will mean the end of Donald Trump's political career. The USSC needs to be expanded, Project 2025 needs to be exposed, and legal means should be explored to get rid of the un-American Heritage Foundation once and for all. Ditto for the corrupt Federalist Society.
Biden gave a brief speech in response to the USSC Trump "immunity" case:
Yes, death squads are a distinct possibility if that madman somehow gets back in the White House:
It might be shocking to the denizens of Democratic Underground, but for so many of us in the real world, the USSC overruling the Colorado Supreme Court on Trump and the ballot was never in any doubt.
Here, direct from the source, is the ruling against Colorado and in favor of Trump:
Since it is an election year, sure the Court had to make a quick ruling. The thing that might shock some on the left was this was a unanimous decision, not just a Leonard Leo-sponsored decision.
"This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency."
In other words, this is a separation of powers issue.
The Roberts Court just told Texas to shove it up its ass. The decision is here.
BREAKING: Supreme Court rejects Texas-led effort to toss out election results in four key states that Biden won
— Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley) December 11, 2020
Earlier: What Trump and company are doing is sedition:
NEW STATEMENT by current and former R's: "We are dismayed that most Congressional Republicans...continue to be silent in the face of the President’s conduct & to abet his false narrative that he won an election that is being stolen from him"https://t.co/JwgEdYlRiO
— Checks and Balances (@chkbal) December 11, 2020
And this:
courtesy of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:
Kavanaugh so frequently inserted himself into high-profile political battles that during his confirmation hearing for his DC Circuit seat, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called him the “Forrest Gump of Republican politics.”
In 1999, Kavanaugh represented two members of Congress who filed a brief in a Supreme Court case supporting a New Mexico school district’s effort to maintain student-led prayers at football games. (The court found the prayers unconstitutional.) The following year, he got involved in the case of Elián González, the young Cuban boy who came to the United States after his mother drowned trying to bring him to the country, prompting an epic custody fight between his father in Cuba and his relatives in Miami. Kavanaugh worked pro bono for González’s Miami relatives in their vain appeals to keep the boy in the United States.
That same year, Kavanaugh represented Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in his fight to overcome constitutional hurdles to his controversial school voucher program that would direct public money to private religious schools. And when the 2000 election came down to some hanging chads in Florida and a contentious recount, Kavanaugh was there, too, working on George W. Bush’s legal team.
That being said, I don’t think it necessarily follows that this means that the Ivy League must be the exclusive source for Supreme Court Justices, or a majority of the Circuit Court of Appeals Judges for that matter. Why is it that Yale and Harvard Law Schools, located within about a two hour drive of each other at most, are the source of all of our Supreme Court Justices? What about Stanford, Columbia, the University of Michigan, or any of the other schools ranked the top ten, or even the top 25 among American Law Schools? Is it really the case that none of these other 23 schools are capable of producing the kind of elite graduates that would make good Justices and Judges at the highest levels of our legal system? The idea that this could possibly be true is, indeed, quite absurd._____
In the coming months and years, this group of Ivy-trained Washington insiders will have to decide whether Texas voters who don’t have driver’s licenses and are required to take three buses across town to pay $30 for a voter ID have effectively been disenfranchised. They will determine whether women who need to travel 300 miles to procure an abortion (women who may lack cars, or paid time off, or money to spend on hotels) face an “undue burden.” But some of the same justices who will bar empathy from those considerations forget that they do evince empathy when they side with those beleaguered “sidewalk counselors,” or multimillionaire campaign donors, or the owner of a mega-chain of craft stores who believes his religious freedoms have been impinged. All of us import our values and experiences into our decision-making. The double-whammy at the current Court is that the justices are no longer allowed to acknowledge it, and that the pool of those with whom they unavoidably identify is so dangerously small and privileged.
When the next court vacancy occurs, there will be lists of brilliant, Yale- and Harvard-trained jurists to choose from. But there will also be many accomplished lawyers toiling in elected office and legal-aid clinics and state-school faculties. Progressives need to identify those prospects and to push them forward. The alternative is ceding the court to ever-more dazzling minds, while seeing less of our own realities in its jurisprudence.
The Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College decisions herald the return of even more sinister “rights” of employers. After all, it was once the case that proprietors claimed the “right” to exclude Jews, or the “right” to refuse to serve blacks, or the “right” to refuse to hire or promote women. “It is my private property,” the proprietor would say, “I have the right to do what I want with it.” By upholding the employer’s supposed “right” to deny health care to women, the Supreme Court invites an attack on every democratic reform that was achieved over the past century.
Ginsburg opens with a bang, immediately describing the decision as one that will have sweeping consequences:
In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.
