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by JazzNU

by ti-amie Brett Kavanaugh is trending on the Bird App.




by ti-amie Details on F.B.I. Inquiry Into Kavanaugh Draw Fire From Democrats
The F.B.I. said some of the 4,500 tips it received about Justice Brett Kavanaugh were given to the Trump White House, leading some Democrats to call the process a sham.

By Kate Kelly
July 22, 2021
Updated 3:30 p.m. ET

Nearly three years after Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s tumultuous confirmation to the Supreme Court, the F.B.I. has disclosed more details about its efforts to review the justice’s background, leading a group of Senate Democrats to question the thoroughness of the vetting and conclude that it was shaped largely by the Trump White House.

In a letter dated June 30 to two Democratic senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Chris Coons of Delaware, an F.B.I. assistant director, Jill C. Tyson, said that the most “relevant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received during an investigation into Mr. Kavanaugh’s past were referred to White House lawyers in the Trump administration, whose handling of them remains unclear.

The letter left uncertain whether the F.B.I. itself followed up on the most compelling leads. The agency was conducting a background check rather than a criminal investigation, meaning that “the authorities, policies, and procedures used to investigate criminal matters did not apply,” the letter said.

Ms. Tyson’s letter was a response to a 2019 letter from Mr. Whitehouse and Mr. Coons to the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, posing questions about how the F.B.I.’s review of Mr. Kavanaugh was handled.

In an interview, Mr. Whitehouse said the F.B.I.’s response showed that the F.B.I.’s handling of the accusations into misconduct by Mr. Kavanaugh was a sham. Ms. Tyson’s letter, Mr. Whitehouse said, suggested that the F.B.I. ran a “fake tip line that never got properly reviewed, that was presumably not even conducted in good faith.”

Mr. Whitehouse and six of his Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee replied to the F.B.I.’s letter on Wednesday with demands for additional details on the agreement with the White House that governed the inquiry. They also pressed for more information on how incoming tips were handled.

“Your letter confirms that the F.B.I.’s tip line was a departure from past practice and that the F.B.I. was politically constrained by the Trump White House,” the senators wrote. Among those signing the letter were Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s chairman, Mr. Coons and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.


Donald F. McGahn, the White House’s general counsel at the time, and the F.B.I. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Former President Donald J. Trump has long taken credit for Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which was almost derailed over allegations by a California professor that Mr. Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her during a high school gathering in the early
Despite widespread concern over the claims — which were followed by other allegations of sexual misconduct, all of which Mr. Kavanaugh has consistently denied — Mr. Trump steadfastly backed the judge. He deployed Mr. McGahn to shepherd Mr. Kavanaugh through the unusually fraught confirmation, which culminated in a heated, daylong hearing in September of 2018.

Both Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who said she was assaulted, and Mr. Kavanaugh were grilled by Senators on the Judiciary Committee.

In a recent interview with the author Michael Wolff, Mr. Trump put his handling of Justice Kavanaugh into stark terms, asking “Where would he be without me? I saved his life.”

But in addition to offering shows of support, the Trump White House carefully controlled the investigations into Mr. Kavanaugh’s past. After Dr. Ford came forward, Mr. Trump’s staff tried to limit the number of people the F.B.I. interviewed as part of that probe. Only after an outcry from Democrats over the president’s approach did the administration say the agency could conduct a more open investigation.

Ultimately, 10 witnesses were interviewed by the F.B.I., according to the F.B.I.’s recent letter. Dr. Ford and Mr. Kavanaugh themselves were never interviewed by the F.B.I.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who signed Wednesday’s letter to the F.B.I., called the process “an injustice in fact orchestrated by the White House under Donald Trump, an injustice that frankly was a disservice to the F.B.I.”

Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, the lawyers who represented Dr. Ford, said in a statement that the nation “deserved better” when it came to the inquiry into Justice Kavanaugh.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/us/p ... tw-nytimes

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by ponchi101 That was why Barret was put there for, and Kavanaugh (a little).
It is so hard to believe that the USA is NOT going in reverse, culturally.

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by ti-amie These darn kids.



This is the website where you can turn in your neighbor, cousin, sister, or aunt if you suspect they're assisting in providing abortions or going to have one for a $10k bounty.

by ponchi101 :clap: :clap: :clap:

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by ti-amie Justice Stephen Breyer to retire from Supreme Court

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Justice Stephen G. Breyer, seen here in 2013, was selected for the court by President Bill Clinton in 1994. (Elise Amendola/AP)

By Robert Barnes
Today at 2:18 p.m. EST

Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the current Supreme Court term, according to a person familiar with his plans, giving President Biden a chance to reinforce the court’s liberal minority and make good on his campaign pledge to make history by nominating the first African American female justice.

Breyer, 83, is the court’s oldest justice, and he has been under unprecedented pressure to retire while Democrats have narrow control of the Senate, which must confirm Supreme Court nominees. The current term concludes at the end of June.

A replacement chosen by Biden would not change the court’s conservative supermajority; Breyer is one of only three liberal justices. But it would give Biden the chance to have his nominee considered by a more favorable Senate, and mean a younger colleague for the court’s other liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, 67, and Elena Kagan, 61.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer indicated that Biden’s eventual nominee would be considered and confirmed “with all deliberate speed.”

Biden’s pledge to nominate an African American woman is a first. There have been two Black men on the court — Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas — and five women, including three current members of the court: Sotomayor, Kagan and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The two women most often mentioned as replacements are Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer Supreme Court clerk who in June was confirmed to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, a former Justice Department official who has represented the government at the Supreme Court as deputy solicitor general.

Others will surely be added to the list, and Biden will likely cast a wide net. There are few Black women on the federal appellate court bench, the traditional spot from which Supreme Court nominees are chosen.

On the current court, only Kagan did not serve previously on an appeals court.

The person familiar with his plans said it is unlikely Breyer will make an announcement Wednesday — although that could change — and that Breyer could make his leaving the court contingent on the confirmation of a successor.

As reaction from lawmakers and interest groups emerged, Biden was reticent. “There has been no announcement from Justice Breyer,” the president told reporters at the White House. “Let him make whatever statement he’s going to make. And I’ll be happy to talk about it later.”

Breyer was chosen for the court in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, a year after Clinton picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He is known as a pragmatic liberal, more moderate than others on the left and willing to search for compromise among the court’s ideologically divided justices.

The term that ended last summer was one of his most productive and significant in his long career, receiving some of the top assignments from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Breyer wrote the majority opinion when the court rejected the third challenge at the Supreme Court to the Affordable Care Act. Earlier, he authored the court’s decision that Google did not violate copyright law in a multibillion-dollar showdown with Oracle, a highly watched case in the tech world.

And he wrote the court’s defense of the First Amendment rights of public school students in a case involving a high school’s punishment of a cheerleader for a profane rant on social media.

Breyer’s decision to leave gives Biden a historic opportunity but also could prompt a monumental battle. Democrats control exactly half of the Senate’s 100 votes, with Vice President Harris holding the tiebreaking key.

Recent Supreme Court confirmations have been largely party-line votes, with a Republican in the White House and the GOP in charge of the Senate.

That is partly why Breyer has been under pressure from liberal activist groups and some Democratic senators to retire now, although the White House has been careful not to pile on.

Ginsburg declined to retire while President Barack Obama was in office, thinking Donald Trump would not be elected, and Democrats paid the price. After her death in September 2020, Trump and Republicans in the Senate pushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett just days before Election Day, and after voters already had started to cast the votes that led to Trump’s defeat.

The increasing partisan polarization surrounding the court has been one of Breyer’s concerns, one he shares with the conservative chief justice. He addressed it this spring during a speech at Harvard Law School.

“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on other branches,” he said.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

by ti-amie The last three appointees made it with less than 60 votes.

by dryrunguy Sinema and Manchin will find something wrong with whoever Biden nominates. Write it down.

by skatingfan The seat will almost certainly remain vacant until President Trump is reelected in 2024.

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by Suliso
skatingfan wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 9:40 pm The seat will almost certainly remain vacant until President Trump is reelected in 2024.
No way that will be the case.

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by ti-amie
ti-amie wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 7:49 pm The last three appointees made it with less than 60 votes.
I finally found this tweet where it's shown the last three appointees didn't require a 60 vote margin.


by ponchi101 Biden's strategy of saying that he plans to nominate a black woman will always backfire with a lot of people. By saying so, a lot of people will always say that she was nominated BECAUSE of those reasons, and not because of her qualifications.
Don't say who you are going to nominate, and then nominate whomever. That way you can say "This is the best qualified person at the moment".

by ti-amie Believe it or not some are saying he should nominate Bernie Sanders

by ponchi101 Oh, ok then. The non-controversial choice, who is also in his mid 80's. Tons of sense.
(I hope I don't need the emoji for this post).

by ti-amie The three women I've seen mentioned most often are all eminently qualified but I have my eye on Sherrilyn Ifill who stepped down as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund a few months ago, the place where the late Thurgood Marshall made his bones. I'm lousy at this so I'll probably be wrong as usual.

by dmforever I had no idea she was being considered. Thanks for that. :)
I've heard her speak a couple of times and have been super super impressed. That would make me very happy. Fingers crossed. :)

Kevin

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National Law Journal
@TheNLJ

“The first words out of his [Breyer's] mouth when he picked up the phone were ‘Hire her,’” Norton recounted.

by ponchi101 Let's see what Cruz, MTG, Boebert, Graham, McConnel et al come up with against her.

by Suliso Qualified obviously, but for this position does it matter so much? Supreme court in US is a political position and in this case Democrats score one. That's all really...

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by ti-amie This might matter in a parallel universe but with Kavanaugh on the bench this is just graffiti.


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by mmmm8
Suliso wrote: Sat Feb 26, 2022 8:30 am Qualified obviously, but for this position does it matter so much? Supreme court in US is a political position and in this case Democrats score one. That's all really...
I think you underestimate the legal expertise required for the position. Yes, it's a political appointment in the sense that presidents pick nominees based on whether they tend to agree with their interpretation of the law, but it's still probably the most sophisticated role in the government. The fact that some recent nominees were less qualified doesn't take away from that.

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by ponchi101 But isn't that going to backfire quickly? The sole thing she has to say is "I was appointed by the court, and everybody is warranted a defense".
It is not even smart.

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Elizabeth Williamson @NYTLiz
#KetanjiBrownJackson gave the gunman 4 years in jail, a stiff sentence. While no one was hurt, his brand of vigilante justice "is utterly incompatible w our constitutional scheme and rule of law," she told him. 3/

The Judge noted that the gunman took violent action based on an "internet rumor." Her concern: other deluded ppl "will take up arms with the intent of sacrificing lives in order to achieve what they believe is a just result." This was 4 years before the #Jan6 insurrection 2/
Elizabeth Williamson
@NYTLiz


by ti-amie When you hear people throwing the word "unqualified" around think about this chart.


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by ponchi101 We know that the vote will go along the lines of the impeachment vote. Only a few GOP senators are there to do what is best for this country, so if they could not vote to impeach Tiny, they will not vote to confirm their most feared "nemesis": an obviously more than qualified black woman.

by ti-amie There's so much more that's being reported about the hearings but since all the Republicans are doing is throwing conspiracy theories at Judge Jackson-Brown I haven't posted all of the back and forth.

VP Harris will be involved in the vote I think.

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by patrick Hawley did not need to ask any questions or comments on the President SCOTUS nominee after his antics on a certain certification day in 2021.

by ti-amie Everything they do is performative.

by ti-amie A huge story broke late this afternoon. There are texts and I think emails between Virginia Thomas and TFG's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that reveal she was deep into the planning of January 6. I find that truly amazing.

by ti-amie Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show
In messages to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after Election Day, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called Biden’s victory “the greatest Heist of our History” and told him that President Donald Trump should not concede.
By Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Today at 5:15 p.m. EDT

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was referring.

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

The text messages were among 2,320 that Meadows provided to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The content of messages between Thomas and Meadows — 21 sent by her, eight by him – has not previously been reported. They were reviewed by The Post and CBS News and then confirmed by five people who have seen the committee’s documents.

Meadows’s attorney, George Terwilliger III, confirmed the existence of the 29 messages between his client and Thomas. In reviewing the substance of the messages Wednesday, he said that neither he nor Meadows would comment on individual texts. But, Terwilliger added, “nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues.”

Ginni Thomas did not respond to multiple requests for comment made Thursday by email and phone. Justice Thomas, who has been hospitalized for treatment of an infection, did not respond to a request for comment made through the Supreme Court’s public information office.

It is unknown whether Ginni Thomas and Meadows exchanged additional messages between the election and Biden’s inauguration beyond the 29 received by the committee. Shortly after providing the 2,320 messages, Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, arguing that any further engagement could violate Trump’s claims of executive privilege. Committee members and aides said they believe the messages may be just a portion of the pair’s total exchanges.

A spokesman for the committee declined to comment. The revelation of Thomas’s messages with Meadows comes three weeks after lawyers for the committee said in a court filing that the panel has “a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States” and obstruct the counting of electoral votes by Congress.

Trump spoke publicly during this period about his intent to contest the election results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the president said in a speech at 2:30 the morning after the election. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Thomas has publicly denied any conflict of interest between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, for an article published March 14.

Ginni Thomas, in that interview, also acknowledged that she had attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, but said that she left early because it was too cold and that she did not have any role in planning the event.

Justice Thomas, 73, is the Supreme Court’s longest-serving current justice and has missed oral arguments this week because of his hospitalization. He has made few public comments about the 2020 election. In February 2021, when the Supreme Court rejected election challenges filed by Trump and his allies, Thomas wrote in a dissent that it was “baffling” and “inexplicable” that the majority had decided against hearing the cases because he believed the Supreme Court should provide states with guidance for future elections.

In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.

In the messages, Thomas and Meadows each assert a belief that the election was stolen and seem to share a solidarity of purpose and faith, though they occasionally express differences on tactics.

“The intense pressures you and our President are now experiencing are more intense than Anything Experienced (but I only felt a fraction of it in 1991),” Thomas wrote to Meadows on Nov. 19, an apparent reference to Justice Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings in which lawyer Anita Hill testified that he had made unwanted sexual comments when he was her boss. Thomas strongly denied the accusations.

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda.

The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

During that period, supporters of the QAnon extremist ideology embraced a false theory that Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots so he could track potential fraud. “Watch the water” was a refrain in QAnon circles at the time.

In the Nov. 5 message to Meadows, Thomas went on to quote a passage that had circulated on right-wing websites: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

The text messages received by the House select committee do not include a response from Meadows.

The next day, Nov. 6, Thomas sent a follow-up to Meadows: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.”

It is unclear if Meadows responded.

On Nov. 10, Thomas drew a reply from Meadows. She wrote, “Mark, I wanted to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!!” She continued by urging him to “Help This Great President stand firm” and invoking “the greatest Heist of our History.”

Thomas added in the message that Meadows should “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta” — appearing to refer to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, as well as lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was involved in Trump’s push to claim victory in Georgia despite Biden’s certified win there.

One minute later, Meadows responded: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.”

Nine minutes after that, Thomas replied, “Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!”

