The Supremes

[Mo Horn 8842]

 It is a sad chapter in American history, in which we are living. 

[Bama Chick 28596]

Can John Roberts and Stephen Breyer take a nice vacay to the Bermuda Triangle?

[Neonmoon 38129]

Sure, they’re making it harder for you to vote, but no biggie 

[formermav43 4606]

58 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Let's not forget all those HOT TAKES that we have a non-ideological 3-3-3 court.

No we don't.  It's 6-3.  They proved that today. 

There were half a dozen different 6-3 alignments this term.

[elfenix 34240]

6-3 on eating at the italian place instead of the mexican place isn't the same 6-3 as allowing unlimited dark money to bribe congress and the judiciary. 

[wildcat09 29354]

5 minutes ago, formermav43 said:

There were half a dozen different 6-3 alignments this term.

This is an absolutely worse-than-worthless way to evaluate the Supreme Court. 

[formermav43 4606]

Just now, wildcat09 said:

This is an absolutely worse-than-worthless way to evaluate the Supreme Court. 

I don’t see why it’s more worthless than blanket statements like “we have a 6-3 court.” Both seem pretty simplistic.

[wildcat09 29354]

Pro tip: it's not a sign of the Court's moderation or partisan neutrality if Sotomayor and/or Kagan join an opinion with Roberts and Kavanaugh, et al, to ensure a particular decision gets written a little more narrowly than say, Alito might write it.

On the matters that a majority of Americans care about, the simplistic explanation is the most accurate explanation and anyone who says differently is lying or doesn't know shit about the Court or the legal system.

[formermav43 4606]

1 minute ago, wildcat09 said:

Pro tip: it's not a sign of the Court's moderation or partisan neutrality if Sotomayor and/or Kagan join an opinion with Roberts and Kavanaugh, et al, to ensure a particular decision gets written a little more narrowly than say, Alito might write it.

I’d agree with that.

[Js1 85337]

If you REALLY want to parse it, we have a 4-3-2 court.  The "2" is Kavanaugh following Roberts around like a puppy.  I think he led the court in justices who voted the same as Roberts this term. 

[formermav43 4606]

Just now, Js1 said:

If you REALLY want to parse it, we have a 4-3-2 court.  The "2" is Kavanaugh following Roberts around like a puppy.  I think he led the court in justices who voted the same as Roberts this term. 

I’d pretty much agree with that too. 

[elfenix 34240]

kav is a roberts fanboi.  he filed a concurrence basically saying 'roberts is totally right go read what he wrote!'

[GRHorn 105]

 

Edited July 1, 2021 by GRHorn

[tx 3 putt 76958]

[tx 3 putt 76958]

so Texas can now ban voting in any precinct ?

[DonkeyCigars 143]

Whatever happened to adding 5 supreme court justices or whatever the "Pack the Courts" plank that Dems were saying and/or running on? Is that dead in the water?

[Beantown Express 2.0 6559]

2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

so Texas can now ban voting in any precinct ?

Don't be silly.  They will just pass a law that all votes in Harris, Dallas, Travis, and Bexar counties only count as 3/5ths of a vote.  

[Lurch 5930]

Whatever happened to adding 5 supreme court justices or whatever the "Pack the Courts" plank that Dems were saying and/or running on? Is that dead in the water?

I believe the presumption is that killing the filibuster was much more passable, and we obv can’t even get that done. There may not even be 45 votes for court packing, much less 50+1

[Queen Bitch 1692]

39 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

Whatever happened to adding 5 supreme court justices or whatever the "Pack the Courts" plank that Dems were saying and/or running on? Is that dead in the water?

Park’s closed. The Manchin out front shoulda toldya.

[Js1 85337]

50 minutes ago, DonkeyCigars said:

Whatever happened to adding 5 supreme court justices or whatever the "Pack the Courts" plank that Dems were saying and/or running on? Is that dead in the water?

It always was.  Joe Biden was never going to seriously add more SCOTUS justices. 

What the far left Dems say =/= what Joe Biden ran on. 

[GRHorn 105]

 

[Js1 85337]

2 hours ago, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

Don't be silly.  They will just pass a law that all Democratic votes in Harris, Dallas, Travis, and Bexar counties only count as 3/5ths of a vote, and all Republican votes count as 7/5ths of a vote.

fify.

[Satchel 6938]

It’s time to start packin’.

