U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

Not truly shocking with this court Law Professor Shaw.

The shocking thing I suppose is that Barrett sided with the liberals.

....but didn't join Kagan as a concurrence.

I suppose being in the majority of a 6-3 court means you can make a game out of taking turns having the others provide cover for you.

Saw somewhere the thought that she may have been spooked at the prospect of actually OKing the execution of someone the state went out of their way to pursue.

BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the liberals in dissent, the Supreme Court halts a lower court order that required Alabama to redraw its congressional map, which diluted Black votes in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) February 7, 2022

i see our future has arrived and it has a big dollop of Jim Crow on it

just want to check back on this article and see how well it has aged

https://www.aei.org/articles/justice-john-roberts-was-right-things-have-changed-in-the-south/

Here's a horror story we should read on Halloween:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/amy-coney-barretts-long-game

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that it will consider a renewed request from New York City teachers and staff to block a vaccine mandate due their religious objections, despite an earlier denial by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The teachers had previously asked Sotomayor -- who has jurisdiction over lower courts in New York -- to consider their emergency request. Sotomayor denied the request without referring the matter to the full court, likely because she did not think her colleagues would be interested in granting the application. The court has been reluctant to get involved in state and local vaccine mandate disputes.
But the New York group then took the unusual step of directing a new request to conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who referred it to the full court to consider. Supreme Court rules allow a party to make a renewed request to "any other justice" after a denial from the justice who has jurisdiction over the lower courts involved in the case. The rules state, however, that such a renewed application is "not favored."

Maskless anti-vaxer Gorsuch at work

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/16/politics/sotomayor-gorsuch-new-york-vaccine-mandate/index.html

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/2/17/2080743/-Gorsuch-overrules-Sotomayor-again-demonstrating-the-Supreme-Court-has-to-be-expanded-to-be-saved?detail=emaildkre

holy shit

interested to see the religious argument for not masking (actually not interested in this)

excited for our forthcoming smallpox epidemic

but it will be divinely inspired smallpox epidemic so it's ok

BREAKING: The Supreme Court will decide whether LGBTQ non-discrimination laws that "compel an artist to speak or stay silent" violate the First Amendment. https://t.co/YlxSXnMjCI pic.twitter.com/isF4Px7yUi

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) February 22, 2022

Motion to fire up new thread U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Roberts Edition

overruled, with roberts, thomas, alito, gorsuch, kavanaugh, and barrett in the majority, and sotomayor, kagan, and breyer in disisent

that's just how it is here

I had to read Stern's article to understand "speak or stay silent."

America has a long and storied tradition of gay bashing

Consider a photographer who refuses to shoot a Muslim wedding; a florist who refuses to sell flowers for a Bat Mitzvah; a hairdresser who refuses to provide services to Black people; a chef who refuses to cater a quinceañera.

SCOTUS could exempt them all from civil rights laws.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) February 22, 2022

I feel like I should know this, but are there really current state civil rights laws that require non discrimination in things like wedding photography?

don’t see how providing wedding photography is different than baking a wedding cake, making floral arrangements or creating a web page

ADF is a well-known Southern Poverty Law Center-designated extremist group. As Joe My God said, “it’s likely that Smith’s is yet another fake company created by the Alliance Defending Freedom in order file a peremptory challenge. In other words, she’s never refused any LGBT clients because she’s never had any attempt to hire her.”

The web page, according to Stern, is more recognizably "speech" than baking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/magazine/clarence-thomas-ginni-thomas.html

Some of this has been previously reported but this article adds more details re Clarence & Ginni Thomas and right wing craziness

don’t see how providing wedding photography is different than baking a wedding cake, making floral arrangements or creating a web page

― Dan S, Wednesday, 23 February 2022 03:19 (seven hours ago) link

I hadn’t realized that public accommodation laws were this broadly defined - I assumed it was places with a physical location open to the public.

I'm as despairing as everyone else, but I really think they might just do a limited ruling that allows discrimination against LGBTQ+ people...which will be horrible and egregious and despicable and personal, obv, but essentially rolling back all civil rights laws doesn't seem prudent in any way, shape, or form.

https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Supreme_Court_Clarence_Thomas_21940.jpg?w=640

Conflict of interest? Our interests are completely aligned!

The only upside I can see is that maybe all us sick queers can move somewhere else.

