#the judicial branch

[deadpresidents]

I just hope these next 4 years go by fast

This election isn't just about the next four years. With Trump in the White House and a Republican Senate at his side, the MAGA movement can pick up where they left off when it comes to packing the federal judiciary with right-wing judges who will control the Supreme Court and appellate courts throughout the country potentially for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this right now. It's the perfect recipe for them to continue stripping reproductive rights away from women nationwide and gives them the opportunity to turn their attention to the other issues that they have been dying to attack, from voting rights to gay marriage and every other extension of personal freedom that has been won by minorities and marginalized people in hard-fought battles over the past 60 years. This is the nightmare scenario that people have been warning folks about for the past few elections. It's here. And there isn't going to be a way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The consequences of this election will have a direct, negative impact on your life -- possibly on the entire remainder of your life. This country just re-elected a President with authoritarian tendencies who is the willing puppet of a dangerous Christian nationalist movement that figured out exactly how to manipulate him (through flattery) for their aims. They have created the perfect vehicle for a genuine cult of personality that they can use to achieve the goals they have been very clear about striving for over the past few years. And you can't blame anybody other than the American voters because they not only elected Trump, but they gave him a fucking mandate, with a Republican Senate and potentially a Republican House. They already have a right-wing dominated Supreme Court for the next few decades, and now they are going to ensure that the entire federal judiciary is in their control for years to come. And don't forget the fact that a few months ago, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave Presidents sweeping immunity for a broad (and conveniently undefined) range of "official" acts, so Trump is going to go into this second term knowing that not only does he not have to deal with the "guardrails" of responsible adults he had around him in his first term (Mattis, Tillerson, Kelly, General Milley, etc), but he knows he can get away with virtually anything and everything that he wants to do this time around. If you thought that Trump's first term was bad, just understand that they are prepared this time and now he's surrounded himself with people who will do his bidding -- people who are perfectly willing to let Trump be Donald Trump.

I wish there was a reason to cry foul, lodge protests, and challenge the election's results. But this wasn't a rigged election. There isn't any confusion about what the voters really wanted. The American people did this. People you know and care about and who say they care about you are the people who did this. We need to recognize that these elections aren't outliers anymore. Trump's supporters aren't simply chaos agents who got lucky on a bad day for the Democrats. That's the country we live in now and we have to find a way to resist it that actually makes a difference because now they have the keys to all the doors and all of the alarm codes. This country has normalized the conspiracy theories and nativism and racism that has powered the MAGA movement since the moment Trump came down the elevator at Trump Tower in 2015. He's given those people permission to be open with their hatred towards people who aren't like them, and it's actually become surprising to see how many Americans have been eager to take advantage of that. I didn't think I had any misconceptions about this country before Donald Trump because I recognized this nation's history, but I clearly had some misconceptions about people I thought I knew until I saw them wearing a red MAGA hat or noticed they had a gigantic flag with Trump's name hanging where their U.S. flag used to hang. Once that happened, it was like a switch went off with them and they started saying things in ways that I'd never heard them speak. I feel like that's happened to the entire country. It breaks my heart and it pisses me off.

For the past few years, I've been warning everybody about how elections have consequences. I imagine that there are hundreds of posts on this blog with that phrase in all caps listed with the tags. Now the elections have happened, and we have to live with real fucking consequences. And we're going to pass these consequences on to other generations because this is the one that you can't get a do-over on. When you give a movement like this the power and the mandate that this country just gave them, there is no easily rolling back the things that they end up doing. They are going to fundamentally change the lives of people in this nation and especially change the way the younger generations of Americans live and love and learn for years to come. And you have people in your life who made that happen. It's another disgusting day in America -- a prelude to another reprehensible four years (at the very least) -- and I'm ashamed of tens of millions of my fellow Americans because this one is on them. They know exactly who the man is that they voted for, and now we know exactly who they are, too.

