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tx 3 putt

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Sotomayor and Kagan need to think about retiring

The US Senate is a fundamentally broken institution. Democratic judges need to account for that in their retirement decisions.
 

https://apple.news/AFAjhqN_IQYWGsKRxG8Yhpw
 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23507944/supreme-court-sonia-sotomayor-elena-kagan-ruth-bader-ginsburg-retire

 

 

yes, please !

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19 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Sotomayor and Kagan need to think about retiring

The US Senate is a fundamentally broken institution. Democratic judges need to account for that in their retirement decisions.
 

https://apple.news/AFAjhqN_IQYWGsKRxG8Yhpw
 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23507944/supreme-court-sonia-sotomayor-elena-kagan-ruth-bader-ginsburg-retire

 

 

yes, please !

JFC

Quote

Barring extraordinary events, Democrats will control the White House and the Senate for the next two years. They are unlikely to control it for longer than that. The 2024 Senate map is so brutal for Democrats that they would likely need to win a landslide in the national popular vote just to break even. Unless they stanch the damage then, some forecasts suggest that Democrats won’t have a realistic shot at a Senate majority until 2030 or 2032. And even those forecasts may be too optimistic for Democrats.

If Sotomayor and Kagan do not retire within the next two years, in other words, they could doom the entire country to live under a 7–2 or even an 8–1 Court controlled by an increasingly radicalized Republican Party’s appointees.

 

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Interesting topic above whether sotomayor and Kagan should think about retiring. Sotomayor at 68 does create a potential seat that could remain empty or flip to a conservative Justice given the upcoming years with the senate.

While the Constitution does allow the justices to stay there for life that doesn’t mean that they don’t owe something to the party that placed them on the bench. It also doesn’t mean that retirement ends their career as a jurist. 

as for Kagan, she’s 62 so It would seem that staying on the court into the 30s is less risky.

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14 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Interesting topic above whether sotomayor and Kagan should think about retiring. Sotomayor at 68 does create a potential seat that could remain empty or flip to a conservative Justice given the upcoming years with the senate.

We've discussed this before on this thread -- Sotomayor is a lifelong Type 1 diabetic.  I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but practically speaking, her life expectancy is probably less than average, and Biden needs to have a sit-down with her.

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At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Currently working its way thru the courts is whether there's a private right of action to enforce VRA section 2. The courts have been saying yes for decades, with Congress reauthorizing the VRA and extending it without ever saying the courts were getting it wrong. But the fedsoc thinks that's another way to limit people's rights (the vast majority of section 2 cases are brought by private right rather than the DOJ) so some judge in Arkansas said no, there's not one, and he's got at least 2 fans on the Supreme Court already.

If you can't go to court to enforce a right, does that right even exist?


https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/jan/12/federal-appellate-court-hears-argument-on/



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5 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Most important part:

 

I mean, it's just a few people they forgot to question. I'm sure that was just a harmless oversight.

Well we wouldn't have to force Thomas or Alito actively lie to somebody's face now?  That would damage the integrity and august history of the court. 

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So, apparently a new documentary was viewed at Sundance concerning Kavanaugh and the sexual assault accusations. It goes further into detail about the one who said he put his dick in her face and is corroborated by another guy who lived in the same dorm.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-allegations-in-secret-sundance-doc-justice

 

Quote

 

The biggest eye-opener in Justice comes more than midway through its compact and efficient 85-minute runtime, when Liman receives a tip that leads him to an anonymous individual who provides a tape made by Stier shortly after the FBI—compelled by Ford’s courageous and heartrending testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—briefly reopened its investigation into embattled then-nominee Kavanaugh.

In it, Stier relays that he lived in the same Yale dorm as Kavanaugh and, one evening, wound up in a room where he saw a severely inebriated Kavanaugh with his pants down, at which point a group of rowdy soccer players forced a drunk female freshman to hold Kavanaugh’s penis. Stier states that he knows this tale “first-hand,” and that the young woman in question did not subsequently remember the incident, nor did she want to come forward after she’d seen the vile treatment that Ford and Ramirez were subjected to by the public, the media, and the government. The Daily Beast has reached out to Justice Kavanaugh for comment about the fresh allegations.

 

 

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Surprisingly, although Ford is seen speaking to Liman just off-camera at the beginning of Justice, she otherwise doesn’t appear except in archival footage. Still, her presence is ubiquitous throughout the documentary, which generates further anger by noting that the FBI ignored Stier’s tip, along with the majority of the 4,500 others they received regarding Kavanaugh. The Bureau instead chose to send along any “relevant” reports to the very Trump-administration White House that was committed to getting their nominee approved.

