Slate writer who's watching the abortion case in the Supreme Court today with thread on Roberts looking very much like he's going to side with the liberals.
Roberts joining the liberals is no sure thing, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility. He seemed frustrated that the Louisiana solicitor general just kept lying about the law, the facts, and the record. Also, he wasn't interested in third-party standing at all.
Kavanaugh kept trying to distinguish this case from Whole Woman's Health—I think he will vote to uphold the law—but Roberts just wasn't having it. The liberal justices also did an excellent job refuting Louisiana's efforts to paint abortion providers as lazy, dangerous quacks.
Here is the key Roberts quote, as I transcribed it: "The impact of [abortion] laws vary from state to state, but the benefits are not going to vary from state to state." If he really believes that, he has to vote against Louisiana, because admitting privileges provide no benefit.
Now, remember that Roberts can ask cryptic questions or change his mind. He may still just vote with the conservatives to distinguish the Louisiana law from Whole Woman's Health on some bullshit pretext. But I don't think he liked the bullshit pretext. I think it irked him.
It may be a case for roberts that this case is just too similar to one they decided on I believe last year and to over turn themselves that quickly is pretty bad look for the courts already tennous credibility. Yolo'ing your own precedent that quick is a good way to make future courts see everything you have done as not really binding.
Or, to go full conspiracy theorist, they don't want an abortion case to galvanize the left and let the right get complacent right before the most important election of our generation
That's not a conspiracy theory, just how the court operates now. There's no way ACA arguments will happen in October to remind everyone Trump is trying to gut the ACA. They will happen in November, after the election.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
It may be a case for roberts that this case is just too similar to one they decided on I believe last year and to over turn themselves that quickly is pretty bad look for the courts already tennous credibility. Yolo'ing your own precedent that quick is a good way to make future courts see everything you have done as not really binding.
Didn’t they do that within the same session last year?
Saying it was fine for the Republican cake shop to discriminate because a councilman was mean on Twitter, but Trump’s twitter couldn’t be considered when evaluating Trump’s policies and executive orders because reasons.
That's not a conspiracy theory, just how the court operates now. There's no way ACA arguments will happen in October to remind everyone Trump is trying to gut the ACA. They will happen in November, after the election.
I think they give people too much credit. There was a literal SCOTUS seat open in 2016, and noone ever fucking mentioned it.
It may be a case for roberts that this case is just too similar to one they decided on I believe last year and to over turn themselves that quickly is pretty bad look for the courts already tennous credibility. Yolo'ing your own precedent that quick is a good way to make future courts see everything you have done as not really binding.
Didn’t they do that within the same session last year?
Saying it was fine for the Republican cake shop to discriminate because a councilman was mean on Twitter, but Trump’s twitter couldn’t be considered when evaluating Trump’s policies and executive orders because reasons.
Also abortion specifically.
Having to post a sign saying your "crisis pregnancy center" isn't an abortion clinic despite deliberately disgusing itself as one = bad!
A law that requires doctors to lie to patients by reading a list of fake problems with abortion- good!
That's not a conspiracy theory, just how the court operates now. There's no way ACA arguments will happen in October to remind everyone Trump is trying to gut the ACA. They will happen in November, after the election.
I think they give people too much credit. There was a literal SCOTUS seat open in 2016, and noone ever fucking mentioned it.
Health care they'd mention. I'd hope. It's depressing that in every single debate, exactly one Democrat (Biden) mentioned this case that I can recall, but for 3 seconds as an aside.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I can't pay attention to the virus stuff today since I watched Last Week Tonight and it made me want to burn the world down. So I found the court had a good, if odd, decision handed down today.
Ramos v Louisiana is effectively a 6 - 3 decision saying that, no really, juries have to be unanimous in their decisions on criminal cases. Louisiana and Oregon were the final two states which allowed criminal trials to be decided by juries that went 10-2. It's a good decision in several aspects but there's an odd alliance which decided it.
