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  On 8/26/2024 at 3:08 PM, C-Man said:

Do Americans Have a Constitutional Right to an AR-15? Gun-Rights Groups Ask the Supreme Court

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/do-americans-have-a-constitutional-right-to-an-ar-15-gun-rights-groups-ask-the-supreme-court-aa34fd50

 

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Not only do they have a right to an AR-15, they have an obligation to own one.--Clarence Thomas

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Annnd they've struck down Biden's restructured student loan forgiveness plan.  Yay.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/us/politics/supreme-court-biden-student-loans.html

 

Supreme Court Blocks, for Now, Another Biden Student Debt Plan

The move followed a decision last year that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority by trying to forgive more than $400 billion in student loans.

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  On 8/28/2024 at 7:15 PM, DDD Dad said:

Annnd they've struck down Biden's restructured student loan forgiveness plan.  Yay.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/us/politics/supreme-court-biden-student-loans.html

 

Supreme Court Blocks, for Now, Another Biden Student Debt Plan

The move followed a decision last year that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority by trying to forgive more than $400 billion in student loans.

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For the masses, let's summarize the legal rule pronounced and applied by this SCOTUS:

Presidential authority and power is complete and total, and the POTUS has complete immunity for anything he does.....unless the POTUS is a Democrat, in which case nothing he does is legal or allowable, and he has no immunity for it and should probably be sent directly to prison, which is how we'll rule as soon as we're presented with that question.

Yes, because a court is made of human beings, there's always a "Calvinball" ELEMENT to it.....but this SCOTUS went from "air of legitimacy" to "complete joke that no rational person should take seriously" in the blink of an eye.  I practice in subject matter and before courts that have to follow SCOTUS precedents, and I can say pretty comfortably that the current SCOTUS has no credibility or legitimacy.  We all follow its rulings only out of habit and a deference to what once was.  I don't know how long that will last.

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I hit 120 payments needed for Public Service Loan Forgiveness 5 months ago. But each time it gets ready to be forgiven, I get an email saying "sorry! a federal court just struck down blah, blah, blah . . . so we'll need to put a forbearance on your account until we figure this out."

 

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  On 8/28/2024 at 7:50 PM, Foosters said:

I hit 120 payments needed for Public Service Loan Forgiveness 5 months ago. But each time it gets ready to be forgiven, I get an email saying "sorry! a federal court just struck down blah, blah, blah . . . so we'll need to put a forbearance on your account until we figure this out."

 

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GAWD you're such a freeloader, working 10 years of public service and making on time payments...

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HBA's live YouTube continuing education today features two lawyers who've been breaking the government on behalf of fossil carbon (and particularly coal which is dying hard anyway) over the last couple of decades. Did much of the heavy lifting in West Virginia v EPA and then killing Chevron. Very tempted to troll them hard in the comments.  

 

This dick just bragged about writing an op-ed in the WSJ that after West Virginia, Chevron was going to die next. Good job, everyone on Leonard Leo's payroll has been going that way for a decade so it was entirely predictable, but you're a Swami.

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  On 9/6/2024 at 5:08 PM, elfenix said:

HBA's live YouTube continuing education today features two lawyers who've been breaking the government on behalf of fossil carbon (and particularly coal which is dying hard anyway) over the last couple of decades. Did much of the heavy lifting in West Virginia v EPA and then killing Chevron. Very tempted to troll them hard in the comments.  

 

This dick just bragged about writing an op-ed in the WSJ that after West Virginia, Chevron was going to die next. Good job, everyone on Leonard Leo's payroll has been going that way for a decade so it was entirely predictable, but you're a Swami.

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Do It GIF by Breaking Bad

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  • 2 weeks later...

Roberts sucks as much as any justice in history.

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  On 9/15/2024 at 12:15 PM, HenryJames said:

Roberts sucks as much as any justice in history.

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Surly lawyers be like

3te0a9.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=49088e229a81f9

 

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Coming to SCOTUS in a few years . . . completely unqualified Trump-appointed district court judge decides to upend 160 years of precedent. 

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Kathryn Mizelle was barely removed from her clerkship when Donald Trump tapped her for the federal bench in the waning days of his administration.

