#i just read what the chief justice said about overturning affirmative action and it's so fucked

[weedle-testaburger]

considering their recent rulings i rule 6 to 3 that the us supreme court should be sentenced to death

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

This Supreme Court term belonged to John Roberts. The chief justice was in the majority in nearly every case. And he quite literally had the last word, as he wrote the opinion for the last two cases released this term, which dealt with President Trump’s much sought-after financial records. The rulings were largely interpreted as a rebuke to Trump, and considering Roberts unexpectedly joined the liberals in several other cases this term, some have speculated that the conservative chief might be moving to the center.

But is Roberts actually becoming more liberal?

New data from Supreme Court researchers indicates that Roberts is firmly at the center of the court. According to this year’s Martin-Quinn scores, a prominent measure of the justices’ ideology, there is an 82 percent chance that Roberts was the median justice in the term that just wrapped. However, as the chart below shows, there is some uncertainty about where he actually falls — or how much daylight exists between Roberts’s ideological position this term and the positions of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

But moving to the center of the court does not mean Roberts is becoming a liberal or even a centrist. Yes, he joined the liberals in several high-profile cases, and according to justice pairing data analyzed by Adam Feldman for SCOTUSBlog, he aligned with Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, more frequently than with fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. But many of the cases where Roberts sided with the liberals were limited in scope or temporary in effect. Roberts also helped push forward several long-held conservative goals — including dramatically expanding the definition of religious liberty — as the pivotal vote in many cases.

Roberts has long been perceived as a conservative, both ideologically and temperamentally — a justice who would prefer to gradually chip away at liberal precedents rather than dispatching them with one swift blow. And on an increasingly conservative Supreme Court, it’s not hard to see how that incrementalist sentiment — combined with a fear of what would happen if the court moved too quickly out of the mainstream — might lead Roberts to some unexpected places and deliver some unwelcome losses to the conservative legal movement. But that doesn’t mean he’s changing in any fundamental way, or that he won’t continue to quietly steer the court in a conservative direction. “People seem to see Roberts moving to the center of the court and assume that he’s becoming more liberal,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University. “I would read it a different way — that the court is moving to the right.”

The idea that Roberts is becoming more liberal didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past few years, his ideological position on the court — as measured by the Martin-Quinn scores — has inched toward the center. In 2005, when he joined the court, he was basically indistinguishable ideologically from Justice Samuel Alito, who was appointed around the same time. Now, however, Alito is probably the second most conservative justice on the court, while Roberts is the fifth most conservative.

The easiest way to interpret that trend is simply to conclude that Roberts is becoming more liberal. After all, he wouldn’t be the first Republican-appointed justice to move left over time. In perhaps the most dramatic example in modern Supreme Court history, a Nixon appointee, Justice Harry Blackmun, started off conservative but was the court’s most liberal member by the time he retired in 1994.

Other factors could explain Roberts’s shift, though, starting with a limitation of the Martin-Quinn scores themselves. The scores are estimates produced by a model based on how the justices vote — they are not a direct window into what the justices actually believe or what’s motivating their votes. The scores also can shift as the composition of the court changes, and the court is still adjusting after the previous longtime swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, retired and was replaced in 2018 by Kavanaugh, who has so far proven to be much more reliably conservative.

Think about it this way: One justice has to be in the middle of the court. So when Kennedy retired and was replaced by a more conservative judge, someone else had to take his place in the center. In this case, that somebody was Roberts. “It could be the case that Roberts is actually drifting left,” said Tom Clark, a political science professor at Emory University. “But it could also be an artifact of the statistical model trying to sort out what happens to the space when you add a new person. At this point, we don’t know which one it is.”

The model also retroactively updates justices’ scores for past years at the end of each term. The changes can be substantial with new justices, since the model has little data about their positions when they first join the court. Case in point: In last year’s Martin-Quinn data, Kennedy was deemed to be the most likely median justice in 2017 and Kavanaugh took the role in 2018, not Roberts. But with the addition of 2019 data, Roberts is now estimated to have actually been the likely median in both years. That’s partly because we now have a better understanding of how Kavanaugh tends to rule; it also reflects the a fairly high probability that Roberts was already the median justice in the 2017 term, because Kennedy hardly swung at all in his final year on the court.

