SCOTUS and the Conclusions

 

It's really not hard to draw an obvious and unpleasant conclusion regarding the conservative justices' rulings regarding effectively legalizing bribery and privileging the opinions of courts over subject matter experts in government agencies with respects to regulatory matters, and to keep this blog post terribly brief, let me just sum it up this way:

The Republican-appointed justices have shown us what they are, and all that's left is billionaires haggling over the price. I'm sure putting it this way would offend Sam Alito and his missus, so to also keep this blog post brief, I will refrain from suggesting what else they can run up a flagpole if they don't like it.

I really shudder at conservative justices using their slapdash "textural" approach to the law as a "public service" to overrule agency decisions based on science. What this means for climate change, curbing pollution, food and drug regulation....

Vergogna!

 

EXCLUSIVE UNDERCOVER AUDIO:
Martha-Ann Alito Unfurled

"I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month." pic.twitter.com/okNsW7SPlu

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) June 10, 2024

There's a lot to unpack in the conversations that undercover reporter Lauren Windsor had with the Alitos. The verification of Samuel Alito's sense of culture war driving his juris-imprudence doesn't entirely surprise me. Does he endorse the return of our country to "a place of godliness? So he does!

It seems to me he must be using his own personal notes for what he thinks godliness means--as for myself, I'm less ambitious, and would like to see the Supreme Court be a place of cleanliness, which would, I am told, be the next best thing and a bit closer to his job. 

But it's Mrs. Alito's sense of an ax to grind over Pride flags, her desire for revenge against the media (how dare they report unpleasant things--like her squabble with the neighbors, or the way her family's security detail may be threatening them), her combination of privilege and aggrievement, that fascinates me. It's her unselfconscious use of the term "feminazis". It's her reference to her German heritage. How she intends to get even. Eventually.

Flagpole Sitta

 

Samuel Alito—who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade—says his wife “makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so.” pic.twitter.com/r52Yjf35ih

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 29, 2024

Far be it for me to question how the Alitos manage their affairs at home--although Justice Alito certainly questions how American women and their families make other important decisions, for example, regarding their reproductive health care--but I love the idea that because the Mrs. is a property owner, he (also an owner of the same property) could not abrogate her important first amendment flag-raising choices by taking the thing down himself. 

Well, one hears of such things. A man can be, for example, top dog in his place of work, but be barely able to raise a peep, let alone lower a flag, in his own home. It appears, based on the report of the Alitos' neighbors, he might well have reason to fear her temper. 

She might have left him hardly able to comfortably sit on a bench, is what I'm getting at. Having foregone that particular conflict, however, he sees himself as still eminently qualified to rule from the highest bench in the country.

It's a matter of judgment. 

Appeal to What, Now?

 

Breaking News: A second provocative flag linked to Jan. 6 was flown at a home of the Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. https://t.co/DCnJ1drXPR pic.twitter.com/MB3JN3TapZ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 22, 2024

Funny old thing about me, if you didn't know--I'm big on the separation of church and state. Once I realized the incompatibility of the first commandment and the first amendment, the idea that the ISA is, in any sense, a Christian or even biblically based nation flew out the window, and I realized that no person tries to present a government as divinely inspired without there being some real fuckery afoot.

Trump, a hedonist, a personification, in his way, of the deadly sins, is a "tool" in the vernacular, but has also been used by Christian Nationalists as a tool to get their feet in the door of the White House. Why? How? I suspect it's that his hands are dirty and theirs stay clean, while their agenda will fall into place under him because he simply is an authoritarian. They don't care "what's in his heart". 

He's a gift to them. A gift from heaven. He'll outlaw abortion and birth control and eradicate wokeness and restructure society back to where everyone knew their "place" in the great chain of being. Where's the catch?

This is a democracy, and most people here don't actually want that, is the catch. We were supposed to have done away with the idea of terrestrial kings who have a "divine right" to do anything. Let alone place religious tests on who participates in government or how laws should induce people to behave. The founders of the US were all too aware of European sectarianism and the dangers thereof, and were trying to manage a system that would accommodate an already diverse society.

Justice Alito Should Pack it In

 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is facing calls to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 presidential election after reports emerged of an inverted American flag flown outside his home days after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. pic.twitter.com/BumAk9E8y1

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 17, 2024

If ultra-conservative SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito (and family) feels so thin-skinned about the burden of the public commenting on the job he's doing (which affects all Americans, and no shit people are rightly concerned) , so much so that the US flag, inverted, was flown on his lawn like a cry for help or a signal that it was time for a revolution (or insurrection), if his bias has become so apparent that people deem it fit that he recuse himself from the most important cases relating to the preservation of our republic and the continued relevance of the Constitution as well as the court on which he sits (what the whole hell else is the "presidential immunity" question?), then he can really do us a favor and retire. 

