Dick Cheney endorses Kamala Harris. It really is this serious.

Also: Another reminder of the dangers of a second Trump administration to the federal judiciary, campaign finance laws, and more. And: Justice Sam Alito's stocks.

“Dick Cheney gets it“ is now yet another sentence that passed through my mind that would never have had to happen again — since his 2000 “freedom means freedom for everybody” debate answer — were it not for Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party.

Because of that, though, here’s what former president George W. Bush’s vice president had to say on Friday about the upcoming election:

Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are voting for the same person as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That should be that. It’s not, and that’s a problem, but it should be.

George W. Bush and Mike Pence, you’re up.

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But also, the courts

Outside of the direct “threat to our republic” that the Cheneys have addressed this week is the threat a second Trump administration would pose to our judiciary — something I’ve written about previously — and, in fact, the threat the judiciary as it stands already poses.

On Thursday, a majority of the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit sitting en banc practically begged the U.S. Supreme Court to upend campaign finance law yet again by allowing coordinated campaign expenditures.

For the majority, Judge Jeff Sutton first explained what’s going on:

At issue is whether the Federal Election Campaign Act’s limits on coordinated campaign expenditures, which restrict political parties from spending money on campaign advertising with input from the party’s candidate for office, violate the First Amendment. In 2001, the Supreme Court held that they do not. FEC v. Colo. Republican Fed. Campaign Comm., 533 U.S. 431, 465. In this action, the plaintiffs argue that the law and facts have changed since 2001, making the Colorado decision no longer binding on lower courts.

After describing some of those changes, though, Sutton wrote:

The key reality is that the Supreme Court has not overruled the 2001 Colorado decision or the deferential review it applied to these provisions of the Act. In a hierarchical legal system, we must follow that decision and thus must deny the plaintiffs’ First Amendment facial and as-applied challenges.

OK. So that seems good enough, such as it is, but there’s one key problem — that final introductory phrase: “In a hierarchical legal system.”

This is how out of control lower courts are. Even Sutton, a George W. Bush appointee, feels like he has to explicitly justify … following Supreme Court precedent.

In contrast, here’s the latest appointee to the court, Judge Rachel Bloomekatz, a Biden appointee, concurring solely in the judgment:

I agree that FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, 533 U.S. 431 (2001) (“Colorado II”) remains binding precedent and the plaintiffs’ arguments for abandoning it are unpersuasive, as articulated in Parts I and II of Judge [Jane] Stranch’s concurrence. That is all that is needed to resolve this case.

That’s it.

But, it wasn’t. Sutton muddied the waters, and the Trump appointees made clear that there is mischief to be done.

Judge Amul Thapar, Trump’s first appointee to the Sixth Circuit, wants to upend not just campaign-finance law but rather all First Amendment law — urging that the Supreme Court’s fundamentally unworkable Second Amendment jurisprudence be applied to the First Amendment.

“History should therefore guide our First Amendment jurisprudence. Specifically, courts should engage in the two-step inquiry that our Second Amendment jurisprudence uses,” Thapar wrote. What’s more, he was joined by three other judges on the court — two Trump appointees, Judges John Nalbandian and Eric Murphy and a George W. Bush appointee, Judge Raymond Kethledge.

Judge John Bush, another Trump appointee, explicitly called on the high court to act: “The Supreme Court should consider revisiting Colorado II for two reasons,” echoing Thapar by noting that Colorado “conflicts with recent decisions of the Court” and “does not address history and tradition that also calls its holding into question.”

Finally, Judge Chad Readler, yet another Trump appointee, provided the sole dissent.

Readler, a former Jones Day lawyer who once oversaw the Civil Division of the Justice Department in the Trump administration, was the one judge of the 16 judges hearing the case who decided the appeals court could ignore Colorado precedent, or, as he put it, “a lone, largely obsolete precedent.“

Dismissing the Federal Election Commission’s arguments, Readler instead wrote, “[W]e may not turn back the jurisprudential clock some two decades to save an undeniably infirm law. Accordingly, I would reach the merits of plaintiffs’ claims and find that the coordination restrictions violate the First Amendment.”

In all, Judge Joan Larsen was the only of the six Trump appointees to the Sixth Circuit not to join one of those three most extreme opinions in the case — although she did sign on to Sutton’s opinion for the court.

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Sam’s stocks

On Friday, the public finally learned that Justice Sam Alito, who is a problem, did actually sell all of his Anheuser-Busch stock when he made the August 14, 2023, sale that I reported on previously at Law Dork.

This was the infamous sale of his Anheuser-Busch stock and purchase of competitor Molson Coors stock on the same day in the midst of the anti-trans right-wing Bud Light boycott.

Alito has never commented on the trade.

The news came in his 2023 annual financial disclosure report, which covers his finances through December 31, 2023, and would have been due by May 15. But, as he regularly does, Alito took the allowed extension and filed on August 13. Due to a lag in the financial disclosure office posting reports, however, it was only posted on Friday.

Along with that beer-trade confirmation was the news that Alito still held individual stock in more than 25 companies as of the end of 2023.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the only other current justice to hold any individual stocks. In contrast to Alito, Roberts holds shares in two companies.