Much ink, resources and litigation, is bound to be expended over the next few years over what falls within official, as opposed to unofficial acts, that attach to the office of the US president. Along the way, a few laws may well be broken. With a delicious sense of irony, the Supreme Court ruling will also shield President Joe Biden from vengeful prosecutions planned by Trump and his courtiers. The law can, every so often, be fantastically double-edged.
The Great American Experiment has been “corrupted” from the top down
“I think that what we are seeing is just how hellbent the Supreme Court is on ensuring that the U.S. assumes the form that the Republican Party wants it to assume.”
Now that the court has obliterated the guardrail on what it can consider, there are no limits to what this least democratic branch of government — and its extremist majority — might do.
Source: The Supreme Court’s Worst New Ruling You Never Heard Of | The Smirking Chimp
The American model of Democracy is to expand and consolidate, consolidate power and privilege with birthright from the top down and let the rest battle seemingly as individuals in the Coliseum of Capitalism so well depicted in the Hunger Games.
In reference to the affirmative action ruling, Trump rattled off a statement to Truth Social on Friday calling it, “A great day for America.”
Source: Trump thrilled with his appointed Supreme Court Justices — calls them “gold” | Salon.com
The Conversation reached out to three legal scholars to explain what the decision means for students, colleges and universities, and ultimately the nation’s future.
The military is not the only place where the court has noted that security interests can justify use of race. The court also cited a 2005 ruling, Johnson v. California, where the justices held that prison officials could temporarily segregate prisoners by race to prevent violence.
It seems that the court is willing to uphold use of race when government power is at stake – as with the military and law enforcement. But it will not do so for the education of America’s citizenry.
American Regression
The Supreme Court had the chance to preserve two tools that could offer a path forward on this persistent problem, and a greater chance to equalize educational opportunity and financial security for all. Instead, the court’s conservatives chose neither—opting, instead, to uphold the myth that society is already equal enough.
Source: The Supreme Court Made It Even Harder to Close the Racial Wealth Gap – Mother Jones
Conservatives in the United States have a stealth function of supporting white supremacy, even if they deny it. Maybe some do not even realize that is what they are doing. People focus on process and not outcomes when thinking of fairness, but what they think of as fair processes don’t guarantee fair outcomes. Nothing is more threatening to white supremacy than affirmative action, which holds that the government and social institutions can reshape American society toward greater racial equality. Hence, the Federalist Society’s corrupt SCOTUS struck down affirmative action in college and university admissions nationwide.
The Supreme Court ruled today in a 6-3 decision that the use of race in college admissions violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus is unconstitutional, dealing a serious blow to affirmative action measures used by colleges to create diverse student bodies and remedy past discrimination against minorities.
Source: Supreme Court Strikes Down Universities’ Affirmative Action Programs – Mother Jones
We can expect that actors seeking to maintain white supremacy throughout American society will invoke the majority’s reasoning in a whole host of other policy areas.
Cruz and other GOP lawmakers looking for funding from a billionaire defend Crow and Thomas
The outpouring of support from some Senate Republicans is unsurprising following their public backing of Crow after reports that the billionaire keeps a collection of Nazi memorabilia in his home.
“He has an extensive historical museum that examines World War Two,” Cruz told Insider, adding that the media is “deliberately” mischaracterizing the nature of Crow’s collection to further damage Thomas’ reputation.
Source: Senate Republicans stand by Clarence Thomas in the face of growing ethics allegations | Salon.com
Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have had a very bad week with their numerous court cases and smoking gun evidence in the Dominion Voting Systems versus Fox News defamation case could end both of them.
Trump tried to buy SCOTUS Harlan Crow did and long before Trump
“Harlan Crow is not, as Thomas claims, his ‘dearest friend’ so much as his corrupt benefactor,” said one critic. “Thomas is unfit to serve on any court, let alone our nation’s highest court.”
Source: ‘He Must Be Impeached’: Clarence Thomas Made Undisclosed Property Deal With Billionaire Megadonor
Conspiracy the true meaning of the word and it’s relationship to reality
“They had a damn insider on SCOTUS who they thought would help them overthrow our democracy. He’s married to a deranged MAGA cult member. He won’t even recuse himself,” wrote former federal prosecutor Richard Signorelli.
