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From that New Yorker article:

”Alito matriculated at Princeton in 1968. The school didn’t have a particularly rebellious student body: during the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the school’s Students for a Democratic Society contingent carried signs that said ‘EVEN PRINCETON.’ Nevertheless, the university saw its share of sit-ins and marches during Alito’s years there, and his already deeply held political allegiances put him at odds with the left-wing youth culture surrounding him. His cultural tastes made him an outlier, too. Alito once recalled spending New Year’s Eve, 1967, in front of the TV at home, watching a band that his parents liked: Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.”

Sam’s classmates would have done him and the country a great service if they had slipped him some LSD and taken him to a Dead show. That uptight square could seriously use some mind expansion. 

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19 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

From that New Yorker article:

”Alito matriculated at Princeton in 1968. The school didn’t have a particularly rebellious student body: during the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the school’s Students for a Democratic Society contingent carried signs that said ‘EVEN PRINCETON.’ Nevertheless, the university saw its share of sit-ins and marches during Alito’s years there, and his already deeply held political allegiances put him at odds with the left-wing youth culture surrounding him. His cultural tastes made him an outlier, too. Alito once recalled spending New Year’s Eve, 1967, in front of the TV at home, watching a band that his parents liked: Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.”

Sam’s classmates would have done him and the country a great service if they had slipped him some LSD and taken him to a Dead show. That uptight square could seriously use some mind expansion. 

An incel of the first order

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Referencing that New Yorker article on Alito again. (It’s a really good article. It’s very long. I could post it here if there’s interest since it’s behind a soft paywall.) There’s this bit about Thomas that seems relevant:

Quote

Alito and Thomas clearly share many political and cultural beliefs, though Thomas has protested that his personal views have no bearing on his jurisprudence. At an event last year at Notre Dame, he said, “The media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference. So, if they think you’re anti-abortion or something personally, they think that that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician.” Such readings of the Justices, he asserted, jeopardized Americans’ “faith in the legal institutions.” (Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, is a prominent right-wing activist who has worked to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. He has not commented on whether those activities might jeopardize “faith in the legal institutions.”)

 

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3 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Tell me again why he’s not in Congress?

Because when the Dems get caught up in problematic behavior -- and it's really debatable how bad Franken's was -- they do the right thing and go away. Republicans double down, bow their chests, lift up their chins and say, "What the fuck are you gonna do about it?"

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/kagan-speech-supreme-court-legitimacy-roberts/

Spoiler

If Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has chosen to close his eyes to the Supreme Court’s role in its own legitimacy crisis and defend his radical colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan has chosen to be a clear-eyed truth-teller. On Monday, she let loose a burst of refreshing clarity during a talk at Temple Emanu-El in New York. “Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves … when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process or when they’re imposing their own personal preferences,” she said. She added that the public has a right to expect that “changes in personnel don’t send the entire legal system up for grabs.” That’s as clear an indictment of the six right-wing justices as you are going to hear. Indeed, Kagan made a few irrefutable points while eviscerating Roberts’s feigned cluelessness. First, she makes clear that the problem is undeniable. The public’s confidence in the court has cratered, and wide swaths of the public believe it is too partisan. Roberts would have us believe the public is simply reacting to a decision it does not like; Kagan scoffs at the suggestion. Something is very wrong, she acknowledges. Second, she recognizes that there is no mass delusion underlying the public’s frustration with the court. Conservatives used to take responsibility for their actions, but that was before the MAGA era of victimhood in which all ills including their own debacles are blamed on “elites,” “liberal media” or “fake news.” Kagan understands there is a reason for the public’s repudiation of the Supreme Court, and that’s the court’s own conduct.
Third, she identifies the primary catalyst for the court’s present crisis: the gutting of precedent by the newest justices. The dissent in Dobbs made plain the absence of any objective rationale for dispensing with nearly 50 years of precedent on abortion rights. As she and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.” They continued, “Stare decisis, this Court has often said, ‘contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process’ by ensuring that decisions are ‘founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.’ … Today, the proclivities of individuals rule. The Court departs from its obligation to faithfully and impartially apply the law.” The dissenters called the majority opinion for what it is: partisan hackery. “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them,” they wrote. “The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.” The dissenters correctly predicted the firestorm the decision would unleash, and warned that the majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which refused to overrule Roe v. Wade, had it right. “The American public, they thought, should never conclude that its constitutional protections hung by a thread — that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school,’ could ‘by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights.” But, the dissent concluded, “It is hard — no, it is impossible — to conclude that anything else has happened here.” Kagan went one step further on Monday, pointing out that there is a price to be paid for the attitude that Roe can go by the wayside simply because the right-wing justices have the votes. They may have the votes, but they cannot control the widespread revulsion when the court rips through precedent it dislikes. For if “we’ve got the votes” is the controlling sentiment, then it follows that the justices should be treated like politicians with binding ethics rules, term limits and greater transparency (on decisions to recuse themselves from cases, for example). Dobbs is not the only reason for the court’s plunge in credibility. The right-wing justices’ rewriting of voting rights law (Brnovich v. DNC), their assault on the administrative state (West Virginia v. EPA), their inconsistent application of state power (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen) and their thumb-on-the-scale treatment of the Establishment Clause (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Carson v. Makin) have all taken their toll. So has the majority’s manipulation of the shadow docket and partisan screeds by right-wing justices in public settings. The only question now is whether justices will follow Roberts’s effort to dissemble and blame others or whether they will listen to Kagan’s call for the court to act, well, like a court. If the former, the court’s stature is bound to decline further.

