haveblue posted:

Harry Reid used a lesser nuclear option (tactical nuclear option?) when he got tired of republicans blockading sub-scotus judicial nominees. The filibuster was theoretically still in place for scotus nominees at that point, but it didn't come up in the remainder of Reid's tenure. McConnell then nuked that remaining case for Gorsuch and now the filibuster cannot be used on any nominee's confirmation to any post

Of course claiming Reid shares any blame for this requires that you also believe that absent his actions McConnell would not have done that anyway

Rigel posted:

Both are not really a big deal and I wish we had either of these quaint and odd things instead of the Senate.

Generally, governor generals are purely ceremonial jobs, making appearances, signing things they are told to sign, and making speeches. Most of them hypothetically have real executive or judicial powers on behalf of the monarch, but in practice they do not do anything that the commonwealth doesn't want them to do, because they all quietly understand that the commonwealth could just decide its all stupid and stop pretending.

The power of the house of lords is basically just the ability to hit pause on specific legislation and go "wait a second, this law looks bad to us. Are you sure this is a good idea? Maybe you should think about it more, here's a suggested amendment." The house of commons can ignore the house of lords and eventually can get what they want if they don't mind a delay. (either one month or one year depending on the bill). If its absolutely critical that the bill is not delayed then I guess the house of lords might have leverage.

Timeless Appeal posted:

.

It needs to be really remembered that the pendulum absolutely doesn't swing both ways equally in the case of abortion in that we did not go from one extreme to another. Casey is often cited as a neutering of Roe, but that's not entirely true . Roe was always a compromise and always gave a backdoor for states and even the federal government to legislate on abortion, but to not eliminate it entirely. And a lot of red states followed to this to the point of virtually eliminating abortion, and still were not satisfied. It really can't be overstated how relentless they are on this issue. Like if they just uniformly sought out a viability ban of anything past 25 weeks, I think most people would be on their side even if that would still negatively impact tons of people, but instead they need to die on the hill of forcing ten year old rape victims to have a baby.

Epicurius posted:

Wouldn't the person most responsible for Thomas being on the Court be either George Bush, who nominated him, or the 52 Senators who voted for him, even after knowing about Anita Hill?

haveblue posted:

They aren't even bothering to disguise it this time.

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1577442950044426240

VitalSigns posted:

Do any of these laws banning abortion make the man an accessory to murder if he pays for it, because if it's genuinely about protecting life yeah Walker should be in jail no different than if he paid for his girlfriend to hire a hitman.

Of course if it's just about controlling women then yeah sure make him a senator why not, can't blame a guy for wisely saving himself from being trapped into paying 18 years of child support.

Rigel posted:

No. He has recently become very concerned about nuclear war and controversially suggested that Ukraine just give Russia most of what they want. The backlash was very severe. Elon is probably still worried about nuclear war and has also been sulking about the bad reaction his suggestion got. This stupid tweet is probably somehow related to that.

LeeMajors posted:

“Abortion” after viability is just a delivery induction. They aren’t yanking out a viable fetus and snapping its neck.

Typically they are dead, dying or suffering from catastrophic birth defects, and are provided as much care as is possible after delivery—palliative or otherwise. Otherwise it’s to protect the health of the mother, in which case it’s a premature induction and also receives maximal appropriate healthcare.

The discussion is *always* disingenuous because abortion is a loaded term and forced birth folks are not interesting in medical accuracy, they are working backwards from a policy goal.

Furthermore a loving lawyer or a local insurance salesman turned politician is not an expert and shouldn’t have any place in the discussion between the patients and their doctors.

Stickman posted:

Naw, they just want to skip a potentially sane court lifting the injunction long enough for disbursement to happen.

Rigel posted:

They should not have standing in any case, but if you were determined to find a way somehow to get through standing to reach the merits, I think DOE v Brown is probably the best way to get there. They may have reached down and grabbed this case and told them to brief it possibly because the standing issue in the other case they have is trickier and could cause more issues.

