The Supreme Court: Clarence & Ginni Thomas Jet Set Edition

[MrWookie]

You’re right, it’s a federal judge. My mistake. Still, with the ability to judge-shop, it still ends up feeling like red states telling blue ones what to do rather than some sort of shared principles at the federal level ruling against blue states.

[Danspartan]

And that is because of the sacred “blue slip” rule. Gawd the senate is just filled with dumb shit that allows minorities to dominate.

[TheDudeAbides]

isnt that by design? i don’t think it’s a necessarily bad thing. tyranny by the majority was/is a very real fear. look at our past failure(s) on web forums, for instance.

[goofy]

@TheDudeAbides

isnt that by design?

No, it’s dumb Senate norms bullshit that the GOP ignored when it suited them:

In October 2017, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he believed blue slips should not prevent committee action on a nominee.[9] In November 2017, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, announced that the committee would hold hearings for David Stras and Kyle Duncan. Stras’s hearing was held up by Senator Al Franken’s refusal to return his blue slip, while Duncan’s hearing was held up by Senator John Neely Kennedy’s indecision on his blue slip. Kennedy, however, consented to Duncan receiving a hearing.[10][11]

In February 2019, attorney Eric Miller was confirmed to serve on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the fact that neither of his two home-state senators (Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both of Washington) had returned blue slips for him.[12] He was the first federal judicial nominee to be confirmed without support from either of his home-state senators, although other nominees were similarly confirmed to the Courts of Appeals without blue slips later in 2019, including Paul Matey (Third Circuit, New Jersey), Joseph F. Bianco and Michael H. Park (both Second Circuit, New York), and Kenneth K. Lee, Daniel P. Collins, and Daniel Bress (all Ninth Circuit, California).

[Danspartan]

It’s like the filibuster. Been horribly abused that any perceived benefit is completely been displaced by LOLFUCKYOU.

[commonWealth]

Again, is a pharmaceutical company going to continue to produce and ship products counting only on jury nullification as their safety net?

My main point here is that the average person has virtually no power in this regard. It’s in the voting booth, and that takes years to play out.

[commonWealth]

@TheDudeAbides

isnt that by design? i don’t think it’s a necessarily bad thing. tyranny by the majority was/is a very real fear. look at our past failure(s) on web forums, for instance.

Tyranny by minority is worse, though. That’s what the Senate and the judicial system is providing.

[boredsocial]

Really depends on how much money they stand to make.

[DrModern]

I think actually, at this stage, a District Court ruling would be limited to the particular district, with the Circuit being the next level of appeal up, which they’d have to go through before the case got up to SCOTUS. It’s honestly a little surprising to me is how quickly these ideologically motivated cases are finding their way into the federal courts in the wake of Dobbs, though. Like, it won’t take long before calls to overturn Eisenstadt v. Baird or Griswold v. CT hit the streets (or, you know, the smoke-filled back room where right-wingers congregate to concoct their evil schemes).

[goofy]

I thought random district court judges can & do make rulings that affect the whole country, like, a judge in Hawaii striking down Trump’s travel ban (hazy memory but I think that happened?) or these dipshit rural Texas judges who love issuing injunctions against Biden that apply nationwide.

It is often the case that higher courts will then stay the lower court order while the issue makes its way through courts, but that’s not a guarantee.

[hammypotter]

Federal government was a party to the travel ban case, so it didn’t matter which district court it was in. The feds were then enjoined from enforcing the ban.

Let’s say you have, for example, a state criminal case that is appealed to the 5th circuit because of a constitutional issue. The 5th circuit ruling would be precedent in the states comprising the 5th circuit. If the case is then appealed to the Supreme Court, the ruling would be precedent nationwide.

[goofy]

Good article about DoJ finally trying to do something about GOP judge-shopping, but also, what in the fuck took them so long:

Republicans can choose the judge who hears their lawsuits. DOJ wants to stop...

Ordinarily, the fact that a few trial judges hold extreme views would be unfortunate, but hardly a crisis. According to the Federal Judicial Center, there are 71 federal trial judges in the state of Texas, and federal lawsuits are supposed to be randomly assigned to a local federal judge shortly after they are filed. So, if Texas’s federal courts were functioning properly, judges like Kacsmaryk or Tipton would only occasionally be assigned cases brought by litigants with a political agenda.

But the case assignments process in Texas is not functioning properly. Texas federal courts assign 100 percent of all cases filed in Amarillo to Kacsmaryk. They assign virtually all cases filed in Victoria to Tipton. That means that right-wing litigants can guarantee their lawsuit will be heard by an allied judge simply by filing their suit in one of these two cities.

