SCOTUS - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[LFC]

Oct 25, 2021 21:42:57 GMT AnBr said:

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

Maybe but not when installing George W Bush as president and not when ruling that the ACA’s penalties were both a tax and not a tax. ( Hmmm. Sounds like Schrödinger‘a tax.)

[LFC]

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

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.

And heeeeeere we go. How the hell is this a surprise? And if there's such open skepticism from partisan hacks Kavanaugh and Barrett then why did they vote against the stay in the first place? Hello. McFly.

On Monday after MSNBC spent an hour and fifteen minutes broadcasting Supreme Court justices questioning attorneys on the controversial anti-abortion law in Texas, two legal analysts admitted that it was "significant" that two of the conservative justices seemed "skeptical' that the law passes constitutional muster.

Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade was the first to weigh in and indicated that she thought the Texas legislature that passed the law might be in for a setback.

"Well, the thing that seems significant to me, if not extraordinary, is the open skepticism, if not downright hostility we've seen by Justices [Brett] Kavanaugh and [Amy Coney] Barrett," she admitted. "And with those two votes, we could see a successful challenge to SB-8."

So what complicated arguments emerged that required the deep well of right-wing judicial scholarship to unwind? (Swallow that drink before you spew on your screen at the Onionesque argument presented by Texass to the highest court in the nation.)

The Economist's Supreme Court reporter Steven Mazie describes the exchange between Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone and Justice Clarence Thomas:

"Stone just said that being really mad about someone getting an abortion (extreme moral or psychological harm) in Texas is enough of an 'injury in fact' to allow private citizens to sue abortion providers."

Attorney, Boston Globe senior opinion writer, and former Supreme Court reporter Kimberly Atkins Stohr expresses shock over the argument:

If, as the Texas solicitor general argues, extreme moral outrage over someone else's actions constitutes a sufficient injury to bring a civil claim, I would have never stopped practicing as a civil litigator because I would have been too busy to quit.
— Kimberly Atkins Stohr (@kimberlyeatkins) November 1, 2021

This asshat should have been expelled from the court on the spot.

[LFC]

The partisan hacks continue to hack in a partisan fashion.

While some of the conservative justices admitted that the plaintiffs Monday had strong cases against the six-week Texas abortion ban, they wrung their hands about how to remedy it.

“I think it’s a forceful argument,” Justice Samuel Alito said after Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar presented the ways that the Texas ban had been written to thwart legal challenges. “But I think we have to be concerned about the implications of the mechanisms that you propose for providing some kind of relief.”

During Monday’s two-and-a-half hour marathon of back-to-back oral arguments in two lawsuits against the ban, the conservative justices took issue with nearly every tactic the plaintiffs came up with to block the law, even as they expressed concern about the law itself.

The plaintiffs’ task was significantly complicated by the fact that the law was purposefully written to skirt federal judicial review. It deputizes individuals, tempted by a bounty of at least $10,000, to carry it out — depriving plaintiffs of an obvious state official to name on the suit and enjoin from enforcing it.

They can't even bring themselves to state the obvious: this is a Texass state government created extra-judicial system designed to attack people doing something they don't like. 

[LFC]

Sanity from the left side of SCOTUS who have no problem stating the obvious.

The liberal women Supreme Court justices let the snark fly Monday as they picked apart the six-week abortion ban out of Texas.

“We would be inviting States, all 50 of them, with respect to their unpreferred constitutional rights, to try to nullify the law that this Court has laid down,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “That was something that, until this law came along, no state dreamed of doing.”

“Essentially, we would be like ‘you’re open for business. There’s nothing the Supreme Court can do about it,’” she continued. “Guns, same sex marriage, religious rights — whatever you don’t like, go ahead.”

“The fact that, after oh these many years, some geniuses came up with a way to evade … the even broader principle that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights and to say ‘well we’ve never seen this before so we can’t do anything about it,’” Kagan paused. “I guess I just don’t understand the argument.”

As the justices poked the lawyers’ arguments on behalf of Texas and its state officials, they led with the effect the law is having on women on the ground.

“We’ve had a little experiment here and we’ve seen what the chilling effect is,” Kagan said of the law and its stiff monetary penalties. “Usually in these chilling effect cases we’re kind of guessing … here we’re not guessing, we know exactly what has happened as a result of this law: it has chilled everybody on the ground.”

At one point, Sotomayor predicated a question on the assumption that the Court would find that the law was intended to dissuade women from exercising their constitutional right to an abortion — and added a sharp warning for Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone.

