SCOTUS: No longer content with stacking, they're now dealing from the bottom of the deck

[Fergasun]

Not true!  Not true!

[China]

The Hobby Lobby leak looks bad for Justice Alito. But that’s not the worst part.

 

Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation following a New York Times report that in 2014, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito divulged the outcome of a closely watched religious freedom case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, during a dinner with an evangelical activist before the decision came down.

 

Alito denies the claim, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the committee is reviewing “these serious allegations.” Determining whether Alito revealed the Hobby Lobby outcome is important, but it won’t solve the court’s most serious problem: While it claims to be a nonpartisan, neutral arbiter of the law, its conservative majority was deliberately cultivated to expand religious freedom for conservative Christians at the expense of the rights of those deemed less worthy of protection.

 

The possible revelation of the Hobby Lobby decision — in which the court held that private corporations can demand religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer health plans cover contraceptives — is the second Supreme Court leak in the news this year. The other involved an even greater victory for the religious right: the unsolved mystery of who leaked a draft of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the right to an abortion. Both rulings were penned by Alito.

 

The heart of the Times story is that the alleged leak enabled the Rev. Rob Schenck, at the time a Capitol Hill-based conduit between evangelical donors and top political players, to help Hobby Lobby craft a public relations campaign ahead of the decision. The focus on his efforts, while an interesting look inside the operations of one (now repentant) activist, obscures the much larger scope and scale of the broader Christian right’s fundraising, activism and litigation over the past four decades.

 

Click on the link for more

[tshile]

I love how the media calls it “expanding religious freedom”

 

it’s actually religious oppression. 

[Califan007 The Constipated]

 

 

[China]

No joke: Supreme Court case could take a big bite out of the First Amendment

 

The court system often is where humor goes to die. For those seeking to use satire or parody of corporations, jokes often run into trademark or other lawsuits and result in a little more than “ha, ha, thump.”

 

The same bad audience could await the defendant in Jack Daniel’s Properties Inc. v. VIP Products LLC. The Supreme Court just accepted a case involving a tongue-in-cheek dog chew toy made to resemble a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle. VIP prevailed in defending the toy as protected speech, but the distiller wants the Supreme Court to declare such parodies to be trademark violations.

 

The docket this term is actually a hoot of parody cases.

 

Another pending case is Novak v. City of Parma, in which Anthony Novak was prosecuted for posting a parody of the website of his local police department. He was charged with (and later acquitted of) a felony under an Ohio law prohibiting the use of a computer to “disrupt” or “interrupt” police functions.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

Oh, and if you haven't seen it, The Onion filed an amicus brief in the Novak v. City of Parma case:

 

 

[Larry]

Been pointing out for a while now. Pretty much the only punishment that Team GOP have suffered from The Big Lie, has been because they said bad things about a corporation. 

[China]

The Stench of Corruption Is Growing Stronger Around the Supreme Court

 

There will be many legacies of the Roberts court whenever the history of this era is written, assuming history books are still allowed in the America John Roberts leaves behind. There will be the court’s string of anti-labor decisions, its extremist rulings in support of guns and against voting rights, and its rejection of precedents like Roe v. Wade. But one of Roberts’s most problematic contributions to the annals of the Supreme Court will be the trail of apparent corruption and impropriety the associate justices have gotten up to under his watch.

 

Under Roberts, the idea that the Supreme Court can police itself has been revealed to be an utter farce. From the way Clarence Thomas refuses to recuse himself from cases involving the insurrection his wife seemingly helped to foment to the 83 ethics complaints that were not investigated against alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, Roberts has been an absentee landlord. He makes grand pronouncements defending the “legitimacy” of the court without doing anything to protect its legitimacy. He has a whole lot to say anytime a liberal justice suggests that the court is losing its standing in the eyes of the public (an objective fact backed up by polling data) but doesn’t say anything while conservative justices allow Federalist Society and religious-right influencers to turn the Supreme Court into their private frat house.

 

The latest example of Roberts’s permissiveness in the face of conservative impropriety comes from an explosive story in The New York Times. In the report, published over the weekend, former anti-abortion activist Robert Schenk revealed that Justice Samuel Alito disclosed the outcome of the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby to a group of dinner guests months before the opinion was released to the public. Alito denies the allegation, but the Times reviewed contemporaneous e-mails from Schenk that seem to indicate Schenk knew the outcome of the contentious ruling in the 5-4 decision, authored by Alito himself, before the rest of us did.

 

Many of Schenk’s other allegations have gotten buried under the weight of the Hobby Lobby reveal, because Justice Alito was also the author of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which leaked weeks before the court’s ruling was made public. Obviously, people concerned about the leak of Dobbs now have another suspect.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[China]

Why Roberts and Kavanaugh Got So Furious at Biden’s Solicitor General

 

During oral arguments on Tuesday in United States v. Texas, an important immigration case, the Supreme Court got sidetracked over a question that has major implications for the executive branch and its ability to function: Can a plaintiff walk into court, challenge a federal regulation, and win a victory that halts the entire government’s ability to enforce that regulation anywhere, against anyone—even parties that played no role in the litigation?

 

The answer to this question is important, because this tactic has rapidly become an obstacle to governance.

 

Under President Barack Obama, conservative judges began using a specific power to “set aside” policies, granted to them by a provision of a 1946 law, to halt executive policies nationwide, claiming that Congress intended to award them this sweeping power. Left-leaning judges used the tool to limit President Donald Trump’s efforts to rewrite federal statutes, particularly asylum law, and prompted a huge backlash among Republicans. Today, with President Joe Biden in office, conservative judges have transformed the power to “set aside” policies into an unprecedented weapon of obstruction, voiding agency rules and executive policies so frequently that they have turned the federal judiciary into a kind of shadow president with a permanent veto over the actual, elected president.

 

It is not actually clear, though, that judges even have the legal authority to wipe federal policy off the books. A strictly textualist interpretation of federal law strongly suggests that they do not.  To the contrary, the fact that federal courts have unlawfully expanded their power to interfere with duties of the executive branch seems like a direct attack on the separation of powers.

 

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar had the courage to point out this problem to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. By doing so, she incurred the wrath of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sounded shocked and offended—furious, really—that the solicitor general would dare accuse them of misreading a statute.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[The Evil Genius]

 

[Jumbo]

****ing idiot scum "conservatives" and their brainless magical-thinking stupid sick minded religiosity that supports their pathetic inability to handle the actual realities we've come to learn scientifically regarding the brain chemistry and overall biology of human sexuality and sociological gender constructs.

 

Troglodyte **** for brains.

[Cooked Crack]

 

[tshile]

4 hours ago, Jumbo said:

 

Troglodyte **** for brains.

Their brains drag their knuckles on the ground as they move around 

[China]

Amy Coney Barrett appears likely to block the GOP’s latest attack on democracy

 

On the eve of Wednesday’s Supreme Court argument in Moore v. Harper, democracy in the United States appeared to be in danger.

 

A group of North Carolina Republican lawmakers asked the Court to embrace a deranged reading of the federal Constitution in order to force the state to adopt gerrymandered congressional maps. But that reading would, as former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told the justices on Wednesday, require them to strike down hundreds of state constitutional provisions protecting voting rights, limiting gerrymandering, and otherwise governing how elections are conducted.

 

Worse, prior to Wednesday, four of the Court’s Republican appointees had already endorsed versions of this misreading of the Constitution, which is known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” (ISLD).

 

On Wednesday, however, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett tossed cold water on the North Carolina GOP’s hopes that a majority of the justices would wholesale adopt this long-discredited theory. There is still a risk that the Court could adopt a milder version of the ISLD, in effect making itself the final arbiter of some election cases it doesn’t currently have jurisdiction over. But if you were alarmed by Moore’s potential to eviscerate fair elections in the United States, after today you can probably dial back that alarm to mere concern.

 

The ISLD derives from two provisions of the Constitution which state that the rules governing congressional and presidential elections shall be determined by each state’s “legislature.” More than a century of Supreme Court decisions hold that the word “legislature,” when used in this context, refers to whatever institutions in a state have the power to make laws — that is, not just the state’s house and senate, but also, for example, a governor with a veto power — and a bevy of dictionaries published around the time when the Constitution was drafted also define the word “legislature” as the Supreme Court has historically defined it.

 

The strongest form of the independent state legislature theory claims that all of these precedents are wrong, and that state governors, state courts, and state constitutions must be cut out of the process of determining how federal elections are conducted. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 concurring opinion endorsing the ISLD, “the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”

 

At Wednesday’s argument, however, only Gorsuch — who spent an astounding amount of time drawing out a bizarre and often incomprehensible theory that the ISLD is an anti-racist doctrine that prevents state lawmakers from counting Black people as three-fifths of a person, as the US Constitution originally counted enslaved people — was openly sympathetic to very strong versions of the ISLD. Even Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable Republican partisan, conceded that state courts must play some role in determining how elections are conducted, as it is their job to resolve disputes over how to interpret state election law.

 

That said, there were broad disagreements among the justices about whether the Supreme Court should intervene in what Chief Justice John Roberts at one point described as “outrageous” cases — that is, cases where a state supreme court egregiously misreads its own law.

 

Although the Supreme Court has long held that it is “bound to accept the interpretation of [state] law by the highest court of the State,” Alito’s questions seemed to imply that he should be able to toss out a state court’s interpretation of a state election law merely because he thinks that interpretation is bad.

 

Other justices, however, including some of the Court’s Republican appointees, expressed openness to more deferential rules that would only permit them to impose their will on the states in extraordinary cases. That is, while Alito appeared to want broad authority to intervene whenever he does not like a state court’s decision, Roberts and others seemed to suggest that the Supreme Court should only intervene in the most extreme cases.

 

The bottom line is that the Court is unlikely to light hundreds of voting rights and anti-gerrymandering protections on fire. That said, there is a real risk that the Court could give itself new power to intervene in election cases.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh went to CPAC boss Matt Schlapp's holiday party, which Trump ally Stephen Miller and Rep. Matt Gaetz also attended: report

 

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh went to a holiday party at the home of Matt Schlapp — the chairman of the influential right-wing group Conservative Political Action Coalition — Friday night, Politico first reported.

 

Among other attendees at the Christmas party included Stephen Miller, a longtime ally to former President Donald Trump, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Trump's former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, and Rep.-elect George Santos of New York, Politico reported.

 

The appearance has sparked questions about possible conflicts of interest with a sitting Supreme Court justice attending a private party of right-wing leaders. Miller's conservative group, America First Legal, has filed briefs on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, according to Bloomberg.

 

The news also comes as the Supreme Court has come under renewed scrutiny over ethics concerns after The New York Times reported of a potential breach of an opinion in 2014.

 

Christian evangelical minister Rev. Robert Schenck told The Times and testified before the House Judiciary Committee last week that he gained advance knowledge of the decision in the high-profile Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. The 5-4 majority, in an opinion delivered by Justice Samuel Alito, ruled that paying for insurance that covered contraception violated the religious freedoms of privately held, for-profit companies.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

I sense Susan Collins levels of concern.  But nobody will do anything about any of the justices.  What somebody should do is start an impeachment inquiry into one or more of the Supreme Court justices, but nobody has the guts.  So nothing will happen.

[China]

On 6/27/2022 at 11:33 AM, Cooked Crack said:

 

 

A high school coach joked about preaching Satanism. Then he got fired.

 

Ethan Gabel, a math teacher at Kirksville High School in Missouri since 2012 and the head coach of the Boys and Girls Cross Country teams since 2016, won’t be returning in the latter role next season after Christians interpreted his satirical tweets to mean he wanted to impose Satanism upon students.

 

The chaos began in late June after the Supreme Court handed down the Bremerton decision. The right-wing majority said that high school football coach Joe Kennedy had every right to conduct performative, coercive Christian prayers at midfield after games despite all the evidence showing how his attention-seeking stunts were harming students on the team. In response to the ruling, Gabel jokingly tweeted about how he was going to follow suit and inject some Satanism onto his Cross Country athletes.

 

He said things like, “Why, yes. I will be praying to Satan around your children” and “I should be able to sacrifice a goat to Lucifer after a cross country meet this year!”

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

[PokerPacker]

2 hours ago, China said:

 

A high school coach joked about preaching Satanism. Then he got fired.

 

Ethan Gabel, a math teacher at Kirksville High School in Missouri since 2012 and the head coach of the Boys and Girls Cross Country teams since 2016, won’t be returning in the latter role next season after Christians interpreted his satirical tweets to mean he wanted to impose Satanism upon students.

 

The chaos began in late June after the Supreme Court handed down the Bremerton decision. The right-wing majority said that high school football coach Joe Kennedy had every right to conduct performative, coercive Christian prayers at midfield after games despite all the evidence showing how his attention-seeking stunts were harming students on the team. In response to the ruling, Gabel jokingly tweeted about how he was going to follow suit and inject some Satanism onto his Cross Country athletes.

 

He said things like, “Why, yes. I will be praying to Satan around your children” and “I should be able to sacrifice a goat to Lucifer after a cross country meet this year!”

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

For the record, that's Devil-worship, not Satanism.  Two very different things.  Not that the pearl-clutching Christians would know the difference anyways.

[China]

On 10/19/2022 at 9:18 PM, China said:

Supreme Court asked to block Biden student debt relief program

 

The Supreme Court on Wednesday was asked to block the Biden administration’s student loan debt relief program, which is set to take effect this weekend.

 

The Brown County Taxpayers Association, a taxpayers’ group in Wisconsin, directed its request at Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is responsible for such matters in Wisconsin.

 

The emergency filing from the association asks that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers be suspended while its lawsuit unfolds. The Biden administration could start processing borrowers’ requests for student loan forgiveness as soon as this Sunday.

 

The U.S. Department of Education opened its application for student loan forgiveness in a beta test on Friday, and more than 8 million people submitted requests for relief over that weekend. The application officially launched on Monday.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

Student loan servicer at the center of debt cancelation case hasn’t paid on one of its own debts in years

 

In March 2006, about 100 people gathered at a Lake Ozark, Mo., resort to discuss the sale of a student loan organization’s assets. 

 

The board of the state-affiliated Higher Education Loan Authority of Missouri, or MOHELA, had already decided once, a couple of months earlier, to sell $2.4 billion worth of student loans to generate about $450 million for state coffers. The idea, originally pitched by then-governor Matt Blunt and scaled down, was to use the proceeds generated from the sale to fund Blunt’s higher education priorities. The notion was controversial given that MOHELA was founded by state lawmakers to ensure Missourians could attend college affordably through low-cost loans and the organization’s assets theoretically were earmarked for that purpose. 

 

MOHELA’s board had initially considered and approved the idea in private, drawing scrutiny from Missouri’s attorney general, who said the process violated the state’s open meeting laws.  

 

So now they were back to debate the idea in public. Some university presidents spoke in favor of the plan, which would use the proceeds from the sale to pay for capital improvements at colleges, boost the schools’ technology profile and other higher education initiatives. But critics worried it would allow MOHELA’s assets to drift towards a use that was distant from the reason it was established by the Missouri state legislature in the first place. One of critics was Faith Sandler, the executive director of the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis.

“I understand MOHELA’s mission to be to provide and insure access to loans for higher education for Missouri residents,” she told the board after apologizing for not thoroughly writing down her remarks beforehand. “No matter the buildings to be constructed nor businesses to be incubated by this initiative, it will not serve MOHELA’s purpose. Not enough is known about the impact your decision will have on low-income students and other future borrowers.” 

 

Now, the years-old arrangement surrounding MOHELA’s assets is part of what the Supreme Court will consider when deciding whether the Biden administration’s mass student loan cancellation plan is legal. The six Republican-led states suing the Biden administration have said that the arrangement that MOHELA and the state of Missouri ultimately reached is enough to give Missouri the right to sue over the policy. Two friend of the court briefs filed with the Supreme Court Wednesday argue that the claim is essentially bogus – in part because MOHELA hasn’t fulfilled its obligation in years. 

 

About a year after MOHELA’s board approved the sale plan for a second time, the state’s legislature codified the arrangement – requiring MOHELA to pay $350 million over time towards the newly created Lewis and Clark Discovery Fund, which would finance the capital improvements and other projects. 

