Category: Supreme Court

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Supreme Court

Elena Kagan Mops The Floor With Brett Kavanaugh In SCOTUS Ruling

A ruling just released from the U.S. Supreme Court features a hilarious footnote in which Justice Elena Kagan uses logic and reason to remind fellow Justice Brett “I like beer!” Kavanaugh that the law applies to everyone, including large corporations who try to get out of paying their employees.

Mark Joseph Stern of Slate caught the dustup between Kagan and Kavanaugh in a case where Kagan was in the majority on an opinion involving overtime pay for a man who worked 84 hours a week but was denied overtime by his employer.

The case is Helix Energy Solutions v. Hewitt. In it, Michael Hewitt alleged that he often worked as much as 84 hours a week on an offshore oil platform owned by Helix but was only paid a set amount for weekly work, not hourly, even though he clearly exceeded 40 hours work in a week, meaning he was entitled to overtime.

Kavanaugh, along with Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, were in the minority, ruling that Hewitt wasn’t entitled to receive overtime for his work. Kavanaugh also authored the dissenting opinion.

That led Kagan to make the following notation in the footnotes of the majority opinion, clearly aiming her comments at the three justices who had ruled against Hewitt, especially Kavanaugh since he was the author:

“The dissent… tries just to power past the regulatory text. The dissent reasons that because Hewitt received more than $455 for a day’s work, he must have been paid on a salary basis. That is a non-sequitur to end all non-sequiturs. Hewitt’s high daily pay ensured that the HCE rule’s salary-level requirement would not have prevented his exemption: $963 (per day) is indeed more than $455 (per week).”

In another footnote to the majority opinion, Kagan also wrote that Helix had made an argument in their filing before the Supreme Court they failed to make in lower court filings, which would normally mean the high court wouldn’t even consider it in their ruling, and yet Kavanaugh saw fit to “opine on it anyway” in his dissent.

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Supreme Court

Attorney Uses Clarence Thomas’ Own Words To Humiliate The Justice

Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas got reminded of his own absurd judicial philosophy during oral arguments on a case dealing with federal and state election rules.

The case is Moore v. Harper, which CNN reports originated as the result of a law in North Carolina.

The North Carolina GOP legislature … argues that state constitutions and state courts have little or no authority to impose limits on how state legislatures craft their rules for federal elections.

The controversial “independent state legislature” theory is being used by Republican lawmakers to argue that state courts could not redraw the congressional map the legislature sought to enact in 2021.

A version of theory was promoted by allies of former President Donald Trump during their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Arguing on behalf of Common Cause in opposition to the North Carolina legislature was former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who noted that the high court had once ruled “states rights” on the issue of abortion and then said such a standard didn’t apply to regulations on guns.

Thomas tried to argue against Katyal:

“You said this court normally doesn’t second-guess state court’s interpretation of their own Constitution. Would you say that in the case of Baker v. Carr?”

Katyal replied:

“I don’t think you declare it unconstitutional. Any number of things. To say they got their own Constitution wrong is just a matter of interpretation.”

That led Thomas to inquire:

“Let me ask you this. It may be a bit unfair. If the state legislature had been very, very generous to minority voters in their redistricting and the state supreme court said under their state constitution that this was — it violated their own state Constitution of North Carolina, would you be making the same argument?”

Katyal:

“Yes.”

Later, Katyal again used Thomas’ own flawed reasoning to prove that conservatives on the high court talk out of both sides of their mouths:

“The North Carolina court is interpreting the elections clauses and powers and the question is whether or not they have misread it or not and so I think that’s the source of the substantive — alleged substantive violation here. The spirit of your question, for 233 years, this court’s never gotten involved and said, hey, we’re going to, you know, say the North Carolina court got it wrong or their provision was too abstract for enforcement or anything like that. Rather, this court has always stayed on the sidelines, let the state process unfold subject to that other part of the trident check, Congress, in the second half of the elections cause.”

If the six conservative justices rule in favor of North Carolina, it will be the end of free and fair elections in the United States. Each state will be able to set their own election standards and disenfranchise anyone they want. They’ll even be able to overrule the will of the voters and choose the winners and losers in each election based solely on political party.

Clarence Thomas’ bullshit is finally starting to catch up with him.

 

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LGBT Issues Supreme Court

Justice Jackson Has The Perfect Question When An Attorney Urges SCOTUS To Allow LGBTQ Discrimination

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today in a case involving the rights of private businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans on “religious grounds,” and there are fears that conservatives on the high court may allow discrimination if the defendant claims it violates his or her beliefs.

Reuters reports on the case:

The wedding websites that Colorado-based web designer Lorie Smith would like to create for clients might offer ceremony details, pictures, a story about the couple and a biblical quote celebrating how through marriage they “become one flesh.”

They would not, however, show same-sex nuptials.

