Supreme Court Watch

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#181

Post by ti-amie »

I have questions about why, if something was fraudulently done like this was, nothing can be done about it, and yes I'm being willfully obtuse. I know they'd have to go back and undo everything he's done but still it just smells wrong. Will this be used as part of the argument to expand the court? I hope so.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#182

Post by ponchi101 »

Look at it this way.
If you were to get a job by claiming you have a PhD, and then the company were to find out that your diploma is fake and you really have nothing, how many more minutes would you remain in the company?
This is the same. This person lied in his job interview, provided wrongful info, and a group if insiders helped him get away with that.
As I say: the GOP cares NOTHING about the democratic process. They will always believe that the end will justify the means. And I know that Joe et al are saying that you cannot pack the court because it will mean that when the GOP gets back in the presidency, they will do the same (hey, 25 Supreme Judges? Why not?), but if you DON'T, they will be the ones doing it.
It is no longer about what is proper; it is about how to save the country.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#183

Post by ti-amie »

ponchi101 wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 9:25 pm Look at it this way.
If you were to get a job by claiming you have a PhD, and then the company were to find out that your diploma is fake and you really have nothing, how many more minutes would you remain in the company?
This is the same. This person lied in his job interview, provided wrongful info, and a group if insiders helped him get away with that.
As I say: the GOP cares NOTHING about the democratic process. They will always believe that the end will justify the means. And I know that Joe et al are saying that you cannot pack the court because it will mean that when the GOP gets back in the presidency, they will do the same (hey, 25 Supreme Judges? Why not?), but if you DON'T, they will be the ones doing it.
It is no longer about what is proper; it is about how to save the country.
That's how I feel Ponchi.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#184

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#185

Post by ponchi101 »

How about the line he crossed? Reverting established laws? That one doesn't matter?
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#186

Post by ti-amie »

ponchi101 wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:25 am How about the line he crossed? Reverting established laws? That one doesn't matter?
Nope.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#187

Post by ti-amie »

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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#188

Post by ti-amie »

Ms Ifill doesn't allow aggregating by the Thread Reader App so this will take a few posts. This is Page 1









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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#189

Post by ti-amie »

P2









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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#190

Post by ti-amie »

P3










Sherrilyn Ifill @SIfill_

And that, is a wrap. The case is submitted.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#191

Post by ti-amie »

I don't think it will make a damn bit of difference how well argued and presented the case was. They're going to do what they want re voting rights.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#192

Post by ponchi101 »

ti-amie wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 8:37 pm I don't think it will make a damn bit of difference how well argued and presented the case was. They're going to do what they want re voting rights.
Some questions do not need 9 highfaluting lawyers, 11 Nobel Prize winners, 52 philosophers and divine intervention to be answered.
Voting rights is one of them.
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#193

Post by ti-amie »



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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#194

Post by ti-amie »

There is a case before the court today regarding rights of indigenous people here in the US. This is part of an exchange.

Found the case.








Philip Gourevitch
@PGourevitch

Replying to @PGourevitch @SIfill_ and @Dahlialithwick
ah yes, the collective cultural identity of vikings and genoese
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Re: Supreme Court Watch

#195

Post by ti-amie »

This answers the question about who leaked the Roe decision doesn't it?

Former Anti-Abortion Leader Alleges Another Supreme Court Breach
Years before the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, a landmark contraception ruling was disclosed, according to a minister who led a secretive effort to influence justices.

By Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker
Nov. 19, 2022
Updated 9:23 a.m. ET
As the Supreme Court investigates the extraordinary leak this spring of a draft opinion of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights.

In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.

Both court decisions were triumphs for conservatives and the religious right. Both majority opinions were written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. But the leak of the draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion was disclosed in the news media by Politico, setting off a national uproar. With Hobby Lobby, according to Mr. Schenck, the outcome was shared with only a handful of advocates.

Mr. Schenck’s allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistle-blower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Mr. Schenck’s allegation.

Mr. Schenck, who used to lead an evangelical nonprofit in Washington, said he learned about the Hobby Lobby opinion because he had worked for years to exploit the court’s permeability. He gained access through faith, through favors traded with gatekeepers and through wealthy donors to his organization, abortion opponents whom he called “stealth missionaries.”

The minister’s account comes at a time of rising concerns about the court’s legitimacy. A majority of Americans are losing confidence in the institution, polls show, and its approval ratings are at a historic low. Critics charge that the court has become increasingly politicized, especially as a new conservative supermajority holds sway.


In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Justice Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Mr. Schenck sent his letter to Chief Justice Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.

In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck’s star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by The Times. “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails,” she wrote.

