Coney Barrett And Kavanaugh Have Had Enough Of Conservative Court’s Nonsense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsHH5fi5beU
Tag: courts
The Supreme Court may let Texas get away with a totally unconstitutional deportation law
“For well more than a century, the federal government has enjoyed near exclusive authority over immigration policy, while states have largely been restricted to assisting in carrying out federal policies. The Supreme Court has reinforced this rule many times over many decisions, such as Truax v. Raich (1915), which said that “the authority to control immigration — to admit or exclude aliens — is vested solely in the Federal Government.”
Texas, however, now wants the Supreme Court to abandon this longstanding constitutional rule, and it thinks that the political tumblers have finally aligned in a way that would lead the Court to do just that.
Texas seeks to upend the longstanding balance of power between the federal government and the states through a law, known as SB 4, which allows Texas state courts to issue deportation orders that will be carried out by Texas state officials. The law is now before the Supreme Court in two “shadow docket” cases, known as United States v. Texas and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy v. McCraw.”
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“The reason why the federal government has historically had exclusive authority over nearly all questions of immigration policy is to prevent a single state’s mistreatment of a foreign national from damaging US relations with another nation. Indeed, Hines v. Davidowitz (1941) warned that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” committed against foreign nationals.
Which isn’t to say that the United States must always treat foreign citizens with caution or deference — just that a decision that could endanger the entire nation’s relationship with a foreign state should be made by a government that represents the entire nation.”
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“the current Supreme Court has only a weak attachment to following precedent, especially when a precedent is widely disliked by modern-day Republicans. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will allow SB 4 to go into effect.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2024/3/12/24097438/supreme-court-texas-deportation-sb4-unconstitutional-border-migrants
Opinion | Why Is Trump Getting Special Treatment From the Supreme Court?
“In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment — even if the outcome would be cruel, needlessly painful or simply unjustified. The effect of this new hostility to delay is most sharply felt in the death penalty context. But a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.
Justice Neil Gorsuch set the tone for this approach in 2019, when he complained that legal challenges to the death penalty were often used to stall or even derail execution. Courts, said Gorsuch, should “police carefully against attempts” to use constitutional challenges as tools to interpose unjustified delay.” In particular, he warned, “last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”
The court has since followed Gorsuch’s lead with an unsavory relish. Before 2020 and the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it was common for the Supreme Court to grant stays to hear legal questions that arose at the last stage of a capital case. Since then, it has only granted two such stays. In the same period, it has also vacated nine stays on death sentences imposed by lower courts.
The result has been predictable: Many of the convictions the court has let stand are plausibly described as “riddled with errors.” And in January, the court declined to hear a challenge to Alabama’s novel use of nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Smith. Witnesses described Smith’s resulting death as horrific — extended and torturous — and not at all painless as the state promised.
The same is true of federal prosecutions. In the last half of 2020, the court stepped aside as the federal government sprinted to execute 13 people — as many as had been killed in the previous six decades. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the court “repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes” to enable an “expedited spree of executions.” In its haste to see punishment done, the court waved away its usual rules.
Outside the capital punishment cases, the Supreme Court has added more and more constraints upon prisoners’ ability to challenge constitutional errors. Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas in particular have urged that the longstanding right to challenge state court convictions in federal court be effectively gutted. The effect of their proposal would be to streamline even further the criminal justice process — shutting down almost all efforts to raise objections before they had even started.
All this makes the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Trump’s appeal for absolute immunity from all criminal charges even more unusual, and troubling.
Start with the weakness of Trump’s argument. There is absolutely no constitutional text, no precedent and no authority in the original debates over the Constitution’s ratification to support the idea for a former president’s absolute immunity. The argument advanced by Trump’s counsel is patently absurd. The idea that senators could impeach a president who threatened them with deadly violence and so no criminal justice process is needed, is facetious. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals rightly ridiculed it — and issued a comprehensive, tightly reasoned and unanimous opinion that presented no good cause for further review.
