Supreme Court Justices

[Cartmann99]

A general thread for the Justices and their shenanigans.

Alito Calls Landmark Supreme Court Decision Expanding LGBTQ Worker Rights ‘Indefensible’

Quote

Justice Samuel Alito is evidentially toting around an old grudge. 

At a Thursday night event at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, he had harsh words for the two conservative justices who joined the majority in Bostock v. Clayton County. 

The 2020 opinion said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, extends to gay and transgender workers. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, in which he was joined by the liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts. 

Speaking via a video feed Thursday, Alito called Gorsuch a “colleague and friend,” but said that grounding the decision in the text of the 1964 law was “in my view indefensible,” according to the Washington Post.

“It is inconceivable that either Congress or voters in 1964 understood discrimination because of sex to mean discrimination because of sexual orientation, much less gender identity,” Alito said. “If Title VII had been understood at that time to mean what Bostock held it to mean, the prohibition on discrimination because of sex would never have been enacted. In fact, it might not have gotten a single vote in Congress.”

His disdain for the opinion has long simmered. 

“The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship,” he wrote in his dissent. “It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Jus­tice Scalia excoriated — the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current val­ues of society.”

Alito wasn’t the only conservative enraged by the decision, and by Gorsuch and Roberts’ defections. 

“All those evangelicals who sided with Trump in 2016 to protect them from the cultural currents, just found their excuse to stay home in 2020 thank to Trump’s Supreme Court picks,” seethed conservative radio host Erick Erickson on Twitter. 

“Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards. This was not judging, this was legislating — a brute force attack on our constitutional system,” bemoaned Carrie Severino, president of the right-wing Judicial Crisis Network. 

While Alito was relitigating the old disagreement, protesters were posted up outside of the event to either celebrate or condemn a much fresher battleground: the justice’s leaked draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

Alito is a bigoted asshole.

[fraurosena]

This is apalling and actually really scary, and people should know that now you are not safe in your own homes anymore. This is just the beginning.You can bet that this will be expanded to the whole country under some pretext or other if the Republicans win the midterms.

 

[Xan]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This is apalling and actually really scary, and people should know that now you are not safe in your own homes anymore. This is just the beginning.You can bet that this will be expanded to the whole country under some pretext or other if the Republicans win the midterms.

 

WTH??  How is this legal?  Honestly, I think we ought to pack the court and diminish the influence of these crazy rightwing judges.  

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[WiseGirl]

What I think of the SC.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Supreme Court rulings represent the tyranny of the minority"

Quote

Everyone knows that the Founders were afraid of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why they built so many checks and balances into the Constitution. What’s less well known is that they were also afraid of the tyranny of the minority. That’s why they scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which required agreement from 9 of 13 states to pass any laws, and enacted a Constitution with much stronger executive authority.

In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”

Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.

These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.

Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholding a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.

Now, the Supreme Court has no obligation to follow the popular will. It is charged with safeguarding the Constitution. But it is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing. They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling (Roe v. Wade) that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by many scholars to overturn what had been settled law.

Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 — 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect “well-regulated” state militia. The Second Amendment hasn’t changed over the centuries, but the composition of the court has.

The majority conveniently favors state’s rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices (who are presumably antiabortion rights and pro-gun rights) are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices (who are presumably pro-choice and pro-gun control) do.

So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.”

The situation is actually even more inequitable: In all likelihood, Roe would not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016. McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.)

Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Dana Milbank: "The Supreme Court radicals’ new precedent: Maximum chaos"

Quote

Nobody should be surprised that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices on Friday jettisoned nearly 50 years of precedent upon precedent in overturning Roe v. Wade. Heck, they didn’t even honor their own precedent articulated 24 hours earlier.

In their opinion Thursday morning forcing New York and other densely populated states to allow more handguns in public, the conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that medieval law imposing arms restrictions — specifically, the 1328 Statute of Northampton — “has little bearing on the Second Amendment” because it was “enacted … more than 450 years before the ratification of the Constitution.”

Yet in their ruling Friday morning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, setting women’s rights back half a century (and cracking the door to banning same-sex marriage and contraception), the conservative justices, led by Samuel Alito (who was also in the guns majority) and joined by Thomas, argued precisely the opposite. They justified abortion bans by citing, among others, “Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise.” That was written circa 1250 and referred to monsters, duels, burning at the stake — and to women as property, “inferior” to men.

The right-wing majority’s selective application of history reveals the larger fraud in this pair of landmark rulings: Their reasoning is not legal but political, not principled but partisan.

