“It would appear that Kavanaugh has finally come to recognize what has been apparent to some of us all along. Namely, that Trump’s immigration crackdown actively imperils the rights of many U.S. citizens.
Good for Kavanaugh, right? Better late than never? Well, maybe. Because it is also worth noting that Kavanaugh’s December opinion makes no reference to his September opinion. How should we make sense of this mysterious and rather glaring absence or omission?
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It seems impossible that these two Kavanaugh opinions are unrelated to each other. So what are we left to conclude about their connection? What is Kavanaugh not saying about the link?
One conceivable conclusion is that Kavanaugh now seeks to walk back his unfortunate past statement without explicitly acknowledging his past misjudgment.
Another conceivable conclusion is that Kavanaugh now hopes to apologize for butchering the Fourth Amendment without doing any actual apologizing. Call it a mea culpa minus the mea.
Needless to say, none of this reflects well on Kavanaugh and his possible motivations. Perhaps we’ll get a more forthright account from him in a future case.”
The Supreme Court has always had elements of reverse engineering where justices reach their conclusions based on political ideology, then reverse engineer a legal argument. Their political ideology may even design their legal philosophy from the very beginning of their legal thinking! However, the justices on the right seem to even be dropping the reverse engineering, and getting more sloppy in their legal thinking, pushing forward their political ideology and partisanship even more. Bush V Gore may have been the moment that the conservative justices crossed the Rubicon and realized that they can get away with pushing partisan, ideological agendas.
The Trump administration told Texas to gerrymander based on race. Texas did as asked. A judge said the gerrymander was illegal because it was based on race. The Supreme Court said that despite the detailed investigation by the lower court that showed a race-based gerrymander, they don’t think it was based on race. They based that opinion on very little, and overturning a lower court based on one’s opinions of the facts is illegal, unless the lower court decision was overwhelmingly erroneous, which it was not in this case. The Supreme court also said it is too close to an election to make a change even though the elections are a year out. This means state legislatures can illegally gerrymander half the years because House elections are every two years.
The Supreme Court is clearly ruling on freedom of religion cases in a way that is biased toward Christianity and that allows Christians to risk and hurt non-Christians as long as they consider it a part of their religion.
“The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” …in Bridges v. Wilson (1945), the Supreme Court unambiguously stated that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.””
The conservative court decided no matter how extreme a partisan gerrymander, it is legal. However, they said racial gerrymanders are illegal. A district judge dug into the Texas gerrymander and concluded that the actors involved explicitly gerrymandered based on race. Without disputing the facts, the conservatives on the Supreme Court rejected it.
“some legal experts say that as a practical matter, the administration — emboldened by the justices — has already managed to eliminate job protections that have been on the books for nearly 150 years.
President Donald Trump’s drive to replace agency leaders and his mass firings across the federal government are all based on the same basic legal concept: the unitary executive theory. It holds that every employee of the executive branch is answerable to, and fireable at will by, the president.
The most extreme version of the unitary executive theory holds that the central premise of the civil service — that rank-and-file government employees shouldn’t be hired or fired for political reasons or simply on the president’s whim — is unconstitutional because it tramples on the president’s power to control the federal government.”
The Supreme Court has used a doubtful gun study funded by a Second Amendment advocacy group to justify its decisions. The author has not published the study, has not shared the data, refuses to talk to anyone about it, refuses to testify in court about it, and one lawsuit dropped the reference to the study because he refused to testify. How the survey was represented was inaccurate compared to the actual survey questions.
“Federal law says the president of the United States may only call state National Guard members “into Federal service” when certain specific conditions are met, such as when “there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against” the federal government, or when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
According to President Donald Trump, he alone gets to decide when or if such conditions exist. Or, as Trump recently argued in a legal filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, “such decisions are committed to the discretion of the President and are unreviewable” by the federal courts.”
“Why does Trump keep winning these preliminary emergency requests before SCOTUS? Unfortunately, we do not always know why because the Court does not always say why. Many of these emergency orders—which critics often call the shadow docket—are issued without an accompanying opinion that explains the Supreme Court’s thinking.
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As The New York Times put it, “more than three dozen federal judges have told The New York Times that the Supreme Court’s flurry of brief, opaque emergency orders in cases related to the Trump administration have left them confused about how to proceed in those matters and are hurting the judiciary’s image with the public.”
Moreover, according to the same Times article, it is not just liberal judges doing the complaining
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Whenever the Trump administration asks the Supreme Court to issue this sort of emergency order in its favor, the justices are basically forced to grapple with the following questions: Is it better in a particular case to let the president carry out his contested agenda right away? Or is it better in a particular case to keep the president’s contested agenda on a temporary pause while the courts—after full briefing and arguments, including oral arguments before SCOTUS—have determined that the agenda does in fact pass constitutional or statutory muster?
The Supreme Court’s current majority does seem to think that it is generally better to let Trump’s agenda speed ahead. But even if that pro-executive approach is the correct one—which is a pretty big if—the majority is not doing itself any favors by keeping its pro-executive reasoning to itself.”