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1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

It wasn’t taxation they were upset about, it was taxation without representation. There’s a huge difference. Death and taxes are unavoidable. We have religion to pretend we can avoid one and the GOP to pretend we can avoid the other. Some people get the two confused.

Bullshit.  Still complaining and avoided taxes like the plague now that they are overrepresented. 

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37 minutes ago, rantanamo said:

Bullshit.  Still complaining and avoided taxes like the plague now that they are overrepresented. 

Two different breeds. The GOP didn’t exist yet when our nation’s founders were complaining about “taxation without representation.” Those are their words, not mine. It wasn’t the taxes that were the problem so much as not having a voice. That’s what gave rise to revolution and our representative democracy. And then our new representative democratic government imposed taxes. Freedom isn’t free. You can’t escape death or taxes. 

Now it’s just a numbers game driven by ultra-rich people who have more money than they can ever spend and pay huge sums to politicians who’ll cut their taxes just because. When David Koch died he was worth $50 Billion. Were high taxes and over-regulation ever really a problem for him? No. And yet he helped fund the Tea Party. That wasn’t a grassroots movement and wasn’t really about taxes, it was a reaction to the election of a black president but if it could also help to cut the taxes of the 1% just so it looks better on the balance sheet then so much the better.

What matters is take home pay. Suppose you work a corporate job for like, say, JPMorgan Chase, and the max raise you can get every year is 2%. You’d better get that whole 2% every year, especially when your cost of living is rising by 1.7% annually. Even then you’re barely scrimping by. And even if you do get a tax break, the ultra-rich are getting a bigger tax break so you wind up taking on a bigger share of the tax burden. What would be better for you is more pay, not lower taxes. Leave taxes the same but get a 5% raise every year and you’d be better off. Meanwhile you think the Republicans are great because they threw you a bone while Jamie Dimon’s income goes from 100 times what you make to 1,000 times what you make.

But the point is that there will always be taxes and our nation’s founders were more concerned about being taxed while not having a voice and weren’t really similar to the Republican Party in any way. Other than that there’s an argument to be made that both Tea Parties could be described as terrorists. 

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16 hours ago, Bullneck said:

I've said it before: he'll run for president again.  Setting himself up to being the "sane" one.

I think it’s the opposite. He knows he’ll never be president so he can now exercise a modicum of a moral compass. His vote guarantees he’ll never sniff a national office as a republican. Remember, there is literally no bottom to right wing depravity these days. They’ll disband the entire government if they take power in congress with a democrat is president. If they take both branches we’ll be a full on theocracy. It’s not ledge stuff to acknowledge that we’re on the brink of a full on constitutional crisis. 

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On 4/7/2022 at 9:27 PM, WhatTheBuck said:

Two different breeds. The GOP didn’t exist yet when our nation’s founders were complaining about “taxation without representation.” Those are their words, not mine. It wasn’t the taxes that were the problem so much as not having a voice. That’s what gave rise to revolution and our representative democracy. And then our new representative democratic government imposed taxes. Freedom isn’t free. You can’t escape death or taxes. 

Now it’s just a numbers game driven by ultra-rich people who have more money than they can ever spend and pay huge sums to politicians who’ll cut their taxes just because. When David Koch died he was worth $50 Billion. Were high taxes and over-regulation ever really a problem for him? No. And yet he helped fund the Tea Party. That wasn’t a grassroots movement and wasn’t really about taxes, it was a reaction to the election of a black president but if it could also help to cut the taxes of the 1% just so it looks better on the balance sheet then so much the better.

What matters is take home pay. Suppose you work a corporate job for like, say, JPMorgan Chase, and the max raise you can get every year is 2%. You’d better get that whole 2% every year, especially when your cost of living is rising by 1.7% annually. Even then you’re barely scrimping by. And even if you do get a tax break, the ultra-rich are getting a bigger tax break so you wind up taking on a bigger share of the tax burden. What would be better for you is more pay, not lower taxes. Leave taxes the same but get a 5% raise every year and you’d be better off. Meanwhile you think the Republicans are great because they threw you a bone while Jamie Dimon’s income goes from 100 times what you make to 1,000 times what you make.

