Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Supreme

Rss Feed Group items tagged

clairemann

Amy Coney Barrett takes oath as a Supreme Court justice - 0 views

  •  Trump rushed back from the campaign trail in Pennsylvania for aceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in the midst of a global pandemic.
  • a month earlier the federal appeals court judge from Indiana was introduced in a crowded settingthat contributed to the spread of COVID-19, both at the White House and in the Senate.
  • Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called Barrett "a woman of unparalleled ability and temperament."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Barrett tried to distance herself and the judiciary from the politics swirling around her nomination and the presidential election.“It is the job of a judge to resist her policy preferences. It would be a dereliction of duty for her to give in to them," she said.
    • clairemann
       
      she says all the right things, but as I hung on her every word as I watched the words do not match the actons.
  • Barrett will become the fifth woman ever to serve on the high court, succeeding the late liberal Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
    • clairemann
       
      absolutely devastating
  • "is one of our nation’s most brilliant legal scholars.”
    • clairemann
       
      blatantly incorrect, no origionilist or textualist truly understands the function of the constitution in America.
  • Barrett will become the fifth woman ever to serve on the high court, succeeding the late liberal Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Petitions challenging voting procedures in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are pending before the high court, which ruled 5-3 along ideological lines Monday night against extending Wisconsin's deadline for absentee ballots.
  • It represents the culmination of conservatives' decades-long project to win control of the Supreme Court, perhaps for decades to come.
  • Democrats immediately cited McConnell's 2016 refusal to act on Obama's nominee as reason to delay action until after the election, to no avail.
  • All 12 Republicans voted to send her nomination to the Senate floor; all 10 Democrats boycotted the vote. 
  • “The American people will never forget this blatant act of bad faith," Schumer said. "It will go down as one of the darkest days in the 231-year history of the United States Senate.”
    • clairemann
       
      couldn't be more true.
tsainten

106 House Republicans back Texas challenge of election results at Supreme Court - CBS News - 0 views

  • Republican congressional ally of President Trump solicited more than 100 of his fellow GOP lawmakers to sign on to a brief with the Supreme Court in support of a long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas seeking to delay certification of presidential electors in four battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden.
  • The simple objective of our brief is to affirm for the court (and our constituents back home) our serious concerns with the integrity of our election system," Johnson wrote. "We are not seeking to independently litigate the particular allegations of fraud in our brief (this is not our place as amici). We will merely state our belief that the broad scope of the various allegations and irregularities in the subject states merits careful, timely review by the Supreme Court."
  • a dangerous violation of federalism and sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • He is asking the Supreme Court to delay the December 14 Electoral College vote and block the four states from casting their votes in the Electoral College for Mr. Biden. The president-elect won the popular vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, and they all have certified their election results, formalizing Mr. Biden's victory over Mr. Trump.
  • "Texas's effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact," he wrote. "The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated."
  • A group of attorneys general from 17 states filed their own friend-of-the-court brief in support of Texas, while the president filed a motion with the Supreme Court asking the join the case.
  • Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah — requested Thursday to join Texas in the case, while the state of Ohio told the Supreme Court it does not support Paxton's proposed relief.
  • "Federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to change the legislatively chosen method for appointing presidential electors. And so federal courts, just like state courts, lack authority to order legislatures to appoint electors without regard to the results of an already-completed election," they argued. "What is more, the relief that Texas seeks would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the states are sovereigns, free to govern themselves."
clairemann

