SCOTAL Itch

[specious_reasons]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Get rid of Roe et al., and they'll need to deliver on their promises to declare abortion murder under the criminal law and deal with the political consequences of trying to march a teenage rape victim and her doctor to the gas chamber.

I guess we're about to find out. AFAIK, abortion has never been punished as "murder" anywhere in the U.S., but apparently there's legislation pending in the Louisiana legislature right the fuck now.

That's why the first teenage rape victim charged with murder will be a person of color, it'll make it that much more palatable.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

People are protesting outside Justice Kavanaugh's house. Someone said "But think of his neighbors" and Kavanaugh's neighbor replied "We ARE his neighbors. We organized the protest"

— Chad Loder (@chadloder) May 8, 2022

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

New gig for the lolyers:

6976291F-0677-4AF3-83C5-74D96BA8AF09.jpeg

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

A man's home is his inviolable property, essentially like his own body. He has the right to unfettered control over it without the interference of others. Anti-abortion protesters at Justice Kavanaugh's house don't seem to understand the core privacy issue at stake here.

— J. Van Wyck (@TheRealJVanWyck) May 8, 2022

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Alito’s neighbors are passing out wine and cheese plates to protestors and letting protesters use their bathroom is the best.

— Paul Cogan (@PaulCogan) May 10, 2022

Neighbors are giving me wine and cheese pic.twitter.com/7ZkPjKvMeE

— Independent reporter Talia Jane (@taliaotg) May 10, 2022

[Stephen Maturin]

Back in 1986, a 5-4 SCOTUS majority reached like hell (there appeared to be no justiciable controversy) and upheld a Georgia law criminalizing "sodomy," as applied to two men, based on their holding that the Constitution "does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy." SCOTUS later overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, but it may be about to make a comeback.

Anyhoo, in one of my all time favorite dissents, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote:

This case is no more about "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy," as the Court purports to declare, ante at 191, than Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), was about a fundamental right to watch obscene movies, or Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), was about a fundamental right to place interstate bets from a telephone booth. Rather, this case is about "the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men," namely, "the right to be let alone." Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

Can't imagine why that came to mind.

[JoeP]

[beyelzu]

I really like this Salon article, it points out that the Court which has very large privacy rights and keeps everything secret because they say they can are soon to decide that others have less privacy.

Their right to privacy is no more enumerated than the privacy that Roe is predicated on.

The Supreme Court guards its privacy. Too bad it doesn't care about yours and mine | Salon.com

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Maybe 2016 mattered:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion...21-12_m6hn.pdf

SCOTUS’s 6-3 conservative majority strikes down limitations on the use of post-campaign contributions to repay candidates’ loans to their own campaigns. The plaintiff? Ted Cruz. https://t.co/txVPetjOTW

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) May 16, 2022

[ChuckF]

Honestly the only surprising thing about Cruz is that it took this long for a new opportunity to gut federal campaign finance rules to present itself to the Roberts court.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

There’s a few protest voters and trump voters who keep trying to reinitiate contact with me and when they do I just send them one of these sorts of things in reply. “lol, this is your fault”

[Stephen Maturin]

I find that the term "Jilliot" well and truly frosts the asses of those who voted Green in 2016 for purity's sake.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Oh my: Hey Jilliot, this is your fault! Wear something nice in your cattle car ride to the camps!

I’m not sure I could actually use that one, though. Gimme time.

[Stephen Maturin]

I've used it more along the lines of, "Remember when you Jilliots confidently told us that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were basically the same person? Good times, eh?" I'm likin' the cattle car thing, though.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Court documents shed light on secretive Christian sect tied to Amy Coney Barrett

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

"Remember when you Jilliots confidently told us that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were basically the same person? Good times, eh?"

In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that border agents may unconstitutionally enter a person's home without a warrant and assault him and ... federal courts are powerless to do anything about it.

