U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

“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.