A rare chance to 'listen-in' on SCOTUS

Barrett refused to answer today whether a president can unilaterally delay an election (he can't), whether voter intimidation is illegal (it is), whether climate change is real (it is), whether a president can pardon himself (he can't) or whether Roe v. Wade is precedent (it is).

She did this to please the president.

She knows that the Senate has the votes to seat her no matter what she says, whether legally sound or not. She knows that she may well end up voting to decide the election, that her vote probably will overturn Roe, and her vote will definitely throw out the ACA.

And the Dems got nothin' but a pocketful of shit.

NoCoPilot wrote:

"Constitutional originialists" like Barrett are like biblical scholars -- the bible/constitution is the word of god, and must be followed to the letter.

Except like xtians everywhere, they pick & choose which paragraphs to highlight and which to ignore.

Women couldn't vote when the constitution was written.

Adulterers have to be stoned to death.

Black people are 3/5th of a person, and are listed as property.

Yep, and I'm not the first to notice.

Quote :

The overwhelming sense I get as I watch these hearings is how bizarrely similar the originalist methods of reading the Constitution ... are to the biblical literalist methods of approaching Scripture. Neither interpretive mode allows there to be room for growth in the community or society built around these documents.

“Inerrancy” is a little political game that biblical scholars like to play with the English translation of the scriptural texts and have been playing since Christianity came to the United States. If it’s in the Bible, it is deemed holy by God. If it’s in the Bible and thus deemed holy by God, it must be his perfect will. Thus, the United States government’s continued endorsement of slavery (Paul sent a slave back to his owner and told him not to provoke his master any longer), the lagging acknowledgment of the rights of women (women in the Bible didn’t own property! Women are told to keep the home!), among other issues.

Here's another hint of what's in store after Barrett is confirmed:

Paul Blumenthal wrote:

For now, Pennsylvania absentee voters will be able to mail their ballots on or before Election Day and have them still count if they arrive up to three days after the election, as the state Supreme Court ruled. Many states allow ballots to arrive after Nov. 3 so that people voting by mail don’t effectively have an earlier election deadline than people who go to the polls.

But four justices ― Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ― voted to prevent the implementation of this new rule and to consider a radical argument that could eviscerate the right to vote granted in 49 state constitutions.
By taking away the power of state courts to interpret what their own state constitutions say about the right to vote, the soon-to-be six conservatives appointed by Republicans on the Supreme Court could become the ultimate arbiters of any expansion of voting rights.  

Four "conservative" judges voted to overrule what the State Supreme Court said about the law in their own state. "Activist judges" much?

NoCoPilot wrote:

The new president has grounds now for impeaching Thomas and Alito. They have just ruled, in their dissenting opinions, in favor of politics and against the law.

That makes them ineligible for a legal career, and ESPECIALLY one on the highest court.

Rather than expanding SCOTUS to 10 or 13 judges, I think a much easier pathway to fairness would be impeachment against 3 or 4 judges for letting politics "trump" the rule of law. Even if Democrats don't hold a 2/3 majority in the Senate, they could still make a darn strong case that Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and soon Barrett are unqualified to hold judgeships based on their counter-legal arguments in favor of political expediency.

18 or 19 Senate seats should swap to Democratic next month, giving the Democrats a 63 - to - 35 majority, meaning they'd only need 3 or 4 Republican votes to impeach.  There are that many Republican lawyers in the Senate.

richard09 wrote:

Four "conservative" judges voted to overrule what the State Supreme Court said about the law in their own state. "Activist judges" much?

You have to view this through the lens of the Federalist Society.  Their view is that all legislation, all court rulings, all societal changes since 1965 -- which we liberals call "progress" -- are to them evidence of "liberal activism," moving society away from what they see as the traditional, "correct" interpretation of the Constitution:

• Women are inferior creatures
  
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant males are endowed by God with the rights of dominion over everybody and everything else
  
• Free enterprise operates at peak efficiency with zero regulation
  
• Taxes are for losers and suckers
  
• The Captains of Industry deserve to call all the shots and reap all of the benefits of the hard work of the unwashed masses
  

In other words, it's a very Ayn Rand / Kane-like philosophy.

Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed tomorrow.

Obamacare will be gone by inauguration.

Roe will be gone by mid-year 2021.

The Biden Administration will have to scramble to put forward a new Bidencare (and get if confirmed) and codify Roe (and get it confirmed) and this will cause a lot of other priorities to bump in the first two years.  By mid-terms 2022 I expect there'll be no GOP anymore.

SCOTUS just voted to kill Christians:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/26/politics/supreme-court-religious-restrictions-ruling-covid/index.html

Sotomayor is livid:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sotomayor-dissent-coronavirus-religious-ruling_n_5fbfe731c5b66bb88c652c98

NoCoPilot wrote:

Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed tomorrow.

Obamacare will be gone by inauguration.

Roe will be gone by mid-year 2021.

It seems the precedent-overturning radical right judges -- Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch -- are opposed by the newest conservative judges, who are actually closer to true conservatism.

Quote :

But the latest developments suggest a possible 3-3-3 pattern, with Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh at the center-right, putting a check on their more conservative brethren who regularly push to overturn precedent.

This means with the mere addition of three new liberal judges, the court could reach ideological balance once again and the jurists who are not constitutionally suited to be on the Court could be muted.

Judge Elena Kagan's dissent on yesterday's voting rights ruling is worth reading.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf beginning page 45

Thomas and Gorsuch -- the two least legal-minded and most activist judges on the court -- now want the court to overthrow nearly 60 years of precedent that public figures can't sue news organizations for publishing unflattering remarks.