The Democrat got more votes for president than the Republican 7 of the last 9 elections, yet 6 of the 9 justices on the supreme court are Republicans. This is a rotten result, because we have a rotten constitution. And the law is now whatever this supreme court says it is. I do not think pretending that we have rule of law in this country is doing us any favors. Rule is by power, nothing more, and what has happened is people have gotten power who should not have it. This can only be undone by the public finding a way to take that power back. The system is not failing. It is working EXACTLY the way it was intended to. Pretending otherwise only helps the evildoers. We can figure it out now or we can figure it out next January when there are boots in the streets.
There are several great ways to reform the Court, and the Senate Judiciary Committee is finally working on them. I think the best ideas are to expand the Court so that all Districts are represented, bringing the total number of Justices to 13; add term limits of 18 years on a rotation replacement, etc. Congress is quite likely to change to the progressive what with the anti-abortion crazies running state legislatures and people really seeing the effects of these policies. It's getting personal. Too bad Biden can't seem to get the cojones to directly address this issue.
The hope would be that Democrats win the White House and both houses of Congress, (reform the filibuster), and then we could try that. To me that's the least painful way out. But I fear that Democrats won't be able to win that kind of mandate (since we need a much higher % of the national vote to get the trifecta than they do) without Republicans first taking power and every last American seeing how bad it is. And of course if that happens they're not going to give power back through the ballot box.
Given how close their edge is in the House and the truly awful things they've done to American women, plus their inability to govern, I'm feeling confident that Republicans will lose the House and the Democrats will at least maintain the standoff in the Senate. Former moderate Republicans may vote for Biden if Trump wins the nomination. I'm not yet ruling out a trouncing, despite gerrymandering.
The top of the ticket is so important for all the other races in a presidential year, and it seems like there's a wide range of possible outcomes there. The consensus is that Trump leads the polls right now, but a large share of voters do not like either candidate. I'm hoping the Democrats are at their floor and not their ceiling, but idk.
The Roberts Courts repeatedly used delay to benefit conservative results.
The House Democrats requested they speed up a case regarding investigating his financial records. The House was in the midst of impeachment proceedings & the issue was of special interest either way. The Supreme Court ignored them. In fact, with COVID breaking out, the case was not even decided by the end of June.
Key financial records only arose much later. House Democrats were not even in power anymore when they released a major report involving Trump violating the emolument requirements.
BTW, the Supreme Court allow emolument challenges run out of time & declared them moot once Trump was out of office.
The civil damages in Trump's sexual abuse & slander cases are nice. But he will appeal them for years, probably. Stephen Bannon stonewalled Congress. After a long process, he was convicted of doing so. His case is still being appealed.
Related to the affirmative action decision, the opinion announcements are now up for the 2023 SCOTUS case at Oyez.com. You have the majority, Thomas with a rare concurrence from the bench, and a long dissent from the bench from Sotomayor. You can listen to most of the opinion announcements (a few have dissents from the bench too, including Kagan in the student loan case) from last term.
Speaking of additional cases, the battle between Judge David Ezra and his attempt to actually administer the law, and the Fifth's obvious interest in promoting Republican extremism was in full display the last few days.
First of all the en banc grant on the PI granted the US was telling. Then, Judge Ezra decided to continue the merits case. Texas just played the worst BS games, and broke all protocol demanding, yes demanding, that Ezra stay any and all proceedings while the en banc appeal of the PI was in play. Texas did not give Ezra time to respond or the US, but immediately appealed a decision not even made yet to the Fifth...and the Fifth granted it.
I don't know if you're interested in any of the Texas lawsuits, but the breakdown in the courts, the lawlessness of the Fifth's actions...As Pluribus noted: what's happening in Texas is actually more important than the Presidential campaigns.
Judge Ezra's recent filings puts on display the strain between the district courts and the Fifth and politicization of the Fifth. Not sure if the US will go to SCOTUS Monday on this latest. But SCOTUS needs to send a message to the Fifth, and one that's more compelling than the message sent this week.
Anyway, this an aside. Apologies for cluttering your comments.
Obviously Government isn’t going to be this snarky given the stakes involved, but with this tight deadline I would just paste in in the footnote as you did in the newsletter with a few sentences saying, “You just wrote this in your opinion less than a year ago. Are you going to actually issue an injunction now that overturns it?”
