Supreme Court Watch

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#196

Post by ti-amie »

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#197

Post by ponchi101 »

Your entire government system needs reform.
But the reform to the SCOTUS should take precedent over any other.
The president can no longer propose the candidates. It has to be some special organ that deals in nothing more than that.
Justices for life can no longer be, in an era in which people can live to 90.
And removal of justices must be A POSSIBILITY. Not automatic, but something that could be done.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#198

Post by Owendonovan »

ti-amie wrote: Sat Nov 19, 2022 6:28 pm
Why do we trust anything Alito says?
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#199

Post by ti-amie »

Some amazing things happened at the SC today



Then this





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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#200

Post by ti-amie »

Thank goodness for Thread Reader App!
This is the case that was argued earlier and that inspired the above comments.


Chris “Subscribe to Law Dork!” Geidner
Arguments will soon begin in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case that was manufactured to overturn Employment Division v. Smith, but #SCOTUS didn't even grant cert on that question. So, we get a First Amendment case, which is really seeking exemptions to nondiscrimination laws.

Thomas asks about ripeness.
Kagan, then Jackson, then Sotomayor are trying to get out the argument about creation v. content v. use.

Waggoner is mightily trying to fight back.
Sotomayor: "Where's the line?"

Waggoner fell off track, so Alito jumps in.
Sotomayor, going through every page of the website mockup from the cert petition: "I'm looking at every page, and it's the story of the couple. ... I keep looking at all of the mockups .... I don't understand. How is this your story?"
Barrett, after getting the wrong answer from Waggoner to a lay-up hypothetical about the message in a website for a cis straight couple who doesn't care about any biblical understanding of opposite-sex marriages, goes back to clean up.

Sotomayor is going strong into getting Waggoner to admit that there is no line in her argument — based on race, etc. — and, when Alito can't jump in, she acknowledges there is no line, although she says there is.
Jackson asks about a sepia-toned photo taken of children with Santa. What if they say there's only white children in old photos so they won't take photos on Santa w/ non-white children?

Waggoner: "That may be an edge case." Claims "the message isn't in the product."
Sounds like Waggoner went to sit down, then Roberts goes, "Not so fast," because she still has the one-by-one questioning to go — different from when she argued Masterpiece.
Kagan: "What are the different meanings? What is the different speech that your client is to provide?"

Waggoner: "She believes that same-sex weddings contradict scripture. ... The announcement of the wedding itself is a concept that she believes is false."
Gorsuch now goes on to help further clean up the bad Waggoner answer to Barrett.
Waggoner's answer to Kavanaugh about the line being whether the action of the provider is speech.

Hard to understand how she gave the answer she gave to Jackson's Santa hypothetical. That seems, under her theory, not an "edge" case. It seems a slam dunk for her side.
Waggoner, on how the same words can mean something different in different context, offers up: "'My body, my choice' means something different" to an anti-vaxxer and a person supporting abortion rights.
Waggoner cannot handle Jackson's hypos.
Eric Olson, Colorado's solicitor general, is up now, defending the state's nondiscrimination public accommodations law against ADF's sought First Amendment exception.
Erm. How long ago does Roberts think Fulton was? (It was 2021.)

Olson: "The sole basis" for their case is status. They're seeking an injunction against needing to make a website for any same-sex couples.
Alito is going down a line about selectivity in making the determination about who is a public accommodation.
Alito quoting from Josh Blackman is really where we're at.

Sigh.
Sam Alito "joking" about Black children in "Ku Klux Klan outfits" is something that just happened in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-two.
Alito: Is it OK to equate opposition to same-sex couples' marriages to interracial marriages?

Olson: "Yes, in how the law applies."

Colo's SG went on to give a really good answer about how the law must apply equally once you have a right, so, of course, Alito cut him off.
Gorsuch: "Good morning, Mr. Olson."

Olson: "Is it still morning?"

Mood.
Gorsuch is now drilling down on Olson with questions relying upon the fixed answer to Waggoner about this being message, not status.
Neil Gorsuch said that nondiscrimination law education requirements constitute a "re-education program."
From DOJ, Deputy SG Brian Fletcher is up.

Kagan correcting Roberts, albeit indirectly, about Rumsfeld v. FAIR would have been amusing if this weren't real life.
I love how much Sotomayor is a trial judge. LOVE IT.

Sotomayor: "What they're asking for is a status-based exception ..."
Gorsuch is basing this entire decision on the cleaned-up Waggoner answer.

