U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

don’t see how providing wedding photography is different than baking a wedding cake, making floral arrangements or creating a web page

ADF is a well-known Southern Poverty Law Center-designated extremist group. As Joe My God said, “it’s likely that Smith’s is yet another fake company created by the Alliance Defending Freedom in order file a peremptory challenge. In other words, she’s never refused any LGBT clients because she’s never had any attempt to hire her.”

The web page, according to Stern, is more recognizably "speech" than baking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/magazine/clarence-thomas-ginni-thomas.html

Some of this has been previously reported but this article adds more details re Clarence & Ginni Thomas and right wing craziness

don’t see how providing wedding photography is different than baking a wedding cake, making floral arrangements or creating a web page

― Dan S, Wednesday, 23 February 2022 03:19 (seven hours ago) link

I hadn’t realized that public accommodation laws were this broadly defined - I assumed it was places with a physical location open to the public.

I'm as despairing as everyone else, but I really think they might just do a limited ruling that allows discrimination against LGBTQ+ people...which will be horrible and egregious and despicable and personal, obv, but essentially rolling back all civil rights laws doesn't seem prudent in any way, shape, or form.

https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Supreme_Court_Clarence_Thomas_21940.jpg?w=640

Conflict of interest? Our interests are completely aligned!

The only upside I can see is that maybe all us sick queers can move somewhere else.

I'd love asylum in Portugal

I hadn’t realized that public accommodation laws were this broadly defined - I assumed it was places with a physical location open to the public.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, February 23, 2022

why should services offered on the internet be treated any differently than Masterpiece Cakeshop or Arlene's Flowers?

President Biden has selected Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Court, two people familiar with his decision said, choosing a well-regarded federal appeals court judge who if confirmed would make history by becoming the first Black woman to serve as a justice.

In Judge Jackson, 51, Mr. Biden selected a liberal-leaning jurist who earned a measure of Republican support when he nominated her to the influential federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., last summer. If confirmed by the Senate, she would replace Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the senior member of the court’s three-member liberal wing, who announced last month that he would retire at the end of the current court term this summer if his successor was in place.

Congrats, KBJ!

Nice.

https://fop.net/2022/02/fop-national-president-patrick-yoes-statement-on-nomination-of-kentaji-brown-jackson-to-scotus/?fbclid=IwAR1mygAcxof5AwY36Br_JFO14vMdL74SbE_r2LVE_mUnFAWywRoqAxltmWQ

Strike against her afaic.

the first South Floridian to get nominated!

by contemporary progressive standards even thurgood marshall would have strikes against him

Now we just need someone to <parody> Gorsuch and Thomas.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/north-carolina-republicans-scotus-gerrymandeering-assault.html?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=traffic&utm_source=article&utm_content=twitter_share

In a late Friday afternoon filing as war raged in Ukraine and as President Joe Biden announced Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, North Carolina Republicans dropped their own bombshell: a legal filing in the Supreme Court that if successful would not only restore the state legislature’s ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering and perhaps tip control of Congress, but would radically alter the power of state courts to rein in state legislatures that violate voting rights in federal elections. There are strong arguments Republicans should lose this case, but don’t count them out before a polarized and politicized Supreme Court.

...This is the “independent state legislature” doctrine because it proposes that the legislature is supreme against all other actors that might run elections. This is a wacky theory of legislative power, but it is one that four Supreme Court justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas) expressed support for in various opinions during the 2020 elections, and it echoes an alternative argument that former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by Justice Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia, made in the Bush v. Gore case ending the 2000 election and handing victory to Republican George W. Bush.

Fucking Bush v. Gore case was one of the worst reasoned court opinions of the past century.

they managed to actually do the thing that half this country is pretty sure happened in 2016

(and the other half is convinced happens in 2020)

It was only recently that I learned that the “one man one vote” principle that results in congressional districts being relatively equal in population was only really enforced starting in the 50s and 60s. In Virginia before the Supreme Court stepped in there were wildly uneven districts which favored rural areas by design and had fast-growing northern Virginia vastly underrepresented.

The decision Brennan was most proud of.

And it had other knock-on effects --- as late as 1989, SCOTUS used it as precedent to unanimously kill off NYC's Board of Estimate, a supreme council of budget and land use, on which the Mayor and two other citywide electeds had three votes each, and the five Borough Presidents one or two. The result was today's City Council system, with 51 members from 51 more evenly-sized districts, and I believe a sort of fundamentally weaker mayor, but don't quote me on that part.

Yeah I remember that decision about the BOE from when it happened (I grew up in suburban Connecticut which was dominated by NY media).

Anyway I think we know how the SC is going to vote on the NC districting, which leads me to think Republican state legislatures then will take the next step and start shoving cities, suburbs and college towns into one congressional district with like four million people and a whole bunch of rural districts with like 5,000 people each.

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a case that could dramatically limit the EPA’s power to fight climate change. The case involves an Obama-era regulation that never actually took effect, and though the Biden administration said that it was working on a replacement and that litigants should wait until there was an actual rule to discuss, the Court ominously decided to hear the case anyway. As expected, most of the conservative justices seemed eager to gut the EPA’s authority to reduce emissions from power plants. They couldn’t have picked a more perfect day: Monday’s oral arguments began just hours after the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a bleak report warning that extreme weather events are already more frequent and severe than previously predicted, and that swift, significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to prevent worse catastrophes.

Above is a description based on NY Times article

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/us/politics/supreme-court-climate-change.html

from the NY Times article on the epa case

The court has called this inquiry the “major questions doctrine.” The justices seemed divided over how it applied to the cases before them.

