The US Supreme Court Thread - Post Roe v. Wade reversal edition

This is beyond bonkers. The right wing is slowly and systematically taking steps to destroy democracy.

 

Slowly? Maybe in the 1980s. It's at an accelerated pace now.

 

Almost like Republicans use the courts at all levels to push their insane agenda

 

Judicial activists!

Remember when they kept saying that back in the 2000s? They were simply projecting, of course.

 

Again.

these are not trump judges
They were chosen by republican power brokers.
Calling them trump judges absolves the GOP (the traditional GOP not the maga usurpers who’ve overthrown them) of the responsibility for how we got here.

With that said..the next round will be Trump judges. And the awfulness of this court merely scratches the surface of the upcoming awfulness if he prevails in November

 

Must read piece by JVL in the Bulwark (exceptionally opened up to non members)


Conservative Legal Philosophy Was All a Lie, Too
The textualists and originalists have taken off the mask.

A few years ago my buddy Stuart Stevens wrote a book called It Was All a Lie.

His thesis was that the dogma conservatives had professed for 60 years—the love of small government and free trade; the desire for robust foreign policy; the belief that character and accountability mattered—turned out not to be values, but rationalizations.

In Stuart’s view, conservatives had a bunch of groups they disfavored and then worked backwards to concoct an ideological framework to support these prejudices. No, not all conservatives. And maybe not on every single issue. But enough so that the generalization was generally fair.

When Stuart first published his book I thought it was an interesting idea. The preponderance of evidence which has emerged since 2020 has buttressed his case.

Yesterday the Supreme Court hinted that maybe conservative legal theory was always a lie, too.

Donald Trump, as always, is the great revealer.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/conservative-legal-philosophy-was

 

An interesting thing about the reaction to yesterday’s proceedings is that they seem to assume the vote. Yeah the proceedings were ominous, and maybe it’s my naïveté, but me, I think the tone of that reaction is wrong. I think the tone was WE ARE AT DEFCON ONE THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!

I think it slid more have been, BE PREPARED TO GO TO DEFCON ONE.

The difference with the latter being you aren’t enacting the first instance of the boy who cried wolf if the justices surprise us.

 

The ending is pretty good, too:

First, I’ve been saying for months that this Court was going to do everything possible to prevent Trump’s D.C. insurrection trial from happening before the election.

I don’t want to question anyone’s motives, but I ask you sincerely: If the Court were packed with justices who were trying to return Trump to power, what would it be doing differently?

It’s JVL’s Law: Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump will become useful to Trump over time.3

Finally, I’ll give the last word to Nicholas Grossman, who also senses that all of that conservative legal theory chin-tugging was just rationalization:

"Conservative Justices approach “can the president legally kill Americans he doesn’t like?” from the perspective of people confident the current president would never order them killed, and the only president who would possibly abuse power like that would kill people the conservative Justices don’t like."
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An other good article by Adam Serwer. utterly depressing situation though.

Adam Serwer: “Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.”

“The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.”

 

Always trying to emulate Pootey

 

This a problem unless Congress or SCOTUS grow some balls and murder the dictator first. That shit goes both ways.

Ironically, it seems unConstitutional that anyone would have the freedom to kill anyone they want for any reason just because they are President. So suffice to say any ruling that would imply that completely negates the Constitution and we are now in a place where ALL the norms are gone, and there should be no disincentive to do whatever is necessary to stop Trump and this SCOTUS.