Corrupt Justice Neil Gorsuch

There's a big to-do about Neil Gorsuch finally recusing himself from a case before the Supreme Court.  Mark Joseph Stern at Slate has a good article explaining the decision and arguing why it's not really commendable.  

Excerpt:

One bizarre facet of this incident is that, as an appeals court judge, Gorsuch had no apparent problem stepping away from cases involving Anschutz and his companies. That may be because the lower courts’ ethics rules are binding and enforceable—so if Gorsuch improperly sat on a case, he would face real repercussions. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has no enforceable ethics rules. And that is in no small part because of Gorsuch’s intransigence. According to the New York Times, when the justices decided to establish their own code of conduct last year, Gorsuch was a chief antagonist of the project. In particular, the justice adamantly rejected any enforcement mechanism, warning that it could undermine the court’s independence. He reportedly served as an insurmountable roadblock to the three liberal justices’ goal of making the code mandatory. The resulting document, released late last year, is something of a paradox—a list of ostensible directives that are couched in voluntary language, with nobody empowered to enforce them.

  Slate

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

Clarence Thomas & Neil Gorsuch: Corporate shills

After having reversed the Chevron doctrine, I'm surprised they turned this aside.

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

Pathetic

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

UPDATE 08/05/2024:

Consistency being the hobgoblin, etc.

He bent precedent to arrive at that decision.  I'm sure he can bend back again.

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

Chief Justice in the muck

Chief Justice Roberts has reason not to want to talk to Congress about court ethics.

Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, invited Roberts to "restore confidence in the Court's ethical standards" by coming on the Hill and giving public testimony. Roberts declined.

[...]

Two years after John Roberts' confirmation as the Supreme Court's chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot. After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.

Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was now the highest-ranking judge in the country.

[...]

[F]or the years 2007 to 2014 [...] Jane Roberts generated a whopping $10.3 million in commissions, paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.

That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistleblower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts [Kendal B. Price], who says that as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms who practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.

[...]

Price's disclosures, which were filed under federal whistleblower-protection laws and are now in the hands of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, add to the mounting questions about how Supreme Court justices and their families financially benefit from their special status.

[...]

"I believe that at least some of her remarkable success as a recruiter has come because of her spouse's position."

  Business Insider

He's just jealous, right Jane?

Mark Jungers, another one of Jane Roberts' former colleagues, said that Jane was smart, talented, and good at her job. "To my knowledge," he told Insider, "friends of John were mostly friends of Jane, and while it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her spouse, I never saw her 'use' that inappropriately. In fact, I would say that Jane was always very sensitive to the privacy of her family and when she could drop the name or make certain calls, she didn't."

[...]

[A] spokesperson [for the Supreme Court] told the Times that the Robertses had complied with the code of conduct for federal judges, citing an advisory opinion finding that "a judge whose spouse owned and operated a legal or executive recruitment business need not recuse merely because a law firm appearing before the judge engaged the judge's spouse."

Of course not. Those justices are above being influenced. They should never be questioned.  They're practically Gods.

(Other advisory opinions have held that when a judge's spouse is actively recruiting for a firm appearing before that judge, or when a spouse has personally done "high level" recruitment work that generated "substantial fees," recusal would be appropriate.)

But they have no mandatory rules on recusal. Or ethics for that matter.

"What's the public confidence in a system when the firms which are appearing before the court are making decisions that are to the financial benefit of the chief justice?"

How dare you question them.

Only 25 percent of Americans say they have "a great deal" of confidence in the court, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1974. The court has been rocked in recent weeks by a series of revelations about the behavior of sitting justices, including transactions and relationships that could lead to discipline in almost any other professional context.

[...]

ProPublica revealed that Clarence Thomas accepted lavish, undisclosed gifts of travel and had engaged in real estate transactions with Harlan Crow, a Dallas real-estate developer and GOP donor. That news prompted the discovery of errors in Thomas's financial disclosure forms, which he agreed to revise. This isn't the first time that Thomas has had difficulty with filing complete and accurate financial disclosure forms. In 2011, Thomas amended 13 years of forms, some of which had wrongly claimed that his wife Ginni had no outside income, when in fact she'd been paid more than half a million dollars by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Then came the news that shortly after his confirmation to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch had sold his share of a vacation property to Big Law CEO. He reported the transaction on his disclosure forms, but left the name of the buyer blank.