Court watcher and Buzzfeed reporter, Chris Geidner summed up this aspect of the decision on twitter this morning.
The decision is, effectively, 6-3. This is a very unusual lineup, and the decision is by Gorsuch, primarily joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kavanaugh. Thomas joins the judgment, based on alternative reasoning. Alito dissented, joined by Roberts and Kagan.
For those wondering what alternative reasoning Thomas could come up with, let me quote the decision for you.
JUSTICE THOMAS concluded that Ramos’ felony conviction by a non-unanimous jury is unconstitutional because the Sixth Amendment’s protection against nonunanimous felony guilty verdicts applies against the States through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, not the Due Process Clause.
Thomas once again, doing everything he can to avoid talking about that pesky Due Process Clause.
ed:Wrong tweet corrected
Martini_Philosopher on
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
Am at work, but any reason given wht Kagan dissented? More curious about that than why Gorsuch and Kavanaugh didn't.
Kagan basically agreed with almost the entire dissent as far as I can see. I'm not sure how relevant the part he disagrees with is to the whole dissent, which honestly seems summed up as "But why?". Which, fair enough imo.
I've come to dread seeing new posts in this thread (and I'm guessing that I'm not alone) as my expectations are "another bad/stupid/blatantly partisan decision" or "bad health news about RBG".
Yeah, note that one of Gorsuch's footnotes about when to ignore stare decisis specifically called out Roe v Wade so that's a thing for future cases.
Any time a conservative writes a judgment even if you agree with the outcome you gotta be real fucking careful about what else is said in it. They intentionally set things up in order to be citable for future cases in order to do hilarious shit.
The whole thing seems kind of Constitutionally arbitrary? We get away with requiring unanimous verdicts entirely because juries are small enough to allow for that. A 200-member jury probably wouldn't be an inherent violation of due process (just absurdly unwieldy), but no one would expect such a jury to need to provide unanimous verdicts.
On Monday, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to reject a Republican effort to sabotage parts of the Affordable Care Act. The upshot of this decision is that health insurers will receive payments owed to them under Obamacare’s “risk corridor” program.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s majority opinion in Maine Community Health Options v. United States, relies on “a principle as old as the Nation itself,” according to the opinion. That principle: “The Government should honor its obligations.”
The vote in Maine Community was not close. Eight justices joined all or nearly all of Sotomayor’s opinion, leaving Justice Samuel Alito in a lonely dissent. That’s a bit of a surprising outcome given what was at stake in the case, which involved a $12 billion Republican scheme to sabotage Obamacare.
And yet, after years of litigation seeking to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and after many more years of partisan rancor bitterly dividing the two major political parties on whether Obamacare should continue to exist, only Justice Alito was willing to endorse this particular effort to undercut President Obama’s primary legislative accomplishment.
While past performance isn't indicative of future decision, this bodes extremely well for the ACA going forward. This was considered by some legal scholars as the best of many bad arguments against it with the ones coming up even more silly and futile.
In a copyright case with potentially wide-ranging implications, the U.S. Supreme Court this week held that annotations added to the State of Georgia’s legal code are not eligible for copyright protection.
The 5-4 opinion, written by chief justice John Roberts, upholds a 2018 appeals court decision that reversed a 2017 summary judgment in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, in which the state of Georgia sued a public access advocacy group for copyright infringement for making the state’s complete annotated legal code—which is published commercially by the LexisNexis Group—freely available online.
I can only see this as a good thing. And while Congress might eventually get around to making it so that a copyright can be claimed, I don't see that happening any time soon. The publishing lobby has been quiet on the copyright front for several years now and there has been enough time to establish several organizations to counter them. The one being sued by the state of Georgia, Public Access, is one such entity. The EFF is another. Attempting to extend copyright to an esoteric thing such as this would likely be seen as an opening salvo on an overall attempt and vigorously fought against. Not to mention the public value as many if not most citizens see access to their laws as being something that shouldn't be restricted. In fact, this is part of the foundation that Roberts bases his opinion upon. Without public access to the law and their annotations, it becomes difficult to argue that the public cannot be blamed when they breach it.