Supreme Court Term Limits Are Not Going to Cut It | Balls and Strikes - 0 views

  • Last week, the Biden presidential commission on Supreme Court reform published a set of “discussion materials” in advance of its final, official report on the subject. Over the course of the 200-plus pages of non-searchable PDF files —a decision that should be punishable under the Geneva Conventions—the commission aimed to “set forth the broad range of arguments that have been made in the course of the public debate over reform of the Supreme Court.”
  • a task force composed primarily of law professors, appellate lawyers, and former federal judges with a vested interest in the Court’s institutional legitimacy: a collection of milquetoast platitudes about the importance of maintaining public trust in a principled, nonpartisan judiciary, no matter how unprincipled or partisan the judiciary’s work actually becomes.
  • “the belief that the judiciary is independent can be undermined if judges are perceived to be ‘playing on the team’ of one party or another,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the one of which the commission is most skeptical is adding seats to the Court. The risks of expansion are “considerable,” the document says, and could “undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the court’s legitimacy.”
  • Term limits are presented not as a tired manifestation of cynical partisan maneuvering, but as an opportunity to advance “our Constitution’s commitments to checks and balances and popular sovereignty.”
  • But for voters of color in Arizona who just watched six Republican-appointed justices hollow out the Voting Rights Act at the Republican Party’s request, for example, expansion would not “politicize” the Court, because the Court’s relentless assault on the right to participate in democracy has been going on for decades. As usual, the people wringing their hands over the Court’s political nature are those who are less likely to be meaningfully affected by the Court’s political choices.
  • because capping the length of judicial service at some point in the future does nothing to address the crisis that this 6-3 conservative supermajority faces right now.
  • The commission took care to note its skepticism that Congress can institute term limits by statute, as opposed to the herculean task of enacting them via constitutional amendment
  • this public trepidation paves the way for savvy Republicans to frame term limits proposals—again, the option that supposedly enjoys “widespread and bipartisan support”—as just another illegitimate Democratic power grab.
  • which increased significantly in the aftermath of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s warp-speed pre-election confirmation. Delegating that task to an ad hoc collection of law review enthusiasts who met over Zoom every few weeks was perhaps the least efficacious method of accomplishing that result, short of doing literally nothing.
  • tasked with writing down lots of big words about this country’s broken legal system while simultaneously saying nothing of consequence.
clairemann

Analysis: Supreme Court ruling is a bitter legal and personal blow to Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • (CNN)The Supreme Court's refusal to block the release of Trump White House documents to the House January 6 committee represents a huge defeat for the ex-President's frantic effort to cover up his 2021 coup attempt.
  • It will also likely be viewed by the former President as a betrayal by the court's conservative majority, which he cemented with three picks for the top bench whom he saw as a legal insurance policy as he's continually sought to bend governing institutions to avoid accountability.
  • The decision means that 700 documents -- including schedules, speech and call logs, and three pages of handwritten notes from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows -- can be transferred from the National Archives to the House committee, a process that was already underway Wednesday evening.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • "victory for the rule of law and American democracy"
  • Trump had mounted an intense effort to avoid such scrutiny and had already lost cases in district and appellate courts as part of a broad campaign of obstruction of the committee, which has included expansive executive privilege claims by ex-aides -- even some, like his populist political guru Steve Bannon, who were not serving White House officials at the time of the insurrection.
  • The Supreme Court did not rule on the key legal question of what happens when there is a dispute between a current and a former president on the scope of executive privilege -- a concept meant to ensure that advice to a commander in chief from subordinates can stay private. But it allowed to stand a ruling by the appellate court that found Trump had not demonstrated that his concerns for executive branch confidentiality should override "profound interests in disclosure" cited by Biden.
  • Wednesday's ruling, in which only conservative Justice Clarence Thomas signaled dissent, will also offer a new mark of legitimacy to the select committee, amid claims by pro-Trump Republicans that it is an illegally constituted witch hunt despite being voted into being by the House. It will also boost the committee's race against time as it tries to complete its work before a possible new Republican majority shuts it down.
  • The net has significantly tightened around the Trump White House in recent weeks.
  • On Tuesday, CNN exclusively reported that the committee had subpoenaed and obtained phone number records from one of the ex-President's sons, Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to his brother, Donald Trump Jr. The committee is interested in investigating the level of coordination between Trump's team and organizers of the Washington rally at which the then-President told supporters who later moved to the Capitol to "fight like hell" to stop Congress from certifying Biden's election win.
  • it appears unlikely to meaningfully reshape the fraught politics of the insurrection. Swathes of the Republican Party, especially in the House, have done their best to whitewash Trump's role that day as he contemplates a possible comeback presidential bid in 2024.
  • There is no doubt, however, that Trump will be apoplectic that his three Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, did not publicly dissent from denying his bid to keep his West Wing records secret.
  • Trump has repeatedly slammed the Supreme Court for throwing out his false claims of election fraud, claiming he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice even though his delusional cases were also dismissed by multiple lower courts.
  • Throughout his presidency, Trump appeared to equate judicial and Cabinet nominations with an act of patronage, viewing those selected as owing him a debt that would be repaid by pursuing his interests rather than honoring the rule of law and the Constitution.
  • The gathering clouds around Trump would represent a grave legal and reputational risk to a normal politician, but given his talent for impunity, it's far from certain that they will slow his political aspirations.
sidneybelleroche

