Sonia Sotomayor Justice Bak

bak 4 26

promoted to primary: opposed CU

MERRI OK

often vs clarence

see shadow docket only dissent gives us clues

~PPL LOSE EG 1ST AMEND PRESS

Dissent:Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested corporate personhood was a mistake. The majority ignored the argument that corporations are already granted a number of privileges (eternal life, ability to sign contracts). Justice Stevens wrote a ninety page dissenting opinion, the longest in his career.

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dissent wise latina woman indeed

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AN 4 26

During an April speech at the University of Alabama Law School, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded the alarm about the number of emergency appeals to SCOTUS coming from the second Trump administration.

The Barack Obama appointee told attendees, "We've done it to ourselves. The newspapers are filled with reports about how many emergency motions we are receiving. It's unprecedented in the Court's history.”

Sotomayor noted that there is "disagreement" among justices over whether Trump administration policies being blocked or held up in the lower federal courts merit examination by the High Court.

The justice explained, "There are members of my Court.... who believe that when Congress passes a law, it causes Congress and the people irreparable harm to have that law ignored.... It has changed the paradigm on the Court."

Newsweek's Jenna Sundel points out that Sotomayor "expressed similar concerns last year in a dissent to a decision related to the government's ability to remove illegal immigrants to countries other than the ones listed on their removal orders."

According to Sundel, the second Trump Administration "has filed around 30 emergency applications with the Supreme Court over the past 15 months, and the Court has ruled in its favor more than 80 percent of the time."

The Hill's Tolu Talabi, covering Sotomayor's University of Alabama speech on April 10, notes, "The administration has appealed cases related to Trump's immigration directives and his administration's firings of members of independent federal agencies. The administration says it is a result of federal district judges overstepping their authority to block Trump's agenda, while the president's critics say the judicial decisions against his administration reflect it acting lawlessly."

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AN 3 26

On Monday, March 23 in the case Villarreal v. Alaniz, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Laredo, Texas-based journalist Priscilla Villarreal — who believes she was wrongly arrested while doing her work. Villarreal argued that the arrest was a First Amendment violation, but most of the High Court's justices disagreed with her appeal and declined to take the case.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, however, offered a vehement dissent in the decision, agreeing with Villarreal (who goes by La Gordiloca online) that journalism was being treated like a crime.

In a newletter published by Slate on March 26, journalist Shirin Ali emphasizes that the High Court's Villarreal v. Alaniz decision and Sotomayor's dissent come at a time when journalism is under attack from the second Trump Administration.

"This week," Ali argues, "the Supreme Court effectively shielded the nation's law enforcement from consequences when it treats journalism as a crime. In rejecting an appeal in Villarreal v. Alaniz, the Court has allowed local officials in Texas to remain immune from prosecution for arresting a journalist who published information she received from a government official. This case presented a strikingly simple question: Does it violate a journalist's First Amendment rights if they are arrested for requesting and publishing information that a government employee willingly hands over?.... The case of Villarreal v. Alaniz has been ping-ponging through the courts since 2019, when it was first filed by Priscilla Villarreal….. Things took a sharp turn for her in 2017, when she was arrested at her home for allegedly violating section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code."

Ali adds, "The obscure law bans a person from soliciting or receiving nonpublic information from a public servant by means of their office or employment with the intent to obtain a benefit."

The Slate reporter notes that although a judge dismissed the charges against Villareal and criticized the Texas law for being too vague, Villareal "fought back with a lawsuit demanding damages."

In her dissent, Sotomayor laid out her arguments in favor of Villareal's position.

The Barack Obama appointee wrote, "It should be obvious that this arrest violated the First Amendment….. By arresting Villarreal, rather than solely disciplining the employee for any wrongdoing, county officials took this 'everyday journalism' and transformed it 'into a crime.' This was a blatant First Amendment violation. No reasonable officer would have thought that he could have arrested Villarreal, consistent with the Constitution, for asking the questions she asked."

The High Court's March 23 decision, Ali argues, is especially bad in light of the Trump Administration's attacks on the First Amendment.

"As we collectively watch Trump's second presidency play out, when he has weaponized every tool at the executive's disposal to attack speech he does not like —Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, late night host Jimmy Kimmel, and a slew of major national news organizations come to mind — the Supreme Court's lack of action threatens all Americans," Ali writes. "Journalists have a singular ability to hold the Trump Administration and local governments all across the country accountable, through shedding light on what they are doing and how they are wielding their power. Criminalizing this work without consequence doesn't just endanger those journalists; it threatens everyday Americans who rely on local and national reporting in nearly all aspects of their lives."

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Sotomayor corners GOP lawyer on Trump’s 'quid pro quo' in campaign finance argument

AN 12 9 25

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted loosened campaign finance rules during oral arguments in a case that would allow political parties to receive even more donations.

Calling it “the most consequential campaign finance-related dispute” since Citizens United, Axios explained that “the justices will decide whether to eliminate a federal law that limits the amount of money big-money party committees can spend in direct coordination with favored candidates.”

Appearing skeptical that the Court should rule in his favor, Justice Sotomayor walked Noel Francisco, the attorney for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, through some top donors to both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates while warning about the appearance of quid pro quo.

“Your answer is suggesting to me that every time we interfere with the congressional design, we make matters worse,” Justice Sotomayor said. “You’re telling us that Citizens United and McCutcheon ended up, yes, in amplifying the voice of corporations, but diminishing another voice, that of the party.”

“Now, you want to now tinker some more and try to raise the voice of one party,” she explained. “Our tinkering causes more harm than it does good.”

Disagreeing, Francisco replied, “Your Honor, I personally never think free speech makes things worse. I think it virtually always makes it better.”

Without mentioning any donors’ names, Justice Sotomayor then said that “in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton set up a joint victory fund with the DNC, 32 state parties, which allowed a single donor to give up to $356,000.”

“In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign launched a joint fundraising operation with his own leadership PAC, the RNC, and 40 State Republican Party committees, that saw donations of up to $814,600,” she said, noting, “I’m not picking on Donald Trump.”

“Joe Biden’s victory fund, together with the DNC and the party committees of all 50 states, um, raised up to $1.3 billion,” the justice added.

She warned that “once we take off this coordinated expenditure limit, then what’s left? What’s left is nothing. No control whatsoever.”

Francisco disagreed again.

“You mean to suggest,” Justice Sotomayor replied, “that the fact that one major donor to the current president, the most major donor to the current president, got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration, does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?”

“Your Honor,” Francisco responded, “I’m not 100% sure about the example that you’re looking at, but if I am familiar, if I think I know what you’re talking about, I have a hard time thinking that his salary that he drew from the federal government was an effective quid pro quo bribery, which may be why nobody has even remotely suggested that.”

Sotomayor warned, “Maybe not the salary, but certainly, the lucrative government contracts might be.”

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AN 12 25

On Monday morning, December 8, the U.S. Supreme Court listened to oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter — a case dealing with President Donald Trump's ability, under the U.S. Constitution, to fire employees of independent government agencies.

Trump and his allies, in the case, are promoting a far-right legal doctrine known as the Unitary Executive Theory — which claims that presidents have total control over who can be fired in the federal government. But opponents of the Unitary Executive Theory vehemently disagree, arguing that Congress has the ability to create agencies that are independent from a president's executive powers. One of those opponents is Rebecca Slaughter, who is arguing that Trump had no right to fire her from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) because of the independence she enjoyed.

During the December 8 hearing, Solicitor General John Sauer was aggressively grilled by the High Court's three Democratic appointees: Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. And MS NOW's Lisa Rubin offered, emphasizing that Kagan was essentially accusing Trump of trying to carry out an "enormous power grab." VID]

Rubin told Cabrera, "This concept of a unitary executive…. has gained currency among political conservatives," adding, "Certainly, it's not a legally conservative theory because it is a gigantic enlargement of executive power. That's not how legal conservatives have traditionally thought, but that is what's going on here."

According to Rubin, the "liberal justices" are "playing out the consequences of the logic being employed by the (Trump) Administration, which is (that) this isn't just about the FTC."

Rubin told Cabrera, "I want to read to you something that Justice Kagan said in her discussion with the solicitor general, John Sauer, because I thought it got to the heart of what this is really about…. The idea was that the president was supposed to do the executing, but he wasn't supposed to do the legislating…. In other words, in Justice Kagan's view, this is a power grab by the president… That, according to Justice Kagan and the other liberals on the Court, is an enormous power grab with real consequences for our country."

Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler, also on the panel, predicted that the High Court's GOP-appointed justices will "almost certainly" rule in Trump's favor and "say the president has the authority to fire the FTC commissioner."

"This outcome is virtually certain," Butler told Cabrera and Rubin — who agreed with him that the outcome in Trump v. Slaughter is a "fait accompli" and that the GOP-appointed supermajority will reject the arguments of Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson."

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immunity 6-3

the Supreme Court justices who dissented to Monday's ruling on former President Donald Trump's presidential immunity claim called it a mockery of the Constitution that reshapes the institution of the presidency.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented to Chief Justice John Roberts ruling that Trump was entitled to absolute immunity for actions carried out in his official capacity as president — but not all presidential actions were official.

AN 9 25

Sotomayor stopped short of denouncing Kavanaugh — but we don't have to

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AN 9 25

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had harsh words for the Supreme Court in her dissent in a ruling allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to continue to arrest people based on profiling Latinos working low-wage jobs.

Monday morning, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an emergency decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo.The case concerns “Operation At Large,” which deployed ICE agents in the Los Angeles area to car washes, bus stops, farms and other locations believed to be frequented by Latino people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants. On July 11, the Central District Court of California ruled that ICE had to stop Operation At Large until appeals in the case could be heard.

The Court’s ruling contained no official explanation for the ruling, however Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence. In his concurrence, Kavanaugh said the law allowed ICE to “‘briefly detain’ an individual ‘for questioning’” if they have “a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned . . . is an alien illegally in the United States.”

Operation At Large, he said, represented “reasonable suspicion” to detain someone on the following factors: “(i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity.”

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He added that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but could be a “‘relevant factor,” and that if someone detained by ICE turned out to be a citizen, they would be “free to go after the brief encounter.”

Sotomayor disagreed that this is what was happening, citing what had happened to other citizens. Jason Gavidia worked at a Los Angeles tow yard that ICE stopped at. Agents repeatedly asked if he was a citizen. They then took his phone, pushed him against a metal fence, twisted his arm, and took away his identification, according to Sotomayor’s dissent.