***

Yesterday, she declared the False Claims Act qui tam provision unconstitutional. The law has been on the books since ABRAHAM LINCOLN signed it into law and existed as a concept dating back to the Middle Ages as described in the English common law treatises that conservative judges usually love to cite. It enjoys a long history in the Anglo-American legal canon as a necessary tool allowing private citizens to recover damages owed to the United States government that might otherwise go unclaimed. For this, she ginned up an Article II theory not unlike the one Judge Mizelle’s counterpart Aileen Cannon recently used to conclude that Special Counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution by existing based on a Clarence Thomas opinion (writing for himself alone!) where he complained that no one else on the Supreme Court agreed with him. Essentially, claiming that the Constitution forbids anyone from acting for the benefit of the United States unless they’re appointed by the president.

***

She says “although” the Supreme Court and her circuit have explicitly not declared the over 160-year-old law unconstitutional, she is going to decide “what if it is?”

A more conscientious and good faith DISTRICT JUDGE would apply the law as it presently exists, leaving it to higher courts to decide if they want to stop reserving this cockamamie Article II theory. An envelope-pushing trial judge could apply existing law and bloviate for 53 pages about how much they disagree with it, hoping to catch a stray nod from a future controlling opinion. It’s not particularly professional, but at least it preserves the role of a district judge. Mizelle will eschew these options.

***

One thing you might notice here is the lack of even A SINGLE CITE TO RELEVANT AUTHORITY. Zilch. Nada. Concurrences, dissents, a fart-sniffing internal Bill Barr statement. No majority Supreme Court, Eleventh Circuit, sibling circuit opinion. Not even a stray district court opinion from some far-flung district. She couldn’t even get ChatGPT to make up some fake cites for good measure. There’s just nothing here!

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But it’s actually a much bigger — and apolitical — deal to have bottom rung trial judges running around inventing new constitutional law “although” higher courts have refused. The judiciary is tiered for a reason. Forcing trial judges to apply existing law, even if they don’t like it, discourages litigants from pursuing costly and frivolous challenges to the status quo. It also prevents the appellate courts from having to run constant clean up on rogue district court opinions when there is a presumption in favor of maintaining existing law. A predictable business litigation environment relies on stacking the deck against judges making radical changes to the law willy-nilly just to impress their friends.

One might even call this approach “little-c conservative.”

Given the makeup of the Eleventh Circuit and the Supreme Court, Mizelle might be correctly reading the tea leaves and those bodies — despite not having the votes to strike down Lincoln’s Law previously — may be on the verge of taking a sledgehammer to precedent. But that shouldn’t matter… it’s not HER job to do that. It’s her job to preside over this case and let the appellate process play out.

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https://abovethelaw.com/2024/10/trump-judge-proves-again-why-shes-known-as-one-of-americas-least-qualified-jurists/

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  On 10/2/2024 at 2:40 PM, Jive Turkey said:

Coming to SCOTUS in a few years . . . completely unqualified Trump-appointed district court judge decides to upend 160 years of precedent. 

https://abovethelaw.com/2024/10/trump-judge-proves-again-why-shes-known-as-one-of-americas-least-qualified-jurists/

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Thanks for posting that.  Just another warning of the damage that the Federalist Society is doing to the federal judiciary.  That article is well done, and it feels like the author was channeling Brisket on the parts about "history and tradition":  

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Given the mandate of the conservative Supreme Court majority in Dobbs that laws only count if they’re “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” one might not expect a right-wing judge to throw out a law with nearly 200 years of unquestioned validity. But that presumes that “history and tradition” amount to anything more than an empty marketing slogan that these folks drag out whenever they want to say that the Framers may have had robust gun control laws but they never SPECIFICALLY said you couldn’t bring an assault rifle on an electric train.