[griseldagimpel]

I just saw someone confused about this again, so:

During Trump's first term in office, he appointed three (3) justices to the Supreme Court.

After Biden took office in 2020, those Trump-appointed justices were still on the Supreme Court.

Those Trump-appointed justices - as well as three other justices appointed by past Republican presidents - voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

None of the Supreme Court justices appointed by Democratic presidents voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

There just weren't enough Democrat-appointed justices to stop it from being overturned. This is a direct consequence of Trump being elected in 2016. Roe v. Wade would not have been overturned in 2022 if Clinton had won in 2016.

When a president leaves offices, the judges and justices they appointed don't leave office, as well.

[antimony-ore]

The executive branch as a whole is a bigger problem than capitalism

[ggenggar]

at the office birthday party for my now 84 year old coworker eating ice cream and cake and my boss asks me what skibidi toilet rizz means 😔

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

It was likely only a matter of time before right-wing federal judges decided to weigh in on student protests over the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. And, these judges being the reactionaries they are, their contribution to the discourse is not designed to provide solutions or even to advance a coherent worldview. Instead, it’s just some good old-fashioned hippie-punching. On Monday, 13 federal judges, led by Trump appointees James Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and Lisa Branch of the Eleventh Circuit, sent a letter to the president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik. They stated they would no longer hire as law clerks anyone who attends Columbia University — the undergraduate and the law school — starting with the entering class of 2024. 

This isn’t the first time Ho and Branch have pulled this stunt. In the fall of 2022, they both declared they would no longer hire law clerks from Yale Law School after students disrupted speeches by right-wing speakers. In March 2023, they extended their boycott to Stanford after students heckled fellow Trump appointee Judge Kyle Duncan. This time around, they’re joined in the letter to Columbia by 11 other Trump-appointed judges (Alan Albright, David Counts, James W. Hendrix, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, Jeremy D. Kernodle, Tilman E. Self III, Matthew H. Solomson, Brantley Starr, Drew B. Tipton, Daniel M. Traynor, and Stephen Alexander Vaden). The esteemed jurists have three demands for Columbia — but they don’t provide any facts, context, or legal reasoning to underpin them. At only two pages, this is a thin little screed, particularly given that fully one-third of a page is just the list of the judges’ names. 

[...]

Quixotically, the people who will be most hurt by this are conservative students. The progressive students out protesting right now don’t want to clerk for judges like this. Right-wing students who might have contemplated attending Columbia will presumably go elsewhere, meaning the viewpoint diversity the judges demand won’t happen either. When Judge Ho announced his Yale clerk boycott, a Yale student asked him exactly this: “How will we fix the culture of students … if all of the conservatives suddenly boycott Yale with the judges?” Ho didn’t have an answer, instead saying that “if someone has a better idea, I am all ears” and that “the objective is very simple, it’s to restore free speech.” These judges are only part of the current right-wing project to redefine free speech and tolerance as the absence of diversity. They’re joined by people like New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has pushed the “great replacement theory” that Democrats are importing millions of undocumented immigrants to replace white voters. This is a theory endorsed by the marchers at Charlottesville and grounded in the antisemitic belief that Jews are behind the plan. These days, Stefanik is a self-styled protector of Jewish students, holding hearings to harangue university administrators over their ostensibly antisemitic behavior and celebrating when she gets them fired.

There’s also Christopher Rufo, who has helped with everything from destroying Florida’s public university system to ousting former Harvard president Claudine Gay. There’s former Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller, whose “America First Legal” law firm exists largely to file lawsuits to block any government initiative that attempts to redress historical wrongs against people of color. And there are any number of feckless state legislators who are eradicating all diversity initiatives in their states. At root, this is a profoundly cynical enterprise. None of this is borne out of concern for Jewish students. Rather, they serve as a convenient prop for the latest iteration of MAGA bombast. None of these people will ever confront the antisemitism at the core of their party and that Trump, their presumptive presidential nominee, has a decades-long history of stoking. These judges will continue to use their lifetime appointments to roll back rights for everyone they don’t like and they will continue to demand that schools show them fealty. Meanwhile, the students they loathe will continue to risk their safety and their future by standing in solidarity with people thousands of miles away. The kids, as they say, are alright.   

