U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

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.

It wouldn't be civil or polite for SC majority to address gerrymandering directly now

tbf I think the problem is they want to be able to address the question as narrowly as possible without having to come up with some kind of specific, correct method for drawing maps (which I actually do agree the courts are not the best-qualified institution to do).

and we haven't even mentioned the Texas case.

good lord the last thing we need is the Supreme Court doing cartography

Yes but Hillary Clinton was as bad as Donald Trump.

x-post-- so you're cool with state legislatures doing whatever they want, even if there's evidence of racial discrimination

but it's not the legislatures' fault! Those minorities have to prove it! Alito said so!

#SCOTUS rules for Trump administration, rejects challenge to Sept 2017 #travelban

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 26, 2018

ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Awful but I expected this outcome.

I guess the crisis pregnancy centers ruling hasn't been mentioned here yet but it's also very bad.

thank god for all that civility we enjoyed before 2016

It's hard not to look at national security rulings since the Truman era and not think the Court would have denied these powers to a president.

It’s also hard not to wonder how it would have turned out if McConnell hadn’t stolen a fucking Supreme Court justice seat in broad daylight

nice to see him publicly gloating about this

I thought you weren't supposed to piss off the other side because of decorum and This Is How You Got Trump

If only everyone had just been a little more civil.

Wonder how hard it was for Breyer not to write "Are you fucking kidding me?" instead of "Really?"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgoEXvgVQAAWQKW.jpg:large

Awful but I expected this outcome.

yup, ever since Gorsuch this was the likely conclusion.

THANKS OBAMA

at least it was delayed for a little while and this ruling came out just in time for the midterms

They overturned Korematsu in the travel ban case, which is horrifying.

Horrifying because it's a complete fake out, let's be clear.

It’s amazing how much bullshit was set aside back then with the underfunding that Hillary Clinton would definitely win

In rejecting Korematsu, majority basically gave the green light to "hey, Islam isn't a RACE" forever, and go ahead and replace "Islam" with any vulnerable group of your choice.