Later that night, Ginni Thomas messaged Meadows seeming to react to a cable news segment. “Van Jones spins interestingly, but shows us the balls being juggled too,” Thomas said, referring to the prominent CNN commentator.

Thomas then turned to her frustrations with congressional Republicans and said she wished more of them were rallying behind Trump and being more active with his base voters, who were furious about the election.

She wrote, “House and Senate guys are pathetic too... only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots... Gohmert, Jordan, Gosar, and Roy.” She appeared to be referring to Republican House members Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Paul A. Gosar of Arizona and Chip Roy of Texas.

This was a troubled time for Trump. News organizations had declared Biden the winner on Nov. 7, after a review of vote totals in each state and the electoral count. Trump’s legal operation was divided between his campaign’s official lawyers and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s confidant and personal attorney who was fast asserting control of his campaign’s legal strategy. While many Republicans supported Trump’s filing of legal challenges in several states, his lawyers stumbled in court and many allies by mid-November were privately confiding that Trump’s legal battle would be short-lived.

Yet Thomas urged Meadows to plow ahead, rally Republicans around Trump and remind them of his enduring political capital.

“Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!” she wrote in her text message to him late on Nov. 10. She then told him to watch a YouTube video about the power of never conceding.

Meadows might not have been Thomas’s only contact inside the Trump White House that week. On Nov. 13, she texted Meadows about her outreach to “Jared,” potentially a reference to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser. She wrote, “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.” The messages provided to the House select committee do not show a response by Meadows.

Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.

Powell was becoming ubiquitous on television — and winning the president’s favor, according to several Trump advisers — as she claimed without evidence that electronic voting systems had stolen the election from Trump by switching millions of ballots in Biden’s favor. She claimed, again without evidence, that hundreds of thousands of ballots were appearing out of nowhere and that a global communist conspiracy was afoot involving Venezuela, Cuba, and probably China.

Still, while Trump cheered some of Powell’s commentary, she was a polarizing figure in his orbit. Her views were considered so extreme and unsupported by evidence that David Bossie, a longtime Trump supporter, told others that she was peddling “concocted B.S.” After Fox News host Tucker Carlson contacted Powell about her claim that electronic voting machines had switched ballots to Biden, he told his viewers that he found her answers evasive and that she had shown no evidence to support her assertion. He stopped having her on his program.

Ginni Thomas stood by her. “Don’t let her and your assets be marginalized instead...help her be the lead and the face,” she wrote to Meadows on Nov. 13.

The following day, Nov. 14, Thomas sent Meadows material she said was from Connie Hair, chief of staff to Gohmert. It is not clear if she was passing on a message from Hair or sharing Hair’s perspective as guidance for Meadows. The text message seems to quote Hair’s belief that “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.”

“This war is psychological. PSYOP,” the text from Thomas states.

Hair said Thursday that she did not have any specific recollection of that text message.

On Nov. 19, which would be a crucial day for Powell as she spoke at a news conference at the Republican National Committee, Thomas continued to bolster Powell’s standing in a text to Meadows.

“Mark (don’t want to wake you)… ” Thomas wrote. “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

“Release the Kraken” had become a catchphrase on the far right after the election, used as shorthand for the anticipated exposure of a voter fraud conspiracy that would upend Biden’s victory with the same force as a “Kraken,” a mythical giant sea monster.

In that same exchange, Thomas also at one point offered Meadows advice on managing the West Wing staff.

“Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark,” Thomas wrote. “The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.”

“Monica Crowley,” Thomas said, referring to the conservative commentator, “may have a sense of this [from] her Nixon days.” Crowley, a top official in Trump’s Treasury Department, had been an aide to former president Richard M. Nixon years after he resigned from office in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal.

Thomas then wrote, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB and others.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sometimes called “ACB” by her supporters, had joined the Supreme Court in October, shortly before the election. It is unclear to what threats Thomas was referring.

Later on Nov. 19, Meadows replied to Thomas’s long text message by saying, “Thanks so much.”

But Thomas’s high aspirations for Powell quickly collapsed that afternoon. Instead of capturing the nation’s attention at the RNC news conference, where she spoke alongside Giuliani and other Trump advisers, Powell was criticized for spreading a false theory about electronic voting machines as a tool for communists. Some Trump aides were horrified by her and Giuliani’s performances and felt they had embarrassed the president by becoming a parody of his post-election fight.

As Giuliani spoke, a dark brown liquid mixed with beads of sweat rolled down his cheek. “Did you watch ‘My Cousin Vinny?’ ” he asked reporters, tying a legal reference to the 1992 comedy.

Thomas wrote to Meadows, “Tears are flowing at what Rudy is doing right now!!!!”

“Glad to help,” Meadows replied.

By Nov. 22, Trump gave his blessing for Giuliani and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, to issue a statement claiming that Powell “is not a member of the Trump Legal Team.”

Thomas reached out to Meadows that day with concern. “Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” she wrote.

“She doesn’t have anything or at least she won’t share it if she does,” Meadows texted back.

“Wow!” Thomas replied.

Meadows did not respond.

On Nov. 24, Thomas engaged Meadows again by sharing a video from Parler, a conservative social media website, that appeared to refer to conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

“If you all cave to the elites, you have to know that many of your 73 million feel like what Glenn is expressing,” Thomas wrote.

She said Trump risked his supporters growing disenchanted to the point of walking away from politics. “Me included,” she wrote. “I think I am done with politics, and I don’t think I am alone, Mark.”

Meadows replied three minutes later: “I don’t know what you mean by caving to the elites.”

Thomas responded: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences... the whole coup and now this... we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”

After continued back-and-forth, Meadows wrote, “You’re preaching to the choir. Very demoralizing.”

The text exchanges with Thomas that Meadows provided to the House select committee pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence. The committee received one additional message sent by Thomas to Meadows, on Jan. 10, four days after the “Stop the Steal” rally Thomas said she attended and the deadly attack on the Capitol.

In that message, Thomas expresses support for Meadows and Trump — and directed anger at Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Trump’s wishes to block the congressional certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.

“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas wrote to Meadows. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”

“Amazing times,” she added. “The end of Liberty.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ows-texts/

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by ponchi101 When did all those arrests happen?
They live in a completely separate universe.

by mmmm8 Clarence Thomas should be censured for treason and/or for some sort of spousal neglect, she seems like someone who needs mental health support

by ponchi101
mmmm8 wrote: Sun Mar 27, 2022 4:18 pm Clarence Thomas should be censured for treason and/or for some sort of spousal neglect, she seems like someone who needs mental health support
She seems like someone that needs a jacket with ten-feet long sleeves and a cold water hose...

by dryrunguy Supreme Court agrees to hear challenge to law regulating how pigs are raised

The Supreme Court on Monday put pork on its legal menu, taking up a challenge to a California law that regulates how pigs are raised. Pork producers said it sets unrealistic requirements and amounts to regulating the industry nationwide.

The law at issue is Proposition 12, approved by voters in 2018, which makes it illegal to sell pork in California unless the pig it comes from was born to a sow housed with at least 24 square feet of space and in conditions that allow the sow to turn around freely without touching her enclosure.

The pork producers challenging the law said hardly any commercially bred sows in the United States are housed with that much space. Given that California imports nearly all of the pork consumed in the state, they said, Proposition 12 in practical effect regulates wholly out-of-state commerce and is therefore unconstitutional. It would require, they say, a more onerous set of hog-raising practices just for pork sold in California — an unfeasible prospect.

“It requires massive and costly alteration to existing sow housing nationwide, necessitates either reduction of herd sizes or building of new facilities to meet its space mandates, raises prices in transactions with no California connection, drives farms out of business, and promotes industry consolidation, and will be policed by intrusive inspections of out-of-state farms conducted by California’s agents,” the challengers said in their appeal.

Farmers in Iowa and Minnesota, the nation’s largest pork producers, said the effects of the law “will be catastrophic and threaten our nation’s supply of safe and wholesome pork.”

The Humane Society, defending the law, said it was intended to end “cruel and unsanitary conditions that threaten the health of California consumers.”

Lawyers for the state said Proposition 12 regulates only in-state sales of products brought in from elsewhere and “is entirely indifferent to the ways products sold in other states are priced or produced."

What’s more, the state said, several pork producers, including Tyson Foods and Hormel, have publicly declared that they have taken steps to ensure that their products meet the California standard.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/suprem ... -rcna20665

by ponchi101 Time for a reckoning in the USA about farming practices. If the animals' rights people win, it simply means that after this, they will go after the poultry industry's practices, and then cattle. And if all these industries need to make the changes, get ready for $100 steaks.

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 Her token gesture to give the impression that she is not partisan to the core.
But, alright. It is at least meaningful.

by ti-amie




by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by Owendonovan
ti-amie wrote: Fri Mar 25, 2022 10:03 pm
Seems she's got her man whipped.

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by dryrunguy It's a strange country we live in. Ten years ago, we were e-smacking Romney for his 47% comments. Today, we applaud him for demonstrating a modicum of respect--something many of his colleague weren't capable of doing. How times--and standards--have changed.

by ponchi101 Indeed. Just imagine the USA if it had gone through a GOP presidency presided by Romney, from 2016 t0 2020. Imagine how much less hatred there would be.

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by ti-amie Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows
"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.

By JOSH GERSTEIN and ALEXANDER WARD
05/02/2022 08:32 PM EDT.

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/0 ... n-00029473

by ti-amie


by ponchi101 Written by Margaret Atwood.
A total disgrace. But, and this does mean in anyway that I will ever agree with any decision banning abortion: what are the democrats and the women of the USA going to do? Because plenty of women will back this decision.
This is precisely what Coney Barret was chosen to do.

by dmforever
ponchi101 wrote: Tue May 03, 2022 5:04 am Written by Margaret Atwood.
A total disgrace. But, and this does mean in anyway that I will ever agree with any decision banning abortion: what are the democrats and the women of the USA going to do? Because plenty of women will back this decision.
This is precisely what Coney Barret was chosen to do.
We need to start calling Amy Coney Barrett Ofjesse.

:(

Kevin

by the Moz For shame SCOTUS.

by ponchi101 AOC (and I am not a fan of her) is making a very good point. The SCOTUS/GOP are not coming after abortion ONLY. This is just a first step to take away all the federal protections involving LGBT rights, and all the other rights that have been won in recent years and which are deemed "sinful" to the religious zealots in both organizations.
Case in point. A less recent positions by the SCOTUS has granted a county the right to fly a flag with a cross over County Hall. A clear violation of the separation of State/Church, but a clear indication of where these psychos stand.

by dryrunguy But Hillary's emails...

by the Moz
dryrunguy wrote: Tue May 03, 2022 6:18 pm But Hillary's emails...
Lock SCOTUS up.

by Suliso Elections do matter. Elect people like Trump and even worse things could happen.

by ti-amie McConnell is after blood, saying that whoever leaked the document, which Roberts has confirmed is valid, should be prosecuted. I think that the last thing the party formerly known as the GOP wanted was an energized, angry group of people who will vote.

After denying Garland even a hearing he and his ilk should just have a seat.

by ponchi101 The myopia of these guys, or in reality, the twisted mentality, is off the scale. A reversal of RvW is what it is being talked about, and they are talking about the "terrible thing" of somebody leaking the decision.
Now, if only some other people were as brave and would leak the full Mueller report, and somebody at Deutsch Bank would leak Tiny's tax returns. If only somebody else were that patriotic.

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 About the justices talking about Roe V Wade in their confirmation. What a shocker! "GOP nominated Justices willing to lie during confirmations!"
Again, I do consider this to be an assault on women and basic human rights. But, why is this a surprise? I wrote about it early in 2020. I was wrong in believing that some case would challenge R.v.W to be used as a campaign talking point, but I was not wrong on the overall scheme: the GOP will use abortion as a campaign tool. Now, as they prepare for the midterms, they will use it as such. Some people are talking about this energizing the Dems; well, it will also energize the right. ALL religious fanatics in the USA see The Handmaid's Tale not as a dystopian piece of literature, but as the way things should be. A LOT of women in the USA see abortion as a sin. Tiny will now (and he will be right) claim that the justices that overturned R.v.W were his appointees (which is factual), which will galvanize more people around him.
Yes, this is an abomination, but you have to see the roots. And the roots are clear: this stems from the religious underbelly of the USA, and the impossibility by many people to accept the separation of State and Church. In a sense, all the little religious things in USA culture are coming back to haunt you: your president taking his oath of office over a bible, your currency carrying an IN GOD WE TRUST bumper sticker, people on court also swearing over bibles and claiming "so help me god".
For the rest of us, this is a civilian matter. For many people in the USA, this is straight from their religious beliefs.

by dryrunguy And Roe v. Wade is just the beginning. I thought about listing what's next, but the list is far too long. Yes, this is just the beginning.

by ponchi101 Please, do help me out with what else is in the cross hairs:
ALL LGBTQ rights (marriage, adoption, non discrimination, etc)
Voting rights
Marihuana?
Certain civil rights?
What other women's rights can be affected?

The thing is that the LGBTQ rights "group" is huge. It encompasses so many issues.

by Owendonovan If THIS isn't a tipping point, this country is done for.
(the leak of it is the least of my concerns)

by texasniteowl
Owendonovan wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 1:51 am If THIS isn't a tipping point, this country is done for.
(the leak of it is the least of my concerns)
I'm more pessimistic than you are. The current division in this country is unreal. No one tries to see other points of view or considers compromise.

by dmforever
texasniteowl wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 2:28 am
Owendonovan wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 1:51 am If THIS isn't a tipping point, this country is done for.
(the leak of it is the least of my concerns)
I'm more pessimistic than you are. The current division in this country is unreal. No one tries to see other points of view or considers compromise.
I've read thoughts similar to yours and I'm curious about exactly what a compromise would look like in some of the issues that were mentioned above. So let's take abortion. Would a compromise be something like a woman can only have an abortion if she is raped? Or only up to say 8 weeks along in her pregnancy? Because it seems to me that fundamentally either you believe in the idea that a woman has the right to control her reproductive choices and her body, or you don't.

Or let's take same sex marriage. What is the compromise? I'm not trying to be argumentative or confrontational. I know that tone is hard to discern in written media, but I just want you to know that I'm genuinely curious. Does compromise mean that only people of a certain age can get married to someone of the same sex? Or only once? Or only if they make a certain amount of money? Again, it seems to me that either you believe in the right to marry whomever you want, or you don't.

So I don't mean to put you on the spot, and if I am, just ignore this message, but I'd be interested in hearing examples of compromise if you want to help me out. Thanks. :)

Kevin

by MJ2004 Ponchi, there are unlimited fresh new hells you haven’t yet thought of. For example:




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

by Owendonovan For me personally, as a married gay man, there is no compromise on my marriage, there never has been. The only person who should concern themselves with my marriage is my husband.

by texasniteowl
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 4:22 am

I've read thoughts similar to yours and I'm curious about exactly what a compromise would look like in some of the issues that were mentioned above.