Trump lost the election, but he had his revenge, leaving us the worst Supreme Court since the Civil War. The irony of Trump’s success in creating a Court ready to approve the agenda of the far right is that the Republicans can now dump him in favor of a less polarizing but equally reactionary leader, say Ron DeSantis, and take advantage of a generational shift in power that can thwart progressive change for decades.
Like the United States Senate and the Electoral College, the Supreme Court presents a major barrier to achieving democracy in the United States. For over 200 years the Court has blocked efforts to abolish slavery and its ongoing legacy, achieve equal rights for women, defend and expand the democratic vote, regulate the distribution of increasingly dangerous weapons, and protect the planet from the dangerous impacts of climate change. Against this record, the assertion by Chief Justice Roberts that the role of a Supreme Court justice is akin to a baseball umpire calling balls and strikes is laughable.
The creation of a democratic society requires that the extraordinary burdens on progressive political change imposed by a Court that follows its conservative political agenda be minimized if not completely overturned. Some change in the institution can be accomplished short of a constitutional amendment. Congress has the authority to eliminate lifetime tenure on the Court by enacting reasonable term limits for justices or by expanding the number of judges on the Court. These are issues that must be addressed by the movements for progressive change in the United States.
Because of key decisions by the court equating money with free speech, our political system is now overrun with grifters, con artists, and career criminals.Informed
Justice Alito Laments Disrespect for Religion as Americans Abandon Faith – Will his Dobbs Push them Further Away?
Justice Alito Laments Disrespect for Religion as Americans Abandon Faith – Will his Dobbs Push them Further Away?
Democracy allows Autocracy but Autocracy doesn’t allow for Democracy. There’s no Second Chance. Rapists are Trumpists and say ” I’ll put it in a little if it hurts I’ll take it out”
So your vote is critical, and not just in federal elections. Make sure you also vote for state legislators who understand what’s at stake to preserve our democracy. Because, as this Supreme Court shows, the future of our democracy is not guaranteed.
Source: The Most Dangerous Upcoming Supreme Court Decision You Never Heard Of | The Smirking Chimp
Regardless of anyone’s views on abortion, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson took away a reproductive right that a half-century of hard-fought judicial precedent had determined was constitutionally protected.
In doing so, the court set a dangerous precedent — that a person’s rights can be taken away.
Overturning Roe v. Wade was a triumph of politics and ideology over constitutional principles. It diminished the power and equality of women, along with transgender men and non-binary people, to make informed decisions about their own bodies without fear of government intrusion.
The opinion itself fails as an application of long-standing constitutional law. The justices arbitrarily discarded precedents they opposed, like Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, threatening the role of precedent in ensuring legal stability.
They selectively reasoned in Dobbs that abortion law should be left to the states, but conveniently did not grant that same level of deference when they declared a New York law unconstitutional for limiting concealed weapons.
This is hardly the first time that the ideologies of Supreme Court justices have shaped their decisions.
It began with the Citizen’s United Act of 2010 allowing corporations to act as individuals in American politics. The Koch bros took full advantage of buying politicians and judges to do their bidding.
Decades of contributions aimed at influencing the judiciary bought the fossil fuel billionaire the ruling he’s always wanted.
Source: How Charles Koch Purchased the EPA Supreme Court Decision
The 2021-2022 Supreme Court term will go down in infamy. The right-wing majority behaved as if they were kids in a candy store, stuffing their faces with all their favorite goodies knowing there was no one who could stop them and no one who could hold them accountable for having done it. On gun rights, abortion, religion and the environment they took a wrecking ball to the court’s precedents and created bold new tests out of thin air. It was a breath-taking exercise of sheer institutional power — and they’re just getting started.