Breyer's retirement preempts more Supreme Court hardball from McConnell - 0 views

  • While many Democratic activists may regard Mitch McConnell as an all-powerful bogeyman, there is little that the Republican Senate minority leader from Kentucky can do to stop President Biden from nominating the next Supreme Court justice.
  • While many Democratic activists may regard Mitch McConnell as an all-powerful bogeyman, there is little that the Republican Senate minority leader from Kentucky can do to stop President Biden from nominating the next Supreme Court justice.
  • Republicans hope to take back the Senate majority in the midterm elections this fall, and McConnell had already signaled last summer that if that were to happen, he would likely block any attempt by Biden to nominate a justice to an open Supreme Court seat.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Justice Stephen Breyer’s impending retirement comes none too soon for Democrats.
  • McConnell’s position does not have precedent, despite his claim to be an institutionalist.
  • But as long as Democrats have the majority in the Senate, Biden can nominate justices to the Supreme Court. That’s because McConnell abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017, in order to appoint Neil Gorsuch to the bench.
  • When Scalia, a conservative justice, died almost six years ago, McConnell — who controlled the Senate at that time as majority leader — moved with lightning speed. Within an hour, he issued a statement saying he would not even allow a hearing for any nominee put forward by then-President Barack Obama.
  • Under McConnell’s rationale for blocking the Garland nomination in 2016, he would have left the seat open and allowed “the American people” to “have a voice in the selection.
  • nstead, McConnell reversed himself. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” he said. The confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett moved the court solidly to the right, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority in some cases and a 5-4 majority even in cases in which Chief Justice John Roberts did not rule their way.
  • I
  • His retirement now, rather than a year from now, will prevent conservatives from dominating the court even more than they already do. And it may end up being the only Supreme Court vacancy filled by Biden.
lilyrashkind

Supreme Court blocks Biden's COVID vaccine mandate for companies, but allows for health... - 0 views

  • "Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly," the court said. "Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category."
  • The high court, though, gave the green-light to a requirement that health care workers in facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding must be vaccinated, siding 5-4 with the Biden administration.
  • The decisions come less than a week after the justices heard oral arguments on the emergency requests regarding the vaccine-or-test rule and vaccine requirement for health care workers.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • President Biden first announced the rules in September as part of a broader strategy from his administration to combat the spread of the Delta variant, which drove a surge of infections toward the end of the summer. 
  • The Supreme Court was asked to intervene last month and swiftly held oral arguments to weigh the emergency requests.
  • "As a result of the court's decision, it is now up to states and individual employers to determine whether to make their workplaces as safe as possible for employees, and whether their businesses will be safe for consumers during this pandemic by requiring employees to take the simple and effective step of getting vaccinated," Mr. Biden said. "The court has ruled that my administration cannot use the authority granted to it by Congress to require this measure, but that does not stop me from using my voice as president to advocate for employers to do the right thing to protect Americans' health and economy."
  • "Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life — simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock — would significantly expand OSHA's regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization," the court said.
  • The Supreme Court received more than a dozen requests for emergency action in cases challenging the requirement after the 6th U.S. Circuit's ruling, with business associations, Republican-led states and private businesses covered by the rule arguing OSHA lacked the power to issue the vaccine requirement.
  • The Biden administration estimated that more than 80 million employees could be impacted by the policy.
  • The second rule examined by the Supreme Court was issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in November and laid out vaccine requirements for staff at a wide range of facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid. The requirement does not have a daily or weekly testing option for unvaccinated workers, but does include medical and religious exemptions.
  • . Then, in a separate case brought by 14 states, a federal district court in Louisiana blocked the rule from taking effect nationwide, but the 5th Circuit narrowed the scope of the order to the 14 states that together sued the Biden administration. 
  • "After all, ensuring that providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the fundamental principle of the medical profession: first, do no harm," the Supreme Court said.
  • "The omnibus rule is undoubtedly significant — it requires millions of healthcare workers to choose between losing their livelihoods and acquiescing to a vaccine they have rejected for months. Vaccine mandates also fall squarely within a state's police power, and, until now, only rarely have been a tool of the federal government," Thomas wrote. "If Congress had wanted to grant CMS authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, and consequently alter the state-federal balance, it would have said so clearly. It did not."
redavistinnell

Supreme Court sides with death row inmate in race discrimination case - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Supreme Court sides with death row inmate in racial discrimination case
  • The Supreme Court ruled Monday morning in favor of a death row inmate in a case concerning race discrimination in jury selection.
  • The jury that convicted him was all white. Twenty years after his sentence his attorneys obtained notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in picking a jury, including marking potential jurors who were black had a "b" written by their name.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The 7-1 decision comes as a welcome relief to critics who say racial discrimination in jury selection persists across the country some 30 years after the Supreme Court ruled potential jurors cannot be struck because of race.
  • Monday's ruling can provide "new life to these so-called Batson claims in the lower courts and the issue of racial bias in jury selection," said Steve Vladeck, CNN contributor and law professor at American University Washington College of Law, referring to the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky.
  • "This discrimination became apparent only because we obtained the prosecution's notes which revealed their intent to discriminate. Usually that does not happen," said Foster's lead lawyer, Stephen Bright, from the Southern Center of Human Rights. "The practice of discriminating in striking juries continues in courtrooms across the country. Usually courts ignore patterns of race discrimination and accept false reasons for the strikes."
  • "The Court today invites state prisoners to go searching for new 'evidence' by demanding the files of the prosecutors who long ago convicted them . ...I cannot go along with that 'sort of sandbagging of state courts.' New evidence should not justify the relitigation of Batson claims,
  • Nearly 20 years after the conviction, through an open records request, Foster's lawyers obtained the notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in the process of picking a jury.
  • "The prosecutors in this case came to court on the morning of jury selection determined to strike all the black prospective jurors," Bright said. "Blacks were taken out of the picture here, they were taken and dealt with separately."
  • One set of documents from the prosecution files shows that potential jurors who were black had a "B" written by their name and their names highlighted with a green pen. On some juror questionnaire sheets, the juror's race "black," "color" or "negro" was circled. One juror, Eddie Hood, was labeled "B #1. Others were labeled B#2, and B#3.
  • The Supreme Court's 1986 case held that once a defendant has produced enough evidence to raise an inference that the state impermissibly excluded a juror based on race, the state must come forward with a race-neutral explanation for the exclusion.
Javier E

Roberts, Leader of Supreme Court's Conservative Majority, Fights Perception That It Is ... - 0 views

  • he has taken Justice Kennedy’s place as the swing vote at the court’s ideological center, making him the most powerful chief justice in 80 years.But all of that new power comes at a dangerous time for the court, whose legitimacy depends on the public perception that it is not a partisan institution
  • Controlling the pace of change on a court whose conservative wing is eager to move fast will be the central problem of the next phase of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • “If he’s smart, and he is, what he’s probably thinking is, ‘I do have a substantive agenda of things I want to accomplish. But it’s a lot easier to do that when the court retains its legitimacy. Let’s do as much as we can get away with, but maybe that’s a little less than some of my colleagues to my right think we can get away with,’” Professor Epps said
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • “One of the greatest crises facing the Supreme Court since Marbury v. Madison was F.D.R.’s court-packing plan,” Chief Justice Roberts said in 2015 at New York University, “and it fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington.”
  • “There are things to learn from it,” he said, and he has seemed to apply those lessons to a series of clashes with Mr. Trump, who has attacked the very idea of judicial independence.
  • . He insisted, against the weight of substantial evidence, that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges
  • Political science data refute that assertion, as do the fights over judicial confirmations. Indeed, the most recent battle, over Justice Kavanaugh, damaged the court’s reputation precisely because the court was portrayed as a political prize.
  • he must view the idea that judging is wholly separate from politics as a useful fiction, a worthy aspiration and, most important, crucial to the court’s standing.
  • The court’s other four Republican appointees — Justices Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — sent a different message not long after, all attending the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group
  • court watchers could not recall a show of force like the one by their conservative colleagues in 2018.
  • Enthusiasm among conservatives for the chief justice has tempered since President George W. Bush nominated him in 2005. They point to his two votes to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law and a leftward drift documented by political scientists
  • In the term that ended in June, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record was almost indistinguishable from that of Justice Kennedy.
  • There is no question, however, that Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record has been generally conservative. On issues of racial discrimination, religion, voting and campaign finance, his views are squarely in the mainstream of conservative legal thinking.
  • He voted with five-justice majorities in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Second Amendment decision that established an individual right to own guns; Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision that amplified the role of money in politics; and Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 voting rights decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.
  • But by casting the decisive vote to save Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, he transformed his reputation. Liberals hailed him as a statesman. Conservatives denounced him as a traitor.
  • Mr. Trump, years before he ran for president, was in the second group. “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” he wrote on Twitter, citing a fake Twitter handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called Chief Justice Roberts “an absolute disaster.”
  • “Moderation, not just in terms of ideological moderation but also humility, is kind of his thing,” he said. “He seems to write limited opinions. He doesn’t reach any further than he has to. He clearly distinguishes between what he is doing as a judge and what he might believe in terms of policy.”
  • The court will have to soon decide whether to hear two sets of cases concerning Trump administration initiatives to revoke protections for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children and to bar transgender people from military service.
  • While Chief Justice Roberts may be inclined to avoid politically charged issues and quietly rebuild his court’s authority, it takes only four votes to add a case to its docket
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
katherineharron

Supreme Court sidesteps major ruling on 2nd Amendment after New York changes gun law - ... - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court declined on Monday to rule in a case concerning the scope of the 2nd Amendment, dealing a blow to supporters of gun rights and lawyers for the government who had hoped the newly solidified conservative majority would expand gun rights as early as this term.
  • The case, which was argued in December, concerns a New York City law that regulates where licensed handgun owners can take a locked and unloaded handgun.
  • When the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, the law blocked individuals from removing a handgun from the address listed on the license except to travel to nearby authorized small arms ranges or shooting clubs.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In a twist, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the city allowed licensed owners to take handguns to other locations, including second homes or shooting ranges outside city limits. In addition, the State of New York amended its handgun licensing statute to require localities to allow licensed gun owners to engage in such transport.
mimiterranova

Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The case, arising from a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, could undermine the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade.
  • “Alarm bells are ringing loudly about the threat to reproductive rights,” Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court just agreed to review an abortion ban that unquestionably violates nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and is a test case to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
  • The Supreme Court’s next term now includes two blockbusters: the abortion case and one on whether the Second Amendment protects a constitutional right to carry guns outside the home.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “This is not a case simply on regulations of the procedure or the places where it is performed,” he said in a statement. “This goes right to the matter of prohibitions on abortion, or, as we would say, protections of the baby.”
saberal

Supreme Court: Tribal police can detain non-Natives on reservations - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON – A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that tribal police may detain non-Native Americans on highways running through their reservations, overturning an appeals court that said such powers were out of bounds absent an "apparent" crime.
  • Saylor moved to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door, revealing a semiautomatic pistol near Cooley's hand. Saylor moved Cooley and a child who was also in the truck to his patrol car and, in the course of patting Cooley down and searching the vehicle, found methamphetamine and other drug paraphernalia.
  • Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote a one-paragraph concurring opinion in the case, saying he agreed with the majority insofar as its decision was limited to the notion that a non-Native American motorist could be stopped by a tribal officer and held for as long as "reasonably necessary for a non-tribal officer to arrive on the scene."
aleija

Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear a case from Mississippi that could undermine Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.
  • The new case, concerning a state law that seeks to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, will give the court’s new 6-to-3 majority its first opportunity to address the subject, and supporters of abortion rights reacted to the development with dismay.
  • The Supreme Court just agreed to review an abortion ban that unquestionably violates nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and is a test case to overturn Roe v. Wade.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I remain committed to advocating for women and defending Mississippi’s legal right to protect the unborn.
  • Last summer, the Supreme Court struck down a restrictive Louisiana abortion law by a 5-to-4 margin, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. providing the decisive vote. His concurring opinion, which expressed respect for precedent but proposed a relatively relaxed standard for evaluating abortion restrictions, signaled an incremental approach to cutting back on abortion rights.
  • The court’s decision to hear the Mississippi case, after considering it more than a dozen times at the justices’ private conferences, is an indication of sharp divisions among the court’s conservatives about how boldly to address the constitutional status of abortion rights.
  • Since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, state legislatures have enacted scores of abortion restrictions and bans in the hope that personnel changes at the court will spur it to reconsider its abortion jurisprudence.
  • Lower courts said the law was plainly unconstitutional under Roe, which forbids states from banning abortions before fetal viability — the point at which fetuses can sustain life outside the womb, or around 23 or 24 weeks.
  • Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic sued, saying the law ran afoul of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s core holding.
  • The precise question the justices agreed to decide was “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
mimiterranova

Supreme Court's Abortion Cases Could Threaten Birth Control, Too : Shots - Health News ... - 0 views

  • Abortion opponents were among those most excited by the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court in October.
  • She is considered likely to vote not only to uphold restrictions on the procedure, but also, possibly, even to overturn the existing national right to abortion under the Supreme Court's landmark rulings in Roe v. Wade
  • A Mississippi ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — a ban that's impermissible under existing court precedents — is awaiting review by the justices
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • many people overlook other things that could flow from new U.S. jurisprudence on abortion — such as erasing the right to birth control that the court recognized in a 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut.
  • includes same-sex marriage, contraception and abortion. You can't just take Roe out and not unravel the whole fabric."
  • ut the court could go a step further and recognize "fetal personhood" — the idea that a fetus is a person with full constitutional rights from the moment of fertilization. That would create a constitutional bar to abortion, among other things, meaning even the most liberal states could not allow the procedure.
  • Medical groups and the federal government don't consider any form of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration an abortion-equivalent, because the standard medical definition of the start of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus
  • An abortion law passed in Georgia in 2019 not only includes a ban on abortion at the point a heartbeat can be detected — often before a woman is aware she is pregnant — but also has a fetal personhood provision.
  • Riley says, "all that's saying is they agree that states can regulate or ban abortion at 15 weeks. What we want to do is have the factual reality that life begins at conception recognized in law."
  • States could effectively ban contraception by arguing that some contraceptives act as abortifacients
  • opponents argued that recognizing life at fertilization would outlaw not just abortion, without exceptions, but also things like in vitro fertilization and many forms of contraception, including some birth control pills, "morning after" pills, and intrauterine devices (IUDs)
  • "personhood has always been the endgame" for abortion foes, not simply overturning Roe
  •  
    my annotation didn't show up
mimiterranova

Amy Coney Barrett Confirmed To Supreme Court : NPR - 0 views

  • The Senate has voted to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, just about a week before Election Day and 30 days after she was nominated by President Trump to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Democrats have railed against the advancement of Barrett's nomination so close to Election Day, after the Republican-led Senate refused to hold hearings for then-President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, nearly eight months before that year's election.
  • The 48-year-old judge's confirmation solidifies the court's conservative majority, potentially shaping the future of abortion rights and health care law for generations.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • "Nearly every Republican in this chamber led by the majority leader four years ago refused to even consider the Supreme Court nomination of a Democratic president on the grounds ... that we should wait until after the presidential election because the American people deserved a voice in the selection of their next justice," he said on Sunday.
  • President Trump is doubling down on claims that the results of the presidential election must be known on election night itself, falsely asserting "that's the way it's been and that's the way it should be."
  • The decision allows election officials in Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots received as late as Friday, as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. The president denied that he would try to declare victor
  • y prematurely.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over," Trump said. "I think it's terrible when we can't know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers," he added.
  • "If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day]. They could have put their ballots in a month ago."
  • But that's not the way voting in America works.
  • For starters, no state ever reports its final results on election night.
  • Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as Election Day. Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some states even extending until the second week of December.
  • Americans are breaking early voting records, with more than 93 million votes already cast. Of that, 59 million mail-in ballots have been returned, with 32 million ballots still waiting to be mailed back, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
  • Election experts predicted that there would be a large increase in mail-in ballots this cycle because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "The counties are staffing up, have a ton of equipment, best practices in place, and are planning, for the most part, to count 24/7 until it's done."
  • FACT CHECK: Trump Falsely Claims That Votes Shouldn't Be Counted After Election Day
hannahcarter11

