The US Supreme Court

[Svartalf]

man, be careful, the sarcasm, it's literally dripping with venom

[macdoc]

How corrupt can you get

Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on the US supreme court, is facing renewed calls for impeachment after it was reported that for two decades he has accepted undisclosed luxury gifts from a Republican mega-donor.

Thomas may have violated financial disclosure rules when he failed to disclose travel on yachts and jets and other gifts funded by the property billionaire Harlan Crow and uncovered by ProPublica.

It found that Thomas flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet and holidays on Crow’s 162ft super-yacht. He has enjoyed holidays at Crow’s ranch in Texas and joined him at an exclusive all-male California retreat. The justice usually spends about a week each summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondack mountains in New York.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -megadonor

[Svartalf]

Justice Thomas is not corryupt, as a black man he just was educated to accept all handouts hed be offered, they never told him about conflict of interest, or judges being supposed not to do that.

[rainbow]

Politicians, judges, and other public servants accept these gifts from on high purely to maintain 'business confidence'. I'm sure it's a massive chore for them to have to go and waste time on a private yacht or in an exclusive Tuscan villa, to spend a week on Murdoch's private island, or to attend a baseball game with Elon and then pop up to a penthouse suit to sniff cocaine out of a high-class escort's bum cheeks. But they do because they have a duty to make sure that billionaires feel like they have friends in government. I thank them heartily for taking those bullets on all our behalves.

Quite. They would be happier in the parking lot of Walmart.

Everyone knows that.

[Tero]

They are going to be busy. Declaring fetuses humans for FDA purposes. Abortion pill kills 50%. Unsafe drug!

[Tero]

How long can it take forAlito to write that abortion pills are not "Things Deeply Rooted in Our Nation's History and Tradition"?

[Tero]

Supreme Court protects access to abortion pill

[Tero]

It merely postponed the case to May 17th, however.

Vladeck said the order from the justices is not necessarily the court weighing in on how they are leaning on legal arguments, but more about allowing the case to go through the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

[Tero]

Elsewhere

Unfortunately, its not over yet. This delays things, but all this does is send the issue back to the 5th circuit which is predominantly Republican (2 x Obama, 1 x Biden, 6 x Trump).

[L'Emmerdeur]

An absent member has been mentioned elsewhere. He of the vehement defense of the beer loving self-righteous shitbird Kavanaugh. One of his more odious endeavors, looking even less justified now.

'Senate investigation into Brett Kavanaugh assault claims contained serious omissions'

A 2018 Senate investigation that found there was “no evidence” to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault against the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh contained serious omissions, according to new information obtained by the Guardian.

The 28-page report was released by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the then chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. It prominently included an unfounded and unverified claim that one of Kavanaugh’s accusers – a fellow Yale graduate named Deborah Ramirez – was “likely” mistaken when she alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dormitory party because another Yale student was allegedly known for such acts.

The suggestion that Kavanaugh was the victim of mistaken identity was sent to the judiciary committee by a Colorado-based attorney named Joseph C Smith Jr, according to a non-redacted copy of a 2018 email obtained by the Guardian. Smith was a friend and former colleague of the judiciary committee’s then lead counsel, Mike Davis.

Smith was also a member of the Federalist Society, which strongly supported Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination, and appears to have a professional relationship with the Federalist Society’s co-founder, Leonard Leo, whom he thanked in the acknowledgments of his book Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State.

Smith wrote to Davis in the 29 September 2018 email that he was in a class behind Kavanaugh and Ramirez (who graduated in the class of 1987) and believed Ramirez was likely mistaken in identifying Kavanaugh.

Instead, Smith said it was a fellow classmate named Jack Maxey, who was a member of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, who allegedly had a “reputation” for exposing himself, and had once done so at a party. To back his claim, Smith also attached a photograph of Maxey exposing himself in his fraternity’s 1988 yearbook picture.

The allegation that Ramirez was likely mistaken was included in the Senate committee’s final report even though Maxey – who was described but not named – was not attending Yale at the time of the alleged incident.

In an interview with the Guardian, Maxey confirmed that he was still a senior in high school at the time of the alleged incident, and said he had never been contacted by any of the Republican staffers who were conducting the investigation.

“I was not at Yale,” he said. “I was a senior in high school at the time. I was not in New Haven.” He added: “These people can say what they want, and there are no consequences, ever.”

The revelation raises new questions about apparent efforts to downplay and discredit accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh and exclude evidence that supported an alleged victim’s claims.

[Tero]

Court spares white man. If he were black he would have been executed 9 times already.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... n-oklahoma

[Tero]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Leo

This is who grooms all the justices. Hevalso keeps them under tight control. The right wing judges tended to drift to center before. They made sure it would not happen by getting the six judges.

[Tero]

He has an excuse

"The job is not worth doing for what they pay," Thomas said during a speech in 2001, The New York Post reported at the time. "The job is not worth doing for the grief. But it is worth doing for the principle."

Thomas was speaking to the Bar Association in Savannah, Georgia, according to the Post. In the speech, which was resurfaced this week by The Nation writer Jeet Heer, Thomas discussed his efforts to gain custody of his then-10-year-old grandnephew. The Post reported Thomas cried during the speech and thanked his lawyer who worked on the custody battle.

In 2001, the salary for an associate Supreme Court justice was $178,300, while the chief justice made $186,300. As of 2023, the salary for an associate justice is $285,400, while the chief justice makes $298,500.

https://www.businessinsider.com/clarenc ... pay-2023-5

[Svartalf]

If he doesn't like his salary, I'll take it, and pay the taxe

[L'Emmerdeur]

Steve Bannon yammers about 'deconstructing the administrative state' and at least two Supreme Court justices are on board with the project.

'Clarence Thomas’s newest opinion would literally bring back child labor'

On Thursday, the Supreme Court imposed strict new limits on the Clean Water Act. The Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA is likely to do serious harm to the government’s ability to quell water pollution, including in major waterways such as the Mississippi River and the Chesapeake Bay.

Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion that would so severely limit Congress’s power to legislate that he might as well have taken several volumes of the United States Code and lit them on fire.

To be clear, a concurring opinion is not the law — it merely reflects the views of the justices who sign onto it. And this particular opinion is unlikely to garner five votes to become law unless the Court’s membership changes drastically. But that does not change the fact that Thomas (and Gorsuch, who joined his opinion) is one of only nine justices, and their views tend to shape the ideas of lawyers and judges throughout the legal system.

Under the approach Thomas lays out in his Sackett concurrence, the federal ban on child labor is unconstitutional. So is the minimum wage, federal laws protecting the right to unionize, bans on workplace discrimination, and nearly all other regulation of the workplace. Thomas’s approach endangers countless laws governing private business, from rules requiring health insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions to the ban on whites-only lunch counters. And even that is underselling just how much law would be snuffed out if Thomas’s approach took hold.

...

Much of Thomas’s opinion is an attack on what he calls the “New Deal era conceptions of Congress’ commerce power.” Thomas argues that the Court should return to the narrow understanding of Congress’s power to regulate the national economy that it followed in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), an infamous and long-ago-overruled decision striking down a law that prohibited goods produced by child laborers from being sold in US markets.

Then he goes even further than that. The primary thrust of his opinion is that the federal government’s authority over the “channels of interstate commerce” — roads, waterways, railroads, and other such infrastructure where people and goods can travel across state lines — is limited only to the power to “keep them open and free from any obstruction to their navigation.”

Taken seriously, this approach could gut much of the rest of the Clean Water Act, and allow a chemical company to dump countless tons of a deadly poison into the Mississippi River, so long as that poison did not prevent ships from traveling along the river.