These disclosures came on the heels of yet another report in November that an evangelical activist orchestrated an influence campaign targeting Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. by mobilizing a network of well-heeled conservative donors to contribute to the Supreme Court Historical Society. One of those donors, the activist claims, received an early heads up about a coming decision in the Hobby Lobby case.

Oh, hell yes. I had forgotten about Alito's stench.

In a statement to Insider, Durbin suggested that he was close to giving up on the prospect that the Supreme Court was capable of policing itself. "The need for Supreme Court ethics reform is clear," he said. "And since it appears that the Court will not take adequate action, Congress must."

Do it.

Roberts said she specialized in placing current and former government officials at law firms, describing the mechanics of her job in market-oriented terms.

Jane is the matron of the revolving door.

While there is no evidence that any of Roberts' placements — as opposed to the firms that hire them — have argued before the Supreme Court, a legal consultant told Politico that Roberts' "access to people is heavily influenced by her last name."

Hunter Biden's laptop!

Gershman's memo cites one case, Dutra Group v. Batterton, in which the Supreme Court overruled a decision that found a WilmerHale client potentially liable for punitive damages. Roberts voted with the majority. "In my opinion, a reasonable person would want to know that the law firm on the other side of a legal dispute had recently paid the judge's household over $350,000," Gershman wrote. "Such a payment might cause a reasonable person to question the judge's impartiality."

[...]

The Supreme Court is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or the oversight of the Office on Government Ethics. It has no internal ethics committee and no inspector general. In lieu of all these safeguards, there is a document called "Statements of Ethics Principles and Practices," which Roberts provided to Durbin.

Even the bare-bones requirement of an annual financial disclosure form is, in Roberts' view, a voluntary gesture, as "the Court has never addressed whether Congress may impose those requirements on the Supreme Court."

[...]

As with his previous forms, Justice Roberts' most recent financial disclosure gives no indication of how much money his spouse made or which law firms it came from. Nor is there any indication that she earned a commission on placements, only income paid out by "Macrae, Inc. — Attorney Search Consultants – salary."

[...]

A memo written in support of Price's complaint by Bennett Gershman, professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University who has written books on legal ethics, goes further. "Characterizing Mrs. Roberts' commissions as 'salary' is not merely factually incorrect; it is incorrect as a matter of law," Gershman wrote. "The legal distinction between these terms is clear, undisputed, and legally material. If the Chief Justice's inaccurate financial disclosures were inadvertent, presumably he should file corrected and amended disclosures."

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

UPDATE 04/29/2023:

Congress makes laws. Congress spends money. Congress approves the president’s cabinet and says whether he can appoint a judge or not. Congress structures the judiciary and Congress sets the size of the Supreme Court and the scope of its business.

The upshot of all of this is that when Congress calls, the other branches are supposed to answer — not as a courtesy, but as an affirmation of the rules of the American constitutional order.

[...]

Last week, Congress called the chief justice. In the wake of revelations concerning the friendship between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, invited Roberts to testify at an upcoming hearing on Supreme Court ethics rules.

[...]

“I must respectfully decline your invitation,” Roberts wrote. “Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the chief justice of the United States is exceedingly rare as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

[...]

More striking than this evasion is the manner in which Roberts ended his reply. Faced with serious questions about the integrity of the court, he pointed to a nonbinding ethics document that has done almost nothing to prevent these situations from arising in the first place. “In regard to the Court’s approach to ethics matters,” he wrote, “I attached a Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices to which all of the current members of the Supreme Court subscribe.”

[...]

“Separation of powers,” in Roberts’s view, means the court is outside the system of checks and balances that governs the other branches of government. “Judicial independence,” likewise, means neither he nor any other member of the court has any obligation to speak to Congress about their behavior. The court checks, according to Roberts, but cannot be checked.