I'd love asylum in Portugal

I hadn’t realized that public accommodation laws were this broadly defined - I assumed it was places with a physical location open to the public.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, February 23, 2022

why should services offered on the internet be treated any differently than Masterpiece Cakeshop or Arlene's Flowers?

President Biden has selected Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Court, two people familiar with his decision said, choosing a well-regarded federal appeals court judge who if confirmed would make history by becoming the first Black woman to serve as a justice.

In Judge Jackson, 51, Mr. Biden selected a liberal-leaning jurist who earned a measure of Republican support when he nominated her to the influential federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., last summer. If confirmed by the Senate, she would replace Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the senior member of the court’s three-member liberal wing, who announced last month that he would retire at the end of the current court term this summer if his successor was in place.

Congrats, KBJ!

Nice.

https://fop.net/2022/02/fop-national-president-patrick-yoes-statement-on-nomination-of-kentaji-brown-jackson-to-scotus/?fbclid=IwAR1mygAcxof5AwY36Br_JFO14vMdL74SbE_r2LVE_mUnFAWywRoqAxltmWQ

Strike against her afaic.

the first South Floridian to get nominated!

by contemporary progressive standards even thurgood marshall would have strikes against him

Now we just need someone to <parody> Gorsuch and Thomas.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/north-carolina-republicans-scotus-gerrymandeering-assault.html?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=traffic&utm_source=article&utm_content=twitter_share

In a late Friday afternoon filing as war raged in Ukraine and as President Joe Biden announced Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, North Carolina Republicans dropped their own bombshell: a legal filing in the Supreme Court that if successful would not only restore the state legislature’s ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering and perhaps tip control of Congress, but would radically alter the power of state courts to rein in state legislatures that violate voting rights in federal elections. There are strong arguments Republicans should lose this case, but don’t count them out before a polarized and politicized Supreme Court.

...This is the “independent state legislature” doctrine because it proposes that the legislature is supreme against all other actors that might run elections. This is a wacky theory of legislative power, but it is one that four Supreme Court justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas) expressed support for in various opinions during the 2020 elections, and it echoes an alternative argument that former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by Justice Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia, made in the Bush v. Gore case ending the 2000 election and handing victory to Republican George W. Bush.

Fucking Bush v. Gore case was one of the worst reasoned court opinions of the past century.

they managed to actually do the thing that half this country is pretty sure happened in 2016

(and the other half is convinced happens in 2020)

It was only recently that I learned that the “one man one vote” principle that results in congressional districts being relatively equal in population was only really enforced starting in the 50s and 60s. In Virginia before the Supreme Court stepped in there were wildly uneven districts which favored rural areas by design and had fast-growing northern Virginia vastly underrepresented.

The decision Brennan was most proud of.

And it had other knock-on effects --- as late as 1989, SCOTUS used it as precedent to unanimously kill off NYC's Board of Estimate, a supreme council of budget and land use, on which the Mayor and two other citywide electeds had three votes each, and the five Borough Presidents one or two. The result was today's City Council system, with 51 members from 51 more evenly-sized districts, and I believe a sort of fundamentally weaker mayor, but don't quote me on that part.

Yeah I remember that decision about the BOE from when it happened (I grew up in suburban Connecticut which was dominated by NY media).

Anyway I think we know how the SC is going to vote on the NC districting, which leads me to think Republican state legislatures then will take the next step and start shoving cities, suburbs and college towns into one congressional district with like four million people and a whole bunch of rural districts with like 5,000 people each.

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a case that could dramatically limit the EPA’s power to fight climate change. The case involves an Obama-era regulation that never actually took effect, and though the Biden administration said that it was working on a replacement and that litigants should wait until there was an actual rule to discuss, the Court ominously decided to hear the case anyway. As expected, most of the conservative justices seemed eager to gut the EPA’s authority to reduce emissions from power plants. They couldn’t have picked a more perfect day: Monday’s oral arguments began just hours after the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a bleak report warning that extreme weather events are already more frequent and severe than previously predicted, and that swift, significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to prevent worse catastrophes.

Above is a description based on NY Times article

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/us/politics/supreme-court-climate-change.html

from the NY Times article on the epa case

The court has called this inquiry the “major questions doctrine.” The justices seemed divided over how it applied to the cases before them.

Jacob M. Roth, a lawyer for coal companies challenging the E.P.A.’s authority, said the key distinction was between regulating individual power plants and the entire energy sector. The latter, he said, was a major question that lacked congressional authorization