#Chief Justice Roberts

[el-ffej]

LIVE CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS REACTION:

[eideard]

Chief justice's wife earns million$ placing lawyers at firms that argue cases before SCOTUS

The highly controversial and highly unpopular U.S. Supreme Court isn’t just facing a historic loss of confidence, it’s now facing yet another ethics scandal that is likely to lower even further public opinion of the far-right institution that in under two decades has seen its approval rating slashed. Although it will not hear arguments, the issue before the Supreme Court and the American people’s…

[supremecourtmemes]

[saywhat-politics]

The chief justice bashed “public officials” who criticize judges for their partisan rulings “without a credible basis for such allegations”

[rh0mbus0fruin]

if Robert Cyger listened/watched this movie he would get so mad he'd punch holes into the wall

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is an important article by Linda Greenhouse, writing in The New York Times. Therefore, the link above is a gift 🎁 link, so anyone can read the article, even if they don't subscribe to the Times.

Below are some excerpts from the article:

To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline. To show why, I offer a thought experiment. Suppose a modern Rip Van Winkle went to sleep in September 2005 and didn’t wake up until last week. Such a person would awaken in a profoundly different constitutional world, a world transformed, term by term and case by case, at the Supreme Court’s hand. To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies. [...} That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court. It’s worth reviewing how the court accomplished each of the goals. It deployed a variety of tools and strategies. Precedents that stood in the way were either repudiated outright, as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did last year to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or were simply rendered irrelevant — abandoned, in the odd euphemism the court has taken to using. In its affirmative action decision declaring race-conscious university admissions to be unconstitutional, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion did not overturn the 2003 Grutter decision explicitly. But Justice Thomas was certainly correct in his concurring opinion when he wrote that it was “clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.” Likewise, the court has not formally overruled its Chevron decision. Its administrative-law decisions have just stopped citing that 1984 precedent as authority. The justices have simply replaced Chevron’s rule of judicial deference with its polar opposite, a new rule that goes by the name of the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court will uphold an agency’s regulatory action on a major question only if Congress’s grant of authority to the agency on the particular issue was explicit. Deference, in other words, is now the exception, no longer the rule. But how to tell a major question from an ordinary one? No surprise there: The court itself will decide. [...] My focus here on what these past 18 years have achieved has been on the court itself. But of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t stand alone. Powerful social and political movements swirl around it, carefully cultivating cases and serving them up to justices who themselves were propelled to their positions of great power by those movements. The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize. That may not be apparent on a day-to-day or even a term-by-term basis. But from the perspective of 18 years, that conclusion is as unavoidable as it is frightening.

[seldnei]

Fucking SCOTUS.

Honestly, I never thought the Dobbs decision would give me *hope,* but obviously SCOTUS decisions *can* be overturned if you work for it.

So let’s do it, gang. Vote Biden. Vote blue all the way down the ballot. Get the AOCs and Bernies in where we can, get the boring middle-of-the-road Democrats in where they’re the only option. Make it possible to reform the Court, to appoint liberal judges, to overturn these bullshit rulings.

Vote. I know he’s old. I know he’s not your first choice. But we won’t get better choices if we don’t keep voting blue.

[lefthandedbastard]

all of these are true of me! check the tags for the us supreme court justices if you dont want to look them up

[anonymous-dentist]

one of these things is not like the other

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Supreme Court creates train wreck over Texas immigration law.

Over the last forty-eight hours, the Supreme Court has made a monumental mess of its review of a Texas law that seeks to assume control over the US border. If the consequences weren’t tragic, it would be comical.

The Texas law is plainly unconstitutional. It is not even a close question. But the Supreme Court created a situation in which enforcement of that law was stayed and then permitted to go back into effect multiple times in a forty-eighth hour period. It was like the Keystone Cops—all because the Supreme Court does not have the fortitude to control the rogue judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here's the bottom line: As of late Tuesday evening, the Texas law cannot be enforced pending further order of the Fifth Circuit. See NBC News, Appeals court blocks Texas immigration law shortly after Supreme Court action. As explained by NBC,

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in saying in a brief order that the measure, known as SB4, should be blocked. The same court is hearing arguments Wednesday morning on the issue.

The appeals court appeared to be taking the hint from the Supreme Court, which in rejecting an emergency application filed by the Biden administration put the onus on the appeals court to act quickly.

I review the complicated procedural background below with a warning that it may change in the next five minutes. For additional detail, I recommend Ian Millhiser’s explainer in Vox, The Supreme Court’s confusing new border decision, explained.

Let’s start here: The federal government has exclusive authority to control international borders. The Constitution says so, and courts have ruled so for more than 150 years.

There are good reasons for the federal government to control international borders. If individual states impose contradictory regulations on international borders that abut the states, the federal government could not promulgate a single, coherent foreign policy—which is plainly the job of the federal government.

Texas passed a law that granted itself the right to police the southern border and enforce immigration laws, including permitting the arrest and deportation of immigrants in the US who do not have the legal authority to remain in the country.

Mexico immediately notified Texas that it would not accept any immigrants deported by Texas. (Mexico does accept immigrants deported by the US per international agreements.)

A federal district judge in Texas enjoined the enforcement of state law, ruling that it usurped the federal government's constitutional role. Texas appealed.

When a matter is appealed, the court of appeals generally attempts to “maintain the status quo” as it existed between the parties prior to the contested action. Here, maintaining the status quo meant not enforcing the Texas law that allowed Texas to strip the federal government of its constitutional authority over the border.

However, the Fifth Circuit used a bad-faith procedural ploy to suspend the district court’s injunction, thereby allowing Texas law to go into effect. In doing so, the Fifth Circuit did not “maintain the status quo” but instead permitted a radical restructuring of state-federal relations in a way that violated the Constitution and century-and-a-half of judicial precedent.