Kevin
I originally had a longer post that was up for a while but I ended up deleting it. In some ways I think compromise may have been the wrong word. Are some of these topics black/white or yes/no...maybe but not really. I feel like those of us who are kinda in the middle on some of these topics get excoriated by the extremes to such an extent that we give up talking about them. I think you can be pro-life as it applies to you and your life but there is no need to push your personal views on other people. I don't oppose same sex marriage because it doesn't affect me but neither am I going to go out and fight for it. I guess I'm trying to say, what is wrong with live and let live? Yeah, maybe that is simplistic and naive. But seriously...live and let live. The two vocal extremes are making that impossible. And maybe I'm just getting old too, but it's just been getting progressively worse, especially the last 22 years.

by ponchi101 Because I find myself very much in TexasNiteOwl's camp, a few relatively random thoughts.
There are some issues that indeed are not negotiable, simply because of their nature. You, obviously, can't be "half married", and you can't get "half an abortion" because you can't be half-pregnant. But there are other things in which a median can be achieved.
The GENDER issue seems to be one of those. I just simply cannot believe or accept that there are 67 genders. I find that in that conversation conservatives do have a point. Left wing activists, to me, seem to be confused between "gender" and "sexuality", and this could have a biological definition: any combination with a Y chromosome makes you a male, all without a Y make you a female. Your sexuality? All yours. Your decision of who to love and/or who to have sex with is yours, as well as how to dress, but drop the 67 genders.
The imposition of labels is another one in which conservatives may have a point. Please, please, don't call me "latinx" or "latinex". That is not my language. Don't have the arrogance to think that you are "saving me" by changing the way my language works. Lots and lots of spanish words end in "o", but that does not mean a sexual imposition. Many words end in "a", and encompass groups. Simplest example: "persona" (person), ending in "a" but without a predisposed sexual indication.
From the right, their intransigence on any form of gun control is borderline childish, if not completely so. There are so many things that could be done (gun registration, mandatory safety training, for example) that would not infringe on the right that it could be discussed.
About abortion. The sole area that I think could be talked about could be a limit on how long into your gestation can you have an abortion. I would accept that the sole reasons for abortions in the third trimester should be medical; by the six month, if you are still unsure of whether you want or not to have a child, then the problem is certainly you. Anything else should be off the board of discussion. On same sex marriage, it is impossible for me to see anything else but absolute equality: marry whom you want, include them in your will, equal access to adoption, etc.
Of course, the GOP and conservatives are the party/mentality of "not minding your own business". An incredibly simple point is missed by them: you don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Let's have a health system and a welfare system that will ensure that you can deliver and raise that child in the best possible way. But, of course, the GOP wants none of that. No abortion, no health care, no welfare. They do make it hard.

One thing is that, as TNO says, there is no discourse. Right now, it is all yelling. It is clear that all liberals and dems must be, rightly so, angry about this SCOTUS plan. But, when E. Warren yells that "we will not go back", she seems to be ignoring something: how? The rules in the USA are that the SCOTUS has the final say. Yes, you were cheated of a SCOTUS seat, and then Justice Kennedy basically committed treason, but that is spilt milk. You will not be able to do anything in Texas, in Florida, and in a bunch of states.
After the '20 election, I posted a small map, joking about what the USA would look like after it would split. Well, the joke is no longer funny. If this atmosphere in the USA continues, the chances that the country will be so divided that it may physically split are no longer zero. California is viable as an independent country. The entire west coast is. The northeastern portion too. If this atmosphere of non-discourse continues, in a few electoral cycles the chances of such a division of the USA will increase. The USA is nothing more than an experiment; all countries are. It has been successful for almost 250 years. Nothing guarantees that it will be so forever.

by dmforever
texasniteowl wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 1:41 pm
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 4:22 am

I've read thoughts similar to yours and I'm curious about exactly what a compromise would look like in some of the issues that were mentioned above.

Kevin
I originally had a longer post that was up for a while but I ended up deleting it. In some ways I think compromise may have been the wrong word. Are some of these topics black/white or yes/no...maybe but not really. I feel like those of us who are kinda in the middle on some of these topics get excoriated by the extremes to such an extent that we give up talking about them. I think you can be pro-life as it applies to you and your life but there is no need to push your personal views on other people. I don't oppose same sex marriage because it doesn't affect me but neither am I going to go out and fight for it. I guess I'm trying to say, what is wrong with live and let live? Yeah, maybe that is simplistic and naive. But seriously...live and let live. The two vocal extremes are making that impossible. And maybe I'm just getting old too, but it's just been getting progressively worse, especially the last 22 years.
Thanks for the examples. But if your point is live and let live, I would strongly suggest that it's not the right and the left that is against live and let live. It's the right only. That is the group that is pushing its views. Just because people react strongly to their loss of rights doesn't make them equal to the group that is taking them away.

And Ponchi, maybe you can see now why you and I have a slightly different view about this space that you have created, and which I'm very very thankful for.

Kevin

by ponchi101
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:16 pm ...

Thanks for the examples. But if your point is live and let live, I would strongly suggest that it's not the right and the left that is against live and let live. It's the right only. That is the group that is pushing its views. Just because people react strongly to their loss of rights doesn't make them equal to the group that is taking them away.

And Ponchi, maybe you can see now why you and I have a slightly different view about this space that you have created, and which I'm very very thankful for.

Kevin
But, the fact that we have differences (and I find them small) does not mean that I don't read you and think about what you write with a critical mind, not dismissing you at once.
Just to make it clear: I can't imagine compromises regarding abortion, other than that 3rd trimester caveat. For me, even if a woman were to decide that abortion will be her preferred choice for family planning, I would still support her.
LGBTQ rights? Consenting adults who, when sex is involved, do so behind closed doors (the same request I have from heterosexual couples). So completely none my business, except for the fact that I support them all. Your body, your life, your love. All should have access to the means to achieve what makes them happy.
I will stop now, to let other opinions come in.

by dmforever
ponchi101 wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:06 pm Because I find myself very much in TexasNiteOwl's camp, a few relatively random thoughts.
There are some issues that indeed are not negotiable, simply because of their nature. You, obviously, can't be "half married", and you can't get "half an abortion" because you can't be half-pregnant. But there are other things in which a median can be achieved.
The GENDER issue seems to be one of those. I just simply cannot believe or accept that there are 67 genders. I find that in that conversation conservatives do have a point. Left wing activists, to me, seem to be confused between "gender" and "sexuality", and this could have a biological definition: any combination with a Y chromosome makes you a male, all without a Y make you a female. Your sexuality? All yours. Your decision of who to love and/or who to have sex with is yours, as well as how to dress, but drop the 67 genders.
The imposition of labels is another one in which conservatives may have a point. Please, please, don't call me "latinx" or "latinex". That is not my language. Don't have the arrogance to think that you are "saving me" by changing the way my language works. Lots and lots of spanish words end in "o", but that does not mean a sexual imposition. Many words end in "a", and encompass groups. Simplest example: "persona" (person), ending in "a" but without a predisposed sexual indication.
From the right, their intransigence on any form of gun control is borderline childish, if not completely so. There are so many things that could be done (gun registration, mandatory safety training, for example) that would not infringe on the right that it could be discussed.
About abortion. The sole area that I think could be talked about could be a limit on how long into your gestation can you have an abortion. I would accept that the sole reasons for abortions in the third trimester should be medical; by the six month, if you are still unsure of whether you want or not to have a child, then the problem is certainly you. Anything else should be off the board of discussion. On same sex marriage, it is impossible for me to see anything else but absolute equality: marry whom you want, include them in your will, equal access to adoption, etc.
Of course, the GOP and conservatives are the party/mentality of "not minding your own business". An incredibly simple point is missed my them: you don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Let's have a health system and a welfare system that will ensure that you can deliver and raise that child in the best possible way. But, of course, the GOP wants none of that. No abortion, no health care, no welfare. They do make it hard.

One thing is that, as TNO says, there is no discourse. Right now, it is all yelling. It is clear that all liberals and dems must be, rightly so, angry about this SCOTUS plan. But, when E. Warren yells that "we will not go back", she seems to be ignoring something: how? The rules in the USA are that the SCOTUS has the final say. Yes, you were cheated of a SCOTUS seat, and then Justice Kennedy basically committed treason, but that is spilt milk. You will not be able to do anything in Texas, in Florida, and in a bunch of states.
After the '20 election, I posted a small map, joking about what the USA would look like after it would split. Well, the joke is no longer funny. If this atmosphere in the USA continues, the chances that the country will be so divided that it may physically split are no longer zero. California is viable as an independent country. The entire west coast is. The northeastern portion too. If this atmosphere of non-discourse continues, in a few electoral cycles the chances of such a division of the USA will increase. The USA is nothing more than an experiment; all countries are. It has been successful for almost 250 years. Nothing guarantees that it will be so forever.
Your view of gender as being 100% biological is different from how other people view it, which is a combination of biology and psychology. They aren't confused. The just take more than biology into account. Sexuality is based on who you are attracted to. Gender is how you feel about yourself. There are many cultures that have had more than 2 genders for millennia. It's not a new concept at all.

I actually used to think that gender was what was between a person's legs, or in their chromosomes, but I found that talking to people or reading about their experiences changed my mind. And a good example is a transgender person. If that person's sexuality were solely based on biology, why would they want to transition? It's because their gender feels wrong to them. How they feel is a part of their gender identity. It's a part of a cisgendered person's gender identity too. It's just that we don't realize it, because we've never had to examine it.

The use of "latinx" began in the Latin community. I totally get not wanting people outside your group labeling you though. That really sucks. Also, I recently talked to a Colombian student of mine who told me that in Colombia at least, people are starting to use the letter "e" to degender some gendered nouns. I don't remember if she said that they use them for adjectives too. She wasn't saying that every noun was going to now end in "e". It was more about nouns for people.

And I agree that there can be compromise in terms of abortion after a set period of time. You chose after 6 months. Don't most abortions either happen before that time, or happen after that time only because there are health risks for the woman, or the fetus has severe problems which will make their life horrible? I don't think most right to choose people would only advocate for abortion up until birth, but I don't think that's the option that's being offered them.

Thanks again for this space.

Kevin

by dmforever
ponchi101 wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:27 pm
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:16 pm ...

Thanks for the examples. But if your point is live and let live, I would strongly suggest that it's not the right and the left that is against live and let live. It's the right only. That is the group that is pushing its views. Just because people react strongly to their loss of rights doesn't make them equal to the group that is taking them away.

And Ponchi, maybe you can see now why you and I have a slightly different view about this space that you have created, and which I'm very very thankful for.

Kevin
But, the fact that we have differences (and I find them small) does not mean that I don't read you and think about what you write with a critical mind, not dismissing you at once.
Just to make it clear: I can't imagine compromises regarding abortion, other than that 3rd trimester caveat. For me, even if a woman were to decide that abortion will be her preferred choice for family planning, I would still support her.
LGBTQ rights? Consenting adults who, when sex is involved, do so behind closed doors (the same request I have from heterosexual couples). So completely none my business, except for the fact that I support them all. Your body, your life, your love. All should have access to the means to achieve what makes them happy.
I will stop now, to let other opinions come in.
I agree. I also read your posts as well and do my best to think them through. I think my point wasn't clear though. Sorry about that. I wasn't referring to you. I was just pointing out that I might perceive this space differently than you, referring back to our discussion a while ago. I need to be more specific. My bad.

Kevin

by ponchi101
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:44 pm ...

The use of "latinx" began in the Latin community. I totally get not wanting people outside your group labeling you though. That really sucks. Also, I recently talked to a Colombian student of mine who told me that in Colombia at least, people are starting to use the letter "e" to degender some gendered nouns. I don't remember if she said that they use them for adjectives too. She wasn't saying that every noun was going to now end in "e". It was more about nouns for people.

...

Kevin
I will only comment on this one.
Colombia indeed is following some trends. For example, the current Mayor of Bogota is an openly gay woman, with a well known partner. I don't know if they are married (I am not sure if Colombia finally legalized same sex marriage) but she is open about it.
That does not mean that ALL society has transitioned to an acceptance of LGBTQ. Colombia is still a very "conservative" society. In reality, they are the typical hypocritical bunch, being conservative in public and very, very liberal in their private lives (mistresses? You bet it is accepted).
About nouns. The language has a lot nouns that end in E, and are gender neutral: presidente, gerente, alcalde come easily to mind. My peeve is the imposition, and on that, I gather that older people (like me) simply refuse the change. Our language really does not use X too much, and it sounds very odd. And, to me, changing the o's and a's is trivial in relation to the other real gender problems we have. Like giving you an aspirin to treat leukemia.
The gender issue is still very different due to culture. It would take too long to put down my ideas. Will, once again, stop here.

by dmforever
ponchi101 wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 4:17 pm
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:44 pm ...

The use of "latinx" began in the Latin community. I totally get not wanting people outside your group labeling you though. That really sucks. Also, I recently talked to a Colombian student of mine who told me that in Colombia at least, people are starting to use the letter "e" to degender some gendered nouns. I don't remember if she said that they use them for adjectives too. She wasn't saying that every noun was going to now end in "e". It was more about nouns for people.

...

Kevin
I will only comment on this one.
Colombia indeed is following some trends. For example, the current Mayor of Bogota is an openly gay woman, with a well known partner. I don't know if they are married (I am not sure if Colombia finally legalized same sex marriage) but she is open about it.
That does not mean that ALL society has transitioned to an acceptance of LGBTQ. Colombia is still a very "conservative" society. In reality, they are the typical hypocritical bunch, being conservative in public and very, very liberal in their private lives (mistresses? You bet it is accepted).
About nouns. The language has a lot nouns that end in E, and are gender neutral: presidente, gerente, alcalde come easily to mind. My peeve is the imposition, and on that, I gather that older people (like me) simply refuse the change. Our language really does not use X too much, and it sounds very odd. And, to me, changing the o's and a's is trivial in relation to the other real gender problems we have. Like giving you an aspirin to treat leukemia.
The gender issue is still very different due to culture. It would take too long to put down my ideas. Will, once again, stop here.
Thanks :) Just to be clear, she meant using "e" like "latine" instead of latino or latina so as to include everyone. And I totally agree that there are much larger gender issues in most places. Perhaps this focus on language happens because it's symbolic and a simple fix to make, if people want to make that change.

Kevin

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 But this is tied to the Tweet you posted in the Politics topic about Barry Goldwater saying what would happen when the religious nuts would take control over the GOP. They don't care about women; they care about some ridiculous concept of "a soul". Never mind that the woman's soul will be expedited to hell after she dies from a botched abortion, if you believe their nonsense.

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 What did she write? "The Handmaid's Tale: a piece of non-fiction".
:?

by skatingfan My condolences to all of our American members.

by Suliso Indeed, but it was very predictable...

by ponchi101 And it will not stop there:
Justice Thomas says the Supreme Court should reconsider rulings that protect access to contraception and same-sex marriage as the court overturns Roe v. Wade

Now, this supreme court will remain in place for a very long time. They are young so, for example, ACB will be there for a good 25 more years. And they will come after all these rights, and after all these people, with no way anybody can stop them.
So, unless people in Texas and all the other states that will ban abortion really gang up and vote DEM (and a lot simply won't), this is where the USA stands. And all the liberals and democrats that stay at home for the midterm elections now really have something to do.

by dryrunguy This is where we are now.


by ti-amie

All of the folks who, in 2016, said there was no difference between the candidates for President should be very happy.