Before the election, thanks. Because apparently, elections make him just too emotional, and as a nation, we've already had two long national nightmares over that sort of thing. 

TWGB: This Situation is not Hypothetical

 

In today's SCOTUS hearing, Samuel Alito argued that immunity for former presidents is good, actually, because without it, ex-presidents might refuse to leave office peacefully if they lose reelection...

Make it make sense. https://t.co/HepJVcgN2Q

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 25, 2024

If I were to take Justice Alito as a good-faith interrogator adhering to the actual facts of the Trump presidency--the actual president this case is about, and not some future generic president we're just having a classroom thought-experiment about, are we supposed to play along and imagine a path where 1/6 does not happen because Trump can rest safe in his bed at Mar-a-Lago certain that no ill shall befall him, because he had immunity. So, he just gracefully turns over the keys to the established firm:

And maybe that even means he is just fine keeping those documents from the White House that he doubtless acquired during his presidency--several boxes of, in fact--and selling them, because we are just going to assume a president does official things officially, and not shady-ass criminal stuff because one has always been a shady-ass criminal? 

On a day where Justice Brown-Jackson noted that immunity (or should we rather call it, impunity?) would turn the Oval Office into a center of criminal activity, we received testimony that Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders were in contact--via their White House offices, with David Pecker regarding the election interference/hush money cover-up scheme. 

Sam Alito Should Retire.

 

The lawyer who “wrote” this is also the lawyer blocking our investigation into Leonard Leo’s Supreme Court freebies.

Shows how small and shallow the pool of operatives is around this captured Court — same folks keep popping up wearing new hats. https://t.co/NUaoxpBy8a

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) July 28, 2023

I have an opinion about this particular justice that is not nice. Samuel Alito's wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while Alito sat in judgment over the EPA. Alito is no stranger to conflicts of interest--it's just that he isn't interested in discussing the conflict part of it. I have once and forever stated that the definition of "conflict of interest" for conservatives was that if one always has decided in one's own interest, there is never a conflict. And I'm not sure that flippant construction doesn't accurately describe the conservative court. 

So what is my take on Alito and his beefing on the idea of checks and balances? Because it boils down to whether Alito thinks he has a say over Congress' ability to set tax law without Congress having an ability to determine whether Alito has any ethical standards he ever has to conform to. 

It would seem to me like Alito does not prefer to have any ethical standards pertaining to him by another authority because he understands his situation wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, and if he doesn't like my opinion on that, he can fucking fight me. 

He won't and doesn't need to, because in his world, my opinion is an irrelevancy. (Also, I would cream him on his conflicted ass and the legacy of it point by butchered legal point.)

He needs to retire because he's at this point trolling how much SCOTUS doesn't have to conform to any ethical standards and he wants to pretend Congress has nothing at all to do with the configuration of the court or the ethics they need to adhere to. But the Constitution literally does exactly that.  Congress can determine how many justices, and even if they can be impeached for their skullduggery. 

Weird that he missed that. It feels very intentional.

SCOTUS Focus

 

I don't love that I'm revisiting this again so soon, but the entire Supreme Court has an ethics problem, as in they don't think they've got an ethics problem and they actually should be the first to see it. Their unanimous joint statement of clarity is pretty clear--who is supposed to check them?  

But what if every indicator suggests these mere mortals are not exactly reliably self-checking?

We are called to mind again of the genuine likelihood of conflicts of interest via spousal income--this time in the form of Chief Justice Roberts' wife's $10 million from making job placements with lawyers to assorted law firms. The kind of firms that are going to be heard in her husband's court? Well, yeah, Obviously. 

The sordid story regarding Justice Kavanaugh's 2018 confirmation hearing was also once again revisited today, with the report that his Senate investigation, just like his FBI investigation, was faulty. The GOP Senate never wanted to know the real story with regards to Kavanaugh because it never mattered to them, 

And of course Sam Alito was heard from, because he won't be ignored. He thinks he knows that the Dobbs leaker was definitely not a conservative. Also, he still claims the leak could have gotten him killed.

Jesus, Guns, Babies, SCOTUS

 

The Dobbs bomb dropped today, and it was already quite a week for SCOTUS conservative signifying. There was an elevation of the free exercise concept regarding religious liberty over the establishment clause, which feels sloppy as hell. Free exercise doesn't to my mind imply taxpayer-funded exercise. We have now introduced a situation in which, having opened the door to funding some religious-operated schools, would the state government be determining a cut off at some point?  All religious schools? Scientology, Hare Krishna, Church of Satan? 

(Look, I'm not a Mainer or Maine's mom or anything, but why do you have such a thing as areas that don't have an actual public school? Instead of offering tuition to anyone, just do a school. I think the world would be a better place if there were more schools. Figure out where there is a gasping need, build it. I don't know how a community exists that doesn't think there is a need for a local school, but okay, village, if you don't build it, the state can just step in that way. Shrug. Of course, I don't believe in private or homeschool education because there's a risk of things being way off standard. Ever see the Abeka curriculum? Yikes on bikes.)