This is another mixed alliance of the court. Noted above Roberts wrote the decision with Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh joining. This leaves Thomas, Alito, & Bryer (in part) dissenting in one opinion and Ginsbert & Bryer dissenting in a separate opinion.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
I think the dissents are just as important to that case as the maj op, because it's telling to see how this broke down and for why
The maj op is speaking out of both sides of their mouth: a judge's words aren't law, but they are governmental edicts still must be published alongside relevant laws that have cases on them (in states where this is outsourced, which is to say half of America); a tacit admission that they're important. How important? Well the dissents are a hint...
Both dissents are worried about judges overturning or nullifying laws, dissent 1 (RBG and Breyer) is worried about unqualified conservative judges who receive ex officio deference, dissent 2 (Alito and Thomas) is worried about people who can use this to further reject pure textualism (which allows GOP to state that any law's language can mean anything they want)
The older folks are worried about this decision's ramifications of judicial power and the younger folks are confident that this surely won't backfire on them
Eddy on
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
... surprised she still *has* her gallbladder to be honest. Lady's either going to live forever out of pure spite or suddenly explode from all the diseases arguing over who gets the finisher.
Good news everybody! Using government resources to inflict punishment on your political opponents is perfectly legal. A fine thing to clear up before this falls election.
Good news everybody! Using government resources to inflict punishment on your political opponents is perfectly legal. A fine thing to clear up before this falls election.
...wait a minute, that's not good news at all!
No, it's just ruling that whatever that is, it's not fraud, because it doesn't meet the definition of that particular crime. 9-0 ruling, I wouldn't read any approval of this into it.
I don't know that you're being cynical. The follow is taken from SCotUSBlog.
The court stressed that accepting the government’s argument would allow the federal government to “use the criminal law to enforce (its view of) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking.” The court did not endorse Kelly and Baroni’s actions: It noted that for “no reason other than political payback, Baroni and Kelly used deception to reduce Fort Lee’s access lanes to the George Washington Bridge—and thereby jeopardized the safety of the town’s residents.” But, the court concluded, “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime.”
It's that last part which bothers me the most. By their very nature, "corrupt acts" diminish the integrity and legitimacy of government at any level. Especially by tying federal level enforcement of integrity to certain proscribed and specific acts. One cannot help but feel slighted if you see part of the overarching roles of a federal government is a greater check on lower level corruption. Where does the buck stop then?
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
I don't know that you're being cynical. The follow is taken from SCotUSBlog.
The court stressed that accepting the government’s argument would allow the federal government to “use the criminal law to enforce (its view of) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking.” The court did not endorse Kelly and Baroni’s actions: It noted that for “no reason other than political payback, Baroni and Kelly used deception to reduce Fort Lee’s access lanes to the George Washington Bridge—and thereby jeopardized the safety of the town’s residents.” But, the court concluded, “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime.”
It's that last part which bothers me the most. By their very nature, "corrupt acts" diminish the integrity and legitimacy of government at any level. Especially by tying federal level enforcement of integrity to certain proscribed and specific acts. One cannot help but feel slighted if you see part of the overarching roles of a federal government is a greater check on lower level corruption. Where does the buck stop then?
I think it's the same problem as we're seeing with the current administration. Who enforces state laws against the people in power?
What they're saying here, I think, is basically that these may be things that should be charged under state laws, not federal?
I don't know that you're being cynical. The follow is taken from SCotUSBlog.
The court stressed that accepting the government’s argument would allow the federal government to “use the criminal law to enforce (its view of) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking.” The court did not endorse Kelly and Baroni’s actions: It noted that for “no reason other than political payback, Baroni and Kelly used deception to reduce Fort Lee’s access lanes to the George Washington Bridge—and thereby jeopardized the safety of the town’s residents.” But, the court concluded, “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime.”