[Neonmoon 38129]

Sorry minorities

 

[gmr548 16580]

Sorry minorities
 

[GRHorn 105]

 

[Satchel 6938]

For all intents and purposes, the Court abolished the VRA. When it invalidated Article 5 in 2013, the Court cited Article 2 as the remaining fail safe. Today, they did away with that. The only remaining remedy is legislation.

[Captainant 27669]

2 hours ago, GRHorn said:

 

wow it's like you and @DonkeyCigars forget about how there's been a concerted effort to close polling locations in areas with concentrations of minorities (source: Reuters, source: NPR, source: Guardian). But I get it, yall prefer non-white folks to just remember their place, right? Tearing up the Civil and Voting Rights acts is MAGA after all.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Captainant

[elfenix 34240]

"oh you took time off your job and won't have money to eat tomorrow and rode the bus an hour out of your way but we moved your polling place last week, so, sorry, you're going to need to get there in the next 15 minutes or you won't be in line because we also reduced the polling hours.  and the bus route takes 45 minutes to get over there."

--GRhorn, probably.

[Js1 85337]

10 minutes ago, elfenix said:

"oh you took time off your job and won't have money to eat tomorrow and rode the bus an hour out of your way but we moved your polling place last week, so, sorry, you're going to need to get there in the next 15 minutes or you won't be in line because we also reduced the polling hours.  and the bus route takes 45 minutes to get over there."

--GRhorn, probably.

John Roberts sees no issue 

[tx 3 putt 76958]

1 hour ago, Js1 said:

John Roberts sees no issue 

 

fuck that douche. his war on voting rights is obsessive. the man is evil 

[wildcat09 29354]

Elie Mystal bringing the heat:

Quote

Conservatives have effectively accomplished their long-term goal of blotting the Fifteenth Amendment out of the Constitution with a bottle of White-Out. This has been the conservative project (whether those conservatives have called themselves “Democrats” or “Republicans” depends on the era) since the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870.

The Fifteenth Amendment, of course, prohibits both state and federal governments from denying the right to vote on the basis of race. Conservatives were shockingly effective at reading this amendment out of the Constitution for the first hundred years after its ratification. The amendment was so bad at stopping conservative racism that we needed a whole different rule, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which was ratified in 1964, to outlaw the poll tax, which had become a favorite way for white people to deny minority voting rights. 

Finally, in 1965, Congress passed, and Lyndon Johnson signed, the Voting Rights Act. This was the first real attempt to make illegal what the Fifteenth Amendment had technically already made unconstitutional. Section 2 of the Act prohibited states from enacting voting procedures that discriminated on the basis of race or color, and in 1982 Section 2 was amended to include the “totality of the circumstances”—meaning that courts should look at impact on minority voters, not just the plain text of the law—when determining if any individual voting restriction is in violation of the Act. 

The Voting Rights Act is to the Fifteenth Amendment what the Volstead Act was to the Eighteenth Amendment’s prohibition on alcohol. It gave form and function to the constitutional thought bubble. That’s because a Constitutional amendment, without a piece of legislation to enforce it or way to sue the government if violated, is less like a “law” and more like a “helpful suggestion.” White state governments have already proven that they can erect an entire system of political apartheid despite the existence of the Fifteenth Amendment, but they’ve had a much more difficult time getting around the Voting Rights Act. Oh, they’ve tried. But they never fully succeeded—until now.

Yesterday, in a Supreme Court case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Justice Samuel Alito told conservatives how to defeat the Voting Rights Act, once and for all. White supremacists don’t have  to storm the Capitol to hoard political power anymore. They just have to follow Alito’s instructions.

The issue in the case was pretty straightforward, as these things go. Arizona had enacted two voter restrictions: one outlawed “ballot harvesting”—which is the scary Republican label for, say, an older person giving their mail-in ballot to somebody else to walk it to the drop-off location. The other allowed the state to discard votes accidentally submitted at the wrong polling place. 
Both of these laws had the effect of suppressing minority voter participation. That’s not a conjecture I’m making based on my apparent Black superpower of understanding what white people are trying to do. That’s an empirical fact, one we know from the data we have from Arizona elections, and that was acknowledged by the Arizona defenders of the laws and the Supreme Court itself. These laws disproportionately affected voters of color, period. 

But the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court said that the racial bigotry inherent in these laws is fine, because they concluded it’s not that much bigotry. In the situation where ballots are cast in the wrong precinct, Alito noted that one percent of Hispanic, African American, and Native American voters cast votes in the wrong precinct (votes that can now be completely discarded in Arizona) while .5 percent of white voters did. Alito says that this disparity is too small to matter for the Voting Rights Act. 

