SCOTUS Sneaky SOBs

In several recent rulings, the Supreme Court unexpectedly handed wins to liberal advocates on election law, minority voting rights and Native American issues, but all three rulings were not conclusive.

That means contentious issues could return to the conservative-majority court, and — based on what some of the justices have said — the outcome next time could be very different.

  NBC

They served their own purpose by those rulings: to lift some of the heat from recent stories about corruption at the Court.  And they managed to have their cake and eat it too by those sneaky rulings.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, said the voting rights and election cases both constitute "ticking time bombs" because of what was left undecided.

[...]

On Tuesday, the court handed a decisive defeat to Republican advocates for a broad endorsement of a fringe legal theory that would give state legislatures almost unlimited powers over election regulation.

[...]

Chief Justice John Roberts said state courts do not have "free rein" on election issues, meaning there are situations in which federal courts could intervene.

In the voting case decided on June 8, the vote was 5-4 in rejecting an effort to further weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority but wrote separately that his vote did not rule out challenges to the provision in question based on whether there is a time at which the 1965 law’s authorization of the consideration of race in redistricting is no longer justified.

And then, they knocked down affirmative action, in case anyone thought they were going to start ruling according to law instead of their feelings.

Remember when all you heard about the courts from "conservatives" was complaints about "activist judges"?  They're fine with activist judges, as long as they're right wing activists.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.