U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

More on George Mason U’s Scalia Law School:

“The documents show how Scalia Law has offered the justices a safe space in a polarized Washington — an academic cocoon filled with friends and former clerks, where their legal views are celebrated, they are given top pay and treated to teaching trips abroad, and their personal needs are anticipated, from lunch orders to, in Justice Gorsuch’s case, house hunting.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/us/supreme-court-scalia-law-school.html

I love this url: https://www.wonkette.com/sam-alito-is-the-pettiest-bitch-alive

xpost They've built a huge infrastructure to prevent Justices from going Souter on them

You mean the Antonin Scalia School of Law?

Home of the mighty ASSOLs?

The Supreme Court takes up a case asking it to overrule Chevron deference to administrative agencies. Review limited to the second question presented. Justice Jackson is recused. https://t.co/GmraMlo2rK pic.twitter.com/Em7nh3KIWM

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 1, 2023

Good morning!☕️

The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to begin its post-Clarence-Thomas-ethics-scandal hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform.

Dick Durbin really wants bipartisan action.

Only one GOP senator has proposed doing anything at all. https://t.co/Ngdu6o3odd

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) May 2, 2023

Does that "anything at all" involve deer?

In the headlights. Murkowski is only Republican who is willing to do talk about doing anything. Apparently at the hearing Republicans alleged things about Dem appointed judges, but they just want to both sides the issues at the hearing and not actually do anything. Plus the want to claim that its all sour grapes from Dems because of the current make up of the court and the decisions

Scalia should've died in 2021.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the early framework that steered the outcome in the dispute over the 2000 presidential election and ensured George W. Bush would win the White House over Al Gore, Supreme Court documents released on Tuesday show.

Memos found in the newly opened files of the late Justice John Paul Stevens offer a first-ever view of the behind-the-scenes negotiations on Bush v. Gore at the court. They also demonstrate the tension among the nine justices being asked to decide a presidential election on short deadlines.

The documents opened at the Library of Congress help reveal how the now-retired O’Connor, the first woman on the high court and a justice steeped in politics from her early days in the Arizona legislature, partnered with Justice Anthony Kennedy, effectively squeezing out an argument advanced by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

And we have Rehnquist to thank for the "independent legislature" bullshit that Trump's lawyers used in 2020 and that SCOTUS is reviewing now.

Rehnquist even worse than I thought and of course Scalia, and Thomas all in on that nonsense.

Someone should really get a Go Fund Me going for Thomas. I guess maybe they already have.

I live in a world where even if it didn’t involve massive ethics violations at the highest levels of government, I’d hang my head in shame if I, a grown ass man earning a 6-figure salary, let another grown ass man pay for my mama’s house and my child’s education.

— curtis marshall (@wxcurtis) May 4, 2023

Thinking about Alito's whining about how people are now "attacking" the Court, I think he has something of a point, he just misunderstands it. I do think the hard-right court's activism has attracted more scrutiny, from the media and the public at large — but that's because when you assert power over other people's lives in ways that negatively affects them and that are actually unpopular with people in general, there is a natural and laudable tendency for people to say, "Well just who the hell are YOU?"

Really I think this is the kind of thing Roberts has had in mind when he has rightly worried about radical ideological decisions undermining the Court's legitimacy.

John Roberts as a Reagan hack devoted himself to limiting the reach of the VRA, so he can fuck himself into a sewer.

loling at the galaxy brain blue check idiots with their "now do Sotomayor's book deal" takes. yes, because that is exactly the same thing.

Oh yeah, Roberts is definitely part architect of the current Court. That he seems to have at least mild misgivings about its rapaciousness doesn't in any way excuse him. I just think he's right to worry about its perceived legitimacy, because once they've lost it — which in a lot of ways they have already — it's hard to get back.

I understand why a chief justice would worry about the legitimacy of a court he has wanted to lead for decades, but Roberts is maybe the least corrupt of a rotten bunch (I write this even as we know now what we do about his wife).

This isn't just about gifts, or perks, or trips--it's about a decades-long effort by the Right to create a separate universe in which Conservative Justices don't have to care about how their decisions are received by law professors or the legal world, but only how they are received by the Federalist Society and rich donors. It's all been done to keep Justices from "growing" (i.e. moving to the center) as had happened with Republican appointees like John Paul Stevens.

We've now reached the point that even regular people are catching on to this shit and no longer see the Court as an elevated priesthood in American life but just another set of partisan crazies.

I mean

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Ginni's got expensive habits, poor Justice Thomas needs all the help he can get with his nephew's schooling and mother's housing, he's living paycheck to paycheck

Funniest thing from this article is that some dude gifted Clarence Thomas tires.
If you're not paying for your own tires, what exactly do you pay for ever?https://t.co/PRi4ZGByZ8 pic.twitter.com/6iFcmIgEjL

— David Dayen (@ddayen) May 4, 2023

Congress could pass a law enumerating a strict code of ethics for the SCOTUS. Nothing prevents it. Such a law would be constitutional. But if one or more justices failed to comply then Congress would still have no enforcement mechanism other than impeachment. Good luck with that.

For Congress to pass a law we’re still stuck with filibuster rules too I think, and it doesn’t look like there are enough Republicans willing to vote for it .

