The Supreme Court: Clarence & Ginni Thomas Jet Set Edition

She’s the same one who recently got into an edit war on her own Wikipedia entry because she’s mad that it (correctly) points out she compared COVID restrictions to WW2 Japanese internment camps.

She is very, very mad to now be in the minority. Please don’t put in the newspaper that she got mad.

SensiblePerson · September 5, 2023, 8:50pm

Who knows if this is a first step toward something meaningful, or “LOL another sternly-worded letter”?

NB: I’m not familiar with this source, so if it’s garbage I apologize. Also, “Whitehouse” does not equal “White House,” which would have been more interesting, IMO.

commonWealth · September 5, 2023, 9:03pm

For a split second I read that as White House and got pretty excited that Biden was playing some hardball.

goofy · September 14, 2023, 7:14pm

Good Serwer article about Alabama’s reaction to & open flouting of the Milligan ruling:

non-paywall link

Why did Alabama choose first to defy the district court, and then to file an appeal with so little substance? It seems pretty obvious: Alabama thinks it will win if the case goes back to the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court is full of right-wing hacks. Again, it is not liberals who are operating on this belief. It is not left-wing trolls on social media. It is the Republicans governing the state of Alabama. The conservative legal movement spent decades building this Supreme Court majority, the GOP expects more returns on its investment.

All of this shows that critics of the Supreme Court majority are not alone in believing that it includes a bunch of partisan hacks. The majority’s political allies think so too. They just happen to like it. If the justices truly deplore this impression, they might spend a little time asking themselves what they’ve done to create such a commonly shared consensus.

riverman · September 22, 2023, 1:36pm

Pull out the fainting couches

https://x.com/propublica/status/1705153555659735371?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg

McTrollson · September 22, 2023, 2:15pm

My norms!

pvn · September 22, 2023, 4:32pm

Is this worse than megayachts and private jets?

goofy · September 22, 2023, 5:39pm

Kacsmaryk is back!

goofy · September 22, 2023, 6:50pm

Also, here’s a very astute piece from MJS + Lithwick that puts Alabama’s defiance of the Milligan ruling in historical context, highlighting how deranged the conservative relationship with the law has become:

Years ago, there was an elaborate ritual dance: Justice Clarence Thomas would drop a line in an opinion or a dissent that someone should bring a challenge to X or Y, and in the fullness of time, some group would bring the challenge. It would take a few years, sure, but the case would be tried, a record would be developed, an appeal would be filed, and the case would duly arrive at the court, awaiting its resolution. The nondelegation doctrine. The individual right to bear arms. The end of preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. The return of state-sponsored prayer. The gutting of the Eighth Amendment. Thomas precipitated all of these developments by putting out a call for a case that was answered by conservative litigators plotting their next challenge.

But Kavanaugh finds himself at this unfortunate moment in Supreme Court history in which nobody cares to do any of those steps anymore: He sends his smoke signal to the litigants, and they just straight up defy the court’s orders. It’s not just that the dog has caught the car with the conservative legal movement’s capture of the Supreme Court. It’s that the dog has eaten the car and spits it out anytime its honks are not to the dog’s liking. Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Milligan does not read as a road map for Alabama to disobey this very ruling; rather, it appears to be a warning that the justice may not enforce the Voting Rights Act in future rounds of redistricting over the coming years. In the old days, litigants would’ve grasped this distinction. When Thomas mused that the Second Amendment might protect a personal right to own firearms in 1997, he was not encouraging gun owners to start ignoring state gun regulations, but planting the seeds for a someday in the future ruling (which came with 2008’s D.C. v. Heller).

With characteristic ineptitude, Kavanaugh tried and failed to pull off this same trick, vastly overestimating the patience of the modern conservative legal movement. It has not been three decades or three years since Milligan, but three months; it’s the same exact case with the identical damn facts. And yet, here we are, waiting to see if the outcome will flip just because Alabama lawyers copied and pasted Kavanaugh’s concurrence into their new briefs. And while we all wait to find out, Alabama voters find themselves in the same posture they were in for the months and years they waited for judicial relief. As Sherrilyn Ifill would remind us: Is this how we do law now?

Jman220 · September 26, 2023, 3:05pm

Pleasantly surprised I guess:

Of course it would have been a jopke if they let Alabama do this after their last ruling.

MrWookie · September 26, 2023, 3:14pm

Yeah, they’ll gut this precedent eventually, but they’re not so bold as to flush any last hint of their legitimacy down the toilet right away.