SCOTUS REBELLION
In a highly anticipated but not unexpected 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on June 30, 2022, that the Obama adminstration’s Clean Power Plan exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
Chief Justice Roger Taney said that members of the “Negro race” were not U.S. citizens and that they had no federal rights at all that white men were bound to respect, including the right to sue in federal court. He actually spoke of whites as the “citizen race” to the exclusion of “Negroes” and “Indians,” who were not eligible (unlike white immigrants from Europe) for naturalization. So President Biden’s nominee will be joining a court that once upon a time denied that Harriet Robinson Scott was or could be a citizen or had any human or civil rights at all. Harriet lived to see the Emancipation Proclamation and the Fourteenth Amendment, which bestowed citizenship on everyone born in the US. Only people who privately still believe in the exclusive privileges of the white “citizen race” will complain about having an African-American woman on the Supreme Court, in an epochal slap in the face to moral monsters like Chief Justice Taney.
There is no Independent bipartisan system in the USA and the Republicans know that while the Democrats still dream of Democracy. Actual rule is from the top down and that needs to be guaranteed Republican no matter who is in government. Trump merely ensured that was welded into the system and all its major institutions. SCOTUS, the ultimate system’s safety switch.
It’s very hard to fathom why the right seems so determined to prolong the deadly COVID-19 pandemic but it’s obvious that they are. From politicians banning mask requirements to media celebrities pushing disinformation about vaccines, there is no escaping the fact that Republicans and their allies simply do not care that more than 850,000 thousand Americans are dead in less than two years from this scourge and that hundreds of thousands of them are still dying because they refuse to take life-saving vaccines. That the majority of them are their own constituents who have died because they believe right-wing conspiracy theories is just mind-boggling, but apparently they are convinced that this is good for them politically and gives them great ratings.
Source: The radical right’s takeover of the Supreme Court is complete | Salon.com
Amy Coney Barrett, the token Aunt Lydia of the 6 conservative judges, kept circling around the argument that women don’t need abortion rights, because “in all 50 states, you can terminate parental rights” after giving birth. It was a question that only makes sense if one assumes women are merely ambulatory uteruses, with no feelings or internal lives at all. In the real world, however, pregnancy is a difficult process, not just physically, but emotionally. Pregnancy isn’t a houseplant you stick in the corner of your house and ignore until someone comes to pick it up. You carry it with your body. People ask you about it — indeed, as anyone who has been pregnant can tell you, it’s basically all people can talk to you about when you’re showing. It causes all sorts of hormonal and emotional reactions, and giving up a baby your body has created is notoriously wrenching, even for those who are ready to do it.
This is nonsense. Cy Vance looking into Trump’s finances poses no more threat to the average Trump voter than Trump getting ticketed for speeding outside Mar-a-Lago—though you can bet he’d insist that was political persecution too. But careful reasoning has never been essential to Trump’s political identity. Displaced grievance has been, and it will remain so for the rest of his life.
Trump’s Next Line of Defense – The Atlantic
SCOTUS denies Trump bid to shield tax returns Donald Trump suffered a major setback on Monday in his long quest to conceal details of his finances as the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for a New York City prosecutor to obtain the former president’s tax returns and other financial records as part of a criminal investigation.
Donald Trump’s tax returns to be released after Supreme Court ruling
WASHINGTON ― After four years of ignoring expertise, lying daily, and breaking both laws and “norms” with impunity, President Donald Trump headed into Election Day with a brazen pledge: that he will cheat by not counting all the ballots. “It’s a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that’s very bad,” Trump told reporters traveling with him on Sunday, as he repeated his desire to end all vote counting on Tuesday night. “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”
Trump’s Closing Message: I Will Cheat | HuffPost Australia
Barring a miracle, Amy Coney Barrett will be confirmed on Monday as the ninth justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a travesty of democracy.
How to Reverse the GOP’s Power Grab | The Smirking Chimp
Amy Coney Barrett is heading for confirmation but supreme court and Senate reform is possible if Biden wins and acts fast
Trump assaulted American democracy – here’s how Democrats can save it | Amy Coney Barrett | The Guardian
As Republicans ram through a Supreme Court nominee appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, the anti-democratic rule of the judiciary is on full display.
