I mean shouldn’t the DOJ lawyer just cite Roberts in Zivotofsky v. Clinton right in Roberts’ face and see what Roberts thinks about that asshole Roberts that Roberts disagrees with? I mean I get that pissing off the Chief Justice has a lot of downside but when he starts asking questions like that you have to realize it’s just a question of whether you’re losing 6-3 or whether a liberal is going to join them. I’d just go for the headlines at that point. And then I’d follow up with, “Hey John, if you don’t think it’s fair, shouldn’t you just vote harder?”
But my take is and has always been that the Biden Administration wanted to lose this case. They wanted credit for student loan relief without actually having to give the (yuck) poor and (bleh) middle class tangible help, because if Joe Biden and John Roberts had some ice cream cones together in a back room, they’d agree, this shit’s totally unfair!
The six members of the Court’s conservative supermajority have spent their careers proudly not giving a shit about fairness for anyone who is not a corporation or a Republican politician charged with a slew of campaign finance violations. If they indeed have the votes to declare Biden’s plan too unfair to be legal, that result will be no less unfair. It will just be a political choice to tolerate unfairness to people who the conservative justices don’t think should count.
All of these articles overlook the solution of the President simply choosing to ignore the court. It wouldn’t work in every single case (like ones specific to the states are a bit trickier) but it would effectively neuter much of their power. I’ll admit it’s a dangerous game to play but I’d rather play that game than just give up and cede all power to the conservative majority that will likely endure for the rest of most of our lives.
I was listening to a 5-4 where they talk about this buddy of Scalia who was a bit of a sex pest so I decided to look up his wiki, good god, this man was out of control for decades. Makes Clarence Thomas seem well-adjusted.
Kozinski would allegedly call clerk Heidi Bondinto his office, pull up pornography on his computer, and ask if she thought it was photoshopped or if it aroused her sexually, interrogating her about why it did not.[35]
A former Kozinski clerk said Kozinski, in his chambers, showed her an “open-legged image of a male figure that was naked.”[36]
“One recent law student at the University of Montana said that Kozinski, at a 2016 reception, pressed his finger into the side of her breast, which was covered by her clothes, and moved it with some ‘deliberateness’ to the center, purporting to be pushing aside her lapel to fully see her name tag.”[36]
A lawyer “said Kozinski approached her when she was alone in a room at a legal community event around 2008 in downtown Los Angeles and — with no warning — gave her a bear hug and kissed her on the lips.”[36]
University of California at Irvine law professor, Leah Litman, said at a 2017 dinner, Kozinski pinched her and joked that he had just had sex with his wife and she or others at the table would be ‘happy to know it still works.’"[36]
Former U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge, Christine O.C. Miller, 73, said that “around early 1986 said Kozinski grabbed and squeezed each of her breasts as the two drove back from an event in Baltimore in the mid-1980s, after she had told him she did not want to stop at a motel and have sex.”[36]
Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate that when she was clerking for another judge on the 9th Circuit and Kozinski learned she was in a hotel room, he asked her what she was wearing.[37]
Nancy Rapoport, special counsel to the president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has written that when she was clerking for another judge on the 9th Circuit, Judge Kozinski invited her to drinks and asked, “What do single girls in San Francisco do for sex?”[38]
Emily Murphy, who was clerking for another Ninth Circuit judge at the time and later became a professor at UC Hastings, said Kozinski suggested to a group that she exercise naked in the courthouse gymnasium.[39] Murphy has said, “It wasn’t just clear that he was imagining me naked, he was trying to invite other people — my professional colleagues — to do so as well. That was what was humiliating about it.”[39]
A former 9th Circuit clerk reported that in late 2011 or early 2012, she found herself sitting next to Kozinski at a dinner in Seattle. He “kind of picked the tablecloth up so that he could see the bottom half of me, my legs,” and he remarked, “I wanted to see if you were wearing pants because it’s cold out.”[35]
A “former 9th Circuit clerk said that at a dinner with other clerks, Kozinski brought up a movie that contained a topless woman, talking about her ‘voluptuous’ breasts. The woman . . . said she made a face to signal her disbelief at what he was saying, and Kozinski turned to her and said something like, ‘What? I’m a man.’”[36]
One “former Kozinski extern said the judge once made a comment about her hair and looked her body up and down ‘in a less-than-professional way.’ That extern said Kozinski also once talked with her about a female judge stripping.” The clerk said she wouldn’t want to be alone with Kozinski.[35]
A former extern said she had at least two conversations with Kozinski “that had sexual overtones directed at me.”[35]
Amazing profession where this guy can run around openly waving his dick at interns for forty years with zero consequences. Riverman is right, the whole legal industry needs to be drawn and quartered. Like everyone knew this guy was out of control but no one gave a shit besides the female staffers and associates.
Trump’s Worst Judge declines to help students suing West Texas A&M University after their piece of shit school president shut down a planned drag event (while admitting “yes I know this is probably illegal but I don’t care”)
Next legal front in the conservative culture war: Making The Exclusionary Rule (aka “fruit of the poisoned tree”, aka cops can’t use evidence collected illegally) Great Again (as in, before it existed at all)
SCOTUS did not force the exclusionary rule to apply to the states until 1961; there are certainly at least a few votes on the court to just undo it!
Guy is an Obama appointee, I imagine he will be overruled as this case moves up the chain in district courts and then the very conservative Fifth Circuit
Just going to further segregate the country too. Blue states will all keep it because their highest courts have also found a right to use the exclusionary rule based on violations of state constitutional rights. Red states will toss it.
Cool cool, so in addition to being incompetent and married to an insurrectionist, Thomas is also openly taking enormous bribes and impeaching him isn’t even on the table. World’s Oldest Democracy!
Curious to see how eDems play this. My guess is not a peep. They don’t want anything to fundamentally change, and they don’t want to undermine the credibility of a court that has been very favorable to establishment Democrat’s true interests (big corporations).
Obviously the correct play is to make this bigger than Benghazi, and always mention that McConnell stole a seat and Trump stole an election thus stealing two more seats. Call SCOTUS illegitimate and say they’re ripping away gender and racial equality.