Trump is within his right to appeal the decision, but there’s no good reason for the Supreme Court to take it up and review it as a matter of law — especially given how thorough the D.C. Circuit was.
In fact, the court’s erstwhile concern with “unjustified delay” in criminal cases would seem to cut hard against hearing the case. It is, after all, a matter of common knowledge that the former president’s legal strategy is to run out the clock and thus prevent a trial prior to the election. Here then is a case where justice delayed may well be justice derailed.
Indeed, the grounds for the court rejecting Trump’s request to take up the immunity question appear much stronger than in Kenneth Smith’s challenge to the use of nitrogen gas. If Smith had been successful, Alabama could have found another, permissible way to kill him. If Trump’s trial is delayed enough, it may never happen. If Trump is back in the White House, he can easily quash the Justice Department’s case.
The Supreme Court’s attention, moreover, is a precision good. In the court’s 2022-23 term, the court issued just 58 decisions. Given that this scarce commodity is so infrequently used to prevent the miscarriage of criminal justice, the question must be asked: Why now? And why for this defendant?
There is no good answer. It is hard to see any legally sound reason why the Supreme Court should have decided to step in to hear Trump’s implausible and constitutionally destructive claim for absolute criminal immunity — especially when it has refused to hear so many other criminal defendants’ far more meritorious claims.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/29/trump-special-treatment-supreme-court-00144138
The Supreme Court just crushed any hope that Trump could be removed from the ballot
“The Court’s latest decision, Trump v. Anderson, took on the question of whether a provision of the 14th Amendment, which prevents former high-ranking officials who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from serving in a high office again, disqualifies Trump from office. Their answer is as big a victory as Trump could have hoped for.
The five-justice majority opinion does not simply hold that Trump may seek the presidency again, despite his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. It effectively neutralizes this provision of the 14th Amendment altogether — at least as applied to the 2024 election.
All nine justices agreed that the state of Colorado, whose highest court determined that Trump was disqualified, was not allowed to make this determination. As the Court’s three Democratic appointees write in a cosigned opinion dissenting from the majority’s reasoning, states have limited authority to decide questions that “‘implicate a uniquely important national interest’ extending beyond a State’s ‘own borders.’” So the decision whether or not to disqualify Trump should have come from a federal court, or some other federal forum, not from state courts.
Fair enough, but the majority opinion (which is unsigned, and joined by all of the Court’s Republican appointees except for Justice Amy Coney Barrett) goes much further than that. It holds that the Constitution “empowers Congress” — and only Congress — to determine which individuals are disqualified from public office because they previously engaged in an insurrection.
Then it points to a single statute, a criminal law that calls for imprisonment and disqualification from office for anyone who “engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof” as the sole existing vehicle to enforce the 14th Amendment’s anti-insurrection provision. Trump has not yet been charged with violating this law, although he has been charged with violating other federal criminal laws because of his alleged attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.
This means that any attempt to disqualify Trump is almost certainly dead. Even if special counsel Jack Smith can amend his indictment to bring charges under the insurrection statute, the Court’s decision to slow-walk Trump’s trial means that the election will most likely be over before that trial takes place.
The courts, it is now crystal clear, are not going to do much of anything to prevent an insurrectionist former president from occupying the White House once again. And the Supreme Court appears to be actively running interference on Trump’s behalf.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2024/3/4/24090163/supreme-court-donald-trump-anderson-ballot-disqualification-fourteenth-amendment
Frozen Embryos Are Now Children Under Alabama Law
“Frozen embryos are “children” under Alabama law, the state’s Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.
Frozen embryos are “unborn children” and “unborn children are ‘children,'” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court’s main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.
The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama’s Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law’s text could not justify reading it to include “unborn children”—let alone frozen embryos.”