But the point is that there will always be taxes and our nation’s founders were more concerned about being taxed while not having a voice and weren’t really similar to the Republican Party in any way. Other than that there’s an argument to be made that both Tea Parties could be described as terrorists. 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court.html?smid=url-share
 

 

steve vladeck writes about Robert’s joining the liberals in criticizing the shadow docket.  
 

it really is embarrassing.  SCOTUS was above it all for much of my life.  Thomas was an aberration.  Now everyone is Thomas and have turned to not even caring that the decisions are blatantly party hackery.  My kingdom for a do over on hariet miers. 

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17 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:


 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court.html?smid=url-share
 

 

steve vladeck writes about Robert’s joining the liberals in criticizing the shadow docket.  
 

it really is embarrassing.  SCOTUS was above it all for much of my life.  Thomas was an aberration.  Now everyone is Thomas and have turned to not even caring that the decisions are blatantly party hackery.  My kingdom for a do over on hariet miers. 

SCOTUS was never actually above politics. The conservative justices are just more blatant about it now.

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On 4/8/2022 at 5:18 PM, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

I mean, it's a photo. Is it really that controversial? Doesn't negate the point, but this seems to be a bit of an overreaction, no? Perhaps someone knows something I don't. Actually, definitely.

Ordinarily, sure, but with the problems already surrounding him, it's just furtherance of a non-objective political hack sitting on the highest court. It's a major fucking problem for anyone who is holding on to any idea that this is still somehow legitimate.

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2 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

Not this shit again.

How often liberal justices vote with other liberal justices and how often conservative justices vote with other conservative justices don't actually indicate anything about how political any of them are. This is the absolute dumbest way to evaluate the Court and Ilya Shapiro knows this. You have to look at the actual cases and the substance of the opinions. Ilya doesn't want more people doing that because then they'll realize he's lying to them.

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1 minute ago, wildcat09 said:

Not this shit again.

How often liberal justices vote with other liberal justices and how often conservative justices vote with other conservative justices don't actually indicate anything about how political any of them are. This is the absolute dumbest way to evaluate the Court and Ilya Shapiro knows this. You have to look at the actual cases and the substance of the opinions. Ilya doesn't want more people doing that because then they'll realize he's lying to them.

Or they’re largely partisan hacks and you don’t want to admit to that.  I do wonder which?

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1 minute ago, fattyflattie said:

Or they’re largely partisan hacks and you don’t want to admit to that.  I do wonder which?

No, I've been saying that for years. I've probably made literally close to a thousand posts on this board about it. But what you linked isn't good supporting evidence of that and is meant to mislead non-lawyers about how that partisanship manifests itself and how radical the Republicans on the Court have become.

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16 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

No, I've been saying that for years. I've probably made literally close to a thousand posts on this board about it. But what you linked isn't good supporting evidence of that and is meant to mislead non-lawyers about how that partisanship manifests itself and how radical the Republicans on the Court have become.

Look who you’re arguing with.

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On 4/7/2022 at 10:27 PM, WhatTheBuck said:

Two different breeds. The GOP didn’t exist yet when our nation’s founders were complaining about “taxation without representation.” Those are their words, not mine. It wasn’t the taxes that were the problem so much as not having a voice. That’s what gave rise to revolution and our representative democracy. And then our new representative democratic government imposed taxes. Freedom isn’t free. You can’t escape death or taxes. 

Now it’s just a numbers game driven by ultra-rich people who have more money than they can ever spend and pay huge sums to politicians who’ll cut their taxes just because. When David Koch died he was worth $50 Billion. Were high taxes and over-regulation ever really a problem for him? No. And yet he helped fund the Tea Party. That wasn’t a grassroots movement and wasn’t really about taxes, it was a reaction to the election of a black president but if it could also help to cut the taxes of the 1% just so it looks better on the balance sheet then so much the better.