Mr. Schenck said Mrs. Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby, and that Justice Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. The court ruled, in a 5-4 vote, that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception violated their religious freedoms. The decision would have major implications for birth control access, President Barack Obama’s new health care law and corporations’ ability to claim religious rights.


Justice Alito, in a statement issued through the court’s spokeswoman, denied disclosing the decision. He said that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights, and did not dispute that the two couples ate together on June 3, 2014. But the justice said that the “allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false.”

Mrs. Wright, in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information. A representative for Hobby Lobby would not comment. Beyond sharing Justice Alito’s statement, a spokeswoman for the court declined to answer questions about Mr. Schenck’s account or its investigation.

Mr. Schenck was not present at the meal and has no written record of his conversation with Mrs. Wright. But The Times interviewed four people who said he told them years ago about the breach, and emails from June 2014 show him suggesting he had confidential information and directing his staff to prepare for victory. In another email, sent in 2017, he described the disclosure as “one of the most difficult secrets I’ve ever kept in my life.”

In interviews and thousands of emails and other records he shared with The Times, Mr. Schenck provided details of the effort he called the “Ministry of Emboldenment.”

Mr. Schenck recruited wealthy donors like Mrs. Wright and her husband, Donald, encouraging them to invite some of the justices to meals, to their vacation homes or to private clubs. He advised allies to contribute money to the Supreme Court Historical Society and then mingle with justices at its functions. He ingratiated himself with court officials who could help give him access, records show.

All the while, he leveraged his connections to raise money for his nonprofit, Faith and Action. Mr. Schenck said he pursued the Hobby Lobby information to cultivate the business’s president, Steve Green, as a donor.


(...)

Mr. Schenck, 64, has shifted his views on abortion in recent years, alienating him from many of his former associates, and is trying to re-establish himself, now as a progressive evangelical leader. His decision to speak out now about the Hobby Lobby episode, he said, stems from his regret about the actions that he claims led to his advance knowledge about the case.

“What we did,” he said, “was wrong.”

(...)

He had long been an ends-justify-the-means anti-abortion provocateur. During the 1992 Democratic convention, he plotted a stunt to accost future President Bill Clinton with an aborted fetus in a container. He was repeatedly jailed for blocking access to abortion clinics. He helped pay Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the 1973 ruling establishing abortion rights, for speaking appearances years later opposing the decision. (She later said she had been paid to lie.)

But no matter how much attention those tactics yielded, Roe v. Wade, one of the most consequential decisions in the past half-century, stood in the way of efforts to end the right to an abortion.

Historically, the court does not like to get too far out ahead of public opinion, and justices do not lightly overturn longstanding precedents. So in 2000, Mr. Schenck launched “Operation Higher Court”— an attempt to reach the justices directly.

Justices are given lifetime appointments to promote independence and buffer them from lobbying and politicking. But Mr. Schenck wanted the conservatives on the court to hear from people who would hail them as heroes if they seized the opportunity to strike down Roe one day. The goal, he said in an interview, was to “embolden the justices” to lay the legal groundwork for an eventual reversal by delivering “unapologetically conservative dissents.”

He wanted to gain access himself — but because he was a controversial figure, he also recruited couples who were less likely to draw notice...

From 2000 to 2018, when he left Faith and Action, Mr. Schenck raised more than $30 million in pursuit of that goal. His donors ranged from evangelicals with little political involvement to the American Center for Law & Justice, a conservative legal group that was founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson and litigates abortion and religious freedom cases. (Faith and Action paid Mr. Schenck an average annual salary of about $83,000, plus a housing allowance.)

To remain as close to the court as possible, Mr. Schenck purchased a building across the street and began working the court’s employees...

He also encouraged his donors to become patrons of the court’s Historical Society. Four of them, including the Wrights, became trustees, giving at least an estimated $125,000, records show...

(...)

Mr. Schenck also asked Justice Scalia to meet privately with the Rev. Frank Pavone, an incendiary anti-abortion activist who ran Priests for Life, a nonprofit that has been involved in issues before the court, as have Mr. Schenck and Faith and Action...
Father Pavone did not respond to requests for comment.

Supreme Court justices mostly police themselves, which Mr. Schenck said he exploited. While they are subject to the same law on recusals as other federal judges, they are not bound by the ethics code that applies to the rest. (Chief Justice Roberts has said they “consult” it.) Under court norms, they can socialize with lawyers or even parties with interests before them, as long as they do not discuss pending cases.

Still, the ethics code requires judges to avoid any impression that outsiders are in a “special position” to influence them. It is this provision that the meetings Mr. Schenck arranged seemed most designed to test, according to judicial ethics experts.

Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said in an interview that because the court’s reputation was essential to its institutional legitimacy, justices must take care to “appear to be playing a different role than politicians.” Meeting with a well-known anti-abortion activist could create the appearance that the “person is getting a private opportunity to lobby the justice.”

(...)

Worried about disclosures, Mr. Schenck gave his “stealth missionaries” close instruction. The justices were more likely to let their guard down at the Historical Society’s annual dinners, he advised recruits in a 2008 “orientation briefing,” because they assumed attendees had been “properly vetted.”

“See a justice — boldly approach,” he told the couples, according to a briefing document reviewed by The Times. If given the opportunity, bear witness to “biblical truth,” but don’t push it, he said. “Your presence alone telegraphs a very important signal to the justices: Christians are concerned about the court and the issues that come before it.”

(...)

Kaitlynn Rivera, who worked for Faith and Action from 2013 to 2015, confirmed many details Mr. Schenck provided, including about the donor couples and his relationships at the court. To supporters, the minister boasted about his group’s connections, but he regularly warned them to keep quiet because he “knew the public at large would be upset by that kind of access,” she said in an interview.

(...)

In the statement from the court, Justice Alito said, “‘I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so.”

He added, “I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action.’” He concluded, “I would be shocked and offended if those allegations are true.”


(...)

In June 2014, when Mrs. Wright told Mr. Schenck that she and her husband would be dining privately with the Alitos, she and the minister agreed she would try to learn the outcome of the Hobby Lobby case, he said. “She knew I had an interest in knowing,” Mr. Schenck wrote in his letter to the chief justice.

On June 4, the day after the meal, Mrs. Wright sent Mr. Schenck her cryptic email saying she had news.

In the interview, Mrs. Wright said that while she did not have her calendars from those days, she believed the night in question involved a dinner at the Alitos’ home during which she fell ill. She said that the justice drove her and her husband back to her hotel, and that this might have been the news she wanted to share with Mr. Schenck.

“Being a friend or having a friendly relationship with a justice, you know that they don’t ever tell you about cases. They aren’t allowed to,” Mrs. Wright said. “Nor would I ask. There has never been a time in all my years that a justice or a justice’s spouse told me anything about a decision.”

The minister said that after he learned the outcome from Mrs. Wright in a phone call, he froze. He knew that pending decisions were not supposed to be disclosed, and that sharing the information could hurt everyone involved if it got out.

His wife, Cheryl Schenck, said he was agonized. “The reason I remember is all the stressful machinations on, ‘What should I do with this information?’” Ms. Schenck, a therapist, said in an interview.

Ultimately, Mr. Schenck could not resist using it, he said. Emails he wrote over the following weeks reflect the advance knowledge he said he had of the Hobby Lobby decision. While the outcome was not surprising — the justices’ questions during oral arguments had hinted at it — Mr. Schenck appeared to know that Justice Alito would author the opinion, even though many court watchers expected Chief Justice Roberts to write it.


(...)

He was still torn, he said, over whether to pass the news to Hobby Lobby’s owners. But Mr. Schenck hoped to further ingratiate himself with the Green family. “I wanted to give them something of value, and perhaps that would engender a reciprocal gift back,” he told The Times.

As the announcement neared, he grew bolder. On June 29, the day before the ruling, he emailed a staff member that “if it’s positive (confidential: I have good reason to believe it will be),” she should publicly laud Justice Alito as a “reliable defender” of religious freedom. No other justice was mentioned.


(...)

The minister said he told almost no one else at the time, beyond his wife, brother and sister. But three years later, he confided the details to a business associate, who corroborated his story in an interview. That same year, he recounted the episode to a potential ghostwriter for his memoir in an email, calling the ruling “a decision I already knew was a done deal weeks before it was announced from the bench.”

By then, he was changing his position on abortion, citing the toll that unwanted pregnancies take on women, as he later wrote in a Times Opinion essay arguing for the Roe decision to stand. He now regrets the tactics he once employed, saying he had used women and babies as props. “In all of my rhetoric about humanizing the fetus, I had very much dehumanized others,” he said in the interview.

The ruling this year thrilled anti-abortion supporters, though it has proved deeply unpopular among the majority of Americans. After the draft was leaked, Mr. Schenck said, he felt compelled to come forward about his attempts to influence the court.

“You can position yourself in a special category with regard to the Justices,” he said. “You can gain access, have conversations, share prayer.”

Even when his group was most active at the court, he said, “I would look up at that phrase that’s chiseled into the building itself, ‘Equal Justice Under Law,’” he recalled. “I would think, ‘Not really.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/us/s ... -wade.html
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