Judges taking on Trump

 Judge orders Trump name removed from the Kennedy Center:

This is where we are, folks

 

They know 2026 is going to be a blowout if they don't interfere.

If by some miracle Democrats get back in control of Congress, they need to do some serious Supreme Court reform.  They need to do a lot of things, but none of them are more important than that.

UPDATE 05/12/2026:

Speaking of slander

 I think Colorado could have a lawsuit here.

And where does he want to move it to?  Huntsville, Alabama.  "Rocket City."

President Donald Trump appeared to believe he was bestowing a new nickname for Huntsville after announcing Tuesday the north Alabama city will house U.S. Space Command headquarters.

[...]

“I am thrilled to report that the U.S. Space Command headquarters will move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama — forever to be known, from this point forward, as Rocket City," Trump announced Tuesday in the Oval Office as he was flanked by Alabama federal elected officials.

[...]

But the nickname Trump gave Huntsville has been around since the 1950s.

  AL.com

I should have been keeping a list of all the words and phrases Trump thinks he coined.

Resistance in the courts

 

MAGA

 

In the laboratories - Alabama & Texas

 

DONALD TRUMP WANTS YOU TO ENVISION a world where providing running water or renting an apartment to illegal immigrants is a crime. Where law enforcement acting upon “reasonable suspicion” can detain people to determine their immigration status. Where anyone who gives a person in the country illegally a ride—even giving a colleague a ride to work or a neighbor a ride home—can be penalized. Where undocumented people can neither seek work nor enroll in public college. Where schools must collecting immigration status information from children—including about their parents.

[...]

In 2011, Alabama passed HB 56, which contained some of these very same provisions. It was widely considered the harshest in the nation at the time. And it was chaos.

[...]

The National Immigration Law Center found at the time that the costs of HB 56 went far beyond economic dislocation. It created an environment of racial profiling by law enforcement officials and sanctioned discrimination by private citizens against anyone suspected of being “foreign.”

Legal challenges largely succeeded in defanging the law, but the political life and death of HB 56 still provides lessons for the Trump administration and Republicans as they try to make the lives of undocumented immigrants impossible.

[...]

Undocumented immigrants fled the state, school attendance plummeted, fruits and vegetables rotted on the vine after farmworkers disappeared and Americans given the chance to replace them couldn’t make it through one day of work.

[...]

State Rep. Mickey Hammon, a co-sponsor who would later go to prison for mail fraud, said at the time that the law was modeled after Arizona’s hardline SB1070, which itself was watered down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The difference, Hammon added, was that HB 56 had an “Alabama flavor” that “attacks every aspect of an illegal immigrant’s life.”

Local Republicans, elected officials, and law enforcement who had to deal with the realities of HB 56 turned against it long ago—a change of heart that could serve as a warning to MAGA acolytes following Trump and Stephen Miller into enforcement oblivion.

  The Bulwark

COULD serve, but MAGA hasn't heeded any of the many warnings they've received over the last decade.

“THE ALABAMA LAW CRASHED AND BURNED because it was a Frankenstein monster, it was unlawful from start to finish,” said Karen Tumlin, the managing attorney who authored the NILC report on the law. She said to this day she still remembers the traumatic hotline phone calls that went directly to her personal cell phone.

[...]

Tumlin was also shocked when a law student intern saw a sign outside a public utility which said “Citizens Only” for water, sewage, and electricity, recalling Jim Crow.

[...]

Complaints commonly involved bullying of Latino children at school. At the elementary school in Crossville, one teacher asked students whose parents were born outside the United States to raise their hands. Some children threatened to report Latino classmates and their families to immigration authorities and asked why they hadn’t gone back to Mexico, the report said.

Texas would like to contribute.

Beyond the testing of the strictures of the law, Tumlin said she fears another echo of Alabama: The bubbling up of private hate that can only be counteracted by Americans of good conscience.

“What keeps me up at night is that when the state or federal government goes so far to target immigrants, we see the floodgates of private hatred open up,” she said.

I’ve covered a lot of heavy stories in my career: the trial of George Zimmerman after he killed Trayvon Martin, followed by more killings of black people by white men, then the 23-month-old girl and her father who were found drowned in the Rio Grande, then the El Paso Walmart shooting.