What matters is take home pay. Suppose you work a corporate job for like, say, JPMorgan Chase, and the max raise you can get every year is 2%. You’d better get that whole 2% every year, especially when your cost of living is rising by 1.7% annually. Even then you’re barely scrimping by. And even if you do get a tax break, the ultra-rich are getting a bigger tax break so you wind up taking on a bigger share of the tax burden. What would be better for you is more pay, not lower taxes. Leave taxes the same but get a 5% raise every year and you’d be better off. Meanwhile you think the Republicans are great because they threw you a bone while Jamie Dimon’s income goes from 100 times what you make to 1,000 times what you make.

But the point is that there will always be taxes and our nation’s founders were more concerned about being taxed while not having a voice and weren’t really similar to the Republican Party in any way. Other than that there’s an argument to be made that both Tea Parties could be described as terrorists. 

They always use small business as the trojan horse/hostage to get their taxes lifted.  Think about the small businesses and landowners that inherit land that they then have to pay inheritance taxes on, etc.  I heard a professor from UVA state that inheritance taxes were implemented in part to prevent an aristocracy.  And what's the point when peeps like Trump can perpetually hold the system up?  

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49 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Like Merrick Garland becoming the norm when one party controls the Senate and one party has the White House.

I don’t think people understand just how spineless Democrats are these days. They will allow for a vote because they will want the same treatment in the future. Or a Republican President would simply do a recess appointment and get away with it. 

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1 hour ago, Mdhorn said:

They always use small business as the trojan horse/hostage to get their taxes lifted.  Think about the small businesses and landowners that inherit land that they then have to pay inheritance taxes on, etc.  I heard a professor from UVA state that inheritance taxes were implemented in part to prevent an aristocracy.  And what's the point when peeps like Trump can perpetually hold the system up?  

Yeah,  Trump dying would help get to that inheritance tax stage.

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I don’t think people understand just how spineless Democrats are these days. They will allow for a vote because they will want the same treatment in the future. Or a Republican President would simply do a recess appointment and get away with it. 

This. It’s what Obama should have done.
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On 3/24/2022 at 12:06 AM, fattyflattie said:

Yeah I get it. Pelosi should be able to rack up 115+m while in office because Ivanka did 600.  Newsflash. They all fucking suck. To which degree is not really arguable anymore.  But being less suck is still suck.  In a country of 300m you think we could do better with the few thousand people that run this country.  But I know, last guy bad and all that. 

 

 

 

Do you really believe that? Or do you just tell yourself that overly simplistic bullshit to assuage a guilty conscience or something?

 

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I really don't understand why people bag on Nancy Pelosi for her money.  It's not "hers".  Her husband runs a successful VC firm.  Unless it can be shown that she paved the way for his success with political favors, it seems a non-starter.

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Didn't see this posted, which surprised me considering it's from one of our own UT Law professors.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court.html?searchResultPosition=1

Quote

Roberts Has Lost Control of the Supreme Court

Spoiler

Last week the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, put back into effecta Trump administration regulation that limited the ability of states to block projects that could pollute rivers and streams. The unsigned, unexplained order in Louisiana v. American Rivers came as part of a highly technical dispute over the scope of the Clean Water Act — and leaves for another day whether the regulation is a valid interpretation of that Nixon-era statute.

But the temporary decision cannot be ignored, especially because of the brief but blistering dissenting opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan. It’s not the first time that liberal justices have called out most of the court’s conservative justices for their increasingly frequent use of the so-called shadow docket — unsigned, unexplained orders like the one last week. But it was significant for being the first time that Chief Justice John Roberts joined her (and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor) in doing so.

With the striking public stance, the chief justice illustrated how concerns about the procedural shortcuts the other conservative justices are taking do (and should) cross ideological divides. He also made clear what many have long suspected: The Roberts court is over.

The term “shadow docket” was introduced by the University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015 to describe the more obscure part of the Supreme Court’s work — the thousands of unsigned and usually unexplained orders that the justices issue each year to manage their docket. Those orders are in contrast to the merits docket, the 60 to 70 cases each year that go through rounds of briefing and oral argument before being resolved in long, signed opinions for the court.

 

 

 

Spoiler

Owing to its inscrutability, the shadow docket has historically received much less public attention or scrutiny. Most shadow docket orders are anodyne — matters as routine as refusing to take up an appeal or giving a party more time to file a brief.