Truly.

The bad answer from Waggoner would have tanked the case.

"There are certain rare contexts where conduct and status are inextricably intertwined," Fletcher says, and same-sex couples' marriages (and sexual orientation status) are one of them. He also cites the wearing of yarmulkes.

"A pretense of selectivity" isn't an out from public accommodations laws, Fletcher says.
They are seeking a "categorical rule based on status," Fletcher says.

Regardless of that, Fletcher says (after prompting from Kagan about Gorsuch saying relief is the court's call) she's not entitled to pre-enforcement relief here.
Kavanaugh suggesting that if Colorado/DOJ win here, speechwriters would be public accommodations required to write speeches for people they disagree with.

Fletcher explains why he doesn't think that's so, but that was a pretty big tell about Kavanaugh's thoughts here.
"Defining the 'what' by the 'who'" is the problem, Fletcher says, in an extremely succinct handling of the case.
Waggoner is up for rebuttal.
"... speech that's only incidental to speech ..."

Huh?
The case is submitted.


https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1599 ... 50849.html
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#201

Post by ti-amie »

You Won’t Even Believe Where Oral Arguments at SCOTUS Went Today
When a justice starts making jokes about a Black child wearing a KKK outfit as a hypothetical, something has gone incredibly awry.
BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
DEC 05, 20225:39 PM

For those who are increasingly frustrated by the fact that the Supreme Court is in possession of a conservative super-majority hellbent on expanding the rights of some plaintiffs (Christians, businesses, and gun owners, for example) while chiseling away the rights of others (Indian tribes, pregnant people, and public school students, for example), oral arguments have been maddening. Specifically, the way in which the court’s conservatives ignore and diminish the latter groups’ rights and interests in favor of the formers’ is getting ever harder to listen to. If you persistently tell only one side of the story with empathy and grace, that story tends to carry the day.

Whether it was Justice Samuel Alito dissolving women’s economic and health interests into a pile of powder in Dobbs, or Justice Neil Gorsuch forgetting about the non-religious student athletes in the “praying coach” case last term, the secret sauce here is to make the actual names and actual faces and actual suffering of the parties in any case about competing rights as small as possible, because then it is easier to rule against them and act like the consequences will be minimal.

In 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case testing whether the free speech rights of a web designer who wants to withhold her services from gay couples is in violation of that state’s public accommodations law, the conservative justices go one better: They completely vaporize the interests of same sex couples seeking wedding services altogether. After all, as Prof. Hila Keren reminded us on this week’s Amicus podcast, there are no suffering parties on the other side of this appeal. There are no names and faces of couples refused services and forced to endure the humiliation of being told that their marriage is in fact “false” (the word used by Alliance Defending Freedom’s lawyer at argument). This case has no Charlie Craig and no Dave Mullins, the couple denied services in front of a horrified parent in a cake shop. There is only one face in this case—Lorie Smith, the web designer who has never made a wedding website for anyone, much less withheld a proposed wedding website from anyone due to their sexuality. (She just already knows that she will want to do that. Really!)

The result of this framing, which is certainly intentional on the part of Lorie Smith’s legal representation, is that we have no names, no faces, no pressing dignitary interests to bolster the state of Colorado’s compelling interest in fighting anti-gay discrimination. There is no trial record and there are no facts, and instead there is just a whole lot of spit-balling about things that could happen someday in a comedic civil-rights-free galaxy far, far away. And what rushes in to fill the vacuum is a host of increasingly deranged hypotheticals, and also what now passes for high comedy at the Supreme Court. Let me say it again: It is one thing to diminish the interests and the pain of the parties you don’t care about in Hobby Lobby, in gun cases, in COVID cases. It’s something rather different to make fun of them.

Among some of the one-liners you may have missed, were you not tuned into the arguments:

• Justice Samuel Alito joking that Justice Elena Kagan might be more familiar than he is with the website, AshleyMadison.com, in a hypothetical about professional photographers. AshleyMadison, of course holds itself out as a meeting place for customers seeking to have extramarital affairs. Alito opened with, “JDate … is a dating service, I gather for Jewish people… Maybe Justice Kagan will also be familiar with the next website I’m going to mention, AshleyMadison. Com… “ “I’m not suggesting,” Alito chuckled. “She knows a lot of things.”