A number of legal scholars have remarked on the judicial power grab of the past several years, in which courts across the federal judiciary have seized key governing decisions from the legislative and executive branches and disparaged the ability of elected officials to, as Josh Chafetz of Georgetown University Law Center writes, “engage in principled, competent governance.”

As one of the architects of this development in American politics, Roberts is essentially using this letter to make plain to Congress the reality of the situation: I will not speak, and you cannot make me. And he’s right, not because Congress doesn’t have the power, but because it doesn’t have the votes.

[...]

It is not especially dramatic, but this exchange with Chief Justice Roberts over the court, its ethics and its responsibility to the public and its representatives has done more than almost anything else in recent memory to illustrate a key reality of American politics in this moment: that our Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves.

  NYT

Another SCOTUS justice story

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court.

[...]

Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.

Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser.

[...]

Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court.

[...]

In the 12 cases where Gorsuch’s opinion is recorded, he sided with Greenberg Traurig clients eight times and against them four times.

  Politico

So, not dispositive of bias, but he should have recused himself from all of them.

Such a sale would raise ethical problems for officials serving in many other branches of government, but the Supreme Court sets its own rules. It has largely left justices to make their own decisions about when and how to report outside gifts and income.

We're seeing how that has left some to decide very liberally on their own behalf. And Chief Justice Roberts has just refused to answer a call to testify to Congress about it.

It is time for all Americans of a certain age to gather in one spot and deliver an ensemble apology to the late Justice Abe Fortas, who was squeezed off the Supreme Court over financial issues that are penny-ante accusations compared to what's going on among the Nine Wise Souls today. [...] In just the last few days, we have seen the messy death of Clarence Thomas's primary alibi for his lucrative relationship with Texas billionnaire Harlan Crow. In addition, it seems that Justice Neil Gorsuch had similar trouble understanding the financial disclosure forms as regards a sweet deal he made for some property in Colorado.

[...]

The time was when you could count on the Chief Justice to take matters in hand and to waste no time in shoring up the Court's reputation. Instead, of course, we have Chief Justice John Roberts, who is the nominal engineer of a runaway ideological train in his day job, and who doesn't have the clout to do anything about the grubby financial deals that some of his colleagues seem to believe are their rights as lifetime federal employees. Senator Richard Durbin sent Roberts a nice letter asking if he'd like to talk things over with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Roberts politely declined.

[...]

The interesting political aspect of this is that Thomas and Gorsuch have been wallowing in the warm springs of wingnut welfare the way the average conservative Senator or state representative do.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43709578/neil-gorsuch-colorado-home-disclosure/?src=socialflowTW   Charlie Pierce

I'm waiting for stories on Alito and Kavanaugh.  Because Alito is a total asshole, and we never did find out who paid off Kavanaugh's big debts when Trump nominated him to the bench.

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

Corruption at SCOTUS doesn't begin and end with Clarence Thomas

(Or Brett Kavanaugh, for that matter.)

Unlike Thomas, however, I'm guessing he wasn't required to.

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

It's Sunday

And speaking of lying justices.

[T]he Supreme Court has removed foundational, decades-old constitutional limits on religion in public schools. Its Monday decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District overruled a half-century of precedent to elevate the rights of public school officials over students. The ruling will allow these officials to engage in coercive sectarian prayer on the job. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 6–3 decision is another maximalist attack on the separation of church and state, stripping students of their First Amendment freedom against religious indoctrination. His opinion also embraces a false narrative of faith-based persecution, illustrating yet again that this court will manipulate facts to reach its desired outcome.

[...]

Joseph Kennedy, the plaintiff in Monday’s case, worked as a football coach at a public high school in Washington State. In 2008, he began reciting Christian prayers at the 50-yard line after games, allowing students to join him. Eventually, a majority of the team consistently formed a prayer circle with their coach. During these invocations, Kennedy would lift a helmet while kneeling students surrounded him. He also led Christian prayers in the locker room before games. In 2015, the school district learned of this practice and asked Kennedy to stop, asserting that his conduct violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause (which bars the government from “respecting an establishment of religion”). The district noted that non-Christian students could be alienated by his behavior and asked him to pray privately, or while he was off-duty.