13 right-wing judicial activists serving on various federal courts sent a letter to Columbia University’s scandal-tarred President Minouche Shafik that they will not hire any Columbia attender for law clerk positions in the future as part of the overblown right-wing moral panic about antisemitism on college campuses.

[nazumichi]

a consistent art style is overrated, what about the joy and excitement of bringing something slightly new to a drawing each time <- talking to myself as if i’m a skittish horse.

[deadpresidents]

I hope I'm not jinxing things, but do you see President Harris picking former President Obama for the next vacancy on the SCOTUS?

I'd be stunned if President Obama had any interest in being nominated to the Supreme Court. I think any former President would have a difficult time adjusting to being one of nine justices after the experience of being the most powerful person in the world during their Presidency. President Obama has a deliberative temperament, but I think the judiciary requires an entirely different form of deliberation and I imagine Obama would feel handcuffed as a member of the Supreme Court.

William Howard Taft was appointed to the Supreme Court after leaving the White House and spent nearly nine years (1921-1930) as Chief Justice, but he's the exception to the rule when it comes to former Presidents and the Court. Taft was a judge before he was an executive, and it was his lifelong dream to sit on the Supreme Court, not to be President. Taft had actively worked to be appointed to the Supreme Court as far back as 1889 when Benjamin Harrison was President, but the politics or the timing just never worked out in his favor until after his Presidency. If it had been up to Taft, he would have gladly traded his time in the Executive Branch (under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt) and four years in the White House for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Despite his background in Constitutional law, I think Barack Obama has always been an activist at heart, and while we now have a hyper-political Supreme Court, I don't see the judiciary as the place where Obama wants to spend the rest of his post-Presidency.

(Plus, if/when a President Harris fills a vacancy on the Supreme Court, it's probably best if she picks someone younger than Obama in order to lock down that seat for as long as possible.)

[dragontatoes]

the reason the trolley problems people are making up don't work is that our situation is really very extremely simple: more Palestinians would die and at a faster rate if more Republicans were in office, and that should be enough to convince people who say they care about Palestine to vote for whatever the best alternative is. it actually doesn't even have to involve who's nicer to gay or poor or disabled americans, even if we're only talking about Palestine it's fucking ridiculous to think it won't get worse if Republicans have more power

[gaynarutodude]

America would lose its mind if the non-violent queers, poc, leftists, etc., were even 30% as violent & dangerous as news sources portray them to be!

[jell-o-mel]

I’m pretty sure they released a 5th familiars book in my dream last night. I also had familiars themed DND dice for some reason.

[anthonymyrlados]

The Judiciary at Noon, #11: February 23 to 29, 2024

Keep up-to-date on the US federal judiciary, February 23 to 29, 2024.

Image courtesy of Sora Shimazaki/Pexels Welcome to The Judiciary at Noon! Take a break from work to get an update on the oft-neglected third branch of the United States government, the judicial branch. The series covers any updates to the federal judiciary, including any new judges confirmed, any deaths, resignations, or retirements from the courts, and any new vacancies that have occurred. It…

[fearsomeandwretched]

The SC has basically lost almost all legitimacy or public respect they had and every single day something new illegal a conservative justice does come out

[impetuoustrait]

Ash and Jack finished the term out and while Jack decided to head straight to work, Ash decided she wanted to go back for another degree. In the meantime, they’re just enjoying the calm before the storm together

[ashfae]

"You don't have to like the reality of your choices, but that does not stop them from being the reality of your choices."

I'm just going to leave this here, because this woman said what I've been trying to articulate for ages much more effectively and succinctly than I've been able to

[whatstheusgovernmentdoing]

11/11/24 - Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is not in session today for Veterans' Day