The SCOTUS Chronicles

[The Valkyrie]

I can criticize their aim when they miss.

I can't count the latest one, though. Someone shot a Border Patrol guy in the face (non-fatal), but it was a robbery attempt, nothing to do with the Gestapo tactics.

Boru

Gotta take what you can get.

[awty]

I have been enjoying the stories of the little pushbacks against trICE. Things like tow truck drivers swooping in and towing their vehicles off when they are making a raid somewhere and have double parked.

A meme I saw said something to the effect of...I don't know who needs to hear this, but trICE vehicles have catalytic converters too.

[The Grand Nudger]

The practical trouble we're in right now is that there's alot of appetite for a coup on the reichs side - and very little appetite for insurrection on the other. The other used loosely, literally everyone else, including the limp trumpists. The nras good guys with guns were always a load of bullshit...but the lefts analog won't show up until they believe that they enjoy the broad assent of society to do a thing they were strongly persuaded to believe is wrong.

[Thumpalumpacus]

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a judge’s limits on Los Angeles-area immigration stops based on a person speaking Spanish or working in a certain profession.

The Trump administration urged the high court for the emergency intervention, calling the order a “straitjacket” on enforcement efforts in an epicenter of the president’s immigration crackdown.

The ruling appeared to fall along the court’s 6-3 ideological lines, though the justices are not required to publicly disclose their votes in emergency orders. The one-paragraph order contained no explanation, as is typical.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second appointee to the court, penned a solo opinion indicating the plaintiffs likely have no legal right to sue and the administration is likely to succeed in defeating the lawsuit, regardless.

“To conclude otherwise, this Court would likely have to overrule or significantly narrow two separate lines of precedents,” Kavanaugh wrote in the 10-page concurring opinion.

[...]

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong imposed the limits in July after a group of individuals stopped by ICE and private organizations sued over what they decried as unconstitutional “roving patrols” in the Los Angeles area.

Frimpong, an appointee of former President Biden, agreed they had shown the administration was likely violating the Fourth Amendment by stopping people without reasonable suspicion.

Her order prevented immigration authorities from relying on four factors to conduct immigration stops and arrests: someone’s race, use of Spanish, type of work or physical presence at a location where migrants in the country unlawfully are known to gather.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-bat...s-angeles/

So, precedent doesn't matter when it comes to stripping women of the right to bodily autonomy, but is very important when permitting the government to profile and harass non-English-speaking people, or poor folk who push a broom or pick your vegetables for a living.

This court is directly complicit in the dismantling of American democracy.

[Mister Agenda]

It takes a particular specialness to give permission to arrest people who look or sound hispanic while looking a Puerto Rican colleague in the eye.

[Thumpalumpacus]

"If a right can be taken away, it's not a right -- it's a privilege." -- George Carlin.

The Japanese-Americans he was referring to are similar to the Hispanic-Americans nowadays: good hard-working citizens being imprisoned for looking different. I hate this government with a passion. I'm worried about my son.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Further evidence that John Roberts is gagging on Trump's mushroom:

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to allow the Trump administration keep frozen billions of dollars in foreign aid that is set to expire next week, the latest turn in a lengthy legal saga over the congressionally appropriated funds.

The emergency intervention came at the administration’s urging to lift a lower court’s ruling ordering it to spend $4 billion in funds approved for aid programs by Sept. 30, its expiration date.

The unsigned order indefinitely extends the pause on U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s injunction that was put in place earlier this month by Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency appeals from the nation’s capital by default, as the high court considered the appeal.

The court gave a brief explanation of its reasoning, saying that the government “at this early stage” made sufficient showing that the lawsuit is precluded under the Impoundment Control Act and that the plaintiffs can’t force the government to pay up.

The court also said that the asserted harm to Trump’s foreign policy powers appeared to outweigh potential harm faced by the respondents.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-bat...id-freeze/

I believe that, if any honest history is indeed being written in America 100 years from now, the Roberts Court will be seen as even worse than the Taney Court, because they're busy rubber-stamping the dismemberment of democracy.

[Jackalope]

So much for Congress having power of the purse.

[Thumpalumpacus]

In an interview with NPR to be aired in October, [former Justice Anthony] Kennedy said that he is "very worried" about America today.

"We live in an era where reasoned, thoughtful, rational, respectful discourse has been replaced by antagonistic, confrontational conversation," he said, adding that "Democracy is not guaranteed to survive."

Indeed, he says that he is worried even about the tone of some Supreme Court opinions.

"It seems to me the idea of partisanship is becoming much more prevalent and more bitter," he said. "And my concern is that the court in its own opinions…has to be asked to moderate and become much more respectful."

When he retired from the court in 2018, Kennedy told a small group of journalists that he was confident that the court's major decisions would remain intact. But when I asked him if he still thinks that is true, he demurred.

Though Kennedy, in close cases, voted most often with the court's conservatives, perhaps most revealing in the book are his accounts of how and why he cast decisive votes with the court's liberals on abortion and same-sex marriage. Of the two issues, it turns out that same-sex marriage was easier for Kennedy to resolve, but harder on his relationship with his conservative colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia.

Gay marriage decision

Starting in 1996 Kennedy wrote every major decision about gay rights, culminating in 2015 when he wrote the court's majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges declaring that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry everywhere in the country.

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family," he wrote.

Kennedy says that perhaps the most persuasive argument for gay marriage came with his realization that many states barred gay couples from adoptions, so that only one could be the legal parent, and the other had no legal right to make decisions for the child, sign school papers for the child, in some cases could not visit the child in the hospital, and the children could not say they had two parents, which was "terribly demeaning for the children of gay parents."

That was the situation faced by "hundreds of thousands of children of gay parents," he observed in our interview. "That was eye-opening for me, and it was very important in influencing me for the result."

It was the gay marriage cases, however, that for almost a year led to a rupture with his colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia. The break came over Scalia's dissenting opinion in the same-sex marriage case in which he wrote that if ever he were to join an opinion like Kennedy's "I would hide my head in a bag." According to Kennedy, the other conservatives thought the dissent "offensive" and "intemperate" and tried to get Scalia to modify it. But they failed, prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to write the lead dissent.
Kennedy says that while he was able to "shrug off" the Scalia dissent, his children and their spouses "were devastated" by its tone." And by the beginning of the next term Scalia, known to all as Nino, "rarely came to lunch" with his colleagues and no longer stopped by Kennedy's chambers to chat.

Months went by and then one day in February of 2016 Scalia "came down the long corridor of the court to my chambers to talk." Once there, "he turned to the subject on both our minds: our own relationship. Nino said he had come to regret deeply his Obergefell dissent" and he apologized for being intemperate. "The visit became a pleasure, even a landmark for us," writes Kennedy. "Neither of us was big on hugging but we hugged, both of us smiling."

[...]

The other emotional legal issue that Kennedy talks about in the book is abortion. A devout and Mass-attending Catholic, Kennedy then, as now, views abortion as a moral wrong. And at one point he was so conflicted that he even considered resigning. "Another life is involved, one that cannot speak for itself. For many of us the unborn child cries out from the womb, cries out with a soulful voice to us and the law: let me exist, let me live," he writes.

Ultimately, though, he concluded that "a moral wrong is not necessarily a legal wrong, nor do my own personal views control what I must decide as a judge." As a co-author of the decision that upheld the right to abortion, he writes, "The constitution promises…a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter" and among those decisions, the mother's choice to bear a child is among the most personal known to our law."

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/27/nx-s1-555...nnedy-book

There's a lot more to read in the article and I hope members head over there and read it in its entirety. I miss moderates like him.

[Deesse23]

How does Volksgerichtshof translate into English?