The US Supreme Court

[Svartalf]

maybe Biden should gift alito to Putin, they should get along famously, and there'd be a free slot in the court to fill with somebody with honesty and a touch of legal sense.

[pErvinalia]

Since Presidents are immune, Biden should murder the conservative judges on the Supreme Court and replace them with liberal judges.

[Svartalf]

actually, he should hire FSB assassins, maybe putin will lend us a few if we're nice enough, or if we bribe largely enough.

[Tero]

The Alabama state court decided that fertilized eggs dropped on the floor are humans. So it is a homicide at least. This will could go to the supreme court. They could give states this power. Then all red states would ban fertility clinics. But...fewer babies?

To produce more white babies you would need to ban birth control.

[JimC]

Idiots...

[Tero]

Alito comments on a case he is not deciding on as his court threw out the case. Anti gay jurors involved.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court also declined to hear the case — effectively upholding the trial decision for Finney. But the victory came with a five-page statement from Alito laying into Missouri courts and expressing concern about Obergefell, the 2015 opinion that legalized same-sex marriage across the country.
“In this case, the court below reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian,” Alito wrote, referring to the Missouri appeals court.

https://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-ju ... 59341.html

[Svartalf]

well, bigoted offpring of unnameable parentage are obviously unfit to serve as judges at all...

[Sean Hayden]

He just doesn’t seem to want to take a stand on anything. I’m guessing he’s more comfortable standing on god’s law.

[Brian Peacock]

Idiots...

But clearly not fucking idiots!

[rasetsu]

Idiots...

[L'Emmerdeur]

Brett Kavanaugh is a despicable person, in my opinion. No need here to go into why I think that, and despicable people can occasionally do the right thing. In two cases being heard together before the US Supreme Court (Moody v. NetChoice from Florida and NetChoice v. Paxton from Texas) the question before the court is whether large social media companies can legally moderate and/or exclude content produced by users of their sites. Going by the oral arguments so far, Justice Alito thinks that such actions are 'Orwellian' and shouldn't be allowed. Justice Kavanaugh for once is taking a different stand.

'Brett Kavanaugh—Yes, Really—Just Stood Up For the Internet as We Know It'

Can Florida and Texas weaponize conservative paranoia over Big Tech’s alleged liberal bias to destroy social media and free speech as we know it? After nearly four hours of arguments on this question at the Supreme Court on Monday, the answer is disconcertingly unclear. The justices split along unusual lines as they grappled with the two laws at issue. A few seemed genuinely torn over the best approach to the whole mess before them. And while uncertainty is fine—judges aren’t gods—the stakes are too high for the court to mess this up.

...

The two laws at issue were inspired by Republican lawmakers’ conviction that social media platforms discriminate against conservative voices. (They don’t, but these lawmakers mistake a few anecdotal instances as irrefutable proof of a trend.) In response to outcry on the right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed substantially similar legislation that limited platforms’ ability to moderate content posted by users. The Florida law forbids platforms from moderating any speech about political candidates, deplatforming a political candidate, or disfavoring any “journalistic enterprises.” It also imposes rigid requirements of “consistency” for all other content moderation. Texas’ law goes even further, barring platforms from making any editorial choices at all that are based on the “viewpoint” of the user.

...

[The social media sites'] theory is persuasive. Every platform seeks to foster a certain kind of “community” by removing and deprioritizing certain speech. By exercising this “editorial discretion,” they are engaging in expression themselves. Choosing which speech to boost, obscure, or remove, the platforms say, is fundamentally expressive activity. In that sense, modern content moderation is indistinguishable from a newspaper’s right to publish or not publish a specific column. The Supreme Court has long held that publications—from newspapers to corporate newsletters—have a right to “editorial control and judgment.” Citizens United, meanwhile, clarified that the First Amendment grants the exact same rights to corporations as it does to individuals and media outlets. These established free speech principles, the social media companies claim, protect their own right to moderate others’ speech as they see fit.

...

At one pole, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito defended the laws and disparaged the platforms as totalitarian bullies. Alito suggested that the phrase “content moderation” succumbed to an “Orwellian temptation to recategorize offensive conduct in seemingly bland terms,” dismissing it as a “euphemism for censors.” Thomas derided the platforms for “censoring, as far as I can tell,” adding, “I don’t know of any protected speech interests in censoring other speech.” (The court has always held that excluding a message is, itself, protected expression.) Thomas also implied that because they are so big, the companies at issue have somehow forfeited their First Amendment rights—a strange argument from the court’s proudest defender of corporations’ right to buy elections. Justice Neil Gorsuch leaned this direction as well.

At the other pole, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh boiled the case down to this: The First Amendment prevents the government from censoring private companies; it does not prevent those companies from censoring their own users. Kavanaugh, despite his recent hard-right turn, has been a consistent champion of corporations’ right to host any speech they want, which also of course means excluding any speech they want. While serving on the D.C. Circuit, he wrote an opinion opposing net neutrality with broad language that foreshadowed these cases: The government, he asserted, cannot “tell Twitter or YouTube what videos to post; or tell Facebook or Google what content to favor.” On SCOTUS, he has carefully guarded the distinction between state censorship and private platform moderation. And on Monday, he directly responded to Alito’s ridiculous Orwell reference, reminding his colleague: “When I think of ‘Orwellian,’ I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals.”

[Tero]

Texas could now bus the illegal to Mecico, with Mexico allowing it. Otherwise they would fly them to the country of origin and pay for it.
CNN
“Texas can now immediately enforce its own law imposing criminal liability on thousands of noncitizens and requiring their removal to Mexico,” Sotomayor wrote. “This law will disrupt sensitive foreign relations, frustrate the protection of indi­viduals fleeing persecution, hamper active federal enforce­ment efforts, undermine federal agencies’ ability to detect and monitor imminent security threats, and deter noncitizens from reporting abuse or trafficking.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/politics ... index.html

[Tero]

Well, I guess the court is still going to say more. But allowing the law to stand for now is a bad sign.

[rasetsu]

It cam out of the fifth circuit court of appeals. What else can you expect.

[Tero]

And so it went:
A US federal appeals court issued an order that prevents Texas state authorities from detaining and deporting migrants and asylum seekers suspected of entering the United States illegally, hours after the Supreme Court allowed the strict new immigration law to take effect.