“Other Operation At Large encounters have included even more force and even fewer questions. For example, agents pulled up in four unmarked cars to a bus stop in Pasadena; ‘the doors opened and men in masks with guns started running at’ three Latino men who were having their morning coffee, waiting to be picked up for work,” she wrote.

“In Glendale, nearly a dozen masked agents with guns ‘jumped out of . . . cars’ at a Home Depot, and began ‘chasing’ and ‘tackl[ing]’ Latino day laborers without ‘identify[ing] themselves as ICE or police, ask[ing] questions, or say[ing] anything else.’ In downtown Los Angeles, agents ‘jumped out of a van, rushed up to [a tamale vendor], surrounded him, and handled him violently,’ all ‘[w]ithout asking . . . any questions.'”

Sotomayor concluded that Operation At Large and the Court’s decision “all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

She also condemned the court for not issuing an explanation beyond the concurrence. She alleged that the Court had been eager to “circumvent the ordinary appellate process” when it comes to President Donald Trump and his administration.

“Some situations simply cry out for an explanation, such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly violates the law,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that Operation At Large and the Court’s ruling clearly violates the Bill of Rights.

“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers.’ After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent,” she wrote.

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an 7 25

Anyone wanting to understand the brouhaha over Pam Bondi’s refusal to turnover (or even acknowledge) the Epstein files need look no further than what the Supreme Court just did.

In McMahon v. New York the Supremes gave Trump a simple way to revoke federal spending authorized by Congress: just fire everyone responsible for implementing that spending.

The high court is allowing Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to fire over half the people who work for the Department of Education until there’s a full hearing on the constitutionality of their action. But by then it will be too late to save much of the department.

Note that the Supreme Court made this astounding decision on its so-called “shadow docket” where it doesn’t even have to explain itself (the only record we have is Justice Sotomayor’s dissent).

No matter that Congress created the Department of Education; apparently, Trump can effectively end it. No matter that Congress in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits a president from unilaterally refusing to spend money that has been authorized by Congress; apparently, Trump can disregard the Act.

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Trump now has unbridled power to repeal federal laws by the simple expedient of firing federal employees who implement them.

Why? How? On what basis? Who’s behind this? We don’t know. We may never know.

Which gets us to the brouhaha over Jeffrey Epstein.

For years, Trump has talked darkly of a “deep state” — a secret cabal intent on destroying America by harming the nation’s children.

Such as, perhaps, six justices who let him shut down the Education Department without even setting out their reasons?

Recall “Pizzagate,” the QAnon conspiracy theory that in 2016 allegedly linked Democrats to a ring of child sex-traffickers. It’s still around but has morphed into a less partisan conspiracy theory involving an alleged worldwide elite of child sex-traffickers.

Jeffrey Epstein and his death fit perfectly. Many right-wing media personalities have posited that the billionaire convict was murdered in prison as part of a cover-up of a sprawling sex-trafficking conspiracy.

Senior Trump administration officials built up great fanfare around the release of the supposed Epstein “client list.”

Even JD Vance accused the government of hiding the list. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case,” Vance said, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”

But that was back in 2021, before Vance became part of the, um, conspiracy.

In February of this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged the existence of Epstein’s client list. She said the client list is “sitting on my desk right now.”

Now the Trump-Vance administration says Epstein’s client list doesn’t exist.

The Epstein case illustrates Trump’s “deep state” no less than does an unsigned “shadow docket” Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to wipe out the Department of Education.

The phrase “Epstein didn’t kill himself” — a rebuttal to the official explanation of Epstein’s death — has taken on a cultural meaning way beyond the facts of the case. It means an unaccountable elite doing evil things in secret.

Trump built his political base on that premise. Once in office, he said time and again, he would expose that unaccountable, secret, evil elite.

No wonder 70 percent of voters believe “law enforcement is withholding information about powerful people connected to Epstein,” including 61 percent of Trump voters. And 58 percent of voters said Trump “maybe was or definitely was” involved in a cover-up.

Conspiracy theories thrive when elites act in secret. I have no idea whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered. But Wired Magazine’s metadata — showing that the FBI’s “raw” surveillance video from the night Epstein killed himself is seemingly missing 2 minutes and 53 seconds — got my attention.

As did the Supreme’s bonkers secret decision in McMahon.

And I’m no conspiracy theorist.

After hyping the promised release, a joint FBI and Department of Justice report last week said they had found no evidence of a list — or that Epstein, who died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019, had been murdered — prompting outcry from within MAGA circles.

As Bondi faces heightened scrutiny for her repeated attempts to dodge questions about the Epstein files, Loomer also teased that “there are people in the White House who agree with me that Pam [Bondi] spent too much time on Fox News and her statements were inconsistent and undermined what messaging is today about the Epstein files.”

Other prominent MAGA-aligned supporters of the president have also warned that Trump could see significant damage to his standing among his base if he does not change course.

Sixty-three percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday said that they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files. Republicans were also nearly split. Just 40 percent said they support how he’s handled the files, with 36 percent disapproving and another 20 percent not offering an opinion.

Mike Flynn — who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term — wrote in a lengthy X post on Wednesday that Trump needed to “gather your team and figure out a way to move past this.”

“The roll out of this was terrible, no way around that,” Flynn wrote. “Americans want America to be successful, therefore, WE NEED YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”

Elon Musk — with whom Trump had a blowup fight last month in which Musk accused Trump of being named in the Epstein files — criticized his former boss for trying to paint the whole situation as a hoax.

“He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday.

The MAGA meltdown over Epstein “could be his Afghanistan going into the fall,” Mark Mitchell, head of polling and operations at Rasmussen Reports, told Steve Bannon Tuesday on his “War Room” podcast.

“People are trying to say this isn’t a big deal,” Mitchell said. “People are trying to say nobody wants this Epstein information out. It’s an absolute misdirection. This is horrifying. And if it isn’t corrected, it threatens derailing Trump’s agenda, getting rid of his political capital.”

“This is not about a guy who died in 2019, this is about a representation of two-tier justice and about unaccountable government,” Mitchell told Bannon.

On Wednesday, conservative political commentator John Solomon told Bannon that he had interviewed the president, and that Trump supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate elements of the Epstein case as part of a broader look into a supposed deep state conspiracy to punish the Republican Party.

“I think he’s frustrated by all the social media chatter by people who don’t really know what’s in the Epstein files,” Solomon said. “He was very pointed about that, let’s stay focused on the things that matter to the American people. ‘I want the answers to Epstein like everyone’, he said, so let the prosecutor do that.”

The Epstein fiasco also prompted Speaker Mike Johnson to split with Trump on Tuesday, calling for the Department of Justice to release all the information it has on the sex offender in the name of “transparency.”

“It’s a very delicate subject, but you should put everything out there, let the people decide it,” Johnson told conservative commentator Benny Johnson, adding that Bondi should explain her previous claims of having the elusive Epstein “client list.”

Just a day prior, the Louisiana Republican had defended Bondi, choosing to defer to the Trump administration instead of criticizing the attorney general.

But Trump appears to remain unmoved despite growing rebellion within his MAGA cohort.

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump repeated his claims that the whole ordeal was a “hoax” peddled by Democrats and once again defended Bondi’s handling of the case.

“She’s done very good. She says ‘I gave you all the credible information,’ and if she finds any more credible information, she’ll give that too. What more can she do than that?” Trump said, adding that he had “lost a lot of faith in certain people” over their outcry on the administration’s approach to the issue.

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omg 6 25 an neutered judic on natl injunction

dissent soto and kbj

What the Supreme Court did was far more dangerous than ending birthright citizenship

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AN 5 25

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its controversial 6-3 decision in Trump v. the United States, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was downright scathing in her dissent.

The High Court's right-wing supermajority ruled that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed in office but not for unofficial acts. And Sotomayor, in her dissent, warned that that under the ruling's guidelines, a president could order the assassination of a political rival and claim it was an official act and therefore, exempt from criminal prosecution.

In Sotomayor's view, the Trump v. the United States decision gave the federal government's executive branch way too much power. And in an article published by Slate on May 27, journalist/attorney Mark Joseph Stern argues that the High Court — four months into Donald Trump's second presidency — is imperiled by its own ruling.

"As the first Supreme Court term of Donald Trump’s second presidency draws to a close," Stern explains, "one particularly alarming throughline has emerged: The Court's decision in Trump v. U.S.nearly one year ago has emboldened the president to challenge the limits of judicial authority to their breaking point. The Supreme Court's 6–3 decision granting Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution looked disastrous from the moment it was released in July 2024. Its impact has only grown more dire since then, as a string of emergency orders and late-night rulings from the Court in response to Trump's daily assaults on the Constitution makes plain."

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Stern continues, "At the time, the most immediate consequence of Trump v. U.S. appeared to be its derailment of special counsel Jack Smith's effort to try Trump for his attempted subversion of the 2020 election. And that outcome undoubtedly bolstered Trump's successful campaign to retake the White House by taking a January 6 trial off the table before November 2024."

The High Court's six GOP-appointed justices, Stern argues, shot themselves in the foot in Trump v. the United States —and now, they're paying the price.

"The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the Court's own power," Stern laments. "Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment. In case after case since Trump's restoration, the Court has tried to have it both ways, reeling in some of his most extreme actions — while still giving the GOP most of what it wants — without entirely ceding its own power to tell the president 'no.' And so, a malignant dynamic is now unfolding between an imperial court and the president whom it crowned 'a king above law.'"

Stern adds, "The conservative supermajority continues to pursue its own agenda, which includes an aggressive expansion of executive authority. But it is doing so at the worst possible time, when the presidency has been captured by an aspiring authoritarian who defies all constitutional constraints. So, the Supreme Court is caught between its own desire to shift the law rightward and its fitful inclination to shoot down Trump's most extreme moves — if only to preserve its own power."

*Mark Joseph Stern's full article for Slate is available at this link.

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AN 5 25

During a hearing on Thursday morning, May 15, Solicitor General John Sauer was questioned by justices of the U.S. Supreme Court — including Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts. The hearing involved universal injunctions blocking President Donald Trump's executive order (EO) against birthright citizenship.

Attorneys who are challenging Trump's order stress that it is unconstitutional, as birthright citizenship is protected by the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.

During her questioning, Kagan asked Sauer, "Does every single person that is affected by this EO have to bring their own suit? Are there alternatives? How long does it take? How do we get to the result that there is a single rule of citizenship…. that is the rule that we've historically applied, rather than the rule that the EO would have us do?"