Still, there is a commonality to the rulings. Both decisions foment maximum chaos and were delivered with flagrant disregard for the instability and disorder they will cause.

The high court was meant to be the guarantor of law and order. But the conservative justices, intoxicated by their supermajority, have abandoned their solemn duty to promote stability in the law and are actively spreading real-world disruption.

Worse, this invitation to disorder comes as the nation is trying to restore the rule of law after a coup attempt led by a president who appointed three of the five justices in the abortion majority. The spouse of a fourth — Ginni Thomas, Clarence’s wife — aggressively pushed state legislators and the White House to overthrow the election. Yet Thomas, the senior associate justice, has refused to recuse himself from related cases.

After decades of crocodile tears over imagined “judicial activism,” the conservative supermajority has shed all judicial modesty and embraced radicalism. The liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, wrote in their Dobbs dissent that the majority’s brazen rejection of stare decisis, respect for precedent, “breaches a core rule-of-law principle, designed to promote constancy in the law.”

Even Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who joined the gun ruling, scolded fellow conservatives for blithely overturning the Roe v. Wade super-precedent. “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed,” Roberts wrote. The majority’s “dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary,” he said, “a serious jolt to the legal system” that could have been avoided with a narrower decision that would have been “markedly less unsettling.”

Alito, in his (characteristically) sneering opinion in the abortion case, dismissed Roberts as unprincipled and public opinion as an “extraneous” concern. He likewise dismissed the pain the ruling would cause, writing that “this Court is ill-equipped to assess ‘generalized assertions about the national psyche.’ ” He washed his hands of answering the “empirical question” of “the effect of the abortion right … on the lives of women.”

The dissent said the majority’s refusal to address real-world consequences “reveals how little it knows or cares about women’s lives or about the suffering its decision will cause.” It is a “radical claim to power,” the dissent went on, to assert “the authority to overrule established legal principles without even acknowledging the costs of its decisions.”

The liberals described the bedlam to come, with suddenly unanswered legal questions about rape, incest, threats to a mother’s life, interstate travel for abortion, morning-after pills, IUDs, in vitro fertilization. “The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment,” they wrote.

Thomas’s gun ruling was much the same, 63 pages of a cherry-picked history of gun laws, with no concern for the real-life effect of allowing millions of people to carry handguns, with virtually no restriction, in the streets of New York or Los Angeles. Breyer, writing for the same liberal justices in dissent, upbraided the conservative majority for unleashing more guns “without considering the state’s compelling interest in preventing gun violence and protecting the safety of its citizens, and without considering the potentially deadly consequences of its decision.”

Alito added a concurring opinion to express contempt for Breyer’s points about gun violence, saying “it is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served” by his mentions of mass shootings and growing firearm mayhem.

The radicals have cast off any pretense of judicial restraint. Now the chaos begins.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[fraurosena]

The only thing that can theoretically be done is impeachment of the lying justices.

In order to be succesful in removing them, you'll need a two thirds majority in the Senate.

The crucial question is, is that realistically achievable in the coming midterms?

[Dandruff]

6 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The only thing that can theoretically be done is impeachment of the lying justices.

In order to be succesful in removing them, you'll need a two thirds majority in the Senate.

The crucial question is, is that realistically achievable in the coming midterms?

Two-thirds majority is one thing but successful impeachment of multiple justices is another.  Doubt it could happen.

[fraurosena]

7 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

Two-thirds majority is one thing but successful impeachment of multiple justices is another.  Doubt it could happen.

Oh, it's highly doubtful. In fact, I believe there is only 1 justice that could potentially be succesfully impeached: Brett Kavanaugh. And not because he lied, but because somebody paid off his considerable debts and he is compromised.

Even so, still highly doubtful. 

[Dandruff]

1 minute ago, fraurosena said:

Oh, it's highly doubtful. In fact, I believe there is only 1 justice that could potentially be succesfully impeached: Brett Kavanaugh. And not because he lied, but because somebody paid off his considerable debts and he is compromised.

Even so, still highly doubtful. 

Nice idea, though.

[Smash!]

Old thread but good advice 

 

[WiseGirl]

Fuckers. I didn't have dismantle public education on my SC Bingo card.

 

Yes it is.

 

[fraurosena]

Keep 'em dumb and un(der)educated, and you can make them believe anything you say...

[WiseGirl]

Pay attention to the other decisions as well.

