U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

Can't wait for the first "Cotton eyes Joe" headline

BIDEN - It Beats Picking Cotton!

These dueling opinions from Kavanaugh and Kagan on mail-in ballots may be the most important story of the day:

Kavanaugh: late ballots could “flip the results of an election”

Kagan: “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted”https://t.co/o4Ew6IEQ2C

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) October 27, 2020

Bush v. Gore was so weird and seemingly such an anomaly that I feel Dems rolled over partly out of a misplaced sense of honor and partly in shock. If this happened again in even more dramatic fashion in this current climate, I feel the SC might as well be voting to light the country on fire.

BIDEN - It Beats Picking Cotton!

xpost to be honest, this is the type of fuckery that I think is more likely to succeed in the Supreme Court. States basically successfully lobbying to discard late-received votes due to the bullshit narrative of it 'flipping' the election. Obviously Justice Kagan is correct but it won't matter as the conservative bloc will win this battle every time.

this unfortunately means we gotta do our shit and get our ballots back early and show up in person to vote if it looks like we're cutting it close. it's bullshit, it's unfair, but it's the only way to be sure that we exterminate the cockroach in the White House.

Kavanaugh's concurrence in the Wisconsin case is sloppy AF.

(A thread.)

— Tierney Sneed (@Tierney_Megan) October 27, 2020

So Barrett might not even be the most incompetent justice. This is fine.

ACB's opinions will also be sloppy, but mostly because of the stigmata blood dripping all over the pages

Does sloppy matter when they can do whatever the fuck they want?

I prefer fastidious fascism myself

Yeah, the more power they gain and hold, the less they need to pretend to care about correct jurisprudence

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/30/conservative-judges-voting-theory/

By
Neal Katyal (who is waking up since his 2017 op-ed saying libs should support Gorsuch getting on the S. Court ) and Joshua A. Geltzer

A novel legal theory is surging among conservative judges and justices. The notion is that, under the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any input from state executives or courts — may set the rules for presidential elections. This theory is clearly a misunderstanding of constitutional election law. But it’s actually worse than that: It fundamentally misapprehends how law itself functions.

Here’s what everyone agrees on: Article II of the Constitution says that “[e]ach State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” that state’s representatives to the electoral college, which chooses the president. No one disputes the basic reality that state legislatures typically take the lead in setting rules for the statewide elections that choose electors who, in turn, choose a president.

But in the past couple of weeks, the focus on two words in that constitutional text — “the Legislature” — has been taken to fanatical extremes. Most recent — and most absurd — is a decision on Thursday by a federal court of appeals that, five days before Election Day (too late for the state to do anything to respond to it), abruptly changed the rule for Minnesota voters from a requirement that their mail-in ballots be sent by Election Day to a requirement that those ballots be received by Election Day, thus unsettling at the last moment both the law and voters’ expectations. The two judges voting for that outcome insisted that a state official who’d interpreted state law to allow the more accommodating deadline had intruded on a power reserved to the legislature alone. It’s the same basic notion that Justice Neil M. Gorsuch expressed in voting to halt a decision by North Carolina’s State Board of Elections interpreting North Carolina law on election rules, and that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. articulated in voting to halt a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision interpreting that state’s election laws. Alito insisted on strict adherence to “the provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections.”

...this is the opposite of what the U.S. Supreme Court has said — including in a 2015 decision holding that the Constitution’s reference to “the Legislature” means a state’s process of making laws, including a governor’s role in vetoing laws and courts’ role in interpreting laws. And put aside the oddity that this idea means that a ballot could count for Minnesota’s state elections but somehow not for federal ones, even though the same legislature enacted the rules for both of them and the ballot includes candidates for both sorts of offices. Even more fundamentally, this newfound notion that legislatures must, in utter isolation, set election rules alone is impossible to square with the basics of how law works in America....

In grade school, children learn that legislatures write the law, executives implement the law and courts interpret the law. To insist that, in the area of election administration alone, state legislatures must do it all themselves fetishizes the words “the Legislature” in the Constitution and strains them beyond recognition — because that’s never what legislatures do. For judges and justices suddenly to claim otherwise isn’t just a bad take on election law, but a bad take on law — period.

A right-wing federal district court judge will be having a hearing Monday on the petition in Texas to throw out 100,000 plus drive-through votes. This case could end up at US Supreme Court

If this weak ass shithead needs to count on a few thousand votes in Texas he’s fucked.