I notice that you said 2012-2014 since a retirement in 2014-2016 would have resulted in an even more rapidly stolen seat. I don't see how we can blame RBG for not being able to see the future and the re-writing of the rules by Mitch McConnell.
I'd much rather blame Mitch than a dead woman who worked her ass off for this country, both legally and in her Herculean effort to stay alive. She almost made it and he had to re-write the rules AGAIN.
You're exactly right. Too bad she didn't have ESP in addition to all her other talents and accomplishments!
With all the work we need to come together do this year, I can hardly believe we still have to deal with this same nonsense...a decade later! I guess it's just easier for some folks to denigrate a dead woman.
Still, you could easily read the tea leaves, she was 78-79 years old, the senate majority was 100% going to the GOP after the next election, and she still didn't retire. I'm not one of the people asking Sotomayor to retire, she's only 69 years old even though it would be great since there's no way Schumer will be majority leader next January.
Counterfactuals are interesting but of limited value.
Not only have multiple troublesome cases included Roberts (so a 5-4 Court would not generally have changed the result), who's to say what happens? The Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency in 2017. They expected RBG would soon die.
What if she resigned & a young liberal was on the Court. Would a Trump led party just sigh and say "oh well, guess abortion rights are safe now?"
We cannot allow Jan. 6 Rebellion to go down the Memory Hole.
Please write more about the Brief filed Friday at Supreme Court re: Merits of Trump’s appeal of Colorado Supreme Court decision to disqualify him from running again: Constitution’s 14th Amendment, Section 3.
I'm trying to be optimistic about the DC circuit - optimism would be that they are taking extra time to deliver a ruling that SCOTUS won't want to take up.
My fear would be that Judge Henderson has decided that she doesn't wanrt the trial to happen before the election, so she slow walking the case and is either writing a concurrence or dissent that is basically an argument to SCOTUS for why they should take it up.
Just as governments show not their addition and subtraction skills, but their values by their budgets, so do jurists, collectively as courts, show not their authoring and scheduling skills, but their values in their calendars. In both cases (governments and courts) it looks like they're doing one thing, but they're really doing quite another.
Hi Chris, It's curious to me that the Court would turn it's attention to the West Point case over the weekend but has been radio silent on its consideration of the Thomas Jefferson case. For a while there it kept getting rescheduled for conference but over the last week and a half it's not showing up on the calendar at all. Do you have any insights into what's taking them so long in reviewing this cert petition?
I don't think it's fair to talk about delay in the gender-affirming care cases as nothing has been filed except a cert petition, and the petitioners didn't oppose the extension (tho that would have probably been pointless). If somebody at any point asked for a stay (of an order reversing an injuction) or injuction then you would have a point. But the current speed of those cases has nothing to do with the court.
With the supreme court (and others) completely corrupted and Biden's refusal to expand it, it doesn't matter who we actually vote for. Our democracy is already gone.
I don't want to harp on this too much since the tone has been earned but at least admit "Biden" does not have superpowers. Congress has to expand it. At best, you had a 50-50 Senate when the Democrats controlled Congress. Expanding the Supreme Court (which I support) is going to require a bit more than that.
As Zach notes, our democracy is not "already gone." It matters who we vote for.
The control of the Senate, allowing Justice Jackson and many more great judges to be confirmed, alone shows this.
I think a big part of the problem is it's hard to fight back the courts when we only have the executive branch, and not the legislative branch too. A lot of their strategy is neuter the executive, knowing that Congress can't or doesn't do anything. If we could win the White House and both houses of Congress (very hard because two senators to each state gives Republicans a big leg up), we could scrap the filibuster for at least some legislation (no Manchin or Sinema anymore) and try passing laws on bodily autonomy, voting rights and election reform, something for education, firearms laws, etc. etc. And then if the courts block everything, we cross that bridge when we get there, having demonstrated those stakes to every elected official. I feel the bigger problem is that we may never even be in the position to do that, and that's down to a rigged constitution but also a Democratic party that's having trouble with its messaging. I think so long as we're still sort of a democracy, we can still try to vote our way out of this. If November goes wrong that option is going to disappear though.
