The Supreme Court: Clarence & Ginni Thomas Jet Set Edition

[goofy]

Kind of a crazy article - a ton of right-wing legal arguments for guns have focused on this random survey shadily performed by a very random Georgetown professor who refuses to talk about it (and also, it’s dogshit work):

(gift link)

The Gun Lobby’s Hidden Hand in the 2nd Amendment Battle

But Dr. English’s interest in firearms is more than academic: He has received tens of thousands of dollars as a paid expert for gun rights advocates, and his survey work, which he says was part of a book project, originated as research for a National Rifle Association-backed lawsuit, The New York Times has found.

He has also increasingly drawn scrutiny in some courts over the reliability and integrity of his unpublished survey, which is the core of his research, and his refusal to disclose who paid for it. Other researchers say that the wording of some questions could elicit answers overstating defensive gun use, and that he cherry-picked pro-gun responses.

“I have been struck by the enormous attention and influence the William English paper has had,” said Joseph Blocher, co-director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University. “It just sort of came out of nowhere, posted online without going through formal peer review, and by a guy most of us had never heard of.”

The Times made multiple attempts to interview Dr. English, who teaches at Georgetown’s business school, but he declined through a university spokesperson. He also did not respond to a list of questions.

Government lawyers tried to talk with him in December, after his research surfaced in a Firearms Policy Coalition lawsuit seeking to overturn Washington State’s ban on assault weapons. But Dr. English did not respond to emails, phone calls or a certified letter, and a process server bearing a subpoena could not find him at the university or his home, where someone inside “looked at the door, then turned away,” according to court records.

Faced with efforts to compel his testimony, the pro-gun plaintiffs in the Washington case chose to drop all references to his research.

[TheDuker]

Ban on guns for people under domestic violence restraining orders upheld 8-1

[L.Washington]

I’m kind of surprised they released that one today. Dumping the good PR case on a Friday doesn’t seem like an ideal press strategy, especially with a bunch of heinous shit still to come. I suppose it doesn’t actually matter since might makes right but JR is usually savvier than this.

[TheDuker]

LOL Thomas, 32 pages of this:

A fire-arm regulation that falls within the Second Amendment’s
plain text is unconstitutional unless it is consistent with the
Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Not a
single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue, 18
U. S. C. §922(g)(8). Therefore, I respectfully dissent.

I aint reading all that.

[riverman]

JLawOk, Clarence

[BriansHat]

Crazy that these SCOTUS abortion rulings keep getting leaked. No idea how this is happening!

The Supreme Court seems poised to allow emergency abortions in Idaho, a...

[goofy]

In other SCOTUS news, they dropped a 6-3 decision this morning that bribery is actually fine as long as it’s done after the paid-for deed and isn’t an explicit quid pro quo:

The Supreme Court rules that state officials can engage in a little...

On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion in Snyder v. United States for the Court’s Republican-appointed majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the Court’s three Democratic appointees.

Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As Kavanaugh writes, “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities, by contrast, “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.” (Emphasis added.)

If that seems like a negligible difference, the facts of this case will probably only underscore that sentiment.

The case involves James Snyder, a former mayor who accepted a $13,000 gratuity from a truck company after the city purchased five trash trucks from that company for $1.1 million. Snyder claims that the money was a consulting fee, but federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with violating an anti-corruption statute.

Highlight from KBJ’s dissent:

Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.

[boredsocial]

I gotta I generally eyeball the cost of a brand new truck/trailer setup at 200k per power unit. I don’t know anything about what garbage trucks cost, but unless I’m much mistaken they have the same frames as regular semi’s.

My best guess is the trucking company sold the trucks to city for ~2x what they were worth and then gave the mayor of the city a 2.6% tip lol.

[boredsocial]

So does this latest ruling mean we can start a go fund me to tip senators for getting rid of the filibuster?

If it was real I would be good for 5-10k without even asking my wife lol. Just an objectively good retirement investment. I’m very confident you could raise several million for this pretty easily.

