The SCOTUS Chronicles

[Thumpalumpacus]

Apparently it's okay to participate in an insurrection too, despite the clear laws against it:

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that an obstruction law used to charge scores of Jan. 6 rioters and former President Trump was improperly applied, spelling trouble for the Justice Department’s far-reaching prosecution of the Capitol attack.

The justices sided 6-3, not along ideological lines, for Joseph Fischer, a former police officer accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, who challenged one of several counts he faces: obstruction of an official proceeding.

The law, Section 1512©(2), makes it a crime to “corruptly” obstruct, impede or interfere with official inquiries and investigations by Congress and carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

It’s been used to prosecute rioters who interrupted Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results, but Fischer — and scores of other rioters — claim the Justice Department retooled a charge that once criminalized document shredding to encompass the conduct of those who stormed the Capitol that day.

“It would be peculiar to conclude that in closing the Enron gap, Congress actually hid away in the second part of the third subsection of Section 1512 a catchall provision that reaches far beyond the document shredding and similar scenarios that prompted the legislation in the first place,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

“The better conclusion is that subsection ©(2) was designed by Congress to capture other forms of evidence and other means of impairing its integrity or availability beyond those Congress specified in ©(1),” he continued.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the high court’s conservative majority, while conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the dissent.

Barrett wrote that her fellow justices “failed to respect the prerogatives of the political branches” in their decision and questioned how Fischer’s case did not fit squarely into the parameters of the charge. She accused the court of completing “textual backflips” to find “some way – any way” – to narrow the subsection’s reach.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-bat...on-charge/