We also saw a radical dismantling of gun control, also pretty bizarrely decided, with Justice Thomas telling us somberly that Justice Taney had some good points in the Dred Scott decision. Wait.. Have we retired the idea that you absolutely do not have to hand it to the Dred Scott decision; because I feel like I missed a memo. Last I checked we were not handing anything to the Dred Scott decision. 

But while the conservative justices were feeling extra cute with their decisions (history might delete later) it's no surprise that Thomas once again added to the obvious furor that the Alito-written Dobbs decision was going to cause by actually saying the unravelling part out loud--yeah, we're coming for Obergefell, Lawrence and Griswold.  (Who is going to check us, bitch? he did not add.) You don't have a private life that isn't dictated by the state. We can control your vertical and horizontal--the outer limits of your physical choices. You will fornicate inside the lines. God will decide if child will issue or not. If you die, you die. 

Ah! There it Is!

 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) argues Roe v. Wade being overturned won’t be that bad:

“Angry leftists, many of whom are pretty ignorant and don’t even know what overturning Roe means, I think a month afterwards are gonna be surprised — ‘Wait, nothing about my life changed.’” pic.twitter.com/GATZKcVG26

— The Recount (@therecount) May 9, 2022

The condescension! The paternalism! The implication that "You silly bitches would be just fine with your rape babies if you weren't being such stupid sluts about it." (And it will only take a month to settle you! Think about that! A month to get over the loss of a right we've had for 50 years.)

When people concern-troll and tone-police about the optics of actually peaceful sidewalk demonstrations by pro-choice advocates, just keep in mind that this is the guy we're up against. Is Cruz trying to convince a single supporter of the right to choose of anything at all by calling us "ignorant"? He makes sure to add "angry", as if the prospect of fully realized human beings having to beg for recognition vs. the projection of humanity the Bible-bangers want to bestow on the 6-week sprog wasn't something to be good and infuriated about. 

"There, there little dummy. Lie back and enjoy it." I mean, it's a gift, right?  It's an opportunity! 

Tell that to the girls as young as five years of age who have gotten pregnant. Tell that to the already-existing children who could lose a parent to an ectopic pregnancy. 

I don't know that protesting outside of the homes of the justices likely to vote against a human right will change their core beliefs, but it will certainly let them know the opposition exists and is robust. I also don't believe that right-wingers are the least bit honest with us or themselves when they pretend the pro-choice contingent is verging on terrorism by simply speaking out (and I wish our elected leaders would push back on the hypocrisy of this instead of eagerly adopting that frame). I think we know full well who has a history of behaving like terrorists. 

Cruz needn't worry about this turning into another, say, January 6th, after all.  Even if he is very worried about whether a terrified Sam Alito has probably gone into hiding somewhere. Probably Cancun. 

It's Only A Hundred Years or so...

 

The more I think about the idea, present in Justice Alito's leaked draft of the decision to overturn Roe about the idea of rights "deeply rooted" in US tradition, the more I think about how women have really only had the right to vote for a hundred years give or take, and how he cited a man who didn't think marital rape was a crime and had witches executed. (It seems like I was just talking about how "witchcraft" and repro rights were related....) 

In just over a hundred years, part of feminist work has been not just to assert our right to manage our reproduction by way of birth control, but to even fight for the concept of consent with respect to our bodies themselves--to not be raped, to be made child brides, to be sterilized, and are still incomplete. 

I have a good idea what a step back would mean for us. We can't take one step back. Not one. 

An Unravelling Thread

 

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and obtained by POLITICO.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes. https://t.co/nl3JFLx9xg

— POLITICO (@politico) May 3, 2022

A perusal of Twitter shows that many conservatives are more concerned with the leak of Justice Alito's draft of the decision to reverse Roe v. Wade than the decision itself, which takes aim not just at the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, but at the right to contraception and the right to marry the adult partner of one's choice. It's as if the privacy of the Supreme Court to make these personal decisions for millions of Americans matters more than the privacy of those decisions for the individual.

They know full well that many people today have no intention of "lying back and taking it". The leak concerns them because it gives people an insight into the game plan (as if the game had not already been quite clear).  We should have always known our rights hung by this thread, but if anyone had not--there it is: the right of the state and the people who run it over your right to run your own life. 

The folks who go around saying they like small government and freedom are dirty liars. They just despise oversight and responsibility. But when they let you know they despise your personal pursuit of happiness, the right to medical care (such as the termination of an ectopic pregnancy, etc.) that can preserve your life, and gives you choices--liberty! They stand against you. 

Forced labor (how else to describe a state-mandated pregnancy?) is violence. It cannot stand.