“You can challenge the assumption,” she added in a biting parenthetical, “but you’ll waste your time.”

[goldenvalley]

Nov 1, 2021 21:29:09 GMT LFC said:

...

So what complicated arguments emerged that required the deep well of right-wing judicial scholarship to unwind? (Swallow that drink before you spew on your screen at the Onionesque argument presented by Texass to the highest court in the nation.)

The Economist's Supreme Court reporter Steven Mazie describes the exchange between Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone and Justice Clarence Thomas:

"Stone just said that being really mad about someone getting an abortion (extreme moral or psychological harm) in Texas is enough of an 'injury in fact' to allow private citizens to sue abortion providers."

Attorney, Boston Globe senior opinion writer, and former Supreme Court reporter Kimberly Atkins Stohr expresses shock over the argument:

This asshat should have been expelled from the court on the spot.

He said that with a straight face?   

BTW McQuade and Stohr along with Joyce Vance and Jill Wine-Banks have a podcast called Sisters in Law.  All MSNBC "contributors" they offer a little more perspective on current legal events than you see in newspapers.

[LFC]

Nov 1, 2021 22:21:31 GMT goldenvalley said:

He said that with a straight face?  

Yep. He went full blown snowflake defense. Meanwhile right-wingers whine about overly sensitive libs and cancel culture.

[LFC]

SCOTUS made a sane decision.

The Supreme Court handed down a brief order Friday evening — it is literally just one sentence long — denying relief to a group of Maine health care workers who object to the Covid-19 vaccine on religious grounds. This means that nearly all workers in health care facilities licensed by the state must be vaccinated in order to keep their jobs.

Of course right-wingnut SCOTUS wasn't completely on board. Reading this it sounds like if any exemption is made for any health law for any reason then it must also be awarded to those who claim a religious exemption. To me (hardly a legal scholar) it reads like a religious exemption is automatically assumed for everything and just needs any other exemption to activate it.

Earlier in the pandemic, the Court handed down a pair of decisions that revolutionized its approach to religious liberty cases and granted churches and other houses of worship broad exemptions from public health orders intended to control the spread of Covid-19. The Court’s Friday evening decision in Does v. Mills, by contrast, appears to have been decided on the narrowest possible grounds. Though it is a loss for the religious right, it is not an especially significant one.

Maine requires nearly all health care workers to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It argues that this requirement is necessary because those workers are unusually likely to interact with patients who are vulnerable to the disease, and because the state’s health care system could potentially be disabled if too many health care workers are infected. The state does exempt a very narrow slice of health care workers, however: those who risk adverse health consequences if they are vaccinated, such as people with serious allergies to the vaccine.

The plaintiffs argued that religious objectors must be exempted from this requirement because the state also provided an exemption to people who could suffer health consequences if they are vaccinated — an argument that is, at least, plausible under the Court’s recent religion decisions. They were supported in an amicus brief by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, arguably the nation’s most sophisticated law firm representing religious right causes.

In a dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, Gorsuch essentially agrees with the plaintiffs, making the case for granting a religious exemption to the state’s vaccine mandate. Quoting Tandon v. Newsom (2021), one of the Court’s two recent decisions granting places of worship an exemption from certain public health rules, Gorsuch claims that a law is constitutionally suspect “if it treats ‘any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.’”

Thus, under Gorsuch’s approach, the state must exempt religious objectors because it has a single exemption — again, for people who could suffer serious health consequences if they receive the vaccine.

Had Gorsuch’s approach prevailed, it’s likely that religious objectors would be exempted from nearly any law. Speed limits, for example, typically exempt police, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles responding to an emergency. Even laws banning homicide typically contain exemptions for self-defense. (Although, in fairness, Gorsuch concedes that a religious exemption is inappropriate when the “challenged law serves a compelling interest and represents the least restrictive means for doing so.” So Gorsuch probably would not allow religiously motivated murder.)

That's f***ing scary. That's right-wing Christianist SCOTUS where religious rights count greater than all other rights. It provides a handy-dandy "this law doesn't apply to me" card. Of course it won't be upheld for those other blasphemous religions when they try to use it.

For example if there is an abortion ban with an exception for rape, incest, or danger to the mother's life then any member of the Satanic Temple has the religious right to an abortion, right? RIGHT? Hello? Any Christianist right-wingers out there?

