SCOTUS - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[jackd]

In the 2020 election enthusiasm got the Democrats out in sufficient numbers despite many obstacles. It could happen again and killing Roe v. Wade may help.

[Bact PhD]

Sept 4, 2021 16:54:24 GMT Traveler said:

I cannot believe how this will engender more POG support from independents and women. Still seems there are too many maggots left in TX to make any difference there, but think of all those states the dump barely won. NC and FL stand out there. So lets root for deminimus to ram this down FL legislature.

Florida legislature already going to take it up next year. Supreme Emperor may have just enough hubris to think the electorate (at least his supporters) would be A-OK with such a thing to be front and center of the initiative…in the midst of campaigning for re-election.

[Bact PhD]

Sept 4, 2021 17:14:18 GMT goldenvalley said:

Sept 4, 2021 16:54:24 GMT Traveler said:

I cannot believe how this will engender more POG support from independents and women. Still seems there are too many maggots left in TX to make any difference there, but think of all those states the dump barely won. NC and FL stand out there. So lets root for deminimus to ram this down FL legislature.

If the districts are gerrymandered well all those inclined to vote out POG will be gathered into a few districts (packed) and the rest will be put into oddly shaped districts (cracked) in which they are never the majority.  Add in what LFC describes and voila! POG wins.

FL has been doing a textbook job of this for the last 20 years. Under current drawings, this blue area has a snowball’s chance on Miami Beach of electing a (D) legislator on either the Federal or State level. The city proper is nicely bisected, and the county is literally surrounded by MAGA types.

[AnBr]

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Attachments:

[LFC]

This is the face of "Christian" "morality." Good gawd she creeps me the f*** out.

[LFC]

GoDaddy punted the Texas vigilante website. So has another provider.

The Texas Right to Life group will have to find a new hosting provider for its website that encourages people to report violations of the state's restrictive new anti-abortion law.

GoDaddy took action after Gizmodo reported that Texas Right to Life's new website, prolifewhistleblower.com, seems to violate a GoDaddy rule that says website operators may not "collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another user or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent." GoDaddy's terms of service also say that customers cannot use the web hosting platform in a way that "[v]iolates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity."

GoDaddy now says that the website has less than 24 hours to find a new hosting provider. "Last night we informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have violated GoDaddy's terms of service and have 24 hours to move to a different provider," GoDaddy told Ars in a statement. GoDaddy previously confirmed the action to The New York Times and Newsweek.

GoDaddy told Ars that "the site violated multiple provisions, including, but not limited to, Section 5.2 of our terms of service." That section is the one that prohibits sites from using GoDaddy to "collect or harvest... non-public or personally identifiable information" without people's prior written consent.

Update at 6:15 pm ET: Texas Right to Life responded to our inquiry, saying that its "IT team is already in [the] process of transferring our assets to another provider and we'll have the site restored within 24-48 hours."

"We will not be silenced," the group also said. "If anti-lifers want to take our website down, we'll put it back up. No one can keep us from telling the truth. No one can stop us from saving lives. We are not afraid of the mob. We will not back down."

Update at 9:45 pm ET: The website went offline briefly but is now back. Its new hosting provider, Digital Ocean, also has rules against violating people's privacy, including one that bans "[c]ontent that... is intended to harass, abuse or invade the privacy of any individual."

While the abortion whistleblower site points to Digital Ocean name servers, its domain registrar is Epik, which has served controversial platforms such as Gab, Parler, and 8chan.

Update at 12:35 am ET on September 4: Digital Ocean has apparently cut off hosting service, as the anti-abortion website is now using Epik for its name servers and as its domain registrar.

[LFC]

Kristy Noem is pushing more anti-abortion rules in South Dakota because of course she is. I would have been shocked if she hadn't. I expect a copycat bill to appear soon.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) signed an executive order on Tuesday that bans the prescription of abortion pills through telemedicine — a move that comes days after she proposed tightening abortion restrictions in her state following the Supreme Court’s decision allowing Texas’ ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy to stand.

Noem’s order states that abortion pills can only be prescribed or dispensed by a physician licensed in the state, which requires an in-person examination beforehand. The order also dictates that courier, delivery, telemedicine and mail services are banned from providing drugs that induce abortions.