I'm with Blanche.

by ti-amie There is a legal podcast I listen to that emphasizes that the right wing radicals on the court do not use settled law as a reference point the way it was done in the past. This is why Thomas is now talking about going after contraception and gay marriage.


by ti-amie Image

by ponchi101 Excuse me but, what is "uncertain" about Florida banning abortion?

by mmmm8
dryrunguy wrote: Fri Jun 24, 2022 8:54 pm This is where we are now.

Our company is providing lodging and travel as well (for reproductive health access and also for gender affirmation) and a lot of our clients are working on doing this.

Who would have thought corporate citizenship is here to guard our civil rights? Is this is what SCOTUS planned for when it ruled Corporations are people?

by mmmm8
ponchi101 wrote: Fri Jun 24, 2022 11:08 pm Excuse me but, what is "uncertain" about Florida banning abortion?
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/20 ... rtion-yet/

by ponchi101 ...yet.

by mmmm8
dmforever wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 3:44 pm
Your view of gender as being 100% biological is different from how other people view it, which is a combination of biology and psychology. They aren't confused. The just take more than biology into account. Sexuality is based on who you are attracted to. Gender is how you feel about yourself. There are many cultures that have had more than 2 genders for millennia. It's not a new concept at all.

I actually used to think that gender was what was between a person's legs, or in their chromosomes, but I found that talking to people or reading about their experiences changed my mind. And a good example is a transgender person. If that person's sexuality were solely based on biology, why would they want to transition? It's because their gender feels wrong to them. How they feel is a part of their gender identity. It's a part of a cisgendered person's gender identity too. It's just that we don't realize it, because we've never had to examine it.
I'm not going to be as nice as DMForever because it's not that kind of day.

The question around gender, transgender people and the various definitions is at this point a known scientific question with plenty of research available and publicized. Gender dysphoria is on the DSM-5, which is the standard for identifying mental health conditions. While there may be questions on whether it's a biological or mental health condition or where it comes from (and some countries no longer categorize it as a mental health disorder), there is no question that gender affirmation is valid medical need and also that one's gender has nothing to do with one's sexuality. There is frankly no excuse for anyone that is confused by the concept to not research more to understand it, the information is out there and it's scientifically backed.

Every time we make a joke about "67 genders," it empowers people who want to not only joke about but eradicate people they don't like or understand. A joke like that holds up very real and serious discrimination as normal, denying people medical access and economic opportunities and this has put transgender people disproportionally at risk for both being killed by others and for suicide.

<rant over and yes I know I'm a month late>

by Owendonovan So I need a gun, claim Jesus as my savior, be a caucasian heterosexual cis male, and fly an American flag to be a true American? I marched with 1,000's of people tonight in NYC, most would not be described like those above, but seemed so much more American.

by Deuce I have no religious or political affiliation. All of my ideas, perspectives, beliefs, values, etc. are entirely my own, and are not merely adopted from some group or other...

I believe that abortion should be allowed in situations like rape, incest, some cases of teenage pregnancy, etc...
But I don’t think that anyone should use abortion as a form of birth control.
There are enough efficient methods of birth control available that refusing to use one, and instead figuring that one can just get an abortion if they become pregnant, is irresponsible and wrong in my view.

In the end, I am pro-education and pro-choice - but the choice should be made before conception whenever possible, not after. That's where the education comes in.

by Owendonovan
Deuce wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 3:37 am I have no religious or political affiliation. All of my ideas, perspectives, beliefs, values, etc. are entirely my own, and are not merely adopted from some group or other...

I believe that abortion should be allowed in situations like rape, incest, some cases of teenage pregnancy, etc...
But I don’t think that anyone should use abortion as a form of birth control.
There are enough efficient methods of birth control available that refusing to use one, and instead figuring that one can just get an abortion if they become pregnant, is irresponsible and wrong in my view.

In the end, I am pro-education and pro-choice - but the choice should be made before conception whenever possible, not after. That's where the education comes in.
All the education in the world won't matter when they take contraception away too, which they are now considering. This isn't about saving unborn lives, being educated or responsible, it's about repressing women. (LGBTQ's are on the menu too)

by MJ2004 Twitter for the past 24 hours.. I just can't. Back under my shell I go.

by ti-amie It seems that the RW expected there to be riots in the streets by supporters of a woman's right to choose and guess what? Not of that happened. I saw several tweets yesterday exhorting people to not take the bait and to make sure all demonstrations were peaceful. That was why there was such a heavy police presence at the SC building yesterday. I'm not a big AOC fan but when she's right she's right.


by ti-amie

by JazzNU
ti-amie wrote: Fri Jun 24, 2022 10:40 pm There is a legal podcast I listen to that emphasizes that the right wing radicals on the court do not use settled law as a reference point the way it was done in the past. This is why Thomas is now talking about going after contraception and gay marriage.
That's not really why though. Sure they are ignoring precedence and will continue to when it suits them, but they will also use it when it suits them just the same.

Contraception has always been heavily tied to abortion in a legal context, that's just a fact. When Roe became law, it largely superseded the previous ruling in Griswold that gave the right to contraception. Griswold is a fundamental rights/due process/14th Amendment case and that was cited as part of the decision that legalized gay marriage. Just need to follow the breadcrumbs on this.

It's about what is on their agenda and what isn't. They'll go after what they want and avoid what they don't. By the bigoted twisted Christian logic being used, interracial marriage should be on the table for being overturned as well, also a 14th Amendment case (called Loving v. Virginia). But it isn't because as much as he wants it to be otherwise, Clarence remains a black man and he's got a crazy white wife he wants to stay married to, so he's not touching that, because that one is personal and would actually affect him.

FYI, stem cell research and IVF are potentially in jeopardy.

Also, the session's not over. They still might strike down or narrow another long settled law (that actually originated from my high school) involving a ban on school prayer. Fun times.

by ponchi101
JazzNU wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 7:58 pm ...

FYI, stem cell research and IVF are potentially in jeopardy.

Also, the session's not over. They still might strike down or narrow another long settled law (that actually originated from my high school) involving a ban on school prayer. Fun times.
Why would stem cell research be banned? It was banned by Bush II when they were harvested from embryonic tissue, but the modern process simply reverts regular cells back into stem-cells. There is no "conception" or embryos involved.

The rest of what you say: yes, fun times indeed. The USA becomes less and less appealing with great frequency.

by JazzNU
ponchi101 wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 8:13 pm
Why would stem cell research be banned? It was banned by Bush II when they were harvested from embryonic tissue, but the modern process simply reverts regular cells back into stem-cells. There is no "conception" or embryos involved.

The rest of what you say: yes, fun times indeed. The USA becomes less and less appealing with great frequency.
Because some have already targeted it as a next step alongside contraception and IVF. Not sure the actual current scientific process matters to the crazies at this point. Some have just said stem cell research and others say more specifically embryonic stem cell research. But I have long since stopped looking for sound logic in their thinking so I have no idea if their why makes sense, but I haven't seen their argument laid out, just that it's been mentioned as a next step.

by Deuce
Owendonovan wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 10:33 am
Deuce wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 3:37 am I have no religious or political affiliation. All of my ideas, perspectives, beliefs, values, etc. are entirely my own, and are not merely adopted from some group or other...

I believe that abortion should be allowed in situations like rape, incest, some cases of teenage pregnancy, etc...
But I don’t think that anyone should use abortion as a form of birth control.
There are enough efficient methods of birth control available that refusing to use one, and instead figuring that one can just get an abortion if they become pregnant, is irresponsible and wrong in my view.

In the end, I am pro-education and pro-choice - but the choice should be made before conception whenever possible, not after. That's where the education comes in.
All the education in the world won't matter when they take contraception away too, which they are now considering. This isn't about saving unborn lives, being educated or responsible, it's about repressing women. (LGBTQ's are on the menu too)
They're not going to remove the right to contraception.

And, again, as long as contraception is available, abortion should not be used as a form of birth control.

by mmmm8
Deuce wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:23 am
Owendonovan wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 10:33 am
Deuce wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 3:37 am I have no religious or political affiliation. All of my ideas, perspectives, beliefs, values, etc. are entirely my own, and are not merely adopted from some group or other...

I believe that abortion should be allowed in situations like rape, incest, some cases of teenage pregnancy, etc...
But I don’t think that anyone should use abortion as a form of birth control.
There are enough efficient methods of birth control available that refusing to use one, and instead figuring that one can just get an abortion if they become pregnant, is irresponsible and wrong in my view.

In the end, I am pro-education and pro-choice - but the choice should be made before conception whenever possible, not after. That's where the education comes in.
All the education in the world won't matter when they take contraception away too, which they are now considering. This isn't about saving unborn lives, being educated or responsible, it's about repressing women. (LGBTQ's are on the menu too)
They're not going to remove the right to contraception.

And, again, as long as contraception is available, abortion should not be used as a form of birth control.

It's not.

by JazzNU I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I know people are angry. But I'm seeing a ton of women, especially young women, who are seriously angry at Democrats for not codifying abortion between Roe passing and now. They're saying it online, they're saying it on the news in interviews, they're saying it on the signs they are holding up at rallies. They say it in a manner like it's a done deal that it would've passed and would've passed the filibuster and then overcome a veto.

I'm unclear if this is from anger and realization will come to them sometime soon or if they are truly under the impression there was a time when the Pro-Life lobby wasn't strong enough to defeat it. They keep saying there's been ample opportunity in the last 50 years to codify it and I'd like them to name the specific years that it would've passed the filibuster to get to a vote and the presidential veto. At no point in the 70s and the 80s was there anywhere near that kind of pro-choice support in Congress. Was there one year in the late 90s or early or late 2000s where it could've passed? I'm not saying it didn't exist, I'm saying I want a specific year. Because you tell me the late 90s and I call BS on the same time period of a Congress that passed DOMA. You tell me when ACA passed and I'm questioning that too. Is the argument that there were Republicans that would've voted to end the filibuster at that point? Because pro-life Democrats do exist and there was a key one during that time period that voted past the filibuster for ACA who was a dyed in the wool pro-lifer that I don't see them getting support from to get passed the filibuster. So, what years are we talking about that we're talking about here? I have yet to see any specificity to such claims.

Because to me these people saying all this sound naive and uninformed about pro-choice support in Congress over the last 50 years. It makes me think, for instance, that people are forgetting or don't know all of the famous pastors of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that had very large followings in-person and on television and the effect that had on the populace as a whole. The Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwells of the world. The religious charlatans were everywhere and they were preaching pro-life constantly.

by Deuce
mmmm8 wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 3:23 pm
Deuce wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:23 am
Owendonovan wrote: Sat Jun 25, 2022 10:33 am

All the education in the world won't matter when they take contraception away too, which they are now considering. This isn't about saving unborn lives, being educated or responsible, it's about repressing women. (LGBTQ's are on the menu too)
They're not going to remove the right to contraception.

And, again, as long as contraception is available, abortion should not be used as a form of birth control.

It's not.
It certainly is by some.

by Cuckoo4Coco I am just a kid and I don't really fully understand all the ins and outs of the judicial system in my country and all that stuff. I do know one thing that I see from all of this stuff though that has been going on lately and not just this one incident and that is my country because of all of this stuff is becoming more and more divided and these groups of people just continue to fight over and over again on these things and 99.9% of the time the outcomes seem to make things even worse. I hope things change soon because I am only 16 years old and I haven't even had a chance to vote, but by the time I am able to things are going to be a complete mess.

by ponchi101
JazzNU wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:19 pm I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I know people are angry. But I'm seeing a ton of women, especially young women, who are seriously angry at Democrats for not codifying abortion between Roe passing and now. They're saying it online, they're saying it on the news in interviews, they're saying it on the signs they are holding up at rallies. They say it in a manner like it's a done deal that it would've passed and would've passed the filibuster and then overcome a veto.

I'm unclear if this is from anger and realization will come to them sometime soon or if they are truly under the impression there was a time when the Pro-Life lobby wasn't strong enough to defeat it. They keep saying there's been ample opportunity in the last 50 years to codify it and I'd like them to name the specific years that it would've passed the filibuster to get to a vote and the presidential veto. At no point in the 70s and the 80s was there anywhere near that kind of pro-choice support in Congress. Was there one year in the late 90s or early or late 2000s where it could've passed? I'm not saying it didn't exist, I'm saying I want a specific year. Because you tell me the late 90s and I call BS on the same time period of a Congress that passed DOMA. You tell me when ACA passed and I'm questioning that too. Is the argument that there were Republicans that would've voted to end the filibuster at that point? Because pro-life Democrats do exist and there was a key one during that time period that voted past the filibuster for ACA who was a dyed in the wool pro-lifer that I don't see them getting support from to get passed the filibuster. So, what years are we talking about that we're talking about here? I have yet to see any specificity to such claims.

Because to me these people saying all this sound naive and uninformed about pro-choice support in Congress over the last 50 years. It makes me think, for instance, that people are forgetting or don't know all of the famous pastors of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that had very large followings in-person and on television and the effect that had on the populace as a whole. The Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwells of the world. The religious charlatans were everywhere and they were preaching pro-life constantly.
You are more informed than I am, so:
If Congress/Senate were to codify abortion and pass it, couldn't this be challenged by opponents, claiming such new laws to be unconstitutional, and wouldn't that once again go to the SCOTUS, for these same people to strike down such laws?
Serious question.

by dave g
JazzNU wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:19 pm I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I know people are angry. But I'm seeing a ton of women, especially young women, who are seriously angry at Democrats for not codifying abortion between Roe passing and now. They're saying it online, they're saying it on the news in interviews, they're saying it on the signs they are holding up at rallies. They say it in a manner like it's a done deal that it would've passed and would've passed the filibuster and then overcome a veto.

I'm unclear if this is from anger and realization will come to them sometime soon or if they are truly under the impression there was a time when the Pro-Life lobby wasn't strong enough to defeat it. They keep saying there's been ample opportunity in the last 50 years to codify it and I'd like them to name the specific years that it would've passed the filibuster to get to a vote and the presidential veto. At no point in the 70s and the 80s was there anywhere near that kind of pro-choice support in Congress. Was there one year in the late 90s or early or late 2000s where it could've passed? I'm not saying it didn't exist, I'm saying I want a specific year. Because you tell me the late 90s and I call BS on the same time period of a Congress that passed DOMA. You tell me when ACA passed and I'm questioning that too. Is the argument that there were Republicans that would've voted to end the filibuster at that point? Because pro-life Democrats do exist and there was a key one during that time period that voted past the filibuster for ACA who was a dyed in the wool pro-lifer that I don't see them getting support from to get passed the filibuster. So, what years are we talking about that we're talking about here? I have yet to see any specificity to such claims.

Because to me these people saying all this sound naive and uninformed about pro-choice support in Congress over the last 50 years. It makes me think, for instance, that people are forgetting or don't know all of the famous pastors of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that had very large followings in-person and on television and the effect that had on the populace as a whole. The Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwells of the world. The religious charlatans were everywhere and they were preaching pro-life constantly.
That, and truly codifying abortion rights would require a constitutional amendment to be able to prevent the Supreme Court from reversing it. Good Luck!

by Owendonovan
Deuce wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:20 pm
mmmm8 wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 3:23 pm
Deuce wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:23 am
They're not going to remove the right to contraception.

