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Wouldn't that basically make him just the new Kennedy? And it would mean that the court shifted so far to the right that Roberts now would be the relative middle. Truly a horrifying prospect.
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Oct 11, 2018 12:48
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Dameius posted:Wouldn't that basically make him just the new Kennedy? And it would mean that the court shifted so far to the right that Roberts now would be the relative middle. Truly a horrifying prospect. He'd be the new Kennedy in terms of being a swing vote, but he'll still be voting to the right of Kennedy.
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Oct 11, 2018 12:53
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iirc Roberts already sided with the liberal justices in more 5-4 decisions last session than Kennedy did. If I'm remembering right this is because he did so in one case, and Kennedy did so in zero.
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Oct 11, 2018 14:21
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vyelkin posted:iirc Roberts already sided with the liberal justices in more 5-4 decisions last session than Kennedy did. Then he insisted that the WH nominate Kavanaugh
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Oct 11, 2018 14:42
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vyelkin posted:iirc Roberts already sided with the liberal justices in more 5-4 decisions last session than Kennedy did. Correct. There were 4 5-4 decisions where someone acted as a swing vote and flipped to the liberal minority 2 Roberts 1 Kennedy 1 Gorsuch Edit: There was also a 5-4 where both Roberts and Kennedy flipped but then Kagan flipped the other way SickZip fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Oct 11, 2018 |
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Oct 11, 2018 14:51
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I think probably the thing to watch with the Chief Justice is how aggressively and quickly he moves on big conservative decisions with such a strong majority, given that his worry about the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of the public is larger than the rest. He still isn't above making decisions that undermine that legitimacy or threaten it, but it would be unlike him to go full throttle and try to get the entire conservative wish list done in five years, especially given that he will have much longer to do so if he wants to move at a more measured pace.
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Oct 11, 2018 17:42
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Yeah there's a lot more groundwork to do eroding voting rights before he can be sure enough of his party's minority rule that it's time to start openly ruling by decree
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Oct 11, 2018 17:44
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Again, it's amazing how the era of Trump whitewashes W's era into making us think it was so much better. Bush's appointment of Roberts shows that versus Gorisch or Kavarapist. Roberts seems miles better than those two, and yet he will vote in lock step with Republican party the majority of the time. It just seems that Roberts got the memo that Justices of the SCOTUS are SUPPOSED to at least appear impartial to politics (hence the loving lifetime appointment) and yet that obviously hasn't been the with the last two. I actually have a friend who is more bummed out by the fact that the SCOTUS is now pretty much a Yale-grad only club now. She graduated valedictorian of her college and law school, but since she didn't go to the good-old boys club of Yale she'll most likely never even have a dream of a shot at SCOTUS even if she continues to be amazing in her career. It's a huge deal, as people who attend Yale obviously don't really even know how the poors live in the US culture. jeeves fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Oct 11, 2018 |
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Oct 11, 2018 18:56
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I hate living in the evil crisis timeline which helps us answer questions like "what if Kavanaugh ended up appointed after all? How do you imagine he would rule?" I guess with an explicit endorsement of ... indefinite detention of immigrants and migrants. Yikes.
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Oct 11, 2018 19:06
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jeeves posted:I actually have a friend who is more bummed out by the fact that the SCOTUS is now pretty much a Yale-grad only club now. She graduated valedictorian of her college and law school, but since she didn't go to the good-old boys club of Yale she'll most likely never even have a dream of a shot at SCOTUS even if she continues to be amazing in her career. It's a huge deal, as people who attend Yale obviously don't really even know how the poors live in the US culture. Which law school did she go to? If she was top tier in a top 14 law school, she should have enough cred for a good federal clerkship and then you never know how things will go from there. Plus, people from tiny schools like Harvard and Princeton are also on the Court. 