Briefly to answer your question though, the plaintiffs are people who did not qualify for the student debt forgiveness program and they are mad about that. (lol not really, they are probably republican assholes who agreed to be used for political reasons) Apparently the Biden administration did not follow all the administrative requirements for a regulatory change including a notice-and-comment period, etc. Basically the same poo poo that Trump's administration ignored or was too lazy to do which got a lot of his changes knocked down.

In this case the DOE is saying "wtf are you talking about, we are forgiving loans here. There are no people adversely impacted, this administrative requirement doesn't apply to us, we didn't need a comment period". The plaintiffs are arguing that had the administration followed the rules, they totally would have weighed in with their thoughts about how their loans also needed to be forgiven, and the administration can't just arbitrarily decide they didn't need to follow all the steps to implement this program.

This ultimately isn't a great route for the court if what they really wanted to do was to completely stop this forever though because Biden could just say "OK, fine. We'll start over, here's your comment period. Done? OK, your comments were stupid, we are going ahead with our plan now".

FlamingLiberal posted:

So in case you didn't believe before that one of the conservative justices leaked the Dobbs decision...

https://twitter.com/scotusreporter/status/1616154385389608962?s=20&t=GTHqOaX0t-vvXtUwj-2rnQ

Dameius posted:

When you know the exact location of the leak you can exhaustively look everywhere else and say you can't find it.

pencilhands posted:

Does anyone know what the big decisions likely to be coming down the pipe this summer will be?

Evil Fluffy posted:

SCOTUS 2023: rice pilaf from Louisiana ... is that like an ISIS video?

Because at the end of the day, the personal opinions of the justices is all that matters and multiple justices have been very open about wanting to see changes to how the internet operates and big tech in particular. Especially with the "Big Tech is silences Conservative voices" garbage from assholes who want to run rampant and force others to listen to them.

Vahakyla posted:

The justices sound skeptical about student loan relief but what the gently caress is it SCOCUS's lane if it's a trillion or not?


"A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, doesn't make much difference to Congress"

Yeah so what? I don't care if it is a 69 gorillion dollars, the Congress wrote the law.
I know it's oral arguments and all and often it is just reading tea leaves, but goddamnit Alito's comment made me mad.

Evil Fluffy posted:

The only conservative who seemed to have any issue with striking it down during recent arguments was Barrett and in her case it was because she doubts the plaintiffs have standing to bring the case to begin with (they don't, but the other 5 don't seem to care).

Dopilsya posted:

I see that argument, but I disagree strongly with it. Just because a current Congress doesn't pass a new law doesn't say anything about the validity of an action under an old law passed by an old Congress. Plus it disincentivizes the President from trying to work through Congress which strikes me as bad.

FlamingLiberal posted:

I mean we're essentially at the point where Dems are the ones refusing to break the filibuster and pass things that people want, and the courts are going to keep sending rights back to Congress where they will die and nobody will mention it again

Crows Turn Off posted:

I'm guessing the student loan case will be terrible too.

Thom12255 posted:

jeeves posted:

Gotta free up those spots for more rich kids that get accepted no matter what. Oops I mean legacy students. Got to keep that legacy up of us being a school for rich kids only.

Main Paineframe posted:

Given that the article itself quotes a conservative justice being openly skeptical of legacy admissions, I wouldn't be quite so quick to jump to this conclusion. In fact, the plaintiffs themselves contended that axing legacy admissions would be an effective way of improving diversity without engaging in directly race-based affirmative action policies, and Gorsuch's concurrence seemed quite receptive to that.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Public vocational school and public college are both great ideas bit they won't solve the "all the jobs gone" problem we are heading towards as AI advances. We need UBI but the world ain't ready for that talk.

rjmccall posted:

I personally agree with the concurrence: the mens rea standard for criminalizing threatening speech should be higher than recklessness, but this dude’s actions should not be understood purely as speech. Repeatedly contacting someone after being requested to stop is harassment, and it ought to be punishable as such even if you’re very slowly reading them the collected works of John Locke.

hobbesmaster posted:

I think they’re trying to say that they would need to rule on an actual application of the law to determine if it’s cruel and unusual instead of hypotheticals?