And, again, as long as contraception is available, abortion should not be used as a form of birth control.

It's not.
It certainly is by some.
And that's their choice, or was.

by Deuce
Owendonovan wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 8:51 pm
Deuce wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:20 pm
mmmm8 wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 3:23 pm


It's not.
It certainly is by some.
And that's their choice, or was.
And I say that it's a highly irresponsible choice.
There are many types of contraceptive out there, very available to most people. Therefore, any adult who - through laziness or indifference or spite - refuses to obtain and use contraceptives which are available to her, and instead simply figures (chooses) that she will just abort if she becomes pregnant after voluntarily having unprotected sex, is an extremely irresponsible person in my book - as is the man with whom she has the unprotected sex.
Voluntarily refusing to make the choice about conception until only AFTER conception is about as irresponsible as it gets.

Again - education is the key. Everyone would be better served if such people were educated about birth control, and encouraged to use contraception to prevent conception, rather than view abortion as a form of birth control.

by dryrunguy Men can use contraceptive technologies as well, from condoms to vasectomy. But no one talks about that. Heaven forbid... Because reproductive responsibility rests solely on women. For some ignorant reason.

by Deuce Certainly men are half the equation, and thus share in the responsibility (as I mentioned above). But this discussion is about abortion.

Both the man and the woman are responsible for contraception and for conception. That is biologically clear. Psychologically, I suppose the more common perspective is that the male can coerce the female into not using contraception more than the female can coerce the male into not using it.

But the female can lie about being on the pill, and then use abortion as a form of birth control. But what if the man wants the baby? What about HIS rights?
Or the woman can have the baby and demand that the man pay child support - even though she told him she was on the pill...
There are all sorts of ugly scenarios possible when it comes to this type of human relation, with different manipulations possible from both parties.

And again, I come to education... educating both parties about the importance of contraception, about the importance of knowing and trusting your partner, about the consequences of not using contraception, and even about the potential psychological/emotional effects of abortion (because it has been known to affect some rather profoundly in this manner).

It's not nearly as black and white a matter as some people are making it out to be. Interactive human relations are extremely complex.

by mmmm8
Cuckoo4Coco wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:48 pm I am just a kid and I don't really fully understand all the ins and outs of the judicial system in my country and all that stuff. I do know one thing that I see from all of this stuff though that has been going on lately and not just this one incident and that is my country because of all of this stuff is becoming more and more divided and these groups of people just continue to fight over and over again on these things and 99.9% of the time the outcomes seem to make things even worse. I hope things change soon because I am only 16 years old and I haven't even had a chance to vote, but by the time I am able to things are going to be a complete mess.
Thanks for posting here. I know it's a lot to process (I was 16 during the Bush-Gore 2000 election, and I thought THAT was a scary mess. The good news is that all of this is cyclical. Things will come down somewhat at some point. The bad news is that it's a particularly messy cycle.

by ponchi101 Here comes Ponchi to uplift everybody's spirit, but...
The problem with cyclic systems is that they "tend" to fluctuate within limits, but if one of the limits is broken the system may not recover. In environmental sciences, Prey/Predator populations fluctuate in tandem: an increase in PREY leads to an increase in PREDATORS (more food to eat) but if the increase in predators goes over a limit, the predators may wipe out the prey, leading to their own demise. The cyclical system disappears.
In politics, systems fluctuate, with political parties leaning one way or another taking turns at ruling. But when the ruling party is extreme, they then stay by all means and the cycle is broken. Is what has happened in Venezuela, where a democratically elected party quickly morphed into a dictatorship. Our system, needless to say, has not recovered and, if it does, it will take more than normal (we have been under this dictatorship for 24 years now).
In the USA, the final arbiter of ALL political decisions is the SCOTUS. And if the SCOTUS goes extreme, the cycle may be broken. An extreme SCOTUS may lead to legal decisions that favor one party over the other (in this case, the GOP), allowing the GOP to remain in power longer, allowing the GOP to be the party that chooses extreme replacements for already extreme judges. The system stops being cyclical and and functions as a positive feedback system.
When the SCOTUS becomes unbalanced in the USA, your final arbiter is no longer reliable. I see at least four justices in the SCOTUS as people that do not see their jobs as dispensing justice, but rather imposing an agenda: ACB, Kavanaugh, Alito and Thomas. And with this RoeVWade reversal, Gorsuch and Roberts may be leaning that way too.

by ponchi101 And this is where this SCOTUS stands:
Supreme Court Sides With Coach Over Prayers on 50-Yard Line

by JazzNU
ponchi101 wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:51 pm
You are more informed than I am, so:
If Congress/Senate were to codify abortion and pass it, couldn't this be challenged by opponents, claiming such new laws to be unconstitutional, and wouldn't that once again go to the SCOTUS, for these same people to strike down such laws?
Serious question.
It would definitely be challenged. Would it be successful? Not necessarily. Standard answer to not liking a ruling of the Court is - then solve it legislatively. That's what codifying abortion laws would do. Current court? Who the **** knows. They don't hold many rights sacred and since they are checking off points on their agenda, yes, it would seem like this particular court might try their hardest. But would they go out of their way to strike down a federal abortion law? It's unlikely even with this court since they never actually said abortion should be or is banned. Think of ACA. How many challenges has it had? How badly do they want to get rid of that? Has it been struck down? It's been narrowed here and there, but not torched. That's way more likely the route would be taken with a federal abortion law. An overarching federal abortion law would be beneficial, it would invalidate most state laws and states would then be forced to challenge whatever narrow application they'd like to put on it, just like anything else, but none could impose an outright ban on it with the federal law in place unless the court were to rule abortion itself unconstitutional (which it isn't).

Disclaimer - this court literally issued two opinions with contrasting logic on state's rights within days of each other - so they are perfectly willing to craft an opinion to suit their activism and are completely comfortable with it lacking any consistency.

by ti-amie
JazzNU wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:19 pm I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I know people are angry. But I'm seeing a ton of women, especially young women, who are seriously angry at Democrats for not codifying abortion between Roe passing and now. They're saying it online, they're saying it on the news in interviews, they're saying it on the signs they are holding up at rallies. They say it in a manner like it's a done deal that it would've passed and would've passed the filibuster and then overcome a veto.

I'm unclear if this is from anger and realization will come to them sometime soon or if they are truly under the impression there was a time when the Pro-Life lobby wasn't strong enough to defeat it. They keep saying there's been ample opportunity in the last 50 years to codify it and I'd like them to name the specific years that it would've passed the filibuster to get to a vote and the presidential veto. At no point in the 70s and the 80s was there anywhere near that kind of pro-choice support in Congress. Was there one year in the late 90s or early or late 2000s where it could've passed? I'm not saying it didn't exist, I'm saying I want a specific year. Because you tell me the late 90s and I call BS on the same time period of a Congress that passed DOMA. You tell me when ACA passed and I'm questioning that too. Is the argument that there were Republicans that would've voted to end the filibuster at that point? Because pro-life Democrats do exist and there was a key one during that time period that voted past the filibuster for ACA who was a dyed in the wool pro-lifer that I don't see them getting support from to get passed the filibuster. So, what years are we talking about that we're talking about here? I have yet to see any specificity to such claims.

Because to me these people saying all this sound naive and uninformed about pro-choice support in Congress over the last 50 years. It makes me think, for instance, that people are forgetting or don't know all of the famous pastors of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that had very large followings in-person and on television and the effect that had on the populace as a whole. The Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwells of the world. The religious charlatans were everywhere and they were preaching pro-life constantly.
Pontificating loudly about subjects they have little knowledge of seems to be a characteristic of some in the younger generation.

by mmmm8
ti-amie wrote: Mon Jun 27, 2022 6:27 pm
Pontificating loudly about subjects they have little knowledge of seems to be a characteristic of some in the younger generation people.
Fixed it for ya. Plenty of proof, including on this board (surely from me as well).

In fact, lawmakers and judges deciding on medical issues like abortion is the height of it, and they certainly aren't in the younger generation.

by ti-amie


by Owendonovan
ti-amie wrote: Mon Jun 27, 2022 6:27 pm
JazzNU wrote: Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:19 pm I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I know people are angry. But I'm seeing a ton of women, especially young women, who are seriously angry at Democrats for not codifying abortion between Roe passing and now. They're saying it online, they're saying it on the news in interviews, they're saying it on the signs they are holding up at rallies. They say it in a manner like it's a done deal that it would've passed and would've passed the filibuster and then overcome a veto.

I'm unclear if this is from anger and realization will come to them sometime soon or if they are truly under the impression there was a time when the Pro-Life lobby wasn't strong enough to defeat it. They keep saying there's been ample opportunity in the last 50 years to codify it and I'd like them to name the specific years that it would've passed the filibuster to get to a vote and the presidential veto. At no point in the 70s and the 80s was there anywhere near that kind of pro-choice support in Congress. Was there one year in the late 90s or early or late 2000s where it could've passed? I'm not saying it didn't exist, I'm saying I want a specific year. Because you tell me the late 90s and I call BS on the same time period of a Congress that passed DOMA. You tell me when ACA passed and I'm questioning that too. Is the argument that there were Republicans that would've voted to end the filibuster at that point? Because pro-life Democrats do exist and there was a key one during that time period that voted past the filibuster for ACA who was a dyed in the wool pro-lifer that I don't see them getting support from to get passed the filibuster. So, what years are we talking about that we're talking about here? I have yet to see any specificity to such claims.

Because to me these people saying all this sound naive and uninformed about pro-choice support in Congress over the last 50 years. It makes me think, for instance, that people are forgetting or don't know all of the famous pastors of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that had very large followings in-person and on television and the effect that had on the populace as a whole. The Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwells of the world. The religious charlatans were everywhere and they were preaching pro-life constantly.
Pontificating loudly about subjects they have little knowledge of seems to be a characteristic of some in the younger generation.
Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell weren't young.

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 All fine, until the RESPECTFUL dissent. I don't think there is any doubt that the foundation of this SCOTUS version is religious to the core. And if so, separation of church and state is gone.
And that is not a slippery slope. That is simply freefall.

by ti-amie I've been making myself read a lot of commentary by Catholic thinkers since May when the leak happened. I'm glad to see them twisting themselves into knots trying to make this ruling into something it's not. People are rightly pushing back on the "adoption option" and asking why don't those who say they'll adopt start with the 400k+ children in foster care? Needless to say there has been no response.

And yes Ponchi "Catholic thinkers" is a bit of an oxymoron.

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 :clap: :clap: :clap:

Not a minute too soon.
But, for another shameful day for he SCOTUS, they dropped mandates that would have made it harder for industries to pollute and emit CC gases. It is not the SCOTUS anymore; it is the SCOCUS (Supreme Court of Corporate United States).

by ti-amie I was on the fence about expanding the SC but now that they've made it clear that they want to send us back to the 1860's I don't see any other way of stopping them.



Stare decisis is the doctrine that courts will adhere to precedent in making their decisions. Stare decisis means “to stand by things decided” in Latin.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_d ... in%20Latin.

by ti-amie

by Owendonovan Kagan and Sotomayor seem far more intellectually able than the rest of the court.

by ponchi101 It is the reason I don't think Supreme Courts should have legal professionals in them. SC's should be filled with philosophers, logicians, humanists, people trained to find the truth, not people trained to win an argument. As you say, Sotomayor seems more intellectually focused on doing what it right.
Of course, the 6 conservative judges are simply following an agenda: turn the clock back to 1910.

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 Bill Maher has said, repeatedly, that the GOP plays the long game. These (expletive) are like the Illuminati.

by ti-amie


by ponchi101 Next step will be to start filling the STATE Supreme Courts with more religious nuts. One generation of that, and you become a theocracy.

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 And if so, why did he side with the other 5 GOP justices?
I mean, there is BS. But this is :cow: :poop: to the max.

by ti-amie

I'm Casablanca shocked.

by ti-amie



Laurence Tribe @tribelaw
·
5h
To all my followers who ask me whether this gross dereliction of duty by the FBI can be invoked to unseat Justice Kavanaugh and thus create a Supreme Court vacancy for President Biden to fill, the answer is clearly no. But it does add strength to the argument for Court expansion.


by ponchi101 The USA is no longer a democracy.
When one entire party sees democratic process as OPTIONAL, you can't claim to be so.

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.

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.

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.

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 How about the line he crossed? Reverting established laws? That one doesn't matter?

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.

by ti-amie

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










by ti-amie P2










by ti-amie P3










Sherrilyn Ifill @SIfill_

And that, is a wrap. The case is submitted.

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.

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.

by ti-amie


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

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

by ti-amie

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.

by Owendonovan
ti-amie wrote: Sat Nov 19, 2022 6:28 pm
Why do we trust anything Alito says?

by ti-amie Some amazing things happened at the SC today



Then this






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

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

by ti-amie

by ti-amie




by ti-amie

by ti-amie Speaking of the Supreme Court...













P1/2

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

by ti-amie Now who paid Kavanaugh's outstanding debts?

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 How do you remove a SC Justice? Serious here. Who and what government entity can do that?

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.

by ponchi101 Well, he must know he is pretty safe then. If that is what it takes to remove a judge.
Txs

by ti-amie




by ti-amie More on Clarence Thomas sugar daddy Harlan Crow
@kjhealy@mastodon.social
oh come on, ALL good historians of fascism have extensive collections of Nazi memorabilia and signed copies of Mein Kampf and originals of Hitler's paintings, or at least high-quality prints, that's how you know they're morally serious people and not weirdos with more money than sense
Personally I'd like to know how close this guy is to the Bush family.

by ti-amie


by Owendonovan Another debased republican in power. Playing dumb as a Supreme Court Justice is a particularly bad look.

by ti-amie Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.
by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
April 13, 2:20 p.m. EDT


The transaction is the first known instance of money flowing from Crow to the Supreme Court justice. The sale netted the GOP megadonor two vacant lots and the house where Thomas’ mother was living.

In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.

The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.

The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.

The disclosure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank.

“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”

Thomas did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

In a statement, Crow said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his childhood, to preserve it for posterity. “My intention is to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”

Crow’s statement did not directly address why he also bought two vacant lots from Thomas down the street. But he wrote that “the other lots were later sold to a vetted builder who was committed to improving the quality of the neighborhood and preserving its historical integrity.”

ProPublica also asked Crow about the additions on Thomas’ mother’s house, like the new carport. “Improvements were also made to the Thomas property to preserve its long-term viability and accessibility to the public,” Crow said.

Ethics law experts said Crow’s intentions had no bearing on Thomas’ legal obligation to disclose the sale.

The justice’s failure to report the transaction suggests “Thomas was hiding a financial relationship with Crow,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis who reviewed years of Thomas’ disclosure filings.

There are a handful of carve-outs in the disclosure law. For example, if someone sells “property used solely as a personal residence of the reporting individual or the individual’s spouse,” they don’t need to report it. Experts said the exemptions clearly did not apply to Thomas’ sale.

