U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

This thread has taken an interesting turn, in a good way.

I went to catholic schools from grades 6-12. Can’t remember the experience being particularly right or left, probably in part because my focus was very much on friends/girls/figuring myself out.

My high school teachers and administrators did have a distinctly stiff, ‘50s style, though - it was in the way teachers carried themselves, the eyeglasses they wore, etc.

A few stray memories:

- One of the religion teachers was, in retrospect, just shy of flamboyantly gay, which must have been obvious to his colleagues. And I think he knew that *we* knew and couldn’t have cared less. It was in his class that I first heard NWA (who I hadn’t even really been aware of - I kinda lived in my own weird world), when a white classmate brought in a tape and played a song as some kind of assignment and tried to explain it. Wish I could remember the teacher’s reaction to that.

- My senior year English teacher was a fan of the Beats and had probably been through the doors of perception a few times, wasn’t afraid to confirm for us that the school was full of shit and that sometimes we were. He also ran the (tiny) poetry club, which I was a member of, so I got to know him fairly well.

- My sophomore year English teacher (who also taught the Creative Writing/Journalism course I took) was a super, super religious dude who rode his bike to school every day, proudly didn’t own a TV, and had us pray at the beginning and ending of every class. (It was normal to pray at the START of each class, any class. Mr. Hooper kicked that up a notch.) He kinda scared me. I can remember, vividly, exactly where in the building all of these courses were held. My best friend in high school - who is still one of my best friends - was deeply rebellious, and his decision one week to apply clear appliqués featuring grapes, pineapples, and other cartoon fruits to his fingernails was not accepted well by this teacher.

I’ll add that it’s been startling to reconnect with/graze high school classmates on social media, and to find that many (though not all!) have tumbled into right wing rabbit holes.

I drifted left economically based on my dad's own hardships in high school (plus I was always the type to give homeless people money - never was the "you made your bed" guy). but was still right wing socially, pro-life, pro-death penalty, believed in trying kids as adults, etc.

a friend of mine named Justin that I met on mIRC of all places, in the #metal channel, was kind of the genesis of my liberal rebranding. he turned me to things I hadn't been exposed to previously.

by my second year of college I was in speech class giving anti-death penalty speeches.

gay-bashing was the one thing that accelerated my leaving church and thus leaving my exposure to right-wing indoctrination, because I had a gay cousin, and also I couldn't figure out why they were obsessed with gay people.

Sorry to get off subject. Was doom scrolling twitter

What SCOTUS is about to do is say if we want gun control, climate action or privacy/bodily rights, we need a Constitutional Amendment or filibuster-proof legislation, knowing full well both those paths are rigged to impossibility by overrepresenting rural white reactionaries.

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) June 23, 2022

x-post -so anyway I attended public schools and do remember being part of a protest in elementary school with two fellow Jewish kids against having everyone including us sing a religious Christmas song. That song got dropped.

In catholic middle school we did some sort of parking lot rally to support the troops in Iraq

We also (I think) sent letters to the troops

This is a sidebar, and obviously middle school sucks for most people, but middle school for me was brutal. I was coming from a progressive school - more focused on art, nature, etc - that I’d attended for elementary, and the work was suddenly way harder, classmates were crueler. It was awful. (High school was less awful.)

oh cool

If a police officer fails to give a suspect his Miranda warnings, and the gov't uses the suspect's un-Mirandized statements against him in court, can the suspect sue the officer for violating his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination? In a 6-3 ruling, SCOTUS says no.

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 23, 2022

The Supreme Court STRIKES DOWN a New York gun-control law that required people to show "proper cause" to get a license to carry a concealed handgun outside the home. The vote is 6-3. https://t.co/jA2Gl7lTiG

— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) June 23, 2022

Now when they don't Miranda you after arresting you for getting an abortion in a state where it is legal, it will be all gravy! And if someone shoots you along the way, all the better!

Lawyers making a lot more work (and money) for lawyers. Shoulda seen it coming.

Alito's concurrence to Alito at Breyer is Peak Alito:

"[T]he real thrust of today’s dissent is that guns are bad and that States and local jurisdictions should be free to restrict them essentially as they see fit." pic.twitter.com/zZ2m6PQwme

— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) June 23, 2022

For the second time this term, Thomas cites Dred Scott to illustrate the rightness within Taney's racist wrongness https://t.co/IyAsExQ5ie pic.twitter.com/LrkaMA5DHI

— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) June 23, 2022

perhaps Clarence, Ginni, Samuel, Kav, Coney, and the 'Such can all be in the same vehicle as a monster truck rolls over it.

One of Thomas' obsessions, written about quite well in Corey Robin's bio, is how frightened southerners were in antebellum times and during Reconstruction about Black men carrying guns.

Maybe I should be comforted knowing that we're all going to die in random shootings long before the slow, torturous death from climate disaster.

I don’t think a Civil War is random, pretty sure most of us here would die in that first if we’re being honest, and that’s what’s coming whether we like it or not, it seems

The idea of people walking around NYC with concealed carry weapons is terrifying to me

The country is now working on legislation that would punish foreign companies seeking to leave, allowing the government to seize their assets and impose criminal penalties, according to Reuters.

Looks like Putin is all in on the SCOTUS anti-boycott ruling

The idea of people walking around NYC with concealed carry weapons is terrifying to me

Terrified? Hi, I'm the NRA and I have a solution to your problem!

lol

Solution to your problem? Or is it pollution to your soblem?

