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Showing posts with label SCOTUS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SCOTUS. Show all posts
Thom Hartmann ✏ with a piece recommended by Christy Walsh.

20-March-2024

And now it appears that the six corrupt Republicans currently on the Court are preparing to make political bribery even easier for their well-heeled patrons . . . 

A democracy is run by and for the benefit of the demos, the people. An oligarchy is run by and for the oligoi, the “few,” aka the morbidly rich.

Thanks to a corrupt bloc of Republicans who’ve controlled the US Supreme Court since the Nixon era, America is more than halfway through the transition from democracy to oligarchy.

But it’s not too late for We, The People to reclaim our government from the forces of neofascism and great wealth who’ve worked so hard since the Reagan Revolution to seize complete control of it.

It’s going to require a two-step process: end the ability of the morbidly rich and giant corporations to legally bribe judges and politicians, and then use that reclaimed political power to require the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

It sounds like a heavy lift, but it’s been done several times before in American history . . .  

Continue reading @ Hartmann Report. 

Is SCOTUS About To Make Bribing Politicians The Same As “Earning A Tip”?

Right Wing Watch 👀 You might think religious-right leaders would be more than satisfied with the Trump Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and invited the criminalization of abortion nationwide, but you would be wrong.

 Peter Montgomery 

Religious-right activists are delving deep into the religious views, church attendance, and families of conservative judges considered possible Supreme Court nominees under a future Republican president, and making “red lists” of judges they deem unacceptable.

The effort is being led by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a project of the American Family Association’s political action arm. The Center is led by Phillip Jauregui; as leader of the Judicial Action Group in 2018, Jauregui was so convinced that God had anointed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court that when Trump instead chose Brett Kavanaugh as his second nominee, Jauregui denounced Kavanaugh as a “usurper” and warned that God would destroy him if he did not withdraw.

Jauregui and AFA’s Walker Wildmon described the justice-vetting effort during Pray Vote Stand, the Family Research Council’s religious-right activist conference held Friday and Saturday in Washington, D.C. AFA Action hosted a luncheon to promote its work . . . 

Continue reading @ Right Wing Watch.

Religious Right Leaders Demand Next GOP SCOTUS Nominees Meet ‘Biblical Worldview’ Standard

Stanley Cohen✊ It has been barely six months since the Supreme Court of the United States ordered women to return to their original intended role as mere dutiful chattel to cook and clean and to be subservient to the demands and “needs” of largely white Christian men under the controlling watch of the politics of a given state. 

7-December-2022

Not satisfied with smashing the clock of gender equality, the Supreme Court, state legislatures, and persons of dark voice and determined malevolent agenda, have moved on in a palpable effort to bully and batter communities that do not reflect their color, faith, sexual identity or voice.

The Sum of All Memories With Which We Were Born by Joni Sarah White.

Domestically, we live in times of all-too convenient self-righteous indignation. With nearly a public whisper, let alone outrage, like in Dobbs, under Haaland v. Brackeen the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) may soon be relegated to mere historical footnote if the Supreme Court signs off on a modern-day residential school system by gutting ICWA, an essential hedge against the intended blanch of indigenous culture, tradition and, ultimately, Tribal sovereignty throughout the United States.

Haaland has its genesis in a challenge under ICWA by the Navaho Tribe which was subsequently joined by the Cherokee, Oneida and Quinault nations and the Morongo Band of Mission to stop an adoption of a Native child by a white Texas family which moved to have the Act struck down. Arguing that only states have power over child custody, and that “Indian” is but a racial classification and not a protected political status with direct historical roots to treaties and Congressional edicts, the Texas family contends protection of indigenous children alone violates the Equal Protection clause of the federal Constitution.

Under ICWA, placement of indigenous children with extended families and tribal communities was designated as a mandated priority with tribal input and oversight over all placement matters concerning Native young. Passed by Congress almost half a century ago with its genesis in age-old nation-to-nation treaties, the Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted to stop the theft of indigenous children routinely separated from parents, extended families, and communities by state child welfare and private adoption agencies to be placed with white families. Though not as glaring as the cut hair, silenced tongue and sex abuse endemic to earlier residential school systems, this more subtle version of cultural genocide was no less devastating with indigenous children stripped of their sense of identity and belonging … forcibly removed from Native communities by the tens of thousands.

At its core Haaland transcends the essential but narrow issue presented by the particular facts of this challenge. It aims directly at powers reserved to Indian nations as sovereigns that have entered into hundreds of treaties with the United States, that has benefitted from them, and from which a long-recognized body of federal Indian law and practices have evolved.

