyer.

To say that the Constitution as read by Thomas' law clerks doesn't address DNA testing, gay marriage, or drone rockets is the most intellectually vacant approach to law ("It's not in there? No. Next.").

breyer has a deep and abiding trust in the benignity of tha Mayberry police dept

To say that the Constitution as read by Thomas' law clerks doesn't address DNA testing, gay marriage, or drone rockets is the most intellectually vacant approach to law ("It's not in there? No. Next.").

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, June 20, 2016 1:02 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think you could defensibly view the Constitution as a limited-purpose document not designed to address every possible new legal wrinkle that can come up. A common conservative view is that the wrinkles get left to the states on most points. I don't agree with that view necessarily but it's not per se intellectually vacant.

Let's just say that it's way more defensible when, say, John Marshall Harlan II writes those decisions.

i.e. it's defensible to believe the Fourteenth Amendment is elastic enough to encompass many rights while being ehhh about incorporation. I tend to think it's the other way around but I'm no lawyer.

TX affirmative action upheld 4-3! (Kagan sat it out)

I like to imagine Scalia's ghost whining somewhere. "The dissenting opinion I'll never get a chance to write!"

alito?!

loooooooool this makes me very happy

oh, nm -- i thought alito had joined the majority for some reason

to the contrary, alito read his dissent aloud for like half an hour or something