The Democrat got more votes for president than the Republican 7 of the last 9 elections, yet 6 of the 9 justices on the supreme court are Republicans. This is a rotten result, because we have a rotten constitution. And the law is now whatever this supreme court says it is. I do not think pretending that we have rule of law in this country is doing us any favors. Rule is by power, nothing more, and what has happened is people have gotten power who should not have it. This can only be undone by the public finding a way to take that power back. The system is not failing. It is working EXACTLY the way it was intended to. Pretending otherwise only helps the evildoers. We can figure it out now or we can figure it out next January when there are boots in the streets.
There are several great ways to reform the Court, and the Senate Judiciary Committee is finally working on them. I think the best ideas are to expand the Court so that all Districts are represented, bringing the total number of Justices to 13; add term limits of 18 years on a rotation replacement, etc. Congress is quite likely to change to the progressive what with the anti-abortion crazies running state legislatures and people really seeing the effects of these policies. It's getting personal. Too bad Biden can't seem to get the cojones to directly address this issue.
The hope would be that Democrats win the White House and both houses of Congress, (reform the filibuster), and then we could try that. To me that's the least painful way out. But I fear that Democrats won't be able to win that kind of mandate (since we need a much higher % of the national vote to get the trifecta than they do) without Republicans first taking power and every last American seeing how bad it is. And of course if that happens they're not going to give power back through the ballot box.
Given how close their edge is in the House and the truly awful things they've done to American women, plus their inability to govern, I'm feeling confident that Republicans will lose the House and the Democrats will at least maintain the standoff in the Senate. Former moderate Republicans may vote for Biden if Trump wins the nomination. I'm not yet ruling out a trouncing, despite gerrymandering.
The top of the ticket is so important for all the other races in a presidential year, and it seems like there's a wide range of possible outcomes there. The consensus is that Trump leads the polls right now, but a large share of voters do not like either candidate. I'm hoping the Democrats are at their floor and not their ceiling, but idk.
The Roberts Courts repeatedly used delay to benefit conservative results.
The House Democrats requested they speed up a case regarding investigating his financial records. The House was in the midst of impeachment proceedings & the issue was of special interest either way. The Supreme Court ignored them. In fact, with COVID breaking out, the case was not even decided by the end of June.
Key financial records only arose much later. House Democrats were not even in power anymore when they released a major report involving Trump violating the emolument requirements.
BTW, the Supreme Court allow emolument challenges run out of time & declared them moot once Trump was out of office.
The civil damages in Trump's sexual abuse & slander cases are nice. But he will appeal them for years, probably. Stephen Bannon stonewalled Congress. After a long process, he was convicted of doing so. His case is still being appealed.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
Related to the affirmative action decision, the opinion announcements are now up for the 2023 SCOTUS case at Oyez.com. You have the majority, Thomas with a rare concurrence from the bench, and a long dissent from the bench from Sotomayor. You can listen to most of the opinion announcements (a few have dissents from the bench too, including Kagan in the student loan case) from last term.
Speaking of additional cases, the battle between Judge David Ezra and his attempt to actually administer the law, and the Fifth's obvious interest in promoting Republican extremism was in full display the last few days.
First of all the en banc grant on the PI granted the US was telling. Then, Judge Ezra decided to continue the merits case. Texas just played the worst BS games, and broke all protocol demanding, yes demanding, that Ezra stay any and all proceedings while the en banc appeal of the PI was in play. Texas did not give Ezra time to respond or the US, but immediately appealed a decision not even made yet to the Fifth...and the Fifth granted it.
I don't know if you're interested in any of the Texas lawsuits, but the breakdown in the courts, the lawlessness of the Fifth's actions...As Pluribus noted: what's happening in Texas is actually more important than the Presidential campaigns.
Judge Ezra's recent filings puts on display the strain between the district courts and the Fifth and politicization of the Fifth. Not sure if the US will go to SCOTUS Monday on this latest. But SCOTUS needs to send a message to the Fifth, and one that's more compelling than the message sent this week.
Anyway, this an aside. Apologies for cluttering your comments.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67630985/united-states-v-abbott/?order_by=desc
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67770228/united-states-v-abbott/?order_by=desc
Obviously Government isn’t going to be this snarky given the stakes involved, but with this tight deadline I would just paste in in the footnote as you did in the newsletter with a few sentences saying, “You just wrote this in your opinion less than a year ago. Are you going to actually issue an injunction now that overturns it?”
