U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

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

Increasing minority enrollment may be instrumental to these educational benefits, but it is not, as petitioner seems to suggest, a goal that can or should be reduced to pure numbers. Indeed, since the University is prohibited from seeking a particular number or quota of minority
students, it cannot be faulted for failing to specify the particular level of minority enrollment at which it believes the educational benefits of diversity will be obtained.

http://i1.wp.com/usatftw.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/gty_541546580.jpg

Yeah this is great. I hope the GOP loses as much ground as possible on their hobby-horse issues thanks to their obstructionism.

KENNEDY, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, and SOTOMAYOR, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion. ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, J., joined.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClpKM8BXIAARoIo.jpg

(sry if hueg)

what the hell??

Thomas's concurrence in the dissent contains as much disingenuousness as some conservatives take a lifetime to produce.

This was announced today also

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-tie-dooms-obama-immigration-policy-n582961

The U.S. Supreme Court split 4-4 Thursday over a challenge to President Obama's immigration policy, a result that prevents the administration from putting the program into effect during the rest of his term.

The split was reflected in a one sentence statement from the court: "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court."

Announced in late 2014, it would shield more than four million people from deportation. But lower courts blocked its implementation after Texas and 25 other states sued, claiming the president had no power to order the changes.

Washington Post re U of Texas case:

Kennedy had never before voted to uphold a race-conscious plan, but he also had been reluctant to say race may never be used. He was joined by three of the courts liberal justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a 51-page dissent and summarized it by saying the majority’s conclusion is “remarkable — and remarkably wrong.”

Bye Alitia

This was announced today also

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-tie-dooms-obama-immigration-policy-n582961

shitty. hope to see Clinton continue with these efforts + appoint a liberal justice to the court and get this done. Seems like a really important and key thing to do to improve the lives of so many people.

yeah but the Constitution, etc