SCOTUS greenlights Trump's deportation nightmare

 

Justice Jackson is going to get herself impeached.

In case you haven't absorbed it yet, we're the bad guys.

Sure, but they won't do anything about it.

In related news:

All good arguments, but...

Mehdi Hasan thinks Justice Sotomayor should retire.

It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the supreme court in my adult lifetime. The first Latina to hold the position of justice, she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.

[...]

To recall how RBG, who had survived two bouts of cancer, refused to quit the court despite calls to do so from leading liberals during Barack Obama’s second term office. To hark back to her insistence, in multiple interviews, that it was “misguided” to insist she retire and that she would only stand down “when it’s time”.

[...]

With Joe Biden trailing Trump in several swing states and Democrats also in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself? Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. Of course, only Sotomayor knows the full status of her health, still it is public knowledge that she has had type 1 diabetes since she was seven; had paramedics called to her home; and is the only sitting justice to have, reportedly, traveled with a medic. To be clear: she could easily – and God willing – survive a potential Trump second term and still be dishing out dissents from the bench come 2029.

But why take that risk? Why not retire now? Why not quit the bench at the same age that justices in Belgium, Australia and Japan are forced to do so?

  Guardian

You can read the article for Mehdi's arguments and answers to objections to his suggestion Sotomayor retire.

I might agree with Mehdi (who is light years smarter than I), but for one thing: I think we've lost any hope for the Supreme Court to rule in a liberal manner if Trump becomes president again.  Where they now sometimes bend a little, they'll feel no need to then.

So I say, keep her on and let her make more righteous dissents for far future (hopefully) more liberal judges to use in their rulings.

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

Sotomayor wins the day

Sotomayor, speaking at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, praised her colleague and said that he “cares about people.”

“He cares about legal issues differently than me,” the liberal Sotomayor said of her conservative colleague, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

“Clarence, who grew up very poor, believes that everyone is capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I believe not everyone can reach their bootstraps.”

  The Hill

And of course, she's right.  And some don't even fucking have boots.

My robe rating for Justice Sotomayor is 10.  Cool cloak.  Kagan looks like she's headed for the Tundra.

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

Justice Sotomayor has lost her last ounce of patience

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

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.

Fake news

...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.

Brett Kavanaugh is still a disgusting prick

In an appalling 6–3 decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court effectively reinstated juvenile life without parole by shredding precedents that had sharply limited the sentence in every state. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Jones v. Mississippi is one of the most dishonest and cynical decisions in recent memory: While pretending to follow precedent, Kavanaugh tore down judicial restrictions on JLWOP, ensuring that fully rehabilitated individuals who committed their crimes as children will die behind bars. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, pulls no punches in its biting rebuke of Kavanaugh’s duplicity and inhumanity.

[...]

The Supreme Court strictly curtailed the imposition of juvenile life without parole in two landmark decisions: 2012’s Miller v. Alabama and 2016’s Montgomery v. Louisiana. In Miller, the court ruled that mandatory sentences of JLWOP—that is, sentences imposed automatically upon conviction—violate the 8th Amendment’s bar on “cruel and unusual punishments.” It explained that children’s crimes often reflect “transient immaturity”; because their brains are not fully developed, young offenders are “less culpable” than adults and have greater potential for rehabilitation. In Montgomery, the court clarified that discretionary sentences of JLWOP—that is, sentences imposed at the discretion of a judge—are generally unconstitutional, as well. It then applied these rules retroactively, allowing all incarcerated people who were condemned to life without parole as children to contest their sentences.

[...]

[Kavanaugh's] majority opinion in Jones v. Mississippi claims fidelity to Miller and Montgomery while stripping them of all meaning. Kavanaugh wrote that these precedents do not require a judge to “make a separate factual finding of permanent incorrigibility” before imposing JLWOP. Nor, Kavanaugh wrote, do they compel a judge to “at least provide an on-the-record sentencing explanation with an implicit finding of permanent incorrigibility.” Instead, a judge need only be granted “discretion” to sentence a child to less than life without parole. So long as that discretion exists, Kavanaugh held, the 8th Amendment is satisfied—even if the judge provides no indication that they actually considered the defendant’s youth, gauged their potential for rehabilitation, and nonetheless decided their crime reflected “permanent incorrigibility.”

  Slate

That is rich coming from a man who owes his seat on the bench to convincing people that his own juvenile indiscretions - and likely crimes - deserved to be forgiven.