Black Lives Matter: Supreme Court throws out case against activist - 0 views

  • The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.
  • The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant
  • The officer, who suffered injuries to his brain, jaw and teeth, also sued Black Lives Matter. That was tossed out on the theory that BLM is a social movement and cannot be sued.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion, said that appeals court should not have reached its ruling, based on free speech rights, without a clear understanding of Louisiana law
  • David Cole, the ACLU's legal director, had said allowing the appeals court decision to stand "would have a tremendous chilling effect on the First Amendment right to protest."
  • lawyers for the injured police officer had argued that reversing the appeals court decision "would encourage negligent, unpeaceful, and illegal behavior at the expense of others and, in particular, would expose law enforcement officers to serious harm."
  • The Supreme Court's most significant precedent also involved a protest organized by Black leaders. It ruled unanimously in 1982 that the NAACP was not liable for damages caused by a boycott of white merchants in Mississippi because its role was nonviolent.
mattrenz16

Supreme Court rules in favor of Black Lives Matter organizer McKesson - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court wiped away a lower court opinion related to Black Lives Matter protests that critics argued would chill the speech rights of demonstrators and dismantle civil rights era precedent that safeguards the First Amendments' right to protest.
  • In an unsigned order, the justices sent the case back down to the lower courts to further review Louisiana law holding that before getting to important constitutional questions, more guidance from state courts is necessary.
  • Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate in the decision, the Supreme Court's public information officer said, because she was busy preparing for oral arguments. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The officer suffered from a brain injury, loss of teeth, and a head injury.
  • A federal appeals court allowed the suit to go forward in a decision that stunned civil liberties communities who argued that if the opinion is left on the books it would chill the speech rights of protesters and dismantle civil rights era precedent that safeguard's the First Amendment's right to protest. The Supreme Court has held that lawful protestors cannot be held liable when someone within their ranks commits unlawful activity.
  • "The Supreme Court has long recognized that peaceful protesters cannot be held liable for the unintended, unlawful actions of others," said American Civil Liberties Union National Legal Director David Cole, who is representing McKesson. "If the law had allowed anyone to sue leaders of social justice movements over the violent actions of others, there would have been no Civil Rights Movement. The lower court's ruling is a threat to the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans."
  • "The First Amendment does not condone physical violence," a group of First Amendment lawyers represented by Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger told the court in support of McKesson. Dellinger argued that while the Constitution does not excuse the attacker's "criminal, tortious and morally indefensible conduct," it does protect the organizer who "neither committed nor incited" the illegal activity.
katherineharron

What the loss of RBG means for the economy, Wall Street and Corporate America - CNN - 0 views

  • Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any more chaotic, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set off a political earthquake that could rattle the fragile economic recovery.
  • At a minimum, the loss of RBG is yet another wild card for investors, CEOs, small business owners and consumers
  • The Supreme Court vacancy is shaking up the previously stable battle for the White House, not to mention control of the US Senate.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • We don't see how the parties can reach a stimulus deal in this environment," Jaret Seiberg, policy analyst at the Cowen Washington Research Group, wrote in a note to clients Monday. "Failure to enact the Phase 4 stimulus will damage the recovery."
  • The unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg adds another element of risk to the timing of the [stimulus talks] outcome, and could weigh on the market overall in the near term,"
  • he Dow was down 3%, or around 800 points, during afternoon trading.
  • If -- and this is a big if -- President Donald Trump successfully replaces Ginsburg, it would result in a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court.
  • "All else equal, it may seem like having a large conservative majority on the court would be positive for business and therefore share prices, because it would reinforce the already antiregulatory and pro-capital tendencies of the Court for the foreseeable future,"
  • Some have argued that the Supreme Court vacancy is a big advantage to Trump because it will fire up his conservative base and, crucially, shift the conservation away from the pandemic.
  • The clearest conclusion we can draw from the Supreme Court vacancy is that it adds yet one more question mark to a year marked by deep uncertainty. And the year isn't over yet.
saberal