Every vote suppressed doesn’t count, and this is over 100,000 of em.

Afraid he will somehow apply this:

A novel legal theory is surging among conservative judges and justices. The notion is that, under the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any input from state executives or courts — may set the rules for presidential elections. This theory is clearly a misunderstanding of constitutional election law. But it’s actually worse than that: It fundamentally misapprehends how law itself functions

welp he dismissed case fortunately

They just appealed to the US 5th Circuit.

5th Circuit Court is psychotic but it'll just be appealed beyond them if they rule otherwise.

Chief Justice Roberts says striking down Obamacare, when Congress wouldn't, is "not our job."

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 10, 2020

"...it is our duty"

but yes, i hope that is a good sign

it's not our job. However, if you all ask nicely...I'll do it just this once

Kavanaugh also making comments about severability that make it sound like they aren't yet ready to kill this thing.

"we can stab it with our steely knives, but we just can't *kill* the beast"

Well, yeah

if they don't strike it down, we're gonna hear a boatload of GOP whining about how "the democrats said the supreme court would take away our healthcare" while conveniently not mentioning how barrett votes on the matter

Breyer and Sotomayor are especially sharp in their questions.

if they don't strike it down, we're gonna hear a boatload of GOP whining

true, whining does seem to come by the boatloads these days

in boat parades, even

Aito, the worst justice.

couldn't see that page, but if you're referring to Alito, yes

god that infuriated me today

the comment about Obergefell and people only being only able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their own homes was really appalling

it was the 'how dare you try to suppress my right to discriminate against you' argument

a world without God would be nice

a world without God Alito would be nice

For years Thomas has gotten the press as the Cruelest Justice, but I can at least see the through-line of his opinions. Alito meanwhile, unlike even Gorsuch, is the grossest hack, never deviating from RNC policy.

a world without God would be nice

― Lover of Nixon (or LON for short) (Neanderthal), Saturday, November 14, 2020 1:22 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure does

sorry nvm

i just read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40081165-the-curse-of-bigness which is a nice short 150pp book of the history US anti-trust legislation/enforcement with emphasis on the obvious gilded age stuff, but also the role of robert bork and what happens next with tech companies.

Bork's pre-they-fucked-me book is on anti-trust legislation, no?

Yeah apparently his came up with a novel interpretation of the Sherman act that was basically: the only thing that matters is does it raise prices? If not then go nuts.

The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.

The court’s ruling was at odds with earlier ones concerning churches in California and Nevada. In those cases, decided in May and July, the court allowed the states’ governors to restrict attendance at religious services.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/us/supreme-court-coronavirus-religion-new-york.html

Let's all die so some fucking idiots can engage in idiotic beliefs that betray their lack of belief in the first place!

Seriously, people who think you need a church to worship a higher power are lunatics. Might as well open up dance clubs and bars.

I thought it would take a little longer for Barrett to get some blood on her hands. Well done.

did you miss her actual first vote

Wow. Apparently Roberts and Gorsuch went at it:

“As we round out 2020 and face the prospect of entering a second calendar year living in the pandemic’s shadow, that rationale has expired according to its own terms,” Gorsuch wrote. “Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical. Rather than apply a nonbinding and expired concurrence … courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause.”

Gorsuch also accused Roberts of “a serious rewriting of history” for now insisting that his May opinion did not rely on a century-old Supreme Court precedent that allowed mandatory smallpox vaccinations in Massachusetts.

“We may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack. Things never go well when we do,” Gorsuch warned.

But Roberts noted that Gorsuch on Wednesday devoted three pages of his opinion to “exactly one sentence” the chief justice wrote in May referring back to the 1905 smallpox vaccination case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

“What did that one sentence say? Only that ‘[o]ur Constitution principally entrusts “[t]he safety and the health of the people” to the politically accountable officials of the States “to guard and protect,”’” Roberts wrote.

“It is not clear which part of this lone quotation today’s concurrence finds so discomfiting … But the actual proposition asserted should be uncontroversial, and the concurrence must reach beyond the words themselves to find the target it is looking for.”

one more like this and the laundering of Roberts as the Sensible Moderate by the mainstream (and a cUlTuRaL mArXiSt by the Right) will be complete.

Institution saved!

There was this one too, but I don't like it as much:
Soccer player and fans adored an amigo (5, 8)