The effect is to paint the entire affair as a charade and a rigged game in which accusatory women were unfairly and maliciously put on the defensive, and powerful men were allowed to skate by on suspect evasions and flimsy denials.

 

 

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“The effect is to paint the entire affair as a charade and a rigged game in which accusatory women were unfairly and maliciously put on the defensive, and powerful men were allowed to skate by on suspect evasions and flimsy denials.”

Yeah, well, to be fair that was obvious to us who were watching live and in real time. We don’t need a documentary to tell us that. And any new information will be treated the same way by those who sided with that lying, crying, whiny little bitch Kavanaugh the first time around.

Still, I look forward to seeing it. Sounds like it’s going to be money. 

Edited by WhatTheBuck
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  • 2 weeks later...
21 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Any reason why the justices don’t have a code of ethics ?

Just give them the same code of ethics as federal judges ?

 

Supervisory authority over the federal courts is assigned to to the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the lower federal courts, its judges, and their conduct, including adopting judicial ethics rules and holding proceedings to enforce them.  This includes the Code of Conduct, which are the ethics rules governing federal judges.  The Judicial Conference is a creature of statute, passed by Congress, but its members are all Article III judges, so it doesn't violate separation of powers because Congress does have the ability to set the parameters of the judges of the "inferior courts."

Congress does not have any constitutional power over the Supreme Court justices, however, and therefore the disciplinary actions of the Judicial Conference are limited to lower court judges.  So there is no "body," like the Judicial Conference, to enforce the Code of Judicial Conduct against Supreme Court justices.

So, the Code of Conduct at least theoretically applies to Supreme Court justices (its introduction states that it applies to the lower court judges, likely to avoid running afoul of separation of powers).  But no one can enforce it other than Congress via impeachment.

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9 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

But no one can enforce it other than Congress via impeachment.

And this ties in to one of the biggest problems.  Removal from office is the most extreme remedy a Code of Ethics can provide.  There are a lot of lesser penalties and even the Judicial Conference can't remove a lower court federal judge from office, that is still an impeachment matter, but it can censure them and take particular or all cases away from them for a period of time, among other things.

So, Congress is really your huckleberry for Supreme Court discipline, but all they can do is impeach.

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One thing I've learned from TwiceHorn's legal posts, is that the legal profession has, seemingly, made it damn near impossible to face consequences for unethical and illegal acts.  It doesn't matter if you're an attorney or a judge, one pretty much has to "shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave." to see any Find Out.  

No wonder people hate attorneys. 

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2 hours ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

One thing I've learned from TwiceHorn's legal posts, is that the legal profession has, seemingly, made it damn near impossible to face consequences for unethical and illegal acts.  It doesn't matter if you're an attorney or a judge, one pretty much has to "shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave." to see any Find Out.  

No wonder people hate attorneys. 

Here you're talking about nine members of the legal profession, an infinitesimally small percentage of lawyers.  And, lawyers didn't set up this system, except to the extent the drafters of the Constitution were lawyers.  This is a "problem" with the Constitution and one that stems partially from its genius:  the separation of powers.

As with many cases in the Constitution, it relies on good-faith actors.  And, some of the ethical problems that have been identified probably really aren't ethical problems, just wishcasting to remove people you find distasteful.

The thing about Roberts' wife is pretty ludicrous:  her clients are the people she recruits and places, not the law firms where they're placed, even if they do pay the bills. The Ginni Thomas thing is more problematic, but to create a real ethical problem, I think her actions are going to have to be imputed to Clarence more clearly than they have been, to date.

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17 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Here you're talking about nine members of the legal profession, an infinitesimally small percentage of lawyers.  And, lawyers didn't set up this system, except to the extent the drafters of the Constitution were lawyers.  This is a "problem" with the Constitution and one that stems partially from its genius:  the separation of powers.

As with many cases in the Constitution, it relies on good-faith actors.  And, some of the ethical problems that have been identified probably really aren't ethical problems, just wishcasting to remove people you find distasteful.

The thing about Roberts' wife is pretty ludicrous:  her clients are the people she recruits and places, not the law firms where they're placed, even if they do pay the bills. The Ginni Thomas thing is more problematic, but to create a real ethical problem, I think her actions are going to have to be imputed to Clarence more clearly than they have been, to date.

I think you're really underestimating the significance of this.

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1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

I think you're really underestimating the significance of this.

