The SCOTUS Chronicles

[The Grand Nudger]

-and now, any decent person considering a similar act of disobedience will concern troll themselves and decide against it no matter how worthy or critical the cause, precisely because the magats drug disobediance through the mud on jan6. If the clerics on the court came out and simply said that women had no rights their husband owners didn't afford them and that blacks were 2/5ths of a person...there would be no riots. There would be no scaling the capital walls....Because Decency™. In order to avoid Being Like Them™.

Bullshit. Disgusting, perverted, and tragic bullshit.

Ferguson, 2014.



DC, 2021



Personally....I've long known that the magats don't believe in my america, the thing I'd burn anything down for. It's disheartening to realize that the libs don't either. It's one thing..if there's nothing else, the two camps have in common. Neither of them would lift a finger to save the us. One, because they don't want it to be saved, and the other, because they have novel moral concerns not shared by the people who openly fantasize about killing them in the streets.

[Nanny]

Once elected, politicians have one drive - getting reelected. They know they have to dog whistle to their constituency, blow hot air, and get nothing done except scoring political points.

Thomas, Alito, et. al. face no such compulsion. They are gods in their own eyes.

[HappySkeptic]

You set up a system that is supposed to ensure justice and fairness, and someone will figure out how to game the system. That's now happened with the Supreme Court.

The best you can do is find ways to reform the court. I was against packing the court, but now I realize they should have. Sure, the other side can re-pack or unpack at some future date, with such a small court it only takes a couple of corrupt people to completely tilt the balance. The credibility of the court is already broken. Packing won't break it more.

To find a detente in the packing-wars, some sort of court reform could be worked out.

[Thumpalumpacus]

A former neighbor of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said that “at worst, he’s outright lying” regarding the timeline of the upside-down American flag flown at his Virginia home.

Alito has been in the spotlight over his homes flying controversial flags, first revealed in reporting by the New York Times. The upside-down American flag, recently associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement, flew in early 2021. His New Jersey house flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag last summer.

The justice has said his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, put up the flag at their Alexandria, Va., home over a “very nasty” neighborhood dispute, one that reportedly involved former neighbor Emily Baden.

Baden’s then-boyfriend had called law enforcement on Feb. 15, 2021, to lodge a complaint about over Martha-Ann Alito’s “unprompted” actions toward them, according to records obtained by CNN.

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Baden disputed the chain of events presented by Alito.

“And I just want to emphasize that the interaction that happened on February 15 is the one that they’re using as an excuse for why they flew the flag,” Baden said on “OutFront” with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“And I really want to hammer home the fact that that happened on February 15, and their flag went up two or three weeks before that, so even if it were a valid excuse that they were having a dispute with a neighbor, and that made them put the flag up,” she continued. “That timeline just disproves it.”

“At best, he’s mistaken. But at worst, he’s just outright lying.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/4707610-ali...ghbor-cnn/

Of course, we knew that already.

[Thumpalumpacus]

And --

Supreme Court justices have received nearly $5 million in gifts since the early 2000s, and one justice in particular, Justice Clarence Thomas, accounts for nearly all of it.

Data released Thursday by watchdog group Fix the Court unveils a list of gifts justices have received since January 2004. The dataset was released ahead of an expected release of the justices’ financial disclosure reports Friday.

Thomas, nominated to the high court by former President George H.W. Bush, made headlines last year after an investigation found he had taken dozens of trips paid for by separate billionaire friends.

According to the data compiled by Fix the Court, since 2004, Thomas has accepted $4,042,286, or 193 gifts. The group reported that, for Thomas, there’s an additional 126 “likely but not confirmed gifts.”

Of the nearly 200 gifts, the group said Thomas only reported 27 of the gifts on his financial disclosures.

The dataset included current and former justices dating back to 2004, tallying their gift totals, including Thomas’s, to be about $4.7 million.

“Supreme Court justices should not be accepting gifts, let alone the hundreds of freebies worth millions of dollars they’ve received over the years,” Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth said in a statement. “Public servants who make four times the median local salary, and who can make millions writing books on any topic they like, can afford to pay for their own vacations, vehicles, hunting excursions and club memberships.”

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-bat...dog/mlite/

They got about everything right except one word: they should have used "grift" instead of "gift".

[Mister Agenda]

Impeachment and conviction are separate. An impeached justice will always be an impeached justice. That's not nothing, though it may be close.

[Divinity]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...235036470/

In case you didn't think Alito deserves to be thrown in the garbage.

[Thumpalumpacus]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...235036470/

In case you didn't think Alito deserves to be thrown in the garbage.

... alongside Thomas. They're both shitbags who have no objectivity.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't know how many times she'll need to be told before she learns --

The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said that she wants to get back at people who raised a controversy after she and the justice were criticized last month for flying politically affiliated flags at their homes.

“You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you,” Martha-Ann Alito said in the recording of a private conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3.

“There will be a way, it doesn’t have to be now, but there will be a way they know,” she added. “Don’t worry about it.”

The remarks were recorded by progressive filmmaker Lauren Windsor, who attended the event as a member of the society under her real name, though she posed as a conservative to elicit answers from Alito and others.

[...]

In the recording, Martha-Ann Alito also committed to flying a “Sacred Heart of Jesus” flag at her homes this month to protest the display of an LGBTQ Pride flag nearby. The Sacred Heart of Jesus flag is a symbol associated with the Christian right wing, specifically used to protest Pride.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-bat...recording/

[Thumpalumpacus]

The secret recording of conservative Justice Samuel Alito endorsing the idea that the country should return to a place of “godliness” has further plunged the Supreme Court into controversy, evoking outrage from Senate Democrats and forcing Republicans to play defense.

Senate Democrats are firing off new salvos of criticism at Alito — and at Chief Justice John Roberts for not reining in his conservative colleague — after he appeared to endorse the idea that the nation should embrace Christian principles and failed to distance himself from his wife’s outspoken hostility to a neighbor’s gay pride flag.

“Alito is an extremist who is out of touch with mainstream America. His rising power on the Supreme Court is a threat to our democracy,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said.

Warren is one of many Democrats who think Alito is bringing a partisan political agenda to the bench, and they’re highlighting it whenever they can ahead of November’s election.

“I am most concerned about the appearance that Justice Alito has prejudged cases that will come before him. That is one of the biggest sins that a judge or justice can commit, and his willingness to align so publicly in the middle of a hotly contested political battle is deeply worrisome,” Warren said.

“It undermines whatever last shreds of credibility the Supreme Court might have had,” she said.

[...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters Tuesday that Democrats will try to advance Supreme Court ethics reform legislation on the Senate floor this week.

“We’re planning on making a move on the floor this week to move the ethics bill for the Supreme Court by unanimous consent,” he said.

The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, which is sponsored by Whitehouse and Durbin, would require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct and create a mechanism to investigate alleged violations of the code and other laws.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4716...eme-court/