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Oct 11, 2018 19:10
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Stickman posted:I was wondering how bad it could be, and holy loving poo poo. He literally argues that Native Hawaiians can't qualify as a tribe because they "don't live together", as in because the government didn't force them onto reservations and they "let" white people live around them. Oh, they don't have a system of government? The one Americans illegally overthrew? In a coup so illegal that the US refused annexation in 1893 (but only for five years - we were still pretty bad)? The amicus brief he filed in that case was co-authored by none other than Robert Bork.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:01
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Brony Car posted:Plus, people from tiny schools like Harvard and Princeton are also on the Court.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:31
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Kazak_Hstan posted:A Texas district court judge ruled the Indian Child Welfare Act unconstitutional on both 14th amendment equal protection and 10th amendment commandeering grounds. The SCOTUS just effectively barred natives from voting in a state by siding with a racist-as-gently caress law that disallows a PO Box as your address for voting purposes, which hits everyone living on a reservation since the USPS doesn't service those and so they use PO boxes. I fully expect every upcoming case to be 5+ against native Americans. Dems as a whole aren't going to give more than the slightest fucks either. Stereotype posted:This is a huge test of the court's acceptance of Kavanaugh. He was aggressively criticized by Sen. Hirono (D-HI) because of an opinion he wrote stating that Native Hawaiians don't constitute a special protected "Native American" class that can receive specific preferential assistance because, crudely: indians have teepees and live on the mainland and hawaiians don't and they just aren't the same so you don't even get to help them like we're forced to do with indians. Roberts doesn't give a poo poo about jurisprudence unless it furthers his own ideological goals.
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Oct 12, 2018 00:54
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Evil Fluffy posted:The SCOTUS just effectively barred natives from voting in a state by siding with a racist-as-gently caress law that disallows a PO Box as your address for voting purposes, which hits everyone living on a reservation since the USPS doesn't service those and so they use PO boxes.
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Oct 12, 2018 01:11
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Harik posted:Someone post the link to how you can help the organization getting street addresses assigned for emergency services, and how that letter is immediately valid for voting. I only remember that it exists, not who is working on it. I believe it is the 911 coordinator
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Oct 12, 2018 04:40
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Harik posted:Someone post the link to how you can help the organization getting street addresses assigned for emergency services, and how that letter is immediately valid for voting. I only remember that it exists, not who is working on it. Has anyone actually confirmed that this is valid for Native American reservations, though?
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Oct 12, 2018 07:33
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Nevvy Z posted:I believe it is the 911 coordinator  E: I don't think this is what I was talking about, but here's an 10/8 update on the situation: https://dakotafreepress.com/2018/10/09/four-directions-organizing-native-voter-id-assistance-in-north-dakota/ Boils down to "Tribal leadership has to make an official address system, get everyone addressed on it and submit it to the state in time for the elections." The fact that this was pushed through between the primaries and the election is monstrous. Harik fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Oct 12, 2018 |
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Oct 12, 2018 07:51
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Brony Car posted:
Princeton law school is my favorite
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Oct 12, 2018 12:37
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So 2 of the liberal Justices voted to strip Native Americans of voting rights?
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Oct 12, 2018 17:00
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Unzip and Attack posted:So 2 of the liberal Justices voted to strip Native Americans of voting rights? Nothing more Liberal than colonialism
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Oct 12, 2018 18:02
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Evil Fluffy posted:The SCOTUS just effectively barred natives from voting in a state by siding with a racist-as-gently caress law that disallows a PO Box as your address for voting purposes, which hits everyone living on a reservation since the USPS doesn't service those and so they use PO boxes. If this isn't the thread for pedantry I don't know what is, so: they didn't uphold the law, they declined to take up the case. Which means the appeals court's strikedown of an injunction stands, which is bad - I think the actual law is still being litigated, but the injunction was because, well, we're coming up on an election and the circuit (?) court wanted to err on the side of caution. I disagree with the decision to decline cert / not reimpose the injunction, obviously. On the plus side, from that Four Directions thing and other stuff I've been hearing, it shouldn't be too tricky for the tribal government to plonk a dude at polling places with unilateral authority to issue the paperwork voters need. The fact that the onus is on the tribes to do it is, uh, garbage, but it seems like a workable solution in the short term. which is arguably bad for the litigation because one of the things the state government was leaning on was that it's not a very substantial burden on the voters 
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Oct 12, 2018 19:13
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Unzip and Attack posted:So 2 of the liberal Justices voted to strip Native Americans of voting rights? It's more like they recognized that the Constitution doesn't say that you can't disenfranchise someone if they don't have a postal address. Technically it would be constitutional for states to disenfranchise people whose favorite food is hot dogs. Remember that before the 24th amendment it was constitutional for states to deny people the right to vote just because they were poor.