Of what, specifically?  Lawyer discipline broadly is a separate issue from Supreme Court ethics.

There is some degree of appearance of impropriety that should be avoided, but that type of thing never results in removal of a judge.  Recusal perhaps.

But it's always going to be problematic to have a system that questions the ethics of what purports to be the highest court in the land.

Give the legislature too much control and it's raw politics at work.  Really raw.

ETA:  the bold was obscured when I replied.  I just find it hard to imagine a conversation between Roberts and the Mrs., "Oh, Kirkland & Ellis is paying you $100k for that last placement, geez, I better give Paul Clement some extra rope on this one."

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Paying a spouse is a very long-standing, tried and true method of currying favor with a public official. If the wife of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States called you up and recommended that you hire someone and pay her for the referral, and you frequently had business before the Court, do you honestly think the fact that you often have business before the Court wouldn't play a factor in your decision? Maybe you wouldn't see it as an opportunity to get favorable treatment, but you'd have to consider the impact on your clients if you refused.  

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1 minute ago, wildcat09 said:

Paying a spouse is a very long-standing, tried and true method of currying favor with a public official. If the wife of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States called you up and recommended that you hire someone and pay her for the referral, and you frequently had business before the Court, do you honestly think the fact that you often have business before the Court wouldn't play a factor in your decision? Maybe you wouldn't see it as an opportunity to get favorable treatment, but you'd have to consider the impact on your clients if you refused.  

If it were some kind of more direct payment, I might agree with you.  This is a little too roundabout for me to give it a lot of credibility.

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How is it roundabout? Just because she nominally has a "client" and they're not literally handing her a bag full of cash with a dollar sign on it doesn't mean it doesn't at least have an appearance of impropriety. It could be honest, but it sure as shit looks like a professional protection racket. 

 

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24 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

How is it roundabout? Just because she nominally has a "client" and they're not literally handing her a bag full of cash with a dollar sign on it doesn't mean it doesn't at least have an appearance of impropriety. It could be honest, but it sure as shit looks like a professional protection racket. 

 

Well, given that Kirkland, for example, has to hire her client for a year or more and pay her a relatively small percentage of what they're paying the placed lawyer, it's a mighty inefficient way to funnel money to a Justice.  Plus, you have to impute her knowledge to him ala the hypothetical conversation.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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I'm pretty sure any biglaw firm or boutique appellate firm with a lot of cases before the Court would be more than happy to do that if they thought it would help them curry favor with Roberts.  I'm also sure that if even a couple of them did it because they thought it would help them curry favor, the rest would feel like they had to do the same to avoid being punished. Even if it's all actually on the up and up (and I see absolutely no reason to give John Roberts the benefit of the doubt), she should find other ways to make money. We're talking about the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States here, the standard should be higher than "well it's not obviously felony bribery" (which John Roberts has coincidentally helped write almost entirely out of existence). I know that's not the standard, and that's a big part of the fucking problem.

On another note, "liberal Jews don't deserve religious liberty" is now the affirmative legal position of the American right:

 

 

Edited by wildcat09
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6 hours ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

One thing I've learned from TwiceHorn's legal posts, is that the legal profession has, seemingly, made it damn near impossible to face consequences for unethical and illegal acts.  It doesn't matter if you're an attorney or a judge, one pretty much has to "shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave." to see any Find Out.  

No wonder people hate attorneys. 

I really don't know what you're talking about.  I can show you the Texas Bar Journal, which every month publishes the list of lawyers who have been disbarred, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for ethical lapses.  It's pretty clear evidence that members of the legal profession do face consequences for unethical or illegal acts.

There are nine people who are not subject to those ethical constraints.  That's it.  Nine.  And if you want to enforce some ethical constraints on them, then you need to petition your Congressman to do that.  It's not the legal profession's job (or within its ability) to enforce standards the Constitution hasn't created.

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I really don't know what you're talking about.  I can show you the Texas Bar Journal, which every month publishes the list of lawyers who have been disbarred, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for ethical lapses.  It's pretty clear evidence that members of the legal profession do face consequences for unethical or illegal acts.
There are nine people who are not subject to those ethical constraints.  That's it.  Nine.  And if you want to enforce some ethical constraints on them, then you need to petition your Congressman to do that.  It's not the legal profession's job (or within its ability) to enforce standards the Constitution hasn't created.

The “don’t fuck up like these people” section is the only one I consistently read. But 9/10 times it comes down to (1) call your clients back and (2) don’t use their money as your own.

Pretty simple.
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