notorius rbg

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NO MERRI

PBUH

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katie Couric slammed for omitting RBG quote to protect ’a sitting Supreme Court justice'

Meaghan Ellis

October 14, 2021

Renowned journalist Katie Couric is facing backlash for admitting that she omitted quotes from her 2016 interview with the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg...

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convenant handmaiden cult? DN

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/23/heidi_schlumpf_amy_coney_barrett

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Will Supreme Court Reconsider Citizens United? Two Justices Hope So##

Last Friday night at the close of business, she wrote a statement in which she was joined by Justice Stephen Breyer suggesting that the controversial Citizens United case should be revisited.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows an opportunity when she sees one.

Last Friday night at the close of business, she wrote a statement in which she was joined by Justice Stephen Breyer suggesting that the controversial Citizens United case should be revisited.

Citizens United held that the government cannot ban campaign spending by corporations in elections.

Ginsburg had voted against Citizens United in 2010, and in Friday's statement she was signaling that a new case might give the court the opportunity to look at Citizens United again.

The statement did not come out of the blue.

Last December the Montana Supreme Court issued an opinion that appears to directly contradict Citizens United, upholding a Montana law that prohibits campaign expenditures by corporations. Opponents of the decision asked the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington to step in and block the Montana decision.

"If Montana is allowed to flout this court's holdings in Citizen's United in such a willful and transparent fashion, respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and this court will be eroded," wrote James Bopp, a lawyer for plaintiffs challenging the Montana ruling.

The Supreme Court did step in at 6 p.m. on the eve of a three-day weekend to put a temporary hold on the Montana Supreme Court's ruling. Ginsburg agreed with the decision. "Because lower courts are bound to follow this court's decisions," the stay was necessary, she said.

But then she went further.

Ginsburg and Breyer (another Citizens United dissenter) said in a statement attached to the court's order: "Montana's experience, and experience elsewhere since this court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC makes it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations 'do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.'"

She quoted a key part of the Citizens United decision.

Ginsburg, of course, recognizes that the five justices who ruled in favor of Citizens United still sit on the bench.

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21,who is a fierce critic of Citizens United, explains her strategy.

"If the court takes this case, it will create the opportunity on the highest legal stage to present a compelling case to the Supreme Court that it was dead wrong in the Citizens United decision. That may not convince the five justices who decided the case to change their opinion, but it will be part of building the case that will ultimately prevail that Citizens United was wrongly decided and must be reversed."

Ginsburg references the current state of affairs in elections. She says, "in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates' allegiance " the Court should have the opportunity to explore whether Citizens United "should continue to hold sway."

Even though the Supreme Court granted the temporary stay, it does not mean that the court will automatically take up the case and hold hearings. It could "summarily reverse" and send the case away without merit briefs or arguments.

Tom Goldstein, publisher of the influential ScotusBlog, says that the court could summarily reverse a decision with only five votes, but a different "rule applies when four justices are willing to vote for plenary review - i.e., the "four votes to grant" rule takes precedence over the "five votes can summarily reverse" rule.

While the majority of the Montana Supreme Court distinguished its case from Citizens United by saying that the Montana case "concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history" Justice James C. Nelson dissented.

Nelson said that while he "thoroughly" disagrees with Citizen's United, "the fact remains that the Supreme Court has spoken."

"Like it or not, Citizens United is the law of the land as regards corporate political speech. There is no 'Montana exception," he said.

"The Supreme Court could not have been more clear in Citizens United v. FEC: Corporations have broad rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution to engage in political speech, and corporations cannot be prohibited from using general Treasury funds for this purpose based on antidistortion, anticorruption or shareholder-protection interests," Nelson wrote.

Two years after the Citizens United case, those on opposing sides seemed to be getting even further apart when it came to the issue of campaign finance. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg is laying down a marker.

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NYT

Court Declines to Revisit Its Citizens United Decision

David Bossie, right, head of Citizens United, with Kasey Kirby at the group’s office on Monday.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

By Adam Liptak

June 25, 2012

WASHINGTON — In a brief unsigned decision, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to have another look at its blockbuster 2010 campaign finance decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

In the 5-to-4 ruling on Monday, the court summarily reversed a decision of the Montana Supreme Court that had upheld a state law limiting independent political spending by corporations. That decision, the United States Supreme Court said, was flatly at odds with Citizens United, which said the First Amendment allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they like to support or oppose political candidates.

“The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law,” the opinion said. “There can be no serious doubt that it does.” Montana’s arguments, the opinion continued, “either were already rejected in Citizens United, or fail to meaningfully distinguish that case.”...

The four members of the court’s liberal wing dissented in an opinion by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who said that Citizens United itself had been a mistake.

“Even if I were to accept Citizens United,” Justice Breyer continued, “this court’s legal conclusion should not bar the Montana Supreme Court’s finding, made on the record before it, that independent expenditures by corporations did in fact lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption in Montana. Given the history and political landscape in Montana, that court concluded that the state had a compelling interest in limiting independent expenditures by corporations.”

Justice Breyer added, “Montana’s experience, like considerable experience elsewhere since the court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so.”

Critics of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance rulings attacked Monday’s decision, saying Citizens United had led to unprecedented levels of outside money pouring into the presidential campaign and races for the House and Senate — the vast majority of it raised not from corporations but from wealthy individuals and spent by “super PACs” and other independent groups.

Democrats in Congress have proposed measures to rein in campaign spending, strengthen disclosure requirements and even amend the Constitution to reverse Citizens United.

In Montana, the State Supreme Court had ruled that the state’s distinctive history and characteristics warranted a departure from the principles announced in Citizens United.

Chief Justice Mike McGrath of the Montana Supreme Court, writing for the majority in its 5-to-2 ruling, stressed that the state’s experience of having its political system corrupted by corporate interests early in the 20th century justified the ruling.

“At that time,” Chief Justice McGrath wrote, “the state of Montana and its government were operating under a mere shell of legal authority, and the real social and political power was wielded by powerful corporate managers to further their own business interests. The voters had more than enough of the corrupt practices and heavy-handed influence asserted by the special interests controlling Montana’s political institutions.”

This year, by coincidence, in a hotly contested election for a United States Senate seat in Montana, Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, has been the target of $2.6 million in spending by outside groups. On Monday, he said that the Supreme Court decision had “rolled back Montana 100 years, back to the time literally when millionaires and billionaires bought elections, and they did it under the guise of free speech, which is crazy.”

In February, two of the dissenters in Citizens United — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Breyer — issued a statement explaining that “lower courts are bound to follow this court’s decisions until they are withdrawn or modified.”

They added, though, that the United States Supreme Court should use the Montana case to consider the aftermath of Citizens United. The case, they wrote, was “an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.”

A spokesman for President Obama, Eric Schultz, said, “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not take the opportunity presented by the Montana case to revisit its decision in Citizens United.”

Mr. Schultz said that since that decision in 2010, “we have seen unprecedented amounts of campaign spending, often by groups that won’t disclose their donors. Citizens United was wrong when it was decided, and as two Supreme Court Justices have observed since, independent expenditures by corporations are threatening the health of our democracy.”

Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2012, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Court Declines to Revisit Its Citizens United Decision. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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warren rips Trump push to fill RBG Seat in fiery floor speech: ‘Last gasp of a right-wing, billionaire-fueled party’

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams  September 23, 2020

In a speech on the Senate floor honoring the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday condemned President Donald Trump and his Republican allies’…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mourn-ruth-bader-ginsburg-but-dont-give-in-to-despair-its-time-to-fight-like-hell-instead/

friday night, when the news of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hit, I was struck by the same wave of hopeless despair that anyone who cares about the future of this country felt. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the weight of the world rested on the shoulders of this diminutive 87-year-old woman who had been battling cancer for many years. With her death, Donald Trump and the Senate Republicans, led by the depraved liar and hypocrite Mitch McConnell, have the power to fill her seat on the Supreme Court with another right wing extremist. With a comfortable 6-3 conservative majority on the court, the Republican mission to dismantle the already battered remains of our democracy will be protected from the occasional bout of conscience from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Things are bad. Really, really bad. It would be foolish to deny it. We have a reality TV fascist in the Oval Office who has been lawsuit-happy when it comes to his efforts to steal himself a second term against the strong will of the American people, and now he’s going to get himself a third Supreme Court justice to grease the wheels. Plus, theuncorking of right wing assaults on human rights — a situation which seemed dire after Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced the at-times-reluctant supporter of equal rights, Justice Anthony Kennedy — are going to spin wildly out of control.

Women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, religious freedom, health care access: These are all on the chopping block now, in ways that will likely make previous assaults seem like a game of tiddlywinks.

So I forgive you (and myself) if you need to sit in the corner for a little with a bottle of whiskey, or a good red wine, as Ginsburg would have done. But once we’re done with that, it’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, get back into it and fight like hell. it is, after all, what Ginsburg would have done.

Ginsburg earned a reputation for being so tough and accomplished that the hagiography started while she was still alive and able to enjoy it. So tough, in fact, when I told my friends over Zoom that she had died, they refused to believe me and demanded to know my source. (Phone alert from NPR.) Being known for such a ferocious tenacity that people can’t even believe you could die, even when you’ve been hospitalized on and off for months from cancer, is quite the quality.

It is this strength that we must channel for what is shaping up to be a fight for democracy itself.

It’s tempting to look at the situation, throw your hands up, and start looking into immigration laws for other countries. But when that urge strikes, I recommend diving into one of the many lengthy obituaries written about Ginsburg, instead of just skimming the first couple of paragraphs. Or watch one of movies about her life, if you prefer. Or read “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” the book that kicked off all the hosannas for the still-living Ginsburg in the past few years.

What you’ll find is the story of a woman who looked at a world that seemingly had no space for her or her ideas, shrugged, and forged ahead anyway. She was one of only nine women in her class at Harvard Law. When she graduated, law firms weren’t interested in hiring women, especially if they were married mothers or Jewish, and Ginsburg was both. And yet she ended up on the Supreme Court.

But even more importantly, she won a series of victories as a feminist lawyer that frankly would seem impossible, if we didn’t live in the world she had created by doing so. In the 1970s, Ginsburg argued six — six! — cases in front of the Supreme Court, winning five.

As Ian Millhiser of Vox notes, this required arguing in front of a bunch of male judges who sprung from “a society that was so sexist that many of them had never had a female colleague.” These were men whose power and privilege rested, in large part, upon centuries of oppression of women, and like most men of the time, they were aware on some level that women’s equality meant giving up some of that power and privilege.

Convincing such men to literally vote to dismantle, bit by bit, a power structure geared to benefit them at the expense of women was a task so enormous that it’s genuinely hard to imagine, especially in the real world, where people are stubborn and blinkered and selfish, so much unlike the glossy Hollywood world where justice always prevails in the end.

But damn it, Ginsburg got her Hollywood ending in those cases. It was, as her biographer and friend Irin Carmon writes, because she embraced a worldview that “was as bold as it was optimistic.” It was not just because Ginsburg had the moral clarity to see what was wrong about sexism, but because she had the imagination to picture a better world, one where men and women are partners and friends, and everyone is more free to be themselves and not circumscribed by absurd gender roles.

It’s arguable that Ginsburg was, if anything, too tenacious. She was too stubborn to retire from the court when there was a chance Barack Obama could nominate her replacement, a decision that no one should bother to defend. But, as with most strong-willed people, her flaws flowed from the same traits that made her great. And we should embrace that pig-headed unwillingness to give up, even when it seems like giving up is the only option.

The fights ahead of us are onerous, starting with the fight to prevent Trump and McConnell from putting whatever troglodyte they have in mind on the court. These fights may seem impossible, in fact. (But nothing is impossible, including convincing Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to save her seat by doing the right thing for once in her miserable career.) Giving into despair might seem like the only option.

But however hard it seems, it’s probably not as hard as it was for Ginsburg to stand up — all 5’1″ of her — and argue to all-male panels of judges about why the very system that gave them their power was wrong. She was forever humble about her courage, often describing herself as “lucky.” But she wasn’t lucky. She was smart, strategic and tenacious. And we have to be those things if we are to protect the legacy that she and other civil rights activists and leaders have built.

If it seems too difficult at times, just remember to ask yourself what RBG would have done. You know the answer is “keep fighting.” So that is what we will do.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/murkowski-joins-collins-in-opposing-trump-scotus-vote-before-the-election/

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mma 920

yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/mitch-mcconnell-accelerating-plan-to-place-at-least-one-more-justice-on-supreme-court-before-the-election-report/

barasso

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an 520

Ruth Bader Ginsburg destroys Trump solicitor general in live hearing from her hospital bed

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/justice-ginsburg-sends-out-dire-warning-about-the-new-supreme-court-ruling-in-wisconsin-election-case/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/were-witnessing-the-most-illegitimate-election-in-modern-u-s-history/

no lnx

We’re witnessing the most illegitimate election in modern US history

Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly April 7, 2020

Does it seem like a bad idea to you to hold an election where people are expected to show up the polls in the midst of global pandemic that has most of the world sheltered in place? It seemed like a bad idea to the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, too, but as Ian Millhiser explains at Vox, he wasn’t able to call off or delay Tuesday’s election:

Last week, Gov. [Tony] Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session just seconds after it was convened. After Evers acted on his own authority to delay the election, the state’s Supreme Court voted along partisan lines to rescind Evers’s order. Republicans also rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state.

Of course, just because the Republicans insist on having this election on schedule, doesn’t mean that you can convince people to show up to vote. In fact, they can’t even convince poll workers to show up:

The April 7 election is shaping up to be a trainwreck. Most poll workers have refused to work the election, out of fear of catching the coronavirus, which forced Gov. Tony Evers (D) to call up the National Guard in order to keep polls open. But even this measure appears woefully inadequate. In Milwaukee, election officials announced that the state only has enough election workers to open five poll locations — when the city would normally have 180 polling places.

It seems inevitable that Milwaukee will have an immensely reduced turnout, which is tantamount to handing the Republicans victory in every statewide contested election on the ballot. But it gets worse.

Once the Democrats understood that the election would go forward, they went to court to try to make sure that absentee ballots could serve as an alternative, and they convinced an Obama-appointed federal judge to extend the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot from 8 pm April 7 to 4 pm on April 13. The judge reasoned that this was reasonable because the state had received 1.2 million ballot requests and was struggling to get them mailed out in time for voters to receive them.

But the Republicans appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 along completely partisan lines to rescind the lower court’s decision and uphold the 8 pm April 7 deadline for receiving an absentee ballot. Predictably, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was incensed:

As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes in her dissent, “the presidential primaries, a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, three seats on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, over 100 other judgeships, over 500 school board seats, and several thousand other positions” are at stake in the Wisconsin election…

…Again, many voters are not expected to receive their ballots until after this April 7 deadline. As Justice Ginsburg notes, “as of Sunday morning, 12,000 ballots reportedly had not yet been mailed out…”

Now, the most egregious thing here is that the Republicans are defying their governor and putting people’s lives at risk. But it’s almost equally offensive that they’re using this crisis to guarantee themselves a slew of easy victories in what are actually competitive elections. And this is all possible because Republican-controlled legislatures and courts are willing to go to any length to help their party electorally, even if it destroys the bench’s reputation for impartiality, and even if it annihilates any respect for the outcome of elections. How can anyone argue that you can have a fair election when Milwaukee can only produce five polling locations rather than the 180 that are needed? How can they say they’re not disenfranchising people when folks have to choose between possible death if they go out in public to vote or not voting at all because they didn’t receive an absentee ballot in time to mail it in by Tuesday night’s deadline?

I’ve seen a lot of things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything on a par with this.

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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Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s plans to keep the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority in check

When President Bill Clinton nominated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for…

omg

On election night in Florida, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes. Because of the closeness of the election, an automatic recount began two days later in every county. Hundreds of lawyers flocked to Florida. Ben Ginsberg, national counsel for the Bush campaign, called it “Woodstock for constitutional lawyers.”

Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks,nicknamed the Cabal.

“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.

Ted Cruz, then 29, put together George W. Bush’s legal team in the 2000 election fight.

Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.

Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and ­prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.

Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable.”

The Bush campaign, which led by 327 votes after the automatic recount, wanted as few disputed ballots accepted as possible. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount, which favored Gore, Bush appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount four days later, on December 12, thereby declaring Bush the winner of the election. No justice put his name on the unsigned 5–4 opinion.

The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred.

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game over tipping pt?! rbg v gorsuch

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/23/supreme_court_deals_blow_to_workers

a major blow to workers’ rights, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 Monday that employers can use arbitration clauses to prohibit workers from banding together to challenge violations of federal labor laws in class-action lawsuits. Arbitration is often confidential. Many workers may agree to mandatory arbitration clauses without even being aware of it when they sign a contract with their employer. In a rare show of public displeasure, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, calling the majority opinion “egregiously wrong” and saying, “The court today holds enforceable these arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts—including the provisions requiring employees to litigate wage and hours claims only one-by-one. Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees.” For more, we speak with Terri Gerstein, former labor bureau chief for the New York State Attorney General’s Office

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