But far more than ever before, the court is using procedural orders on applications for emergency relief while appeals work their way through the courts to resolve disputes affecting the lives of millions of Americans — whether in blocking a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on a vaccination mandate for large employers, refusing to block Texas’ ban on most abortions after six weeks or putting back into effect congressional district maps that two Alabama lower courts struck down as violating the Voting Rights Act.

Time and again, the justices are ordering lower courts to treat these decisions as precedents — even when, as in last week’s ruling, the order includes no analysis to apply to other cases, which often makes the precedent difficult for lower courts to apply.

Unsurprisingly, these rulings have provoked increasingly strident dissents from the court’s liberal justices. Last September, when the justices refused, by a 5-to-4 vote, to halt the patently unconstitutional Texas abortion law, Justice Kagan criticized the majority not just for the substance of its ruling but also for what that ruling said about the shadow docket. She wrote, “The majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this court’s shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.”

Last week, by freezing a district court injunction despite a lack of evidence that it was harming the complaining states, the majority once again defied the requirements for the very emergency relief they granted. Justice Kagan wrote that that renders the court’s “emergency docket not for emergencies at all” but rather “only another place for merits determinations — except made without full briefing and argument.” In other words, the principal justification for shadow docket orders — the need to intervene early in litigation to prevent a party from suffering irreversible harm while the appeal unfolded — was nowhere to be found.

Spoiler

Chief Justice Roberts voted with Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan in dissenting from six previous shadow docket rulings. But the Clean Water Act dispute was the first time he joined in the procedural criticism that the other conservatives were not just using the shadow docket but abusing it. In that respect, his rebuke cannot be dismissed as partisan. By publicly endorsing the charge that the conservative justices are short-circuiting ordinary procedures to reach their desired results without sufficient explanation, Chief Justice Roberts provided a powerful counter to defenders of the court’s behavior. Justice Samuel Alito, for instance, claimed in a September 2021 speech that critics of these rulings are acting in bad faith because their real objections are to the results in these cases.

What is especially telling about Chief Justice Roberts’s dissents in these shadow docket cases is that, unlike Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, he’s often been sympathetic to the results. In February’s Alabama redistricting ruling, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts agreed that the court should reconsider the interpretation of the Voting Rights Act under which Alabama’s maps had been struck down; he just believed that any change in that interpretation had to come through the merits docket, not the shadow docket.

At least on the shadow docket, though, that’s no longer up to him. Instead, the court’s destiny increasingly appears to be controlled by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. She implored an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library just last week to “read the opinion” before jumping to any conclusions about whether the justices are acting more like politicians than judges. Two days later, she joined the majority’s unsigned, unexplained order in the Clean Water Act case, in which there was no opinion to read. Justice Kavanaugh, too, seems more troubled by criticism of the court’s behavior than by the behavior itself, going out of his way in February’s Alabama redistricting cases to criticize the “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket’” in Justice Kagan’s dissent.

It’s not the rhetoric that is wearing out, though; it’s the court’s credibility. The justices have long insisted — as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter put it in 1992 — that “the court’s legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the nation.” The proliferation of principle-free decisions affecting more and more Americans — and with a clear, troubling tendency of favoring Republicans over Democrats — calls that legitimacy into increasingly serious question.

It’s understandable, then, why Chief Justice Roberts would finally speak out. No one better understands the stakes for the court’s credibility — and institutional viability. If even his objections can’t persuade the other conservatives to stop abusing the shadow docket, then that may signal the willingness of the court’s conservative majority to go even further in the future and to use the shadow docket to resolve even more significant and contentious constitutional questions.

Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck), a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, specializes in the federal courts and constitutional law. He is also a co-host of “The National Security Law Podcast.” He is writing a book on the shadow docket.

 

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“the court’s destiny increasingly appears to be controlled by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. She implored an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library just last week to “read the opinion” before jumping to any conclusions about whether the justices are acting more like politicians than judges. Two days later, she joined the majority’s unsigned, unexplained order in the Clean Water Act case, in which there was no opinion to read. Justice Kavanaugh, too, seems more troubled by criticism of the court’s behavior than by the behavior itself, going out of his way in February’s Alabama redistricting cases to criticize the “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket’” in Justice Kagan’s dissent.”

