Don't expect SCOTUS opinions today to lift your mood

And in a terrible blow to the country and obvious grab for judicial power, the Court has ditched the Chevron doctrine - from the case decided over 40 years ago that permitted federal agencies, with their policy experts, to make decisions which the Court, with no experts, should defer to.

This Court session may well go down in history as the biggest travesty - and tragedy (see what I did there?) in our history.

And to round it off, they've given the January 6th defendants a helping hand.

No Jackson dissent?  That's interesting, and I'm sure she has good reason, but I am just too despondent from last night's debate and today's SCOTUS rulings to try to find it out.

Good luck, America.

UPDATE 09:57 am:  For all of you who had Trump immunity decision the last possible date in your office pool, you win.

UPDATE 01:02 pm:

No doubt, the Supreme Court’s decision deals a soft blow to the government’s use of the (c)(2) provision of Section 1512. Section 1512(c) prohibits corruptly obstructing an official proceeding in two ways: first, under subsection (c)(1), by altering, destroying, mutilating, or concealing a record, document, or other object with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding, and second, under subsection (c)(2), by “otherwise” obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding. Rather than apply what the U.S. Solicitor General described as the plain meaning of the word “otherwise” to other means of obstructing the proceeding, such as by violently attacking the joint session of congress to count the electoral ballots–a plain meaning with which Justices Barrett, Sotomayor, and Kagan generally concurred in dissent–the Court held that the obstruction barred by (c)(2) must be tied to impairing the integrity or availability of evidence.

[...]

Assessing the impact of this decision needs to be done dispassionately and with nuance. The upshot is that the decision means little in terms of the pending charges against former President Donald Trump. It means potentially more to a subset of the January 6th defendants who were charged under this statute, who comprise only a fraction – 24% – of the existing January 6th defendants. And even within that 24%, in the great majority of cases that have resulted in a guilty verdict (by plea or after trial) for a 1512(c)(2) offense, the defendant was also found guilty of one or more other felonies (62%). Further, as to the 71 defendants who have been charged under Section 1512(c)(2) and are still awaiting trial, all of them are charged with crimes in addition to 1512(c)(2), and a majority are charged with one or more other felonies.

  Just Security

Continue reading.

UPDATE 03:56 pm: