SCOTUS Happenings

Politics
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Yeah, but how else you gonna get confirmed. :person_shrugging:

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The linked interview with Justice Eddins of the Hawaii Supreme Court is really good:

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The Hawaii Supreme Court, [Thomas] wrote, preferred to use “public safety balancing tests,” ostensibly prioritizing “policy” over real law.

Unlike Thomas’s and Alito’s “history and tradition” standard, which they made up just a couple of years ago, courts prioritizing the general public interest over ambiguous statutory language predates the United States of America. This is one of the strengths of a Common Law system like ours and the UK’s over Civil Law systems like most of the rest of the world. Courts here don’t have to wait for statutory law to catch up with the modern world. Courts here can make law when they need to. Firearms in 2024 are not what they were in 1789. Anyway, Mark David Stern is right, it’s not Hawaii who’s making shit up here, it’s him and Alito.

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I respect Shannon; but am not as hopeful as he is.

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The Court, and the nation, looked very different when Gorsuch and Roberts sided with the liberals in Bostock. Roberts, especially, seems to have moved to the right. I’m predicting a 5-4 decision, split along gender lines.

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Are you telling me that cis-women don’t see danger in trans-women the way men do? But I thought that was the whole point: to protect cis-women from such dangers. So strange. What could the explanation be? /s

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With the Chevron Doctrine out of the way, SCOTUS will likely find in favor of the companies.

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So it seems like the naked partisanship of the SCOTUS (as well as what happened in Hungary and Poland) is so scary that all the democratic parties in Germany (so excl. AfD and BSW) have banded together to change the constitution to make the German supreme court (even more) independent from politics

The main points are:

  • each judge can only be appointed for one period of 12 years
  • upper age limit of 68
  • fixed number of judges

These rules are the same as before, but now they are fixed in the constitution, rather than in laws, so they are much harder to change.

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51

I think what I’d like to see with SCOTUS, is a term limit where at the end of the term, rather than just being retired from the bench, they rotate out to one of the Appeals Courts. Those courts aren’t limited in size anyway, and they already have judges on senior status (kind of a semi-retirement). I’d like to say this wouldn’t require a Constitutional Amendment, but I suspect it would be challenged, and I doubt if SCOTUS would vote to limit their own terms once that challenge reached the Supreme Court. Which brings us to a bigger problem. Our Constitution has become, for all intents and purposes, impossible to amend.

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I’m sure this was posted elsewhere, but in case it wasn’t…

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54

And once he’s sentenced can he then appeal the sentence? I’d presume he can.

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Also, this doesn’t yet involve the Supreme Court, but it’s something I wanted to talk about here:

So the Idaho legislature, if this passes, will, I guess, send a request to the US Supreme Court asking them to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. The problem is that SCOTUS doesn’t do that. They need an actual “case or controversy” to issue a ruling. They won’t even issue formal or informal opinions about issues. So the Idaho legislature is asking SCOTUS to upend 235 years of Constitutional jurisprudence and procedure. They’re not going to do that. Not even this Court. They will need a new lawsuit in order to revisit Obergefell. In other words, a state somewhere needs to stop issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples in order to trigger a lawsuit by one or more of those couples against that state. That could happen. I have no idea what the Idaho legislature is thinking. What they’re doing is just virtue signaling.

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Of course. As anyone can. However, since it appears his sentence will be less than a slap on the wrist, I doubt that appeal will go anywhere.

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With this court; who knows?

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And, indeed, not even a slap on the wrist. Discharged with no restrictions. Literally, a sentence of nothing. And he still plans to appeal that. I suppose to force New York to waste taxpayer money defending the sentence. The sentence of nothing. What a colossal joke.

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I wonder if this will hurt his appeal? I mean, he can’t show any actual harm. He still was elected to the highest office in our country, so being convicted by a jury certainly didn’t impede his election.

I suppose he could claim lawyer fees as being financially damaging to him, but we all know he doesn’t pay his bills.

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It’s pathetic.

A lot of countries won’t let a convicted felon visit.

Maybe he won’t be able to visit some golf courses?

He’s certainly in the record books now. First convicted prez to serve.

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