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Discendo Vox posted:They're saying both. The sudden short-notice confirmation decision was a strategic move by Trump's people with ties to Congressional Rs that has created a split in Dem messaging on the nomination decision. They don't have one shot to stop a Trump nominee, they have zero shots. Forcing the Republicans to kill the filibuster doesn't exactly qualify as an "obstacle", since they have the votes to do it and no one seriously expects them not to.
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Jan 31, 2017 00:38
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Evil Fluffy posted:The GOP wants to kill it too, because once they just say "fine gently caress it, filibuster is dead" then they can drop any pretense of not holding single party rule over the entire country. and any bills they want passed will pass unless a couple Senators break ranks to reject it with a simple majority. The GOP doesn't really want to kill it, for that exact reason - once they end the filibuster, their voters will expect them to hold uncontested single-party rule in the federal government. Both parties have things that their voters want passed but their legislators don't, and blaming the opposing party for blocking those things is the best excuse possible. It's especially important right now with Trump running the show; if Mitch kills the filibuster now he puts himself in the position of either passing anything Trump tells him to or having to say "No" to Trump. Javid posted:Holding off and doing it on a HUGE, attention-getting issue (rather than a random appointment) gives them more media and support for their one shot at it. Theres no "one shot". There's zero shots. No amount of "media and support" is going to somehow make it impossible for the Republicans to end the filibuster; in fact, I expect that coverage would only make the GOP more likely to pull the trigger. Besides, Trump is an expert at stealing headlines. He can take away the Dems media attention in an instant if he wants. Cabinet nominees are pretty drat huge, anyway, it's not like these are random nobody diplomats or something.
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Jan 31, 2017 16:31
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FlamingLiberal posted:So Trump is doing a SCOTUS Apprentice or something because he's inviting both finalists to DC for the announcement. He knows how to work the media, that's for sure.
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Jan 31, 2017 19:10
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Because Gorsuch would replace Scalia, so you're not shifting the balance of the court, but the next one might replace RBG. So if they filibuster isn't dead yet they might compromise and nominate a moderate conservative. Much like Obama's offer of that guy whose name I've already forgotten for Scalia's seat. LOL at this scenario, I love it. Why would they name a moderate conservative? They own the white house and congress. The Republicans don't want to maintain some balance of power on the court, they want to own it. If they were satisfied by a centrist compromise pick they would have accepted Obama's centrist compromise pick, or at least put it to a vote. They went through the trouble of keeping the seat empty for a year because they wanted to own the seat.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:51
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vyelkin posted:Yeah Republicans were willing to hold their noses and vote for Trump for the chance to keep Scalia's seat but Democrats were unwilling to do the same for Clinton to take it. Shows the difference in motivation between the two parties' voters. It shows the difference between the campaign machines, more like. The Republican establishment made a big deal about the Supreme Court seat, going so far as to undergo McConnell's gamble for the seat based on the chance of winning the next election. The Dems, on the other hand, stuck to their uninteresting centrist compromise candidate even after it was clear no compromise was going to happen, and barely mentioned the Supreme Court seat since they didn't want to look too partisan. The time to make a big deal about the seat was before the election, and the Dems didn't really bother.
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Feb 1, 2017 19:03
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Potato Salad posted:Try convincing anyone voting red that the issue isn't settled outright at "Senate advises." Especially those who complained about the Do Nothing congress. Simple - just point out how mad they'd have been if it were the other way around. Hell, conservatives still complain about Bork, who was far more radical than Garland yet still got an up-or-down vote.
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Mar 22, 2017 14:57
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MrNemo posted:Maybe i should rephrase, i get why it is attractive from a political viewpoint how there are political and financial pressures in the US judicial system we don't have to anything like the same degree in the UK. I was seeking to check if my understanding of originalism was broadly correct and if it was, how does that come to be labelled a conservative judicial philosophy? It's radical, like super radical. I've always had a great sympathy for Burkean conservatism and i cannot reconcile in any way with wanting to throw out the whole foundation of Common Law. It's not that it's conservative in a judicial or legal sense, it's that it tends to lead to conservative political outcomes and roll back more recent constitutional protections and legal developments.