Meanwhile, it’s also possible that Roberts just appears to be moving to the left because the kinds of cases that make it to the court are shifting. This effect is especially difficult to measure and the Martin-Quinn scores can only account for it in a limited way. But Clark said if the types of cases being brought before the court are changing, that could matter a lot to how liberal or conservative each justice’s rulings really are. Because it could be that the Trump administration and conservative legal advocates, emboldened by the solid slate of conservatives on the court, are simply pushing Roberts to move to the right faster than he’s willing to go.

Take one high-profile case from this term, where the justices considered a Louisiana abortion restriction that was functionally identical to a Texas law the court had struck down in 2016. In the previous case, Kennedy — who over the course of his career was ideologically unpredictable on a handful of high-salience issues, including the abortion, affirmative action and the death penalty — voted with the liberals against the Texas law. This year, though, Roberts broke the tie, saying that while he still disagreed with the 2016 ruling, he felt he had to adhere to the precedent. That doesn’t mean Roberts’s fundamental stance toward abortion changed, though. Instead, the change in the court’s composition put him in a situation where institutional considerations — like not wanting to overturn a recent precedent on an extremely hot-button issue four months before a presidential election — may have trumped his own ideological preferences.

That’s significant because in the vast majority of cases, Roberts appears to be basically as conservative as he’s ever been. According to The Supreme Court Database, a clearinghouse for data about the court, the share of opinions where he voted in a conservative direction hasn’t actually changed much in the past few years — when Kennedy’s departure and the addition of Trump’s more solidly conservative appointees gave Roberts an increasingly pivotal vote — compared to his opinions between the 2005 and the 2017 terms. (This data is not yet available for the term that just ended.)

Roberts hasn’t really become more liberal

Share of Roberts’s votes that were coded as conservative, before and after the 2016 Supreme Court term

Pre-Trump Post-Trump Cases Votes Conservative Rulings Votes Conservative Rulings Diff. Close 198 81.8% 38 78.9% -2.9 All 914 58.2 137 55.5 -2.7

“Pre-Trump” includes case data for the 2005-2016 terms, while “post-Trump” covers the 2017 and 2018 terms. The 2016 term is counted as pre-Trump because it started before Trump was elected, but it ended in 2017. “Close cases” are defined as those in which the majority was four or five and the minority was three or four.

Source: The Supreme Court Database

In other words, Roberts is still very conservative. (For the record, so was Kennedy.) But several experts told us it’s possible that in Kennedy’s absence, Roberts may be increasingly willing to rule narrowly with the liberals in certain high-stakes cases. Part of his motivation is likely that as chief justice, he feels a responsibility to ensure that the court maintains its reputation as an even-handed institution.

This year was a perfect storm for a chief justice trying to keep the Supreme Court from being dragged into the muck of partisan politics, too. “The country is deeply polarized, we’re heading into a presidential election, there’s a pandemic, an economic crisis, significant social unrest,” said Marin Levy, a professor at Duke Law who studies chief justices. “This is a moment where it’s critical to someone like Roberts that the public maintain its faith in the court.” And in fact, even though this term’s docket was full of hot-button issues, the court’s rulings were largely in step with public opinion, thanks in part to Roberts’s willingness to join the liberals.

So if Kennedy’s forays to the left were motivated by a couple of issues on which his views were more liberal than the rest of the conservative bloc, like gay rights and sometimes abortion, Roberts’s recent swings appear to be be driven by more strategic — and even political — considerations. “He’s concerned about maintaining his own power and the power of the court,” said Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan. It was perhaps a sign of Roberts’s success that some of the biggest conservative victories this term mostly flew under the radar, such as when the conservatives continued to expand the circumstances under which religious schools can qualify for public funding, building on a case from 2017. Litman and others said that Roberts could follow a similar blueprint for eroding something like abortion rights in the future. Rather than overturning precedents outright, he might prefer to whittle away at abortion access by allowing states to pass a patchwork of restrictions, until landmark precedents on abortion eventually become functionally hollow.