Meanwhile Washington Post is reporting that Leonard Leo , right wing Fed Society judicial activist directed Kellyanne Conway in 2012 to pay Ginni Thomas for consulting work but to leave her name off the billing paperwork.

Dem Judiciary chair Durbin and Schumer could be more assertive about all of this but they aren’t willing to try . Maybe there would not be votes to impeach Thomas but make him sweat and do something at least while making clear how corrupt he is

The IRS is apparently fine with a whole network of Leo run entities acting in political ways despite how they’re incorporated

“Non-profit “ entities

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/05/04/leonard-leo-clarence-ginni-thomas-conway/

Surprised they even made an effort to hide the payments

Weird bedfellows in this California 'bacon law' ruling:

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/supreme-court-california-bacon-law-dismissed-18093919.php

whoops

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/supreme-court-california-bacon-law-dismissed-18093919.php

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/court-throws-out-conviction-of-former-cuomo-aide/

While a code of ethics for the Supreme Court would be nice , I am reading some say that all that would do would be to legitimize the extremist right wing partisan decisions coming from the Court. Thus, the answer is still expanding the court to 13 justices to match up to the 13 circuit courts of appeal. I recognize it is fantasyland right now to think we will ever have a Democratic majority courageous enough to do that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/opinion/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-legitimacy.html

If it is not possible to redesign the Court so as to render it more credibly independent from our nation’s polarized politics, then weakening its authority (and thus, judicial review) seems preferable to acquiescing to right-wing minority rule. https://t.co/Tho0EFESBj

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) May 8, 2023

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/what-conservatives-cant-say-about-clarence-thomas.html

That said, if progressives have an interest in preserving public confidence in the integrity of the federal government writ large, we have no such interest with respect to the current Supreme Court. Surely, the primary problem with the Roberts Court is not that its reactionaries occasionally profit off their power

Rather, it is that the court’s conservative majority (1) denies rights that progressives deem inviolable, and, in other domains, (2) circumscribes popular sovereignty in deference to a facially implausible interpretative doctrine that just so happens to almost invariably yield substantive outcomes favorable to the American right (which, uncoincidentally, cultivated and exhaustively vetted every single member of that majority).

The idea that other justices have secured gifts as lucrative as Thomas’s — and the media is simply failing to spotlight them — is unsubstantiated and, given the extremity of Thomas’s behavior, highly improbable. But the suggestion that liberals are more interested in using Thomas’s ethical violations to erode the Supreme Court’s legitimacy than they are in reforming that institution’s ethics rules is plausibly true. Or, at least, in my view, liberals should be more interested in doing the former.

As a general matter, flagrant government corruption is bad for the progressive project. If people view the state as full of self-dealing parasites, it will be much harder to persuade them to accept higher taxes in exchange for more social services and public investments. And insulating democratic politics from the corrosive influence of class inequality requires, among other things, ethical norms that deter open bribery.

True.

Bouie in NY Times article linked above:

For the left-of-center of American politics, the Supreme Court has been, over the course of its long history, more hindrance than help. And to the extent that liberals began to trust the court as an institution, it’s because they made a mistake, confusing the exceptional rulings of the court under Chief Justice Earl Warren for the norm. The Supreme Court, as the legal scholar Lucas A. Powe Jr. has observed, is “part of a ruling regime doing its bit to implement the regime’s policies.” If the court appeared liberal — or at least friendly to liberalism — in the first decades after the Second World War, it was because of the hegemony of New Deal liberalism over American politics, not because of any inherent quality of the Supreme Court itself.

See: almost every Fuller-era ruling.

not because of any inherent quality of the Supreme Court itself.

how could the Supreme Court have any inherent qualities?

ask them!

Lmfao they voted 9-0 to limit public corruption laws in a case where the guy pretty much just wrote “I am soliciting bribes” via email https://t.co/Uu7NZcKLjk

— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) May 11, 2023

SCOTUS ruled 7-2 against Andy Warhol in a fair-use case regarding a photo of Prince:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/us/supreme-court-warhol-copyright.html

Interesting to see which way the justices fell in this one: Sotomayor wrote the opinion and Kagan the dissent. And the lone justice who joined the dissent was Roberts.

Currently reading Kagan's dissent, which quotes both Jonathan Lethem and Nick Cave.

I was pretty surprised and put off by the LGM take on this

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/05/warhol-foundation-v-goldsmith

Sort of a funny take considering the name of that blog.

That LGM writer often trolls readers.

Irony about the blog title aside, what about the LGM take surprised you? From a Marxist perspective the concept of "fine art" can be classic mystification and the "transformative" angle of fair use has been criticized as a license to steal.

Here's a good primer on transformative fair use

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

I kind of agree with the LGM take on this--Warhol is not exactly "transforming" the art he creates when he uses, say a Goldsmith photo

Im still angry about RBG. Know when to quit FFS.

Justice Gorsuch calls Covid safety measures “the greatest peacetime intrusions on civil liberties in American history.”

White wealth privilege is ignoring 400 years of Native genocide, 265 years of Black slavery, & 99 years of Jim Crow—but lamenting 1 year of PTO during COVID.😑 pic.twitter.com/MrwMribfGX

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) May 19, 2023