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Mar 22, 2017 17:34
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Forer posted:So I happened to be incredibly bored the other day and found the first crime listed in my states criminal code. Depending on the age of the law, it was almost certainly used to suppress some particular group of people, such as political dissidents, racial minorities, or maybe even unions. A very common authoritarian tactic is to ban or closely regulate "public gatherings", and then define "public gathering" as "any conversation or meeting between three or more people", which means that police have an excuse to poke their nose into anything from political rallies to organization meetings to three friends having a chat on the side of the road.
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Mar 23, 2017 15:22
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twodot posted:This doesn't make any sense. Even ignoring the obvious bad outcome that this strategy demands Senators vote against good nominees (supposing Trump accidentally nominated someone good) who aren't specifically named Garland. How is this supposed to scale? Do we have to wait for Garland to die before we can start voting on Supreme Court nominees other than Garland? If Trump nominates a judge that Dems like more than they liked Garland, then there wouldn't be any problems with Dems voting for that nominee. But there's no need to worry about that, because if the GOP thought a nominee to the left of Garland was acceptable, then they wouldn't have blocked Garland in the first place. When Republicans thought Hillary was going to win, they insisted that not only would they prevent Obama from appointing a Supreme Court Justice, but they would do all they could to prevent Hillary from nominating one too. Now that the shoe's on the other foot, it's way too late to get concerned about the sanctity of the Supreme Court and Senate traditions of bipartisanship. The Supreme Court nomination process is already broken, and it can't be put back together again - particularly when Republicans still insist even now that what they did was justified and refuse to offer up even the slightest hint of compromise.
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Mar 30, 2017 23:13
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The Iron Rose posted:Seems eminently reasonable to me. I'd rather Gorsuch than just about anyone else the Republicans could nominate. He's qualified, not a raving ideologue and that's about as good as we can get from the Republican Party. The Republican Party can do a lot better, they just don't want to because they're about as willing to compromise on Supreme Court appointments as they are on healthcare. This "well, Gorsuch is only a little to the right of Scalia, he's the best we could possibly hope for and we should be grateful for it" narrative is garbage.
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Mar 31, 2017 04:32
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skull mask mcgee posted:lmao if you think Mike Pence is getting anything done in a world where Trump is successfully impeached. he'll be the lamest duck to ever duck So what? He'll still have House and Senate majorities, as well as the full authority of the executive. What, do you think the GOP Congress is going to start refusing to push Republican policy just because of a little thing like an impeachment? Number Ten Cocks posted:Exactly. Far more people will care about a liberal justice replacement than the trivia footnote who didn't replace Scalia. Why would people care more about replacing Ginsburg with a conservative than replacing Scalia with a liberal? No one actually cares about the "status quo" on the court when they're the ones in power.
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Mar 31, 2017 15:34
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Number Ten Cocks posted:You're not familiar with basic psychological biases and endowment effects? Most people fear losses more than they want equivalent gains. Oh, so by "people" you specifically meant "the Democratic base" only, rather than the Republican Senators who actually get to decide who gets to fill empty Supreme Court seats.
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Mar 31, 2017 16:28
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twodot posted:I don't understand what "good faith" means in this context. There's agreement that McConnell, in fact, didn't want Garland to be a Justice, and worked to achieve that desire openly right? No, there's agreement that McConnell didn't want any Obama nominee to be appointed, and had already announced his intention to block any Obama nominee before Garland was ever nominated. That is the critical point. If the Senate had said "well, we don't think Garland is an acceptable nominee because of reasons X, Y, and Z, but if you nominate someone else who isn't saddled with that baggage we can take another look", it would have been fine. But McConnell's only problem with Garland was that he was nominated by a Democratic president, and at that point the process has broken down at a fundamental level.
