U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

dude litigated the travel ban = liberal hero

Judging an attorney's principles by examining the cases they've argued seems like a highly doubtful methodology to me.

His Twitter labels him an "extremist centrist," which is nice ass-covering.

wiki:

Katyal was critical of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. While teaching at Georgetown University Law Center for two decades, Katyal was lead counsel for the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), which held that Guantanamo military commissions set up by the George W. Bush administration to try detainees "violate both the UCMJ and the four Geneva Conventions."

I know this is an uncomfortable conversation, but progressives must understand+confront role that Big Law—including heroes who’ve done great work serving in Dem admins—has played in undermining legal rights of vulnerable workers and consumers, esp through attack on class actions https://t.co/i9fLwvUcOm

— Brian Highsmith (@bd_highsmith) May 21, 2018

Um, the job of biglaw is to serve capital, what the fuck does anyone think it is?

So Neal K. Katyal, who was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, is a law professor at Georgetown and a partner at Hogan Lovells, wrote the cert petition on behalf of the employer asking the Supreme Court to weaken labor law in this case, and the NY Times let him write an op-ed back in 2017 entitled "Why Liberals Should back Neil Gorsuch.".

― curmudgeon, Monday, May 21, 2018 12:12 PM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is literally the exact type of motherfucker I was talking about in my earlier post in re "pukeworthy" lawyer takes

the Supreme Court ruled for the Colorado baker. "The ruling is a win for baker Jack Phillips but leaves unsettled the broader constitutional questions the case presented."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado-gay-marriage-cake-supreme-court/

Yeah, seeing similar elsewhere:

So: on a quick read, SCOTUS punted the core difficult issue of Masterpiece Cakeshop by saying "however it comes out, in this case there was unlawful bias in the process." Um.

— KneelBeforeHat (@Popehat) June 4, 2018

Kagan and Breyer voted with the 5 conservative justices

The conservative justices probably couldn't muster the necessary 5 votes to establish a whole new legal framework to give everyone a right to discriminate whenever they can claim that their religion requires such discrimination. By punting the issue and dodging the entire question, they could get 7 votes using the narrowest possible legal basis, save face, and let the cakeshop owners off the hook, thereby mollifying the evangelicals and letting them claim victory, despite establishing zero precedent for the future. A better outcome than it might have been.

I'm not knocked out by the decision even if I recognize this is the usual John Roberts way of Keeping the Court Legit despite having lost control of any comity (the nine justices are yelling at each other; look at all the opinions!).

If the plea of "my religion requires me to treat certain people like lepers" ever gets official sanction, I may revive a new variant of the Thug sect, which required its acolytes to kill people, usually travelers. In my new Thug religion killing conservative Supreme Court justices would provide extra merit in heaven.

Please also establish schools and ask for voucher money for your Thug faith. The $ would of course just cover non-Thug teaching

this hadn't occurred to me, but is kind of compelling

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/04/donald-trump-travel-ban-supreme-court-218590

At issue in Hawaii v. Trump is whether the entry ban order results from anti-Muslim animus—that is, a kind of religious prejudice. Much of the fight is about whether courts should ignore President Trump’s Islamophobic statements when reasoning about the purpose of the entry ban. In Monday’s decision, Justice Kennedy made plain that it is appropriate to consider the prejudice in things government officials say when analyzing claims that those officials’ actions are unconstitutionally discriminatory: The key to the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, for Kennedy, was a series of statements by two members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that displayed, or might have suggested, a prejudicial attitude toward the baker’s religious beliefs.

Good breakdown of the cake case: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-narrow-ruling-masterpiece-cakeshop-could-undermine-future-civil-rights-ncna879976

Breaking: In 5-4 decision Alito reverses 6th circuit & upholds Ohio's purging of infrequent voters. Ohio has purged 2 million voters since 2011, more than any other state. Black voters 2x as likely as whites to be purged in state's largest counties

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) June 11, 2018

fuck this worthless shithole-ass country

Is there any hope that Dems will ever reclaim Congress and get enough of a majority in both the Senate and House to rewrite the federal voter registration law(s) that Alito wrongly interpreted?

Ohio sends a notice after a voter skips a single federal election cycle. If they fail to respond and do not vote in the next four years, their names are removed from the rolls.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court’s job was not to decide whether Ohio has adopted the “ideal method” for keeping rolls up to date, but only whether it complies with federal law.

The case is Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-upholds-ohios-way-of-removing-voters-from-rolls-after-they-miss-elections/2018/06/11/5013195e-62c4-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.612d2dc87397

who ever could have seen this coming the very instant the GOP refused to give Merrick Garland a hearing

the court’s job was not to decide whether Ohio has adopted the “ideal method” for keeping rolls up to datethe voting rights of U.S. citizens had been wrongfully denied them, but only whether it complies with federal law could be plausibly twisted to allow those voting rights to be denied.