[LFC]

Not directly SCOTUS but here's the natural outcome of giving religious people the right to pick which laws they don't want to follow.

For-profit businesses can be shielded from LGBT discrimination liability based on sincerely held religious beliefs, a federal judge in Texas ruled Sunday, addressing several legal questions left open after the U.S. Supreme Court granted anti-bias protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.

Braidwood Management Inc., which operates Christian health-care businesses controlled by Dr. Stephen Hotze, can avoid Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s LGBT anti-bias prohibitions under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth held.

Separately, Bear Creek Bible Church and other religious nonprofits can escape liability for firing, refusing to hire, or taking other adverse job actions against LGBT workers under Title VII’s religious exemptions, O’Connor said.

The ruling comes in a lawsuit that Braidwood and Bear Creek filed against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, seeking carve outs to Title VII following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, GA, which expanded civil rights protections for LGBT workers. The justices left unaddressed the scope of religious defenses to workplace discrimination liability.

[LFC]

The right to an abortion is doomed.

Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban wasn’t on trial Wednesday. Roe v. Wade was.

A lot can happen between oral arguments and the court issuing its decision six months from now, but there was no silver lining today for abortion rights advocates.

The state was candid, with Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart goading the majority-conservative Supreme Court to not just scooch up the viability line from around 24 weeks to 15, but to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood altogether.

The conservative justices on the bench, including its two newest members, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were highly amenable to ditching the court’s own precedent. The expectation beforehand that the robust six-justice conservative majority might tiptoe their way to overturning Roe quickly proved wrong. There was little in the way of window-dressing, or careful parsing of ways in which the court might inch away from Roe.

After 45 years of fulminating that Roe was bad law badly decided, the conservative legal movement finally got its chance to roll it back. The conservative justices responded with aplomb, bringing up Plessy v. Ferguson and other dark marks on the court’s history that were later overturned.

Chief Justice John Roberts took to the task the most meekly, dithering over a hypothetical 15-week viability line, while the others raced to tear down the precedent.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 2, 2021 15:44:24 GMT LFC said:

The right to an abortion is doomed.

Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban wasn’t on trial Wednesday. Roe v. Wade was.

A lot can happen between oral arguments and the court issuing its decision six months from now, but there was no silver lining today for abortion rights advocates.

The state was candid, with Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart goading the majority-conservative Supreme Court to not just scooch up the viability line from around 24 weeks to 15, but to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood altogether.

The conservative justices on the bench, including its two newest members, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were highly amenable to ditching the court’s own precedent. The expectation beforehand that the robust six-justice conservative majority might tiptoe their way to overturning Roe quickly proved wrong. There was little in the way of window-dressing, or careful parsing of ways in which the court might inch away from Roe.

After 45 years of fulminating that Roe was bad law badly decided, the conservative legal movement finally got its chance to roll it back. The conservative justices responded with aplomb, bringing up Plessy v. Ferguson and other dark marks on the court’s history that were later overturned.

Chief Justice John Roberts took to the task the most meekly, dithering over a hypothetical 15-week viability line, while the others raced to tear down the precedent.

Apparently, this is a states' rights issue, not an issue of fundamental rights, to the anti abortion advocates and their affiliated judges.  Like slavery was a states' rights issue and like voting rights will be viewed as in the near future.  If people disagree with each other vehemently on anything, just let the individual states decide...sort of a popularity contest.  Only guns and religious "freedom" are in the Constitution so they are the only fundamental rights we have.  

[jackd]

Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, put it well: They're gaslighting us, pretending to be anything other than the partisan politicians they are (summarizing).

[LFC]

Dec 2, 2021 18:58:18 GMT jackd said:

Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, put it well: They're gaslighting us, pretending to be anything other than the partisan politicians they are (summarizing).

Josh Marshall discussed the impacts of the almost foregone decision. He described right-wing SCOTUS like this:

The only mild saving grace to today’s SCOTUS arguments is that the pretenses are removed. These are ideologues and politicians. Their entire political movement has been propelled by the goal of overturning Roe v Wade and outlawing abortion. The conservative legal movement which birthed and swirls around The Federalist Society has many legal fish to fry. But its political potency, the engine that transformed the federal judiciary and made it more than a genteel debating society, was abortion. Of course they’re going to overturn Roe. It’s good to have that be crystal clear to anyone who wasn’t paying attention.

It’s a corrupt Court. It’s good to understand that.

Here's a follow-up (paywalled) which had much more detail on the purple states likely to be impacted.