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Apr 4, 2017 21:51
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Nckdictator posted:Saw this in the Post earlier, no idea if it holds water or not. It's crap. There was nothing wrong with the Bork fight, and there's only two kinds of people mad about it: old conservatives still mad they couldn't get a judge to the right of Scalia twenty-nine years age, and conservative media outlets who like to manufacture outrage about it so they can use it as an excuse for literally any Supreme Court fuckery. The story that Supreme Court nominations were non-political until Bork was rejected is bullcrap concocted by the GOP because it was the first major failure of the conservative campaign to carry out a political takeover of the judiciary to roll back civil rights gains.
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Apr 5, 2017 14:46
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Bueno Papi posted:https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe...m=.e75107a04b4c As usual, McCain talks the talk but is utterly unwilling to walk the walk. It's not even like he has to worry about voters getting mad at him, he's 80 years old and isn't up for reelection again until 2022.
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Apr 6, 2017 00:35
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TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:This is quite simply incorrect. They lost the filibuster and for some reason people here simultaneously think that the filibuster is worthless and yet are really angry at the republicans for getting rid of it. These are schizophrenic viewpoints. The argument hinges on several points that are just not true. If Gorsuch was so uncontroversial, how come the GOP couldn't even flip eight Dems? For all the whining about how the base is insisting on fighting everything Trump does, more than half Trump's nominees have been confirmed with more than 60 votes, with many of the genuinely non-controversial nominees getting 85 or more votes.
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Apr 8, 2017 19:54
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Grapplejack posted:With term limits suddenly you have judges that need to keep their jobs. You'd see poo poo like the ACA case fail in court. Cases would suddenly only go up when you would be sure the judiciary would rule the way you want, and your interpretation of laws would bounce back and forth between Presidents. That's not how term limits work - judges would only need to pander if they had multiple terms. Saying "a judge can only sit on this court for X years total" just makes turnover more predictable and eliminates the stupid age factor. As for the rest...where the hell have you been? The Court's interpretation already shifts between presidents, this would just make it do so more consistently. Judges are already chosen based on ideological bona fides. The Supreme Court has taken a far more prominent place in our government than anyone imagined when the Constitution was written, and the idea that interpretation of law would shift so wildly based on the composition of the Court was something I doubt they'd considered.
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Apr 9, 2017 15:04
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Harik posted:People with great power and influence that retire don't tend to just do nothing afterwards. Even with a lifetime pension at 100% of their salary they'd go sit on boards or something just to keep the feeling of control. There's nothing stopping judges from doing that now. They're not forced to retire, but they can, and sometimes do. If there was a big corruption problem someone would've noticed by now.
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Apr 10, 2017 04:14
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Possibly, but it also seems likely that as the non-white vote grows the white vote is just going to consolidate around the Republicans. You're eventually going to end up with the White Party (maybe with Asians who flee disfunction and a spoils system that takes away from them more than anyone) and the Non-White Party (with a minority of whites fighting to limit how many leadership scraps they have to hand out at the top of the party). The White Party is going to have ideological consistency but be run by mid-wits who couldn't make it in real jobs, the Non-White Party is going to have ideological chaos and infighting (when not directed outward in racial hatred) but the smartest managerial caste, when they're allowed to run things in sufficient numbers. You're both making the critical mistake of assuming that minorities will necessarily come out and vote Democratic. There's plenty of non-white conservatives, there are plenty of Hispanic-Americans who couldn't give half a poo poo about immigration policy, and there's plenty of time left for the GOP to woo minorities before the boomers die off. Meanwhile, 2016 was a harsh lesson to Dems who thought that just saying "we're not openly racist like the other guys" would be enough to drive minority turnout.