Today’s frequent use of the FCA’s qui tam provision emerged relatively recently. Although the FCA as enacted in 1863 permitted relator suits, it took a package of prorelator amendments in 1986 to elevate the device from obscurity. At least one study found that the DOJ’s records reveal only three qui tam actions in the four decades between 1943 and 1986, see WILLIAM L. STRINGER, THE FALSE CLAIMS ACT AMENDMENTS: AN ASSESSMENT OF ECONOMIC IMPACT 23 (1996) (admitting that the records are incomplete but concluding that qui tam actions were “undoubtedly very few”), while others estimate that the “DOJ used to receive about six qui tam cases a year” before the 1986 amendments, Steve France, The Private War on Pentagon Fraud, 76 A.B.A. J. 46, 48 (1990). Whatever the precise figure, the relator amendments triggered an explosion of qui tam lawsuits. See 2023 FCA Stats at 1–2 (showing 31 new FCA qui tam matters in fiscal year 1987 rising to 712 new qui tam matters in 2023).

Credit where it’s due, Mizelle didn’t have to include the parenthetical admitting that her primary source admitted he was basically making it up based on incomplete records. On the other hand, it’s the sort of addition that should’ve kept the cite out of the opinion entirely. But this again gives us occasion to remember the risks posed by the cottage industry of building a body of “History-ish” publications for judges to cite whenever the actual record can’t back it up. It’s an accelerating problem with student journals publishing historical claims that could not pass scholarly peer review, but provide Federalist Society judges historical sounding factoids to insert into string cites. Indeed, one of the authors at the heart of the recent controversy over flimsy academic claims is right there in this opinion!
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Bonus tidbits from another article written by that same guy:

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Another reminder that America’s Second Amendment jurisprudence is now governed by vibes masquerading as history. A right-wing jurist of the last generation called the Second Amendment theory that would eventually be enshrined — for the first time — in Heller as a “fraud on the American public,” but years of law review articles compiling flimsy historical Mad Libs in favor of unfettered gun rights provided the Court the foundation it needed to rewrite constitutional law under the fig leaf of originalism.

Originalism.jpeg

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carl-chef-kiss.gif

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  On 10/2/2024 at 3:22 PM, Gap03 said:

Bonus tidbits from another article written by that same guy:

carl-chef-kiss.gif

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Yep.  Perfectionism.

I remember being a young aspiring attorney, and reading up on "modalities" of constitutional interpretation.  "Originalism" had the veneer of intellectual honesty -- it was its main attractor, actually.  But once you do ANY digging in to how it actually works....you realize that it is a trojan horse: it is perhaps the most intellectually DISHONEST mode of interpretation, cloaked in a false identity of honesty.

Originalism is sold as the bulwark against "judicial activism."  But in reality, it's the surest gateway to naked judicial activism there is.  It's total fucking garbage.

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  On 10/2/2024 at 3:39 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  Perfectionism.

I remember being a young aspiring attorney, and reading up on "modalities" of constitutional interpretation.  "Originalism" had the veneer of intellectual honesty -- it was its main attractor, actually.  But once you do ANY digging in to how it actually works....you realize that it is a trojan horse: it is perhaps the most intellectually DISHONEST mode of interpretation, cloaked in a false identity of honesty.

Originalism is sold as the bulwark against "judicial activism."  But in reality, it's the surest gateway to naked judicial activism there is.  It's total fucking garbage.

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Or...every accusation is a confession example eleventybillion.

For those interested in reading further, I suggest "Worse Than Nothing" by Erwin Chimerensky.

 

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The roberts court continues to be dogshit and play politics with its unopinioned rulings 

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-emergency-abortion-texas-bf79fafceba4ab9df9df2489e5d43e72

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Without detailing their reasoning, the justices kept in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations that would violate Texas law.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court order, arguing that hospitals have to perform abortions in emergency situations under federal law. The administration pointed to the Supreme Court’s action in a similar case from Idaho earlier this year in which the justices narrowly allowed emergency abortions to resume while a lawsuit continues.

The administration also cited a Texas Supreme Court ruling that said doctors do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide an abortion legally. The administration said it brings Texas in line with federal law and means the lower court ruling is not necessary.

Texas asked the justices to leave the order in place, saying the state Supreme Court ruling meant Texas law, unlike Idaho’s, does have an exception for the health of a pregnant patient and there’s no conflict between federal and state law.

Doctors have said the law remains dangerously vague after a medical board refused to specify exactly which conditions qualify for the exception.