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Oct 12, 2018 19:22
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We desperately need a constitutional amendment that just says everyone has the right to vote.
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Oct 12, 2018 19:38
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Kazak_Hstan posted:We desperately need a constitutional amendment that just says everyone has the right to vote.
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Oct 12, 2018 20:17
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I guess I will never understand how the Supreme Court can rule that same sex marriage is constitutional but people having the right to vote isn't. Not that I'm opposed to the former at all- just that how do you arrive at the conclusion that the Constitution requires the former but not the latter?
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Oct 12, 2018 20:30
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Don't worry gay marriage will get overturned soon. Probably Lawrence too! Contradiction resolved.
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Oct 12, 2018 20:33
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Unzip and Attack posted:I guess I will never understand how the Supreme Court can rule that same sex marriage is constitutional but people having the right to vote isn't. Not that I'm opposed to the former at all- just that how do you arrive at the conclusion that the Constitution requires the former but not the latter? Marriage is a fundamental right, and then the question is if restricting that fundamental right to only opposite-sex couples is justified. Conclusion: it isn't. quote:[T]he Court has long held the right to marry is protected by the Constitution. In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12 (1967), which invalidated bans on interracial unions, a unanimous Court held marriage is “one of the Voting is also a constitutionally protected right, in that it cannot be denied or abridged based on several factors (race, former slave status, sex, failure to pay poll tax, or on account of age if over 18). Like any other right (xref freedom of speech and right to bear arms), there can in fact be a hell of a lot of limits put upon it, which then have to be evaluated to see if they meet the constitutional criteria. For the North Dakota case, a fair amount of the case result is the procedural posture. Th is a preliminary injunction phase before the case has actually been litigated, so all the State really needs to show is that they have a decent chance on appeal. And here, where there isn't any voter registration, the State has to use other means to evaluate eligibility. The State chose a residential street address, and so the court is seeing if there's a reason for that as opposed to not requiring a street address: quote:North Dakota has no voter registration requirement, so a resident may appear at the polls on election day and cast a ballot without any previous expression of desire to vote. Election officials at the polls are charged with determining whether a person who appears is qualified to vote.
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Oct 12, 2018 20:53
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ulmont posted:Voting is also a constitutionally protected right, in that it cannot be denied or abridged based on several factors (race, former slave status, sex, failure to pay poll tax, or on account of age if over 18). Hypothetically (i.e. not with the current SCOTUS composition), could you make a legal argument that the current prison system is slavery, based on the "except as punishment for a crime" part of the 13th amendment and the fact that current prison basically is slavery, and then use that to argue that denying ex-cons the right to vote is unconstitutional because of their former slave status?
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Oct 12, 2018 21:09
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You could also make the argument that when voter suppression happens, those states should start losing Representatives based on the 14th, but that's equally unlikely.
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Oct 12, 2018 21:19
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Ardlen posted:You could also make the argument that when voter suppression happens, those states should start losing Representatives based on the 14th, but that's equally unlikely. Yep. Prisons often get located far away from everything else not just because of NIMBYism, but also because it suddenly gives an area with maybe a few hundred voters a few thousand extra people to include in their district. Fremont County, Colorado has 20% of its population in one of its 15 (!) prisons.
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Oct 12, 2018 21:27
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vyelkin posted:Hypothetically (i.e. not with the current SCOTUS composition), could you make a legal argument that the current prison system is slavery, based on the "except as punishment for a crime" part of the 13th amendment and the fact that current prison basically is slavery, and then use that to argue that denying ex-cons the right to vote is unconstitutional because of their former slave status? I think that would be a longshot even for the Warren Court, but I can see the logic. It would probably be easier to have Congress pass a law saying a state could not disenfranchise convicts from federal elections; given inertia and the difficulties of having people be eligible for one set of elections but not another, that would likely push most states all the way to full ex-convict voting rights restoration.