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Apr 13, 2017 17:58
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GlyphGryph posted:What does packing actually mean, I can't find a definition online anywhere. I don't think it has an official one, only references to Roosevelt's plan but that wasn't even the first time justices were added and I presume the previous times were added (and taken away) also for transparently political reasons? Maybe I'm wrong. Generally, it means creating a bunch of new court positions solely to change the leaning of the Court in a favorable direction by filling them with loyalists. You're right that it's not the first time judges were added or removed for transparently political reasons. Hell, Marbury v. Madison was the direct result of political clashes after a lame duck Congress created a bunch of new judge positions after an election season that the opposing party had largely won, before the next president's inauguration, and the outgoing president tried to fill as many of those seats as possible in the nineteen days remaining before his successor was inaugurated. The fallout of that mess also led to the first and only attempted impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice. While we're talking transparently political Supreme Court antics, one that particularly comes to mind was in 1866, when Congress refused to confirm a president's appointment to a vacant seat and instead passed legislation that outright eliminated that vacant seat. Just to make absolutely sure that president wouldn't get an appointment, the legislation also stipulated that the next two seats to be emptied would be eliminated as well, though that part was repealed shortly after that president left office. It shouldn't come as any surprise that that president was Andrew Johnson, who had a notoriously bad relationship with Congress!
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Apr 14, 2017 17:07
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DeusExMachinima posted:You act like the 15th wasn't discussed in the decision, and that other amendments don't also apply to Congress' conduct. I'd like to see pre-clearance on all states but to act like you couldn't at least craft a legal argument for either side is pretty delusional, seeing that different courts ruled different ways on the case. My point was that Congress could've avoided the whole thing and not doing so was their problem, not the umpire's problem. There wasn't a problem for Congress to fix until the Supreme Court decided to create one when it decided that voting rights law had an expiration date.
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Apr 15, 2017 03:09
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Number Ten Cocks posted:The sun seemed to shine a little brighter today. Just another example of human-caused climate change.
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Apr 17, 2017 23:35
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Evil Fluffy posted:The VRA case shows that the SCOTUS can't be weakened. They took a case they had no legal right to even address, ruled against it with a majority that included a chief justice who has wanted to get rid of the VRA for decades, and the response of the Executive and Legislature was "oh, well ok then" and not "you don't have any authority over this matter per the 14th. Thanks for trying but this law is still in full force And what happens when the states subject to preclearance say "actually, that's bullshit, the Supreme Court said the 14th doesn't apply and we're going to follow their ruling"? In this fantasy world of yours where Obama is willing to incite a Constitutional crisis, is he going to send in federal troops to police voting stations or will he simply unilaterally declare that those states' electoral votes don't count?
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Apr 19, 2017 20:25
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Potato Salad posted:Does this make sense? The court reviewed legislation that is expressly authoritative per the 15th. You can't just decide that you want to drastically pare down an incoming case, review legislation on the basis of an unenumerated 10th right while blindfolding yourself to the authority of the 15th amendment without drawing Well, technically they can, since it's the Supreme Court that gets to decide what the 10th Amendment and 15th Amendment actually mean for the purposes of US legal interpretation. It's a lovely, bullshit ruling more concerned with enforcing the judges' ideological beliefs than making a Constitutional judgement, but Tenth Amendment cases often are. As for the balance-of-power concerns some have raised here, the problem isn't just a Supreme Court that's asserting more and more power, it's a weak Congress that's asserting less and less power and neglecting even some of its basic constitutional responsibilities. The Congressional remedy to the Shelby County ruling is simple (just pass a new preclearance formula), but no one's even bothered to discuss the possibility in an era where Congress can't even pass budgets, has essentially surrendered its oversight powers over military action, and has turned confirmation processes into nothing more but partisan rubber-stamps for or against the president. And to me, that weak Congress is much more of a concern than a strong Supreme Court.