If Indians cannot be treated as sovereigns and if you cannot treat Indians differently from non-Indians, does that render all laws and treaties that respect tribal sovereignty and independence as unconstitutional and thus null and void? And what of the benefits that the United State and U.S. corporate elite have realized and continue to by virtue of treaties including access to and use of indigenous lands and waters; inter-state and cross-border rights of way; and trillions of dollars arising from pillaged indigenous natural resources?

With its veracious appetite to undo decades of social and political growth and equal protection to be sure, the Supreme Court has its eyes set on eviscerating other historical and constitutional bedrocks. Thus, in what may prove to be a seismic step back of centuries, under the long-vanished “independent state legislature theory” the Supreme Court may very well hold in Moore v. Harperthat state courts and constitutions are powerless in matters relating to federal elections, thus leaving the final word on how to proceed with them– and who and how one may vote — to the political appetite and drive of each independent state legislative body. Just what does this mean?

North Carolina argues with passion but poison that the Election Clause empowers state legislators alone to regulate federal elections, prohibiting any other state authority whether the courts or the governor from imposing any checks and balances on their unbridled power. In a time and place with a Supreme Court not owned by the Federalist Society or comfortable sleeping with the white sheets of the Klan, any such argument would be promptly dispatched with all deliberate speed by settled law with a unanimous per curiam denial.

Indeed, as a starting point, because the framers had grave and well-founded misgivings about state lawmakers, they left the ultimate oversight of federal elections to Congress which alone had the power to establish their rules. To do otherwise would permit national elections to be controlled on a state-by state basis by the diverse political whims and agenda of the states without any of the checks and balances otherwise applicable to state lawmakers.

Should North Carolina prevail in Moore, elections there and across the country would be thrown into utter bedlam leaving state legislators with the unchecked and non-reviewable power to nullify any and all election rules be they those established by state constitutions, voter initiatives or long-standing administrative procedures. While dramatic and arbitrary changes in settled electoral policies such as voter registration, mail voting, a secret ballot and prohibitions against de facto poll taxes come to mind, ultimately this preach of the independent state legislative theory here and now is nothing short of a legislative attempt through racial gerrymandering to return Black voters to their original foundational design as 3/5 human beings.

For nearly a century Jim Crow screamed don’t tell me how to run my life, my business, my community. For nearly a century, the owners of inns, bus stops, restaurants, motels and churches dictated without government interest, let alone interference, who could enter, who got served, who could shop, who could pray based on nothing more than the color of one’s skin. This private veto, Jim Crow raged, was a personal one which granted exclusive power to the individual to determine and to control who got the proverbial key to walk through their door. Long supported by the Supreme Court doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson of separate but equal, Jim Crow normalized economic, educational, political and social handicaps creating a de jure second-class citizenship for Black women and men largely in the South.

Its end came not from any thunderbolt of decency, compassion or humanity, but largely from mass protest and civil disobedience and enforcement of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts which were rooted in the Interstate Commerce Clause that outlawed discrimination in public accommodations such as privately owned restaurants, hotels, stores, schools and workplaces. The use of the Commerce Clause to ensure full equality for all citizens was ultimately upheld by a Supreme Court seemingly a world apart from todays in the landmark case of Heart of Atlanta v. United States.

Yet, today when it comes to the rights of the LGBTQ community to full opportunity and equality throughout the public and private square of society alike, this is a Supreme Court which apparently believes Jim Crow was but a bad dish served up long ago on dirty plates of the deep South.

Walking now in the comfortable homophobic shoes of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission where the Supreme Court upheld the right of a baker to refuse to provide services for same-sex couples based on religious beliefs, the court will soon decide in 303 Creative v. Elenis whether the voice of one’s god can trump the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which renders it discriminatory and illegal to refuse services to someone on the basis of “disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.”

In Elenis the plaintiff, a wedding website designer, is unwilling to create websites for same-sex couples, saying it would go against her Christian beliefs. If history is indeed a harbinger of things to come and not, as we learned in Dobbs, the bind of long settled judicial precedence, it is likely the Supreme Court will once again say no to a same sex couple to obtain equal protection in the marketplace of today’s commerce clause.

Imagine how that same clause would rub up against a claim of religious freedom in this Supreme Court if, for example, a Muslim shop owner applying a hypothetical tenet of Islam limited female customer shoppers in the name of personal faith to but those wearing Hijab and escorted by male chaperones.

