U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

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.

I did not say they should try to impeach Alito now or that it would succeed, I said Durbin should hold a hearing to keep this in the news, and should keep pushing for subpoenas (and then try to impeach later if Dems get a majority in House and Senate). The Mayorkas thing was using impeachment where there was just a difference in policy. Here we have Alito supporting an insurrection, and engaging in lots of personal corruption. Let Republicans try to both sides this, but this seems way way beyond Mayorkas simply executing a policy that one party doesn't like.

Average voters don't even know about Alito's actions. The Dems need to feed this to old-school and social media. Throwing up hands now and saying there's nothing we can do now because we don't control the House and that it would look like the Mayorkas thing to some, will just bury this story quickly.

I would keep pushing for investigation or impeachment of Thomas and use the media spotlight that creates to talk about Alito and how the court has been infected by extremism.

curmudgeon otm, keep the spotlight on

Jennifer Rubin, a never Trumper onetime conservative Washington Post columnist spoke to some Law professor ethics types and she said re Alito and the court

Durbin, who has dawdled long enough, should put on the floor a mandatory ethics reform bill, which Painter suggests should include an inspector general for the court

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/alito-flag-ethics-supreme-court/

A good, detailed article on what a piece of shit hack Alito is.

a mandatory ethics reform bill, which Painter suggests should include an inspector general for the court

This is broadly a good idea. Congress could certainly pass a bill to impose a mandatory code of ethics on the supreme court justices and fund an inspector general to oversee compliance. If it ever came about, the existence of such a code would be helpful, in that it would provide a neutral yardstick by which to determine a justice's fitness to serve and somewhat de-politicize the act of making that determination.

But the separation of powers ensures that the only mechanism for enforcement of that mandatory code of ethics would still be impeachment and in real terms a successful impeachment and removal would be no easier to accomplish than under present conditions. Do I have to cite Trump's two impeachments, or McConnell's stonewalling Garland while ramming through Coney Barrett to prove this point?

In Trump's case the Senate's vote to acquit can be indirectly redressed by Trump's term ending and the electorate voting to reject rather than reinstate him. In Alito's case, there ain't no redress. He's in until he resigns, dies, or is impeached.

If Trump wins, it’s because of deliberate decisions by those in power to refuse to act because of “norms” or “comity” or whatever.

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

ugh, a Christian Nationalist flag

Doesn't he realize that a plurality of his fellow insurrectionists don't think Catholics are Christians? Does he think he'll survive the cull if they get the America they want?