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Apr 20, 2017 14:56
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Potato Salad posted:I haven't thought of a weak congress vs strong court in this way before. The power of any particular branch of government is always relative, as it's the other two branches that can work to restrain it. The Court has certainly been pretty assertive over the past couple of decades, but it's done far worse over the years, and the current incarnation of its assertive spirit has created a lot of good rights that weren't previously recognized - that's why conservatives have been turning to a strategy of judicial warfare to begin with. On the other hand, the outcome of previous cases of Supreme Court overreach have largely depended on how willing Congress was to rein it in, as well as how eager the executive and the public were to pressure Congress to take action. For example, in 1970, Congress passed an extension to the Voting Rights Act that was then overturned by the Supreme Court, and Congress responded by amending the Constitution to put that VRA addition directly into the text of what's now known as the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Of course, there have been more famous instances too, like the heavily pro-business court of the early 20th century suddenly changing course in respond to FDR's court-packing plan, or the substantial kerfuffle set off by the Dred Scott decision. The big distinction that sets apart this era of the court from previous eras isn't really the strength or assertiveness or blatantly ideological decisions - those have all been seen before. Instead, what really distinguishes the current government situation is a weak, cowardly, irresponsible Congress that refuses to rein in the other branches of government and can barely carry out its own functions, less concerned with governing and more concerned with making sure voters blame someone else for the outcomes of governing. Partisanship is a big part of that - Congress is now more concerned with flexing their ideological bona fides and impressing well-funded ideological lobbyist organizations than actually running the country, which leads to a tendency to spend most of their time in Washington loudly posturing on the floor of Congress while quietly maintaining the status quo and leaving most of the real work of changing things to the other two branches. on the morning of November 9th, a lot of people weren't really in a good frame of mind, and some of them spent money on tearfully buying barely-coherent avatars for anyone who they thought had disagreed with them. I'm not getting rid of mine until it stops being hilarious
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Apr 20, 2017 18:03
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Evil Fluffy posted:All while ignoring that any violation of the 10th, if it did exist, is superseded by newer amendments so if there's a concern about the 10th being in conflict with the 14th or 15th, the 10th loses. I may very well be making a fool of myself here, but I'm reasonably sure none of this is true - conflicting parts of the Constitution don't automatically resolve in favor of whatever Amendment was passed more recently, and the Reconstruction Amendments don't bar the Supreme Court from interpreting them or ruling on them. I agree that the ruling is bullshit that happened basically exclusively because Roberts hates the Voting Rights Act and there was a conservative majority, but it's because the reasoning was bullshit, not because the 15th is immune to judicial review.
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Apr 22, 2017 02:08
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Kalman posted:This is only true because justices will go to almost any length to avoid reading the provisions as in conflict with one another in order to avoid finding implicit repeals. Here's the baseline rule they work from: Maybe I worded it poorly. I wasn't just talking about implicit repeals, I was talking about any conflict at all. For example, what if Congress passed a law (not an amendment) allowing warrantless searches of the homes of anyone accused of holding people in slavery? It would seem to be a law passed in service of enforcing the Thirteenth Amendment, which clearly falls into the enforcement clause of that amendment...But that doesn't mean the Supreme Court is barred from reviewing this obvious violation of the 4th Amendment just because the 13th is newer, as Evil Fluffy seemed to be suggesting! Potato Salad posted:Alternate interpretation: the 10th and 15th do not conflict. Both are short and consistent with each other. Go read them. Sure,, but that doesn't mean that it's illegal for the Supreme Court to review 15th-related cases at all, it just means Roberts made up some arbitrary bullshit in the pursuit of an obviously ideological result - the ruling's implication that laws have some kind of expiration date and weigh more and more heavily on states' sovereignty over time is basically incoherent, and I don't see that getting cited as precedent very often because it makes absolutely no loving sense and is impossible to boil any generally-applicable logic or principles out of. But going from that to "actually, the Supreme Court doesn't have the authority to hear 15th-related cases at all" is a really loving big leap.
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Apr 22, 2017 14:06
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Dead Reckoning posted:You misunderstand, I think the case was wrongly decided. I don't think you can draw a distinction between "I voted to convict because the defendant is hispanic, and they think they can do anything with women" and "I voted to convict because the defendant has a face tattoo and drives a beat up Geo Metro, and is therefore a lower class person with poor impulse control who, if he didn't do what he is accused of, probably did something" on the basis that racism is just magically different. The majority's whole rationale is that decisions based on racial bias undermine the justice system, but I don't see how they do so in a way that other biases, or regular laziness and stupidity, don't. Because there are laws and constitutional amendments that say that racial bias is unacceptable in ways that other biases aren't. I agree that it's kind of a strange distinction that leads to a large number of weird cases and knock-off effects, but it's a distinction that shows up in other places too. Another example is the interaction between at-will employment laws and employment discrimination laws, which results in a weird state of affairs where people can be fired for literally any reason at all and don't have to provide that reason, unless the fired person thinks that it was due to discrimination.