This feels like a good time to mention that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by just .3 percentage points in the Arizona 2020 Presidential election. But hey, what’s a half-point of racism between friends in an allegedly representative democracy, amiright? 

Alito called this and other instances of voter suppression a “mere inconvenience” and concluded that, even if the inconveniences disproportionately affected voters of color, the disproportion wasn’t bad enough to violate the Voting Rights Act. 

Elena Kagan, joined by Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, blasted Alito’s framing in a dissent that is already more well-known than Alito’s majority opinion. It’s worth reading in full, but this part is stellar:

“And what is a ‘mere inconvenience’ or ‘usual burden’ anyway?… Consider a law banning the handing out of water to voters. No more than—or not even—an inconvenience when lines are short; but what of when they are, as in some neighborhoods, hours-long? The point here is that judges lack an objective way to decide which voting obstacles are ‘mere’ and which are not, for all voters at all times.”

Kagan’s mention of water was a clear reference to the current eruption of voter suppression being carried out by Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere. She was absolutely right to go there, because Alito’s awful logic will not stay in Arizona. Instead, it will give vote-suppression efforts (those already happening and those yet to come) a clear safe harbor to smuggle in all their bigotry.

Alito applies his new conception of the Voting Rights Act to laws restricting the “time, place, and manner” of voting. Alito then makes up a five-factor test to apply to these voter restrictions (spoiler alert: racists win), but the upshot is that, going forward, states that argue their voter suppression efforts only restrict when people can vote, where they can vote, and what they have to do in order to vote can functionally ignore the Voting Rights Act. It won’t matter if those time, place, and manner restrictions have a disparate racial impact. It won’t even matter if those restrictions are done with the express intent of racial bias. The presumption that voter restriction is illegal if it is designed to exclude or suppress minority voters has been replaced by Alito’s new ruling that the state can impose restrictions that merely inconvenience voters of color on purpose. 

Alito’s pathway will be adopted by other white courts and lawmakers eager to disenfranchise Black voters. The current Department of Justice lawsuit against Georgia will be an early example. I expect courts will soon be quoting Alito, not Kagan, as they issue decisions denying Black folks water while they wait to cast their ballots. Dehydration is just a minor inconvenience, after all. 

This country has lived under a regime of voting inconveniences before: it was called the Jim Crow South. Trying to guess which day the election was on (time) when the authorities would lie to you was pretty inconvenient. Having to walk halfway across the county to get to the one, barely advertised polling site (place) was pretty inconvenient. And having to prove clairvoyance and guess the number of jellybeans in a jar (manner) was sho’nuff inconvenient to American citizens trying to exercise their right to vote. It was the Voting Rights Act that tried to put a stop to all that, but now the six conservatives on the court have tried to put a stop to the Voting Rights Act.

This is what conservative justices have always been here to do. People think that the issue which unites conservative justices is hostility towards abortion or antipathy towards the LGBTQ    community or a shared passion for corporate malfeasance. And sure, conservatives broadly share horrible views about all that stuff. But the thing that truly binds a Trump judge with a Bush judge with a Ronald Reagan judge, the thing that reaches out across time and space to put Roger Taney in bed with William Rehnquist and John Roberts, is their rejection of Black voting rights and the laws and the precedents meant to protect them. The idea that the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits laws that say “No N***** Votes” but nothing else is the consistent theme of conservative voting-rights decisions. Unless the law explicitly uses the n-word, conservatives are going to tell you that it’s a “race neutral” restriction on voting and turn to stone. 

There is nothing that can be done about these people and their persistent attacks on voting rights other than to expand the court to dilute their influence. Congress can’t just pass a law, because conservative justices will overrule that law or limit it to the point that it loses all value. Congress can’t amend the Constitution, because, as we’ve seen, conservatives are entirely able to ignore constitutional amendments. (Even the comparatively simple poll tax amendment was ignored by conservative justices last year when the state of Florida reinstituted just such a tax for people who had been incarcerated.) We can’t elect “better leaders” at the state level who will refuse to pass voter suppression laws, because conservative courts have allowed Republicans to gerrymander districts to weaken minority voting rights. And we can’t elect better leaders at the national level because the Senate and the Electoral College bake-in white minority rule through the unequal representation of the Senate, which itself is a constitutional hangover from a “great compromise” with slaveholders. 

The only solution is to protect voting rights by expanding the courts with judges and justices who will protect voting rights, and then hope and pray that enough people avail themselves of their rights that the white supremacist rump of the Republican party never gets full control of all three branches of government again. That is the way. That is the only way. I know that is the only way because we’ve tried every other way. 

