U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Nino Edition

it's a draw!!

would that it were.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2018/10/RTX38JUL/lead_720_405.jpg?mod=1539041004

luckily, in the spirit of the case, the 4-judge minority opinion now becomes the rule of the land https://t.co/3297SeMiQ3

— Sam Eifling (@SamEifling) June 27, 2019

i'm still kind of in shock, tbh

this is deeply fucked up

first of all, this decision doesn't impact racial gerrymandering, which is what VA was about.

Sure it does. Effectively this decision authorizes legislatures to substitute party for race and skirt any restrictions that would be unconstitutional if they were racially based.

this is truly nauseating

https://splinternews.com/pack-the-fucking-court-1835909348

Extreme gerrymandering leaves Rs with lots of thin majorities that will crumble in a wave election. If people are as committed to getting rid of Trump as they appear to be, that could happen next year. Obviously that's a highly rosy scenario.

meanwhile

The Hill reports:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says he would give a new Democratic president’s nominee to the Supreme Court a hearing and vote in 2021, but isn’t making any promises that person would win confirmation in a GOP-controlled Senate.

Whatever he says today he'll feel free to renege n later.

John Paul Stevens dead.

Hope Trump thinks this means he's allowed to kill a Republican justice.

Stevens was a Republican

Boy oh boy is this thread's revival ever anxiety-inducing

One of the few men in public life whom I can credit for improving mine.

This bit in Greenhouse's obit intrigued me:

One plausible explanation for Justice Stevens’s growing affinity for the liberal side was his response to the polarizing discourse about the Supreme Court that emanated from the administration of President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s. After Attorney General Edwin Meese III criticized a long series of Supreme Court precedents that had interpreted the Bill of Rights as binding not only on the federal government but on the states as well — a foundational premise of 20th-century constitutional law — Justice Stevens took him on directly. The attorney general, he said in a speech to the Federal Bar Association in Chicago in 1985, “overlooks the profound importance of the Civil War and the postwar amendments on the structure of our government.”

[snip]

His distinctive approach to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection was perhaps the best example of his disdain for doctrinal formalism.

By the mid-1970s, the court had developed an elaborate grid for evaluating claims of unequal treatment at the hands of the government. Policies that distinguished among people based on their race were subject to “strict” judicial scrutiny and were almost never upheld. Policies that simply concerned economic interests were subject to minimal scrutiny and were upheld as long as they had a “rational basis.” Policies that treated men and women differently fell somewhere in between, subject to “heightened” judicial scrutiny and required to serve an “important governmental interest.”

Justice Stevens rejected all this. “There is only one Equal Protection Clause,” he declared in 1976, concurring in Craig v. Boren, an early sex discrimination case. “It requires every state to govern impartially.” A straightforward application of that principle was all a court needed, in his view, to decide an equal protection case.

Republicans continue to Republican:

Person who’s worked high up in GOP politics for A DECADE does not know that Stevens retired years ago. The best people I’ll tell ya. pic.twitter.com/cY5Ur4mP3o

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) July 17, 2019

When Jimmy Carter dies does Walter Mondale become a former President?

Xpost she now claims she was tired and thought it said Breyer

How is the RBG cult taking the news that she called Kavanaugh and Gorsuch “very decent men”?https://t.co/cdjCPclzUF

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) July 26, 2019

mans loses healthcare in crazy nonagenarian twitter beef

morbs don't bump this thread if there's not a decision or a death or something you'll give us heart attacks

the death of hope

Morbs is actually trying to kill you.

is that a message to Ginsburg? untrue

No, ILX.

well, that's true

"Doug Henwood" as usual reaching the Urban Outfitters crowd

Scott Lemieux ranges over SCOTUS history since the LBJ era for evidence that RBG and Breyer fucked up by not resigning.

Earl Warren, who hated Nixon, resigned in 1968 out of a justified that Nixon would win and be able to nominate his replacement. LBJ screwed it up and the old conservative coalition won one more once in an oddly under-discussed event of great historical significance, but this doesn’t change the fact that Warren retired strategically.

Potter Stewart resigned as soon as the term after Reagan’s inaugural ended.

Burger and Powell are less obvious cases, but resigned with Reagan in office; they’re certainly not counter-examples.
Brennan and Marshall were unable to resign strategically, but not for lack of trying. Both very strongly did not want to be replaced by a Republican president and stayed on for years in horrible health hoping to live to see the next Democratic administration. Brennan was forced off the Court by a massive stroke and Marshall resigned on his near-deathbed with Bush’s approval rating north of 70%, and on his way out said “there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.” Neither of them believed there was a norm that required them not to consider who would replace them.