The revelation of a direct financial transaction between Thomas and Crow casts their relationship in a new light. ProPublica reported last week that Thomas has accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including private jet flights, international cruises on the businessman’s superyacht and regular stays at his private resort in the Adirondacks. Crow has long been influential in conservative politics and has spent millions on efforts to shape the law and the judiciary. The story prompted outcry and calls for investigations from Democratic lawmakers.

In response to that reporting, both Thomas and Crow released statements downplaying the significance of the gifts. Thomas also maintained that he wasn’t required to disclose the trips.

“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends,” Thomas wrote. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.” Crow told ProPublica that his gifts to Thomas were “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

It’s unclear if Crow paid fair market value for the Thomas properties. Crow also bought several other properties on the street and paid significantly less than his deal with the Thomases. One example: In 2013, he bought a pair of properties on the same block — a vacant lot and a small house — for a total of $40,000.

Image
The block in Savannah, Georgia, where Texas billionaire Harlan Crow bought property from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Today, the vacant lots Thomas sold to Crow have been replaced by two-story homes. Credit:Octavio Jones for ProPublica

In his statement, Crow said his company purchased the properties “at market rate based on many factors including the size, quality, and livability of the dwellings.”

He did not respond to requests to provide documentation or details of how he arrived at the price.

Thomas was born in the coastal hamlet of Pin Point, outside Savannah. He later moved to the city, where he spent part of his childhood in his grandfather’s home on East 32nd Street.

“It had hardwood floors, handsome furniture, and an indoor bathroom, and we knew better than to touch anything,” Thomas wrote of the house in his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

He inherited his stake in that house and two other properties on the block following the death of his grandfather in 1983, according to records on file at the Chatham County courthouse. He shared ownership with his brother and his mother, Leola Williams. In the late 1980s, when Thomas was an official in the George H.W. Bush administration, he listed the addresses of the three properties in a disclosure filing. He reported that he had a one-third interest in them.

Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1991. By the early 2000s, he had stopped listing specific addresses of property he owned in his disclosures. But he continued to report holding a one-third interest in what he described as “rental property at ## 1, 2, & 3” in Savannah. He valued his stake in the properties at $15,000 or less.

Two of the houses were torn down around 2010, according to property records and a footnote in Thomas’ annual disclosure archived by Free Law Project.

In 2014, the Thomas family sold the vacant lots and the remaining East 32nd Street house to one of Crow’s companies. The justice signed the paperwork personally. His signature was notarized by an administrator at the Supreme Court, ​​Perry Thompson, who did not respond to a request for comment. (The deed was signed on the 23rd anniversary of Thomas’ Oct. 15 confirmation to the Supreme Court. Crow has a Senate roll call sheet from the confirmation vote in his private library.)

Thomas’ financial disclosure for that year is detailed, listing everything from a “stained glass medallion” he received from Yale to a life insurance policy. But he failed to report his sale to Crow.

Image

Image
First image: Thomas’ signature on the deed for his deal with Crow. Second image: A 2014 photograph shows the vacant lots that Crow bought from Thomas. Credit:First image: Chatham County Superior Court. Second image: Chatham County Metropolitan Planning Commission.

Crow purchased the properties through a recently formed Texas company called Savannah Historic Developments LLC. The company shares an address in Dallas with Crow Holdings, the centerpiece of his real estate empire. Its formation documents were signed by Crow Holdings’ general counsel. Business records filed with the Texas secretary of state say Savannah Historic Developments is managed by a Delaware LLC, HRC Family Branch GP, an umbrella company that also covers other Crow assets like his private jet. The Delaware company’s CEO is Harlan Crow.

A Crow Holdings company soon began paying the roughly $1,500 in annual property taxes on Thomas’ mother’s house, according to county tax records. The taxes had previously been paid by Clarence and Ginni Thomas.

Crow still owns Thomas’ mother’s home, which the now-94-year-old continued to live in through at least 2020, according to public records and social media. Two neighbors told ProPublica she still lives there. Crow did not respond to questions about whether he has charged her rent. Soon after Crow purchased the house, an award-winning local architecture firm received permits to begin $36,000 of improvements.

Crow’s purchases seem to have played a role in transforming the block. The billionaire eventually sold most of the other properties he bought to new owners who built upscale modern homes, including the two vacant lots he purchased from Thomas.

Crow also bought the house immediately next door to Thomas’ mother, which was owned by somebody else and had been known for parties and noise, according to property records and W. John Mitchell, former president of a nearby neighborhood association. Soon the house was torn down. “It was an eyesore,” Mitchell said. “One day miraculously all of them were put out of there and they scraped it off the earth.”

“The surrounding properties had fallen into disrepair and needed to be demolished for health and safety reasons,” Crow said in his statement. He added that his company built one new house on the block “and made it available to a local police officer.”

Today, the block is composed of a dwindling number of longtime elderly homeowners and a growing population of young newcomers. The vacant lots that the Thomas family once owned have been replaced by pristine two-story homes. An artisanal coffee shop and a Mediterranean bistro are within walking distance. Down the street, a multicolored pride flag blows in the wind.


https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... ate-scotus

by ti-amie

by ti-amie I wonder if Mrs. Thomas (Clarence's mother) pays rent to Harlan Crow's company?

by ponchi101
ti-amie wrote: Fri Apr 14, 2023 7:53 pm I wonder if Mrs. Thomas (Clarence's mother) pays rent to Harlan Crow's company?
$0.50/Month?

by ti-amie

Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC

The fact that Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett voted to halt the decisions below—and that Alito did not even try to defend Kacsmaryk or the 5th Circuit, on standing or the merits—strongly suggests that the Supreme Court will NOT use this case to ban or limit mifepristone.

by Owendonovan Calls out the women, mmhmm. Dick.

by patrick Thomas did his usual dissent while accepting gifts on the side

by ti-amie I'm shocked, shocked that it's not just Thomas.


by ponchi101 They all have a price...
(The GOP nominated)

by ti-amie

So it's not just the Thomas's.

by ti-amie

by ti-amie


by ti-amie Some are calling this the Tweet of the Year


by ti-amie






by ti-amie It wasn't just Clarence Thomas.

ProPublica asked about Alito’s travel. He replied in the Wall Street Journal.
Questioned about an undisclosed fishing trip hosted by a GOP billionaire, the Supreme Court justice instead shared his rebuttal in a rival media outlet — before the investigative journalists could publish their scoop
By Paul Farhi and Robert Barnes
Updated June 21, 2023 at 2:04 p.m. EDT|Published June 21, 2023 at 1:25 a.m. EDT

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took issue with questions raised by the investigative journalism outlet ProPublica about his travel with a politically active billionaire, and on Tuesday evening, he outlined his defense in an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal.

Yet Alito was responding to a news story that ProPublica hadn’t yet published.

Alito’s Journal column, bluntly headlined “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers,” was an unusual public venture by a Supreme Court justice into the highly opinionated realm of a newspaper editorial page. And it drew criticism late Tuesday for effectively leaking elements of ProPublica’s still-in-progress journalism — with the assistance of the Journal’s editorial page editors.

An editor’s note at the top of Alito’s column said ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan had sent questions to Alito last week and asked for a response by Tuesday at noon. The editor’s note doesn’t mention that ProPublica hadn’t yet published its story — nor does it mention that Alito did not provide his answers directly to ProPublica.

A spokesperson for the Journal, whose editorial page operates independently from its newsroom, did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment late Tuesday.

ProPublica published its story on Alito just before midnight on Tuesday, about five hours after the Journal published Alito’s column.


The article details the conservative justice’s relationship with billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, including their trip to an Alaskan fishing resort in 2008. According to the story, Singer — whose hedge fund subsequently came before the court 10 times in cases involving business disputes — flew Alito to the resort on his private jet, a trip ProPublica reported would have cost Alito more than $100,000 one way if he had chartered the jet on his own.

Alito, who wrote the landmark Dobbs decision that struck down federal abortion rights last year, didn’t list the trip on his financial disclosure forms, an omission that some ethics experts say could violate federal law.

The article noted the role of conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo in organizing the Alaska trip, including recruiting Singer to fly Alito to the lodge. The longtime head of the Federalist Society, Leo helped Alito win confirmation to the Supreme Court. Singer and the lodge’s owner were major donors to the Federalist Society.


The story carried the bylines of Kaplan, Elliott and a third ProPublica reporter, Alex Mierjeski — the same team that reported a blockbuster story in April detailing years of luxury trips taken by Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, and paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow, who also paid for Thomas’s grandnephew’s private school tuition.

Those disclosures and others — The Post reported last month that Leo arranged for Ginni Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork — have led some Democrats in Congress to call for Clarence Thomas to resign and others to call for stricter ethics standards specific to the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has resisted congressional efforts on that front, but he recently acknowledged the controversy.

“I want to assure people that I’m committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct. We are continuing to look at things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment,” Roberts said when accepting an award last month from the American Law Institute.


But the justices for years have been considering an ethics plan, without being able to come to agreement.

In his Journal column, Alito accurately anticipated the thrust of ProPublica’s not-yet-published article. He denied he had a conflict in accepting Singer’s “hospitality” or was obligated to disclose the 2008 trip. “Neither charge is valid,” the justice wrote preemptively.

He asserted that Singer was merely an acquaintance, with whom he spoke only fleetingly during the fishing trip, and said he was not aware of Singer’s connection to any subsequent court matter.

Alito said he accepted the offer of a seat on Singer’s private plane because it would otherwise have been unoccupied. A commercial flight, he wrote, would have imposed costs on taxpayers, who would have had to pay for the deputy U.S. marshals who provide security to Supreme Court justices to fly with him.


He also disputed ProPublica’s apparent characterization of the fishing resort, calling it “misleading.”

“I stayed three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, a comfortable but rustic facility” with “home style meals,” he wrote, adding, “I cannot recall if (we were) served wine, but if there was, it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.”

Alito said he didn’t disclose the flight in his annual disclosure form because the rules at the time were vague: “I followed what I understood to be standard practice.”

His defense was similar to that offered by Thomas when ProPublica first reported on his luxury trip.

“Early in my tenure at the Court,” Thomas said in a statement, “I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

Federal law mandates that top officials from the three branches of government, including the Supreme Court, file annual forms detailing their finances, outside income and spouses’ sources of income, with each branch determining its own reporting standards.

Judges are prohibited from accepting gifts from anyone with business before the court. Until recently, however, the judicial branch had not clearly defined an exemption for gifts considered “personal hospitality.”

Earlier in the spring, a committee of the Judicial Conference, the courts’ policymaking body, revised those rules to be more specific, stating explicitly that judges must report travel by private jet. Gifts such as an overnight stay at a personal vacation home owned by a friend remain exempt from reporting requirements. But the revised rules require disclosure when judges are treated to stays at commercial properties, such as hotels, ski resorts or other private retreats owned by a company, rather than an individual.

The revised rules apply to the justices’ 2022 disclosure forms, which were made public this month. Thomas and Alito requested filing extensions, so their forms are not yet available.

Leaders at the Society of Professional Journalists criticized the Alito op-ed — the justice for writing it, and the Journal for publishing it.

Chris Roberts, the group’s ethics committee’s vice chair, said Alito appeared to be trying to undermine the story instead of engaging with the reporter. “It’s pretty rinky-dink for a Supreme Court justice to use journalism ethics against journalists,” he said.

And the committee’s chair, Fred Brown, called the Journal’s decision to publish the column before ProPublica had published its story “an affront to professional courtesy and professional standards.”

“The WSJ editorial board could have avoided a lot of justifiable criticism — and possible confusion by readers who had not yet had an opportunity to see the ProPublica piece — if they had just waited,” he said.

The Journal’s editorial page has veered sharply to the right in recent years and often expresses support of the more-conservative members of the Supreme Court. In April, it blasted “left-leaning” ProPublica’s reporting on Thomas, arguing that the justice did not violate any disclosure rules at the time and that he faced no conflict of interest in his dealings with Crow.

And in April, after the justices reported on their unsuccessful effort to identify the leaker of a draft of the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that affirmed the constitutional right to abortion, Alito gave a rare interview to a Journal editorial page editor and a private lawyer active in conservative causes.

The justice, who wrote the Dobbs opinion, told the pair that he had a “pretty good idea” who leaked the document but that neither he nor the court can prove it. In the interview, Alito said the theory that the draft was leaked by someone on the right, in hopes of locking in the five votes necessary to overturn Roe, “is infuriating to me.”

“Look, this made us targets of assassination,” Alito told his interviewers. “Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”

Elliott, the lead ProPublica reporter on the Alito story, told The Post early Wednesday that he and his colleagues had been informed Tuesday by the Supreme Court’s chief spokeswoman that Alito would not comment for their story.

“It was surprising to see the op-ed publish several hours after that,” he said, “but we’re happy to get substantive engagement with our questions in any forum.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/20 ... hing-trip/

by ti-amie A "modest" room at the Georges V hotel in Paris is still a room in the Georges V hotel in Paris.

by ponchi101 You have to impose term limits on these justices.
And some form of supervisory body.

by ti-amie Key document may be fake in LGBTQ+ rights case before US supreme court
Christian website designer says she received email request from same-sex couple but ‘author’ says he did not send it – and is not gay
Sam Levine in New York
Thu 29 Jun 2023 23.21 BST

The veracity of a key document in a major LGBTQ+ rights case before the US supreme court has come under question, raising the possibility that important evidence cited in it might be wrong or even falsified.

The supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on Friday in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, which deals with a challenge to a Colorado law prohibiting public-serving businesses from discriminating against gay people as well as any statements announcing such a policy.

The suit centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who does not want to provide her services for gay weddings because of her religious objections.

In 2016, she says, a gay man named Stewart requested her services for help with his upcoming wedding. “We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website,” reads a message he apparently sent her through a message on her website.

In court filings, her lawyers produced a copy of the inquiry.

But Stewart, who requested his last name be withheld for privacy, said in an interview with the Guardian that he never sent the message, even though it correctly lists his email address and telephone number. He has also been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years, he said. The news was first reported by the New Republic.

In fact, until he received a call this week from a reporter from the magazine, Stewart says had no idea he was somehow tied up in a case that had made it to the supreme court.

“I can confirm I did not contact 303 Creative about a website,” he said. “It’s fraudulent insomuch as someone is pretending to be me and looking to marry someone called Mike. That’s not me.

“What’s most concerning to me is that this is kind of like the one main piece of evidence that’s been part of this case for the last six-plus years and it’s false,” he added. “Nobody’s checked it. Anybody can pick up the phone, write an email, send a text, to verify whether that was correct information.”

Stewart said he had no idea how his name wound up in the request. He said he is a designer with a fairly sizable following online. The inquiry to Smith sent in 2016 lists his personal website, where he used to have his email and telephone number displayed, so it’s possible a stranger could have collected those to impersonate him.


The existence of an actual request to create service is significant in the case because it helps establish that Smith has suffered some kind of harm and has standing to bring the suit. Last year, lawyers for Colorado urged the justices not to take the case because Smith had not received a request to make a website for a gay couple.

Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for Colorado’s attorney general, Philip Weiser, declined to comment on the possibility that the query might be falsified. He pointed out that the attorney general’s office had raised questions about the query in its brief to the supreme court.