Fucking cunts. Both of them. 

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Credit where it's due, Gorsuch with a good concurrence today:

 

He'll never be helpful on anything that is particularly politically salient to most Americans, but he seems to have a soft spot for some historically mistreated people and the textualist approach makes it easy to reject the specious bullshit that is usually used to justify such mistreatment. 

Of course, that makes his taking the party line on voting rights shit all the more obvious for the naked partisanship that it is. But I hate him less than Alito.

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Yup, my ranking of conservative justices starts pretty low but when you get to them they are:

Roberts

.

.

Gorsuch

.

.

.

Barrett Kavanaugh

.

.

.

Alito

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Thomas. 

I'd put Thomas lower but its longcat enough. And if you check my CR history I've been railing on him well before his wife tried to overthrow the government.

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I rank Alito below Thomas. Thomas is actually less wholly partisan than Alito and occasionally has a good opinion (when it doesn't matter). I particularly liked his dissent in the TransUnion case last year. I've never read anything from Alito that I was even remotely pleasantly surprised by.

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5 minutes ago, 'stache said:

Yup, my ranking of conservative justices starts pretty low but when you get to them they are:

Roberts

.

.

Gorsuch

.

.

.

Barrett Kavanaugh

.

.

.

Alito

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Thomas. 

I'd put Thomas lower but its longcat enough. And if you check my CR history I've been railing on him well before his wife tried to overthrow the government.

That’s my bracket as well, except I have Thomas lower.

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5 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I rank Alito below Thomas. Thomas is actually less wholly partisan than Alito and occasionally has a good opinion (when it doesn't matter). I particularly liked his dissent in the TransUnion case last year. I've never read anything from Alito that I was even remotely pleasantly surprised by.

Thomas went a decade or more without asking a single question. His race and Indian law dissents alone are disgusting. He's worse and its not close. Which says more about Thomas than Alito because I otherwise agree that he's a hack beyond hacks. And even if I had them close, his wifes recent outing as a traitor to the country is the difference.

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3 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

Thomas is getting worse by the day.   First, the wife stuff comes out, then he hires halfwits as clerks which puts them in line to be federal judge like that imbecile in Florida the other day.  She's a half wit clerk of a half wit SCOTUS justice, so a quarter wit I guess.

gonna be awkward when he has to vote to overturn her stupid ruling

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27 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I rank Alito below Thomas. Thomas is actually less wholly partisan than Alito and occasionally has a good opinion (when it doesn't matter). I particularly liked his dissent in the TransUnion case last year. I've never read anything from Alito that I was even remotely pleasantly surprised by.

 

24 minutes ago, Satchel said:

That’s my bracket as well, except I have Thomas lower.

 

24 minutes ago, 'stache said:

Thomas went a decade or more without asking a single question. His race and Indian law dissents alone are disgusting. He's worse and its not close. Which says more about Thomas than Alito because I otherwise agree that he's a hack beyond hacks. And even if I had them close, his wifes recent outing as a traitor to the country is the difference.

 

10 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

Thomas is getting worse by the day.   First, the wife stuff comes out, then he hires halfwits as clerks which puts them in line to be federal judge like that imbecile in Florida the other day.  She's a half wit clerk of a half wit SCOTUS justice, so a quarter wit I guess.

Can we regret to Thomas as his rightful name Uncle Ruckus? 

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8 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

Thomas is getting worse by the day.   First, the wife stuff comes out, then he hires halfwits as clerks which puts them in line to be federal judge like that imbecile in Florida the other day.  She's a half wit clerk of a half wit SCOTUS justice, so a quarter wit I guess.

There's also the incredibly racist girl who is now a federal clerk on the Second Circuit that literally moved in with Clarence and Ginni after she got fired for tweeting "I hate Black people." The depths of that man's self loathing are bottomless.

I'm actually fine with the not speaking for a decade on the bench thing. I wouldn't do the same, but the only purpose any of that usually serves is performative signaling to other justices and to the public. The signaling to the other justices can all be done outside the courtroom and the only communication to the public that matters is their actual opinions.

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