The death of Jocelynn Rojo Carranza is one of the stories I won’t forget.

Marbella Carranza, Jocelynn’s mother, says schoolmates bullied her daughter over being Hispanic, threatening that they were going to speak to immigration to take her parents, and she was going to be left alone. She says the school was aware but did not inform her of the bullying.

MAGA regrets

 MAGA voters didn't seem to care much about viruses during Covid, but even red states universities got research grants.

UPDATE 12:58 pm:

Family values

But I bet Alabama votes red this year

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

Stupid mistake

I would have expected them to do it 91 days out.

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

Why do all the voter fraud cases seem to involve Republicans?

Here's another one in a thread from Kyle Whitmirethread from Kyle Whitmire.

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

Republicans should be getting the hint

UPDATE 07:33 pm:

Laws to counter laws

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

Florida was cued up

A Florida Republican senator this week said she has sidelined a bill that seeks to add fetuses to wrongful death lawsuits amid ongoing concern from Democrats that the legislation was an attempt to grant personhood to fetuses.

Lawmakers expected to hear the bill, SB 476, in the Senate committee on Rules on Monday but Chair Debbie Mayfield announced that it had been temporarily postponed.

  Politico

Only the backlash over the Alabama ruling has put a halt to this avenue of MAGA control over conception and women's rights.  It'll come back around.

“Although I have worked diligently to respond to questions and concerns, I understand there is still work that needs to be done,” Grall said. “It is important we get the policy right with an issue of this significance.”

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

It's Sunday

In his opinion [giving rights to incubated embryos], Parker wrote: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. [Alabama’s Sanctity of Life statute] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life—that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

  Elie Mystal @ The Nation

This is in the decision of a Alabama Supreme Court justice. Tom Parker

The word “God” appears 41 times in [Justice Tom] Parker’s opinion, which also liberally quotes from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis, and theologians like Thomas Aquinus and John Calvin. In an interview, Parker said he supports the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which is a code for imposing Christian rule based on biblical precepts on the rest of society.

[...]

The decision came out on Friday, and less than a week later two Alabama clinics, including the state’s largest hospital, have stopped offering IVF because they cannot assume the legal liability that could arise from discarding the unused, unwanted embryos IVF treatments produce.

[...]

Do the icicle babies get a Social Security number? Can their mothers count them as dependents on their taxes? Do their fathers have to pay child support? Are we all nine months older than we think and, if so, do 17-year-olds get to vote in the upcoming election?

[...]

This is clearly unconstitutional. The Alabama ruling, on its face, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court is privileging one religious sect—dominionist Christians—over all others, and it is doing this to extract legal payments from others, namely hospitals and clinics, that don’t share the justices’ religious viewpoint. Using the power of the state to force others to live in accordance with a particular religious belief is the very definition of state-sponsored religion.

[...]

What’s troubling to me is the extent to which the rest of the country has just accepted that we live under the rule of theocrats in robes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Establishment politicians, media figures, and even non-theocratic judges just kind of shrug and pretend that scripture is a reasonable basis for judicial pronouncements in a free society. If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds.

[...]

I don’t know how we combat the Christian takeover of the judicial branch—a takeover that has largely already happened—when most people in power won’t even acknowledge that a theocratic takeover of the judicial system is bad and out of step with the principles the country was literally founded on.

[...]

The priests and deacons and ministers of our time are using the bully pulpit of the judiciary to impose their version of God’s will on the rest of us, and their God is spiteful, bigoted, and misogynist.

We are entering a new Dark Age, one where, like the last one, science, education, and facts mean nothing, and Christian myths and legends are given the force of law. I don’t know how to stop them, but I think the first step is to recognize and name what they’re doing.

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

UPDATE 03/07/2024:

Extrauterine children

In a case originating from Mobile, LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc., the [Alabama] Supreme Court held in a 7-2 decision that parents of frozen embryos killed at an IVF clinic when an intruder tampered with an IVF freezer may proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic for alleged negligence.

[...]

[T]he defendants and their amicus devote large portions of their briefs to emphasizing undesirable public-policy outcomes that, they say, will arise if this Court does not create an exception to wrongful-death liability for extrauterine children.

[...]

