Well…as I said in the personal update this morning, I was going to have a few topics this morning but I don’t remember being this prolific in a single morning. But, there is one more thing that I wanted to talk about that gives all of us who want a functioning democracy a ray of hope….yesterday, two of the objective SC justices refused to take on a case on the egregious repub gerrymandering that has damaged our democracy and has helped them rig elections across the country. What some pundits that follow the court are speculating is that this means that the Wisconsin case that has already been argued has been decided and that it will strike down partisan gerrymandering once an for all across the country; so there is no need to take on any other cases that deal with it. If this is true, this will be the death knell of the repub party that is only in power thanks to this abuse of democracy…and it will ensure fairness and restore trust in the electoral process that has been destroyed by the repubs….I’ll have my fingers crossed….
Tag Archives: Supreme court
Gorsuch gets slapped….
Well…as the confirmation hearings go on for Neil Gorsuch and he continues to try to hide his hard right judicial philosophy….the supreme court did us all a favor by ruling unanimously in a case that came through Gorsuch’s court that he was really wrong in his legal reasoning…and if you lose Thomas and Alito, you are way outside even their right wing rulings. But first, the pattern of Gorsuch’s fealty to corporations and their interests was established by another ruling of Gorsuch’s in the so-called “frozen trucker” case, where Gorsuch ruled that a worker could be fired because he abandoned a disabled trailer in sub zero temperatures to keep from freezing to death…yep, he doesn’t give a damn about workers, thinking them as little more than slaves to be forced to die to protect the corporations property. But, the unanimous ruling yesterday that said that school districts can’t just provide “the minimus” in education to special needs students…which is just warehousing them without any education, and what Gorsuch ruled in the case… that if they just looked at them once or twice a day, that was just fine….what we don’t need on the supreme court is another far right corporatist who has never once in his career ruled for workers or people’s rights over his billionaire backers rights…..send him home….
Those bastards are ruining our democracy…
Well…if it wasn’t enough that ole Trump is undermining our democracy by claiming there is “widespread” voting fraud going on right now (there isn’t)…now we have John McCain doing even more to ruin the US democracy by promising that the repubs will never approve another supreme court nominee that is put up by a dem president. Yep, you heard that one right…the repubs have promised to do their best to wreck democracy here in the US by making sure that the supreme court can’t do it’s job….these idiots are proposing a constitutional crisis as politics as usual…something that has never happened in the history of our country…never happened when GW appointed justices or any other repub but these guys just think that ideology is more important than doing their jobs and it makes taking back the senate even more important since the repubs have shown they have no interest in following the rules that have worked for 240 years. So, get out and vote and let’s not let these self centered idiots ruin this country…geez…
A good day for women…
Well…it is a good day for women’s rights today with the supreme court decision striking down a particularly onerous anti abortion law in Texas. In a total repudiation of so called “TRAP” laws that try to eliminate a woman’s right to choose by putting severe restrictions on the providers, the court ruled that the laws requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and that the clinics need to be mini hospitals were unconstitutional and placed an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions. So, that means that the 13 repub controlled states that have passed these laws will no longer be able to enforce this intrusion into the private decisions that a woman can make about her own health….and I hope will give these asses pause when they try to think up even more creative ways to deny women their rights. Yeah….I know, there is no stopping the repubs as they take away women’s rights, voting rights, and anyone else’s rights that they don’t personally agree with….but, I’ll take this decision today….
Too good to be true…
Well….I usually have to read some news item in at least a couple of places before I will believe it…but, sometimes something comes along that I just want to be true so that requirement is suspended…one of those came along yesterday with rumors the Clarence Thomas is thinking of retiring from the supreme court. I know, your first thought is “who would notice?” since he holds the record for the fewest questions asked by a justice in the history of the court and has no thoughts of his own…acting as little more than an echo chamber for Scalia’s rantings. I can understand why he would be thinking about leaving now…after all, when Hillary is elected and appoints a progressive judge, Thomas’s only job will then be to write dissents to cases that the conservative block will lose and that will just piss those asses off…maybe we can get Alito to do the same? Or all of the conservatives? All I know is that with progressive control, there won’t be any more “Citizen’s United” or cases that will infringe on a woman’s right to chose…to Thomas all I have to say is don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out….geez…
The republicans only know how to cheat….