Right now, of course, Roberts is still the closest thing we have to a swing justice. But he’s not really a wild card — especially compared to Kennedy, who was genuinely unpredictable on a handful of issues, including abortion. Clark said a better description for Roberts might be the “pivotal” justice, or the person with the power to broker compromises between left and right, allowing him to determine the court’s direction. That moniker is especially apt given that Roberts was so frequently in the majority this term. At SCOTUSBlog, Feldman suggested calling him the “anchor” justice for that reason. The fact that Roberts is chief justice gives him additional power when he votes with the majority, too: He gets to assign the opinion to a specific justice, and that can do a lot to shape the breadth and impact of the final ruling.

One thing does seem clear: Roberts is now by far the most powerful person on the Supreme Court. And he is not willing — at least not yet — to let his fellow conservatives veer sharply to the right. But his occasional votes with the liberals shouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s still a very conservative justice overall. As with Kennedy, the handful of times he swings to the left may come to define his career. And this term he’s certainly proved that Trump — and conservative legal advocates — can’t expect him to rubber-stamp any argument they lay at his feet. But when he does swing, it will likely be political and institutional factors, not a shift in his ideology, that guide his vote. And that means liberals really can’t rely on him to rule their way in the future.

[ariaanna27]

ROGER STONE: ON BOYCOTTS AND CANNABIS

(By Roger Stone) Recently I launched a bipartisan effort to persuade President Donald Trump to honor his pledge made during the presidential campaign to respect the states’ rights to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Partnering with me in this important endeavor is Orlando trial attorney and major Clinton donor and fundraiser John Morgan, Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano, Congressman Matt Gaetz and HBO’s Bill Maher among others.

I have written spoken, marched and rallied against for drug law reform for 20 years. As a libertarian, I am not a newcomer to this fight. I am also a witness in a new lawsuit filed against the Federal government to overturn the feds classification as a Schedule 1 drug.

I spoke to the Cannabis Business Expo in New York City in June, and the bipartisan approach I outlined including an effort to take Cannabis off the Schedule 1 drug classification so doctors can prescribe it to people who might benefit was well received. I am scheduled to speak before the LA- based Cannabis Business Expo on Sept 14.

Recent a small group of activists said they would boycott the Expo if I spoke and vowed to disrupt my speech if my remarks are not canceled.

It’s a free country. They are free not to attend. I have no intention of canceling my remarks which I am giving pro-bono while other major speakers are paid. I feel strongly about this cause.

This group of dissidents uses recycled” research” from Media Matters for America packaging it as a “boycott campaign” for my scheduled speech. The trolls and bots pushing this bullshit sure look like Brock, Carusone and they’re diminutive minions.

My twitter feed is lively and not for the faint of heart. I comment on many matters.This bogus claim I am a racist, anti-Semite or misogynist is based on old tweets that are either taken out of context, twisted or in some cases simply fabricated. I most certainly never referred to myself as a ‘N*gga with a Nixon Tattoo. It’s a Fugazi.

To be clear, I have been speaking out for drug law reform for over 30 years. I spoke along with the Reverend Al Sharpton and Russell Simmons and Drug Reform Activist Randy Credico at a “Countdown to Justice Rally” against New York’s racist, draconian Rockefeller drug laws in 2003. I spoke out again against these racist laws which destroy families and lives at the Yippie Museum in Greenwich Village in 2008. These are hardly the acts of a racist.

I am proud of my libertarian streak and have consistently supported human rights actively opposing an Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendment that was on the ballot in Florida. I also supported both campaigns to legalize medicinal marijuana by constitutional amendment in Florida.

Although I have been an acolyte and intimate of President Richard Nixon, I have been sharply critical of his failed War on Drugs. It was Nixon who, as Vice President was praised by Dr. Martin Luther King for rounding up enough Republican votes in the US Senate to offset the many southern white Democrats who opposed the 1958 Civil Rights Act. President Richard Nixon desegregated the public schools without violence or bloodshed. When LBJ left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When Nixon left, the figure was 80 percent.

Nixon also raised the Department of Justice Civil Rights Enforcement Budget 800 percent, doubled the budget for black colleges, appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president until that time, including LBJ. Nixon invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business, loans to minorities 1,000 percent, and increased U.S. deposits in minority-owned banks 4,000 percent.

