OK! It's About Time. The Court Thread!

[batmagadanleadoff]

It may be your policy of choice, but there's plenty of hope without court packing.

Like what? Neil Gorsuch and Bret Kavanaugh's car falling from a 300 feet cliff during a Dem administration? Get real.

Please don't ask questions and then answer them yourself and then tell me to "get real" because you reject the answer that I didn't give.

Oh, a little good-natured snarkiness never hurt anybody. But fair enough. So, like what?

I'm assuming that when you allude to other hope, you're referring to other solutions that don't involve tinkering with the judiciary.

Because there are plenty other things the Dems can do to the judiciary, besides pack it. And if they sweep into power, they won't need bipartisan cooperation.

The Constitution establishes and delineates very few of the Supreme and lower Court's functions. The Constitution establishes the courts, and lists a few kinds of cases that the court must, or may, hear. And very little else beyond that. Most of the court's functions and rules are determined by Congress and legislation, not just the size of the Court. So Congress can, for example, limit the jurisdiction, or the kinds of cases that the courts may hear. It can limit the length of the terms of judges and justices, including the judges and justices already on the bench.

But the Dems should expand the SCOTUS. Otherwise, they won't be able to legislate their way out of their predicaments. Because the Trump court will simply strike down whatever legislation Dems pass. And if you have doubts about this, look no farther than the ACA, which didn't even survive Trump's lower courts after he polluted the lower courts by filling almost 200 vacancies. And this from a legal theory that is widely viewed by a consensus of academics and legal experts and scholars as totally crackpot. As crackpot as the Trump judges.

[batmagadanleadoff]

quite the opposite. they were afraid Hillary could appoint a MORE LIBERAL judge if they voted "no" on Garland. by not taking action on his nomination, they could still vote 'yes' on him post-election if Hillary had won, because Obama wouldn't have wthdrawn the nomination. they werent going to SAY that of course.

I disagree, but now we're gonna get into mostly opinions instead of facts. There were cries from the rooftops and the mountaintops for Hillary to nominate someone much more liberal than Garland if she had won the election. That was a huge risk the GOP took if the reason you cite was the justification for the blockade. I think Hillary would've loved to dare the GOP to keep that seat open for another two, maybe four years. Plus, the Supreme Court would been deadlocked in an ideological and political 4-4 split for the most part, with the Dems holding a 5-3 advantage on most gender and abortion issues with Kennedy on the court. That would've been a much better position for Dems and liberals than the way it was with Scalia still on the court. So I strongly doubt that Hillary was averse to replacing Garland as the nominee.

So I still wonder, even right now -- why did the GOP go for that blockade, with its intellectually insulting rationale?

Another reason I'd disagree with your second point is because if Hillary had won the election, than the Dems almost surely win the Senate as well. And the GOP had to be thinking that. So with Dem control of both the WH and the Senate, Obama definitely withdraws the Garland nomination. And the Dems could then run out out the lame-duck session and wait for the new Dem controlled Senate to be sworn in, in order to take control of the process to replace Scalia without any GOP interference. So I doubt that the Garland blockade was motivated by a potential Hillary win. The GOP blocked Scalia's vacant seat to fill it with a like-minded justice. That was the only acceptable outcome for them.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Thanks to the GOP en masse blockade of every one of Obama's lower court judicial nominations after the GOP regained control of the Senate during the 2014 mid-term elections:

1 in every 4 circuit court judges is now a Trump appointee

Trump’s influence on the circuit courts is already deeply felt. Under his presidency, Trump and Senate Republicans have turned three federal appeals courts — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, based in New York City; the 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia; and the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta — from ones that were primarily filled with judges tapped by Democratic presidents into ones with a majority of Republican appointees, according to Wheeler.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

[batmagadanleadoff]

Liberals to Breyer: Time to retire

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/0 ... ire-455321

Agree. Breyer's 82 and this narrow window where the Dems will have both the White House and the Senate might not be there in 2022.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Liberals to Breyer: Time to retire

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/0 ... ire-455321

Agree. Breyer's 82 and this narrow window where the Dems will have both the White House and the Senate might not be there in 2022.

And quite frankly, I'm not gonna count my chickens until Georgia certifies both Ossoff and Warnock.

[Willets Point]

Cool. We need to nominate a justice who's 30 years old, has the ideology of Bernie Sanders, and the willingness to slip a poisoned pubic hair into Clarence Thomas' Coke can.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Now THAT'S a callback!