To sum it up, five male justices ruled that thousands of female employees should rightfully be subjected to the whims of their employers. That women can be denied a benefit that they already pay for and is guaranteed by federal law. That contraception is not essential healthcare. That corporations can pray. That the corporate veil can be manipulated to suit the needs of the corporation. That bosses can cynically choose à la carte what laws they want to comply with and which laws they do not. Each specific finding opens a door to a new form of discrimination and unprecedented corporate power. If you think this ruling won’t affect you, you haven’t been paying attention. If you think these corporations are going to stop at birth control, you’re kidding yourself.
The Supreme Court decision targets the democratic rights not only of African Americans, but the entire working class. It removes a legal barrier to restrictions on the right to vote and encourages new efforts to curtail the franchise.
With consummate cynicism, Chief Justice John Roberts attempted to present his assault on the Voting Rights Act as a step, reluctantly taken, to pressure Congress to update the measure and bring it into conformity with present conditions. This pose of legalistic objectivity is belied by his role in the 1980s as President Reagan’s point man in attempting to weaken the act.
By effectively discarding the law’s enforcement mechanism, which requires Alaska and eight southern states, plus parts of seven other states, to pre-clear any changes in voting procedures with the federal government, Roberts gave these jurisdictions a green light to enact any changes they desire.
The embrace of gay marriage by the Obama administration, large sections of the Democratic Party and even a growing number of Republicans and conservative business groups underscores the degree to which identity and lifestyle politics in its various forms—race, gender, sexual orientation—has become a vital element of bourgeois politics.
This serves as a mechanism for diverting attention from the assault on democratic rights, the expansion of war, the growth of poverty and the widening chasm between rich and poor.
Pro-Democratic Party organizations have promoted issues of identity and lifestyle as a means of obscuring these basic class issues, as a means of diverting attention from the reactionary policies of the Obama administration. The Democratic Party uses general support for equality to obscure its fundamental agreement with the Republicans on attacking the working class all down the line.
It is quite telling that bourgeois politicians and media are devoting so much attention to the Supreme Court’s gay rights rulings, while the court’s outrageous and wholesale attack on basic democratic rights, embodied in its decision striking down the Voting Rights Act earlier this week, garners dwindling attention.
The ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act means that the federal government must recognize the gay marriages deemed legal by the states — 12 plus the District of Columbia, before the California case was decided.
The law helps determine who is covered by more than 1,100 federal laws, programs and benefits, including Social Security survivor benefits, immigration rights and family leave.
“DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others,” the ruling said. It added that the law was invalid because there was no legitimate purpose for disparaging those whom states “sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”
The mandate’s advocates said it was necessary to ensure that not only sick people but also healthy individuals would sign up for coverage, keeping insurance premiums more affordable. The law offers subsidies to poorer and middle-class households, varying with their incomes. It also provides subsidies to some businesses for insuring their workers.
The law requires states to expand Medicaid coverage for poor and nearly poor households. In all, tens of millions of people are expected to gain insurance from the law, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as part of a march toward universal coverage, a goal that has eluded legislators and presidents – including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton – for generations.
The decision came on the last day of the term, which the justices extended by three days to deal with the crush of major issues. On Monday, the court delivered a mixed ruling on an Arizona law intended to crack down on illegal immigrants, which the Obama administration opposed.
There won't be any questions about Kagan's qualifications, expertise or intellect -- she's exceptionally smart and knowledgeable -- and she largely holds positions on social issues, such as a solid pro-choice and pro-gay record, that will be pleasing to progressive constituencies. But the same is true for many outstanding candidates to replace Stevens, including Appellate Court Judge Diane Wood, former Yale Law School Dean and current State Department legal adviser Harold Koh, and Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan. And those choices, unlike Kagan (or Sunstein), would maintain the Court's fragile ideological balance rather than shifting it decisively to the Right for decades to come.
In other words, according to the Supreme Court, when corporations spend billions manipulating elections and obtain the desired results, this is “democracy.” This Orwellian characterization of democracy could have been dictated by the hedge funds, financial institutions, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations that routinely inject billions into American politics in return for favors from both corporate-controlled parties.
Up to now, under established law and Supreme Court precedent, corporations were obliged to funnel their campaign bribes though “independent” political action committees, or PACs. This placed certain legal and public relations restraints on their manipulation of the electoral process. Now, even these restraints are lifted.
From a legal standpoint, the majority opinion rests primarily on the specious claim that corporate campaign spending is protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The majority opinion baldly asserts, in disregard for the historical origins of the Bill of Rights, the democratic conceptions of its authors, and the egalitarian traditions that are deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, that corporate money equals speech.
This legal fiction turns the First Amendment upside down.
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.
Here are a few pictures I took at Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon today, including a couple of them from the historic lodge:
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