909D5DBA-F17C-4345-8EBC-DBF7EBA1955C.gif.6046a9923209de9b89db9333836f6bb4.gif

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30 minutes ago, Js1 said:

 

Misleading headline is misleading. The Court did not grant an emergency stay. That’s different than a merits ruling, especially where the case was decided by a state court on state law issues, and if I remember correctly they haven’t exhausted the state level appeals process. 

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Went down to the courthouse for jury selection yesterday… it was something else seeing Alito pop up on the instructional video wax on about your patriotic duty to serve as a juror and how diversity is valued. 

Edited by YChang
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14 minutes ago, YChang said:

Went down to the courthouse for jury selection yesterday… it was something else seeing Alito pop up on the instructional video wax on about your patriotic duty to serve as a juror and how diversity is valued. 

“Hello I am Judge Alito and I want to thank you for doing your civic duty of jury participation.  You know our country is diverse, and that diversity is valued.  There are the traditional Catholics, the red hooded strict catholics like my colleague Judge Barrett, and then those who we call “pre-Catholics” who will be catholics whether they want to or not”

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1 hour ago, Cacti said:

Is it your belief that SCOTUS should include public sentiment in their deliberations?

Read

3 hours ago, Horn Dog said:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/kagan-speech-supreme-court-legitimacy-roberts/

  Reveal hidden contents

If Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has chosen to close his eyes to the Supreme Court’s role in its own legitimacy crisis and defend his radical colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan has chosen to be a clear-eyed truth-teller. On Monday, she let loose a burst of refreshing clarity during a talk at Temple Emanu-El in New York. “Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves … when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process or when they’re imposing their own personal preferences,” she said. She added that the public has a right to expect that “changes in personnel don’t send the entire legal system up for grabs.” That’s as clear an indictment of the six right-wing justices as you are going to hear. Indeed, Kagan made a few irrefutable points while eviscerating Roberts’s feigned cluelessness. First, she makes clear that the problem is undeniable. The public’s confidence in the court has cratered, and wide swaths of the public believe it is too partisan. Roberts would have us believe the public is simply reacting to a decision it does not like; Kagan scoffs at the suggestion. Something is very wrong, she acknowledges. Second, she recognizes that there is no mass delusion underlying the public’s frustration with the court. Conservatives used to take responsibility for their actions, but that was before the MAGA era of victimhood in which all ills including their own debacles are blamed on “elites,” “liberal media” or “fake news.” Kagan understands there is a reason for the public’s repudiation of the Supreme Court, and that’s the court’s own conduct.
Third, she identifies the primary catalyst for the court’s present crisis: the gutting of precedent by the newest justices. The dissent in Dobbs made plain the absence of any objective rationale for dispensing with nearly 50 years of precedent on abortion rights. As she and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.” They continued, “Stare decisis, this Court has often said, ‘contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process’ by ensuring that decisions are ‘founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.’ … Today, the proclivities of individuals rule. The Court departs from its obligation to faithfully and impartially apply the law.” The dissenters called the majority opinion for what it is: partisan hackery. “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them,” they wrote. “The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.” The dissenters correctly predicted the firestorm the decision would unleash, and warned that the majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which refused to overrule Roe v. Wade, had it right. “The American public, they thought, should never conclude that its constitutional protections hung by a thread — that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school,’ could ‘by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights.” But, the dissent concluded, “It is hard — no, it is impossible — to conclude that anything else has happened here.” Kagan went one step further on Monday, pointing out that there is a price to be paid for the attitude that Roe can go by the wayside simply because the right-wing justices have the votes. They may have the votes, but they cannot control the widespread revulsion when the court rips through precedent it dislikes. For if “we’ve got the votes” is the controlling sentiment, then it follows that the justices should be treated like politicians with binding ethics rules, term limits and greater transparency (on decisions to recuse themselves from cases, for example). Dobbs is not the only reason for the court’s plunge in credibility. The right-wing justices’ rewriting of voting rights law (Brnovich v. DNC), their assault on the administrative state (West Virginia v. EPA), their inconsistent application of state power (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen) and their thumb-on-the-scale treatment of the Establishment Clause (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Carson v. Makin) have all taken their toll. So has the majority’s manipulation of the shadow docket and partisan screeds by right-wing justices in public settings. The only question now is whether justices will follow Roberts’s effort to dissemble and blame others or whether they will listen to Kagan’s call for the court to act, well, like a court. If the former, the court’s stature is bound to decline further.

909D5DBA-F17C-4345-8EBC-DBF7EBA1955C.gif.6046a9923209de9b89db9333836f6bb4.gif

 

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3 hours ago, Cacti said:

Is it your belief that SCOTUS should include public sentiment in their deliberations?