After Sauer was questioned by Barrett, the conservative justice accused him of being evasive in his responses to Kagan's questions.

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Barrett told Sauer, "Are you really going to answer Justice Kagan by saying there's no way to do this expeditiously?"

The questioning is receiving a lot of responses on X, formerly Twitter — some from angry MAGA Republicans, others praising their questions.

Law professor Jonathan Turley tweeted, "are you really going to answer [J]ustice [K]agan by saying, there's no way to do this expeditiously?"

David W. Green, a self-described "MAGA patriot," told Turley, " If the conclusion reached is anything other than 'judicial overreach has gone too far,' then we have an unconstitutional judicial branch and a constitutional crisis."

Jim Devine, a self-described "conservative libertarian," said, " I believe we will be seeing some hypocrisy soon."

MAGA user Dave Harvilicz, @DaveHarvilicz posted, "Amy Coney Barrett on universal injunctions is currently showing her intellectual inadequacy. Better diligence on judicial appointments is warranted."

@GulfFLLinda posted, "The 14th amendment was meant to protect the children of slaves. That’s it. Which should have been done. Period. You’re right it will be Barrett and Roberts who choose to interpret the Constitution and make up their own rules."

Eric Daugherty wrote, "The Supreme Court must overturn Birthright Citizenship. Amy Coney Barrett and/or John Roberts will be required. It was not created so foreign nations could implant pregnant mothers into our country to "anchor" themselves here. Even thinking about the fact this is allowed is ludicrous."

X user Amanda Giancana wrote, " Solicitor Gen Sauer is gettin ANNIHILATED by #SCOTUS, he’s an embarrassment [and] so outta his depth. [Barrett] just called him out on his disgraceful response to Kagan — “did u really answer Justice Kagan with “there’s no way to do this expeditiously!"

Journalist Brian Cano Sr. tweeted, "@SCOTUSblog: Justice Kagan questioned the rationale behind bringing Trump v. CASA, Trump v. Washington, and Trump v. New Jersey to the Supreme Court, stating, 'There's no way that I would bring this before the court.' Is D. John Sauer taking one for the team?"

*Watch the full video below or at this link.

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an 10 24 badash

last year, when Donald Trump’s attorneys declared he had “total immunity” from prosecution, many in the legal community scoffed. No president in all of American history had ever proclaimed they could not be convicted for serious violations of law—most infamously, President Richard Nixon had to have been keenly aware he might be criminally prosecuted.

Just eleven days after Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, TIME reported, “Nixon’s new status as a private citizen puts him in grave peril.”

In fact, TIME continued, “the Watergate grand jury had vigorously wanted to indict Nixon while he was President.”

The American public is aware presidents can be prosecuted for certain crimes, and there is a foundational expectation of that possibility. In February of 2021, after the Democratic House impeached Donald Trump, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared the ex-president should face criminal prosecution rather than impeachment.

“Donald Trump’s legal troubles are far from over, despite his acquittal in the U.S. Senate impeachment trial that ended on Saturday,” Reuters reported on February 16, 2021. “Minority Leader Mitch McConnell noted this just moments after voting to acquit Trump, saying the courts are the proper forum for holding the former president accountable for his role in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.”

We now know that after Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the claim of “presidential immunity” by Trump’s attorneys, it refused, waiting for a lower court to weigh in. Chief Justice John Roberts sent a “scathing critique of [that] lower-court decision and a startling preview of how the high court would later rule,” The New York Times reported last month.

“Behind the scenes, the chief justice molded three momentous Jan. 6 and election cases that helped determine the former president’s fate,” according to The Times’ reporting.

“’I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently’ from the appeals court, he wrote,” The Times reported, offering this interpretation for the Chief Justice’s message: “In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.”

During oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, had literally argued a president could order a coup and be protected by immunity because it was an “official act” of the presidency.

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Sauer also argued a president could order the assassination of a political rival and still have immunity from prosecution.

- YouTub

vid]

Chief Justice Roberts responded to the “momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases…by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.”

In short, the Chief Justice used his powers to intervene and craft an opinion that some experts have said creates new law—certainly nothing that is found in the U.S. Constitution.

“There’s no legal authority for it,” remarked CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen back in December.

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Nor, as the “originalist” far-right justices on the bench have adopted, does Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling lie in the “history and tradition” of the United States.

And yet, despite decades of history starting with Richard Nixon, and despite the scathing dissenting opinion from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, CNN reports on Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts “was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.”

“The Roberts Court has been in sync with the GOP political agenda largely because of decisions the chief justice has authored: For Trump and other Republicans. Against voting rights and racial affirmative action. Against federal regulations over environmental, public health and consumer affairs,” CNN’s Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic reported. “Roberts, joined by his five fellow conservatives, found that the former president was entitled to presumptive, if not absolute, immunity for actions related to his official acts. Roberts’ view of official acts, as opposed to private ones, was vast.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion on Trump’s immunity blasted Roberts and the far-right justices, famously declaring:

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”

She also wrote:

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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7 24

"Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency," Sotomayor wrote.

"Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

The justices condemn their six colleagues — whose argument was penned by Chief Justice John Roberts — for a decision they say condones treason.

"The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power," wrote Sotomayor. "Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent."

This dark tone was met with a glib response from Roberts in his ruling.

"As for the dissents, they strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today," writes Roberts. "[We] conclude that immunity extends to official discussions between the President and his Attorney General, and then remand to the lower courts to determine 'in the first instance' whether and to what extent Trump’s remaining alleged conduct is entitled to immunity."

While the question of immunity still remains unclear, legal experts say its increasingly unlikely Americans won't see their presumptive Republican nominee stand trial on election interference charges before election day in November.

The Supreme Court spent two months deliberating the presumptive Republican nominee's argument against the federal election interference case — raising concerns of deliberate delay as Trump could kill the case if he reclaims the White House.

While Trump argued he cannot be prosecuted for any official acts as a standing U.S. president, special counsel Jack Smith countered the former president acted as a private citizen pursuing his own personal gain.

The argument stalled the Washington D.C. case for months as the argument worked its way through the appeals court system.

Three of the nine judges were appointed by Trump — Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Justice Clarence Thomas faced direct calls for recusal over the conflict of interest presented by his wife Ginny's participation in Trump's efforts to challenge the 2020 election.

On Monday, Sotomayor argued the majority's decision "completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability."

"Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force," she concludes. "Under scrutiny, its arguments crumble."

---

soto dissent said simple, quack duck vs clarence nerdy trivia

BB 6 24

after a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas and hurt hundreds more using a bump stock to automate his rifle fire into the crowd, then-president Donald Trump banned the devices. The U.S. Supreme Court today lifted that ban, with Justice Clarence Thomas (R—Harlan Crow) saying that firearms with bump stocks do not meet the Federal definition of a machine gun irrespective of their rate of fire.

The 6-3 vote fell on ideological lines, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor voicing her dissent: "When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." In his concurrence with the majority, Justice Samuel Alito conceded that in "practical terms" a weapon equipped with a bump stock is a machine gun but that it was down to Congress to ban them.

The ruling does not lift state bans on bump stocks; eighteen states have done so. The NRA briefly supported the federal ban, sensing public fury at the massacre, but returned to opposing it when no serious political support for gun reform emerged.

===

an 1 24

Fatigue and a thickening caseload are testing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's reserve.

On stage during a Monday appearance at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school, the first Latina justice spoke to the demands of the gig's demands at her age since she was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2009.

“And to be almost 70 years old, this isn’t what I expected,” Sotomayor told UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, according to Bloomberg Law. “But it is still work that is all-consuming, and I understand the impact the court has on people and on the country, and sometimes the world. And so it is what keeps me going.”

The crammed schedule for this term alone has been staggering, with the Court deciding some the most seminal issues of our time: abortion, gun, social media; and whether or not former President Donald Trump should be left on the presidential ballot.

“Cases are bigger," said Sotomayor. They’re more demanding. The number of amici are greater, and you know that our emergency calendar is so much more active. I’m tired.

"There used to be a time when we had a good chunk of the summer break. Not any more. The emergency calendar is busy almost on a weekly basis.”

When asked about the unflattering light the Supreme Court has in the country and confidence in the Constitution on the brink, the justice explained the only salve is to keep soldiering on.

“What choice do you have but to fight the good fight," she asked. "You can’t throw up your hands and walk away. And that’s not a choice. That’s an abdication. That’s giving up."

Inspiring her to fight the good fight are those freedom fighters who came before her, such as Justice Thurgood Marshall and Rep. John Lewis (D-G.A.), among others.

“How can you look at those people and say that you’re entitled to despair," she said. "You’re not," answering her own question.

She continued: "I’m not. Change never happens on its own. Change happens because people care about moving the arc of the universe towards justice.

"And it can take time, and it can take frustration."

As far as how decisions the Court made sit with her? Often not well.

“Why do you think I’m still writing," she asked. "I live in frustration. Every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart. But I have to get up the next morning and keep on fighting.”

---

https://www.alternet.org/sonia-sotomayor-slams-supreme-court-s-egregious-error-in-felony-decision/

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an raw 12 22

Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal was the lawyer who appeared before the Supreme Court to argue in the Moore v. Harper case, and he not only came prepared, he came prepared to go after the justices with their own words.

As the counsel for Common Cause, Katyal walked through the ways in which the Supreme Court inserted itself into the state laws after previously saying that they were leaving laws up to the states to decide, which is yet another contradiction. That said, the courts claimed "states rights" for abortion but then blocked it for gun regulation.

The exchange between Katyal and Thomas began with the latter saying that he'd been wanting to ask the lawyer questions for 30 years, drawing laughter from the Court crowd.

Katyal fired back: "I've waited for this case for you because it goes to exactly how you interpret the constitution, with history." He went on to explain how the history of the courts shows just how wrong the Republican side is.

"You said this court normally doesn't second-guess state court's interpretation of their own Constitution," said Thomas. "Would you say that in the case of Baker v. Carr?"

"I don't think you declare it unconstitutional. Any number of things. To say they got their own Constitution wrong is just a matter of interpretation. That is -- " Katyal said as Thomas interrupted.

"It was purely an interpretation of their own Constitution," said Thomas.

"And violation of federal law," said Katyal

"Yeah. In the end, it was invalidating their interpretation of their redistricting principles," said Thomas.

"And Justice Thomas, it's the same point picking up on Justice Kavanaugh's questioning. Palm Beach, the court said that sovereignty was at its apex when talking about state constitutions and interpretations by state courts," said Katyal.