Nixon gave us Affirmative Action by adopting the Philadelphia Plan mandating for quotas for the number of blacks in unions, and in college and university admissions. This desegregated the trade unions. Yes, I’m a Nixon Republican.

There is no doubt that some of my tweets are too pungent and politically incorrect for my critics. I did use a word used by the US Census until 2011 that some construed to be a racial epitaph in tweets regarding Herman Cain, Dr. Ben Carson, Alan West and Roland Martin. In retrospect, I see that this attempt at sarcasm can be seen as a slur; therefore, I heartfully apologize to all this gentleman.

I don’t expect this apology to appease my critics because, like the President, nothing I say can please them. Like Trump, I don’t apologize as a general principle. I am violating one of my own Rules. In this case, it’s the right thing to do. I am hopeful some of these gentlemen will accept my apology as it is sincere.

I am many things, but I am not a racist.

There is no doubt that I sometimes use flamboyant, descriptive and politically incorrect language that some people find offensive. It’s 2017, and I suggest these people read the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution which guarantees free-speech even if it is sometimes vulgar. Note- what Media Matters is advocating is censorship, the silencing of those they disagree with. It is both un-American and more egregious than anything I have ever said or written in a 40-year career in American Politics.

I do not apologize for criticizing CNN talking head Ana Navarro based on her entire lack of credentials to opine and her false description as a “Republican strategist.” This is a woman who got caught lying about being an attorney during the Jeb Bush Administration (New York Times) Everything I have ever tweeted about her is accurate is not in any way a reflection of my views on all women.

New York’s Times columnist Gail Collins ripped off a riff about Mitt Romney strapping his dog to the roof of his car and driving to Boston, making it a running gag in her column. I wrote it first in a series of columns at STONEZONE.com. Odious. Dislike of Ms. Collins does not imply criticism of the entire gender of women.

Jill Abrams, formally of the Wall Street Journal, wrote a roundup story on the best-selling books at the time of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and didn’t include my book, “The Man Who Killed Kennedy – The Case Against LBJ,” New York Times Bestseller. Also, it was selling more copies than any book of this genre other than Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Kennedy” (FOX was a selling machine) and out-pacing experienced authors like David Talbot.

Abrams was cavalier about my complaint to her for failure to provide fundamental fairness her story. Thus, I saw her firing at the Wall Street Journal as a reflection of her bad karma. I don’t withdraw my criticism of her. It does not mean that I hate all women.

The access to cannabis for medical purposes that is used by millions of American will end if Jeff Sessions and White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly, aided by the new FBI Director have their way and reignite the “war on drugs” with a federal crackdown on state legalized marijuana. Thus starting a reversal of a directive of Attorney General Eric Holder by which the feds have wisely stood down. Only the President can stop this catastrophe.

The President has told me he is a strong supporter of medicinal marijuana. He has launched a just war on opioids which he has correctly said the real drug abuse crisis today. We must not only assure that the Trump Administration respects the State’s Rights to legalize and set up a system to regulate, tax and sell cannabis, we must also convince the President to take Cannabis off the Schedule 1 drug list.

I am confident both can be done and will not be hindered in my efforts to make this happen. This is not the time for petty partisan politics or the small minded.

You don’t need to agree with me or my politics nor do I need to agree with yours to work together in this vital effort. Our effort includes Republican and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, libertarians and progressives. We agree on only one thing- Cannabis.Those who do not choose to join us can step aside.

My critics are only playing politics and harming the cause of a united bipartisan effort to protect state legalized marijuana in the 29 states where the people have elected to make it legal. They are more interested in scoring petty political points than securing permanent drug law reform.

I will not be deterred from my efforts to persuade the President of the folly of launching a new “War on Drugs” considering the expensive and unjust failure of the last one and to keep his promise to protect the access to cannabis by millions of Americans including many veterans who are using it for medicinal purposes.

  from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/roger-stone-on-boycotts-and-cannabis/

from Roger Stone https://rogerstone1.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/roger-stone-on-boycotts-and-cannabis/