Kennedy refused. Instead, he hired a team of far-right lawyers and fomented a media firestorm, framing himself as a martyr facing oppression from anti-Christian secularists. The coach continued to kneel in prayer after games, and even students who hadn’t played would race onto the field to join; after one game, zealous students created a “stampede” that injured several classmates.

[...]

Under precedent that existed until Monday, Kennedy’s lawsuit was frivolous. The Supreme Court has long held that the establishment clause outlaws the recitation of prayer in public school. It has forbidden prayer at graduation ceremonies and football games, explaining that schools must avoid “state endorsement” of religion and religious “coercion” of students.

[...]

With remarkable mendacity, [Gorsuch] actually claimed that the court had already overruled these cases, citing a series of concurrences and dissents.

[...]

Gorsuch then declared that Bremerton School District violated Kennedy’s free speech and free exercise rights by asking him to pray privately or off-the-job. [...] Moreover, Gorsuch argued that the policy impermissibly suppressed Kennedy’s speech, because it was “quiet” and therefore not made “pursuant to his official duties.”

This claim requires a heroic suspension of disbelief. [...] Kennedy was obviously in the midst of his official duties when he kneeled on the field, in uniform, responsible for the conduct of his students. And when he led his prayer circles, he was not “quiet,” but loud and prominent by design.

[...]

To reach his conclusion, Gorsuch simply rewrote the facts. In his account, Kennedy had been suspended exclusively for his silent prayer—not the spectacle he created by hijacking football games with prayer circles. And because this prayer was allegedly so “quiet,” it qualified as “private” expression shielded by the First Amendment. The coach’s prayer, Gorsuch insisted, was “not delivered as an address to the team, but instead in his capacity as a private citizen.”

[...]

To promote its preferred narrative, the court had to ignore Kennedy’s “years of inappropriately leading students in prayer in the same spot, at that same time, and in the same manner.”

[...]

After Kennedy, what remains of the 60-year bar on prayer in public schools? Can a district bar teachers from praying at the start of class and inviting (but not formally requiring) students to participate? How about a principal at the start of an assembly? School districts will likely be too fearful of a lawsuit to limit this conduct. After all, any teacher who’s told not to pray can now launch a lawsuit that may take years, and millions of dollars, to litigate—all the while turning themselves into a cause célèbre.

[...]

The roughly 5,000 students in Bremerton School District practice dozens of different faiths. Yet Gorsuch evinced no concern for the religious liberty of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and atheists who may now be subjected to thinly veiled pressure to practice Christianity at school. These students do not matter to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Reading Kennedy with last week’s decision forcing Maine to fund private sectarian schools, a principle emerges: Under the guise of defending religious freedom, Christians have a First Amendment right to impose their faith on the rest of us.
  Slate

Gorsuch should be impeached.

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

UPDATE 09/08/2023:

Susan Collins has concerns - again

Poor, Susan.  Duped again.

UPDATE:

Dear Nancy, every Democrat Senator who ignored the issue of federal judge appointments for decades need to explain themselves to the American people.

UPDATE:

Dick for life

I heard that Alito and Thomas then took their masks off, too.

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

UPDATE:

UPDATE 1/19:

What a fucking shame.  And the shame is not that the report was inaccurate.  The shame is that now the whole thing will be awash with "conservatives" bellowing about fake news instead of focusing on the fact that the asshole Gorsuch shouldn't be "directed" to wear a mask.  He should be wearing a mask out of consideration for Justice Sotomayor, and in fact for all of the other justices.

The fallout from having elected Donald Trump will continue for decades

Slate

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

Scrub the Supreme Court

The news this week that Justice Amy Coney Barrett has signed a $2 million book deal should strike even capitalists such as myself as unseemly. Barrett has been on the Supreme Court for less than a year and she is already cashing in for seven figures. I publicly supported her confirmation to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg but her decision to accept a $2 million advance for a book she could not have sold for $200 before her confirmation casts serious doubt on her judgment, and judges, especially Supreme Court justices, need good judgment.