Smith, an evangelical Christian who believes marriage is only between a man and a woman, has taken her fight to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples and to advertise that policy to the U.S. Supreme Court in a major case to be argued on Monday. Smith is appealing lower court rulings backing Colorado.

During oral arguments, some of the conservative justices did indeed seem included to allow such blatant discrimination, according to CNN.

Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that a businessperson’s objection would not be based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message the businessperson did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a lawyer for the designer that her “strongest ground” is that the designer’s work is “custom.”

The newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, had a brilliant question for an attorney representing Smith before the court.

“Give me your thoughts on a photography business in a shopping mall during this holiday season that offers a product called Scenes with Santa, and this business wants to express its own view of nostalgia about Christmases past by reproducing classic 1940s and 1950s Santa scenes…because they’re trying to capture the feelings of a certain era, their policy is that only white children can be photographed with Santa in this way, because that’s how they view the scenes with Santa that they’re trying to depict.”

The attorney desperately attempted to differentiate between the two:

“Because in the photograph itself, the objection is not contained in that photograph. But in addition, I think it’s important to remind the court –”

When Jackson countered that the two instances are exactly the same, the attorney replied, “The specific objection that you’re including is not necessarily in that photograph, but even if it were, this court has protected vile, awful, reprehensible, violent speech in the past.”

How exactly is it “speech” to refuse to set up a website for someone just because the potential client is LGBTQ? That’s discrimination and it wouldn’t be allowed based on the color of a person’s skin, as Justice Jackson noted. But the current right-wing 6-3 majority on the court may allow it to happen with their approval. Yet another reason we need to expand the court and make sure these six extremist judges don’t take away every right we have.

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Discrimination Supreme Court Voting Rights

Ketanji Brown Jackson Gives Her SCOTUS Brethren A History Lesson During Tuesday Oral Arguments

During oral arguments Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave her right-wing brethren a much-needed history lesson on voting rights.

The case before the high court is Merrill v. Merrigan, which challenges Section 2 of Voting Rights Act. A lower court ruling struck down an Alabama legislative map which is considered to be discriminatory to people of color who live in the state.

Justice Jackson weighed in, making it clear that she isn’t going to sit quietly and let conservatives strike down more of the Voting Rights Act.

“I don’t think that we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem, because I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution and what the framers and the founders thought about, and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the Equal Protection Clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way. That they were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the freedmen, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.”

Indeed, those two amendments, which were ratified after the Civil War, were meant to protect the rights of black citizens who had once been enslaved in Confederate states, Jackson continued, and she supported her assertion with statements made by the very legislators who crafted them.

“I looked in the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the 14th Amendment, and that report says that the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves. The legislator who introduced that amendment said that, quote, ‘Unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated freedmen.'”

But Justice Jackson was far from finished reminding her colleagues of why such laws are necessary today just as they were during Reconstruction.

“They drafted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which specifically stated that citizens would have the same civil rights as enjoyed by white citizens. That’s the point of that act, to make sure that the other citizens, the Black citizens, would have the same as the white citizens.

“They recognized that there was unequal treatment. People based on their race were being treated unequally and, importantly, when there was a concern that the Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have a constitutional foundation, that’s when the 14th Amendment came into play. It was drafted to give a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens.”

Jackson concluded her comments by eviscerating the argument being made attorneys for the state of Alabama:

“So with that as the framing and the background, I’m trying to understand your position that Section 2, by its plain text is doing that same thing, is saying that you need to identify people in this community who have less opportunity and less ability to participate and ensure that that’s remedied, right? It’s a race-conscious effort, as you have indicated. I’m trying to understand why that violates the 14th Amendment, given the history and background of the 14th Amendment.”

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Abortion Social Media Supreme Court

Kellyanne Conway’s Daughter Has A July 4th Message Her Mother Will Hate But Every American Needs To Hear

Since it’s July 4th/Independence Day, it seems a good time to take stock of what we see going on in the United States 246 years after our independence from Great Britain was formally proclaimed and announced in Philadelphia.

Thanks to the United States Supreme Court’s recent rulings on the issues of guns and reproductive freedom, many Americans aren’t exactly in a celebratory mood this July 4, if only because it seems like we’re moving in reverse, having to fight for rights we thought had already been won nearly a half-century ago.

One person who seems to be channeling that angst is Claudia Conway, the 17-year-old daughter of former Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway, who weighed in on the high court and where we’re at in the United States.

Here’s what Claudia posted on Twitter:

Boom! Mic drop. Take a bow, young Ms. Conway.

Claudia added this message:

Hell yes! This young lady has a future in politics if she wants one.

There were plenty of high fives for Claudia Conway.

https://twitter.com/SassyHairDood/status/1543909561106677760?s=20&t=OWTwLxUWj7V_hPW8ojt7-g