The border, once again, is a Constitution-free zone.https://t.co/rpRXsAEpbO

— Cristian Farias (@cristianafarias) June 8, 2022

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Better than the electric chair, I guess, for now:

as we await a likely Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, here is a sign of what will follow: A Heritage Foundation mediocrity touting a "thoughtful proposal" to commit women who have abortions to "mandatory psychiatric custody" pic.twitter.com/o621ovYXRr

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) June 20, 2022

[ChuckF]

The word for that is psikhushka.

[Ari]

“We ought to treat women who illegally abort the way we treat failed suicides”

The language is interesting, the use of ‘illegally’ as if not all abortions are actually bad, only those not allowed by the male authority. I can understand how someone who believes that a woman’s sole purpose is to give men children might see abortions as essentially self harm, the refusal of the role in which she was made by god for, and thinking she should be sent to the same place they’ll eventually send women who wear pants with pockets in public to.

[Stephen Maturin]

Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. ___ (2022).

Having given up hope for the federal government, life is much simpler. My efforts, meager though they are, relate exclusively to helping keep my state and local governments from gleefully jumping down the Nazi Hole. A modest goal, to be sure, but a worthwhile one I think.

It wasn't always that way. Decades back I firmly believed that Establishment Clause jurisprudence was a big deal. That barely generates a blip on my radar nowadays.

I was never delusional about it. After all, in the first case where SCOTUS used the Jefferson quote and commented on the importance of "a wall of separation between church and state," the court OKed a New Jersey law that provided public funds to reimburse parents for the cost of transporting their ankle biters to and from school, including a whole lot of Catholic schools. The "wall" has always ranged from thin to downright imaginary.

The Carson case will come as a surprise to no one given the current composition of the Court. The biggest outrage here is not the decision itself but the facts giving rise to it. In Maine, the country's most rural state, half the school districts have no public secondary school at the fuck all. Therein lies the outrage; in a nation where he right to a public education is (at least theoretically) enshrined in federal law, shockingly large swaths of the country provide diddly shit.

Given the horrifying paucity of public schools, Maine has a program that pays part of the tuition for private secondary schools so long as the schools are non-religious. Can't do that, sez a 6-3 majority of SCOTUS (it's not hard to guess who's in the majority). That's discrimination most foul against religious folk in violation of the federal Free Exercise Clause, ya see.

For anyone who's interested, Justice Sotomayor's dissent does a good job of describing how far down the shithole this jurisprudence has gone in a relatively short amount of time:

In 2017, I feared that the Court was “lead[ing] us . . . to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.” Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation. If a State cannot offer subsidies to its citizens without being required to fund religious exercise, any State that values its historic antiestablishment interests more than this Court does will have to curtail the support it offers to its citizens. (Emphasis added, citation omitted.)

This isn't much compared to what's likely coming next week, but damn. I remember pointing and laughing at wingnuts and their give-me-free-stuff-but-do-it-on-my-terms whining. Now the whining has the force and effect of federal constitutional law.

For anyone who's actually interested in religion and the law issues, the Religion Clause blog is still up and running. It's the work of Howard Friedman, who decades ago undertook the thankless task of trying to teach me and my classmates constitutional law. Prof. Friedman's gotta be several million years old at this point, but he's still blawging on a daily basis.

[Ari]

I haven’t read any of the details yet, but ever since I saw the headline I’ve been wondering, is there anything in this that prevents Muslim schools from taking government money, or is that more of a ‘we’ll crush that mosque when we get to it.’ state of affairs?

[viscousmemories]

This made me die a little more inside.

SCOTUS Drama Intensifies As Justice Sotomayor...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

How's it goin'?

[Stephen Maturin]

Jesus Christ. I recently completed my initial slog through Thomas's majority opinion in the Second Amendment case and . . . holy fuck, I can't even. So much goddamn codswollop, so little time.

ETA: For some reason, ChuckF's epic On the fundamental right to improvised explosive devices thread comes to mind.

[Ari]

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.