Technically, Barrett has done nothing wrong. The United States Code limits a judge’s outside earned income at 15 percent of the judge’s salary. Barrett’s current salary as an associate justice of the Supreme Court is $265,600, which means her outside earned income cannot exceed $39,750. Although I do not teach math for a living, I do know that $2 million is a lot more than $39,750. But in a federal statutory schema littered with loopholes, book royalties inexplicably do not count as outside earned income for purposes of government ethics.

  The Hill

It's not inexplicable. It's lawmakers making sure they keep themselves in big money.

Among current members of the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor tops the list, with more than $3 million in book advances in 2010 and 2012 for her memoir “My Beloved World” and for a children’s book. Justice Clarence Thomas received a $1,500,000 advance for his 2007 memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was paid $225,000 for “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” a book about the “essential aspects” of the Constitution, as well as events that shaped his life and outlook.

Justice Barrett’s book is projected to be about how judges should avoid letting their decisions be shaped by personal feelings. Although it is probably fair to say that almost everyone would agree with that proposition, it is equally fair to say that anyone not looking to cash in on a Supreme Court justice’s fame — in Barrett’s case, the publisher is the conservative Sentinel imprint of Penguin Random House — would not pay $2 million for a book about a proposition as obvious as that.

[...]

[S]cholars who write about corruption understand that even more worrisome than the classic quid pro quo, where the publisher for instance pays the justice a big advance in exchange for the justice casting votes strongly protective of freedom of the press, is the use of public office for private purposes or gain, even when legal.

[...]

There is also the issue of the Constitution itself, the fundamental law that Barrett and her colleagues on the Supreme Court have sworn an oath to uphold. The emoluments clause, which rose from obscurity to prominence during Donald Trump’s presidency, forbids public servants from benefiting from their positions while holding their offices.

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

They thought he was their guy

Neil Gorsuch, widely considered one of the more conservative justices on the Supreme Court, stunned observers and drew enmity from right-wing commenters after he authored Monday’s landmark decision guaranteeing LGBT people protection from workplace discrimination.

Gorsuch wrote in the 6-3 decision that the prohibition against discrimination on the basis of "sex" in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act also applies to gay and transgender employees.

[...]

“When the ex­press terms of a statute give us one answer and extratex­tual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest,” Gorsuch wrote Monday. “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”

[...]

His 33-page opinion prompted swift rebukes from social conservatives who expected the Trump appointee to be a reliable ally on the high court.

“All those evangelicals who sided with Trump in 2016 to protect them from the cultural currents, just found their excuse to stay home in 2020 thank to Trump’s Supreme Court picks,” Erick Erickson, a conservative radio host and blogger, wrote on Twitter.

Carrie Severino, president of the right-wing Judicial Crisis Network, tweeted: “Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards. This was not judging, this was legislating—a brute force attack on our constitutional system.”

[...]

Legal experts said the textualist approach can rankle conservatives who are more concerned with policy outcomes than the consistency of judicial methods.

“Those with principled conservative approaches to law should be pleased, (but) those whose conservatism pertains principally to social policy and not law will be outraged,” said Mary Anne Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago. The latter, she said, “are merely results oriented, and will blithely abandon all their announced legal principles to achieve desired results.”

  The Hill

Which is pretty much the entire Republican party these days.

“So, despite the huge victory today for LGBTQ rights, this remains a very conservative Court and I expect that the right will be consoled by other decisions issued before the end of the term on abortion rights, DACA, and other hot button issues,” Franke said.

I won't be a bit surprised.

Kavanaugh pays off for Trump

Over the last several weeks, the Supreme Court has issued a number of important rulings on its “shadow docket” — cases that are heard on motions to grant a stay or for other immediate relief without oral argument and usually without written opinions by the justices. In three of these rulings, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has more than lived up to President Donald Trump’s expectations that he will be far to the right on the court, including on crucial issues for the Trump administration.