Opinion | Is Amy Coney Barrett Joining a Supreme Court Built for the Wealthy? - The New... - 0 views

  • Much of the public anxiety about Amy Coney Barrett — judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Notre Dame law professor and Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court — has focused on the question of abortion, and whether as a believer in originalism and a practicing Catholic she would be likely to vote to reverse Roe v. Wade.
  • Although we don’t usually think of it this way, the decisions of the Supreme Court have the power to affect the quality of the air we breathe, the pay we receive and the conditions under which we work, by determining what kinds of business and industry regulations are constitutional.
  • With a 6-3 conservative court, the country is at risk of having the few remaining tools that permit some limits on the power of business — like labor unions and environmental legislation — weakened still further.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • As a federal appeals judge, Judge Barrett has often ruled in ways friendly to employers. She has joined rulings that stopped a case in which the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission objected to a company that allegedly assigned workers to particular geographic locations based on race and ethnicity and that limit the scope of laws prohibiting age discrimination.
  • In the following decades, the court became publicly associated with liberalism and civil rights. But just as the conservatives of an earlier generation recognized that the courts could be used to override majorities that pushed for limitations of property rights, in the summer of 1971, the lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.”
  • Soon after, Richard Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court; he was a justice for 15 years, and his rulings helped to expand the First Amendment rights enjoyed by corporations, paving the way for Citizens United.
  • But these cases in themselves are less significant than the underlying question: Will the Supreme Court become once more what it was in the early 20th century
  • And it could mean that — as has so often been the case in recent years — workers, ordinary citizens and the very possibility of democratic governance will again lose out.
carolinehayter

Supreme Court To Hear Arguments On NCAA Limits On College Athlete Pay : NPR - 0 views

  • The U.S. Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it would review a case testing whether the NCAA's limits on compensation for student athletes violate the nation's antitrust laws.
  • The court's unusual expedition into sports law comes amid an increasing national battle between athletes and the schools they play for over player compensation. On one side, the NCAA says it is just trying to protect amateurism, and to maintain a basic competitive equality between schools that play each other. On the other side, players argue that the top athletic teams are operating a system that acts as a classic restraint of trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
  • And at the heart of the case, says sports law expert Gary Roberts, is this question: Are these young men and women "employees or are they students?"
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Those students, he says, "ought to be benefited. And by the way, a majority of those students are African American, and that's an issue that can't be ignored in this discussion either."
  • Popular sports bring in money for other athletic programs But at the same time, Roberts notes the NCAA system has benefited students who have scholarships to play other sports
  • The case before the Supreme Court involves 126 teams that play big-time football and men's and women's basketball. But for all of college sports, Roberts and other sports law experts say, the lower courts have left these issues in a legal mess.
  • California, for instance, passed a law last year effectively requiring schools to allow athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses. After the law was enacted, the NCAA abruptly reversed its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early next year.
  • its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early nex
  • images
  • A Supreme Court decision siding with the NCAA would likely fortify the NCAA's effort to maintain tighter restrictions on benefits for big-time college and basketball players. A decision holding that the NCAA has gone too far would likely lead to more benefits for players whose hard work and frequent injuries allow the schools they play for to reap billions in TV and other revenue.
  • While that revenue sometimes benefits lesser-known sports and players at those schools, many experts say it more often benefits coaches and assistant coaches who are paid tens of millions of dollars, and allows schools to spend millions on mammoth stadiums and lavish locker rooms.
  • Last week 60 minutes reported that "at least 30 universities have cut almost 100 programs: soccer, squash, golf, gymnastics. Football powerhouse Clemson cut men's track and field. Stanford eliminated 11 sports. Schools are honoring existing scholarships, but more than 1,500 student-athletes, both men and women, will no longer have a team to compete for."
  • Zig-zagging through this legal minefield will be difficult for the Supreme Court, to say the least. And it may well issue a narrow opinion that still leaves most of these questions unresolved. But the fact that the justices decided to take on the this case, when it has dodged similar ones in the past, indicates they are at least serious about the issues.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 727 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page