Conservatives will never stop trying to take away the right of nonwhite citizens to vote. That has been their unyielding position since the end of the Civil War. You can have a free and fair democracy, or you can have conservatives in control of the judiciary, but the history of this country says that you can’t have both.

 

 

[Satchel 6938]

Some of Justice Kagan’s stinging clap back:

But Kagan shot back by arguing that Alito and the rest of the majority ignored the historical context of the Voting Rights Act as well as the court’s own precedents. 

“The majority’s opinion inhabits a law-free zone. It congratulates itself in advance for giving Section 2’s text ‘careful consideration’ … and then it leaves that language almost wholly behind,” she wrote. "So too the majority barely mentions this court’s precedents construing Section 2’s text.”

She argued the plain reading of the law would have justices look at the effect of voting restrictions and not just the intent of the state legislators who drafted them, contending that any reduction in a polling place’s hours or ability to send a ballot to an election official via a third party are most likely to affect minority voters. 

“The majority says as little as possible about what it means for voting to be ‘equally open’ or for voters to have an equal ‘opportunity’ to cast a ballot,” she wrote. “It only grudgingly accepts — and then apparently forgets — that the provision applies to facially neutral laws with discriminatory consequences.” 

She cited late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the 1991 case Chisom v. Roemer in which he opined a supposedly neutral law that limited voter registration to only a few hours a week and thus made it more difficult for Black voters than white voters to register because of life circumstances would result in Black people having “less opportunity to participate in the political process than whites." 

She argued that in enacting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Congress “documented many similar (if less extreme) facially neutral rules” such as registration requirements and voting and registration hours and purging policies that resulted in disparities of voting opportunities. 

Turning specifically to Arizona’s voting laws, Kagan argued they had a disproportionate impact on iivoters

She noted that in 2012, Arizona accounted for about a third of the 35,000 ballots nationwide that were thrown out because they were cast in the wrong precinct. And she said that Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy resulted in Hispanic and African American voters’ ballots being thrown out at a statistically higher rate than those of white voters.

She argued that restrictions on ballot collection were especially burdensome for Native American voters in Arizona who “need to travel long distances to use the mail.” 

In summation, she argued that Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act to “address a deep fault in our democracy — the historical and continuing attempt to withhold from a race of citizens their share of influence on the political process,” and that it is up to Congress not the court to decide whether the law needs to be remade or not. 

“That law, of all laws, deserves the sweep and power Congress gave it. That law, of all laws, should not be diminished by the Court,” she wrote. 
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/561132-kagan-rips-conservative-colleagues-with-blistering-41-page-dissent

[WhatTheBuck 28781]

We all see what’s happening. 

[Willfully Horn 8017]

Gotdamnit man, time to learn to weld, or something.

 

 

[Js1 85337]

Hurry up.  Luckily even if he chooses 2022, the GOP still can't stop it. 

[wildcat09 29354]

It's so cool that the world is teetering on the edge of doom and the only sane people in politics are octogenarians who refuse to do anything to help but also refuse to get the fuck out of the way.

[Longhorn_Fan68 33870]

 

 

[wildcat09 29354]

 

Excuse me, I need to go light things on fire. 

[Js1 85337]

🤮

[Gap03 3307]

24 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

 

Excuse me, I need to go light things on fire. 

 

Pollees when asked questions about the Supreme Court:

 

 

 

[elfenix 34240]

[Hank Scorpio 17729]

 

[wildcat09 29354]

 

 

The Supreme Court is a wholly lawless institution.

 

 

[Js1 85337]

I am SHOCKED that Kav, Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas are political hacks that are now ok with things they didn’t like under Trump. Just truly mind blown 

[tx 3 putt 76958]

They need to be dragged out of their offices, tarred and feathered !

[Fudge Nuggets 19190]

Twice will be here any minute now to explain how there really wasn’t any other way they could rule. 

[wildcat09 29354]

Serious question: how long before a Trump-appointed district judge orders Biden to re-invade Afghanistan, or invade Iran or Pakistan? 

[wildcat09 29354]

Not a SCOTUS case yet, but...:

 

I can't wait for SCOTUS to issue a shadow docket order that any challenge to voter suppression laws is per se frivolous and any attorney bringing a challenge will be subject to sanctions.

[babysdaddy 2724]

I'm not a lawyer but curious about input from our surly legal team regarding the 6-3 decision on eviction moratorium ruling last night?