"Let me ask you this," Thomas stepped in again. "It may be a bit unfair. If the state legislature had been very, very generous to minority voters in their redistricting and the state supreme court said under their state constitution that this was -- it violated their own state Constitution of North Carolina, would you be making the same argument?"

"Yes," Katyal said.

"Justice Gorsuch said it seems as though it depends on -- though it depends on what ox is being gorged. You would be making the same argument?" Thomas asked again.

"This Court never second-guessed state interpretations of their own constitutions," Katyal explained, returning to his argument that the Court has never gone to war with the states like this before. "If it's a general clause and it benefits or hurts minority voters, Justice Sutton says that's the process the states deal with. There is a special safeguard here which is the second half of the elections clause which allows Congress to supplant whatever that errant state decision is."

"What is the source of the authority for the state of North Carolina's Supreme Court to be involved in a federal election?" Thomas asked. "I understand there's no disagreement about a state legislature, but this is a federal election and it's similar to the problem we had with the presidential election in Bush v. Gore."

Bush v. Gore had a provision in it that said it would only apply to that case and should never be used as case law.

"It's just like *Smiley*, your honor. It's the exact same thing. It's a federal issue. The North Carolina court is interpreting the elections clauses and powers and the question is whether or not they have misread it or not and so I think that's the source of the substantive -- alleged substantive violation here. The spirit of your question, for 233 years, this court's never gotten involved and said, hey, we're going to, you know, say the North Carolina court got it wrong or their provision was too abstract for enforcement or anything like that. Rather, this court has always stayed on the sidelines, let the state process unfold subject to that other part of the trident check, Congress, in the second half of the elections cause."

Meanwhile the debate didn't fare well with the opposing counsel, who faced off against Justice Sonia Sotomayor. At one point she told him, "It seems that every answer you give is to get you what you want, but it makes little sense."

Listen to the argument below orat this link.

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2018 9th circuit

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/01/supreme-court-california-disclosure-law-donors-497554

no lnx

Supreme Court nixes California disclosure law in blow to dark-money opponents

The high court ruled a state law requiring not-for-profit organizations that raise money in California to disclose their donors violated the donors' First Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court has ordered California to stop collecting the names and addresses of top donors to charities, siding with a nonprofit group with links to billionaire Charles Koch.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, backed by political megadonors Charles Koch and the late David Koch, brought one of the suits. | David Zalubowski, File/AP Photo

By JOSH GERSTEIN and ZACH MONTELLARO

07/01/2021

The Supreme Court dealt a blow Thursday to efforts to rein in so-called dark money political groups, issuing a ruling striking down California’s policy of demanding donor lists from nonprofit organizations.

The high court split 6-3 along ideological lines in its decision on a pair of cases challenging that California requirement, which forced non-profits raising money in California to give the state copies of federal tax forms containing donor information.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion for the court, ruled that California’s “blanket demand” for that information “is facially unconstitutional.”

“When it comes to the freedom of association, the protections of the First Amendment are triggered not only by actual restrictions on an individual’s ability to join with others to further shared goals. The risk of a chilling effect on association is enough,” Roberts wrote for the court.

The ruling could have a political impact, complicating donor-disclosure requirements for groups that often pour large sums into elections but stop just short of the “express advocacy” for or against candidates that triggers stricter rules on revealing the sources of donations.

The court ruled that the California mandate for groups to turn over donor information to the state, even if kept confidential, was overly broad.

“The point is that a reasonable assessment of the burdens imposed by disclosure should begin with an understanding of the extent to which the burdens are unnecessary, and that requires narrow tailoring,” Roberts wrote.

Roberts’ ruling did not address the federal government’s authority to require the filing of donor information with the Internal Revenue Service. Most charities are still required to file lists of donors giving over $5,000 in a given year, but in 2018 the IRS dropped the requirement for some politically-oriented groups.

The justices’ ruling Thursday addressed lawsuits filed by two politically active, conservative nonprofit organizations in 2015. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation,backed by political megadonors Charles Koch and the late David Koch, brought one of the suits. The other was filed by theThomas More Law Center,a Michigan-based legal organization active on behalf of Catholic causes that was bankrolled by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza.

Both organizations argued that California rules requiring filing of donor lists with state officials violate the First Amendment by discouraging individuals from giving and by exposing them to threats and harassment.

In 2016, AFP persuaded a federal judge in Los Angeles to issue a permanent injunction against the requirement. The judge said the state rarely used the information, but often disclosed it accidentally with charities’ public tax filings.

However, two years later, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously reversed that ruling,holding that the state had a legitimate need for the data and that the Koch-founded group had not shown a significant burden on donors.

It’s unclear how the Supreme Court’s conclusions will impact similar donor-disclosure requirements at the federal level. The Internal Revenue Service has generally done a better job of keeping filings it receives confidential.

Part of Roberts’ opinion does, however, open the door to challenges to other disclosure requirements: “While exacting scrutiny does not require that disclosure regimes be the least restrictive means of achieving their ends, it does require that they be narrowly tailored to the government’s asserted interest,” he wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent and joined by the two other liberal-leaning justices, did however predict that the decision would open the floodgates to weakening disclosure requirements.

“Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” she wrote. “Regulated entities who wish to avoid their obligations can do so by vaguely waving toward First Amendment ‘privacy concerns.’”

The high court rulings could have a broader impact on efforts by Democrats to broaden and increase disclosure requirements, particularly for groups that run ads that mention federal candidates while stopping short of explicitly endorsing or opposing them.

The For the People Act, congressional Democrats’ massive campaign and ethics reform legislation that is stalled in the Senate amid Democratic infighting and a successful Republican filibuster last week, also contains provisions that would remake campaign finance disclosure law if enacted.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stands with Sens. Raphael Warnock and Amy Klobuchar while speaking with reporters before a vote on the For the People Act.

CONGRESS

[Senate Republicans block Dems’ sweeping elections reform bill

BY MARIANNE LEVINE AND ZACH MONTELLARO]

Amid the hundreds of pages of the bill is a long-fought-over proposal that would dramatically expand which organizations are required to disclose donors and expenditures if they spend a nominal amount on communications that broadly mention federal candidates.

Republicans are now broadly opposed to such measures, a turnabout from two decades ago when prominent GOP leaders backed robust disclosure rules as an alternative to attempts to restrict donations to campaigns and outside groups.

“Republicans are in favor of disclosure,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a 2000 interview. “Why would a little disclosure be better than a lot of disclosure?”

McConnell has said that soon after those comments — and the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act despite his opposition in 2002 — he concluded that such rules for groups that don’t engage in express advocacy violate the First Amendment. In the AFP case decided Thursday, he filed an amicus brief saying donor-disclosure requirements should face the “strictest scrutiny” when reviewed in court.

While AFP and the Thomas More Law Center unsurprisingly garnered support for their legal challenges from other conservative organizations, several liberal groups and First Amendment advocates also urged the Supreme Court to rule in favor of donor privacy in the cases.

The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the LGBTQ rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign and others argued that the justices should hold that California’s failure to keep the donor information confidential violated the conservative groups’ rights.

However, the liberal organizations’ brief — which drew significant interest from conservative justices at oral arguments — pushed the court toward a narrow decision that would not upset disclosure requirements for political campaigns or address the rights of regulators with a better track record for confidentiality to gather donor information.

FILED UNDER: CAMPAIGN FINANCE, CALIFORNIA, U.S. SUPREME COURT,}}:

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https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna31750700

week before her Senate hearings, Republicans are floundering in their efforts to trip up Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, unable to find an effective message about why she's not fit to serve.

Blame the tricky politics of opposing the woman who would be the first Hispanic justice, especially for a party struggling to broaden its base and whose chief spokesman on Sotomayor has a troubled history of racism allegations.

Add to that the mathematical impossibility of Republicans' rejecting President Barack Obama's first high court nominee, and it's a recipe for a weak-kneed response.

Conservative activists have noticed, and they're not happy.

"Too many Republicans and conservatives planned to lose instead of planning to win" the debate over Sotomayor, said Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch. His group has mounted strong opposition to the federal appeals court judge.

About half the Senate's Republicans are willing to raise serious questions about Sotomayor and there's "a sizable minority who — partly because she's Hispanic — just want this to go away," said Curt Levey of theCommittee for Justice.

Conservative groups have sought to convince Senate Republicans that they can benefit politically by strongly opposing Sotomayor. But many of their leaders complain the message isn't getting through.

During recent confrontations, some activists have told GOP senators, "Don't throw away yet another conservative agenda item when it's a successful one for you. Your base cares about this and you should, too," said former Rep. David McIntosh, R-Ind., who's advising some outside groups on Sotomayor's nomination. "It was kind of a blunt message."

There are good reasons for Republicans to be holding back, wondering what their best approach is to opposing a nominee who's broadly acknowledged to be qualified and whose past rulings make it difficult to pigeonhole her as a liberal crusader.

The GOP has just 40 votes in the Senate — well short of the majority they would need to defeat Sotomayor or to sustain a drawn-out effort to block a final vote to confirm her.

Even if they could stall Sotomayor's nomination, though, it's evident that many Republicans don't think it's politically prudent to take on a Hispanic woman, given the GOP's low standing in the polls and its efforts to appeal to women and minorities. Those groups traditionally have shunned the party.

The issue of race and ethnicity has proven a toxic one for the key Republican carrying the party message on Sotomayor: Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the senior GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which begins hearings on Sotomayor on July 13....Sessions' own nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986 was scuttled by allegations that he made racist comments and targeted black civil rights leaders as a federal prosecutor in Alabama....denied those charges. But he did acknowledge making what he called some off-color "jokes," such as calling civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People "un-American."

Sessions has spoken in similar terms recently about a Puerto Rican legal advocacy group on whose board Sotomayor sat from 1980 until 1992.

"This is a group that has taken some very shocking positions with respect to terrorism," Sessions said of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, citing its defense in 1990 of Puerto Rican nationalists who 36 years earlier had wounded five lawmakers during an attack on the House while it was in session....Sessions said Thursday the group's stances on issues from capital punishment to race were "extreme." His staff raised concern about its ties with the community organizing group ACORN, which Republicans routinely describe as a radical organization.

Democrats said the GOP was grasping at straws.

It's not that Republicans aren't criticizing Sotomayor. Early on, they went out of their way to treat her gently, trying to distinguish themselves from party firebrands such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who called her a racist.

In recent days, GOP senators have faulted her for her stance on gun rights, her ruling against white firefighters who alleged reversed discrimination, and her participation in the Puerto Rican legal advocacy group. They've raised questions about her ability to be "colorblind."

