U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

Seeing some elsewhere say that the Justice Department lawyer could have done better in countering the conservative justices on their arguments and conclusions but not sure about that myself

― curmudgeon, Thursday, April 25, 2024

Nah, he did an admirable job, knew his shit, swatted the more ridiculous arguments aside. But Alito and Kavanaugh were relentless.

"Everything's coming up Milhouse Orange Dipshit"

another clarence thomas classic pic.twitter.com/lD9zZZq2AS

— jor (@jorfolle) April 25, 2024

One of the NPR analysts made the point that the conservative part of the SCOTUS bench is full of people who worked in the DOJ for Republican presidents and whose whole conception of the presidency is that it is constantly under deeply unfair and immoral political attack. So of course they view this whole case through that lens.

Yep. And they won’t consider or acknowledge or argue with an opposing view , just double down on their own defensive take.

Let’s fuckin goooooooooooo

Sotomayor: If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military to assasinate him, is that within his official acts to which he has immunity?

"That could well be an official act," Trump lawyer John Sauer says

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) April 25, 2024

“That could well be an official act, but only if Trump does it,” Sauer clarified.

how officers of the court of any kind refrain from yelling WE SEE EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE DOING is surprising to me but welp

So ... like any other defendant who goes to trial?

Alito described consquences for Trump of going to trial:

"That may involve great expense, and it may take up a lot of time. And during the trial, the former president may be unable to engage in other activities that the former president would want to engage in and then the…

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) April 25, 2024

What about that time the Supreme Court let the civil trial against Clinton go forward because it probably wouldn't take up that much time

If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person

Clever Sonya! You hid it in plain sight.

Wouldn’t want to cut into his grifting time.

Trump's lawyer was offered a chance for rebuttal at the end and he turned it down. He obviously sensed he was going to get what he wanted

i’m not gonna lie this shit is kinda crazy

What a time to be alive

It's all going according to plan

Trust the plan

If the president decides that his rival a Supreme Court justice is a corrupt person

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/supreme-court-trump-immunity-arguments-alito-maga.html

Lithwick, Stern , and others summarizing the Immunity case and how Alito is in his Maga world

“Mark Joseph Stern: This was a great example of Alito being fully brain-poisoned by Fox News. This is been happening for years; he used to ask famously great questions, but these days it’s just culture war grievances and stuff that falls apart upon even a little bit of scrutiny. He’s losing his edge. And that was clear in this bizarro question saying that actually, a functioning constitutional democracy requires us to let presidents off the hook when they engage in a criminal conspiracy to steal elections.”

I hate commentary like this. Alito has always been the biggest POS on the court. Nothing has changed.

Stern knows better than that. Alito asked famously trolly right wing hack questions.

stakes have changed

God help you if you are a criminal defendant whose fate rests in the hands of Samuel Alito . . . unless you are a Republican ex-president, apparently.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/throw-out-originalism-do-inclusive-constitutionalism.html

Inclusive Constitutionalism vs Originalism

https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-supreme-court-congressional-redistricting-black-representation-201c1fa9e494ad0d88e4d9ed8328eae0

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge on Thursday to the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded, one that could have hobbled the bureau and advanced a central goal of the conservative legal movement: limiting the power of independent agencies.

The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing the majority opinion.

Had the bureau lost, the court’s ruling might have cast doubt on every regulation and enforcement action it had taken in its 13 years of existence, including ones concerning mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans and banking.

The central question in the case was whether the way Congress chose to fund the bureau had violated the appropriations clause of the Constitution, which says that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”

Justice Thomas said the mechanism was constitutional.