[riverman]

lol they’re never applying this shit to democrats, like imagine they say absolute immunity for presidents then Biden orders Trump murdered. “It is axiomatic that an elected official may not use violence to interfere with the political process” - someone who let 1/6 rioters off

[boredsocial]

I agree of course, but I think it would be very good for everyone if they gave Presidents immunity and Biden without blinking had every major republican politician/donor bagged off to a black site never to be seen or heard from again. It’s quite literally what they’re publicly planning for the other side and giving the president immunity is a direct step towards legalizing doing it to us.

Our side should for sure start a fund to equally tip every senator that votes for filibuster reform. It should be tens of millions of dollars. At that point it forces the GOP to double back.

They pass a stupid rule our side needs to weaponize it immediately. The time for finding out was the day Biden got inaugurated. The fact that the guys in windbreakers weren’t there for everybody with no chance at anything resembling bail after they tried to overthrow the government on national TV is hugely bad for the health of the overall system and made something like that happening again extremely soon almost infinitely more likely.

I mean if vote buying becomes explicitly legal through this structure what is to stop a bunch of concerned citizens from pooling together cash to tip politicians for voting for whatever those private citizens want? This should unleash absolute chaos.

You used to need to wink wink nudge nudge know someone to pay them explicitly for doing what you wanted lol. We have tiktok. They just literally said that bribery is fine as long as you don’t pay them until after they deliver what you’re paying for. That’s pretty goddamn buyer friendly I’m in. Let’s corrupt some politicians for good I guess.

[commonWealth]

@boredsocial

They pass a stupid rule our side needs to weaponize it immediately.

This. Game theory. Just like California should be gerrymandered like crazy, it’s 52 seats and there are 12 Republicans. That should be like 4, maximum. That’s the difference in having a trifecta right now. The Republicans aren’t going to do anything because it’s right. You have to make them feel pain to what to do something. Then, you don’t disarm something that’s advantageous to you for nothing. You get something in return.

[boredsocial]

Like I bet you could create a straight up legal vehicle that was like a security that paid every person voting aye for a specific bill a certain amount of money. There wouldn’t need to be any trust involved you could just donate to the prize pool for any bill you wanted passed.

I mean yeah this is pretty grim, but at the same time it’s pretty close to what’s been happening the last 40 years, except now you don’t have to have enough money to put a k street firm on retainer to access it.

@Jman220 is this sounding remotely sane? Is this what they just did?

[eyebooger]

@commonWealth

Just like California should be gerrymandered like crazy, it’s 52 seats and there are 12 Republicans. That should be like 4, maximum.

Wait until you hear about New York state.

[boredsocial]

Seeing something bad and saying ‘well we won’t use it because then calling to end it would be hypocritical’ is a very bad strategy. The right strategy is to use it right back so hard they think ending it is a push that will make everyone’s life better somehow.

When they go low we go high is the some of the worst political advice in history. The first time someone does something that is outside the rules you see if the law is going to get involved. When the law doesn’t get involved you immediately do it back. That’s just how the game works. Anything else is opting out of playing the game.

I am a little hopeful that the white supremacist nutbags who Trump very successfully lured out into public are going to get FBI’d super hard over the next few years. They’ve certainly handled that kind of work before back before 9/11.

[commonWealth]

I doubt it could be explicit in advance, those are the types of things that still have to be done quietly. And obviously if major progressive legislation gets done, that “gratuity” will obviously be treated as a bribe and the robes will smirk as they do it.

But yeah, the optimal play is still to force them to end it or at least draw an arbitrary line in the sand like “Well $13K is just a reasonable gratuity, $15K on the other hand… THAT is bribery!”

[Jman220]

Kind of seems like it.

[LouisCyphre]

7 in 10 Americans think Supreme Court justices put ideology over...