This quartet of cases says with determined Supreme Court voice and venom that if you are a woman, an Indian, Black or queer you need not come knocking on the doors of justice as to this court in this time they remain closed … a hateful judicial pathway, but a tease of a different time and place for now put to pasture.

These are but several cases in a long list of political prey targeted by members of the current court to undo; justices who have waited with sharpened personal political fangs for the day when minority dissents would become majority fiat, no matter who its victim or what their pain.

Throughout history the Supreme Court has, at times, built grand political bridges designed to close the chasm between ideal and practice and at others destroyed those constructed of hateful supremacist creed of all kind. Yet not before have members of its bench been so unleashed from the exercise of necessary judicial temperament and justice as to break loudly and with ease from protecting settled collective freedoms in pursuit of their own personal political agenda. And while these women and men of today’s bench are surely seasoned in the verbal massage of nuance it is clear they care less about the penumbras of justice than they do imposition of majoritarian values. For this we are all victims.

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.
You can no longer follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw

Black Robes ✏ White Straight Christian Male Justice

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Three Hundred And Twenty Two

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Hundred And Eighty Two

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Hundred And Seventy One

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Hundred And Fifty Nine

Hemant Mehta ✒ Coral Ridge Ministries, a Christian hate group, spent years fighting the “hate group” designation. They just lost again.

A request by a Christian hate group asking the Supreme Court for help in getting people to stop calling it a “hate group” has finally ended in failure. The Court said on Monday that it would not take up the case, with only Clarence Thomas dissenting.

It’s the latest and final twist in a pointless battle that was fought by Coral Ridge Ministries (formerly called Truth in Action and also known as D. James Kennedy Ministries) after they were included in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2010 list of “Active Anti-LGBT Hate Groups.” (Kennedy himself died in 2007.)

The ministry said in its initial 2017 lawsuit that being put on the SPLC’s list hurt them financially because Amazon (also a defendant) refused to allow them to fundraise via AmazonSmile precisely because they’re considered a “hate group.” GuideStar (also a defendant) temporarily labeled SPLC hate groups as such on their website, and the ministry said that also hurt fundraising.

They insisted there was nothing hateful about them.

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

Supreme Court Rejects Christian Hate Group’s Case Over ‘Hate Group’ Label

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Hundred And Fifty Two

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Hundred And Twenty Eight

TheHumanist.com ✒ The U.S. Supreme Court, once seen as the last bastion of protection for our rights, is instead laying waste to them. 

Rob Boston
13-January-2022
Stacked with ultra-conservatives, the high court seems especially intent on trashing seventy-plus years of jurisprudence upholding separation of church and state and ditching the right to legal abortion established in 1973’s Roe v. Wade.
It’s hard to tell where the court might strike next. At the height of the COVID pandemic, the court embraced a dangerous theory of religious freedom that fails to recognize the harm of unfettered transmission through religious services. The court is being asked to recognize a broad right to religious exemptions to mandatory vaccines. The justices also seem to be inching toward allowing discrimination in private and even public settings as long as it’s based on religion. Under this court, “religious freedom” has become a license to discriminate and ignore laws you dislike.

Marriage equality, which a differently configured court upheld in 2015, could be overturned or severely undermined. The justices are also increasingly ruling that religious schools and other institutions have a right to taxpayer support, even as they engage in appalling forms of discrimination.

Continue reading @ TheHumanist.com.

The Supreme Court Is Trashing Our Rights. What Are We Going to Do?

Alternet ✈ ‘A relativist dressed in originalist drag’: Catholic paper urges Senate to ‘reject’ Barrett in scathing op-ed.

By Alex Henderson

Republican supporters of Judge Amy Coney Barrett have been citing her Catholicism as one of the reasons why the U.S. Senate should confirm her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible. 

But Barrett is by no means universally loved among Catholics. And the National Catholic Reporter has slammed Barrett this week in a blistering staff editorial, asking the U.S. Senate to "reject" her nomination.

In the editorial, the Reporter's editorial board argues:

We believed it was wrong for the Senate to consider this nomination in the first place given the precedent set four years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February (2016), nine months before the election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold hearings on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, saying repeatedly that the American people should have a say in the matter. This year, when the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg created a vacancy less than nine weeks before Election Day, McConnell has seen fit to ram through the nomination.

The editorial complains that "hypocrisy is rank" with the nomination and that it is impossible to see how "rushing this nomination will be good for our democracy."

Continue reading @ Alternet.