Noem says she will work with lawmakers on legislation that would make the policies in her order permanent.

Currently, abortions can’t be performed on women in South Dakota past 22 weeks of gestation. State law allows abortions to be performed by a physician during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. After the 12-week mark, abortions are limited to specific settings such as a licensed hospital or in the physician’s licensed medical clinic or office through 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling allowed Texas’ anti-abortion to stand, Noem proposed tightening restrictions in her own state by directing her office’s unborn-child advocate to review the state’s abortion laws.

[LFC]

Greg Abbott goes full blown Handmaid's Tale. He's quickly becoming as much of a sick and twisted f*** as DeSatanist.

Looks like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) needs to be reminded of how the dystopian anti-abortion law he signed into law works.

Twitter users swiftly called out Abbott’s head-scratching response Tuesday when he was pressed on how Texas’ new anti-abortion law — which bans the procedure post-six weeks of pregnancy — will inevitably force survivors of rape or incest to carry a pregnancy to term.

Abbott defended the law by falsely suggesting that six weeks is more than enough time for pregnant people to get an abortion. Abbott’s suggestion is, of course, unrealistic — most people do not know that they are pregnant within six weeks of pregnancy.

“It doesn’t require that at all because obviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion. So for one, it doesn’t provide that,” Abbott said, referring to overwhelming concerns the new law would force people who become pregnant from rape or incest to carry to term.

Without outlining details, Abbott went on to make the bizarre vow that law enforcement will now somehow find ways to arrest and prosecute rapists before they get around to raping someone.

“Let’s make something very clear: rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets,” Abbott said.

The level of immorality and rejection of reality is bottomless in the Republican Party. There is simply nothing they won't do if they think they can get away with it which, unfortunately, is now a f***ing lot.

[goldenvalley]

Well why hasn't Abbott eliminated rapists in Texas before now?

[LFC]

The fascists are already winning with their brown shirt / vigilante tactics.

Three out of the four abortion facilities in San Antonio have temporarily stopped offering the procedure in hopes of avoiding lawsuits from private citizens under Texas’ new restrictive abortion law.

Two abortion clinics and one surgical center, operated by Planned Parenthood of South Texas, paused all abortions starting Sept. 1, when one of the country’s most stringent abortion laws went into effect. The law bans abortions whenever fetal cardiac activity is detected — as early as six weeks into pregnancy, when many don’t know they are pregnant.

In the meantime, the clinics will continue making other reproductive health services available to the more than 1.5 million people living in the city. Alamo City Surgery Center in San Antonio is still performing abortions, according to its website.

[pnwguy]

Sept 8, 2021 16:47:31 GMT goldenvalley said:

Well why hasn't Abbott eliminated rapists in Texas before now?

Because he can't alienate his GOP voting base?  He's already killing off his voter pool with anti-vaccine and anti-mask mandates, and arming the survivors with guns they don't know how to safely operate.  And now you want to start jailing rapists?    

[LFC]

I'm more and more convinced this fool is going to pull a Ginsburg (yes, she deserves any shots she takes on this point) and even further cement SCOTUS into a fascist arm of the Republican Party. F***.

83-year-old Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told NPR on Thursday that he will only retire when he's ready to do so -- and that he's not setting out a timetable.

When asked by NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg if he had changed his mind about plans to retire, Breyer remained defiant about staying on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.

"I'm only going to say that I'm not going to go beyond what I previously said on the subject, and that is that I do not believe I should stay on the Supreme Court, or want to stay on the Supreme Court, until I die," Breyer said. "And when exactly I should retire, or will retire, has many complex parts to it. I think I'm aware of most of them, and I am, and will consider them."

[LFC]

Oh, Amy. Ideological, no respect for precedence or even the law, and dumb as a rock. You're a perfect Republican pick.

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she told the guests at a Sunday celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

That's the McConnell Center named after Mitch McConnell who was also there.

Then there's this little beauty. She really is a dim bulb, a straight-faced liar, or both.

Barrett, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, spent much of her talk at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel arguing the court is defined by "judicial philosophies" rather than personal political views.

"Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties," she said, noting that she identifies as an "originalist" and citing fellow Justice Stephen Breyer as an example of the other main school of thought, "pragmatism."

Yeah, I'm sure the courts "originally" felt that citizen lawsuit vigilantism with no risk to get a result that you were unable to obtain through actually passing laws was just hunky dory. F***ing ninny. At least Clarence has the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

[LFC]

Right-wing SCOTUS refused to stand up to an old Jim Crow technique that an older, more sane SCOTUS struck down as a clear end run around actual law and upholding the law.

Following Reconstruction in the South, Texas banned African Americans from voting in party primaries in a law adopted in 1923. This was an example of Jim Crow, a system of laws and customs that institutionalized anti-Black discrimination in the U.S.

When this state law was challenged before the Supreme Court and struck down in Nixon v. Herndon in 1927, the Texas Legislature responded in 1928 with a tricky maneuver much like the current Texas abortion law. Texas repealed the offending statute and enacted legislation that specifically delegated to political parties the power to determine “qualifications of voters in primary elections,” thus seeking to take the state out of the equation.

By putting that power in the hands of private parties, allowing them to discriminate against and prevent African Americans from voting, the state sought to avoid legal rules, based on the Constitution, that required “state action” before a law could be struck down. Essentially, the state contracted out the dirty work of denying Black Texans the right to vote.

In the landmark 1944 ruling in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court “looked behind the law and ferreted out the trickery,” as expressed by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case at the court. The court ruled that no matter how “uninvolved” the state of Texas attempted to be, primary elections involved state action sufficient for purposes of a successful lawsuit under the 14th Amendment.

The court concluded that the constitutional right to vote “is not to be nullified by a state through casting its electoral process in a form which permits a private organization to practice racial discrimination in the election.”

Does this shock anybody? Of course they went right back to their coveted history.

[jackd]

Precedents? We don't need no stinking precedents!

[LFC]

Sept 14, 2021 21:11:03 GMT jackd said:

"Precedents? We don't need no stinking precedents!"

"I should be made Dear Leader for life!" --Donald Trump, misunderstanding the meaning of "precedents."

[LFC]

From Vox this is definitely worth a read. Partisan judicial activism is now pretty standard.

The Supreme Court is drunk on its own power
A Court that used to prize careful deliberation now seems to care more about making big change quickly.

[LFC]

And the award for Complete Lack of Self-Awareness goes to...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Thursday criticized some in the judiciary for veering into the role of legislators and politicians, saying it is not the role of judges to make policy or to base decisions on their personal feelings or religious beliefs.

Speaking at the University of Notre Dame, Thomas said judges “venturing into areas we should not have entered into” is part of why the nomination process, particularly for federal judges with lifetime appointments like himself, is so contentious.

“The court was thought to be the least dangerous branch and we may have become the most dangerous,” Thomas said. “And I think that’s problematic.”

He did not cite any specific examples.

[LFC]

It was supposed to be a quiet shadow docket non-decision to allow Texass to go through with their vigilante civil suit anti-abortion law. Instead it became a massive public story and now right-wing SCOTUS seems to feel the need to defend themselves from well-founded charges of being partisan hacks. Not with facts and reasoning, mind you. Just straight up elementary schoolyard level "NUH UH!"

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the deeply conservative justice who has reliably voted in favor of the GOP’s agenda from the bench, complained on Thursday that his critics were “going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”

“I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” the justice lamented during a lecture at the University of Notre Dame. “So if they think you are anti-abortion or something personally, they think that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician.”

Thomas also seemed to take aim at progressives’ push to expand the Supreme Court in wake of Republicans’ repeated hijacking of the high court in recent years.

National leaders have “lost the capacity” to “not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don’t get the outcomes that we like,” said Thomas.

Thomas’ remarks came several days after Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett insisted that SCOTUS “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks” as she spoke at a celebration of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

[jackd]

Methinks they do protest too much.

[goldenvalley]

Sept 19, 2021 16:05:19 GMT jackd said:

Methinks they do protest too much.

Especially Barrett who we all know ended up on the Court for the purpose of overruling Roe.  That's her intent anyway.  Trump's intent was for her to help with any election difficulties he might have.  That didn't work out for him.