Still, they've had to reach to score points against Sotomayor.

For instance, Republicans recently banded together to raise concerns about her position on gun rights. They held a news conference about an appeals court decision Sotomayor joined that said the Second Amendment's protection against curbs on bearing arms applies only to the federal government — not to states.

That was in line with Supreme Court precedent on the issue, Sessions acknowledged, and presumably in keeping with GOP views that judges should be restrained.

But Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, criticized Sotomayor for taking a "cramped and restricted view of a basic civil liberty." At the same time, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Sotomayor had been too expansive in her ruling on the right to keep and bear arms. "I wish Judge Sotomayor had been similarly restrained on these issues" as other courts that ruled differently, he said.

The message was as clear as mud.

REF SORTA

wiki 7 22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research

...

U.S. Supreme Court examples

In 1916, after President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis for the Supreme Court, "concerned" citizens seeking to block his confirmation offered information that Brandeis was a "radical Zionist", even though he was not a practicing Jew. Brandeis aggressively outmaneuvered his detractors by mounting his own opposition research efforts, including a carefully constructed chart that exposed the social and financial connections of the group, mostly from Boston's Back Bay, and including Harvard president Lawrence Lowell, as well as a group headed by former President William Howard Taft and a host of American Bar Association past presidents. Brandeis sent the chart to Walter Lippman at the New Republic who penned an editorial condemning "the most homogeneous, self-centered, and self-complacent community in the United States." Brandeis was confirmed after four months of hearings, in a Senate vote of 47–22.^[46]

Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, prompting a Senate floor speech from Democratic Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, which later became known as the "Robert Bork's America" speech:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is – and is often the only – protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

Kennedy's speech prompted a rapid-response opposition research effort from Democrats, but the White House waited two and a half months to respond. The Senate Judiciary Committee, under the direction of Delaware senator and presidential hopeful Joseph Biden, commissioned a report in response to the materials Reagan's staff had released in support of Bork's nomination. Prepared by a panel of lawyers, including two Duke University law professors, the 78-page became known as "The Biden Report." The report detailed Bork's record, and analyzed the pattern of his rulings, and deeming him to be a conservative "activist" rather than an impartial jurist. Ultimately, Bork's embattled nomination failed, and Anthony Kennedy (no relation to Ted) was later confirmed to fill the position.^[47][48] The fierce research-based opposition to Bork's nomination attracted significant media attention, even though a Gallup Poll on the eve of the confirmation vote showed that very few Americans could name the nominee in question, much less recall his rulings.^[49] A new verb was later coined; "to bork" a candidate or nominee by mounting such voluminous research and vocal opposition that the person in question would be forced to withdraw.^[50]

After President George W. Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Boston Globe reported that Republican conservative advocacy groups were conducting opposition research against her: "Groups are circulating lists of questions they want members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Miers at her confirmation hearings. The activists' thinly veiled hope is that Miers will reveal ignorance of the law and give senators a reason to oppose her."^[51] Miers later withdrew her name from consideration for the court.

On July 7, 2005, soon after the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Democratic National Committee gathered and circulated information on the "anti-civil rights" and "anti-immigrant" rulings ofSamuel Alito, by then nominated by President George W. Bush to replace her. Upon inspection, the documents were revealed to have been amended by Devorah Adler, research director for the DNC. Alito's "record" had been pointedly altered to present him in a negative light. While the incident was not unusual, it received publicity in prominent places because it drew attention to the "meta-data" that is often unwittingly stored in documents that are altered and forwarded electronically.^[52]

On May 2, 2009, after Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his intent to retire from the court, theNew York Times reported that Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, had noted that conservatives were "focusing opposition research efforts on 17 women, whom they have divided into two tiers based on their perceived chances."^{[53] SOTOMAYOR}

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an 5 22

A ruling handed down by the right-wing United States Supreme Court on Monday that strips convicted felons of the opportunity to present evidence in federal court that they had ineffective counsel is facing ferocious condemnation by legal experts.

The 6-3 majority decision in Shinn versus Ramirez and Jones, authored by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, denied the petitions of two death row inmates in Arizona – David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones – to submit proof that their attorneys had failed them at trial. Martinez and Jones argued that as a result, their Sixth Amendment rights to due process and habeas corpus were violated.

Because their appeals were denied at the state level, Thomas declared that Ramirez and Jones had no legal standing to sue federally.

“[O]nly rarely may a federal habeas court hear a claim or consider evidence that a prisoner did not previously present to the state courts in compliance with state procedural rules,” Thomas wrote.

"Such intervention is also an affront to the State and its citizens who returned a verdict of guilt after considering the evidence before them," he said. "Federal courts, years later, lack the competence and authority to relitigate a State’s criminal case."

The Court's three liberal jurists dissented.

"This decision is perverse," Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor opined on behalf of the minority."It is illogical: It makes no sense to excuse a habeas petitioner’s counsel’s failure to raise a claim altogether because of ineffective assistance in postconviction proceedings ... but to fault the same petitioner for that postconviction counsel’s failure to develop evidence in support of the trial-ineffectiveness claim."

She said that "the Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”

Numerous legal experts concurred with Sotomayor, stressing that Monday's precedent-reversing ruling guts the 6th Amendment.

"You can't meaningfully enforce the Sixth Amendment in a state post-conviction proceeding unless you have an ounce of seriousness about the lawyer they are getting in that forum," University of Texas Law Professor Lee Kovarsky tweeted. "And since representation in state post-conviction proceedings is a national embarrassment, it means that it's not a really useful site of Sixth Amendment enforcement."

Kovarsky expanded upon what that means for defendants.

"You can have your claim decided on the merits in federal court, but you cannot INTRODUCE EVIDENCE to prove that claim," he said. "There's a million ways to pick this opinion apart, but here's a simple one. If you get to federal court with incontrovertible evidence of innocence, you can disable procedural bars but that evidence can't be considered on the merits. Your modern Supreme Court, people."

Read his thread below [twt]

university of Texas Law Professor and CNN contributor Steve Vladeck noted that "Thomas holds that habeas courts can't expand the record to take new evidence showing ineffective assistance of state postconviction counsel."

Leah Litman, an associate professor of law at the University of Michigan, agreed.

"It's bad," she Tweeted. "If the state appoints you a lawyer who is constitutionally ineffective at your trial; and then appoints you ANOTHER lawyer who is constitutionally ineffective to argue your trial lawyer was ineffective ... you're screwed. This is just a horrific decision that will close the Martinez exception that allowed litigants to enforce the 6th amendment right to counsel."

Others were far less cordial in her critique.

"HOLY. SHIT," New York City Public Defender Eliza Orleans said. "This decision effectively ensures that innocent people will remain imprisoned. This is radical. This is horrifying. This is extremely scary."

Commercial litigator Akiva Cohen pointed out the obscure insidiousness embedded within Thomas' annotations.

"I don't think I've ever been angrier about a footnote. Context: this is in a SCOTUS decision holding that a state prisoner on death row can be executed because of his appellate counsel's negligence, because district courts CANNOT 'forgive' the forfeiture due to that negligence," he said. "I mean holy fuck. 'Oops, sorry your lawyers suck, but it would cost too much to make sure you're actually guilty before we electrocute you'??"

Slate correspondent Mark Joseph Stern was equally as outraged.

"The Supreme Court's second and final opinion of the day is an absolutely atrocious 6–3 ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, a habeas case. I will say more but this decision effectively ensures that innocent people will remain imprisoned," he tweeted. "The Supreme Court has previously said that habeas petitioners can bring ineffective assistance of counsel claims for the first time in federal court. But today, it says they *can't develop evidence to support these claims.* In doing so, it turns that 'right' into an illusion."

Stern added that "everything about Thomas' opinion is repulsive."

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sorta // roberts that tx ~ roe guts scotus; startling lang

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/sonia-sotomayor/

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torres-sp

Chapter 9 · Death and Chocolate 171

Doe v Unocal (Burma Total France; rape extrajudical killing, military burn villages; Alien Tort Statue;

Kiobel v Royal Dutch/Shell Nigeria Ken Saro Wiwa jrnlist and others hanged; [2012 Mohammed v Palestinian Authority Torture Victims Protection ACT APPLIED ONLY TO NATURAL PERSONS]; NONVIOLeNT PROTESTORS; wIWA SETTLE 15M$

next year Daimler hu rights violations Argentina CA case; during dirty war vs union ppl? only 2.4% of sales, thus no (but still billions of $, Sotomayor; 9th circuit Nestle case slavery not OK and not off hook b/c corp; en banc denied and scotus denied cert? 190

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/supreme-court-conservative/

js edit bd

In Friday's column, I said the Republicans seem to have frightened David Brooks, which suggests the party has frightened respectable white people, too. I consider the Times columnist to be representative of the conventional wisdom of that great globular middle of American politics. The more these people fear the Republicans, the better.

Today, I want to take this a step further. If I'm right in thinking that respectable white people are less willing to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt, on account of most of them being okie-dokie with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn a free and fair presidential election, this is an ideal time to push them, by way of persuasion, to an important conclusion, to wit: conservatism has become a byword for barbarism.

Consider a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. In Jones v. Mississippi, the court ruled a person convicted of murder while a minor does not have to be shown to be "permanently incorrigible" to be imprisoned for life without parole. In a 6-3 decision, the court's six conservative justices reversed years of progress in the courts to show mercy toward juveniles who had committed heinous crimes. The AP: "Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said previous decisions only require a judge to consider 'an offender's youth and attendant characteristics' before imposing a sentence of life without parole. Kavanaugh rejected a more demanding standard."

In fact, Miller and Montgomery held that life without parole for juveniles was justifiable only in the worst of the worst cases—if the convicted person cannot be rehabilitated or, in other words, is "permanently incorrigible." Kavanaugh said his opinion was in keeping with those previous rulings, but it was a departure from them. He said Miller and Montgomery didn't require a more demanding standard, but, um, they did. Only Justice Clarence Thomas was honest. He said the old decisions were wrong anyway.

All this is made worse by the facts of the case. According to Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, quoting Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion, Brett "Jones was 'the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape.' His biological father was an alcoholic who physically abused his mother, who had severe mental health problems. His stepfather abused him, too, using 'belts, switches, and a paddle.' He openly expressed his hatred for Jones. When Jones moved to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, he abruptly lost access to medication he took for mental health issues, including hallucinations and self-harm. Jones' grandfather beat him, as well." Twenty-three days after his 15th birthday, young Brett Jones stabbed his grandpa to death.