• Justice Samuel Alito responding to a Ketanji Brown Jackson hypothetical about an all-white Christmas photography package (asking whether it would be discriminatory, which it would be) with his own hypothetical, bizarrely about a Black Santa at the mall who is faced somehow with a child dressed up in a KKK outfit. Alito is trying to probe whether Black Santa should not have to be photographed with the KKK-kid: Haha. “If there is a Black Santa at the other end of the mall and he doesn’t want to have his picture taken with a child who is dressed up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, Black Santa has to do that?” he asked. The spectators laughed uneasily as Alito joked: “You do see a lot of Black children in Ku Klux Klan outfits, right? All the time.” See, if everyone’s dignity and humiliation is hilarious, then nobody’s is serious. Except Lorie Smith’s, apparently.

• Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, representing the website designer, responded to the hypothetical from Justice Jackson about an all-white Santa photography package for Christmas by saying that “there is a direct overlap in the musical of Hamilton,” because “in that case, we know they’re expressing a preference for who they are hiring because of race.” Jackson, at least, didn’t let her finish the analogy.

• Justice Gorsuch pressing Colorado’s Solicitor General Eric Olson to concede that the state of Colorado had forced Jack Phillips, the Christian baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop who refused services to same sex couples, to undergo a state mandated “reeducation training program.” Gorsuch asked, “Mr. Phillips did go through a reeducation training program…did he not? Olson: “It was not a reeducation program…it was a process to make sure he was familiar with Colorado law.” Gorsuch: “Someone might be excused for calling that a reeducation program.” It was not, in fact, a reeducation program, but this is a yet another notch in Gorsuch’s project to deride all of government as an endless string of soulless Orwellian bureaucrats intent on brainwashing innocents.

There is a difference, albeit a subtle one, between erasing one class of people while reifying another, and mocking the entire project of balancing genuine, and competing interests. It was the latter that happened today at the Court. And what we should realize is that it becomes easier to make this move if you can freestyle your way through wholly theoretical cases. You can just keep insisting that the only victim in this dispute—a dispute that was reverse engineered to have only one victim—is Lorie Smith.

But when you start lobbing around references to “Hamilton” and “Black Santa” and “Ashley Madison” and the riotously funny prospect of small Black kids dressed up as Klansmen, you’re in wholly new territory. So today’s hearing at the highest court in the land was about levity and mockery, and all the trivial examples of imaginary harms that will never come to pass. This is not just erasure of LGBTQ interests; interests in which the state has an important and established interest in protecting. This is about mocking the obvious implications of creating a carveout from antidiscrimination laws with fatuous slippery slopes and petty humor.

It’s bad enough that this is what passes for sober analysis at the court in this case—that is already its own mess. Instead of reflection on that point, we have to grapple with the fact that it comes from the selfsame jurists who see every critique of their own conduct as intolerable. These are the jurists who keep insisting that declining public confidence in the court is the public’s problem, mind you. Meanwhile, treating important civil rights cases with dignity is not that hard.

This is an appeal that— if its decided for Smith as it surely will be—will have material and painful impacts for gay people around the country, and vast implications for those seeking to discriminate on the basis of race, intermarriage, and, as Justice Sotomayor kept emphasizing at arguments, disability. Treating it as such would have taken no extra labor and no extra effort from Alito and Gorsuch and Waggoner. Were this merely about bad jokes and laughable hypotheticals, it would be one thing. That it’s also about recasting the concerns of the once-invisible victim as the now-merely-ridiculous? That’s what makes it a tragedy.


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... sible.html
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#202

Post by ti-amie »

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#203

Post by ti-amie »





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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#204

Post by ti-amie »

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#205

Post by ti-amie »

Speaking of the Supreme Court...













P1/2
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#206

Post by ti-amie »





Tweet's 13 & 14 are the important ones.





Remember the stories about Clarence and Ginni taking road trips around the country in an RV?



P2/2
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#207

Post by ti-amie »

Now who paid Kavanaugh's outstanding debts?
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#208

Post by ti-amie »

“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#209

Post by ponchi101 »

How do you remove a SC Justice? Serious here. Who and what government entity can do that?
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#210

Post by ti-amie »

ponchi101 wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 8:17 pm How do you remove a SC Justice? Serious here. Who and what government entity can do that?
From https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-wh ... e%20Senate.

Federal judges can only be removed through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate. Judges and Justices serve no fixed term — they serve until their death, retirement, or conviction by the Senate.
If he wasn't shameless he'd resign because of the damage his shenanigans are doing to the reputation of the Court. Remember Bush 1 inflicted this person on the country despite the bravery of Anita Hill who tried to tell us exactly who he was.
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