[LFC]

Following Barret and Thomas, Sam Alito also felt the need to tell us he's not a partisan hack. Right-wing SCOTUS's unprecedented Texass decision has them taking a well earned public beating and apparently it hurts their little feelings.

Justice Samuel Alito on Thursday rejected criticism that the Supreme Court has improperly handled some of the cases that come to it as a part of its emergency docket without the benefit of a full briefing schedule and oral arguments.

Alito said the goal of his lecture at the University of Notre Dame was to "dispel some imaginary shadows" and push back on a notion that he claimed was put forward recently by the media and those in the political sphere that the court was acting in a way, he said, that was "sneaky or dangerous."

He said the recent criticism was geared to suggest "that a dangerous cabal is deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view."

Alito's speech -- almost an hour long and coming on the eve of a new term -- marked a rare instance of a Supreme Court justice lashing out not only at the media and the political branches, but even at the sentiments that had been expressed by one of his own colleagues.

Alito called the criticism "very misleading," adding that "there is absolutely nothing new about emergency applications." The justice then launched into a 10-point rebuttal directed specifically at times at the media and some political actors, defending the court's practices of late.

He noted the complications surrounding the emergency docket -- often referred to as the "shadow docket" and said that the justices do "the best we can" under the time constraints imposed by the situation.

Alito acknowledged that the court has had to resort to the emergency docket more in recent years and said that was due to a series of factors, including that during the Trump administration, "a number of the President's important initiatives were enjoined by a district court judge." He also attributed the recent increase to the challenges related to restrictions put in place to combat Covid.

But he defended the factors the court uses to consider the petitions, stressing that the justices weigh the harms claimed by the parties and the probable outcome of the case.

I have visions of each one of these people doing a bad Richard Nixon imitation while saying, "I am not a crook!"

[LFC]

This author says that a case coming before SCOTUS will be a good litmus test to see if their now repeated denials of being partisan hacks hold any merit.

The justices are feeling insecure.

Four members of the Supreme Court — Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett — all gave speeches in the last several months complaining that they are often perceived, as Barrett put it, as “a bunch of partisan hacks.”

Justice Thomas summarized these justices’ complaints at a mid-September speech at the University of Notre Dame: “The media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference. So if they think you are anti-abortion or something personally, they think that’s the way you always will come out.”

As it turns out, the Court will hear a case on Tuesday, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, which tests the hypothesis that the justices are “always going right to [their] personal preference” in abortion cases.

On the one hand, Cameron involves a Kentucky state law that restricts certain kinds of abortions — and it also involves an effort by Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, to undo the pro-abortion work of his Democratic predecessor-turned-current-governor Andy Beshear. It is a classic partisan dispute over reproductive rights, with high officials from both parties maneuvering to get the policy outcome they prefer.

On the other hand, the specific legal issue before the justices has little to do with abortion. It’s a hyper-technical procedural case asking whether Cameron may appeal a particular court order directly, or whether he must instead file a motion seeking “relief from a judgment or order” in a federal trial court. (The Cameron case should not be confused with another case being heard in December, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which is an existential threat to Roe v. Wade.)

Viewed through a partisan lens, in other words, one would expect Cameron to end in a 6-3 decision with all six Republican appointees siding with Cameron and all three Democratic appointees voting against him. This is, after all, an abortion case. We know where each party stands on abortion.

But seen through the eyes of a nonpartisan judge, Cameron is exactly the sort of case where the justices’ votes are difficult to predict and where the final vote could break down on unconventional lines. Even in an era of extreme polarization, it’s not like the national leadership of either party has strong feelings about whether the proper vehicle for Cameron to seek relief is a petition for rehearing en banc, or a motion filed under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(5).

Each justice will need to make a decision about how they approach this case. Will they analyze the procedural question presented by Cameron with the same objective neutrality that most justices would apply to a similar case that did not involve a politically charged issue like abortion? Or will their personal preferences overcome their legal analysis?

There’s good reason to fear that at least five of the justices will fail this test. Just last month, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the Supreme Court considered a Texas ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which was drafted specifically to evade judicial review.