[batmagadanleadoff]

Great. But why just Thomas? That still leaves the conservatives with a 5-4 majority.

[Willets Point]

Thomas' replacement poisons Alito and they work their way on down. Can't do it all it once or it will arouse suspicions.

[Marshmallowmilkshake]

Cool. We need to nominate a justice who's 30 years old, has the ideology of Bernie Sanders, and the willingness to slip a poisoned pubic hair into Clarence Thomas' Coke can.

Suggesting the assassination of the Supreme Court's lone African-American justice -- or any justice -- is not OK.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Expand the Supreme Court. Do It Tomorrow.

In an unsigned order, the highest court's coward majority ruled that unconstitutional laws are cool so long as they're enforced by bounty hunters.
By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 2, 2021

My generally unfocused red-eyed rage at what the Supreme Court did late Wednesday night cleared momentarily and I realized that, according to the 5-4 decision allowing the blatantly unconstitutional anti-choice Texas law to stand, a state can pass all kinds of blatantly unconstitutional laws as long as they leave the enforcement of those laws to bounty hunters.

Jesus, we're back at the Kansas-Nebraska Act again.

This moment of clarity passed, quickly, and unfocused red-eyed rage reasserted itself. This was completely appropriate when directed at a corrupted Supreme Court majority which did what it wanted to do, legitimate precedents be damned, and through such preposterous playground illogic that William Blackstone should rise from his unquiet grave and smack all five of those hacks upside their watery heads with copies of his Commentaries. We all knew that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were bag-job nominations for the specific purpose of voting the way they did late Wednesday night, and we all knew that Neil Gorsuch and Sam Alito were just waiting in the weeds with Clarence Thomas, who’d been there longer than any of them. But, at their moment of ultimate triumph, they at least could have tried a little harder. I mean, look at this mess.

The State has represented that neither it nor its executive employees possess the authority to enforce the Texas law either directly or indirectly. Nor is it clear whether, under existing precedent, this Court can issue an injunction against state judges asked to decide a lawsuit under Texas’s law…

Finally, the sole private-citizen respondent before us has filed an affidavit stating that he has no present intention to enforce the law. In light of such issues, we cannot say the applicants have met their burden to prevail in an injunction or stay application. In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit. In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts.

The Supreme Court of the United States is saying two things here: 1) that it really doesn’t understand the law it is being asked to adjudicate, and 2) that the Texas law, which depends upon a transparent scheme to dodge judicial review, is beyond the Supreme Court’s reach because its transparent scheme to dodge judicial review is so cleverly drawn. No wonder the five cowards in the majority issued their order unsigned. I wouldn’t want my name attached to this pile of offal, either.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were not so reticent, and they clearly can see a church by daylight. From Sotomayor:

The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand…Because the Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent…In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.

The Legislature fashioned this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of enforcing. By prohibiting state officers from enforcing the Act directly and relying instead on citizen bounty hunters, the Legislature sought to make it more complicated for federal courts to enjoin the Act on a statewide basis.

Today, the Court finally tells the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked. The structure of the State’s scheme, the Court reasons, raises “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that counsel against granting the application, ante, at 1, just as the State intended. This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.

For her part, Kagan expanded her anathemas to include the Court’s continuing abuse of its “shadow docket,” of which this order is the apotheosis.

Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the Court’s “shadow-docket” decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process. That ruling, as everyone must agree, is of great consequence. Yet the majority has acted without any guidance from the Court of Appeals—which is right now considering the same issues. It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail. In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-docket decision-making—which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.

(It is notable that Chief Justice John Roberts joined the minority in dissent. This further reinforces my belief that the only issues on which Roberts is reliably implacable are restricting the franchise and enhancing the corporate power of the oligarchy. That’s why Citizens United is his defining decision. For Roberts, that was a two-fer.)

Expand the Court. Do it tomorrow. Jesus Christ, a 5-4 majority just ruled that a cheap legal three-card monte game at the heart of a law was too clever for the Constitution to address. This whole decision reeks of the same kind of corruption that afflicted the 1919 World Series.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... rtion-law/

[Ceetar]

woah, pot shot at Joe Jackson.

It'll never work because the Democrats are already super conservative as a group and at least two Senators are actually republicans in all but name.