Last Tuesday, the Justice Department finally decided that something must be done about this problem. It filed a motion in one of Kacsmaryk’s political cases, arguing that he must transfer the case to a location where it will be randomly assigned from a list of more than one judge. The Texas federal courts’ practice of allowing conservative litigants to choose their own judges, the motion argues, “undermines public confidence in the administration of justice.”

Realistically, the likelihood that Kacsmaryk will grant this motion is vanishingly small. Kacsmaryk has spent his brief time on the bench undermining public confidence in the administration of justice with judicial decisions that cannot be squared with the law. But the motion, at the very least, will allow the Justice Department to appeal this issue up the judicial chain — and eventually to the Supreme Court, where the justices could step in if they choose.
…
At the very least, DOJ’s motion shines a big spotlight on the judge-shopping problem, and it could potentially embarrass the Supreme Court into taking action.

The article makes a good point that, while there’s a rule (that’s clearly been flagrantly ignored many, many times) that “suits should be filed in the judicial district where ‘the plaintiff resides’” and “federal law provides that ‘an entity with the capacity to sue and be sued … shall be deemed to reside … only in the judicial district in which it maintains its principal place of business’” - so, Texas should not be filing federal lawsuits in Amarillo - that argument works only on technical grounds if enforced, so DoJ is also presenting a better argument:

Additionally, DOJ points to a statute permitting cases to be transferred to a different district “for the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice.” Among other things, DOJ argues that “‘the interest[s] of justice’ alone favor transfer” because “the public’s interest in the fair administration of justice would be harmed if a filing with strong indicia of judge shopping were left unchecked.”

Of these two arguments, the latter is far and away the more potent. While the former argument might succeed in moving this one case out of Kacsmaryk’s courtroom, future litigants can likely get around this argument by simply adding a plaintiff to the case who lives in the Northern District of Texas. They may even be able to manufacture such a plaintiff by creating a shell corporation that is nominally headquartered in Amarillo.

The latter argument, by contrast, suggests that judge-shopping is inherently suspect under federal law, and could potentially allow DOJ to attack any effort to shop lawsuits challenging federal policies to partisan judges like Kacsmaryk or Tipton.

[hammypotter]

I appreciate the author suggesting not one, but two arguments that the judge will wipe his ass with before saying fuck you, no

[hammypotter]

Jen The Feisty Librarian

[eyebooger]

Roses are red
Caffeine makes me wired
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Should have retired

[Danspartan]

Before she was dead

[goofy]

NBC News

It’s not super clear from the wording but SCOTUS denied cert on this. You may have heard of this case awhile ago because the Onion filed a great amicus brief. If you were curious what happens when an immovable object (freeze peach) meets an unstoppable force (cops) in front of SCOTUS, there’s your answer.

[goofy]

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1629531188208517123

non-paywall link

Very good article about the casual cruelty of the conservative justices, where 4 of the 6 were like “eh, fuck it, just let them kill the guy” to a man who received a death sentence via a process that’s been ruled unconstitutional.

How unconstitutional? Eleven years before Cruz’s trial, in Simmons v. South Carolina, the Supreme Court had ruled that when prosecutors arguing for the death penalty cite the risk of future “dangerousness,” defendants have the right to let the jury know that the alternative to a death sentence would be life without the possibility of parole.

That’s what Cruz asked for at his trial. The judge not only refused — he incorrectly instructed the jury that Cruz could be eligible for parole after 25 years. And that seemed to make a difference to the jurors in deciding whether to impose a death sentence.

So Cruz sought a new trial. He lost, and lost again before the Arizona Supreme Court, which, again incorrectly, asserted that Simmons didn’t apply to Arizona’s death penalty sentencing scheme because parole was available. In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

But in 2016, the high court, seemingly exasperated by the Arizona courts’ repeated recalcitrance, summarily reversed the Arizona Supreme Court. Yes, the high court said in Lynch v. Arizona, Simmons did apply in Arizona.

Four conservatives still voted to kill this guy!

[Danspartan]

Lynch v Arizona ?

The writers are making this up.

The irony of that name being railroaded to an execution.

Let me guess, all four are pro-life

[goofy]

Some good tweets about SCOTUS treating student loan forgiveness radically different from any other issue that comes before them

Law Boy, Esq.

Law Boy, Esq.

Jay Willis

Jay Willis

Sparky Abraham 🟥

Sparky Abraham 🟥