Jones was convicted after confessing to the murder. He became a model prisoner. His grandmother, the victim's widow, asked for his release. Jones met the criteria required by Miller and Montgomery.He had demonstrated corrigibility. So the court didn't only make a return to free and open society impossible for Jones. It handed judgment down on the idea of reform, to wit: that reform, however much a free and open society depends on it, is a delusion. No amount of rehabilitation will change bad people. Brett Jones' fate was sealed the moment he was born. That he was born into violence and suffering merely means he deserved it. As for jailing him for life, the court is just furthering a process begun by God, the only true source of goodness and mercy. If all that doesn't sound conservative so much as barbarous, that's because you're right.

That Kavanaugh, and presumably the rest of the conservative justices, were dishonest about whether or not Jones was in keeping with Miller and Montgomery suggests they know a ruling allowing juveniles to be put away for life without any chance of getting out is indefensible. They know Jones is going to get flak from legal activists on the right and the left, people who won Miller and Montgomery thanks to former Justice Anthony Kennedy. They know Jones moves in the opposite direction of democracy, but they are going to move that way nonetheless. Why? They can. They have the power. Because they have the power, they must be good. Otherwise, they wouldn't have it.

The Republicans benefit greatly from the word "conservatism." It sounds like just another school of political thought in free and fair competition with others. It sounds like a way of thinking about the world seeking to conserve the collective knowledge and traditional values of humanity for the sake of our progeny. But that's not the case. The Republicans abandoned democracy after the twin shocks of 2008, Barack Obama's election and the financial panic. Inside a democratic context, conservatism can be healthy. On the outside, it's not. Outside the rule of the majority, it becomes barbarism.

The Republicans used to worry about their national reputation for cruelty. That's why the campaign of George W. Bush invented out of thin air the popular concept of "compassionate conservatism." His politics would be more palatable to respectable white people who did not want to be seen supporting a candidate who'd punch down as president. Punching down, and enjoying it, has become the point of conservatism. This is what we need to press respectable white people into understanding clearly.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

deadly game’: Legal experts blast Supreme Court’s dead-of-night decision enshrining ‘religious rights’ over all others

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

November 26, 2020

At 11:57 PM Wednesday, three minutes before the country tries to celebrate Thanksgiving during a pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for a group of Catholics and Jews who sued to prevent the State of New York from imposing restrictions in the...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/marco-rubios-final-humiliation-gops-seven-year-campaign-against-key-obama-policy-was-just-terminated-by-the-supreme-court/

“Q: Did Marco Kill Obamacare?” asked a 2015 tweet from the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., before presumptively answering the question: “A: You bet he did.”

OK, so who wants to tell him?

Rubio, like his fellow failed presidential aspirant Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, staked his campaign on bringing down Barack Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Rubio began his specific effort to sabotage the law in 2013, a few short years after entering the Senate and before setting out to win the White House. Seven years later, the Supreme Court made clear what was otherwise evident then: Rubio and his fellow Republicans didn’t kill Obamacare, they only made it a bigger mess.

While Cruz’s infamous stunt to undermine the ACA by shutting down the government — complete with his 2013 reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor — proved he was willing to “troll the libs” at any cost, Rubio’s less flashy legal assault was meant to cement his status as the Obama-slayer.

At the time, Rubio was still making an attempt to burnish his Tea Party bonafides. As congressional Republicans unsuccessfully voted to defund the ACA more than 50 times he went on the warpath against an obscure portion of the law meant to safeguard participating insurance companies against crippling financial loss as a result of the new requirement to cover clients with pre-existing conditions. Under what was known as “risk corridors,” the law helped some companies defer the cost of lower premiums in the early days of the ACA marketplaces. If an insurance company priced its plans less than 3% below a set target, the government would cover the losses. Conversely, an insurer that benefited from millions of new customers under the law’s individual mandate had to pay its excess profits to the government. Ultimately, the goal was to entice more insurers on the markets, leading to lower prices for consumers. Like the ACA itself, risk corridors have a Republican pedigree and were even included inGeorge W. Bush’s Medicare Part D program .

Still Rubio picked the program to push forward his presidential ambition by promoting what he thought would prove a poison pill to the larger health care law.

Decrying it as a “taxpayer bailout,” he testified against risk corridors as the star witness at a House Oversight Committee hearing and penned op-eds against the program. In a classic case of a solution in search of a problem, Rubio claimed that the ACA was suffering a “death spiral,” an actuarial term used to describe a marketplace spinning out of control, to push for the demise of the law’s infrastructure. Although Rubio didn’t actually sponsor the provision in Congress’ 2014 appropriations bill that prevented the federal government from using certain funds to make the required payments to insurers, he took credit for it. The Rubio-inspired provision also required the program to become budget-neutral.

The Republican rider effectively pulled the rug out from under insurers. After companies had already locked in their 2015 rates on the assurance of a government stopgap, Congress changed the rules such that the federal government could only afford to pay 13 cents of every dollar owed to the insurance companies. Insurers compiled an overall loss of $5.5 billion the year after the Republicans blocked one avenue of funding. The risk corridors were a temporary program, which expired after 2016, but insurers ultimately lost $12 million due to Rubio’s shenanigans.

“So far, we’ve succeeded in stopping the Obama administration from bailing out healthcare companies under ObamaCare, and it’s critical that Congress once again stand with taxpayers to stop any taxpayer bailout of health insurers from happening,” Rubio wrote to Republican leadership at the time.

As lawyers for the insurance companies argued before the Supreme Court, Rubio and congressional Republicans orchestrated “a massive government bait-and-switch.” Republicans weren’t able to muster the votes to repeal the ACA outright, so they just tried to bail out on the law’s statutory obligations. The end result was weakened Obamacare markets with fewer insurers and higher premiums.Premiums that, as the Supreme Court just ruled, must still be subsidized by the federal government.

On Monday, the Supreme Court voted in an 8-1 decision against Rubio’s gimmick to take down Obamacare. Justice Samuel Alito was the sole dissenter, arguing that the decision provides “a massive bailout for insurance companies that took a calculated risk and lost.” Writing for the majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor relied on what she called “a principle as old as the nation itself: The government should honor its obligations.” Republicans in Congress could not simply decline to fund the program, the Supreme Court ruled. The government still has to pay insurers $12 billion all of these years later.

So the man Donald Trump derided as “Little Marco” didn’t win the White House, and didn’t kill off Obamacare either. He simply drove small insurers out of rural America, leaving many coverage areas with no competition in the marketplace. In effect, he created a monopoly by driving out small insurers, quite likely so he could attract Koch brothers funding for his ill-fated presidential campaign.

Of course this was all eminently predictable, according to a plain reading of the relevant laws and long-standing jurisprudence. But Rubio’s instance on a vanity campaign that cost millions of dollars and denied millions of people access to affordable health care feels like more than a pathetic afterthought now, as our embattled health care system struggles to meet the challenge of a global pandemic.

an 220

Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly February 25, 2020

You might be wondering why Trump decided to go on the attack against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor this week.

To understand why Sotomayor has suddenly become a target, it is helpful to talk about the way that this administration is changing how presidential policies are being handled in the courts.

One of the reasons Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is so committed to stacking the courts with extremist conservative judges is that, as I pointed out last week, the Trump administration’s incompetence has led to an abysmal record in the courts. Whereas previous administrations prevailed in the courts 80 percent of the time, this president has failed in over 90 percent of the cases his administration has argued.

What this often means is that lower courts issue injunctions against the implementation of the administration’s policies while the case works its way through the courts. Attorney General William Barr complained about that practice in his speech to the Federalist Society.

First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government…

It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.

Of course, Barr didn’t mention that those major policies have been frozen by the lower courts because the Trump administration failed to make a coherent case in support of them, so the courts have temporarily halted their implementation. As an example, this is what Coral Davenport wrote about their efforts to roll back Obama’s fuel efficiency standards.

In January, administration staff members appointed by President Trump sent a draft of the scaled-back fuel economy standards to the White House, but six people familiar with the documents described them as “Swiss cheese,” sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked “text forthcoming.”

The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain. And, because the new auto pollution rule lacks the detailed technical analyses required by law, the regulations would be unlikely to withstand court challenges…

More basic issues holding up the regulations point to another problem: the skeleton crew of inexperienced political appointees who are heading the drafting process may not be up to a job that would usually be handled by career federal workers with decades of expertise.

The Trump administration’s response to these failures has been to go directly to the Supreme Court and ask them to expedite emergency relief from the injunctions of the lower courts.

Professor Steve Vladeck, a CNN contributor who has studied the issue of emergency requests, noted in a recent piece for the Harvard Law Review that Solicitor General Noel Francisco has been more aggressive in seeking to “short-circuit” the ordinary course of appellate litigation than his immediate predecessors.

In an interview, Vladeck noted that Francisco has not always prevailed, “but he has done so far more often than his predecessors.”

“This is now the 24th time that the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to put a lower court decision on hold in less than three years compared to a total of eight such requests during the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama administration’s combined,” Vladeck said.

That is precisely what sparked Justice Sotomayor’s critique against the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, who have consistently been willing to grant that relief to the Trump administration.

The justice wrote that granting emergency applications often upends “the normal appellate process” while “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the party that won.” Targeting her conservative colleagues, she said “most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior” has benefited “one litigant over all others.”…

:{:{}:

“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases,” Sotomayor said. “It is hard to say what is more troubling,” she said, pointing to the case at hand, “that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.” She noted that in the case at hand, the lower court order that the Supreme Court lifted was narrow and only impacted one state.

:{:{}:

That is what has placed Sotomayor’s name in the news. I seriously doubt, however, that Trump understands or cares about these legal maneuverings, which is why he couldn’t articulate his objections to Sotomayor during a news conference in India today.

The reason Trump is on the attack against liberal Supreme Court justices probably has more to do with a case that is being made against Justice Clarence Thomas. As we’ve seen, the president is in the midst of a purge of federal employees who don’t demonstrate enough loyalty to him. Jonathan Swan reported thatGinni Thomas—the wife of Clarence Thomas—has been deeply involved in lobbying on behalf of a purge, providing the administration with lists of who needs to go as well as potential replacements.}:

In response, there have been calls for Thomas to recuse himself on matters related to Trump and his administration. Trump’s call for Sotomayor and Ginsberg to recuse themselves is not only a way to further politicize the Supreme Court; it also provides his media enablers with a distraction from the issues surrounding Thomas and the ability to pretend that both sides do it.