“The Company did not respond to that online form. Nor did the Company take any steps to verify that a genuine prospective customer submitted the form,” lawyers wrote.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the well-funded conservative group that has targeted LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, did not return a request for comment.

The revelation of a falsified request may not matter much in a strictly legal sense, said Jenny Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a group that protects LGBTQ+ rights. The court has signaled recently that potential liability is enough to support a legal challenge, she said.

“The bigger impact might well be on the public’s view of the claims by self-identified Christian business owners who claim they are victims of religious persecution when they are expected to follow the same non-discrimination laws that apply equally to all business owners,” she said. “This sort of revelation tends to reinforce to many people that the fundamentalist Christian victim narrative is without foundation.”

The inquiry from Stewart seems to have appeared at a suspicious point in the litigation, the New Republic noted.

The query was sent on 21 September 2016, a day after the Alliance Defending Freedom filed the lawsuit on Smith’s behalf. In the fall of 2016, Smith’s attorneys originally said that she did not need an actual request for services to challenge the law. But months later, in February of 2017, it referenced the request. Smith signed an affidavit saying she received the message.


US district judge Marcia Kreiger dismissed portions of the case in September 2017 and referenced the inquiry. “Assuming that it indicates a market for Plaintiffs’ services, it is not clear that Stewart and Mike are a same-sex couple (as such names can be used by members of both sexes) and it does not explicitly request website services, without which there can be no refusal by Plaintiffs,” she wrote.

ADF attacked that reasoning – pointing to the request from
Stewart and Mike – in a press release. The US court of appeals for the 10th circuit also did not rule in Smith’s favor before her case arrived at the supreme court.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/ju ... SApp_Other

by ti-amie The bought and paid for SC majority has done what the people who own them want - to return the US to the country it was in the 1950's. It's depressing but not surprising at all.


by ti-amie



by ti-amie


by ti-amie Magpieblog
@sarahc
An expert on the US Supreme Court tries to make sense of today's student loan decision.

' The Supreme Court’s decision in Nebraska is not rooted in law, and it barely even attempts to resemble a legal decision. The Court overrules both elected branches. It rewrites a federal law. And it roots its decision in a fake legal doctrine with no basis in any actual legal text. '

#SCOTUS #USSupremeCourt #MajorIssuesesmmDoctrine #BidenVNebraska #StudentLoans #LoanForgiveness

https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/6/30/23779

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 Serious here.
My priors. OF COURSE I disagree that a person can tell you s/he will not bake a cake for you because of some religious belief. BUT: HOW do you force them? Do you impose a penalty? Suspend their license?
Switching examples. What if a person that is a member of the Church of Satan asks them to make a cake with the COS logo? Of course they would refuse but, if so, how can you force them?

by ti-amie I think the issue is that the incident she cited was made up by RW lawyers. The defendant in this case has never designed a website but was "thinking about it" hence Ms Ifill's comments.


by dryrunguy When I decide to tie the knot, I'm going to search out one of the few people who is diametrically opposed to my lifestyle so I can get wrapped up in a prolonged Supreme Court battle for years and years and years--just to make a point. Because there are no other options out there.

Said no one ever.

by Owendonovan If you don't want my money for a service you provide because you don't like that I'm gay, that's fine, I'm not interested in doing business with people like that anyhow. Maybe one day the world catch on to the scam that organized religion is.

by meganfernandez
dryrunguy wrote: Sat Jul 01, 2023 1:51 am When I decide to tie the knot, I'm going to search out one of the few people who is diametrically opposed to my lifestyle so I can get wrapped up in a prolonged Supreme Court battle for years and years and years--just to make a point. Because there are no other options out there.

Said no one ever.
Especially if you specialize in the very same service that you're seeking out!

by ti-amie Karin Wulf
@kawulf@historians.social
Elena Kagan Has Had Enough. Catching up on reading and as usual, Jamelle Bouie is excellent and on point: "The court, Kagan concluded, “exercises authority it does not have." ...To say that the Supreme Court can violate the Constitution is to reject the idea that the court is somehow outside the constitutional system....Kagan’s dissent, in other words, is a call for accountability." #SCOTUS #Law #History #Histodons

by ti-amie

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 So. Let's look at it from a different view.
The SCOTUS can now look at HYPOTHETICAL cases?
If a three headed gay Elvis Clone wants to marry a transgender squid, but a catholic dog refuses to officiate the wedding, can you force a cat to bake them a cake?

by Owendonovan
ponchi101 wrote: Sun Jul 02, 2023 10:32 pm So. Let's look at it from a different view.
The SCOTUS can now look at HYPOTHETICAL cases?
If a three headed gay Elvis Clone wants to marry a transgender squid, but a catholic dog refuses to officiate the wedding, can you force a cat to bake them a cake?
If the cat believes Jesus is it's savior, then yes, all can go accordingly, if it doesn't believe, jail might be more appropriate.

by ti-amie

by ponchi101 They should simply list themselves in Craiglist.

by dryrunguy I guess I'll put this here. It's pretty wild--wild enough that I'm actually going to include the text from the AP article.

::

The NRA has a surprising defender in its free speech case before the Supreme Court: the ACLU

NEW YORK (AP) — In a case of politics making strange bedfellows, the National Rifle Association will be represented by frequent nemesis the American Civil Liberties Union in an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The New York-based civil liberties group confirmed Saturday that it would provide legal representation for the gun-rights group in its First Amendment case against New York’s Department of Financial Services even as it “vigorously” opposes nearly everything it stands for.

“We don’t support the NRA’s mission or its viewpoints on gun rights, and we don’t agree with their goals, strategies, or tactics,” the ACLU in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. “But we both know that government officials can’t punish organizations because they disapprove of their views.”

The NRA, which reshared the ACLU’s statement on its social media account, wrote in a follow-up post that it was “proud” to stand with the ACLU and others who recognize that “regulatory authority cannot be used to silence political speech.”

The nation’s highest court is set to hear arguments early next year in a case centered on comments former New York State Department of Financial Services superintendent Maria Vullo made in the wake of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

After 17 people were killed at the Parkland, Florida, school, Vullo called on banks and insurance companies operating in New York to discontinue their association with gun-promoting groups.

In letters to companies and news releases, she urged operators to consider “reputational risks” from doing business with the NRA and other gun groups.

The NRA sued Vullo after multiple entities cut ties or decided not to do business with the Fairfax, Virginia-based organization. The federal appeals court in New York rejected the NRA’s claims, saying Vullo acted in good faith and within the bounds of her job.

Spokespersons for New York’s financial services department didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Saturday.

But the ACLU, in additional comments posted on X, argued that if the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, it could create a “dangerous playbook” for regulatory agencies across the country to blacklist or punish “viewpoint-based organizations” including abortion rights groups, environmental groups and even the ACLU itself.

“The questions at the core of this case are about the First Amendment and the principled defense of civil liberties for all, including those with whom we disagree on the Second Amendment,” the ACLU wrote. “We won’t let the rights of organizations to engage in political advocacy be trampled.”

The announcement, which comes as the NRA and the gun-rights movement broadly has proven resilient amid the nation’s ceaseless mass shootings and gun violence, was criticized by at least one prominent ACLU affiliate.

The New York Civil Liberties Union, in a statement, said it “strongly disagrees” with the decision and would not participate in the case, even though it originated in New York.

“The important First Amendment issue in the case is well-established, the NRA is one of the most powerful organizations in the country and has sophisticated counsel, and representing the NRA directly risks enormous harm to the clients and communities the ACLU and NYCLU work with and serve,” Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in an emailed statement.

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-cour ... bbe985f18f

by ti-amie The above just goes to show how complicated these cases are. Thanks dry.

by ti-amie Supreme Court says it will decide if Trump qualifies for Colorado ballot
By Ann E. Marimow and Patrick Marley
Updated January 5, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. EST|Published January 5, 2024 at 5:05 p.m. EST

The Supreme Court said Friday that it will decide whether former president Donald Trump’s name can appear on primary election ballots, scheduling arguments just five weeks from now in a case that will have a major impact on this year’s presidential election.

Colorado’s top court disqualified the Republican front-runner from the ballot last month, finding that he engaged in an insurrection before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Similar arguments have been made to keep Trump off the ballot in other states.

While some of those challenges have failed, including in Michigan and Minnesota, the efforts are still pending in Illinois, Oregon, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Maine’s top election official last month barred Trump from that ballot, an order that the former president has appealed in state court.

Friday’s announcement puts the justices in a pivotal, and potentially uncomfortable, position with echoes of the court’s involvement in the 2000 election — when its decision assured victory for George W. Bush polarized the nation and damaged the court’s reputation as an independent institution.

The court’s brief order scheduled oral arguments for Feb. 8 and came a day before the third anniversary of the Capitol riot.


Legal scholars and state election officials have urged the court to quickly settle the question of Trump’s eligibility as a candidate and to ensure all states follow the same policy ahead of this year’s primary voting. Trump holds a wide lead over other Republican contenders, with the Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away and state primaries starting Jan. 23.

The Colorado decision was the first time a court found that a presidential candidate could be barred from the ballot because of a provision of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment. The provision prevents insurrectionists from holding office and was designed to keep Confederates from returning to power.

Colorado and Maine temporarily put their decisions to bar Trump as a candidate on hold, meaning the former president’s name will stay on the primary ballots until the legal issues are resolved. Both states hold primaries March 5, but ballots are printed — and mailed to military and overseas voters — weeks before then.

Ballots will be mailed to most voters for Colorado’s mail-in primary starting Feb. 12, four days after the justices are set to hear arguments. Colorado law required Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) to certify who could be on the primary ballot Friday, and she included Trump’s name because the state Supreme Court ruling remains on hold. If Trump is later found ineligible to run, Griswold could prevent votes for him from being counted.

The public already views the Supreme Court through a partisan lens, with Democrats expressing little confidence in the court and Republicans saying the opposite — and the question of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot has the potential to further polarize those views.

“It throws them right into the political thicket,” Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell said of the court. “There is no way they can decide the case without having about half the country think they are being partisan hacks.”

The justices also face other novel questions affecting the political future and criminal liability of Trump, who has been indicted in state and federal court in connection with his efforts to block the 2020 election results, though those criminal charges do not include insurrection. Already, the high court has announced that it will review a law used to charge hundreds of people in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, a charge that is among those Trump faces in his federal election obstruction case in D.C. The Supreme Court will also probably be asked to decide whether Trump can be prosecuted for actions he took while president — a question being heard next week by the federal appeals court in D.C.

In the Colorado case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., an ardent institutionalist, is likely to look for consensus through a narrow ruling that seeks unanimity or avoids a partisan split on a court with a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three justices nominated by Trump.

Constitutional scholars are divided on whether it would be good for democracy to bar Trump from the ballot, or whether such a move, even if legally sound, is politically too dangerous. Many of them say they expect the justices to try to find a way to decide the case without addressing the underlying question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection. The justices have several paths to do so.

In urging the justices to invalidate the Colorado decision, and give voters the opportunity to select the candidate of their choosing, the former president’s lawyers and the Colorado Republican Party have made multiple arguments. States, they say, have no authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment without the passage of federal legislation. They also contend that Section 3 applies to those who took oaths to serve in Congress or a state legislature, not to serve as president. In addition, Trump’s lawyers say he did not engage in an insurrection.

If a majority of justices agree with Trump on any of those arguments, the court could allow the former president’s name to remain on the ballot.

Attorneys for the six Colorado voters who challenged Trump’s eligibility have said that the Constitution’s language barring insurrectionists from office is clear, that it applies to presidents and that it does not require an act of Congress to be enforced. They urged the justices in a filing Thursday to abide by the finding from Colorado’s top court that the former president intentionally incited his supporters to violence on Jan. 6 to disrupt the certification of the election — and exacerbated the attack while it was ongoing.

“We’re glad that the Supreme Court will definitively decide whether Donald Trump can be on the ballot. We look forward to presenting our case and ensuring the Constitution is upheld,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which brought the challenge on behalf of Colorado voters, said in a statement.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung welcomed the court’s decision to take the case, saying it would end questions around the country about whether Trump can serve as president again.

“We are confident that the fair-minded Supreme Court will unanimously affirm the civil rights of President Trump, and the voting rights of all Americans in a ruling that will squash all of the remaining ballot challenge hoaxes once and for all,” Cheung said in a statement.

Of the nine sitting justices, only Justice Clarence Thomas was on the bench when the court issued its 2000 decision about the vote count in Florida in Bush v. Gore. But his colleagues are certainly mindful of the lasting impact the ruling had on the high court’s image.

Years after she retired, the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for one, expressed misgivings that the court had gotten involved in the case, acknowledging that the ruling “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”

“No doubt they have learned some lessons from that,” said McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge. “They do not want to be in a position where they look like they’ve decided an American election.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... urrection/

by ti-amie I'm not a lawyer. My gut reaction is that they should not have gotten involved with this situation. It's purely a matter for the States to decide.

Thomas, whose wife is a supporter of the Insurrection, should recuse himself but he won't.

by ponchi101 Anyway, the concept that the SCOTUS is a non political entity is a very hard concept to sell.

by ti-amie
ponchi101 wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:22 pm Anyway, the concept that the SCOTUS is a non political entity is a very hard concept to sell.
It never used to be thought of as a political body until Bush vs Gore. The late Sandra Day O'Connor said publicly that they shouldn't have gotten involved in that situation.

The late RBG thought she was doing the Dems a solid by holding on as long as she did but in the end she ended up giving TFG a pick he shouldn't have had.

Back in the day you would never see the likes of Alina what's her name who is TFG's latest pinup, telling Kavanaugh point blank that he knows they have the goods on him - all of the tips from the public about him went to TFG campaign and not the FBI so they do have all the goods on him - and that he had better vote a certain way.

A SCOTUS justice back in the day would have recused himself and/or resigned from the bench once it was known that his wife was neck deep in planning the January 6 coup attempt. Forget about said justice shaking down backers...

A SCOTUS justice back in the day would never have "allegedly" leaked his own opinion striking down what had been settled law for 50+ years.

The old court ruled strictly on the law - precedents and opinions that had existed for centuries, and not issued opinions that were just that - opinions with no basis in settled law.

Sigh.

by dave g "The old court ruled strictly on the law - precedents and opinions that had existed for centuries, and not issued opinions that were just that - opinions with no basis in settled law."

Accept some of those precedents and opinions were pretty ugly, back in their day; most noticable Dread Scott.

by ti-amie
dave g wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2024 9:22 pm "The old court ruled strictly on the law - precedents and opinions that had existed for centuries, and not issued opinions that were just that - opinions with no basis in settled law."

Accept some of those precedents and opinions were pretty ugly, back in their day; most noticable Dread Scott.
The Dred Scott decision will always stand in infamy as one of the worst decisions made by the Supreme Court.
The decision of Scott v. Sandford, considered by many legal scholars to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court, was overturned by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-docu ... d%20States.

by ponchi101 I have always disliked the concept of precedent. If that is something you take into consideration, then the status quo will always have an advantage.
And we know how that goes when it comes to discrimination and unfair laws.

by ti-amie Justice Sotomayor speaks on frustration following some Supreme Court rulings
By Devan Cole, CNN
Updated 7:27 PM EST, Mon January 29, 2024


CNN

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor opened up on Monday about the “frustration” she said she experiences daily as the high court’s conservative supermajority continues to move the country further to the right.