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Oct 12, 2018 22:59
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ulmont posted:I think that would be a longshot even for the Warren Court, but I can see the logic. Or the Kris Kobach's of the world would relish the chance to make voting even more complicated, giving them more opportunities to prosecute "voter fraud" when someone mistook their eligibility to vote and lots more get frustrated or intimidated into not voting.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:15
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Kazak_Hstan posted:Or the Kris Kobach's of the world would relish the chance to make voting even more complicated, giving them more opportunities to prosecute "voter fraud" when someone mistook their eligibility to vote and lots more get frustrated or intimidated into not voting. They generally haven’t done that with the HAVA-mandated voter registration forms that must be accepted for federal elections but not necessarily state ones I thought?
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Oct 12, 2018 23:53
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I don't really know what states have done in the past, but I think it's at least worth considering what people acting in bad faith could break on purpose.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:57
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Kazak_Hstan posted:We desperately need a constitutional amendment that just says everyone has the right to vote. I've often thought about this. Something like "The government shall not deprive any citizen over the age of 18 their right to a convenient, expedient, and equal vote." I'm not a lawyer so you might need to add some more but I think the idea is sound. (And yeah, the definition of an "equal" vote is probably gonna end up being a mess here but I say let the courts hash that out.)
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Oct 13, 2018 01:33
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vyelkin posted:Hypothetically (i.e. not with the current SCOTUS composition), could you make a legal argument that the current prison system is slavery, based on the "except as punishment for a crime" part of the 13th amendment and the fact that current prison basically is slavery, and then use that to argue that denying ex-cons the right to vote is unconstitutional because of their former slave status? Hypothetically, you can make whatever argument you feel like, but I doubt many people would seriously buy a stretch like that. That style of weird legal gimmick arguments usually only works when the court already wanted to rule that way and just needs an excuse.
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Oct 13, 2018 04:07
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vyelkin posted:Hypothetically (i.e. not with the current SCOTUS composition), could you make a legal argument that the current prison system is slavery, based on the "except as punishment for a crime" part of the 13th amendment and the fact that current prison basically is slavery, and then use that to argue that denying ex-cons the right to vote is unconstitutional because of their former slave status? Legally, the US prison system is currently not a form of slavery, as in the prisoners are not actually the property of someone. The Constitution allows States to punish convicts, just not "cruel and unusual" punishment. It IS possible for a State to decide to literally enslave prisoners, but no State has done that, and if they tried to pass a law to enslave all prisoners it would probably be struck down as unconstitutional for being too cruel to a majority of prisoners. Note that the SCOTUS has ruled that for certain prisoners the State can deny a prisoner even the right to life, so I imagine for certain prisoners the SCOTUS will rule that a punishment of literal enslavement would be constitutional.
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Oct 13, 2018 05:10
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Felony disenfranchisement is based on the conviction, not the sentence. People who are convicted of felonies and don't go to prison are still disenfranchised in a number of states. Even if you adventurously read the 15th Amendment proscription of disenfranchisement based on "previous condition of servitude" as applying to prisoners, the states could argue they are acting based on the fact of conviction, not because the person was a prisoner. And I think that would be a substantially correct argument. I think a more compelling argument is found in Article IV's requirement that the United States guarantee each state a republican form of government. When you approach Florida levels of disenfranchisement there is a decent argument that those actions create democratic deficits, which in turn render the government something other than a republic. Textualists would just say the common usage of the word in 1789 contemplated something substantially less than universal suffrage, but there's probably a coherent argument to be made that the 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments have changed the meaning of "republican form of government." All of those amendments refer to "the right to vote," which is an essential characteristic of a republican form of government. It's probably still a stretch to argue that "a republican form of government" in Article IV means "universal suffrage," but there is at least a foundation for that argument in the political science literature. I don't really think that is a winning legal argument, but it is at least a coherent one. It would probably be an uphill fight to convince even a portion of the liberal minority on the court.
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Oct 13, 2018 05:44
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qkkl posted:Legally, the US prison system is currently not a form of slavery, as in the prisoners are not actually the property of someone. The Constitution allows States to punish convicts, just not "cruel and unusual" punishment. It IS possible for a State to decide to literally enslave prisoners, but no State has done that, and if they tried to pass a law to enslave all prisoners it would probably be struck down as unconstitutional for being too cruel to a majority of prisoners. Mere cruelty isn't sufficient unless it is also unusual Hence why tortuously murdering prisoners with paralytic drugs is fine
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Oct 13, 2018 09:44
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also the constitution doesnt actually matter
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Oct 13, 2018 20:27
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