Blackmun, who was very invested in the survival of his most famous opinion, stayed until Clinton was elected and resigned midway through his first term.

Byron White, a conservative but still a Democratic partisan, consciously and explicitly waited to resign until a Democratic president was elected although he had been sick of the job for a long time.

Both Stevens and Souter waited until Obama was elected to resign. (It is striking that there have now been three Republican nominees who have put more weight on the survival of Roe v. Wade than Clinton’s two nominees.)

If you think Anthony Kennedy would have resigned in 2018 if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, I have 20 acres of oceanfront property in Shelby County, Alabama to sell you.

an 8-member court seems likely: Dem in the WH and McConnell in the Senate refusing to vote on any nominees

cool

8-member court overturning Roe v. Wade, possible but not guaranteed. I'm not sure Roberts would be cool with such a sweeping decision.

To absolutely no-one's surprised.

To absolutely no-one's surprise

https://splinternews.com/another-sexual-misconduct-allegation-against-brett-kava-1838129679?utm_source=splinter_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2019-09-15

Then there's this Louisiana case.

A woman’s nominal right to choose to have an abortion is worth nothing if Republican-led state legislatures and governors — with the blessing of the Supreme Court — can ensure that there are no or almost no clinics or doctors available to provide the procedure. Since its 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court has explicitly recognized this fact, which is why it then struck down a Texas statute designed to force the closure of most of the state’s abortion clinics.

But on Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would be hearing a virtually identical case, June Medical Services v. Gee, to determine the constitutionality of a similarly draconian Louisiana abortion statute targeting that state’s clinics. Given that it’s been a mere three years since the first decision, and the cases themselves are virtually the same, the only factor that would necessitate a full hearing is the makeup of the Supreme Court itself.

All of that is to say: The religious conservatives who held their noses and voted for Trump in 2016 to get a conservative-leaning court peopled with the likes of Brett Kavanaugh in order to overturn Roe v. Wade are about to get a major reward at the expense of the reproductive freedom of American women.

I may start a new thread. Nino's been stinking for too long.

Scalia's as dead as that crab meat!

Goes to show it’s in the Neens

Mark Joseph Stern on today's Title VII case:

There was a low-key beautiful moment when Kagan almost referred to a trans person’s “biological sex,” then stopped herself and thought for a moment and said “sex assigned at birth” instead. ❤️

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 8, 2019

read thread

Interesting interview with Corey Robin, author of a new book about Clarence Thomas.

I put the book on hold at the library. Robin's The Conservative Mind is terrific.

*REACTIONARY mind

Robin was on Doug Henwood to talk about that book recently and it's fucking fascinating

good news
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/supreme-court-lets-sandy-hook-143642777.html

otoh (short thread)

It looks to me like the Supreme Court is going to uphold the Trump administration's DACA rescission, probably by a 5–4 vote. I think the conservative majority will say that the rescission was handled lawfully, while a few conservative justices will say DACA itself is illegal.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) November 12, 2019

I think this was a foregone conclusion - legal reasoning is pretty clear ie a President did it unilaterally, therefore a President can undo it unilaterally

in this case the weakness in the system was Congress and the POTUS, not the SCOTUS.

otm

Wow.

Inside the Federalist Society dinner featuring Brett Kavanaugh.

A man and a woman just stood up, blew a rape whistle, and yelled:

“WE BELIEVE CHRISTINE FORD! WE BELIEVE SURVIVORS!!”

Via @KristinMinkDC

pic.twitter.com/O3wGPujoae

— Joshua Potash 🆘 (@JoshuaPotash) November 15, 2019

should happen everywhere he goes imo

Ruth Marcus has a book about Kav:

It was a historic moment in April 2017 when Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy presided over the ceremonial Rose Garden swearing-in for the court’s new member, Neil M. Gorsuch: the first time a sitting justice was joined on the nation’s highest court by one of his former law clerks.

But a secret meeting moments later in the White House was just as significant, according to a new book by Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post deputy editorial page editor.

Kennedy requested a private moment with President Trump to deliver a message about the next Supreme Court opening, Marcus reports. Kennedy told Trump he should consider another of his former clerks, Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was not on the president’s first two lists of candidates.

“The justice’s message to the president was as consequential as it was straightforward, and it was a remarkable insertion by a sitting justice into the distinctly presidential act of judge picking,” Marcus writes in “Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover.”