“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Thus Charles Schumer, senior senator from New York and possible new majority leader of the Senate, to be…
Tag: supreme court
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, she should have retired
Supreme Court justices are the closest thing we have in the U.S. to an aristocracy, maintaining the once-universal situation where the office and the person are one that has otherwise fortunately disappeared. Justice Ginsburg had an extraordinary career, but one must say that the worst part of her life was her delay in leaving office….
Clarence Thomas to Brethren: Why Can’t You Guys Listen to “Reason”?
Why indeed? The Supreme Court recently refused the opportunity to consider a raft of lower court decisions regarding both the Second Amendment and the “qualified immunity” extended to public officials—most “controversially” (that is to say, most inappropriately), as applied to the police— protecting them against law suits for their actions—like blowing someone’s head off for…
The United States Supreme Court is dancing, dancing, dancing. The United States Supreme Court is dancing, dancing on Nino Scalia’s grave.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County can be described as “the war of the textualists” in that both the majority opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch extending federal prohibition of job discrimination to non-hetero folk and the “stinging” (I guess, because I haven’t read them) dissents by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel…
Shorter Chuck Schumer: Democrats can so be as bad as Trump!
Politics ain’t beanbag, for sure, but sometimes, when you consider the intellects of the playas involved, perhaps it ought to be. A case in point is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s recent pseudo gangsta-style outburst directed at the Supreme Court, telling the Supremes in no uncertain terms to keep their goddamn hands off of goddamn…
Textualism refuted! Or Clarence Thomas lays an egg
A few posts back, I groused (loudly) over Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in FTB v. Hyatt, overturning a previous Supreme Court decision, Nevada v. Hall regarding the immunity of states from suit in other states’ courts. In rejecting Hall, the Court found that the Constitution not only grants states an inherent immunity to suits…
Justice Thomas, casting shade—on the Constitution!
If you want to get a laugh out of a constitutional “originalist” like Supreme Court Justice Clarence “if it ain’t there it ain’t there” Thomas, use the word “penumbra” in a sentence. Yes, it is inside, but it’s funny, to Clarence and his Federalist pals, thanks to Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, who, writing in…
UPDATE: Clarence Thomas didn’t “vote black”; other conservatives voted “white”
On Monday, I used the time-honored journalistic dodge of “ethically” floating a sensational but unverified allegation by stating it in the form of a question, to wit: Clarence Thomas didn’t just ‘vote black’, did he? Well, according to Mark Joseph Stern, over at Slate, he didn’t. Instead, he voted “Thomas.” “Clarence Thomas Joins Liberals, Shocks…
You’re funny, Justice Scalia! You’re a funny man! You’re also a fat-assed, self-congratulatory liar, and a shitty constitutional scholar to boot!
Okay, is that enough persiflage for one headline? Sometimes El Nino gets it right, and the “liberals” (seriously “so-called” liberals, in my book) get it wrong, as in U.S. v. Comstock, in which only Justices Scalia and Thomas had the intelligence to argue that the federal government had no authority to imprison convicted sex offenders…
Does ObamaCare Have a Prayer?
A week ago, I would have said yes. I would have said that there was no way that perennial swing man Anthony Kennedy would have the nerve to take the ax to a really major piece of congressional legislation, something that hasn’t happened since 1935. But that was then. The universally derided performance of Solicitor…