Earlier I noted that a number of purple and even blueish states will likely end up banning abortion in a post-Roe world. People assume it’s just red states. But many of these states are so effectively gerrymandered that Republicans have a lock on state legislatures. But I just realized I greatly understated the situation. TPM alum Eric Kleefeld mentioned that Wisconsin never repealed its pre-Roe abortion ban. So the moment Roe is overturned, which will likely happen next June or July, abortion will be banned in Wisconsin, except in cases where necessary to protect the life of the mother.

There’s not a lot of precedent for state laws coming back to life in this way. And there may be delays in enforcement, especially in states with Democratic governors. But that won’t hold up long. Even if the big GOP majorities which control the Wisconsin state legislature may have hesitated to immediately ban abortion, they certainly won’t agree to repeal the law.

And it’s not just Wisconsin. I looked this up and eight states still have pre-Roe abortion bans on their books as unenforced laws. Wisconsin is one and Arizona and Michigan are two others. Each has a Republican held state legislature. (The others are Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia. Texas also has such a law on the books but it is permanently enjoined under court order.)

In Michigan and Wisconsin I had thought the 2022 gubernatorial races were all the stood in the way of abortion being banned in these states. It turns out abortions will be banned even before the elections happen, assuming Roe is overturned.

[LFC]

TPM Update: Abortion coule effectively be illegal in 17 states.

[LFC]

And here's the end-game. They've been working towards this for decades.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) on Sunday suggested that abortion laws should be left to states to decide, days after conservatives on the Supreme Court demonstrated a lack of pretense as they questioned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional legitimacy during a hearing on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.

During an interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” Braun argued that when it comes to abortion laws, “it’s time to turn it back to the states.”

Braun went on to say that he is “perfectly comfortable” with criminalizing abortion, but supposedly “just not at the level where everybody’s got to live with the same thing.”

“And when you talk about criminalizing it, then all you’re doing is taking this to a logical extreme that you’ll never get to anyway,” Braun said. “We just need to take it off of where it is, send it back to the states. Let’s find that right way to address it. And this applies to many other issues as well.”

Pressed on the irony of his opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates when he believes that the government should force pregnant people to carry a pregnancy to term even if they may not want to, Braun dismissed the argument, denying that these matters are an “issue of equivalency.”

[goldenvalley]

Dec 6, 2021 17:14:50 GMT LFC said:

And here's the end-game. They've been working towards this for decades.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) on Sunday suggested that abortion laws should be left to states to decide, days after conservatives on the Supreme Court demonstrated a lack of pretense as they questioned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional legitimacy during a hearing on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban.

During an interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” Braun argued that when it comes to abortion laws, “it’s time to turn it back to the states.”

Braun went on to say that he is “perfectly comfortable” with criminalizing abortion, but supposedly “just not at the level where everybody’s got to live with the same thing.”

“And when you talk about criminalizing it, then all you’re doing is taking this to a logical extreme that you’ll never get to anyway,” Braun said. “We just need to take it off of where it is, send it back to the states. Let’s find that right way to address it. And this applies to many other issues as well.”

Pressed on the irony of his opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates when he believes that the government should force pregnant people to carry a pregnancy to term even if they may not want to, Braun dismissed the argument, denying that these matters are an “issue of equivalency.”

No surprise.  Kavanaugh's comments during the arguments shows this.  The sole focus is on the "life" in the womb, not on the life of the womb and the living people around it.  There is nothing "equivalent" to that in the minds of these folks even as their states refuse Medicaid expansion which could help cover maternal care.

[LFC]

Right-wing SCOTUS has immortalized the legality of vigilantism. Sotomayor tore into this protection of an unconstitutional law.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that abortion providers in Texas can sue certain state officials to preemptively block the state’s six-week abortion ban. However, the law will stay in effect for now.

The thorniess of the decision is evident in the many splits between the justices.

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh agreed that abortion providers can sue executive licensing officials.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer found that abortion providers can sue the licensing officials, the Texas attorney general and state clerks.

Justice Clarence Thomas alone said that the providers cannot sue at all.

The executive licensing officials the justices reference hold positions within various state medical entities that would have to take action against the abortion providers if they violated the law.

The court has cleared the way for preemptive lawsuits to proceed against that limited set of people, sending the action back down to the state level. The ruling gives abortion providers a narrow pathway to thwart the law’s tricky enforcement scheme and to challenge it in court.

