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Zerg Mans
Oct 19, 2006

Der Meister posted:

has anyone considered ignoring them

Texas

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Mothmansplainer
Apr 2, 2020

Der Meister posted:

has anyone considered ignoring them

this is already happening in more and more red states

Jimong5
Oct 3, 2005

If history is to change, let it change! If the world is to be destroyed, so be it! If my fate is to be destroyed... I must simply laugh!!
Grimey Drawer
I thought years ago after the enemy combatants ruling, what's stopping the president from declaring his opponents enemy combatants and detaining them in gitmo indefinitely. Apparently the answer is nothing lol.

Spaced God
Feb 8, 2014

All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement
Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us
Out of this fearful country!



Jimong5 posted:

I thought years ago after the enemy combatants ruling, what's stopping the president from declaring his opponents enemy combatants and detaining them in gitmo indefinitely. Apparently the answer is nothing lol.

Noooo the answer is :decorum:

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

Jimong5 posted:

I thought years ago after the enemy combatants ruling, what's stopping the president from declaring his opponents enemy combatants and detaining them in gitmo indefinitely. Apparently the answer is nothing lol.

at some point i was watching cnn or meet the press or something and the guy insisting that trumps presidential immunity theory was hokum brought up obamas ordering osama bin ladens assassination for reasons not at all clear to me i think he was trying to give a platonic example for why presidential immunity is good

it didnt seem to occur to him at all that obama just arbitrarily killing whoever he pleased without even a pretense of oversight actually backs up trumps argument and the only especially absurd part about these assassination hypotheticals in trumps case is that theyre implicitly being used in relation to white people in the united states

Real hurthling!
Sep 11, 2001




any spicy 6-3's on the horizon?

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

Real hurthling! posted:

any spicy 6-3's on the horizon?

well they did just do a 6-3 decision today siding with republicans over the south carolina district map that forces black people into the same district but thats boring did u hear about samuel alitos upside down flag smdh at how this countrys going down the tubes

Real hurthling!
Sep 11, 2001




yeah but whens the sicko poo poo

HashtagGirlboss
Jan 4, 2005

Real hurthling! posted:

yeah but whens the sicko poo poo

Usually the second half of June is when all the interesting stuff drops

titty_baby_
Nov 11, 2015

Real hurthling! posted:

yeah but whens the sicko poo poo

Dameius
Apr 3, 2006
Usually the second half of June is when all the sicko poo poo drops

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

do we think applying the enron law to literally anything anyone in the government ever does is going to be a 6-3 or a 9-0

HashtagGirlboss
Jan 4, 2005

Some Guy TT posted:

do we think applying the enron law to literally anything anyone in the government ever does is going to be a 6-3 or a 9-0

My money is on 9-0. It’s like the Trump ballot ban. The liberals aren’t gonna want to wade into the poo poo

Puppy Burner
Sep 9, 2011
All crime is legal if your bank account is >$10 000 000 in a 9-0 decision

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, “Reading the Constitution,” which rejects the originalist approach of the court’s conservative majority, is less an argument for judges to adopt a specific approach to legal analysis than it is a plea, a cry into oncoming darkness. Reading his book and interviewing Breyer in front of a sold-out Los Angeles crowd Tuesday night convinced me that the question of how judges analyze the Constitution and statutes is perhaps the most pressing legal issue of our time.

What is the best way for judges to judge? Under one increasingly popular judicial approach, which has been employed by the majority of the current Supreme Court to upend Roe v. Wade and topple a New York gun restriction, judges must look only at the text of the Constitution (originalism) or a statute (textualism) to determine what it means. For Breyer, that’s the beginning of a judge’s job, not the end of it. Judges, he says, must do more, including looking at the purpose behind the written words, the values that are implicated by those words and the consequences of interpreting those words one way or another. It makes no sense, as the originalists claim, that they must ignore the consequences of their decisions. In fact, as Breyer argues, doing so undermines our lawmakers’ ability to implement modern solutions to modern problems.

Breyer, who was known for an approach to the law that insisted that judges consider the real-world consequences of their decisions, served on the Supreme Court from 1994 until 2022. That’s when Democrats, who had lived through the trauma of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying during Donald Trump’s presidency (she’d resisted calls to retire when Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate) persuaded Breyer to step down. He was replaced by one of his former law clerks, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Breyer, 85, told me he misses being on the court, but he’s not done arguing for why his approach leads to better judicial decisions. His new book is about just that.

Throughout Tuesday’s event, the crowd was engaged and appreciative, most likely because Breyer was animated, knowledgeable and compelling. The audience warmly applauded a few times throughout the evening when Breyer explained the importance of his approach to judging, but I can’t shake the feeling that it wanted more. People who come out to see a retired justice on a weeknight are bound to follow legal news more than the average person, and my guess is that the hundreds there wanted Breyer’s take on alarming behavior by his former colleagues and their spouses.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas both received expensive gifts from billionaires that they didn’t initially disclose.

Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, flew flags outside their homes that could be understood as supporting those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, helped plan speeches outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and supported efforts to overturn the election. Just this week, Alito declined to recuse himself from cases involving Jan. 6, including one arguing that former presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. But to expect to hear condemnation from Breyer is to live in fantasyland. Breyer isn’t going to single out members of the court and talk about their behavior. But he will do what he did during our interview: talk about how justices determine whether or not they should recuse themselves. And about the difficulty trying to create a mandatory ethics code that applies to the Supreme Court.