From the Breyer dissent:

Since Heller was decided, experts have searched over 120,000 founding-era texts from between 1760 and 1799, as well as 40,000 texts from sources dating as far back as 1475, for historical uses of the phrase “bear arms,” and they concluded that the phrase was overwhelm- ingly used to refer to “‘war, soldiering, or other forms of armed action by a group rather than an individual.’ ” Brief for Linguistics Professors 11, 14; see also D. Baron, Corpus Evidence Illuminates the Meaning of Bear Arms, 46 Has- tings Const. L. Q. 509, 510 (2019) (“Non-military uses of bear arms in reference to hunting or personal self-defense are not just rare, they are almost nonexistent”); id., at 510– 511 (reporting 900 instances in which “bear arms” was used to refer to military or collective use of firearms and only 7 instances that were either ambiguous or without a military connotation).
These are just two examples.

Breyer is too nice here I think:

I repeat that I do not cite these arguments in order to relitigate Heller. I wish only to illustrate the difficulties that may befall lawyers and judges when they attempt to rely solely on history to interpret the Constitution. In Hel- ler, we attempted to determine the scope of the Second Amendment right to bear arms by conducting a historical analysis, and some of us arrived at very different conclu- sions based on the same historical sources. Many experts now tell us that the Court got it wrong in a number of ways. That is understandable given the difficulty of the inquiry that the Court attempted to undertake. The Court’s past experience with historical analysis should serve as a warn- ing against relying exclusively, or nearly exclusively, on this mode of analysis in the future

“...additionally, 46 references to “bear arms” were made during a single 1877 case, the infamous “People of West Virginia V. Titanium Bear Man”

Thomas issued a rare rebuttal to the dissent, which merely said "suck my ass, GUNS".

because no sane person at this point believes the framers intended for their populace to be armed to the teeth, the Founding Fathers would have shit their pants over such an idea. they were cool with the idea of a militia preventing the populace against the government veering into militant fascism, because that would be terrible and they figured it wouldn't happen anyway. lol @ Jefferson et al being cool w/ a bunch of dumbfuck needledicks threatening sitting politicians with war machines because of Pizza or some shit.

One of Thomas' obsessions, written about quite well in Corey Robin's bio, is how frightened southerners were in antebellum times and during Reconstruction about Black men carrying guns.

Last year we toured the place in GA where Thomas grew up, and I can totally see how his worldview was shaped by that experience.

I heard Leonard Leo being interviewed this morning on NPR. He confidently asserted that "The conservative legal movement doesn't believe in an outcome-driven approach to judicial decision-making." It was good for a laugh.

xp

can understand that, but many people have experiences that could shape their world view and they rise above it

Some historians in fact believe the point of the phrase “a well regulated militia” was added in to the second amendment so that White Southern states could use state militias to put down enslaved Black revolts. These White Southern politicians didn’t trust the federal government to protect their uh interest here.

ugh

fuck

eat shit and die you motherfuckers!!!

notice Thomas did not mention Loving.

well yeah, wouldn't want to make a decision that affects him personally

From the dissent:

"Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other."

"Either the mass of the majority's opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other." pic.twitter.com/mQ77HWhPp3

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 24, 2022

we're done pretending it's not the latter though, right?

sorry, idk who I'm even addressing :(

it's ok. think we're all just flustered and devastated right now :(

In a solo concurring opinion, Thomas says the court should reconsider rulings that protect contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.

It feels like we are under attack. I mean we are under attack.

Whatever its imperfections, the liberal order we have come to think of as American life in the late 20th/early 21st century is under full-blown assault.

if it feels like you're under attack as a straight CIS white man, then others are definitely under attack and have been since the beginning of this country

hi!

The court situation is not going to get better in the foreseeable future. We'd have to have a both Alito and Thomas die or retire under a democratic president for the current split to reverse, and if we get a republican president I'm guessing one or both retires so they can be replaced.

On abortion (and who knows what else), the fight is going to be at the state level. And that's not going to be easy, because the GOP have a better state-level apparatus, although my impression is Democrats have been improving theirs.

white evangelicals are not going to stop until either the rapture comes or they have created all the conditions they think must exist in order for the rapture to happen.

it's so fucking unbelievably dumb that no one ever believes it, or, i guess, knows what to do about that, since it's horrifying to believe that about 100 million people are actually like that.

sick of hearing about the 'conservative' majority... Roberts might be a conservative, the other four are radical activists

I'm surprised no one's jumped on the relish with which Thomas used "substantive due process" as if trying to pwn the libs. Like Clarence and the rest of the Sinister Six wouldn't have voted against maximum hours, minimum wages, child labor laws, the income tax, and the other Lochner-era decisions while citing "liberty of contract."

does anyone else remember a (late?) 80s-era propagandistic refrain to a lot of u.s. history lessons: " ... so if you really want to make a change, you should work from within the system." like i remember more than one of my primary teachers used that exact saying with regards to rbg or brown v boe or something. i thought it was weird then, but i was a weird child so shrug

anyway, yeah. what a load of indoctrinating bullshit that was.

seems like it was around the same time credit scores became a thing. fucken reagan. dunno how he does it, but that fucken rascal has just continued to fuck the country. even in his own death, until he fucks it *to* death. his policies were like an STD. so toxic it magnifies in severity with each new strain. cool fucken story, bro.