[batmagadanleadoff]

The second part of the GOP strategy to curtail abortion rights:

The second part of the strategy? Installing far-right judges who will aid this sabotage. Toward the end of President Barack Obama’s term, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked more than 100 judicial appointees, and then under President Donald Trump filled them at breakneck speeds with the most extreme, far-right reactionaries available. The result: Courts like the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is, in the words of University of Texas Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck, “as conservative a federal appeals court as any of us have seen in our lifetimes.” Last week, the 5th Circuit jumped to prevent an injunction that would have stopped S.B. 8 from taking effect.

With the Supreme Court now packed with Trump appointees, abortion opponents are getting bolder in their schemes to undermine Roe.


From WAPO's To stop abortion opponents, the only solution is mass mobilization

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ilization/

[Lefty Specialist]

Well, mass demonstrations in pink hats won't change anything. Democrats acting like Democrats will.

There'll be a Two Americas on abortion very soon; states where it'll be legal and states where it won't. By the by, the Supreme Court of Mexico just decriminalized abortion for the first time today.

[Ceetar]

Science will prevail of course, you can get an abortion with pills in the comfort of your own home. Obviously this will affect poor people more, because #america, but it'll happen. It might drive people to sketchier internet sites that'll ship to Texas, or someone in another state that will repack it for you, but they'll still happen.

Of course, it's not really about abortion, and there are plenty of other evils the authoritarian republicans courts are doing that won't be as easily circumvented. I see renewed push to expand the courts the last week or so, but feels like it'll again fall on deaf ears in Congress.

[Lefty Specialist]

Expanded court is dead unless you get another 4-5 Democratic Senators in 2022. They're working on ways to outlaw the pills as well as contraception in general. That's Phase II in the Handmaid's Tale manual.

Abortions will always happen; they've happened since the dawn of time. They'll just be unsafe in a lot of the country. And rich white girls will ALWAYS be able to get abortions regardless of how far down the path we go.

[batmagadanleadoff]

They wouldnt have to pack the courts if they'd voted Hillary in. But she wasn't perfect enough for a lot of these Dems now gnashing their teeth at the new Texas law and the apparent doomed fate of Roe v Wade.

Which was all very foreseeable on Election Day 2016. Hillary not winning probably set back the Dems by decades.

[MFS62]

Trump's Supreme Court additions are showing their true colors.
https://theweek.com/roe-v-wade/1004551/ ... rue-colors

Liars:

Still, it's worth remembering that during their confirmation hearings, each justice — and, often, their supporters — danced around the question of how they might rule on the issue, giving noncommittal answers that sometimes sounded almost as though they accepted Roe as settled law.

Later

[seawolf17]

They wouldnt have to pack the courts if they'd voted Hillary in. But she wasn't perfect enough for a lot of these Dems now gnashing their teeth at the new Texas law and the apparent doomed fate of Roe v Wade.

Which was all very foreseeable on Election Day 2016. Hillary not winning probably set back the Dems country by decades.

Fixed that for you.

[Willets Point]

The Insurrectionist Party is totally going to succeed in blocking Ketanji Brown Jackson despite being in the minority, aren't they? The Democratic Party's cargo cult around BiPaRtIsAnShIp will once again have them collaborating in their own destruction. They're so fucking useless.

[seawolf17]

No. She'll get through 54-46 or something like that, which is still bullshit because it should be unanimous, but this is our country now.

[Willets Point]

I got an email from my Senator asking me to sign a petition supporting Jackson's confirmation, which is strange since that is his job. But he's one of the progressive ones so I fear he's gearing up for a fight with the more conservative Dems in the Senate.

[Edgy MD]

It's almost like it's a compound e-mail capture.

We have your e-mail, but if you sign this, it puts you on a higher profile list of e-mails that bear more fruit.

[batmagadanleadoff]

The Insurrectionist Party is totally going to succeed in blocking Ketanji Brown Jackson despite being in the minority, aren't they? The Democratic Party's cargo cult around BiPaRtIsAnShIp will once again have them collaborating in their own destruction. They're so fucking useless.

I havent been hearing or reading about anything to suggest that Jackson's nomination is on shaky grounds. But I definitely get your larger point. A part of me is hoping that the GOP sweeps into power in 2024, pulling off the trifecta sweep and the first thing they do after they win, like three minutes after they possibly can, is to kill the filibuster. Because the Dems kinda deserve that. Fuck it. I can't get pregnant anyways so I wont ever be in the market for an abortion.

[Lefty Specialist]

Jackson will be confirmed. Sinema and Manchin are fully on board. One or two Republicans might cross over, but that's window dressing. Now let's see how bad Clarence Thomas' "flu-like symptoms" are.