“I live in frustration. And as you heard, every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart. But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting,” Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said at an event at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

“How can you look at those people and say that you’re entitled to despair? You’re not. I’m not,” she said, responding to a question from the school’s dean about how students there increasingly feel discouraged by the current court and how it’s shaping American law. “Change never happens on its own. Change happens because people care about moving the arc of the universe toward justice, and it can take time and it can take frustration.”


The comments from Sotomayor come as the majority-conservative high court is poised to issue rulings on a number of contentious issues, including gun rights and the power of federal agencies. The court’s liberal members have found themselves on the losing side of numerous blockbuster cases in recent years after former President Donald Trump appointed three conservatives justices, and Sotomayor has often publicly bemoaned her colleagues’ decisions in those matters.

Just last week, after the court cleared the way for Alabama to carry out the first-ever execution of a death row inmate by nitrogen gas, Sotomayor voiced her opposition to the move in a strongly worded dissent that underscored her “deep sadness” over the court’s order.

“Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before,” she wrote in dissent. “This Court yet again permits Alabama to ‘experiment … with a human life.’”

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson also publicly dissented from the court’s order that allowed Kenneth Smith’s execution to move forward.

During Monday’s event, Sotomayor waded into other topics related to the court, including the impact of oral arguments on a justice’s vote. At one point, she criticized some criminal defense attorneys who she said have occasionally done a poor job of advocating before the high court.

“I can’t tell you how often I’ll look at (Justice) Neil Gorsuch and I’ll send him a note and say, ‘I want to kill that lawyer.’ Because he or she didn’t give up that case. Because by the time you come to the Supreme Court, it’s not about your client anymore. It’s not about their case,” she said. “It’s about how that legal issue will affect the development of law and how you pitch it – if you pitch it too broadly, you’re gonna kill the claims of a whole swath of people.”


https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/29/poli ... index.html

by ti-amie The Supreme Court’s “Unanimous” Trump Ballot Ruling Is Actually a 5–4 Disaster
BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 04, 202411:56 AM

On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a Colorado Supreme Court decision removing Donald Trump from the ballot because of his engagement in an insurrection on Jan. 6. But that top-line holding is where the unanimity ended because five conservative justices just couldn’t help themselves: They went much further than the case required, announcing an entirely new rule that Congress alone, through “a particular kind of legislation,” may enforce the constitutional bar on insurrectionists holding office. As the three liberal justices pointed out, in a separate opinion that glows white-hot with indignation, the majority’s overreach “attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.” They are, of course, correct. After this decision, it is impossible to imagine a federal candidate, up to and including the president, ever being disqualified from assuming office because of their participation in an insurrection.

Monday’s case, Trump v. Anderson, is proof positive that the Supreme Court can act at rapid speed to resolve a dispute of national importance—at least when Trump’s own interests are under threat. The Colorado Supreme Court disqualified Trump on Dec. 19. SCOTUS took up the case on Jan. 5 and heard arguments on Feb. 8. Now, less than a month later, the justices have resolved the case in Trump’s favor. The court’s ultra-accelerated consideration of Anderson sits in sharp contrast with its treatment of Trump’s claim of absolute immunity in his criminal trial over Jan. 6, which the justices have, by comparison, slow-walked to the point that it appears unlikely the former president could face trial before November. This disparity alone may provide a clue that there is something other than law afoot in these cases.

Anyone in need of another clue can look to the majority’s unsigned opinion in Anderson shielding Trump from removal by the states. This case involved a genuinely difficult dispute: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War, bars former insurrectionists from reclaiming office but does not explain how this bar should operate. A group of voters urged the Colorado courts to enforce the amendment on their own, under a state law that lets voters challenge any candidate’s legal qualifications for office. The Colorado Supreme Court heeded the call and dumped Trump from the ballot. All nine justices have now agreed that states may not unilaterally disqualify a presidential candidate. Doing so, they reasoned, would allow a handful of states to effectively determine the outcome of a presidential election, undermining the inherently national nature of both the election and the presidency itself. The Constitution’s division of authority between the federal and state governments cannot permit a state’s go-it-alone effort to disqualify a federal candidate who’s running to represent the entire country.

That, however, is where the agreement ends. Five justices—Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—went further: They declared that only Congress may enforce the insurrection clause against federal candidates. How, exactly? The majority says that Congress must “prescribe” specific procedures to “ascertain” when an individual is disqualified under the 14th Amendment. Such procedures, of course, do not exist today. And without them, the majority insists—in just a few paragraphs of sparse reasoning—the insurrection clause cannot be enforced against office seekers. It derives this conclusion from two primary sources: “Griffin’s Case,” an 1869 opinion written by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, acting as a circuit judge, and Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which says, “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The three liberal justices wrote a separate opinion, authored jointly, to explain why this reasoning fails. First, Griffin’s Case was, until Monday, widely discredited as the political handiwork of a chief justice plotting to run for the presidency as a great conciliator between North and South. It is “a nonprecedential, lower court opinion by a single Justice in his capacity as a circuit judge,” as the liberal justices wrote. Moreover, Sen. Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 14th Amendment, resisted the logic of Griffin’s Case, declaring that while congressional legislation might provide a “more efficient and speedy remedy” for disqualifying a candidate, it is the 14th Amendment itself that “prevents a person from holding office.”

Second, it is bizarre to claim that the insurrection clause requires enabling legislation by Congress when the remainder of the 14th Amendment—indeed, all three amendments ratified after the Civil War—is “self-executing” (meaning it does not require congressional action for enforcement). Everyone agrees that Congress need not pass a law to ensure that all persons have due process, equal protection, and freedom from enslavement. Why, the liberals wondered, did the majority create “a special rule” for the insurrection clause alone? They added that the clause does mention congressional action, but only to say that Congress may lift a disqualification by two-thirds vote: “It is hard to understand why the Constitution would require a congressional supermajority to remove a disqualification if a simple majority could nullify Section 3’s operation by repealing or declining to pass implementing legislation.”

These disagreements matter a great deal. As the liberals point out, the majority’s sweeping Congress-only approach “forecloses judicial enforcement” of the insurrection clause—in, for instance, the context of a criminal trial involving an insurrectionist. It also bars future enforcement on the basis of “general federal statutes” that compel “the government to comply with the law,” since the majority says any congressional enforcement must be “tailored” to the insurrection clause. And it even empowers the Supreme Court to prevent Congress from disqualifying an insurrectionist in the future, because the court can claim that any enabling legislation did not adhere to the made-up rules in Monday’s opinion. By blocking off these pathways, the liberals wrote, the majority “foreclose future efforts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.” They continued:

Section 3 serves an important, though rarely needed, role in our democracy. The American people have the power to vote for and elect candidates for national office, and that is a great and glorious thing. The men who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, however, had witnessed an “insurrection [and] rebellion” to defend slavery. They wanted to ensure that those who had participated in that insurrection, and in possible future insurrections, could not return to prominent roles. Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.

Notably, the liberals actually had Justice Amy Coney Barrett on their side too. She authored a separate opinion expressing her disapproval of the majority’s overreach but declining to say more because “the court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” So, in effect, Anderson is a 5–4 decision, with a bare majority effectively repealing the insurrection clause for federal officeholders. The liberals’ disapproving citations to Bush v. Gore and Dobbs give a sense of how disastrously they believe the majority went astray.

It should go without saying that Congress will not enact legislation enforcing Section 3. The Republican Party is about to renominate the alleged insurrectionist in this case as its candidate for the presidency in 2024. The party is complicit in the violent events of Jan. 6. It will not allow any insurrection-related laws to clear the Senate filibuster. The whole point of a written constitution is that it can protect individual rights and democracy even when the democratic process itself is corrupted or compromised. SCOTUS has backtracked from that guarantee just when American democracy needs it most.

In their incandescent opinion, the liberal justices walk right up to the line of accusing the majority of doing a special favor for Trump. They are right to do so, and they would have been justified to cross it. The majority had no reason to nullify the insurrection clause other than an obvious desire to ensure that no other federal candidates are nixed from the ballot because of their participation in Jan. 6. An optimist might say that by doing so, the majority was just trying to inject stability into the upcoming election. But close court-watchers know that every time this Supreme Court waves the flag of stability, it does so on behalf of Trump and his allies. Anderson’s bottom-line outcome is certainly defensible. But the rest of it serves as an unwarranted gift to Donald Trump and the oathbreakers who violently assisted his efforts to overturn a free and fair election.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... aster.html

by ti-amie Supreme Court Inadvertently Reveals Confounding Late Change in Trump Ballot Ruling
BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 04, 2024 4:58 PM

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to keep Donald Trump on Colorado’s ballot was styled as a unanimous one without any dissents. But the metadata tells a different story. On the page, a separate opinion by the liberal justices is styled as a concurrence in the judgment, authored jointly by the trio. In the metadata of the link to the opinion posted by the court, however, this opinion is styled as an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, authored not by all three justices but by Sonia Sotomayor alone. Even a techphobic reader can discern this incongruity through careful copying and pasting, piercing the facade of unanimity that the conservative justices sought to present.

What happened? Most obviously, the Supreme Court rushed out this opinion and forgot to check the metadata. The court, after all, scheduled the opinion’s release only one day earlier, on Sunday afternoon, evidently to hand it down before Tuesday’s Colorado primary. Moreover, the justices did not take the bench to announce the opinion, as they usually do—probably because they had not all planned to be in D.C.—further proving that it was a last-minute release. The deeper question remains, of course: Why was an opinion originally authored by a lone justice as a partial dissent transformed into a concurrence authored by all three liberals together?

We cannot know with any real certainty. We may never. But we can certainly speculate!

First, a recap: The Supreme Court ruled that an individual state may not disqualify a presidential candidate from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from regaining public office. All nine justices agreed with this bottom line. Five justices went further, however, declaring that only Congress may enforce Section 3 against federal candidates. In a brief opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the court should not have reached this broader question about congressional authority. Sotomayor made the same point in a longer, more acerbic opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her opinion was styled as a concurrence, but we now know that it was actually, probably until late in the drafting process, labeled a dissent. We also know that the opinion was originally ascribed only to Sotomayor.

Now the speculation: We can guess that the bulk of this opinion was authored by Sotomayor herself. It bears some of the justice’s trademarks, including a realpolitik assessment of the majority’s handiwork and stormy rhetoric about its consequences for democracy. In addition, during oral arguments last month, Sotomayor sounded the most skeptical of Trump and his various legal theories. Perhaps, after arguments, the court convened to vote on the case, and a majority settled on a sweeping rationale in Trump’s favor. Sotomayor then moved forward with a dissent faulting the majority’s overreach. At some point, that dissent turned into the opinion “concurring in the judgment” that we saw on Monday.

Which leads to a second question: Why did a stand-alone Sotomayor dissent transform into a three-justice concurrence? Here, the most rational intuition is that Kagan and Jackson were keeping their votes fluid in the hopes of striking a bargain to avert a gratuitously broad opinion effectively repealing the insurrection clause. This bargain may have been simple; the two justices might have joined with Barrett to seek a fifth vote for a narrow holding, presumably from Roberts. All the while, Sotomayor worked on the fallback option: a partial dissent chastising the majority’s overreach. When Kagan and Jackson realized they couldn’t nab a fifth vote for the narrow position, they teamed up with Sotomayor, making a few changes and signing their names as authors in a show of force and agreement within the progressive bloc. (The description of presidential elections as “a great and glorious thing,” for example, sounds like the work of Kagan or Jackson, not Sotomayor.)

Broaden the scope of the potential negotiations, though, and things get more interesting. After oral arguments, many smart court watchers mused that the justices might reach a grand bargain that tied this case to a separate dispute involving Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution for election subversion. The liberal justices might agree to keep Trump on the ballot if the court also refused to take up the immunity case. There would be an exchange of votes: Trump stays on the ballot but gets no immunity from prosecution. He could run in all 50 states but would also have to contend with a criminal trial that would likely conclude before the election.

That, of course, didn’t happen: The court sided with Trump on the ballot issue and took up his immunity case last week on a less-than-speedy timeline, helping him run out the clock to November. But maybe Kagan and Jackson were working behind the scenes to strike this grand bargain. Maybe they were withholding their votes in both cases, scrambling to find two conservative justices who would rule narrowly for Trump in one case and swiftly against him in the other. If so, that didn’t happen. But it would still make sense for Kagan and Jackson to withhold their votes in both cases until they got confirmation that no compromise lay on the horizon in either dispute.

Then there is the least interesting possibility: that Sotomayor’s opinion was going to be a partial dissent until Roberts and Barrett prevailed upon her to call it a concurrence—in a bid to look unanimous and “turn the national temperature down” (in Barrett’s words). It’s frankly difficult to see Sotomayor, an independent-minded and principled jurist, buying into this stratagem if she got nothing out of it. And this theory doesn’t explain why the other two liberals signed on as authors apparently so late in the game.

But there is always another bargain to seek, another compromise to pursue. Who knows what these three justices might have received in exchange for removing the word dissent from this opinion. Maybe they needed to call the opinion a concurrence to wrench a separate opinion out of Barrett, one she might not have offered otherwise, criticizing the majority. Barrett strived to frame the outcome as a reflection of friendly unanimity; perhaps she threatened to paper over her disagreement unless the liberals dropped the word dissent to keep up the facade of cross-ideological agreement. Or maybe Barrett was on the fence about whether to grant Trump a full stay in his immunity case and push the case onto next term’s docket, instead of hearing it on a marginally expedited basis this term. If so, perhaps the “concurrence” language was the price of her vote there. Whatever the liberals were able, or not, to eke out of the conservative justices, it appears to have been thin gruel indeed.

Such guesswork is ultimately somewhat of a fool’s errand, but it’s irresistible when the Supreme Court leaves such a big clue dangling in the metadata. (I asked the court for comment on Monday but have not yet received a response.) Whatever happened behind the scenes, the final product is plenty fractured on its own terms. The liberal justices can call their opinion whatever they want. At the end of the day, it reads exactly like what it is: a furious and fearful dissent.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... ssent.html

by Owendonovan In this post pandemic world, I've noticed that straight, white men, especially in power, have clawed back all the good will, power, and decency that was rising in those who aren't straight white men in America. I can't help but feel a much more violent America on the horizon because of those men.

by patrick
Owendonovan wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2024 12:42 pm In this post pandemic world, I've noticed that straight, white men, especially in power, have clawed back all the good will, power, and decency that was rising in those who aren't straight white men in America. I can't help but feel a much more violent America on the horizon because of those men.
Especially if a certain person was to repeat 2016 as that person, McConnell and others stacked the courts. McConnell is responsible for the first one as he stated no one gets nominated in an election year. However, McConnell dropped that clause by electing Barrett in 39 days.

by ti-amie
Owendonovan wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2024 12:42 pm In this post pandemic world, I've noticed that straight, white men, especially in power, have clawed back all the good will, power, and decency that was rising in those who aren't straight white men in America. I can't help but feel a much more violent America on the horizon because of those men.
I wish I could disagree. They want pre WW2 United States.