SCOTUS and whatnot

[pfife]

Pretty sure bruh is the insult chief

[buddha]

1 hour ago, pfife said:

oh, so like chief of staff?  or chief executive?   commander in chief?  when I call you and/or eswieg and/or Archie chief?

😉

[chasfh]

57 minutes ago, pfife said:

Pretty sure bruh is the insult chief

Since when is "bruh" an insult?

[pfife]

bruh version is the one I see on twitter all the time in response to something really stupid.

Edited February 2, 2022 by pfife

[oblong]

So the Dems have no majority because of the NM Senator's stroke.  

[pfife]

Best wishes for the Senator.

I think this means Shumer is still majority leader, right?  just that a lot of his votes where he's anticipating 50 won't be obtainable?

[oblong]

14 minutes ago, pfife said:

Best wishes for the Senator.

I think this means Shumer is still majority leader, right?  just that a lot of his votes where he's anticipating 50 won't be obtainable?

yes still leader but they no longer have 50 D votes for stuff.  No provisions for remote voting in the Senate.

 

[pfife]

Gotcha.   I think there are some republicans out there that might be able to get a SCOTUS over 50 votes but man the last thing I want to do is depend on republican decency, that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and ice pirates are raiding the ruins for treasure.  

[oblong]

the "black woman" thing gave them the excuse they needed to oppose it while pretending to be "reasonable".  

[pfife]

40 minutes ago, oblong said:

the "black woman" thing gave them the excuse they needed to oppose it while pretending to be "reasonable".  

I think it merely saved them the work of having to devise their own excuse, which wouldn't have been difficult for them anyways since they're not beholden to anything they've ever said before.

[chasfh]

14 hours ago, pfife said:

bruh version is the one I see on twitter all the time in response to something really stupid.

Had no idea. Will take that under consideration on future posts.

[gehringer_2]

This guy wants to start a movement....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/us-supreme-court-nomination.html

Quote

The great promise of our legal system as understood by many modern theorists — that law can create a framework to reconcile plural interests in a diverse society — has manifestly failed. Instead the law has become ever more politically contested and bitterly divisive; the tolerance celebrated by the proponents of liberalism appears to be more science fiction than fact. Something has gone badly wrong: It is unclear, in America in 2022, what the point of the law is, what higher ends it should strive to attain. We have forgotten what law is for.

Today’s reigning theories of law are exhausted. On one side, legal progressivism shamelessly instrumentalizes the law in the service of a particular vision of social justice centered on identity politics and libertine social and sexual mores. This relentless crusade undermines the family, traditional morality and the well-being of the citizenry — especially those who lack the resources to buffer themselves against societal disintegration.

On the other side, originalism, which pretends to separate law from justice, rests on an invented tradition that has projected itself back into the past. As the historian Jonathan Gienapp puts it, originalists’ understanding of the Constitution is “anachronistic, a species of modern constitutional thinking that they unwittingly and uncritically impose on the eighteenth century.”...

Neither progressivism nor originalism has proved capable of transcending partisanship to produce solidarity and community. Every June, the Supreme Court breaks down largely along ideological lines — precisely in the great cases that attract the most public attention and concern, and that inevitably symbolize our national commitments. We lack an overarching legal framework to help all Americans argue over principles while still retaining the sense that they are participating in a common enterprise.

What’s missing from our law today is an emphasis on the common good, a concept that from the founding era onward was central to the American legal tradition, embodied in the references to the “general welfare” in both the preamble to the Constitution and its text. The classical legal tradition, the mainstream of the Western legal tradition until the 20th century, holds that laws should be interpreted in light of the legitimate aim of government, which is the flourishing of the community as a community. Classical constitutionalism holds that our political community can succeed only as a whole, rather than as a collection of warring interests, competing ideologies and isolated individuals — the underlying logic of modern jurisprudence. The aim of constitutional government and legal interpretation should be to promote the classical ideals of peace, justice and abundance.

....

 

[pfife]

Personally I thought that passage ended way better than it began.

[buddha]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

This guy wants to start a movement....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/us-supreme-court-nomination.html

 

call me skeptical that" cant we all just get along" will work as a judicial philosphy.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, buddha said:

call me skeptical that" cant we all just get along" will work as a judicial philosphy.

The guy is shilling a book and I would hope there is more to it than Kumbaya . But I think he has a point. IIRC, from what I've read an example might be the way Cardozo looked at whether expansion of manufacturers' liability in an industrializing age was as much in the interests of public policy as in any pre-existing case law. So maybe our author is arguing less for some new utopian model than just a return to jurisprudence based more on simpler ideas of common justice and less in the arcania of whatever you can twist the semantics of some piece of old text into.