As I’ve been suggesting for a while now, the Supreme Court is scheduled to issue rulings in several explosive cases prior to the November election. One of them has to do with whether or not Trump will be required to release his tax returns. From everything we’ve seen, that is the hill that this president is prepared to defend at all costs. And according to CNN, the latest dissent issued by Sotomayor could indicate that tensions are rising as the justices consider these major cases.

The justices are behind schedule in releasing opinions, and court watchers have questioned if the delay is caused in part by Chief Justice John Roberts’ required participation in the impeachment proceedings, or if the justices themselves are fractured over a number of cases. Although Sotomayor wrote alone, her opinion suggests unease behind the scenes.

All of this is probably just the opening salvo in what promises to be a very contentious season for the Supreme Court.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-the-real-reason-trump-is-lashing-out-at-supreme-court-justices-as-his-cronies-try-to-short-circuit-the-judicial-process/

an 220

Outrageous’: Legal experts condemn Trump for demanding Sotomayor and Ginsburg recusals

"Justice Sotomayor's dissent is a call to action, and now…

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Sotomayor writes a devastating rebuke of her conservative colleagues’ callousness and fealty to Trump

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a devastating conclusion to a dissenting…

919 AN

Justice Sotomayor issues powerful dissent to the Supreme Court’s ‘extraordinary’ move unleashing Trump’s harsh asylum rules

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a forceful dissent issued Wednesday as…

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/24/a_threat_to_democracy_justices_appear

citizen q census

ca ny tex lose big time, fed funds, seats in congress

U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case challenging the Trump administration’s plans to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Voting rights activists fear that adding the question will deter immigrants from participating in the census and lead to a vast undercount in states with large immigrant communities. Census officials have estimated 6.5 million people will not respond to the census if the citizenship question is added. This undercount could affect everything from the redrawing of congressional maps to the allocation of federal funding.

The case centers on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had the authority to add the question to the census. The American Civil Liberties Union and 17 states have sued, saying Ross’s move was aimed at deterring immigrants from participating in the census. During the oral arguments, the court’s conservative majority appeared to side with the Trump administration, while the liberal minority questioned the administration’s motives and methods. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “There’s no doubt that people will respond less. If you’re talking about prediction, this is about 100 percent that people will answer less.” We speak with Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF is representing plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits challenging the census citizenship question. We also speak with Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones. His new piece is titled “In Census Case, Supreme Court Suddenly Cares a Lot About Voting Rights Act.”

rogue's galllery opposed her nom:

https://thinkprogress.org/what-the-gop-witness-list-reveals-about-their-anti-sotomayor-strategy-816d7650a48e/

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sotomayor rips them another one;koromatsu repealled

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/supreme-court-sides-trump-anti-muslim-travel-ban-5-4-ruling

Supreme Court has just handed down a 5-4 ruling siding with President Donald Trump, saying his anti-Muslim travel ban is constitutional.

MSNBC's Pete Williams says the Supreme Court rejected the argument that Trump's anti-Muslim animus was obvious in his campaign statements and tweets, even as president.

The Court claims Trump has the power to impose the ban as a matter of national security.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/supreme-court-just-blocked-order-north-carolina-redraw-gerrymandered-congressional

North Carolinians may vote in the 2018 midterm elections under a congressional map that has been gerrymandered by Republicans. The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked a lower court ruling ordering the U.S. House of Representatives district lines be redrawn by January 24.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor both objected to the order.

Reuters explains the initial ruling that ordered the district lines be redrawn:

"The three-judge panel ruled that the Republican-drawn districts violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law by intentionally hobbling the electoral strength of non-Republican voters. Two of the three judges also said the plan ran afoul of the Constitution’s First Amendment by discriminating based on political belief and association."

The Supreme Court is reviewing cases of alleged gerrymandering in Wisconsin and Maryland. The implications of these cases on other states, including North Carolina, remain to be seen.

...

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wiki

Sonia Maria Sotomayor (/ˈ soʊnjə ˌsoʊtoʊmaɪˈjɔr /, Spanish: [ˈsonja sotomaˈʝor];^[3] born June 25, 1954) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving since August 2009. Sotomayor is the Court's 111th justice, its first Hispanic justice, and its third female justice.

Sotomayor was born in The Bronx, New York City and is of Puerto Rican descent. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. She was an advocate for the hiring of Latino faculty at both schools. She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.

Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and her nomination was confirmed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School.

In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace retired Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31. On the court, Sotomayor has been a reliable member of the liberal bloc when the justices divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines.

[hide]

5 Court of Appeals judge

6 Supreme Court justice
- 6.1 Nomination and confirmation
- 6.2 Justiceship

Early life...

...

Sotomayor cast her first vote as an associate Supreme Court justice on August 17, 2009, in a stay of execution case.^[200] She was given a warm welcome onto the Court^[201]and was formally invested in a September 8 ceremony.^[202] Sotomayor heard arguments in her first case on September 9 during a special session. The case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, involved the First Amendment rights of corporations in campaign finance^[203] and became one of the most controversial and consequential decisions in a number of years, and one in which Sotomayor dissented.^[204][205] Her first major written opinion was a dissent in the Berghuis v. Thompkins case dealing withMiranda rights.^[204][206]

As her first year neared completion, Sotomayor said it had been exciting, challenging and a little scary;^[207] she told friends she felt swamped by the intensity and heavy workload of the job.^[206] In succeeding Justice Souter, Sotomayor had done little to change the philosophical balance of the Court.^{[204][205][206]} Sotomayor voted with Justices Ginsburg and Breyer 90 percent of the time, one of the highest agreement rates on the Court.^[204][208]

In two very high-profile June 2012 decisions at the end of her third term, Sotomayor was part of a 5–3 majority in Arizona v. United States that struck down several aspects of the Arizona SB 1070 anti-illegal immigration law,^[209] and in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius was part of a landmark 5–4 majority that upheld most of the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (while being part of a dissent against the reliance upon the Constitution's Taxing and Spending Clause rather than Commerce Clause in arriving at the support). While many cases are decided unanimously or with different voting coalitions, Sotomayor has continued to be a reliable member of the liberal bloc of the court when the justices divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines.^[210]...

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http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2009/09/sonia-sotomayor-and-the-corporate-personhood.html

09/17/2009

Sonia Sotomayor and the Corporate Personhood

Jess Bravin reports that: WSJ)

In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law. ... Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

A DailyKosite observed: "If Justice Sotomayor keeps up with this line of thinking, she will truly represent a great progressive change on a much too corporate-friendly Court."

Maybe so. Maybe not.

If she keeps up with this line of thinking, the one sure thing is that she'll be making a fundamental error (or, more precisely, two fundamental errors).

There are a couple of different ideas bollixed up in Sotomayor's statement. We need to entangle them.

Let's start with the idea of corporate personhood.

It is certainly true that the corporation's legal personhood is a mere legal fiction. A corporation is not a moral actor. Edward, First Baron Thurlow, put it best: "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?" The corporation is simply a nexus of contracts between factors of production.

Although the corporation’s legal personality obviously is a fiction, it is a very useful one. Consider a large forestry company, owning forest land in many states. If the company were required to list all of its owners—i.e., every shareholder—on every deed recorded in every county in which it owned property, and also had to amend those filings every time a shareholder sold stock, there would be an intolerable burden not only on the firm but also on government agencies that deal with the firm. Hence, for example, it is useful for the law to allow the corporation to sue and be sued in its own name and to own and deal in property in its own name.

Likewise, the corporation's legal personhood is a useful fiction in constitutional law. Government regulation of corporations obviously impacts the people for whose relationships the corporate serves as a nexus. (You see how hard it is to even talk about the corporation without reifying it?) It's useful to allow the corporation to provide those persons with a single voice when seeking constitutional protections.

Indeed, doing so is not just useful, it is necessary to protect the rights of the parties to those various contracts. As Larry Ribstein explains in Corporate Political Speech, 49 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 109, because "a corporation is a nexus of contracts, these contract rights should be constitutionally protected to the same extent as other contract rights. Thus, the state must show why intervention in the corporate contract is constitutionally justified given the availability of self-protection through private contracting." He continues:

The Court must begin to base its decisions on well-developed modern economic theory rather than on unsupported assertions about corporations and the political process. It is particularly important to understand that any regulation of corporate speech or of the electoral process can have far-reaching consequences in terms of both the costs of governing the firm and the deadweight costs of effecting wealth transfers among interest groups. Until the Court understands these consequences, its decisions may be the proverbial bull in the china shop, particularly as pressure builds for more extensive reform of campaign financing and of corporate political activity.

While it may be useful to allow the corporation "person" standing to assert collective rights, however, it is very important to remember that this is still a fiction that we embrace to facilitate protection of the rights of individuals. As Ribstein recently blogged:

In a nutshell, viewing the corporation as an entity for First Amendment purposes actually serves to push the speech rights of owners and managers under a rug. Abandoning entity reasoning would focus on what matters for the First Amendment analysis. My article and blog post just linked show that once you do that, and put the arguments for limiting speech rights under an analytical spotlight, they look pretty weak.

A distinct problem with Sotomayor's analysis is her treatment of the corporation as a creature of state law. It is true that a corporation must have a certificate of incorporation from the state to obtain legal recognition as such. We might reasonably infer from Sotomayor's overall comment, however, that she accepts some version of the old concession theory, pursuant to which the corporation was regarded as a quasi-state actor exercising powers delegated by the state. It has been over half-a-century since corporate legal theory, of any political or economic stripe, took the concession theory seriously. In particular, concession theory is plainly inconsistent with the contractarian model of the firm, which treats corporate law as nothing more than a set of standard form contract terms provided by the state to facilitate private ordering.

Note how the two points are related. The state provides the corporate form as a means of facilitating private ordering amongst people. When the state wrongfully interferes with how those people have ordered their relationships, those people need the protections of the Constitution. Collective action problems of various sorts may prevent them from banding together to vindicate their rights. Accordingly, the law allows the corporation--under the control of its board of directors--to seek the necessary Constitutional protections on behalf of the community of stakeholders (and, especially, the shareholders who hold the residual claim).

I treat these issues in more detail in my article, Community and Statism: A Conservative Contractarian Critique of Progressive Corporate Law Scholarship.

JUDGE'S JOURNEY TO TOP BRONX' SOTOMAYOR ROSE FROM PROJECTS TO COURT OF APPEALS

By GREG B. SMITH

Saturday, October 24th 1998, 2:05AM

IT MAY COME AS a surprise to some that a child of the broken-glass streets of a Bronx housing project could rise to become a judge in the polished-wood chambers of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Not to Sonia Sotomayor.