It's that last part which bothers me the most. By their very nature, "corrupt acts" diminish the integrity and legitimacy of government at any level. Especially by tying federal level enforcement of integrity to certain proscribed and specific acts. One cannot help but feel slighted if you see part of the overarching roles of a federal government is a greater check on lower level corruption. Where does the buck stop then?
An analysis I read suggested to me that this is a confluence of a few problems. Congress, being useless these days because of Republicans, has not actually changed the law to expand it to specifically include stuff like this. And the judiciary, mostly via the SCOTUS via it's usual deliberate lack of understanding it seems, is refusing to let the government stretch current law to cover this stuff. And those that aren't rich and white and thus capable of hiring good lawyers to take a case all the way to the SCOTUS, don't get to take advantage of the situation.
I actually have been motivated to post about this on twitter. Barr and Trump are using a pandemic as cover to shield their friends (and possibly themselves) from prosecution.
The dismissal is with prejudice, meaning a future admin can’t bring charges. The prosecutor overseeing it resigned in advance of the filing.
And I bet the lawyers who drafted this BS will get plum positions at top law schools.
I actually have been motivated to post about this on twitter. Barr and Trump are using a pandemic as cover to shield their friends (and possibly themselves) from prosecution.
The dismissal is with prejudice, meaning a future admin can’t bring charges. The prosecutor overseeing it resigned in advance of the filing.
And I bet the lawyers who drafted this BS will get plum positions at top law schools.
Given the state of the case, does the judge actually have to accept?
I actually have been motivated to post about this on twitter. Barr and Trump are using a pandemic as cover to shield their friends (and possibly themselves) from prosecution.
The dismissal is with prejudice, meaning a future admin can’t bring charges. The prosecutor overseeing it resigned in advance of the filing.
And I bet the lawyers who drafted this BS will get plum positions at top law schools.
Given the state of the case, does the judge actually have to accept?
It would be highly unusual for the judge not to accept. I really doubt it will happen because judges generally (and theoretically should) defer to prosecutors in choosing whom to prosecute.
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All they did was say no this isn't worth expedited review. Not surprising.
Didn’t they do that within the same session last year?
Saying it was fine for the Republican cake shop to discriminate because a councilman was mean on Twitter, but Trump’s twitter couldn’t be considered when evaluating Trump’s policies and executive orders because reasons.
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I think they give people too much credit. There was a literal SCOTUS seat open in 2016, and noone ever fucking mentioned it.
Glad to see slivers of hope in the latest from here. Really wish we had a court that didn't make me so regularly afraid.
Also abortion specifically.
Having to post a sign saying your "crisis pregnancy center" isn't an abortion clinic despite deliberately disgusing itself as one = bad!
A law that requires doctors to lie to patients by reading a list of fake problems with abortion- good!
Health care they'd mention. I'd hope. It's depressing that in every single debate, exactly one Democrat (Biden) mentioned this case that I can recall, but for 3 seconds as an aside.
Ramos v Louisiana is effectively a 6 - 3 decision saying that, no really, juries have to be unanimous in their decisions on criminal cases. Louisiana and Oregon were the final two states which allowed criminal trials to be decided by juries that went 10-2. It's a good decision in several aspects but there's an odd alliance which decided it.
Court watcher and Buzzfeed reporter, Chris Geidner summed up this aspect of the decision on twitter this morning.
For those wondering what alternative reasoning Thomas could come up with, let me quote the decision for you.
Thomas once again, doing everything he can to avoid talking about that pesky Due Process Clause.
ed:Wrong tweet corrected
Kagan basically agreed with almost the entire dissent as far as I can see. I'm not sure how relevant the part he disagrees with is to the whole dissent, which honestly seems summed up as "But why?". Which, fair enough imo.
Any time a conservative writes a judgment even if you agree with the outcome you gotta be real fucking careful about what else is said in it. They intentionally set things up in order to be citable for future cases in order to do hilarious shit.