“Under the appropriations clause,” he wrote, “an appropriation is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes. The statute that provides the bureau’s funding meets these requirements. We therefore conclude that the bureau’s funding mechanism does not violate the appropriations clause.”

good thing we got the big brains on this one

how it’s bad for joe biden, the key takeaway

the country dodged a bullet with that one

“How lawless does your opinion have to be to be brutally owned by Clarence Thomas, from the left” is a question we can now answer thanks to 5CA and Alito and Gorsuch https://t.co/xlhsCaIsu7

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) May 16, 2024

my bad I thought it was on this case

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-likely-to-discard-chevron/

this is bad

NEWS

After January 6 and just days before Biden was inaugurated on January 20, the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had an inverted flag flying outside of it.

That flag was the symbol that Trump supporters were using at the time for “stop the steal.”

The flag… pic.twitter.com/izzXfFvLbM

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 16, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/justice-alito-upside-down-flag.html

gifted here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/us/justice-alito-upside-down-flag.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk0.9_ph.JNEJQfAIa371&smid=url-share

I was about to post this wonderful news.

I took this photo at a local hotel in February '22. My sister insists it's You Know Who in the background.

https://i.imgur.com/4kOL378.jpg

A grim brunch

I'm going to say yes. The woman seated next to him looks an awful lot like Alito's wife.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/public/WY42AZRZGUI6TIDMH3EO2UE5CU_size-normalized.jpg&w=1200

yeah, I googled her too. The chin gave it away.

Alito's lame response to NY Times re the flag flying upside down at his house is typical for him--“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin is calling on Alito to recuse himself from all cases involving the 2020 election.

"The Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making, and Justice Alito and the rest of the Court should be doing everything in their power to regain public trust."

While others want to call on Alito to resign, Durbin is not ready to go that far. He also has chosen not to request enforcement of subpoena requests to Leo of the Federalist Society and Justice Thomas and Alito’s billionaire pal Crow. I get that it’s hard to get the votes in Congress for these various steps but Durbin isn’t even trying.

Dick Durbin is Gil from The Simpsons.

Alito sold his Bud Light stocks just as right wingers were calling for a boycott of Bud due to association with trans person

https://x.com/chrisgeidner/status/1792353122440065113?s=46&t=u2ZSlsY3trRV36IPP6jNDQ

More details on the RV that Clarence Thomas got , but still unclear whether Thomas has paid required taxes on the acquisition

https://newrepublic.com/article/181627/clarence-thomas-rv-loan-democrats-letter

Bud Light has its own stock??

Anhueser - Busch owns Bud Lite and that is whose stocks Alito had

I see again that when Justice Jackson recuses from a case she explains why and cites a particular Judicial code section, but Kavanaugh and the other conservative appointees never explain or cite to anything.

x-post back to Dick Durbin- he was asked if he was going to have a hearing regarding what Alito did, and he said no, and that the only 2 options were asking Alito to recuse or impeaching him. Dude doesn't get that keeping a story in the news even when you don't have the votes or courage to impeach is a good thing. I also blame Schumer for not encouraging Durbin to do something, and not speaking out more regularly himself.

Durbin understands the way the system works, warts and all. All the evidence points to Alito just being an ideological hack, an arrogant and shallow legal thinker, and someone who never should have been nominated or confirmed in the first place. But he was confirmed.

Now, to use the lingo of Watergate, there is no "smoking gun" showing conclusively that Alito corruptly uses his lofty position of public trust in return for direct personal benefit (iow, bribery). Unfortunately, just being a shallow legal thinker and ideologically-driven puppet of the right wing doesn't really cut the mustard when it comes to impeachment of a SCOTUS justice.

Much as we hate him, he's not impeachable for refusing to recuse himself on political cases involving Trump. He'll be allowed to embarrass himself and the court through his blind fealty to his masters, so long as he hasn't committed a verifiable crime.

Durbin is an old fart stuck in the past when bipartisan politeness was an important thing

You saw how well it worked out for the House to try to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas over nothing but political differences didn't you? This would be similar. It's a weak case, because the terms are too nebulous. It's a losing political gambit that would satisfy the base but make the Democrats seem petulant and ineffective to average voters.