The Supreme Court Is Smothering American Democracy
But the most chilling moment of her Supreme Court confirmation testimony Tuesday came when she said she would “need to hear arguments” about whether President Trump can postpone the election. “President Trump made claims of voter fraud and suggested he wanted to delay the upcoming election,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, observed. “Does the Constitution give the president of the United States the authority to unilaterally delay a general election under any circumstances? Does federal law?” AD
Opinion | Postpone the election? Voter intimidation? Amy Coney Barrett is open to it. – The Washington Post
Trump and McConnell have corrupted the Supreme Court and th judicial branch for a generation. Time to fight dirty
The Supreme Court is finished: Republicans have killed it. Now it’s time to fight back | Salon.com
My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Rushing to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell shows power trumps principle | Robert Reich | Opinion | The Guardian
the Right’s resort to judicial supremacy is not a sign of strength, but an admission of weakness: a beleaguered regime calls upon the authority of the court only to achieve what it cannot accomplish through electoral politics.
How Abraham Lincoln Fought the Supreme Court
Voter Suppression is Real and Legal. SCOTUS judgement (ODT)
The justices declined to set aside an order by the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that effectively halted the voter registration of former felons in Florida who cannot afford to pay fines or fees mandated by state law.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented from the decision.
The voting rights of hundreds of thousands of former felons in Florida were called into question Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a lower court ruling to stand, permitting the state to bar former inmates from voting if they owe court fees or fines.
“This Court’s order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent.
via Supreme Court Leaves In Place Voting Restrictions On Former Felons In Florida | HuffPost
Ransacking workers pensions funds (ODT)
Robbing workers’ pension funds has long been central to Wall Street’s business model. In last week’s Supreme Court ruling, Brett Kavanaugh and his conservative cadre of justices opened the door for financial managers to take their looting of those pension funds even further.
via The Supreme Court Has Given the Green Light to Bosses and Financial Managers to Steal From Workers
Trump has already succeeded in his goal of running for president twice without disclosing basic financial information. He has already succeeded in using the office of the president to shield himself from potential prosecution of his suspected financial crimes. Trump has already won. The only question now is how much the rest of us will lose.
We should expect decisions on these two cases in late June. The Supreme Court will then tell us how much more of our democracy must be sacrificed in the service of Donald Trump.
via SCOTUS May Have Just Decided to Exempt Trump From the Rule of Law | The Nation
Trump has made the Supreme Court the busiest court in the USA due all the cases against him being heard there. He owns that court. (ODT)
via Trump asks Supreme Court to fight House subpoena for his tax returns
Trump has taken it to his own privatised Courtroom. It’s where all his appeals will land (ODT)
via Trump Asks Supreme Court To Stop The Release Of His Tax Returns | HuffPost Australia
It is no secret that—amid his whining, braggadocio, and staggering displays of self-pity—would-be Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly perjured himself. Fact-checking articles in the days after the hearing identified well more than a dozen lies: lies about his high-school years, his college years, his drinking habits, his calendar, his yearbook, his judicial beliefs, the laws of Maryland, the testimony of his friends, and the meaning of words. It’s a wonder he gave his real name.
via Brett Kavanaugh Is a Liar—So Why Couldn’t Democrats Call Him One? | The Nation
Democrats urged the FBI to investigate Swetnick’s claims and voiced concern that the White House may be narrowing the scope of the agency’s work.
“I’m very concerned about this because the White House should not be allowed to micromanage an FBI investigation,” Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who sits on the judiciary committee, told CNN.
She added: “I think she [Swetnick] has to be interviewed by the FBI. I haven’t met her. I believe in due process, she did sign an affidavit.”
via Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick to be excluded from FBI investigation | US news | The Guardian
Just 24 hours after caving to pressure from the Senate and requesting an FBI probe into the sexual assault allegations against his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump is reportedly already working to impose strict limitations on the scope of the investigation—a move that has been denounced as a flagrant attempt to further rig the process in Kavanaugh’s favor.
One of the most stupid lies he has repeatedly told was that he didn’t drink much, even though all signs point to the opposite. Well, one of his Yale classmates and roommate of Debbie Ramirez (second accuser), Liz Swisher, went on CNN to directly contradict his ridiculous “I was a totally sober choir boy” story.
via Kavanaugh’s Yale Classmate Says He Lied About His Drinking | Crooks and Liars
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