The risk corridors can stay in the ACA. From Vox:
While past performance isn't indicative of future decision, this bodes extremely well for the ACA going forward. This was considered by some legal scholars as the best of many bad arguments against it with the ones coming up even more silly and futile.
ed: A link to the full decisions.
In short, Georgia cannot contract a company to compile legal annotations to their laws and then claim copyright. From Publisher's Weekly:
I can only see this as a good thing. And while Congress might eventually get around to making it so that a copyright can be claimed, I don't see that happening any time soon. The publishing lobby has been quiet on the copyright front for several years now and there has been enough time to establish several organizations to counter them. The one being sued by the state of Georgia, Public Access, is one such entity. The EFF is another. Attempting to extend copyright to an esoteric thing such as this would likely be seen as an opening salvo on an overall attempt and vigorously fought against. Not to mention the public value as many if not most citizens see access to their laws as being something that shouldn't be restricted. In fact, this is part of the foundation that Roberts bases his opinion upon. Without public access to the law and their annotations, it becomes difficult to argue that the public cannot be blamed when they breach it.
This is another mixed alliance of the court. Noted above Roberts wrote the decision with Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh joining. This leaves Thomas, Alito, & Bryer (in part) dissenting in one opinion and Ginsbert & Bryer dissenting in a separate opinion.
The maj op is speaking out of both sides of their mouth: a judge's words aren't law, but they are governmental edicts still must be published alongside relevant laws that have cases on them (in states where this is outsourced, which is to say half of America); a tacit admission that they're important. How important? Well the dissents are a hint...
Both dissents are worried about judges overturning or nullifying laws, dissent 1 (RBG and Breyer) is worried about unqualified conservative judges who receive ex officio deference, dissent 2 (Alito and Thomas) is worried about people who can use this to further reject pure textualism (which allows GOP to state that any law's language can mean anything they want)
The older folks are worried about this decision's ramifications of judicial power and the younger folks are confident that this surely won't backfire on them
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
https://www.c-span.org/networks/?channel=radio
Currently some sort of patent case. Booking.com seems to be central to the arguments???
Per SCOTUSBlog, appears to be trademark - is a generic word+".com" sufficient to claim trademark? Not the highest stakes case.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
I mean, by all means, feel free to sue...
pleasepaypreacher.net
...wait a minute, that's not good news at all!
No, it's just ruling that whatever that is, it's not fraud, because it doesn't meet the definition of that particular crime. 9-0 ruling, I wouldn't read any approval of this into it.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
It's that last part which bothers me the most. By their very nature, "corrupt acts" diminish the integrity and legitimacy of government at any level. Especially by tying federal level enforcement of integrity to certain proscribed and specific acts. One cannot help but feel slighted if you see part of the overarching roles of a federal government is a greater check on lower level corruption. Where does the buck stop then?
I think it's the same problem as we're seeing with the current administration. Who enforces state laws against the people in power?
What they're saying here, I think, is basically that these may be things that should be charged under state laws, not federal?
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
An analysis I read suggested to me that this is a confluence of a few problems. Congress, being useless these days because of Republicans, has not actually changed the law to expand it to specifically include stuff like this. And the judiciary, mostly via the SCOTUS via it's usual deliberate lack of understanding it seems, is refusing to let the government stretch current law to cover this stuff. And those that aren't rich and white and thus capable of hiring good lawyers to take a case all the way to the SCOTUS, don't get to take advantage of the situation.
I actually have been motivated to post about this on twitter. Barr and Trump are using a pandemic as cover to shield their friends (and possibly themselves) from prosecution.
The dismissal is with prejudice, meaning a future admin can’t bring charges. The prosecutor overseeing it resigned in advance of the filing.
And I bet the lawyers who drafted this BS will get plum positions at top law schools.
Given the state of the case, does the judge actually have to accept?
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
It would be highly unusual for the judge not to accept. I really doubt it will happen because judges generally (and theoretically should) defer to prosecutors in choosing whom to prosecute.