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May 14, 2017 22:46
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Roadie posted:You can still obtain the "goods and services" in question if you're a guy. You just can't get into that specific theater at that specific time. And under many laws or ordinances, including those for the specific area in question, that's not allowed. Yes, a man can get into every other theater except that one, but segregation is illegal and most anti-segregation laws and ordinances don't have an "unless the segregated accommodations are really equal" exception. It's fair to say that having a women's-only screening isn't malicious and doesn't really inflict any meaningful harm, but it still would likely fall afoul of desegregation laws.
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May 28, 2017 14:21
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:But if Trump can just pardon anyone who violates the constitutional rights of another doesn't that mean that he is effectively violating the constitution? Is the president still bound by the constitution if he is using a constitutionally granted power of the executive to violate some other party's rights also granted by the same document? Pardoning someone who violates constitutional rights isn't the same as directly violating constitutional rights. As far as I'm aware, there isn't really a constitutional right to have someone punished for violating your constitutional rights.
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Sep 1, 2017 18:20
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:If there is no consequence for the violation of someone's constitutional rights can they really be said to hold those rights in the first place? Legally, yes. The fact that consequences were waived in a particular case or situation doesn't mean that the law doesn't exist or doesn't count. It's like pointing to various prominent cases of murderers getting off without punishment (occasionally with the aid of law enforcement) and using that to say that murder isn't actually illegal.
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Sep 5, 2017 20:07
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:The law is only meaningful in its effect, if the courts cannot remedy a situation because the executive overrules them then they are effectively meaningless and the law itself with them. If a law is not enforced consistently then it starts to lose its meaning, equality before the law is a necessary part of the foundation of the legal system. If the laws simply existed on the books but were never enforced, if all the courts closed their doors forever would you still say that those laws have any bearing on the real world? The question isn't whether I would say that, though - the question is whether a court would say that. Is a sitting judge going to agree with "well, the law wasn't enforced in this one case, I guess that means the law doesn't exist anymore"? Sure, the pardon power undermines the law. That's a given, because it's a specific, unlimited power that was granted to the Executive for the express purpose of undermining the law when the president considers it appropriate.
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Sep 6, 2017 14:02
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:So what I'm getting here is that you don't think that the court system would object or resist if the executive chose to nullify a law or even the entire criminal justice system by pardoning all offenders that the courts convict? The executive has the legitimate power to do that, and the limitation people are suggesting isn't mentioned in the Constitution or in previous court precedent, so I don't expect that the courts would respond in any meaningful way. The pardon power is part of the checks and balances between the branches of government. Even if the pardoning is seen to be illegitimate, it would be Congress's role to do something about it. Besides, there is precedent for pardoning everyone accused of a serious violation of the Constitution; Johnson issued an unconditional pardon for treasonous acts committed during the Civil War, in addition to thousands of individual pardons for Civil War crimes. Of course, there's also the fact that the court system can't resist in any meaningful way - even if they issue an injunction against it or something, it's up to the executive branch to enforce that, and guess who controls the executive branch? Ultimately, it would still be up to Congress to take action.