Take a look at the voter ID decision in this list. Holy shite.  https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/25/politics/supreme-court-rulings-abortion-second-amendment/index.html

"U.S. Supreme Court's 'Miranda' decision further guts 150-year-old civil rights law." https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-courts-miranda-decision-further-guts-150-year-old-civil-rights-law-2022-06-27/

Or the prayer decision "Joseph Kennedy, a former high school football coach in Bremerton, Wash., had a constitutional right to pray on the field after his team’s games, the justices "ruled.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court-coach-prayers.html 

 

[47of74]

The supreme catholic court wasn't done yet.  There was another 6-3 decision to allow prayer in public schools.  

But this one might come back to haunt them.

 

[thoughtful]

I know the other decisions are a more immediate danger to the safety of people, but the prayer in school crap really burns me up, as well.

I spent 20 years as a public school teacher, at a supposedly secular job, in a supposedly liberal area, but surrounded by colleagues who'd gone to Catholic schools and wanted to recreate their elementary experience with our students.

I held my ground about not bringing religion into the music classroom, at least. But it was sometimes exhausting, and always fraught with anti-secular (and antisemitic, since I think many of them assumed I was just doing it because I was The Jew)  undertones from many of my co-workers.

I was not even in the evangelical deep South, but still needing to deal with the "gee, isn't everyone Christian?" shit.

[fraurosena]

It always astounds me just how religious the US are in comparison to my country. Here, public life is secular. Religion does not factor into it at all. That doesn't mean there aren't any religious people, or that there aren't any faith based schools, (heck, the university I work at is faith based) but it is never in the forefront. One's faith is one's own business and one doesn't 'show' it to the world. Most people aren't overtly religious. I would even go so far as to say that overt religiosity is somewhat frowned, or looked down, upon. It's simply 'not done'. Going to church on Sundays is only done by a small fraction of the public; and that faction is getting ever smaller. So every time I am confronted with just how much religion (or rather, christianity) plays a role in the daily lives of Americans, it's quite the culture shock.

A ruling such as this one wouldn't even enter the minds of our justices. It's too foreign a concept-- literally as well as figuratively.

 

[thoughtful]

On 6/28/2022 at 1:24 AM, fraurosena said:

It always astounds me just how religious the US are in comparison to my country. Here, public life is secular. Religion does not factor into it at all.

That's also true of my current area, and everywhere else I have lived in the US, including the place about which I posted above.

I'm in my late 60s, and nobody I've ever met socially or in a work setting has brought up religion with new people or casual acquaintances. I know, from hearing others talk about it, that the "nice to meet you, and where do you go to church?" thing happens in some places, but it has never happened to me.

I've occasionally been the object of proselytizing, but mostly by street preachers, doorknockers, and other people who I will never see again. Most of my experience has been that such things are socially unacceptable among people who expect to interact in the future. The Rods and Bro Gary would fall as flat in my area as they would in yours.

To say that "the US" is religious, or, for that matter, conservative or liberal, or mean  or kind, or funny, or anything else, would be inaccurate. It would be as if I said "people in Europe and the Middle East and some of Asia and most of Africa are all ________ " (insert one adjective here).

This country is enormous, and enormously varied. The "culture of the US" consists of the thousands of cultures of the entire world - some newly arrived, some filtered through many decades of changes and mixed with other cultures, and shaped by geography, climate, work, and many other things. I wouldn't claim to know the details and nuances of most of them, and I live here.

The separation of church and state is basic to our government, and, in my experience, also everyday life. I know it seems ironic that we actually have no state religion but you keep hearing about fanatical US Christians wanting prayer everywhere.

Until recently, our judges would never have done this kind of shit. The maniacal crap the Supreme Court is now doing is making the news not just because they are going against our law, but because it is not universally part of our culture.

I'm not pretending there isn't a serious problem. There are more of these dangerous people in this country than I wish there were, and I have to acknowledge that they exist and are trying to take over.

But reacting to the myth that people in the US bring religion into everything is falling for the image the far right is selling. They want us, and you, to think it's normal and all-American to assume everyone is Christian, or should be. Please don't give them the satisfaction of falling for the myth that the majority here is like that.

And I know, you posted right after my post about an actual experience with  US Christians who didn't seem to understand that everyone is not like them. So I do recognize that I might have inspired that thought.

But it's not the first time you (and others) have posted something like that. I know you mean well, but those posts often sound like people are lumping all US citizens together, thinking that running around with guns blazing and Jesus on our minds is universal here (other than those of us on FJ and a few others). It is not.

My story was an individual experience based on a specific setting, where the evangelical Protestants of the stereotype were actually not present at all, and nobody brought religious preaching or prayer into everyday life or government. I didn't go into detail, so I can see how it seemed to fit the mold.