The former Bronxdale Houses girl who'll take a prestigious spot on the appeals court in Manhattan next month has believed for a long, long time that one day she would find herself at the top of her profession.

"I was going to college and I was going to become an attorney, and I knew that when I was 10," she says. "Ten. That's no jest."

And though the destination was predictable, the journey was anything but simple.

Her nomination to the federal appeals court was held up for a year and her name turned into a national symbol of liberal excess. She became a target for conservatives who worried that the appointment to 2nd Circuit was just a cover for her eventual elevation to the very top the U.S. Supreme Court.

Some Republican senators jammed her nomination and prompted much talk-show jousting about the role of judges in society. It took until Oct. 2, more than a year after President Clinton nominated her, for the Senate to approve her promotion. In the end, the vote was 68 to 28.

To those who know Sotomayor, that day came not as a terrific surprise. It was, in fact, even a bit predictable given her longstanding ambition.

"She has a very clear-cut idea of where she wants to go," says Hugh Mo, a Manhattan lawyer who once served with her in the Manhattan district attorney's office in the early 1980s. "She wants to reach the highest level of the legal profession," Mo said. "A Supreme Court justice is not far-fetched."

During a recent interview in her large Manhattan Federal Court office, where she is winding down her final days as a District Court judge, Sotomayor recalled with precision the precocious year she decided to go into law.

Back in 1964, she lived in the Bronxdale Houses, walked 2 miles to Catholic school and read enough Nancy Drew mysteries to decide she would definitely be a detective when she grew up.

That year, she was diagnosed with diabetes and told being a cop was out of the question.

"I became very disappointed about not having a life plan," she said. "At the time, 'Perry Mason' had become a very popular show, and I loved Perry Mason. If I couldn't do detective work as a police officer, I could do it as a lawyer."

Thus began a rapid and steady climb. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, who at age 10 sketched out a daily planner with time set aside to "improve myself," Sotomayor set about winning scholarships, first to Princeton, then to Yale Law School.

The daughter of Puerto Rican parents who came to the U.S. during World War II, she became editor of the Yale Law Review, and after graduation in 1979 landed a prestigious job with Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

Her job was her life. She was divorced in 1983, never had children, immersed herself in the law and kept an eye out for powerful people who could help her up the ladder.

In the district attorney's office, she learned criminal law, and even her opponents admired her discipline and sense of fair play.

Steven Kimelman, who defended a man Sotomayor prosecuted for trafficking in child pornography, recalled, "She handled it very well. She didn't pander to the jury. She was very methodical and well prepared."

Openly preparing a resume for a potential judgeship, she switched from criminal to civil law in 1984, becoming an associate at a small firm, Pavia & Harcourt. She made partner in three years.

"I wanted to complete myself as an attorney," she recalls.

She also began swimming with the big Democrats, persuading Mayor Ed Koch to appoint her to the city Campaign Finance Board in 1985, and getting Gov. Mario Cuomo to put her on the state's Mortgage Agency in 1987.

The schmoozing paid off. In 1991, one of the state's senior Democrats, Sen. Daniel Moynihan, nominated her for a District Court judgeship in Manhattan. She began serving in October 1992 at age 38.

She remained low-profile, except for her applauded handling of the 1994-95 baseball strike that resulted in owners and players putting aside months of bitterness to settle.

The newly crowned Baseball Judge (a long-time Yankee fan) won praise from fans across the nation, and by September 1997, she was nominated for a spot on the 2nd Circuit. Her elevation was expected to come off with nary a speed bump.

Then one morning last June, Judge Sotomayor picked up The Wall Street Journal and learned on that paper's conservative Op-Ed page that she was now a lefty judicial activist.

The Journal blasted two rulings: one in which she required a midtown business district to pay the minimum wage to homeless people, and another ordering the New York Bar Association to accommodate a law student with reading problems who wanted help taking the bar exam.

Conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh picked up the paper and ran with it.

Soon her nomination was in peril. Some Republicans were convinced Clinton was promoting her to the 2nd Circuit so he could later move her and her allegedly liberal views to the Supreme Court.

It got to the point where during her Sept. 30, 1997, Judiciary Committee questioning, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) mentioned rumors that she refused to stand when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas addressed a 1992 meeting with 2nd Circuit judges.

"Did you see fit to stand and applaud?" Sessions demanded.

"He was Supreme Court justice for our circuit," she said. "I stood."

Today, even after she won Senate approval and is prepared to begin work in the 2nd Circuit, she remains angry at what she says was the Republican stereotype of her: she's a woman, she's Latina, she must be a bleeding-heart liberal.

"That series of questions, I think, were symbolic of a set of expectations that some people had [that] I must be liberal," she said. "It is stereotyping, and stereotyping is perhaps the most insidious of all problems in our society today."

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https://web.archive.org/web/20170509121157/https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/13/nyregion/gop-its-eyes-on-high-court-blocks-a-judge.html

Judge Sonia Sotomayor seemed like a trouble-free choice when President Clinton nominated her to an appeals court post a year ago. Hers was an appealing story: a child from the Bronx housing projects who went on to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton and become editor of the Yale Law Journal and then a Federal prosecutor.

Moreover, she had been a trial judge since 1992, when she was named to the bench by the last Republican president, George Bush.

But Republican senators have been blocking Judge Sotomayor's elevation to the appeals court for a highly unusual reason: to make her less likely to be picked by Mr. Clinton for the Supreme Court, senior Republican Congressional aides said in interviews.

The delay of a confirmation vote on Judge Sotomayor to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York, is an example of the intense and often byzantine political maneuverings that take place behind the scenes in many judicial nominations. Several elements of the Sotomayor case are odd, White House officials and Democrats in Congress say, but the chief one is the fact that there is no vacancy on the Supreme Court, and no firm indication that there will be one soon. Nor is there any evidence of a campaign to put Judge Sotomayor under consideration for a seat if there were a vacancy.

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Judge Sotomayor's nomination was approved overwhelmingly by the Senate Judiciary Committee in March. Of the judicial nominees who have cleared the committee in this Congress, she is among those who have waited the longest for a final vote on the floor.

Senate Republican staff aides said Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, has agreed to hold up a vote on the nomination as part of an elaborate political calculus; if she were easily confirmed to the appeals court, they said, that would put her in a position to be named to the Supreme Court. And Senate Republicans think that they would then have a difficult time opposing a Hispanic woman who had just been confirmed by the full Senate.

''Basically, we think that putting her on the appeals court puts her in the batter's box to be nominated to the Supreme Court,'' said one senior Republican staff aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ''If Clinton nominated her it would put several of our senators in a real difficult position.''

Mr. Lott declined through a spokeswoman to comment.

Judge Sotomayor sits on Federal District Court in Manhattan, and the aides said some senators believe that her record on the bench fits the profile of an ''activist judge,'' a description that has been used by conservatives to question a jurist's ability to construe the law narrowly. It is a description that Judge Sotomayor's supporters, including some conservative New York lawyers, dispute.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, was blunt in his criticism of the Republicans who are blocking a confirmation vote. ''Their reasons are stupid at best and cowardly at worst,'' he said.

''What they are saying is that they have a brilliant judge who also happens to be a woman and Hispanic, and they haven't the guts to stand up and argue publicly against her on the floor,'' Senator Leahy said. ''They just want to hide in their cloakrooms and do her in quietly.''

The models for the strategy of putting candidates on appeals courts to enhance their stature as Supreme Court nominees are Judge Robert H. Bork and Judge Clarence Thomas. Both were placed on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in part to be poised for nomination to the Supreme Court. Judge Bork was denied confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 and Judge Thomas was confirmed in 1991, in both cases after bruising political battles.

The foundation for the Republicans' strategy is based on two highly speculative theories: that Mr. Clinton is eager to name the first Hispanic person to the Supreme Court and that he will have such an opportunity when one of the current justices, perhaps John Paul Stevens, retires at the end of the current Supreme Court term next month.

Warnings about the possibility of Judge Sotomayor's filling Justice Stevens's seat was raised by the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages this month, both in an editorial and in an op-ed column by Paul A. Gigot, who often reflects conservative thinking in the Senate.

Although justices often announce their retirements at the end of a term, Justice Stevens has not given a clue that he will do so. He has, in fact, hired law clerks for next year's term. The Journal's commentary also criticized Judge Sotomayor's record, particularly her March ruling in a case involving a Manhattan business coalition, the Grand Central Partnership. She ruled that in trying to give work experience to the homeless, the coalition had violated Federal law by failing to pay the minimum wage.

Gerald Walpin, a former Federal prosecutor who is widely known in New York legal circles as a staunch conservative, took issue with the Journal's criticism.

''If they had read the case they would see that she said she personally approved of the homeless program but that as a judge she was required to apply the law as it exists,'' he said. ''She wrote that the law does not permit an exception in this case. That's exactly what conservatives want: a nonactivist judge who does not apply her own views but is bound by the law.'' Mr. Bush nominated Judge Sotomayor in 1992 after a recommendation from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York's Democratic Senator.

It also remains unclear how some Senate Republicans came to believe that Judge Sotomayor was being considered as a candidate for the Supreme Court. Hispanic bar groups have for years pressed the Clinton Administration to name the first Hispanic justice, but White House officials said they are not committed to doing so. The Hispanic National Bar Association has submitted a list of six candidates for the Supreme Court to the White House. But Martin R. Castro, a Chicago lawyer and official of the group, said Judge Sotomayor's name is not on the list.

On Sept. 30, the day of her confirmation hearing, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host, warned the Senate that Judge Sotomayor was an ultraliberal who was on a ''rocket ship'' to the Supreme Court. That day, Judge Sotomayor was questioned closely by Republicans.

In the end, the only Republicans to vote against her were Senator John Kyl of Arizona and Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri. The committee's other conservative members, including Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, voted in her favor. Mr. Kyl and Mr. Ashcroft declined to comment today.

The confirmation delay comes as Ralph K. Winter, chief judge of the Second Circuit, has complained that unfilled vacancies on the court have created its worst backlog in history. In his annual report, Judge Winter, a conservative Republican, lamented that he had to declare judicial emergencies several times to allow retired judges and trial judges to sit on appeals panels.

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Contents

Early life...

09/17/2009

Sonia Sotomayor and the Corporate Personhood

JUDGE'S JOURNEY TO TOP BRONX' SOTOMAYOR ROSE FROM PROJECTS TO COURT OF APPEALS