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Sep 6, 2017 16:02
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Rygar201 posted:This is addressed in the article. The notion that an action could warranty removal from office and prosecution but be unjusticiable is worrisome in itself. Not really. The mere existence of the pardon power implies that it's okay for something that warrants prosecution to not be justiceable, because that's the entire point of the pardon power. Remember, there's that whole "checks and balances" thing. If the courts could override a pardon, there wouldn't be much purpose in even having the pardon power. Like it or not, that's one instance in which the executive has the power to counteract the judiciary; if the president is using that power in an illegitimate or unjust fashion, it's up to the legislature to intervene against the executive in support of the judiciary.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:24
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evilweasel posted:When it comes to legal precedents there is absolutely reasons to be concerned about a slippery slope. The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" rationale was used to suppress labor movements for decades under criminal syndicalism laws until Brandenberg. Exceptions in the law very often do not stay limited to the specific factual circumstance before the court that made the exception. Unfortunately, in those cases, the damage is already done. There have been a number of cases over the years of universities threatening and punishing pro-Palestine activists, often facing no consequences beyond an angry letter from the ACLU. "If we allow universities to crack down on Nazi demonstrations, they might slippery-slope to using those same tactics to crack down on pro-Palestine demonstrations" is a solid argument, but with one significant flaw: universities are already using those tactics to crack down on pro-Palestine demonstrations, without much in the way of public pushback. Not just universities, either - anti-BDS laws have been popping up in legislatures all over the US. The fear of the slippery slope is a valid one, I think, but the slope has already been built. If we don't slide down it, then the only true winners will be the people who set up those abuses in the first place.
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Oct 20, 2017 18:46
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Death row resident Keith Leroy Tharpe is getting another shot at appeals, after the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the juror who called him a racial slur and told Tharpe's lawyer that "I have wondered if black people even have souls" may have been prejudiced or swayed by Tharpe's race. It shouldn't be any surprise which three justices dissented.
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Jan 8, 2018 17:32
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cis autodrag posted:The plaintiff here is being willfully obtuse by saying the union, by negotiating on his behalf, is engaging in political speech. He would like to not have to pay them money, even though he'll still benefit from the negotiation the union does. He wants a free ride. This breaks the union as people will stop paying dues and eventually they just won't have the money to operate. The argument is going beyond just this, too. The argument is that any negotiation a public sector union does is inherently political, because they're public employees whose paychecks come out of government budgets, and therefore how public employees are treated is "government policy" and has unavoidable political aspects. Kennedy seemed to be very sympathetic to that argument, too.
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Feb 27, 2018 06:48
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Hail fascist Satan, SCOTUS has a doozy for us! https://twitter.com/NPR/status/968508235966828551 5-3, Kagan recused. This is a big win for ICE, and a big win for indefinite arbitrary detainment.
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Feb 27, 2018 16:51
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Mikl posted:Motherfucking what? Basically, the Supreme Court has previously ruled that it's unconstitutional to hold detainees indefinitely without a hearing, but there's nothing to really set out what "indefinitely" means in this instance, nor is there any clearly defined requirement for hearings. So practically speaking, ICE can just do whatever they want, and it's each detainee's individual responsibility to get a lawyer and file a habeas petition if they think they're being detained for an overly long period without due process. Rodriguez was held for three years before he saw a judge for the first time, even though he was a lawful permanent resident who was picked up by ICE because he'd been convicted on a misdemeanor drug possession charge. Obviously, the status quo is unacceptable. So the appeals court decided to draw the line for "prolonged" at six months, and require a bond hearing in which the government has to demonstrate that the detainee is a flight risk in order to extend the detention past that limit. However, the Supreme Court struck that down. They decided that since the text of the law doesn't say anything about a six-month limit or required bond hearings, there's no grounds for the appeals court to mandate that, and in fact they think the text of the law means that bail hearings are outright prohibited for these detainees. Where does that leave the plaintiff's constitutional claims? Punted back to the appeals court for another go under these new restrictions. Breyer is pissed, and read a reportedly-passionate dissent from the bench. Thomas thinks the court doesn't even have the authority to rule on immigration-related matters in the first place.
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Feb 27, 2018 18:04
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Oracle posted:So what's this I hear about if the public sector union free-rider case is decided in favor of the RTW assholes that it means that sympathetic strikes are no longer illegal? I heard something to that effect on NPR this morning or last night and was like 'oh, there's a can of worms.' IIRC, it's that There is an argument to be made that unions might just unilaterally stop abiding by those restrictions and stop obeying authorities if they're squeezed down too hard, as the early workers' movement did in the first place. But I think we're a long way away from that with today's weak unions, and the  culture of the mainstream media isn't really interested in talking about that yet.
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Feb 27, 2018 22:47
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