On appeal, the Supreme Court has now reversed the trial court and held that a human frozen embryo is a “child,” which is “an unborn or recently born person,” within the plain meaning of the Act and under prior judicial decisions recognizing that unborn children are protected by Alabama law.

[...]

That life is sacred because every human being is made in the image of God, noted Chief Justice Parker, and the People chose to make that a clear matter of constitutional law. As to the effect of the Sanctity of Life Amendment, Chief Justice Parker reasoned that it “does much more than simply declare a moral value that the People of Alabama like. Instead, this constitutional provision tilts the scales of the law in favor of protecting unborn life.”

  1819 News

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

UPDATE 02/22/2024:

And what did those IVF clinics do with the frozen embryos they already have?  "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Doe, We are closing our clinic; come pick up your children."

UPDATE 02/22/2024:

UPDATE 02/23/2024:

UPDATE 02/24/2024:

If corporations are people, why not embryos?

UPDATE 02/25/2024:

UPDATE 03/07/2024:

Capital punishment in Alabama

Alabama has carried out the first execution of a death row inmate in the US using nitrogen gas, an untested procedure which the prisoner’s lawyers had argued amounted to a form of cruel and unusual punishment banned under the US constitution.

Kenneth Smith, 58, was pronounced dead at 8.25pm on Thursday evening at an Alabama prison after breathing pure nitrogen gas through a face mask to cause oxygen deprivation.

[...]

The technique, known as “nitrogen hypoxia”, leads to fatal oxygen deprivation.

  Guardian

Yikes.

Alabama claimed that the new nitrogen gas method was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”. But eyewitness statements from reporters present in the death chamber suggested that Smith’s death was anything but humane.

[...]

The execution took about 22 minutes.

[...]

Marty Roney of the Montgomery Advertiser reported that between 7.57pm local time and 8.01pm “Smith writhed and convulsed on the gurney. He took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head.”

Roney’s report continued: “Smith clenched his fists, his legs shook … He seemed to be gasping for air. The gurney shook several times.”

[...]

The execution took about 22 minutes. Smith appeared to remain conscious for several of those minutes, at times appearing to shake and writhe on the gurney and pull against his restraints. This was followed by several minutes of heavy breathing, until his breathing was no longer perceptible.

[...]

The Rev Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, was at Smith’s side for the execution, and said prison officials in the room “were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went”.

And why didn't they stop it?

The execution had been scheduled to begin at 6pm local time at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, but it was delayed as the US supreme court weighed his final appeal. Shortly before 8pm, the court denied that appeal, allowing the execution to proceed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who along with two other liberal justices dissented, wrote: “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. The world is watching.”

[...]

The prisoner also unsuccessfully argued that he was being dealt with doubly unlawfully by dint of him having been subjected to an execution procedure once before. In November 2022, the state strapped him for four hours to the gurney and punctured his arms and legs in a failed attempt to find a vein through which to kill him using lethal medications.

Jesus.

In the run-up to the execution, Alabama had come under a raft of domestic and international criticism. Hundreds of Jewish clergy and community leaders across the US signed a letter organised by L’chaim!, Jews Against the Death Penalty, calling for a halt.

“Just the idea of using gas for executions is an affront to our community,” the co-founder of L’chaim, Mike Zoosman, said. “The Nazi legacy of experimentation to find the most expeditious way to rid our community of undesirable prisoners is an undercurrent for anyone who is aware of that history that should not be repeated in Alabama, or anywhere.”

Smith’s pending death was also denounced by UN experts on arbitrary executions and torture who fiercely opposed the use of what they decried as a human experiment.

[...]

Smith was convicted of the 1988 murder-for-hire of a pastor’s wife, Elizabeth Sennett. He and another man were each allegedly paid $1,000 to kill her by Charles Sennett, a minister in the Church of Christ who went on to take his own life after suspicion fell on him.

Supreme inaction is action

Once again redistricting is front and center in Louisiana. Once again, an election is nigh, and once again, the Supreme Court, this time without dissent, has refused to intervene.

[...]

The status quo is that the trial court, has found that the existing map drawn by the legislature likely violates the Voting Rights Act. That ruling is still on appeal to the Fifth Circuit.

[...]

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday backed away from a confrontation with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and its efforts to delay the redrawing of Louisiana's congressional map ahead of the 2024 election.