Hypocrisy Is Rank

Right Wing Watch ✈ “Anti-Catholic bigotry has no place in the United States of America,” President Donald Trump said two weeks ago in a hyperpartisan video message to the charitable Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation, claiming in the next breath that such bigotry “predominates in the Democrat Party.” 

Peter Montgomery 
It’s a preposterous claim, considering that the two top figures in the Democratic ​Party—presidential nominee Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—are practicing Catholics.

That kind of divisive smear is sadly not surprising coming from Trump; as the editors of the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal editorialized recently, “What sets Trump apart, and makes this election so urgently important, is the viciousness of the man himself: his malice and well-documented mendacity, his callousness and incompetence, his total lack of scruples.”

‘Anti-Catholic’ Smears as Political Tactic

Even before Trump went along with demands from his religious-right supporters that he nominate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, right-wing groups were dusting off the dishonest “anti-Catholic” playbook that they have turned to again and again—accusing Democratic senators who raise questions about judicial nominee​s​’ judicial philosophy of being anti-religious, and often specifically anti-Catholic.

Continue reading @ Right Wing Watch.

‘Anti-Catholic’ Smears And Anti-Catholic Bigotry In Trump’s Base

Right Wing Watch ➨ Trump’s ‘Prophets’ Say Ginsburg’s Death Just First ‘Blast’ of God’s Wrath, Suggest Biden or Pelosi Could Be Next.

A group of dominionist “prophets” declared Tuesday evening that the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday was just the beginning of the divine vengeance they say is about to be poured out on those who resist God’s plan to use President Donald Trump and his Supreme Court appointments to do away with legal abortion in the United States.

Frank Amedia, a former Trump campaign adviser and founder of the Trump-supporting “prophetic” network POTUS Shield, hosted nightly online events over the past week as part of seven days of prayer and fasting about the election and Supreme Court. Over the weekend, they celebrated Ginsburg’s death as the fulfillment of Amedia’s prophecy that God would give Trump three Supreme Court justices in his first term.

As he did over the weekend, Amedia suggested Tuesday that God took Ginsburg out and that her death was just the beginning. He said God would make three more major moves to make his power known before the election. “Sometimes it’s good for someone to check out,” Amedia said. “They need to go.”

Continue reading @ Right Wing Watch.

Ginsburg’s Death Just First ‘Blast’ of God’s Wrath


From Right Wing Watch ➤American Pastors Network Says Supreme Court’s LGBTQ Ruling Undermines Biblical Order and Invites God’s Judgment.

 
By Peter Montgomery 

The American Pastors Network devoted time in recent episodes of its “Stand in the Gap” broadcast to denouncing the Supreme Court’s June 15 ruling that federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. APN leaders charged that the Supreme Court created legal chaos by redefining “biblical” definitions of sex and undermined the biblical template for law and order.

“This is a very, very bad case,” said attorney David New, a guest on the June 18 broadcast.

It’s very bad for the American family. It’s very bad for children. Whenever the gay-lesbian agenda is promoted and encouraged and supported, you basically damage American families, and it really damages children.

Continue reading @ Right Wing Watch.

Hate Theology Lashes SCOTUS

A Press release from Americans United welcoming the SCOTUS decision to strike down a request from religious exemption from Covid-19 laws. 

Tonight, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a religious exemption to California’s public health order that temporarily limits both religious and secular gatherings – a measure enacted to protect people from the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Casting the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts explained:

Similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time. And the Order exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods. 

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, issued the following statement:

The Supreme Court’s order allows Governor Newsom to protect the health and religious freedom of the people of California. Governor Newsom’s public health order, which applies to both religious and secular gatherings, does not violate religious freedom; it advances it by ensuring that the government is not favoring some people’s religious practices in a way that endangers other people’s lives.
We applaud the faith leaders who are finding new methods to provide solace, spiritual guidance and community to their congregations while it is still unsafe for them to meet in person. Because COVID-19 can spread easily at both religious and secular gatherings, we are all relying on each other to follow the advice of health experts to keep everyone well.

The U.S. Supreme Court also refused to take action in a similar Illinois case after Gov. Jay Pritzker lifted all restrictions on religious services on Thursday.

Americans United has filed amicus briefs in both the California case, South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, and the Illinois case, Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church v. Pritzker, as well as in 16 similar cases nationwide. AU has urged courts to protect both public health and religious freedom by treating secular and religious gatherings equally.

➽Americans United is a religious freedom advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the nonprofit educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.

Supreme Court Protects Religious Freedom, Public Health By Allowing California Order To Stand

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