Because, after all, the US Constitution is not about rights, but about words.

John Roberts finally gets to do what the Reagan White House programmed him to do.

Just won big Supreme Court decision on Voting! Great News!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018

Hope he gets polonium’d by Kim Jong Un

Lots fewer people able to vote in Ohio! Lots of them brown-skinned! Big win! Great news!

I agree w the conservative majority for once!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-rules-that-states-may-require-online-retailers-to-collect-sales-taxes/2018/06/21/a24e0100-755e-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.1590dd6922e3

He was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.

weird alliances here

there goes Amazon's business model

What i dont get about this ruling is kagan and sotomayor’s dissent - do they really agree w Roberts’ “not our business” demurral? Seems odd.

p sure Amazon already does this voluntarily now. Had this decision come 15 years earlier however, both Amazon and the retail world would look very different.

Roberts seems to want it both ways, for, after all, he acknowledges that times have changed

honestly not sure what this is about until i saw Trump was into it. Taxes are good now ?

He has a grudge against Amazon is all you need to know

did he get auto renewed for Prime or something ?

I reserve the right to be 100% wrong about this, but my hunch for Kagan and Sotomayor's dissent is that this ruling will hurt a lot of small internet retailers who are going to have many different taxations schemes to deal with. Amazon will see their bottom line decrease slightly, these small retailers risk more permanent damage. It's all for the moment being, an intelligent bi-partisan thing that could happen (ha! ha!) is for congress to create one small business e-commerce tax for sales across the states, that would then the collected money could be redistributed to states. The SCOTUS overruling seems to allow that kind of stuff.

lol at mascherano forgetting that there was still a world cup game in progress

lol sorry

what i meant was "HEY GET 1 VAT"

It’s hard to imagine that it’s all that challenging in 2018 to deal with varying state tax schemes. Probably a simple piece of software can handle.

Well there’s the matter of finding out what the sales tax is for every zip code in the US, and also hoping that it doesn’t vary within too many zip codes or you’ll have to do some actual geocoding, and that it doesn’t change too often, and then remitting it to accounts in all the relevant states, so it’s not a trivial effort to get it right.

Also some sales taxes exclude some kinds of purchases but not others etc etc.

99% of small businesses selling online are using something like Shopify or a Square/PP/etc. payment processor, all of which could bundle sales tax to deal with the paperwork issues.

I mean, if I can instantly find out the low temperature in any zip code, surely I can find the sales tax rate.

No surprise, Gorsuch and other conservatives protecting CEOs in this other decision (a 5-4 one)--

Today in Wisconsin Central v. U.S., a party-line 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that the stock options of railroad executives are not “money renumeration” that qualify as “compensation” for the purposes of the Railroad Retirement Act of 1937, and hence some lucky ducky railroad executives get a hefty tax-free pension. Since stock options can immediately be converted into cash, this is…not a very plausible interpretation. According to Neil Gorsuch, however, the theory of original meaning leaves them with no choice:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/06/legal-realism-new-gilded-age

Well there’s the matter of finding out what the sales tax is for every zip code in the US, and also hoping that it doesn’t vary within too many zip codes or you’ll have to do some actual geocoding, and that it doesn’t change too often, and then remitting it to accounts in all the relevant states, so it’s not a trivial effort to get it right.

the argument for simplicity is well received but this is one element of the tax code where software can trivialize the vast majority of use cases

especially if you force the resource load on an entity the size of Amazon

well!

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the government cannot monitor people's movements for weeks or months by tracking the location of their mobile phones without a warrant.

In a ruling that could have broad implications for privacy rights in the digital age, justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum said rapid advances in technology make decades-old rules on data privacy inadequate.

It was another in a series of digital privacy verdicts issued by the high court, following rulings in recent years that police cannot use GPS equipment to track vehicles or search cellphones without a warrant.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion and was joined by the court's four liberal justices. He stressed that it was a narrow decision that does not question conventional surveillance techniques and tools, such as security cameras. The court's other conservative justices dissented.

The latest case grew out of a series of armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio in 2010 and 2011. To prosecute its case against Timothy Carpenter, the government obtained cellphone records that revealed his approximate location over 127 days, placing him in proximity to the crimes.

Sure is gonna suck when Roberts becomes the middle guy on the court.

I don't think he wants to be remembered as Melville Fuller II.

Or Souter

The Supreme Court is choosing not to take on a new case on partisan redistricting for now. Instead, the justices are sending a dispute over North Carolina's heavily Republican congressional districting map back to a lower court for more work.

The court's order Monday follows a ruling last week in which it declared that Wisconsin voters who sued over the state's GOP-drawn legislative districts had not proven they have the right to bring their case in court. The justices ordered the court in North Carolina to examine the same issue.