“We won, on very narrow grounds,” Whole Women’s Health, the abortion provider, responded on Twitter. “Our lawsuit can continue against the health department, medical board, nursing board, and pharmacy board. We’d hoped for a statewide injunction, but no clear path to it.”

[LFC]

This paywalled piece at TPM talks about how transparently bogus right-wing SCOTUS is being but the media is completely missing the point.

A DC lawyer reader is dismayed by the coverage of today’s Supreme Court decision on the Texas abortion ban:

The press coverage of this decision is all wrong.

Sure, the 5-justice majority permitted a narrow route into federal court. But it will be easy for Texas and other states to close that route and block all access to federal court – because the majority makes clear that is permissible.

The threat posed by the Texas law is the private lawsuits against abortion providers, and anyone who provides related help to those seeking abortions, threatening draconian liability. The relief that providers and other prospective defendants need, therefore, is an injunction blocking those suits. But the majority’s ruling – barring suits against the court clerks and prospective plaintiffs, makes clear that federal courts can’t give any relief against those lawsuits.

As the Chief Justice explains, the plaintiffs should be able to sue the attorney general and the court clerks

What the majority permits is only a federal court suit based on the threat of enforcement action by state licensing entities. But all Texas, or another state, would have to do is to make clear that no enforcement action is permissible, by any entity. If it does that, there is no federal court action permissible under the majority’s rationale.

Now, perhaps this doesn’t matter because it’s pretty clear Roe is being overruled anyway. (There is also a state court ruling today declaring the law unconstitutional under Texas law – but that court refused to issue an injunction, which means that there is nothing preventing folks from filing suits against providers.)

But the 5-justice ruling shows just how far this majority is willing to go in limiting access to federal court – and how unwilling it is to protect constitutional rights against novel threats. That is of a piece with the Dobbs argument and this week’s argument in the Maine Establishment Clause case. We are in for dramatic changes in our entire legal system.

Not clear to me why abortion groups are unwilling to make clear how bad this ruling is. Maybe they are focused on the next steps in the litigation. But, as usual, Justice Sotomayor is clear-eyed about what’s going on: “By foreclosing suit against state-court officials and the state attorney general, the Court effectively invites other States to refine S. B. 8’s model for nullifying federal rights. The Court thus betrays not only the citizens of Texas, but also our constitutional system of government.”

She lays it all out in Part III of her opinion, starting on page 10. Here’s the opening graph but you should read it all: “My disagreement with the Court runs far deeper than a quibble over how many defendants these petitioners may sue. The dispute is over whether States may nullify federal constitutional rights by employing schemes like the one at hand. The Court indicates that they can, so long as they write their laws to more thoroughly disclaim all enforcement by state officials, including licensing officials. This choice to shrink from Texas’ challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions. I doubt the Court, let alone the country, is prepared for them.”

[LFC]

Gov. Gavin Newsom is now calling for vigilante laws modeled after Texass's abortion law to be applied to guns. I can hardly wait until this reaches right-wing SCOTUS and they "somehow" figure out how to strike those down while propping up the anti-abortion laws. They really are partisan and corrupt at a level never seen in our lifetimes.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said he plans to use a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling on strict abortion curbs in Texas to design a law that would allow private citizens to sue some gun manufacturers, distributors and sellers.

Newsom, a Democrat, said on Saturday his team will work with state Attorney General Rob Bonta and the legislature to draft a proposal in line with the Texas law that would let citizens sue manufacturers, sellers or distributors of assault weapons or ghost gun kits for at least $10,000 per violation.

"I am outraged by yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Texas's ban on most abortion services to remain in place," Newsom said in a statement.

"If states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people's lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm's way."

Personally I would like to see this opened up to individual gun owners who do not follow safety procedures. Imagine the outrage if a parent was sued by another parent because when their kids played together they were able to access their gun and use it as a toy. That'll be $10,000 for your shitty parenting, please.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 12, 2021 15:42:37 GMT LFC said:

Gov. Gavin Newsom is now calling for vigilante laws modeled after Texass's abortion law to be applied to guns. I can hardly wait until this reaches right-wing SCOTUS and they "somehow" figure out how to strike those down while propping up the anti-abortion laws. They really are partisan and corrupt at a level never seen in our lifetimes.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said he plans to use a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling on strict abortion curbs in Texas to design a law that would allow private citizens to sue some gun manufacturers, distributors and sellers.