Jacob M. Roth, a lawyer for coal companies challenging the E.P.A.’s authority, said the key distinction was between regulating individual power plants and the entire energy sector. The latter, he said, was a major question that lacked congressional authorization

meanwhile a 5th circuit panel -- two Trump judges (Duncan and Engelhardt) plus the notorious Edith Jones, all Federalist Society darlings are trying to force the White House to let unvaccinated Navy Seals stay in their job positions-

The conservative legal position appears to be that the commander-in-chief has inherent constitutional authority to conduct military operations without congressional approval and indefinitely detain “enemy combatants”—but not order all his troops to get vaccinated. https://t.co/BtsmWacR4p

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 1, 2022

current conservative commitment to anti-vaccination is a position I find completely baffling. Is there any good explanation other than just "here's something we can use as a wedge issue"?

might be useful

Went on a deep dive to understand vaccine polarization and its immense, irreparable cost https://t.co/Bv8ZJAyIMN

— Joss Fong (@JossFong) February 23, 2022

current conservative commitment to anti-vaccination is a position I find completely baffling. Is there any good explanation other than just "here's something we can use as a wedge issue"?

It is really not difficult, a lot of people would rather die than see the Venn diagram described by "minorities" and "non-heterosexuals" happy

excellent link caek, thanks

there was an episode of that mediocre show Commander in Chief where President Mac (Democrat) took an executive action in an emergency that upset many environmentalists, and Donald Sutherland (rival Republican politician) showed up in support of the environmentalists, one of whom said out loud "Kind of surprised to see you on OUR side". and he wasn't, he was just there to fuck with the Democratic president for cheap political points.

any chance to frustrate liberals and co-opt progressive slogans in the process (i.e. "My Body, My Choice") is like peak troll-boner for these cocks. they don't actually believe anything.

that, and 200% what Dan said.

after all, it's not like conservatives are anti-Big Pharma. they're the assholes who said things like "what's the point of developing drugs if you can't profit from them" and constantly defend big corporations.

but they're also anti-science to a degree, and say shit like "doctors never know anything!". so there is probably some aspect of them that actually is truly anti-vaccine that can't merely be explained by trolling, even if it's an incoherent reason. but mostly, they don't want anybody telling them what to do, which has been the M.O. of conservatives going back 50+ years. "small government stay out of our lives" bullshit. and as someone mentioned last year in another thread, they don't believe THEY'RE going to die from COVID or any other disease, because they have a 'healthy immune system, unlike everybody else'. which is why, dumb as they are, Ebola in the USA freaked them the fuck out, because even as unlikely as it was for anybody to get it, the mortality rate was high, and they were worried they'd get it and get sick or die.

I can't watch that vid rn (at work) but agree very much with "misinformation is an incomplete explanation." It's ALWAYS an incomplete explanation. After all, (1) we all have access to that misinformation, and we aren't all prone to believe it, and (2) we all have access to correct information as well, but that correct information fails to impress those who believe the misinformation. It's not like we live in a dictatorship with a controlled internet where the "misinformation" is the only version we are ever presented. Some people are primed to and even want to believe the misinformation for whatever reason (it owns the libs, it feels good, the alternative just seems scary, etc.).

Yeah the vox explainer I posted is very vox. The motivation for leaders on the right who manufacture consent via fox etc. probably boils down to “the cruelty is the point”.

to me it started as a symbiotic relationship. Trump did all he could to frame the pandemic as a hoax or conspiracy, so the anti-vax quacks and true believers jumped right in behind him and rode Trump's coattails into the mainstream. now it's conservative dogma and they can't back away without committing heresy and being excommunicated.

IDK, Trump was pretty openly pro-vax. He wanted all the credit for it!

More on the “major questions “ judicial doctrine that conservative justices are using to kill agency actions on climate change , vax rules , and more . Punting items back to Congress to decide, rather than letting agencies do so

https://www.vox.com/2022/2/28/22954696/supreme-court-epa-west-virginia-clean-power-plan-brett-kavanaugh-samuel-alito

By the time the vaccine arrived in December 2020 and Trump decided he wanted full credit for it the floodgates had already been opened for months on the line that "it's all a hoax designed to let the government trample on your FREEDOMS" and that current was running too strongly among the Q-adjacent and Q-susceptible for even Trump to swim against.

xxpost but not before he called COVID a 'hoax' and referred to it as the "corona flu virus" and suggested he was going to make all of the states open whether they were ready or not. and refusing to mask for a very long time.

sure, he pivoted to bragging about the vaccine because he knew the pandemic was killing him, but that's because he felt he could steal some independent voters by embracing it/taking credit for it. he also probably thought the vaccine would end the pandemic in like ten minutes too, because that's his kind of magical thinking.

To realize this Master of Branding could've saved thousands of lives by handing out face masks with his name on them and didn't is to wonder what snail mush his brain is made of.

I also think a big part of it for the past year comes down to the hope that failing efforts to slow COVID can be pinned on the Biden administration and help swing upcoming elections towards republicans who can say that the vaccine didn't do what was promised

all underpinned by this idea that most of the people who were going to die from COVID were "them" rather than "us"

It's not like we live in a dictatorship with a controlled internet where the "misinformation" is the only version we are ever presented.

Grimaces in Chomsky

and Other Stories

Number 1: Straight up racist.
Number 2: Right, we always hear about LSAT scores for Republican judges.
Number 3: LSAT scores are about getting into law school, not the quality of a legal mind.
Number 4: Trump's grades and taxes...
Number 5-100: Straight up racist. https://t.co/lvVYHzgQt3

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) March 3, 2022

I have never once been asked my LSAT score since graduating law school.