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“In IVF, the process of preparing the body for ovulation and harvesting eggs can be extremely taxing on women’s bodies, as well as time-consuming and expensive. After this, not all of the eggs collected may be successfully fertilized. And when viable embryos are created, it may take multiple tries at transferring one into a woman’s body before implantation is successful. For all of these reasons, it makes sense for doctors to collect myriad eggs at one time, fertilize these eggs, and then freeze the viable embryos for later transfer, rather than harvesting eggs and creating a single new embryo for each transfer. (This also helps people who may want to create embryos when they are younger to use when they are somewhat older, or who may face illness that will impede their future fertility.) And to maximize the chances of success, doctors sometimes transfer two or more embryos at once.
Treating embryos as having the full legal rights of children could imperil all of these practices.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/21/frozen-embryos-are-now-children-under-alabama-law/
No, Blocking Traffic Is Not Protected by the First Amendment
“freedom of expression is crucial and central to the American project. It’s also not a force field by which people are shielded from other rules. If I want to get people’s attention by, say, driving 120 miles an hour while sporting a Palestinian flag, I cannot tell the officer who pulls me over for reckless driving that I’m simply exercising my free speech rights. The First Amendment does not give carte blanche to violate the law.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/26/no-blocking-traffic-is-not-protected-by-the-first-amendment/
Trump legal news brief: Supreme Court keeps Michigan sanctions in place for pro-Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood
The high court did not offer any comment on its decision, which means Powell, Wood and the other defendants must pay a total of $132,693.75 to the city of Detroit and another $19,639.75 in legal fees to the state of Michigan.
In their unsuccessful effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Michigan, Powell, Wood and their co-defendants made wild claims in a lawsuit brought in the state alleging that Dominion voting machines were involved in fraud.
A district court judge ruled that the lawyers’ court challenges represented a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals later upheld the bulk of the district court judge’s ruling, calling the fraud claims “simply baseless.”
In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the defendants continued to argue that they were simply pursuing “legitimate election challenges.”
Powell has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from her efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and has agreed to testify against Trump and 14 others still charged there.
Dominion is suing Powell for $1.3 billion over her false claims that the company rigged the election against Trump.
Wood has been subpoenaed to testify in the Georgia case.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-legal-news-brief-supreme-court-keeps-michigan-sanctions-in-place-for-pro-trump-lawyers-sidney-powell-and-lin-wood-203526696.html
Federal Appeals Court Rules in Favor of Reform Prosecutor Removed from Office by Ron DeSantis
“A federal appeals court has reinstated a First Amendment lawsuit filed by former Tampa-area reform prosecutor Andrew Warren against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and now the DeSantis administration will have to argue that Warren’s job performance, not his ideology, was the controlling factor behind Warren’s removal from office.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/10/federal-appeals-court-rules-in-favor-of-reform-prosecutor-removed-from-office-by-ron-desantis/
Who Decides Whether Trump Can Run, and What Sort of Evidence Suffices?
“”The mob was seeking to halt or overturn a core constitutional function at the seat of government, which can reasonably be described as an attempt to replace law with force,” Magliocca wrote. Furthermore, the criminal charges against some of the rioters indicated that they “intended to inflict bodily harm on members of Congress, which can be reasonably understood as a direct attack on the legislative branch itself and, more generally, the existing government.””
https://reason.com/2023/12/29/who-decides-whether-trump-can-run-and-what-sort-of-evidence-suffices/
What’s the insurrection clause? Here’s what it says.
“Here’s the full text:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Quite a mouthful, right? Let’s simplify. Here’s a streamlined version of the clause with only the most relevant parts highlighted:
“No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, … who, having previously taken an oath, … as an officer of the United States, … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same …”
The justices are sure to delve into the precise meaning of those pivotal phrases. For example:
Was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “insurrection”? If not, the insurrection clause doesn’t apply.
Even if Jan. 6 was an insurrection, did Trump “engage” in it? If not, he is eligible to hold office again.
When Trump took his oath of office as president, did he take that oath as “officer of the United States”? If not, the disqualification provision does not apply to him.”
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/02/08/trump-supreme-court/what-is-the-insurrection-clause-00140188