Newsom, a Democrat, said on Saturday his team will work with state Attorney General Rob Bonta and the legislature to draft a proposal in line with the Texas law that would let citizens sue manufacturers, sellers or distributors of assault weapons or ghost gun kits for at least $10,000 per violation.

"I am outraged by yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Texas's ban on most abortion services to remain in place," Newsom said in a statement.

"If states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people's lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm's way."

Personally I would like to see this opened up to individual gun owners who do not follow safety procedures. Imagine the outrage if a parent was sued by another parent because when their kids played together they were able to access their gun and use it as a toy. That'll be $10,000 for your shitty parenting, please.

Yeah I can a reason to open the proposed bill to include any owner who does not secure weapons properly.  How many kids commit suicide with a weapon they found in their own house.

[LFC]

Dec 12, 2021 19:19:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

Yeah I can a reason to open the proposed bill to include any owner who does not secure weapons properly.  How many kids commit suicide with a weapon they found in their own house.

And it should be expanded to the person who sold them the gun without a trigger lock or having them provide a signed form that they could store the gun safely.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 12, 2021 20:29:22 GMT LFC said:

Dec 12, 2021 19:19:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

Yeah I can a reason to open the proposed bill to include any owner who does not secure weapons properly.  How many kids commit suicide with a weapon they found in their own house.

And it should be expanded to the person who sold them the gun without a trigger lock or having them provide a signed form that they could store the gun safely.

Upon further reflection I can see that SCOTUS will strike down any such law by distinguishing it from the abortion law. They will say the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms is clearly established in the Constitution unlike anything related to abortion which, as Kavanaugh noted doesn't say anything about it, and is therefore "neutral" on it.  Not that I'm suggesting California shouldn't try it...need to force this Court to clearly show what politics it has.

[Traveler]

GV has it. AFAIK, Newsome's ban is on assault weapons only, not unsecured guns. Not that it wouldn't be a good idea.

[LFC]

I'm afraid Breyer is going to allow the Republicans to gain a multi-generational stranglehold on SCOTUS. There seems to be a certain brand of hubris that goes with these people, first with RGB and now Breyer. At every turn there appears to be another actor who, through obstruction and/or inaction, has failed to do what they can to stand up to the coming of fascism to America. Breyer is just one of the latest.

Senate Republicans are poised to deny President Joe Biden an appointment to the Supreme Court if they take the majority in the 2022 midterm elections.

Five Republican senators raised the stakes around Justice Stephen Breyer's retirement, telling CNN they'd oppose any likely nominee out of this White House.

But Democrats in the Senate and the White House, though they've come off the November elections more worried in recent weeks about a potential wipeout in the midterms, are still avoiding calling directly for Breyer to quit, fearing that it would backfire and encourage the 83-year-old to stay on the bench.

Breyer has told several people who've made unofficial efforts to push him to retire that he thinks the confirmation process shouldn't be political, according to people told of those discussions, and Democrats worry he'd remain as an act of resistance to show he's not bowing to politics.

Still, top Democrats across Washington would like Breyer to announce he's going even before the end of the court term in June, so they can get moving on confirmation hearings well before the midterms. More than the political calendar is on their minds -- with their 50-50 margin and several aging Senate Democrats coming from states with Republican governors, they head into the new year fearing that their control of the chamber could collapse at any moment.

Privately, multiple Senate Democrats complain that Breyer seems to have let his ego overtake him and he is not being realistic to how radically Supreme Court confirmation politics has changed in the last five years.

Publicly, they continue to approach Breyer gingerly. Asked if the 50-50 Senate divide, the health of his colleagues and Breyer's own health should accelerate the justice's timeline, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse chose his words carefully, noting that he'd deliberately avoided calling for Breyer's retirement.

"I would hope," the Rhode Island Democrat finally said, "the choice and its consequences are apparent to the justice."

[jackd]

This situation illustrates, by the way, why the Democrats can't just throw away Manchin; they need him for the majority. Should the majority switch, and Breyer decided to retire or died, Mitch would not allow a Biden appointment to be confirmed.

[LFC]

Dec 20, 2021 21:40:31 GMT jackd said:

This situation illustrates, by the way, why the Democrats can't just throw away Manchin; they need him for the majority. Should the majority switch, and Breyer decided to retire or died, Mitch would not allow a Biden appointment to be confirmed.

And if they need an excuse and have the House then they'll just impeach him over some random lie. Then the excuse becomes, "well we couldn't possibly consider a nominee from a president in the midst of being impeached."