In January, the court voted 5-4 to dissolve preliminary injunctions that had halted the Trump ban on transgender service members as the lawsuit against the ban moved forward. As a result, while the litigation continues over the next year or so, the military can prevent transgender individuals from enlisting and “courageous transgender service members will face discharges.” As one veteran put it, in addition to the hardship and discrimination against transgender individuals, the court’s 5-4 ruling “has made it harder for every commander in the military,” since each will “have to look at some of the best troops we have and kick them out for being honest about who they are.”

Kavanaugh cast one of the deciding votes to lift the injunction against the ban. [...] Justice Kavanaugh has “evinced no interest in defending” the LGBTQ community’s rights or their dignity. Trump’s other Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, also voted to dissolve the injunction. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were part of the 5-4 majority again in February, when the court voted 5-4 to reverse an Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that had temporarily stayed an execution because of a “powerful” claim that prison officials had violated the prisoner’s religious liberty. The court of appeals was concerned that Alabama refused to allow a Muslim prisoner to have an imam present to offer him religious guidance in his last moments, even though it allows that religious accommodation for Christian prisoners.

[...]

Votes by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were recently almost enough to allow a restrictive Louisiana anti-choice law to go into effect, even though it is virtually identical to a Texas provision struck down by the Supreme Court three years ago. By a 5-4 vote with Justice Roberts joining the court’s four moderates, however, the court halted the state law pending a decision on a request that the court review the case on the merits. As one commentator put it, if the court had declined the stay, the net result would have made Roe v. Wade “all but dead.”

[...]

On February 7, 2019, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to stay the Fifth Circuit ruling and prevent the law from taking effect, pending a decision on a request that the court review the case on the merits. Trump’s appointees both dissented, with Kavanaugh writing a separate dissent suggesting that the plaintiffs file another stay request later if needed. That dissent effectively disregarded the court’s Texas ruling that admitting privilege requirements are unconstitutional and provide no benefit to patients, thus effectively declaring “war on Roe v. Wade.” Progressives have already referred to Kavanaugh’s vote and opinion in again criticizing Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for her key vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

The votes of Kavanaugh and Gorsuch could be critical when the Supreme Court considers the Louisiana law on the merits, which it is likely to do in 2019-20. Chief Justice Roberts was one of the three dissenters when the court invalidated the Texas law in 2016. If he takes the same position when the Louisiana statute is reviewed on the merits, then the votes of Kavanaugh and Gorsuch could be decisive in effectively reversing the Texas decision and endangering Roe v. Wade.

  The Hill

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

Meanwhile in the Trump Court

You may have forgotten in all the noise that the administration* was planning to reintroduce a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. The Census is the province of the Department of Commerce, presently under the direction of Secretary Wilbur Ross, a man who once claimed to have misplaced two billion dollars.

A group of state attorneys general found all of this very suspicious and filed a lawsuit. Ross tried to fob the whole thing off on the Department of Justice. Back in July, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, and, in doing so, announced that Ross's reasons for including the citizenship question were, at best, at variance with what the judge believed to be the truth.

[...]

In short, two departments of this administration* concocted a bogus story to add a bogus citizenship question to the census for purely political reasons as part of its overall plan to rig the immigration system in profoundly racist ways. And a federal judge caught them—and Ross, as well. Enter Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked a deposition that Ross was scheduled to give as part of that lawsuit. (It allowed another deposition to go forward.) But, as Stern explains, Gorsuch wanted to go much further in deference to the current executive branch.

In a partial dissent, Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, wrote that he would have blocked both officials’ depositions, as well as any discovery beyond the record the Commerce Department already compiled.

[...]

Gorsuch conveniently leaves out Furman’s most critical finding: that Ross lied about his reasons for adding the citizenship question. Initially, Ross insisted—under oath before Congress—that he began considering the question in response to the DOJ’s request. A document obtained in discovery, however, reveals that Ross himself pushed the DOJ to submit this request, contradicting his earlier sworn testimony.

[...]

