The US Supreme Court

[Sean Hayden]

Maybe it’s time for the church to step in and excommunicate the rotten Catholics on the court.

[Svartalf]

church excommunication would have no effect on their ability to operate as flunkies to the 1st Tyrant of Magaland
and given they are willing to serve as flunkies for manifestly illegal stuff, I strongly doubt it would make them rethink their actions and position in life, even for one mment

[Brian Peacock]

I blame Mitch McConnell.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Aye his pernicious machinations had a lot to do with the current population of the bench but he just exploited the power that was available to him. The US Constitution assumes a modicum of respect for the concept of democracy on the part of those who've been democratically elected. It's a weakness which presents a number of openings for ruthless operators like McConnell.

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Noting that though Chief Justice Roberts would like to be viewed as the defender of the Supreme Court's good name, he's really just another flavor of MAGA stooge. For him the 'good name' of the court is dispensable when it conflicts with the Trumpist agenda.

That pose of upholding the honor of the court has never been particularly convincing in the first place given that Roberts has made it a career-long pet project to disable and dismantle the Voting Rights Act. To further that goal he's willing to consistently legislate from the bench. Of course in those cases we heard nary a peep from the righteous Republicans that for decades have been wailing a jeremiad against "activist judges" who meddle outside their proper bailiwick.

Here he personally steps up as the brave embodiment of obedience to his master's voice. For reference, according to the US Constitution the 'power of the purse' (determining how, when, and where the government will disburse funds) is held by the legislative branch, not the executive branch.

Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday temporarily kept in place the Trump administration’s decision to freeze nearly $5 billion in foreign aid.

Roberts acted on the administration’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. President Donald Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.

The high court order is temporary, though it suggests the justices will reverse a lower court ruling that withholding the funding was likely illegal. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled last week that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.

Trump told House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in a letter Aug. 28 that he would not spend $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

[source]

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Also, more about shadow docket shenanigans. Justice Gorsuch rebukes a lower court judge for not correctly interpreting the somewhat terse and often unexplained shadow docket rulings that the six 'conservatives' have been spewing out ever since their golden boy, the grotesque mountebank felon president, got back into office.

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Massachusetts opened a hearing by doing something that federal judges almost never do: offer a sheepish, public apology. 

“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to, on the record here, to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court,” said Judge William Young. “I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer.”

Young was responding to a recent concurring opinion from, as you might expect, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, in a decision that allowed President Donald Trump to cancel roughly $800 million in National Institutes of Health research grants because he thinks science is woke. The case had started in Young’s courtroom, and Gorsuch took a beat to scold Young for a decision that, in Gorsuch’s view, so egregiously flouted other Supreme Court shadow docket orders that he had no choice to conclude that Young was being willfully insubordinate.

“Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote. “When this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” He went on to characterize Young’s decision as the “third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents,” and complained that all three interventions should have been “unnecessary,” which is basically an admission that Gorsuch got annoyed that someone made him work during what he hoped would be a relaxing end to his summer vacation.

I understand the various reasons Young felt the urge to apologize: Supreme Court justices sit above him on the org chart, and they called him out in public, which is a stressful and embarrassing experience in any workplace. Young, a Reagan appointee, has also spent the last four decades ensconced in an institution that venerates the Court and assumes that its justices in their magisterial wisdom are entitled at all times to a presumption of correctness.

All that said, I am begging William Young to have an ounce of self-respect here. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation in 2020, this Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority has specialized in churning out shadow docket decisions that are sloppy, vague, contradictory, incoherent, or—in most cases—some combination thereof. On some occasions, the conservatives assert that these cases are binding on lower courts; on others, they emphasize that these orders are only temporary, and should not necessarily be construed as rulings on the merits. Their only real goal is giving the Trump administration what it wants; dealing with the practical implications of their decisions is almost always left for another day, or not at all.

[source]

[Brian Peacock]

The Pontiff and his Council of Cardinals.

[Svartalf]

bad analogy, NO pope was ever as omnipotents in his own states as rump is in the USA

[Brian Peacock]

Then perhaps he's more like the Prelate of Opus Dei with the Supreme Court as his Curia, the Republicans as his Supernumeraries, the media as his Numeraries, and the MAGA faithful as his Cooperators.