[LouisCyphre]

At first I thought this is good news

The Supreme Court rejects a nationwide opioid settlement with OxyContin maker...

then I read this

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

and now I am confused

[goofy]

This is a weird one, and Matt Levine has written about it well - here’s his column today:

We have talked a few times about the Purdue Pharma LP bankruptcy. The essential points are:

1. Purdue makes opioid painkillers that led to an addiction crisis and killed a lot of people.
2. Various people — victims, their families, states, etc. — sued Purdue for its actions.
3. This has left Purdue facing perhaps trillions of dollars of morally and legally valid obligations to its victims.
4. Purdue does not have trillions of dollars. Its business is worth perhaps a few billion dollars.
5. It filed for bankruptcy, and its lawyers, together with lawyers for victims and the bankruptcy court, came up with a plan to split up the value of Purdue and give it to the victims. The victims would not get nearly as much as they would otherwise be entitled to — individual victims would get between $3,500 and $48,000 of compensation, orders of magnitude less than a jury would probably give them — but there is only so much money at Purdue.
6. Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family, got very rich over the years from their ownership of Purdue. In particular, in the years after the opioid crisis became widely recognized, Purdue paid about $11 billion of dividends and distributions to the Sacklers. They are billionaires, even though the company that they ran has a net worth of, on some assumptions, negative trillions of dollars.
7. This seems pretty unfair to, essentially, everybody. I mean even to the Sacklers, kind of.
8. So the Sacklers offered to pitch in up to $6 billion of their own money, as part of the bankruptcy plan, to help pay the opioid victims.
9. In exchange, though, they wanted the bankruptcy court to forever extinguish all opioid-related lawsuits against them.
10. The bankruptcy court — and a majority, though not all, of the victims — agreed to the deal.

You can analyze that deal on several levels. There is the level of moral fairness: The Sacklers, loosely speaking, extracted $11 billion for themselves by running a company with a net social value of perhaps negative trillions of dollars. And now they have agreed to give back roughly half of it, leaving them still billionaires. Arguably you should become a billionaire by doing stuff with positive value and keeping some of it for yourself; doing stuff with enormous negative value and getting billions for yourself seems bad. As a matter of fairness, the Sacklers should perhaps have to give back, you know, all of it, or almost all of it, or perhaps more than all of it.

But then there is the pragmatic level. How are you going to get the Sacklers to give up all their money? You could sue them, sure, of course. The entity that is most obvious liable for the opioid crisis is Purdue, the company, which is very bankrupt, but you can probably find some causes of action to sue the Sacklers. For one thing, some Sacklers were executives or board members of Purdue, so you could sue them personally for their own actions running Purdue. (But not all of them were.) For another thing, there are arguments under the bankruptcy code that they should not have been able to extract $11 billion from the company while it was facing all this opioid liability, that the dividends they got were “fraudulent transfers” and can be clawed back by the company.

There are problems with all of this. There are a lot of Sacklers. They can hire good lawyers. Some of them live abroad. Much of their money is in trusts that a US court might not be able to get access to. If you sued all of them, it would be expensive and time-consuming and you might not get much money. You might! And you might at least make life very unpleasant for them, which has its own virtues.

But the majority of the victims, and the bankruptcy court, concluded that getting $6 billion from the Sacklers in the bankruptcy settlement was better than the victims would do by suing them personally. And so they reached the pragmatic compromise that they’d take $6 billion, and not sue for the rest, rather than trying to get the whole $11 billion and possibly ending up with nothing.

But then there is the legal level. The Sacklers weren’t willing to pay $6 billion just to get most, or almost all, of the victims to agree not to sue them. There are so many victims, so many people who could sue. If they paid the $6 billion to extinguish 99% of the claims, they would still spend the rest of their lives fighting lawsuits from the other 1% of the victims.

The Sacklers wanted to pay $6 billion to get rid of all of the claims against them:

So this case is basically, should they be allowed to do that? Or no? This bounced around a few court levels with each level reversing the prior, up to and including SCOTUS deciding 5-4 along non-partisan lines today that they can’t do that.