During his decade on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch built his reputation as a skeptic of the “administrative state,” those executive branch agencies tasked with implementing federal law. He is an outspoken critic of the rule that courts should defer to these agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes...Apparently not. Instead of sticking to his principles, Gorsuch is running interference for the Trump administration, urging the courts to let the administrative state misapply federal law and then suppress all evidence under the guise of privilege. That’s a disappointing departure from the justice’s legal philosophy—one that seems tailored to let Wilbur Ross sabotage the census in an effort to entrench Republican power for a decade.

Sooner or later, Camp Runamuck will close down for good. But that which the Republicans sold their collective souls to entrench will be with us for years.

  Charles P Pierce

I wish I could be as sure this administration will pass in time.

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

Kavanaugh shows his allegiance

A Supreme Court argument on Wednesday over the detention of immigrants during deportation proceedings seemed to expose a divide between President Trump’s two appointees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

  NYT

Kavanaugh knows how he got his job. Trump owns him. Gorsuch didn't have to have huge indebtedness paid off, nor have the FBI stand down from an investigation of his fitness to serve.

The question in the case was whether the federal authorities must detain immigrants who had committed crimes, often minor ones, no matter how long ago they were released from criminal custody. Justice Kavanaugh said a 1996 federal law required detention even years later, without an opportunity for a bail hearing.

“What was really going through Congress’s mind in 1996 was harshness on this topic,” he said.

But Justice Gorsuch suggested that mandatory detentions of immigrants long after they completed their sentences could be problematic. “Is there any limit on the government’s power?” he asked.

Not if Trump and Kavanaugh have their way.

In April, Justice Gorsuch joined the court’s four liberal members in a 5-to-4 decision striking down a law that allowed the government to deport some immigrants who had committed serious crimes, saying it was unconstitutionally vague.

[...]

The plaintiffs [in the current case] include people who entered the country illegally, tourists or students who overstayed their visas and lawful permanent residents. Among them are immigrants who arrived in the United States legally as infants, committed minor crimes like possessing marijuana and were detained years after completing their sentences.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, concluded that the law requires mandatory detention only if the federal authorities take immigrants into custody soon after they are released.

“Because Congress’s use of the word ‘when’ conveys immediacy,” Jacqueline H. Nguyen wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel, “we conclude that the immigration detention must occur promptly upon the aliens’ release from criminal custody.”

Justice Kavanaugh disagreed, saying the 1996 law put no time limits on the detentions it required.

[...]

The 1996 law includes a contested phrase. It says the federal authorities “shall take into custody any alien” convicted of certain crimes, some serious and some minor, “when the alien is released.” The key word is “when.”

[...]

“That raises a real question for me whether we should be superimposing a time limit into the statute when Congress, at least as I read it, did not itself do so,” [Kavanaugh] said.

Justice Breyer said the solution was to allow immigrants detained long after release from criminal custody to have bail hearings. He said those would allow immigrants who were not dangerous and who posed no flight risk to return to their communities. “The baddies will be in jail,” he said, “and the ones who are no risk won’t be.”

Justice Kavanaugh disagreed. “The problem is that Congress did not trust those hearings,” he said. “Congress was concerned that those hearings were not working in the way that Congress wanted and, therefore, for a certain class of criminal or terrorist aliens said, ‘No more.’”

Sounds to me like the case needs to be put on hold until the matter goes back to Congress for a clarification, Kavanaugh's certainty about what Congress had in mind in 1996 notwithstanding.

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

Just another lie

Will Gorsuch get tweet-slammed?

I'm surprised he hasn't already.

Administration officials familiar with the situation told The Washington Post that Trump was upset that Gorsuch had been too liberal in some recent cases, and that he feared the justice was not a reliable conservative.

The report comes just two days after Gorsuch cast the deciding vote in an immigration deportation case, siding with the court’s four liberal justices against the Trump administration.

Shortly after the decision, Trump called on Congress to pass stricter immigration laws.

[...]

Trump has repeatedly touted his nomination of Gorsuch as one of his major successes as president.

  The Hill

Not any more.

No loyalty Neil?

He couldn't hold out any longer

UPDATE:

"Ease his concerns."  LOL.  His "concern" was that Gorsuch wasn't praising him.  This helped "ease" that concern.

A little more praise should do it.