Thomas is a fuckhead of biblical proportions, but a consistent one. He has always been anti-substantive due process and pro-overruling any case based on SDP. That being true, his repulsive concurrence in the abortion case comes as zero surprise.
He'd have no trouble at all distinguishing the interracial marriage issue: "Loving v. Virginia was firmly grounded upon a straightforward application of the Equal Protection Clause's clear and unequivocal language, whereas Roe involved making up a 'right' from whole cloth and force-fitting it into the wholly procedure-oriented language of the Due Process Clause" etc. etc. blah blah.
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
United States provinces of Kentucky, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Texas announce massive funding increases for adoption, foster care, and pre-natal medical treatment for the poor.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">United States provinces of Kentucky, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Texas announce massive funding increases for adoption, foster care, and pre-natal medical treatment for the poor.</p>— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) <a href="https://twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/1540387897613893643?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 24, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Hmmmm, My first thought on seeing that is, "That'll be the day"
__________________
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.” —Henry Ford
Thomas is a fuckhead of biblical proportions, but a consistent one. He has always been anti-substantive due process and pro-overruling any case based on SDP. That being true, his repulsive concurrence in the abortion case comes as zero surprise.
He'd have no trouble at all distinguishing the interracial marriage issue: "Loving v. Virginia was firmly grounded upon a straightforward application of the Equal Protection Clause's clear and unequivocal language, whereas Roe involved making up a 'right' from whole cloth and force-fitting it into the wholly procedure-oriented language of the Due Process Clause" etc. etc. blah blah.
Assuming my marriage will be nullified shortly after we learn that the Slaughter-House Cases were correctly decided after all.
My sister and her long-time girlfriend - Ohioans - were able to get married thanks to Obergefell. Ohio is a wingnut shithole that was never, ever going to do away with het-only marriage legislatively. Its het-only marriage statute was one of four directly at issue in that case.
I checked a couple of hours back just for kicks, and was utterly unsurprised to discover that Ohio's "marriage is a union of one man and one woman" statute remains on the books.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChuckF
after we learn that the Slaughter-House Cases were correctly decided after all.
Marbury may be the safest of all precedent.
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
It might! The majority didn't do away with substantive due process entirely, and I suspect that some of those justices are punching the clown to fantasies of bringing back the old-time economic SDP of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Cuz really, what right-thinking person would dispute that crapola like wage/hour legislation and child labor laws contravene sacred freedom-of-contract rights?
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
There is ample reason to disagree with originalism as a legal philosophy. Should a 21st century society really interpret its Constitution by the standards of 1787 — an era before the introduction of semi-automatic weaponry, steam power, penicillin, automobiles, trains, electric lights and indoor plumbing? In some ways, though, that’s a pointless debate at the moment. With originalists holding six of the Supreme Court’s nine seats, we’re all living in an originalist world.
The functional problem with originalism is that it requires a very, very firm grasp of history — a grasp that none of the nine justices, and certainly few of their 20-something law clerks, freshly minted from J.D. programs, possess.
And
Quote:
But to appreciate how the founding generation thought about firearm regulation, we can look at what they did, and not just what they said. James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, twice introduced state legislation in Virginia that would impose penalties on any individual who “bear[s] a gun out of his inclosed ground, unless whilst performing military duty.”
You read that right. The author of the Second Amendment drafted statewide legislation that was effectively a forerunner to the New York state law that the Supreme Court just struck down. The bill, which was really aimed at regulating deer hunting, did not pass. But it clearly demonstrated that Madison viewed individual gun ownership as well within the state’s regulatory prerogative.
The article also discuss how the Dobbs opinion is equally ahistorical.
Thomas appears to be going for the most passive aggressive form of divorce ever by turning the clock back till before inter-racial marriage was legal. Henry the VIII is quite pleased.
Ha!
I hadn’t read this when I made a very similar joke in person yesterday.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a former high school football coach in Bremerton, who prayed with his players and other students on the field, could legally do so under his First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.
This coach prayed at the 50 yard line after each game. Soon, he started proselytizing to students, and some students felt pressure to join in order to play. He was instructed to stop the preaching, and he did, but still prayed at the end of each game at the 50 yard line. Since he was still publicly advocating his religion on school grounds at a school event as a school official, he was fired. There was nothing innocent about his actions, yet the 6 Supremes were conveniently "fooled" by his arguments.
In the dissent:
Quote:
... Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Constitution neither requires nor authorizes public schools to allow officials to pray “at the center of a school event.”
She cited the same sections of the Bill of Rights as the majority, writing that they protected students who have a right to education free from government-exercised religion.
“Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections
for the religious liberty of students and their parents,” Sotomayor wrote.
Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks. Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway. It did so because it thought anything less could lead a reasonable observer to conclude (mistakenly) that it endorsed Mr. Kennedy’s religious beliefs.