But the heart of our conversation was about his book’s compelling case for why a textualist or originalist approach, which he acknowledges is deeply appealing, is wrong. While it’s supposed to be a simple and predictable form of judging and rein in judges who might simply use their own judgment about what the law should be, Breyer argues convincingly that such an approach is unworkable and that it delivers on neither of those promises.

Telling judges to look only at history “imposes on them a task that they cannot accomplish,” Breyer writes, because “judges are not historians.” Second, this approach undermines democratically elected lawmakers’ ability to “create modern solutions to modern problems.” It should go without saying that gun violence in the country is a public health crisis. It should also go without saying that interpreting our Constitution in a way that places a stranglehold on lawmakers’ ability to address that crisis is a problem. Third, by freezing the meaning of the Constitution at the moment when it was written, originalism prevents judges from taking “into account the ways in which our values as a society evolve over time as we learn from mistakes of our past.”

No book about the failings of originalism would be complete without a discussion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which erased the right to obtain an abortion from the Constitution. Constitutionally, the question is whether the word “liberty” in the 14th Amendment’s due process clause includes reproductive choice. For almost 50 years, starting in 1973, the court said it does. Then, in 2022, employing an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, the court said it doesn’t.

Breyer’s discussion of Dobbs focuses on the doctrine of stare decisis (“to stand by things decided”) which is meant to strongly encourage judges to adhere to precedent (past decisions) whenever possible. The idea is that stare decisis promotes predictability, stability and the ability of people to rely on legal decisions. The doctrine is also supposed to shout to the world that legal decisions and the development of the law aren’t based on the whims and personal predilections of judges. But, as Breyer said Tuesday night, when justices employ an originalism interpretation of the Constitution to overturn precedent, they are using their discretion to determine which past decisions are bad enough to overrule. Alito, who authored the Dobbs decision, said it was OK to overturn Roe v. Wade because it was “egregiously wrong.” Breyer says “egregiously wrong” isn’t a discernible standard for future judges to use in deciding whether to overturn past decisions.

Separate from his concerns about how an originalist approach undermines the Constitution, Breyer also illustrates why textualism undermines democracy. He argues that “an interpretation of a statute that tends to implement the legislature’s will helps implement the public’s will, thereby furthering the Constitution’s democratic purpose.” Textualism, he says, does neither because it could lead to an interpretation of a statute that wasn’t intended by our elected lawmakers. By confining their analysis to only the words of a statute and ignoring things like the legislative history behind it, textualists can undermine the legislature’s will.

As Breyer writes, “Congress cannot write statutes that precisely address every possible application of each phrase in all circumstances.” And we shouldn’t ask it to. It’s only textualists who demand this superhuman level of precision.

For Breyer, textualism and originalism represent a painter’s painting “with only half a palette.” When it comes to statutes, it makes no sense to ignore a statute’s “purposes and the consequences to which a particular interpretation will likely lead.” Legislative history, and what a “reasonable legislator” might understand a statute to mean, ought to play a role. When it comes to statutes and the Constitution, Breyer looks at a “phrase in light of the values that underlie them.” To do otherwise, he convinced me, would be to look at a toolkit and use only a fraction of it. If you need to loosen a pipe, it makes little sense to stubbornly insist on using only pliers (originalism) when a wrench (pragmatism) will do a better job.

While the book is written in understated and academic prose, in person, Breyer delivered his message with urgency. He is (politely) screaming at us to realize the folly of a textualist and originalist approach to the law.

In our nation’s history, there have been only 112 Supreme Court justices. One of them is pleading with us to understand his perspective. We should listen before we allow a wrongheaded judicial approach that has already caused immeasurable harm to subvert our governing document.

FistEnergy
Nov 3, 2000

DAY CREW: WORKING HARD

Fun Shoe
My dislike for Bryer increased dramatically after I started listening to the 5-4 podcast. He was the deciding vote in numerous horrific right-wing decisions despite being ostensibly a liberal justice.

PostNouveau
Sep 3, 2011

VY till I die
Grimey Drawer

FistEnergy posted:

My dislike for Bryer increased dramatically after I started listening to the 5-4 podcast. He was the deciding vote in numerous horrific right-wing decisions despite being ostensibly a liberal justice.

He loooooooooooved police and giving them more power

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011



Mr. Sharps
Jul 30, 2006

The only true law is that which leads to freedom. There is no other.



blaming the wife? loser move

Mr. Sharps
Jul 30, 2006

The only true law is that which leads to freedom. There is no other.



flags??? I hate em! but my wife? well she never met a flag she didn’t like to fly!

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

very clever of alito to release this right when the trump trial finished so that noone would notice the disgrace this has brought upon the supreme court

Sudden Loud Noise
Feb 18, 2007

These "Take my wife" jokes are getting wordy.

HashtagGirlboss
Jan 4, 2005

Sudden Loud Noise posted:

These "Take my wife" jokes are getting wordy.

But Senators! That’s not a flag! That’s my wife!

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RandolphCarter
Jul 30, 2005


my wife is a real flag hag.

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