Tag: SCOTUS

SCOTUS made it impossible to resolve America’s gun violence

1 Comment

The satirical newspaper the Onion famously repeats the same headline whenever a high-profile mass shooting occurs in the United States: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

It’s a grim reminder that the United States — or, at least, key leaders within government — has chosen to prioritize gun rights over the kinds of laws that successfully protect citizens of many other nations from being struck down by a bullet.

One of the most consequential choices by policymakers to choose gun rights over sensible policy came in 2008, with the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. By a 5-4 vote, the Court held, for the first time in American history, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a gun. Among other things, Heller gave special constitutional protection to handguns…

The bulk of gun deaths in the United States look very different from the kind of mass killings that inspire so many American nightmares. Most of these deaths are suicides. 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, shows that over 24,000 people died of suicide from a firearm that year, while just over 19,000 died in a gun-related homicide…

And when someone is murdered with a gun, the most common motive is an argument that escalates into a killing because someone was armed.

And it seems to me … that the precedent created in a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court might be revisited in some future time and case.

Trump Supremes continue their racist “mission” to destroy voting rights

1 Comment

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled Alabama’s controversial new congressional maps could stay in place while it reviews a legal challenge, overruling a lower court that had ordered the state to redraw its districts in order to give Black voters better representation…

In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the court’s stay will allow the justices to fully hear the case, pushing back the dissenters’ criticism that the majority was making a sweeping ruling to gut voting rights without a full briefing from the parties…

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissenting opinion that the majority’s ruling undermines careful consideration applied by the judges below.

“It does a disservice to the District Court, which meticulously applied this Court’s longstanding voting-rights precedent. And most of all, it does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished—in violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy,” Kagan wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the other two liberal justices.

I hope none of this surprises any Americans who thought Trump was sensible enough to stay away from reconstructing the Republican Party in the image of George Wallace, the KKK, and other “favorite” racist campaigns in the history of American politics.

Just another page in the Fascist Coloring Book.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Receiving $1Million Award

Leave a comment

❝ Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the winner of this year’s $1 million Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture. The award announced Wednesday by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute honors Ginsburg, who started the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s, for her pioneering legal work for gender equality and her support for the rule of law. The institute says Ginsburg will direct the money to charity…

Of course, she will. Of course, she would.

Added proof of racist intent to alter census — won’t bother SCOTUS bigots

8 Comments


Samuel Alito — Chip Somodevilla/Getty

❝ If we had a fair Supreme Court not driven by partisanship in its most political cases, Thursday’s blockbuster revelation in the census case would lead the court to unanimously rule in Department of Commerce v. New York to exclude the controversial citizenship question from the decennial survey. Those newly revealed documents show that the Trump administration’s purpose in putting the citizenship question on the upcoming census was not its stated one to help Hispanic voters under the Voting Rights Act, but rather to create policy that would be “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites…”

…It’s difficult to produce a greater smoking gun than explicitly saying you are hoping to help the GOP by increasing white voting power. But this revelation, coming from the hard drive of a deceased Republican political operative and made available to Common Cause by his estranged daughter, is ironically more likely to lead the Republican-appointed conservative justices on the Supreme Court to allow the administration to include the question that would help states dilute the power of Hispanic voters…

❝ As I explained in Slate back in March, the U.S. government is defending the inclusion of a question about citizenship for the first time since the 1950 census as needed to provide accurate demographic information to the Department of Justice to help it protect Latinos in Voting Rights Act lawsuits. Two lower courts had found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross insisted on including the citizenship question for undisclosed reasons and that the DOJ voting rights claim was a mere pretext. Republicans have again lined up in favor of including the question, which Democrats oppose as likely to inhibit a complete and accurate count of all persons in the United States as explicitly demanded by the Constitution, leading to lower representation in Democratic-leaning areas and fewer federal resources based on population.

All of this may be the first open display of what passes for conservative in today’s Republican Party. The remaining hard-liners will stick with the fake president and his protozoan fascist brain trust through every attempt to drag the United States back to the level of civil war rationales for “keeping down” everyone but “acceptable” white folks.

SCOTUS rejects corporate appeal — Lead Paint Decision Stands!

2 Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected appeals from Conagra Brands and Sherwin-Williams Co., leaving intact a ruling that requires them to pay more than $400 million for lead-paint remediation in California.

The rebuff, issued without comment Monday, is a blow to business groups, which had called for high court review in the hope of derailing other suits over climate change, opioid addiction and gun violence…

The cities and counties said the companies and their trade associations promoted lead paint as safe well after they learned that it caused irreversible neurological harm, particularly to children. Lead paint was banned in the U.S. in 1978 but remains on the walls of many homes.

Overdue – not just the ruling; but, corporate profiteers taking responsibility for the poison they maintained for years after they new of the risk presented by lead paint. Time to pay up for the clean up.

Supreme Court’s Day of Infamy

4 Comments

In what may be the worst decision since the infamous Korematsu case, when the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the court Tuesday by a 5-4 vote upheld President Donald Trump ‘s Muslim travel ban.

Like the Korematsu decision, Trump v. Hawaii elevates legal formalities as a way to avoid addressing what everyone understood is really at issue here — namely, prejudice.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion downplays Trump’s anti-Muslim bias, focusing instead on the president’s legal power to block immigration in the name of national security…

…We might well be celebrating the fact that the Supreme Court had finally and expressly repudiated Korematsu, which it had never fully done before. Instead, Roberts’s declaration reads like a desperate attempt to change the subject.

The truth is that this decision and Korematsu are a pair: Prominent instances where the Supreme Court abdicated its claim to moral leadership.

RTFA. Please! Noah Feldman cuts through the breast-beating of Trump and his peers. Pimps for bigotry.