As Sotomayor noted in her extraordinary dissent, “this conclusion would come as a shock to the Courts in Miller and Montgomery.” Those decisions explicitly required the judge to “actually make the judgment” that the child is incorrigible. They also “expressly rejected the notion that sentencing discretion, alone, suffices.” Kavanaugh claimed that he followed these precedents, Sotomayor wrote, but he “is fooling no one.”

[...]

“The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing,” Sotomayor declared. “The Court knows what it is doing.” Then she used Kavanaugh’s own words against him, quoting his past statements claiming to support stare decisis, or respect for precedent, to illustrate how he has abandoned his own purported principles. “How low this Court’s respect for stare decisis has sunk,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court is willing to overrule precedent without even acknowledging it is doing so, much less providing any special justification. It is hard to see how that approach”—and here, she quoted Kavanaugh himself—“is ‘founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.’ ”

"Activist judges." The very thing Republicans claim to abhor.

Brilliant

Sotomayor background.  (By his answer here, I don't think he even knows what she said.)

Ginsburg shoud recuse because she didn't support his election.  Hmmmm.  Using that as the standard, why not just eliminate the Supreme Court and allow the president to adjudicate all cases?

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

UPDATE:

Weighing in on a domestic matter as he began a day of ceremony, meetings and a joint news conference with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Mr. Trump seized on a dissenting opinion last week by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and a years-old comment by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to demand that the two Democratic-appointed jurists recuse themselves from any cases involving him.

[...]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Justice Ginsburg called Mr. Trump a “faker” and said she could not imagine him as president.

He responded at the time that she should resign. She did not, but expressed regret, saying her remarks were “ill advised” for a Supreme Court justice and promised that “in the future I will be more circumspect.”

[...]

“Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each,” [Justice Sotomayor] wrote. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.”

[...]

Writing on Twitter Tuesday morning, [Trump] quoted Laura Ingraham of Fox News: “‘Sotomayor accuses GOP appointed Justices of being biased in favor of Trump.’”

“This is a terrible thing to say. Trying to ‘shame’ some into voting her way? She never criticized Justice Ginsberg when she called me a ‘faker’. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!”

[...]

Later, during the news conference at the Indian presidential palace, he added of Justice Sotomayor, “Her statement was so inappropriate.”

[...]

But Justice Sotomayor did not overtly accuse Republican-appointed justices of being biased in favor of Mr. Trump, as the president asserted. She complained in her dissent that the court “is partly to blame for the breakdown in the appellate process,” because it “has been all too quick to grant the government’s” reflexive requests.

  NYT

Pretty overt.

She added: “Perhaps most troublingly, the court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others,” a reference to the Trump administration.

[...]

[B]ut Justice Sotomayor did not frame her disagreement in partisan terms, and her dissent was written in much the same way as others by justices who lose divided rulings.

Mr. Trump did not seem familiar with what Justice Sotomayor actually wrote but instead seemed to be reacting to a headline that characterized her statement in a far balder, more political way than she had.

Bingo.

Asked by a reporter what exactly he found inappropriate, Mr. Trump demurred, saying “you know what the statement was.”

When the reporter accurately summarized part of the justice’s dissent, the president said, “No, I don’t think that was it.”

[...]

[T]he president’s attack raised the temperature of his continuing assault on the law enforcement and justice systems, which he has tried to bend to his will in increasingly bold ways.

Sonia calls out her colleagues

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a dissenting opinion Friday accusing her conservative colleagues of having a bias toward the Trump administration after the court voted to 5–4 to uphold the administration’s public charge rule, which critics call a “wealth test” for legal immigrants.

[...]

The policy virtually bars legal immigrants from using public assistance, including Medicaid, housing vouchers and food stamps. The five conservative justices ruled in favor of the stay, while the liberal justices — including Sotomayor — opposed it.

[...]

“Today’s decision follows a now-familiar pattern,” Sotomayor began. “The Government seeks emergency relief from this Court, asking it to grant a stay where two lower courts have not. The Government insists—even though review in a court of appeals is imminent—that it will suffer irreparable harm if this Court does not grant a stay. And the Court yields.”

[...]

The Supreme Court had previously voted 5-4 in January to lift a nationwide injunction imposed by a federal judge in New York while the case played out in appeals court. Last week, Solicitor General Noel Francisco sent a request asking the court to do the same for the Illinois injunction.

  The Hill

I wonder if any other Supreme has been so explicit.  Scalia might have done.

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

Presumably

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

Funny How That Happens

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