US Supreme Court Discussions

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm hopeful and skeptical. I'll leave it at that too.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I would say the initial signs are positive. When the Senate GOP Whip says that he expects the Republican support in the Senate to be similar to in the House, that is a good sign. On the flip side, I'm not sure that Romney, who would normally be considered one of the most moderate and bipartisan GOP senators, would support this, given his Mormon beliefs. His only comment that I have seen is that he will look at it, without committing either way.

Senators expect GOP support to grow for same-sex marriage bill in bid to overcome filibuster

[N.E. Brigand]

Periodic polling by Marquette University has found that Americans' approval for the Supreme Court has fallen from 66% less than two years ago (September 2020) to just 38% now.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

For the first time ever, four women have all voted in the same U.S. Supreme Court case. And all four dissented in a 5-4 vote with the five men voting one way, and the four women voting the other way.

Justice Jackson dissents in first vote as Supreme Court won't reinstate Biden immigration policies

[Impenitent]

Voronwë, I don't know how you feel about this video being posted to HoF. If you think it's inappropriate, remove.

Scare-mongering and exaggeration, or embroidered summation?

https://www.thejuicemedia.com/hga_scotu ... zBXG3HDALA

[RoseMorninStar]

There are several things in that video I'm concerned about, especially state legislatures getting to choose their own electors. Several states have some pretty extreme candidates on the ballot.. and they could win.

[N.E. Brigand]

I would say the initial signs are positive. When the Senate GOP Whip says that he expects the Republican support in the Senate to be similar to in the House, that is a good sign. On the flip side, I'm not sure that Romney, who would normally be considered one of the most moderate and bipartisan GOP senators, would support this, given his Mormon beliefs. His only comment that I have seen is that he will look at it, without committing either way.

Senators expect GOP support to grow for same-sex marriage bill in bid to overcome filibuster

Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, today said that while she continues to support it, the announcement of yesterday's deal between Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin to pass a bill that reduces the deficit will make it harder for her to convince fellow Republicans to vote for the same-sex marriage bill.

[N.E. Brigand]

This review of a new memoir by legendary court reporter Nina Totenberg raises some interesting questions about the interactions of power and journalism. Totenberg was very close to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She seems to have held to a code of journalistic conduct, but to judge from the review, she failed to recognize how much, in the course of developing friendly relationships with powerful people (in order to have access to scoops), she came to accept their views (e.g., at one point, Totenberg apparently hosted a dinner party for, among others, Justice Antonin Scalia, who had lately written the decision striking down a venerable Washington D.C. gun law, and everyone had a good laugh at the gun-themed decor at the party). Some quotes:

With its odd, priestly culture, the court is particularly susceptible to this sort of veneration. Could you imagine a congressional reporter doing a book called Dinners With Harry Reid, tracing shopping excursions and intimate family moments with the late majority leader, who died the year after Ginsburg? I’m not saying Totenberg has to treat the justices as if they were venal, low-wattage members of the Palookaville ward-politics machine. But it’d be nice if she held open the possibility — a hard thing to do when you’re pals.

When we spoke, Totenberg waxed nostalgic about the old Washington of cross-aisle comity. “It was an incredibly different time and it was a better time,” she says. Today, “it’s better than people think it is, because there are people who are still friends even though they don’t advertise that. And there are people who still work together even though they don’t advertise that. But it’s much worse than it used to be.”

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

A little SCOTUS levity

[Inanna]

I’m not saying, but I’m reading along, V. Thank you for the updates.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Just a little background, the above exchange came in a case about an apparently well-known Andy Warhol painting of Prince, that was based on a photograph. The photographer was paid a small fee at the time, but the image was used again in a different portrait and she sued the foundation that runs Warhol's estate. They countersued to establish that Warhol's images did not infringe on the photographer's copyright.

Apparently, among other points made in the oral argument, "Justice Amy Coney Barrett used “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and its movie adaptation as an example."
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/natio ... 18aa649b50

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is a hugely important case. It could literally destroy our democracy.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Oral arguments are happening today in two cases involving affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Almost certainly, affirmative action is going to be all but ended by these cases, not just in the use of promoting diversity at colleges and universities but also for other purposes such as in employment.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Justice Thomas Says He Does Not ‘Have a Clue’ What Diversity Means at Oral Arguments in College Affirmative Action Case

[RoseMorninStar]

I read something today which made the argument for diversity based admissions to be made by social class/income rather than race. That could have merit but it would take a statistician to figure that out.

[N.E. Brigand]

The New York Times today published a letter sent this summer to Chief Justice John Roberts by a minister who was in 2014 the leader of a prominent conservative evangelical organization. The letter alleges that Justice Samuel Alito in 2014 leaked the result of the then-forthcoming decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby to one of the group's donors, who had told the minister in advance that she would be seeking this information when she attended a dinner with Alito and who shared it in person with the minister. He then shared it with the president of Hobby Lobby. The minister sent Roberts the letter because he felt it bore on the investigation that Roberts ordered into the leak of information about Dobbs, the big abortion case whose outcome was announced in June.

Contemporary emails arguably back up the minister's story, the donor in question claims not to remember but is clearly lying (she says that when she emailed the minister to say she had "good news" "interesting news" to share with him (edited to add: that she wrote could only share in person not via email), she might have meant only that Alito drove her home after she fell ill), and Alito outright denies it. (Edited further to add: More specifically, via a Supreme Court spokesperson, he denied that he or his wife told this woman or her husband the news. There are multiple ways around this denial.)

I would argue that what the article reveals is at least as bad and perhaps worse than the leak of the Dobbs decision.