Well….not sure if you read about the latest supreme court case where the repubs again tried to cheat the system and destroy how voting districts have been drawn since the beginning of the country. In the case Evenwel v. Abbott, the repubs tried to get the court to throw out over 200 years of precedent and the constitution with it to allow them to draw districts only taking into account voters in the districts…a change that would allow rural areas to out vote cities since cities have a larger concentration of people that can’t vote…or don’t vote and the motivated repub base in the rural areas then could dictate to the cities what goes on there. This runs directly counter to the one person, one vote tradition that has been the interpretation of the constitution since the country was founded….and since when do only voters deserve to have a voice in our society? Don’t kids and non-voters deserve representation? The only thing you need to know about this suit is that was brought by the same asshole billionaire who got the court to gut the voting rights act when Scalia was alive…I hope this 8-0 drubbing will keep this guy from filing any more frivolous suits whose only goal is to cheat and tilt the playing field to the repubs…but, the repubs only know how to cheat so I guess we will see more of this crap in the future…geez…
It’s the Supreme Court, stupid….
Well…now that we have heard from the turtle man McConnell that, under no circumstances will he allow any hearings to be held on a new supreme court justice until he loses the job of majority leader….I am at a loss to understand his end game…I mean, what does he expect to gain from this? Another Scalia? That is never going to happen and, unless he is the most stupid person in the world (which I think he is) he can’t think he will get anyone farther to the right than Garland. Go ahead, Mitch, hold this one up until we take back the senate and you will get another Ginsburg who will push the court farther to the left than the current nominee. The latest outrage in this whole mess is ole Mitch’s statement yesterday that he won’t allow any hearings on anyone that the NRA disapproves of…yep, you heard it right, Mitch is now giving up his job to the NRA…now, I’ve read the constitution and there is not one mention of the NRA advising and consenting on supreme court justices…I am just shaking my head here today on how far off the rails the repubs have gone….and they need to go…get out and vote people…this needs to stop….
Some good omens from the court…
Well…with the death of Scalia a few weeks back, it appears that the conservative stranglehold on the supreme court is starting to weaken….and none too soon. This past week we saw the court basically slap down the conservative 5th circuit court that had allowed some draconian anti abortion legislation to take effect that would close all but one clinic in Louisiana….restrictions that are all but identical to those in Texas that made clinics that did no surgical abortions be brought to the same code as surgical centers and that required admitting privileges for doctors performing abortions…and that are before the court right now. And in that case, we saw the liberal justices on the court shred the arguments that Texas had for restricting a woman’s right to choose…telegraphing that the court is leaning toward throwing out the Texas laws as being too restrictive. It is somewhat gratifying that the liberals are dragging the court back to actually deciding cases based on the law, not on ideology that the conservatives had gotten away with as Scalia bullied the rest of the court….and that business has seen the writing on the wall that they won’t get everything they want from the court…as seen in Dow Chemical settling a price fixing case for almost a billion dollars since they understood that their bought and paid for shills, led by Scalia, could no longer give them the rulings they wanted…..it’s about time…geez…
Dow and the Supreme Court….
Well…getting to the end of the month and I am running out of topics so it looks like I will need a couple of fillers to make the goal for the month…I did want to talk about the effect the death of Scalia is having on business…many of them are realizing that with Scalia gone, business will no longer have their best set of shills on the court who invariably rule for business…and you only have to look at Citizens United and the Hobby Lobby decisions to see how far these guys will bend over backward to make sure business and the 1% get what they paid for….and the latest indicator that business is realizing the gravy train is over is the settlement that Dow Chemical made over the past week of almost a billion dollars to settle a price fixing class action suit even going so far to mention the supreme court changes as the reason they wanted to settle….now, when you have a statement like that…that nakedly admits that they had the court in their pocket until Scalia died and they think that they won’t get another one like him, another business shill, when the next justice is appointed….this should really trouble anyone who naively thought that the court was fairly deciding cases without ideology entering into it….geez…
11 dimensional chess….
Well…I was a little chagrined earlier in the week when a conservative repub was floated as the new supreme court justice to be appointed by Obama…but then I found that Sandoval’s name was just part of the 11 dimensional chess that Obama is playing…he is actually trolling the repubs to make sure their reactions are as terrible as they can be…making sure that they go on record as saying that no matter who is nominated, the repubs will not do their constitutional duty to advise on the legal appointment of a new justice that Obama has every right to do…thereby ensuring that we will take back the senate later in the year when the new dem president will appoint a true progressive and tilt the court back to sanity for a generation….and the cool thing is that the repubs just don’t see it…only seeing their obstructionist path that is going to lead to their doom…please proceed, repubs…