That said, clearly it is up the courts to abide by black letter law and  interpret it when its meaning is placed in doubt, but the reality is that at the appellate and SCOTUS level the questions  are often more purely ones of policy. McGirt for instance was a case where if the court had said that the interests of overall public policy and justice would not be served by such a radical re-orientation of the political facts on the ground on which generations had relied, and that in the end may not even have served any purpose you could call justice, no-one would have questioned it. That was clearly a case where the court was deciding public/legal policy as much as interpreting the black letter of a treaty. History has simply moved past any possibility of all old Indian treaties being enforced to the letter so the court was not actually seriously bound on that point. They made a policy decision to enforce that one.  I think those are the kind of cases where what the members of a court see as the larger purpose of the law can matter.

 

Edited February 3, 2022 by gehringer_2

[pfife]

 

[1984Echoes]

But...

But...

But...

The Supreme Court is NOT Partisan Hackery...

Right?

[pfife]

Robert's is a hater of the VRA as we already know, but he joined the libs on this one.   They're too far right for even him on VRA.  It's a goner.

This is the fate of whatever would have come out of the Senate if the could actually legislate there.

 

[chasfh]

Democracy slowly dying before our very eyes …

Edited February 8, 2022 by chasfh

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, pfife said:

Robert's is a hater of the VRA as we already know, but he joined the libs on this one.   They're too far right for even him on VRA.  It's a goner.

that's the one saving grace of how extreme the right wing on the court is, they are driving Roberts to the middle, so we are creeping slowly closer to a 5-3-1 court than a 6-3 than the conventional wisdom would say. The question would be does he snap back if Biden happenes to get another appointment?

Edited February 8, 2022 by gehringer_2

[buddha]

a couple things:

1) citing mark joseph stern on the supreme court is like citing triple7 about the tigers.  does he know some of the facts and the basics?  yes.  is he occasionally insightful?  as much as a broken clock is right twice a day.  is he hyperbolic, over the top, and seeking attention for himself rather than offering any useful information?

yup.

2) roberts didnt really take the liberals' position, he took a centrist position.  like usual.

3) this ruling doesnt gut the voting right act.  it doesnt say anything about the voting rights act.  here is the deal, the alabama legislature passed a map that would have had one majority black voter district whereas the old map had two.  instead, the new map puts some black voters in other districts.  the district court (with two trump nominees who obviously forgot their marching orders) sided with the naacp and said this is a violation of section ii and they had to redraw the map.  the legislature asked them to stay their ruling (which would have left the old map intact) while they appealed to the supremes.  the district court said no.  it said you have plenty if time to redraw the map now get busy.  if you dont redraw it with a good map, we'll appoint an outside agency to draw one for you.

the supreme court got the appeal and said yes, we will hear this and we will stay the district court's decision until we can rule.  this means the ruling is stayed until the supremes can hear the appeal in the fall which, for all intents and purposes, means this new map is in effect for the next election.

kagan says thats bs and the ruling should go into effect now and the supremes can hear the state's appeal while the state operates under the old map (or the redrawn map ordered by the court).  kavanaugh says thats not fair to the state because it is planning the elections with the new map and that the supremes are not supposed to get involved in state elections so close to election time (technically kinda true).  roberts says the case needs to be heard to clarify section two of the vra (which was changed in shelby county by roberts) and that the old maps should be in effect until the supremes can make that clarification.

4) i think kavanaugh is wrong and kagan/roberts are both kind of right.

5) democracy isnt dying.  nor is it dead.  life will go on in heavily gerrymandered states like illinois and alabama and pennsylvania and maryland and north carolina...

6) despite #5, i think gerrymandering is stupid and should be ended.  post haste.

[buddha]

one correction to the above: bronvich changed section 2, not shelby county.

[gehringer_2]

9 minutes ago, buddha said:

one correction to the above: bronvich changed section 2, not shelby county.

and of course while a narrow aspect of the argument like 'how many majority black districts' is relevant to the VRA, it actually has nothing directly to do with which side is favored by which map in practice. As has been seen in MI, dividing the city of Detroit vote actually favors the Dems and there has been much GOP wailing and gnashing of teeth over our new district maps even though one result may be the loss of a minority congresscriter.

Edited February 8, 2022 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

The frog is getting warmer and warmer.

[pfife]

Cool but I don't need stern to tell me that - everything I said was pretty obvious before his tweet was ever sent. 

In fact, what I said is pretty obvious to almost every piece of legislation the Democrats pass for the next couple few decades, your opinions notwithstanding.  

Nice ad-hom though,  did we defund the ad-hom police officer that was here for a week or so?  Or is ad-hom 911 a joke?

Edited February 8, 2022 by pfife