[LFC]

Interesting opinion of right-wing SCOTUS and the abortion bills they'll be hearing. I can't say I have even a shred of faith that the author is wrong. Right-wing SCOTUS has produced too many opinions that have been torn to shreds by legal experts as often not following precedent, often misquoting precedent, and too often border on legal malpractice. Sorry, Amy. You really are partisan hacks. Saying you have a different judicial philosophy, one that let's you do whatever you wish to get to your predetermined outcome, is partisan hackery at its finest. Scalia, probably one of your heroes, was a master at it.

One of the oldest sales tricks in the book is the one where the salesperson presents the potential buyer with an extremely crappy option first, and follows that up with an only moderately crappy second option. The potential buyer, dazzled by the jump in quality between options one and two, won’t scrutinize option two as much, because it’s so much better than option one. This has been employed by slimy realtors, wedding planners, and used car salesmen.

And now, we’ve reached the point in the American experiment where the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority has resorted to a cheap sales tactic in an attempt to rehabilitate its image. Lower the customer’s expectations enough, conventional wisdom goes, and they’ll thank you for ripping them off.

This week, the court agreed to hear a legal challenge to SB8, the Texas law that bans abortion once a “fetal heart rate” is detected—usually around the sixth week of gestation, which is actually around three weeks after the implantation of a fertilized egg in the wall of a uterus, or a little over a week after a missed menstrual period in a person with a predictable schedule. The law empowers any ol’ Yosemite Sam to enforce said ban by filing a lawsuit against anybody who “aids or abets” an abortion. This means doctors, receptionists, advocates, and even Uber drivers who bring a patient to a clinic could be on the hook.

The high court agreed to hear the Biden administration’s challenge to the law on Nov. 1, on an expedited schedule. Legal observers predict that the court will toss the law out. I—and many wary pro-choicers—predict that after tossing the law out, the media will fawn over the court’s newfound social moderation, and the Susan Collinses of the world will crow that they were right, the hysterical feminists were wrong, and the Supreme Court was never going to toss abortion rights on—as Mike Pence would say—“the ash-heap of history.”

The following month SCOTUS will hear oral arguments in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health, testing the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that directly confronts Roe v. Wade by banning abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation. Roe established in 1973 that the government has no right to interfere with abortion access prior to fetal viability—around 24.5 weeks’ gestation (a full-term pregnancy takes 40 weeks). Dobbs is the direct challenge to Roe that conservative activists have had a hard-on for since Reagan.

John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett do not look like or live like the people whose rights they are about to strip. None of them are women of childbearing age. None of them are poor. Five of those six are Roman Catholic. Five of them are men. Five are white. None of them are from Texas or Mississippi. They would not be on the court in the first place had they not impressed conservative advocacy groups like the Federalist Society with their fringe bona fides that put their beliefs in opposition to the supermajority of American voters who believe that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, and that access to abortion should be preserved.

Without the smokescreen of SB8, it would have been more difficult for the court’s conservative majority to pass off their inevitable favorable ruling in Dobbs as anything less than a wildly undemocratic ruling by a judicial body that has gone irretrievably off the rails. But thanks to SB8, we’re going to get a taste of “See, America? We could have done Option 1 (overturn Roe as hard as we possibly can!) but instead we did Option 2! (overturn Roe, but less hard).” As though the rights of women to choose whether or not they want to go through childbirth were a used car.

Tossing SB8 is a distraction. It is less than the least I previously believed the Supreme Court could do in its desperate quest to re-establish public trust and a sense of nonpartisan legitimacy. SB8 is an objectively crazy law. If the court were to uphold it, and by extension grant that it is a-OK for states to enact laws that allow ordinary citizens to enforce unconstitutional mandates, there’s nothing but small-time, cable hit-hungry legislators’ nonexistent capacity to feel shame stopping a free-for-all across the country. California’s Democratic supermajority could pass a law that would pay citizens tens of thousands of dollars to turn in people who “aid or abet” the sale or trade of any firearms. Conservative strongholds like Idaho could empower citizens to sue people who facilitate same-sex weddings.

[AnBr]

Oct 25, 2021 19:25:10 GMT LFC said:

Scalia, probably one of your heroes, was a master at it.

But even Scalia a couple of times felt he had no choice but to rule against his desired outcome.