Jesus H. Donkey-Blowing Christ. That's some Boy Scouts of America v. Dale-level misrepresentation of the record right there.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the coach, who then asked the court of appeals for an en banc review. The court of appeals denied that request. At page 9 of the pdf you'll find an opinion from Judge Milan Smith concurring in the denial of en banc review and bitch-slapping a colleague:
Quote:
Unlike Odysseus, who was able to resist the seductive song of the Sirens by being tied to a mast and having his shipmates stop their ears with bees’ wax, our colleague, Judge O’Scannlain, appears to have succumbed to the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel for Appellant, to the effect that Joseph Kennedy, a Bremerton High School (BHS) football coach, was disciplined for holding silent, private prayers. That narrative is false. Although I discuss the events in greater detail below, the reader should know the following basic truth ab initio: Kennedy was never disciplined by BHS for offering silent, private prayers. In fact, the record shows clearly that Kennedy initially offered silent, private prayers while on the job from the time he began working at BHS, but added an increasingly public and audible element to his prayers over the next approximately seven years before the Bremerton School District (BSD) leadership became aware that he had invited the players and a coach from another school to join him and his players in prayer at the fifty-yard line after the conclusion of a football game. He was disciplined only after BSD tried in vain to reach an accommodation with him after he (in a letter from his counsel) demanded the right to pray in the middle of the football field immediately after the conclusion of games while the players were on the field, and the crowd was still in the stands. He advertised in the area’s largest newspaper, and local and national TV stations, that he intended to defy BSD’s instructions not to publicly pray with his players while still on duty even though he said he might lose his job as a result. As he said he would, Kennedy prayed out loud in the middle of the football field immediately after the conclusion of the first game after his lawyer’s letter was sent, surrounded by players, members of the opposing team, parents, a local politician, and members of the news media with television cameras recording the event, all of whom had been advised of Kennedy’s intended actions through the local news and social media.
In his statement, Judge O’Scannlain omits most of the key facts in this case, reorders the chronology of events, and ignores pertinent Establishment Clause law, much of which has been in place for more than half a century.
Of course, judicial officers lying about the record is small potatoes here in the post-factual era.
If it hasn't already happened, it will soon: some wingnut public school board will impose mandatory, no-exceptions Pledge of Allegiance recitation as a means of getting West Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette overruled, and/or mandatory in-school Bible readings to get School Dist. of Abington Twp. v. Schempp shitcanned.
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
Originalism or textualism is in my simple country microbiologist opinion(seriously though I know that I’m just a layperson in legal matters) a garbage position that assholes adopt in order to justify being assholes. They say it matters how people used to think while cherry-picking when exactly those people were living, and then they misrepresent the thinking of the people by cherry picking examples.
Then they just cry about how it doesn’t matter how they feel about the thing misrepresenting how they feel as their rulings are in agreement with those feelings.
The court is illiberal. I don’t say that lightly. They won’t be held back by facts or any sort of need for consistency.
Textualism, which is a method of statutory interpretation, is pretty legit. The idea of going no further than a statute's text is appealing in an "I don't give a shit what you meant, only what you said" sort of way. That approach is what got us the 2020 SCOTUS decision holding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination against gay and transgendered folk.
Originalism, a "method" of constitutional interpretation, is horseshit. It's just a vehicle for wingnuts to start with their desired conclusion and "reason" backward.
If anyone's interested in truly nerding out on the issue, I highly recommend Originalism as Faith by Georgia State University lawprof Eric Segall.
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
Similar to the adage that if a cop is asking your permission they know they aren’t allowed as they are exercising their full amount of power at all times, it seems the conservative court is excising its power to the fullest to get what it wants and coming up with excuses after the fact.
I think so much from conservatives/authoritarians is in bad-faith because it ultimately comes down to “Because I want it!/Said so!” as their reason, but they know that wouldn’t fly so they come up all sorts of justifications but those justifications ultimately end up hollow as they were only there as a smoke screen for “Because that’s what *I* want!” “Because I want my toys.” “Because I want women to hurt as punishment.” “Because I need to feel in control.” “Because the church is where the money is.” Are all things that would sound horribly mean and selfish if said straight. So we get the some lame excuse and an ‘I think they bought it’ smirk.
Textualism, which is a method of statutory interpretation, is pretty legit. The idea of going no further than a statute's text is appealing in an "I don't give a shit what you meant, only what you said" sort of way. That approach is what got us the 2020 SCOTUS decision holding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination against gay and transgendered folk.
Originalism, a "method" of constitutional interpretation, is horseshit. It's just a vehicle for wingnuts to start with their desired conclusion and "reason" backward.
If anyone's interested in truly nerding out on the issue, I highly recommend Originalism as Faith by Georgia State University lawprof Eric Segall.
Like I said I’m just a lay person, I guess the way the right wingers invoke textualism has given me a dimmer view of it than reality, probably cuz they do pair it with originalisn.
It is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws. The decision of that question belonged to the political or law-making power; to those who formed the sovereignty and framed the Constitution. The duty of the court is to interpret the instrument they have framed with the best lights we can obtain on the subject, and to administer it as we find it, according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted.
This is Taney justifying Dred Scot, it could be from a ruling today.
I too am just a simple lay-bort and thus speak only from that position. But it seems to me, at least sociologically, that stopping even at the end of the game and kneeling on the field of play is not doing an act quietly, even if no words are spoken. It is a public display, a loud action that speaks volumes to all who are there to witness it regardless of whether they are free or not to do other things.
The same people who think it's okay to kneel quietly in prayer, are the ones who become apoplectic with rage when others take the knee in support of Black Lives Matter.
I think so much from conservatives/authoritarians is in bad-faith because it ultimately comes down to “Because I want it!/Said so!” as their reason
I think in the case of many religious people (my Mom, for example) it's simply "the church says this thing is true, therefore it is true", so any and all discussion of *why* that thing is true requires all kinds of creative rationalization, often culminating with some variant of "reason is the domain of man, I have faith."
Re: SCOTAL Itch
Linear Mode