Well, it would say least be a better set of tests than the ones they're using now...

Kinda like, at least it's an ethos 

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4 hours ago, Horn Dog said:

“Hello I am Judge Alito and I want to thank you for doing your civic duty of jury participation.  You know our country is diverse, and that diversity is valued.  There are the traditional Catholics, the red hooded strict catholics like my colleague Judge Barrett, and then those who we call “pre-Catholics” who will be catholics whether they want to or not”

Ugh, this is only tangentially related but I can count a number of ways in which this bugs the hell out of me. I heard on the radio today that former Buckeye and current Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has converted to Catholicism. Really, Marcus? Seriously? How long has that been in the works? Years? Or months? Does this have to do with your sincerely held religious beliefs? Or is it a career move?

 

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For those that missed it, Senator Whitehouse's discussion regarding the Supreme Court's legitimacy on MSNBC last night is worth a listen:

 

I had missed a lot of what Whitehouse has been up to over the last year+, but he's going pretty hard to the paint on the USSC, the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo.  Here's his latest twitter thread on where this all may be going:

Quote

Right-wing extremists want to give state legislatures power to overturn federal elections — and finish what they started after the 2020 election. How? Here’s their scheme. 

First, years of gerrymandering and dark money have built obedient Republican state legislatures — just look what red states did to abortion rights. 

Next they turn to The Court That Dark Money Built. Years of packing extremists onto the Court and political pressure have brought an obedient Court supermajority to power. 

Then they send in dark-money front groups like the Honest Elections Project, which has filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court that lays out the plan. Who is this group?  ...

Spoiler

Honest Elections Project calls itself a “nonpartisan organization devoted to supporting the right of every lawful voter to participate in free and honest elections.” Wrong. This group promotes voter suppression under the guise of “election integrity.” 

Now look at the “independent state legislature” theory that this group is pushing, which says that the Constitution forbids state courts to block any law state legislatures pass about federal elections – even if the laws violate the state constitution. 
Rings a bell? It’s the theory pushed by Trumpster John Eastman to overturn the 2020 election (he also filed an amicus brief in this case). If the GOP justices go along, it would unwind our democracy as we know it. 
Under this theory, radical, gerrymandered state legislatures could try to impose almost any voting restrictions. It could end independent commissions that prevent gerrymandering and other laws that protect voting rights. 
And extremists like Eastman hope that it would even let them pick election winners, overriding the state’s popular vote. 
The fringe doctrine they’re pushing first cropped up in — of all places — Bush v. Gore (three FedSoc Justices were involved in Bush v Gore, btw), but SCOTUS never adopted it. Yet three R justices (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch) have endorsed it. 
The extremists think they won’t need to sack the Capitol next time. Just (illegally) fix the vote in Republican state legislatures and run it up to the captured Supreme Court for a rubber stamp. Bingo — Bush v. Gore 2.0. 
This is what the Scheme to capture SCOTUS was for: creating a captured Court amenable to extreme ideologies that serve Republican big donor interests. 
Who was behind this Scheme? The same guy behind the Honest Elections Project: Leonard Leo, who from his Federalist Society perch stocked the Court with Roberts, Alito, and three Trump justices. 
And Leo’s Honest Elections Project isn’t even a real group.  It’s a legal “fictitious name” of another group that also operates under other “fictitious names,” including the Judicial Crisis Network. 
The Judicial Crisis Network took in checks as big as $17 million to run TV political ads for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The whole Court Capture Scheme looks to have cost more than $580 million — the big donors weren’t messing around. 
The Federalist Society became their dark-money turnstile, grooming and selecting loyal judges. How do we know?  Trump plus his White House Counsel plus FedSoc founder plus a Republican Senate Judiciary chair all bragged about it.  Not subtle. 
Recap:  the Justices put on the Court via Leo’s FedSoc are getting marching orders from Leo’s Honest Elections Project, which under a different “fictitious name” also funded the TV ads to confirm the Justices. Not normal. 
To cap it all off: Leo also just got a $1.6B political slush fund from a far-right billionaire to influence our politics using right-wing dark money schemes. It worked for Court capture; what’s next? 

Thread by @SenWhitehouse on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

 

It's all fucking infuriating.  Hopefully, it starts getting a lot more coverage.

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6 hours ago, Bookman said:

In a common law legal system, every judge and justice, in every case, should at least consider public sentiment.

What source would a judge or panel of judges use to gauge public sentiment? What would be their go-to source to get a sampling of public opinion?

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In fact ---on matters including due process, 8th amendment, and criminal law, SCOTUS has many times looked to what state legislatures have been doing as a proxy for the will of the people, which it has indicated is a relevant consideration.  Now that SCOTUS itself has gutted the Voting Rights Act and refuses to review any gerrymandering, what is a proper way to gauge the will of the people? Well luckily, there's now no need to consider things other than what centuries-dead white slaveholding men thought in the 18th century. Win/win!

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37 minutes ago, Bookman said:

Do you think judges shouldn't take public sentiment into account? What do you think the "law" is?

Answering a question with a question can sometimes be effective, but in this case it’s just going to lead us in circles. So, never mind.

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