The case has been widely watched, not just because it could produce an additional Democratic seat in the House, but because the Fifth Circuit's actions in the case were seen as a defiant challenge to the Supreme Court's authority.

On Thursday, however, the justices, without explanation or noted dissent, declined to block a highly unusual legal maneuver by the Fifth Circuit that could prevent the creation of a second majority-Black district in time for the 2024 election.

  NPR

Supreme Court decisions should all have to be explained.

Thursday's decision was a turnaround for the high court, which, in a similar case in June, ordered the state of Alabama to draw a second competitive district for Black voters. Following that decision, the justices ordered Louisiana to go ahead with its efforts to draw a new map that would comply with the rules set down in the Alabama case.

[...]

The Louisiana redistricting dispute centers on the fact that, as of now, the congressional map appears to mirror the racial vote dilution that the Supreme Court found to be illegal in Alabama. Specifically, one-third of Louisiana's population is Black, but the way the congressional districts have been drawn, only one out of six congressional districts has a majority of Black voters.

[...]

Now, however, the the justices have declined to intervene further.

Why intervene in Alabama and not Louisiana?

Voting rights experts say that normally, in a situation like this, the courts adopt a two-track approach. While the circuit court considers any appeals, the trial court goes ahead with considering possible alternative maps so they can be ready when and if needed. Or as Justice Jackson put it, "we have previously emphasized this litigation should be resolved 'in advance of the 2024 elections in Louisiana.'"

[...]

Indeed, three weeks ago, a Fifth Circuit panel, by a 2-to-1 vote, took the extraordinary step of cancelling the trial court's hearing, a procedural step that University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck called "stunning."

[...]

And there is every probability that the Fifth Circuit and the state of Louisiana will now "try to run out the clock."

[...]

The closer the election is, the less likely the court is to intervene.

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

UPDATE 11/11/2023:

The Louisiana Legislature has until Jan. 15 to enact a new congressional map after a lower court ruled that the current boundaries weaken the power of Black voters in the state, an appeals court ruled Friday.

The order by a three-judge panel in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was released Friday. It tosses out the 2022 ruling, and it is the latest in the state’s redistricting fight, which could determine which party controls the state House following the 2024 elections.

[...]

The district court would need to consider whether the new plan is in line with the Voting Rights Act or whether another preliminary injunction is necessary, the appeals court argued Friday.

  The Hill

Court ordered and drawn

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

UPDATE 10/16/2023:

Alabama all out of tries to rig the district map

The Supreme Court refused to reinstate Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map, enabling a court-appointed official to draw the lines for the 2024 election instead.

The justices in June struck down Alabama’s previous map for likely diluting the power of Black voters, and the current dispute concerned a new version that still did not add a second majority-Black district.

[...]

Rather than using the Republican-drawn lines for the 2024 election cycle, the order paves the way for an independent expert appointed by a panel of federal judges to design the boundaries instead.

That court-appointed expert is set to submit the final map in the coming days.

  The Hill

Let us hear no more of this bullshit. The court already allowed a rigged map for the 2022 elections.

When Alabama brought its redistricting fight to the high court the first time, the justices ruled 5-4 in February 2022 to temporarily revive the state’s map, allowing it to be used for that year’s midterms.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to revive the map, at the time cited a legal doctrine that federal courts should not intervene to alter state election rules in the lead-up to an election.

But in the final decision months later, Kavanaugh went the other way, giving Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals a majority to toss Alabama’s map for likely violating the Voting Rights Act.

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

UPDATE 10:41 am:

APR has now identified connections between Alabama officials who led the 2023 redistricting process — which disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — with far-right power broker Leonard Leo’s dark money network, described this past week by Politico as “a billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action and many other issues.”

APR’s reporting shows the extent to which Alabama’s calculation to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislators in Alabama but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

[...]

[F]ormer President Donald Trump famously stated that Leo’s Federalist Society had “picked” his judges, and all six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices “were seated with major help from Leonard Leo,” who has come to be known as the “hidden architect of the Supreme Court.” With few exceptions, the justices Leo has ushered to the bench have reliably voted to permit the partisan gerrymanders and strict restrictions on voting access that have proliferated in recent years from red-state legislatures, which themselves work in tandem with — and sometimes under the direction of — Leo’s dark money groups.

  Alabama Political Reporter