There has been a spike in complaints that pregnant women in medical distress have been turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate strict laws against abortion.

Pregnancy terminations have long been part of medical treatment for patients with serious complications, as way to to prevent sepsis, organ failure and other major problems. But in Texas and other states with strict abortion bans, doctors and hospitals have said it is not clear whether those terminations could run afoul of abortion bans that carry the possibility of prison time.

The Texas case started after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, leading to abortion restrictions in many Republican-controlled states. The Biden administration issued guidance saying hospitals still needed to provide abortions in emergency situations under a health care law that requires most hospitals to treat any patients in medical distress.

Texas sued over that guidance, arguing that hospitals cannot be required to provide abortions that would violate its ban. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court Appeals sided with the state, ruling in January that the administration had overstepped its authority.

 

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This supreme court is full of charlatans and drunks and fascists

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/kavanaugh-trump-white-house-fbi-report/

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The report, which was produced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a Judiciary Committee member and leading critic of the Kavanaugh confirmation, and provided to The Washington Post ahead of a public release on Tuesday, provides additional evidence of the tight control exercised by the White House over the FBI investigation — despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

 
 

The report found that messages to the FBI tip line regarding Kavanaugh were forwarded directly to the White House and never probed, and that the FBI had no written protocols for the supplemental background investigation ordered by the White House. It notes that the FBI was instructed by the White House to talk to 10 potential witnesses and was not given the leeway to pursue corroborating evidence — the absence of which was cited by senators as they narrowly voted to confirm Kavanaugh, marking a major triumph for the conservative movement and locking in a right-leaning majority that would later overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

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Trump ordered the additional inquiry following nationally televised testimony by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had groped her and tried to take off her clothes more than three decades earlier, when they were in high school at a party in suburban Maryland. Another accuser, Deborah Ramirez, had come forward in a New Yorker story, saying Kavanaugh had shoved his penis into her face during a dorm party when they were at Yale University in the early 1980s.
 

“The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” said Blasey Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks.

 

An attorney for Ramirez, John Clune, said of the report: “It’s really disappointing since our client was so candid about something that was a pretty awful experience.”

Kavanaugh did not respond to a request for comment sent to the Supreme Court on Monday. Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Kavanaugh was unfairly slandered and smeared with lies.”

Some of the limits placed by the Trump White House on the inquiry were widely reported at the time. The FBI did not question Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford about the allegations. Nor did the FBI interview dozens of people whose names were provided by lawyers for Blasey Ford and Ramirez who said they could have offered corroborating evidence. It was also clear at the time that the FBI was not conducting a criminal investigation in which it would have broad authority,
 

...
 

In an interview, Whitehouse said the review of the FBI probe took six years because of resistance from both the Trump and Biden administrations to providing correspondence with the FBI, access to FBI officials and answers to questions about the investigation. Until 2021, the only information Democratic senators said they were able to obtain about the procedures for a supplemental background investigation was a publicly accessible YouTube video explaining how the FBI tip line works.

 
 

“Assurances that everything was being done by the book and according to standard FBI procedures omitted the fact that for supplement background investigations, there is no book and there are no procedures,” Whitehouse said. “You simply do what the White House tells you.”
 

The report notes there was no dedicated tip line set up for the Kavanaugh inquiry; members of the public used a preexisting portal called the National Threat Operations Center. The FBI received more than 4,500 calls and electronic messages related to Kavanaugh and was directed to forward the tips to the White House without pursuing any possible leads, according to the report. Even when senators contacted the FBI directly with the names of people who claimed to have relevant information about Kavanaugh, the FBI did not contact them.
 

The report described how two days before voting on Kavanaugh, senators were
given about an hour to review more than 1,600 pages of material collected by the FBI, mostly raw information from the tip line. Neither the FBI nor the White House explained whether the tips had been reviewed, Whitehouse said.

“It all went up to the White House for a decent burial,” Whitehouse said, “with no investigation whatsoever.”

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“Assurances that everything was being done by the book and according to standard FBI procedures omitted the fact that for supplement background investigations, there is no book and there are no procedures,” Whitehouse said. “You simply do what the White House tells you.”

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  On 10/8/2024 at 3:10 PM, Captainant said:

This supreme court is full of charlatans and drunks and fascists

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/kavanaugh-trump-white-house-fbi-report/

“Assurances that everything was being done by the book and according to standard FBI procedures omitted the fact that for supplement background investigations, there is no book and there are no procedures,” Whitehouse said. “You simply do what the White House tells you.”

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Project 2025 is a book.

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Must allow illegal maps to stand because February is too close to an election but a state can dump voters off the rolls less than 90 days before an election (in violation of federal law) because reasons 

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Republican officials in Virginia to revive a plan aimed at removing noncitizen voters from the rolls ahead of next week’s election.

The justices blocked a federal judge’s ruling that put the program on hold and required the state to restore 1,600 voters to the rolls.

...

Groups that sued, including the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said the process drew in people who might have indicated they were not citizens at that time but have subsequently become U.S. citizens. Civil rights groups and the Biden administration both provided evidence of U.S. citizens who had likely been removed from the rolls as a result.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-virginia-purge-noncitizens-voter-rolls-ahead-elec-rcna177673

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  On 10/30/2024 at 4:53 PM, elfenix said:

Must allow illegal maps to stand because February is too close to an election but a state can dump voters off the rolls less than 90 days before an election (in violation of federal law) because reasons 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-virginia-purge-noncitizens-voter-rolls-ahead-elec-rcna177673

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I mean this in all seriousness, the DOJ should simply behave as if this ruling is invalid. Order state officials not to purge the rolls and arrest them if they attempt to do so.  What the fuck is Sam Alito going to do about it? 

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  On 10/30/2024 at 4:54 PM, wildcat09 said:

I mean this in all seriousness, the DOJ should simply behave as if this ruling is invalid. Order state officials not to purge the rolls and arrest them if they attempt to do so.  What the fuck is Sam Alito going to do about it? 

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Fly his MAGA flag upside down 

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So is now the time to re-visit whether Kagan and Sotomayor should step down?  The Senate majority is fragile, but how do we feel about the Dems having any firmer control over the Senate over the next decade the way things are currently going?   

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  On 11/6/2024 at 8:50 PM, Gap03 said:

So is now the time to re-visit whether Kagan and Sotomayor should step down?  The Senate majority is fragile, but how do we feel about the Dems having any firmer control over the Senate over the next decade the way things are currently going?   

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They won't but they should. Dems might actually have a shot at retaking the senate in 2026, but it won't matter then obviously and any presidential election in 2028 will be hopelessly rigged by GOP state-level officials and the courts.

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  On 11/6/2024 at 8:50 PM, Gap03 said:

So is now the time to re-visit whether Kagan and Sotomayor should step down?  The Senate majority is fragile, but how do we feel about the Dems having any firmer control over the Senate over the next decade the way things are currently going?   

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I think an area that Trump could get a bipartisan win for both sides would be to expand the SC. Maybe go to 12 or 15 Justices?  I think Biden wanted to do this originally, but didn’t have support of Congress.

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  On 11/6/2024 at 8:50 PM, Gap03 said:

So is now the time to re-visit whether Kagan and Sotomayor should step down?  The Senate majority is fragile, but how do we feel about the Dems having any firmer control over the Senate over the next decade the way things are currently going?   

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they should have steeped down year one of biden, but yes they need retire today 

 

it’ll be interesting to see how much they offer thomas and alito to step down after the next session under trump 

you know they’d love to get rid of roberts too

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  On 11/6/2024 at 10:52 PM, tx 3 putt said:

 

they should have steeped down year one of biden, but yes they need retire today 

 

it’ll be interesting to see how much they offer thomas and alito to step down after the next session under trump 

you know they’d love to get rid of roberts too

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They don't need to offer them shit. Alito and Thomas will gladly retire after this term or the next ends. 

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  On 11/6/2024 at 11:01 PM, wildcat09 said:

They don't need to offer them shit. Alito and Thomas will gladly retire after this term or the next ends. 

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thomas isn’t stepping down unless he’s give. a large check or death. he wants to tear it all down to 1789

 

 

wild card - roberts says fuck it, retires and decides he doesn’t want to be a part of four more trump years 

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