That one's on me. So, if anyone is interested, there's more under the spoiler, about that specific situation.

Spoiler

When I took that job, in the 1980s, in a northeastern state, near a big city, I had good reason to think that both the area and the time would mean I'd be working with people who understood diversity. Multicultural sensitivity had been brought up in several of the interviews I'd had, including the one for that job.

The school system was in a town that, for years, had hired a lot of teachers who'd gone to Catholic schools, and the same college as one another. Many were friends or even relatives.

A lot of them shared a whole set of memories of what school was like, and should be like. They were cultural Catholics (some also observant Catholics) of European descent.

The town, for a long time, had been a conservative pocket trying to keep outsiders at bay. A brief time when there was a new administration, trying to be progressive, led to my being hired, as well as a few others who didn't fit the old mold.

The town, and school enrollment, had recently grown. The job I filled had been the responsibility of the high school/middle school choral teacher, who, when told that responsibility for music in the elementary schools was now going to be a separate job, chose to stick with the older kids.

She had close friends among the elementary teachers, who were primed and ready to resent anyone given the job. They were quite the Mean Girl clique, who met periodically to talk about how they were the best, and gave out an award each year, to one of their little group! They loved to prey on new hires - there were stories of their making other teachers cry in meetings.

And I didn't know any of this history, other than the fact that the previous teacher had chosen the upper grades, when I got there.

My colleagues weren't teaching Christian doctrine, or going on and on about Jesus. A lot of them just made a huge fuss about Christmas (some also made a big deal of Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Valentine's Day - but Christmas was the biggest, eating up most of December).

Some claimed they were teaching kids about all of the "winter festivals" of the world, since just blatantly celebrating Christmas in a public school was frowned upon.

But they were mostly teaching traditions about which they were sentimental, as far as I could tell. One had her first grade kids make paper crowns with candles drawn on them, and marched them through the school for The Feast of St. Lucia. A kindergarten teacher told me she "didn't have to cover Khanuka" one year, since she had no Jewish students in her class that year.

Basically, most of their "multicultural" activities were different ways to celebrate Christmas. Nothing from other traditions was brought up at any other time of year.

I didn't try to stop them - I just didn't join them. I didn't do Christmas, and that led to some tension.

The fact that I did varied performances and interactive experiences for visiting parents throughout the year, rather than a Holiday Concert, was exciting for some of my colleagues, and sometimes an opportunity to collaborate. But it was disappointing to others, and made me a pariah to some of the old guard.

 One year, a few of them staged a performance of How the Grinch Stole Christmas with their students. They rehearsed with the Grinch carrying a menorah. A colleague saw that, was quite sure the point was that the Grinch was using it to light its way to the houses, and asked the principal to talk to them.

I guess it's possible that she misunderstood, that it was supposed to be one of the things the Grinch stole from the Whos, and this was the teachers' clumsy way of trying to be inclusive. But she felt quite clear about what she saw. I don't remember how it all ended, and I don't know what the truth was.

I had the impression that they were trying to fill what they perceived as a horrible emptiness in the school year because the music teacher wouldn't do Christmas.

However, I have no idea if they connected any of this with Christianity or Jesus. I have no idea if they suspected or disliked me due to my lack of belief, or even knew I was an atheist. To me, bringing Christmas into a public elementary school violates the separation of church and state, but I know not everyone feels that way.

I admit that I could be wrong about those former co-workers, and whether they'd want prayer in the public schools. Given the opportunity to actually lead students in prayer, they might all have understood that it was wrong, and refrained.

But I suspect that several might have leaped at the chance. And the SC's stupid   decision made me remember the fine line I walked in that job, the feeling of being an outsider, and the gratitude I felt that the law of the land was to separate church and state.

tl;dr - please let go of the stereotype that people in the US shove religion into everything. Most of us don't.

Edited June 29, 2022 by thoughtful
riffle

[Smash!]

Indeed the Supreme Court isn’t done yet. Chilling article by Laurence H. Tribe in the Guardian Does Justice Clarence Thomas want to overturn a landmark freedom of the press ruling?

Quote

On Monday, tucked away in a busy news cycle, was a quiet, subtle but no less terrifying judicial development. US supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas laid out the formula for destroying the free press.

Full article under spoiler

Spoiler

On Monday, tucked away in a busy news cycle, was a quiet, subtle but no less terrifying judicial development. US supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas laid out the formula for destroying the free press.

Thomas dissented to denial of certiorari in Coal Ridge Ministries Media v Southern Poverty Law Center with an opinion giving us more than a hint of precisely what he has in store. Freedom of the press has a rightwing target on its back. Thomas wrote that the court should “revisit” the landmark free press case of the 20th century, New York Times v Sullivan.