 

The six Republican-led states suing over the debt cancelation plan have argued that Missouri has the right to challenge the policy in court in part because MOHELA – which now services student loans for the federal government and could lose accounts if borrowers’ debts are discharged – still owes the state money as part of this deal. “MOHELA and Missouri are also financially linked,” the state attorneys general wrote in court documents, “MOHELA owes $105.1 million to the State’s LCD Fund,” referring to the Lewis and Clark Fund. “The States rely on MOHELA’s legal obligation to contribute to the LCD Fund,” the states’ brief continues. 

 

In ruling to temporarily halt the debt relief plan, a panel of judges on the the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found the states’ argument sympathetic, writing of the possible hit that the debt cancelation could cause to MOHELA’s servicing revenue, “this unanticipated financial downturn will prevent or delay Missouri from funding higher education at its public colleges and universities.” 

 

But, according to legal experts, the link doesn’t give Missouri standing – or the right to sue over something because you’ve been harmed by it – in part because MOHELA hasn’t made a payment towards its obligation since shortly after the state established the Lewis and Clark fund in 2007.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

[China]

Supreme Court takes up Christian postal worker's religious claim

 

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an evangelical Christian mail carrier's employment discrimination claim in a case that could force employers to do more to accommodate the religious practices of their workers.

 

The justices will hear an appeal brought by Gerald Groff, who says the U.S. Postal Service could have granted his request that he be spared Sunday shifts based on his religious belief that it is a day of worship and rest.

 

Groff has asked the court to make it easier for employees to bring religious claims under Title VII of the Civil Right Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination of various forms, including based on religion.

 

Groff worked as an auxiliary mailman in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area from 2012 to 2019, when he resigned. A noncareer employee, his job was to fill in when other workers were not available, including on weekends and holidays.

 

Initially he was not asked work on Sundays, but the situation began to change in 2015 due to the requirement that Amazon packages be delivered on that day. Based on his request for an accommodation, his managers arranged for other postal workers to deliver packages on Sundays until July 2018. After that, Groff faced disciplinary actions if he did not report to work.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[CobraCommander]

1 hour ago, China said:

Supreme Court takes up Christian postal worker's religious claim

 

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an evangelical Christian mail carrier's employment discrimination claim in a case that could force employers to do more to accommodate the religious practices of their workers.

 

The justices will hear an appeal brought by Gerald Groff, who says the U.S. Postal Service could have granted his request that he be spared Sunday shifts based on his religious belief that it is a day of worship and rest.

 

Groff has asked the court to make it easier for employees to bring religious claims under Title VII of the Civil Right Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination of various forms, including based on religion.

 

Groff worked as an auxiliary mailman in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area from 2012 to 2019, when he resigned. A noncareer employee, his job was to fill in when other workers were not available, including on weekends and holidays.

 

Initially he was not asked work on Sundays, but the situation began to change in 2015 due to the requirement that Amazon packages be delivered on that day. Based on his request for an accommodation, his managers arranged for other postal workers to deliver packages on Sundays until July 2018. After that, Groff faced disciplinary actions if he did not report to work.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[TheGreatBuzz]

I never worked a Sunday in my life until I joined the Navy.  Most places I worked weren't open on Sundays but the few that were I told I wasn't available when I applied.  None of them bothered to ask why, they all just assumed I was religious.  No, my parents taught me what was really important. 

 

Football.

 

Edited January 15, 2023 by TheGreatBuzz
Autocorrect

[Larry]

1 hour ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

I never worked a Sunday in my life until I joined the Navy.  Most places I worked weren't open on Sundays but the few that were I told I wasn't available when I applied.  None of them bothered to ask why, they all just assumed I was religious.  No, my parents taught me what was really important. 

 

Football.

 

But what about college football?

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Larry said:

But what about college football?

 

Lame.

[PokerPacker]

3 hours ago, Larry said:

But what about college football?

You know, I really like football, I just wish there was a way I could watch it being played by people with less skill who were being exploited for no pay.

[TheGreatBuzz]

8 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

You know, I really like football, I just wish there was a way I could watch it being played by people with less skill who were being exploited for no pay.

 

My issue with college ball is there are just too many teams and players for me to follow like I do the NFL.  And I grew up a Maryland fan but their team sucked and no one watched it.  My dad was big into UM basketball but I just could never get I to that sport.