The US Supreme Court

[Svartalf]

The Supreme Court can kiss my ass, they have authority by force alone, the worst kind of authority—bleh.

meaning that if it should come to that, it's much more likely they'll make you kiss THEIR bum rather than brownnose to you.

[Svartalf]

it's not so much he's married to a man than his love of stuffing it to people up where the sun doesn't shine.

[Sean Hayden]

Supreme Court Increasingly Favors the Rich, Economists Say

A new study found that the court’s Republican appointees voted for the wealthier side in cases 70 percent of the time in 2022, up from 45 percent in 1953.

Supreme Court justices take two oaths. The first, required of all federal officials, is a promise to support the Constitution. The second, a judicial oath, is more specific. It requires them, among other things, to “do equal right to the poor and to the rich.”

A new study being released on Monday from economists at Yale and Columbia contends that the Supreme Court has in recent decades fallen short of that vow.

The study, called “Ruling for the Rich,” concludes that the wealthy have the wind at their backs before the justices and that a good way to guess the outcome of a case is to follow the money.

The study adds to what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent in June, called “the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this court than ordinary citizens.”

…continued https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/us/p ... -poor.html

[Brian Peacock]

Ah, but you have to factor in that richer people are just better, and moreso.

[L'Emmerdeur]

This reminded me of somebody who posts here sometimes:

... strategy of obfuscation through trolling, distraction theatrics, outright lies and, when all else fails, simply refusing to engage at all.

I suppose belittling the source to avoid dealing with the argument would fall under 'distraction theatrics'. Marcotte, the author of the piece below, describes this strategy as an inherent component of MAGA's approach to politics. True enough but what is behind that approach? The knowledge, even if they're unable to acknowledge it, that their position is often not only illogical but counterproductive and harmful.

'John Roberts embodies MAGA cowardice'

One would think, in order to rise to the level of a Supreme Court justice, it would behoove a person to be fond of a rigorous debate. Not so with John Roberts, who is no less than the Grand Poobah of the berobed arbiters of constitutionality. A devastating recent report from the New York Times has exposed how the chief justice led the way to the escalating abuse of the shadow docket, a Court power once reserved for emergencies but that is now the primary tool of the institution’s conservative justices to evade having to debate or even explain their decisions in a lengthy and reasoned ruling available for all to examine. While this revelation is just the latest in a series of scandals involving the Court, it ties into a larger pattern that has animated and defined the MAGA movement from its very beginning: a cowardly aversion to robustly debating ideas.

The term “shadow docket” itself sounds like wonky legalese, but in practice it’s quite simple. The Court has the power, which has traditionally been reserved for emergency situations, to issue temporary orders while the case itself awaits final judgment. As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, these “typically involve requests that the Court temporarily lift lower court orders” and “usually involve limited briefing, no oral argument, and rulings with little or no analysis of the Court’s reasoning.” The granting of shadow docket requests were once exceedingly rare and granted only for cases under an imminent deadline, such an inmate on death row needing a stay of execution to give his lawyers time to finish an appeal.

But with Donald Trump in office, the conservative Court is using the shadow docket as a back door to issue rulings upholding the administration’s unpopular — and often legally questionable — policies, while having to avoid explaining themselves to the public. Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak have pinpointed a winter night in 2016 as the turning point, when the justices “issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling” on Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Since then, according to their count, the Court has sided with the Trump administration in over 20 cases without “the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases.” Most of these followed a Trump loss in the lower courts — and came with considered judicial opinions that were published. But the Supreme Court effectively took those carefully reasoned and evidence-heavy decisions and threw them in the trash with no explanation.

Since shadow docket rulings are unsigned, we can’t know for certain the usual tally of supporting and opposing justices. Still, it’s a safe bet, based on judicial philosophies, past rulings and inclinations — not to mention the evidence compiled by Kantor and Liptak — that the Court’s conservative justices have been the drivers of these decisions.

There are many theories swirling around for why they have increasingly chosen to abandon their basic duty to legal transparency. And the likeliest one is also the simplest: They’re cowards.

[Etc.]