“Revisit” is judicial talk for “overrule”.

Thomas asserted that “New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity’.” He offered no evidence and made no argument in defense of his claim that the existing burdens on those who sue for defamation are indeed excessive, given the competing interests at stake.

Make no mistake. Overruling Times v Sullivan to make it much easier for public figures to sue their critics would strangle the media’s ability to report freely and speak critically about public figures, especially elected officials.

L B Sullivan was a city police commissioner in Montgomery, Alabama, who sued the Times and 60 eminent Americans over a full-page 1960 ad they had placed to raise money for Martin Luther King Jr’s budding civil rights movement. The ad called police actions against nonviolent protestors in Montgomery “an unprecedented wave of terror”.

That perspective wasn’t shared by all, but the ad was spot on in terms of accuracy except for some relatively immaterial factual errors. In the end, the court unanimously tossed out a $500,000 verdict against the Times on the grounds that a public official, to prove libel, must show that a publisher acted with knowledge that its statement was factually false or made with reckless disregard for the truth – what the law calls the “actual malice” standard.

The court wrote of America’s “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open”. Such debate, the court reasoned, requires “breathing room” for mistakes. Otherwise, the threat of defamation actions would chill robust public debate.

The chill is real. Imagine if, to terrify critics, political figures such as Donald Trump could weaponize the negligence standard Thomas would have the court install in place of the higher barrier that “actual malice” represents.

There is so much of great importance that we might never have learned. Case in point: the meager amount of factual material that would have been published about 6 January under the chill that a Thomas standard would generate might not have sufficed for the special House committee or the justice department to pursue an investigation of Trump’s role in the insurrection or of his role in the attempted coup of which the insurrection was a part.

Think of Cassidy Hutchinson as today’s Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who told the 1973 congressional select committee on Watergate of the existence of White House tape recordings that brought Nixon down. That might never have happened but for the freedom of the press made real by New York Times v Sullivan nearly a decade earlier.

If you need to pull one small thread from the now multi-layered evidentiary embroidery of the Trump saga that the current hearings are disclosing, consider this: two days after the insurrection, the media published reports that Trump was “gleeful” and “delighted” at the 6 January violence, a critical strand of criminal intent evidence should he be prosecuted for insurrection. The information came from White House insiders. Would they have shared it had there not been a significant legal deterrent to Trump falsely suing them for slander – New York Times v Sullivan?

We may never know those who were the sources. But today, a brave 25-year-old woman – far more courageous than her former boss, Mark Meadows – told us under oath that the glee was real. She testified that Trump said after hearing of the “hang Mike Pence” by Capitol invaders, that “Mike deserves it.”

She was in the room where it happened.

The history of 20th century totalitarianism tells us that to rule absolutely, strongmen need to destroy the press to keep truth from the public. Thomas’ dissent is effectively inviting litigants like Sarah Palin, who is appealing her loss, to help him pave that road to American carnage.

Thomas’ signal is a warning. There is comfort in the fact that he signed his dissent alone and in the prospect that a people alert to dangerous signs can keep their republic if they keep up their guard.

 

[Smash!]

SCOTUS is hard at work. From People Magazine Supreme Court Rules That States Can Prosecute Non-Native Americans Who Commit Crimes on Tribal Land

This quote stood out to me 

Quote

The verdict will be widely viewed as an attack on the sovereignty of tribal lands and a breach of agreements between the government and Native American tribes, as the McGirt ruling previously solidified several treaties between the two sides.

Hill weighed in after that ruling, stating, "It's incredibly important to the tribe to preserve the maximum amount of sovereignty that we have because that's how we protect our communities."

 

[byzant]

Oh wow they really are going for the all time asshole award. And the press stuff is terrifying not only taking rights but taking away the right to report and of course i'm sure it has nothing to do with Clarence Thomas history of sexual harassment 

[Xan]

I think Thomas is pissed.  He never got over the Anita Hill debacle and now people are complaining about his wife.  I think he'll definitely go after gay rights, contraception, and possibly interracial marriage.  After all, his own marriage would probably be grandfathered in and we know that he's all for claiming rights and climbing up but pulling the ladder up after him.  Once he gets what he wants, he doesn't care if anyone else is affected.

There's something really wrong with having a maniac president enabled to appoint three Supreme Court justices.  And, any way you look at it, they (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett) lied about Roe v. Wade during confirmation hearings.

Edited June 29, 2022 by Xan