In a world where the rule of law prevails, the Supreme Court should have slapped down the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith gambit. It did not. Instead, the Supreme Court allowed the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith ploy to remain in effect—but warned the Fifth Circuit that the Supreme Court might, in the future, force the Fifth Circuit to stop playing games with the Constitution.

The debacle is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit. The reason the Fifth Circuit acts like a lawless tribunal is because the Supreme Court has allowed the Fifth Circuit to engage in outrageous, extra-constitutional rulings without so much as a peep of protest from the reactionary majority on the Court.

John Roberts is “the Chief Justice of the United States.” He should start acting like it by reprimanding rogue judges in the Fifth Circuit by name—and referring them to the Judicial Conference for discipline. Until Roberts does that, the Fifth Circuit will do whatever it wants.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[gorgugplushie]

I pee pee out of my peenasd

[lightdancer1]

Democracy died and its grave-digger was John Roberts:

The irony is that between this and the Chevron ruling the SCOTUS has proven what anyone halfwitted knew all along. Originalism was always a hoax, the ultimate aim was furthering authoritarianism. The equal reality is that this ruling invalidated the Chevron ruling before the ink was dry because the first Sulla in the White House will see this problem, abolish the SCOTUS, and then get on with business.

The moral democracy vs. dictatorship part of this election is over, the goal now is to forestall the rise of Sulla as long as humanly possible and to hope no Mussolini does a March on Washington and then exploits the powers he seizes by armed force under this ruling to do as he pleases.

Even if the incumbent doesn't and his would-be replacement is too Alzheimer's ridden to do so, democracy died, and now the US gets to know what too many of our hemispheric neighbors have known for a very long time. What it is to have some dipshit of a caudillo posturing about what a big man he is.

[jonostroveart]

SEMAPHORE

This story is likely to be buried by the very significant news of the unanimous jury conviction in the Trump case, but it’s not insignificant that John Roberts has formally blown off the Senate Judiciary Committee’s request for an ethics discussion.

[william-r-melich]

If Nefarious Breach, You Must Impeach - 04/26/2024

Presidential immunity is something that I haven't previously given much thought to, probably because it's something that hasn't surfaced much as an issue until recently. Yesterday at Trump's hearing on presidential immunity, US Supreme court justice Samuel Alito questioned whether prosecuting former presidents would harm the country's governance. Trump's lawyers argued that former presidents should have absolute immunity for official acts they made during their tenure as president. They said if they didn't, then prosecuting former presidents would become routine and would undermine future presidents from being able to execute difficult decisions without worrying about future legal repercussions. After all, our country's presidents are commonly put in difficult positions wherein the right thing to do would be considered illegal if performed by any other citizen outside of the executive office.

While speaking to Michael Dreeban, an attorney for special counsel Jack Smith's team who are persecuting Trump in two other cases, the Bush-appointed justice (Samuel Alito) asked him this. “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable, democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully, if that candidate is the incumbent?” “Of course,” replied Dreeban. Alito further posited this, “if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election, knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Dreeban replied that he believes there are “lawful mechanisms to contest the results in an election and outside the record” but claimed that President Trump and others “filed dozens of electoral challenges and my understanding is they lost all but one” in the courts following the 2020 election. He continued, “There was an appropriate way to challenge things through the courts with evidence, if you lose, if you accept the results, that has been the nation’s experience. I think the court is well familiar with that.”

Alito rebutted those assertions on whether there are enough legal safeguards to handle prosecutors acting politically. Dreeban and Jack Smith's team have said that prosecutors must go to grand juries for securing indictments as a check against prosecutions that are politically motivated. The justice responded by saying, "prosecutors could convince a jury to indict a ham sandwich."

Trump's lawyers also argued that their client was merely performing his duties as president while looking to uncover voting fraud during the 2020 election.

This week in New York, the former President, in reference to the Supreme Court case, told reporters the following. “If you don’t have immunity, you’re not going to do anything. You’re going to become a ceremonial president, you’re not going to be taking any of the risks, both good and bad.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, along with at least four other justices didn't seem to support the claim that absolute immunity would stop Trump from being prosecuted on charges of supposedly conspiring to overturn his loss in the 2020 election. Roberts was also with several of the other justices who indicated that the case might need to go back to the lower courts previous to the start date of any trial.

Roberts also showed his dismay with the reasoning brought by the Washington appeals court who gave the ruling against President Trump. During the hearing, the chief justice said this. “You know how easy it is in many cases for a prosecutor to get a grand jury to bring an indictment and reliance on the good faith of the prosecutor may not be enough in some cases.”

So, it appears to me that it's likely they will uphold limited presidential immunity, not absolute immunity. As such there's a good chance that it will go back to the lower courts to determine if he was actually performing his official duties while he was questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election results. If it's determined that he was, then immunity would apply, if not then it won't.

Oh, and by the way, there's something I forgot to mention. In the framer's wisdom they installed an important mechanism should the POTUS (President of the United States) engage in severely unlawful, egregious acts; Impeachment, - Duh! (I can't believe I forgot that and it's so important that I had to change the title of this post from, SCOTUS Hearing on Presidential Immunity.) Under impeachment it would require a 2/3rds majority vote in the senate to convict the President or one of his office holders. So, in deference to a famous Johnnie Cochran line, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit;" although with the opposite intention: "If nefarious breach, you must impeach."

[roosterjournal]

Chief Justice Roberts Sounds Alarm on Defying the Judiciary

Chief Justice John Roberts recently issued a significant warning, emphasizing the importance of “judicial independence” as the nation prepares for the upcoming presidential inauguration. This message was part of his annual report detailing the federal judiciary, where he expressed his concerns about the current political climate. In his 15-page report, Roberts noted that the nature of judicial…