I just keep thinking how different a 5-4 court would have been.... If only RBG had retired in between 2012-14.
I notice that you said 2012-2014 since a retirement in 2014-2016 would have resulted in an even more rapidly stolen seat. I don't see how we can blame RBG for not being able to see the future and the re-writing of the rules by Mitch McConnell.
I'd much rather blame Mitch than a dead woman who worked her ass off for this country, both legally and in her Herculean effort to stay alive. She almost made it and he had to re-write the rules AGAIN.
You're exactly right. Too bad she didn't have ESP in addition to all her other talents and accomplishments!
With all the work we need to come together do this year, I can hardly believe we still have to deal with this same nonsense...a decade later! I guess it's just easier for some folks to denigrate a dead woman.
Still, you could easily read the tea leaves, she was 78-79 years old, the senate majority was 100% going to the GOP after the next election, and she still didn't retire. I'm not one of the people asking Sotomayor to retire, she's only 69 years old even though it would be great since there's no way Schumer will be majority leader next January.
Counterfactuals are interesting but of limited value.
Not only have multiple troublesome cases included Roberts (so a 5-4 Court would not generally have changed the result), who's to say what happens? The Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency in 2017. They expected RBG would soon die.
What if she resigned & a young liberal was on the Court. Would a Trump led party just sigh and say "oh well, guess abortion rights are safe now?"
We cannot allow Jan. 6 Rebellion to go down the Memory Hole.
Please write more about the Brief filed Friday at Supreme Court re: Merits of Trump’s appeal of Colorado Supreme Court decision to disqualify him from running again: Constitution’s 14th Amendment, Section 3.
I'm trying to be optimistic about the DC circuit - optimism would be that they are taking extra time to deliver a ruling that SCOTUS won't want to take up.
My fear would be that Judge Henderson has decided that she doesn't wanrt the trial to happen before the election, so she slow walking the case and is either writing a concurrence or dissent that is basically an argument to SCOTUS for why they should take it up.
Just as governments show not their addition and subtraction skills, but their values by their budgets, so do jurists, collectively as courts, show not their authoring and scheduling skills, but their values in their calendars. In both cases (governments and courts) it looks like they're doing one thing, but they're really doing quite another.
Hi Chris, It's curious to me that the Court would turn it's attention to the West Point case over the weekend but has been radio silent on its consideration of the Thomas Jefferson case. For a while there it kept getting rescheduled for conference but over the last week and a half it's not showing up on the calendar at all. Do you have any insights into what's taking them so long in reviewing this cert petition?
I don't think it's fair to talk about delay in the gender-affirming care cases as nothing has been filed except a cert petition, and the petitioners didn't oppose the extension (tho that would have probably been pointless). If somebody at any point asked for a stay (of an order reversing an injuction) or injuction then you would have a point. But the current speed of those cases has nothing to do with the court.
With the supreme court (and others) completely corrupted and Biden's refusal to expand it, it doesn't matter who we actually vote for. Our democracy is already gone.
I don't want to harp on this too much since the tone has been earned but at least admit "Biden" does not have superpowers. Congress has to expand it. At best, you had a 50-50 Senate when the Democrats controlled Congress. Expanding the Supreme Court (which I support) is going to require a bit more than that.
As Zach notes, our democracy is not "already gone." It matters who we vote for.
The control of the Senate, allowing Justice Jackson and many more great judges to be confirmed, alone shows this.
I think a big part of the problem is it's hard to fight back the courts when we only have the executive branch, and not the legislative branch too. A lot of their strategy is neuter the executive, knowing that Congress can't or doesn't do anything. If we could win the White House and both houses of Congress (very hard because two senators to each state gives Republicans a big leg up), we could scrap the filibuster for at least some legislation (no Manchin or Sinema anymore) and try passing laws on bodily autonomy, voting rights and election reform, something for education, firearms laws, etc. etc. And then if the courts block everything, we cross that bridge when we get there, having demonstrated those stakes to every elected official. I feel the bigger problem is that we may never even be in the position to do that, and that's down to a rigged constitution but also a Democratic party that's having trouble with its messaging. I think so long as we're still sort of a democracy, we can still try to vote our way out of this. If November goes wrong that option is going to disappear though.