https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1600528692400181249
https://twitter.com/stevenmazie/status/1600530772565295106
Good threads to follow.
1 Like
My guess is that SCOTUS clamps down on the derps here. Ruling the way the magas want would mean limiting the power of the judiciary in general which I donât think theyâre in a hurry to do. 7-2 ruling, alito and thomas dissenting.
1 Like
Gorsuch is 100% voting with Alito and Thomas here. Iâm not sure which way the other 3 will go, although Rapenaugh has come out in favor of the independent state legislature theory in the past. It wouldnât surprise me if they landed on a 6-3 âgerrymander to your heartâs content, but all other election laws are reviewable by state courtsâ with Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito writing a concurrence that agreed with the decision but argued they should go even further.
Not gonna get the full derp ruling I donât think, but going to get something that will be highly unhelpful for â24
I did some more reading on this and it sounds like itâs gonna be some mega 
shit. From what i read it sounds like people think theyâre going to give themselves the power to overrule âegregiousâ or âoutrageousâ state supreme court decisions. Whatâs going to constitute something that meets that criteria? Presumably like the âmajor questions doctrineâ that is âwhatever raises John Robertsâ eyebrowâ itâs going to be âwhen a liberal court makes a decision we donât like we strike it downâ.
Yeah well theyâll rue the day in few generations when liberals finally wrest control of the Supreme Court!
I heard thereâs a good reason they call him âPeterâ Davidson.
2 Likes
I donât see Dinesh on the list he must be the designated survivor for the ghoul council
2 Likes
Highly underappreciated post.
1 Like
Lemley is something of a âstarâ law prof. Hereâs his recent essay in the Harvard Law Review, âThe Imperial Supreme Courtâ.
My goal in this essay is not to criticize these decisions on the merits, though there is much to criticize; lots of others will do that. Nor do I aim simply to make the legal realist point that the Justices will do what they want in the cases before them, though the last few Terms provide ample evidence for that claim too. Rather, my argument is that the Court has begun to implement the policy preferences of its conservative majority in a new and troubling way: by simultaneously stripping power from every political entity except the Supreme Court itself. The Court of late gets its way, not by giving power to an entity whose political predilections are aligned with the Justicesâ own, but by undercutting the ability of any entity to do something the Justices donât like. We are in the era of the imperial Supreme Court.
In Part I, I show that the Court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments. Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once. In Part II, I show that this result cannot be explained by any consistent judicial philosophy. The Court is happy to embrace conflicting philosophies to achieve the ends it wants in the case before it. In Part III, I suggest that the imperial Supreme Court is something new and dangerous and that we must consider more radical options to protect the American form of government.
None of this is to say that textualism, originalism, and fidelity to precedent arenât playing a role in modern Court opinions. But they are tools the Justices deploy to achieve particular results those Justices have already decided they want to reach; they canât explain those results because they arenât used consistently.
2 Likes
Well itâs interesting from a tactics point of view. Consolidating so much power into one organization is a high risk / high reward move and youâd do it if you were sure you could limit the downside. With the federalist society working in concert with the Republican Party thereâs very little risk of Republicans losing their conservative majority in our lifetimes so why not consolidate as much power into something that you have little chance of ever losing.
The only weakness is if they ever get a D President who realizes they can just ignore the rulings. Other than that theyâre golden assuming they donât lose their majority in the next 2 years.
ETA: Even if they do a D majority on the court will play it straight and not turn themselves into a super legislature like the Rs have.
I donât necessarily think the Courtâs new majority is doing this intentionally, aggregating power for its own sake. A more plausible explanation is that a newfound conservative majority is simply doing whatever it wants in the cases before it, consistent with a particularly strong form of the legal realist idea that judges just implement their own policy preferences. 106 Ă 106. A full analysis of legal realism would be a book in its own right. For a few of the major sources, see AMERICAN LEGAL REALISM (William W. Fisher III et al. eds., 1993); O.W. Holmes, The Path of the Law , 10 HARV. L. REV. 457 (1897); Karl N. Llewellyn, Some Realism About Realism â Responding to Dean Pound , 44 HARV. L. REV. 1222 (1931).Show More On that theory, perhaps the restrictions it has imposed on the power of Congress, administrative agencies, lower courts, and the states are simply byproducts of its desire to rewrite the law on the merits. In other words, the imperial Supreme Court may result not from a desire to take power away from other branches of government but from a desire to do what the Court wants and to prune back what it views as obstacles to that goal. Congress or the states are passing laws you donât like? Restrict their power to do so. Administrative agencies are tackling climate change? Create new obstacles to their doing so. Cases arenât making their way through the courts fast enough, or are being mooted by events? Reach out and take them anyway.
I mean this is true, but but who gets to decide what in the resulting situation is important and itâd be silly to think that the justices donât think about âwhat if liberals get to control the fulcrums of powerâ as part of their âconservativeâ reasoning.
More Calvinball.
https://twitter.com/GregStohr/status/1604958311836680192?s=20&t=46jZyljUeG0EOnZyKd3vfg
Even the downsides assuming Republicans lose the court are negligible.
In their eyes, theyâre just asserting authority they are arguing it always has hadâthe other side could just as easily do the same (they wouldnât because lol Dems, but still). I guess Dems are more likely to do it if Republicans do it first, but thereâs no guarantee they wouldnât do it anyways.
More fundamentally, the courtâs power is mainly to alter the actions of other branches of government. Itâs not something that changes on a dime, and they know the first thing a Dem court would have to do is spend years and years undoing the work of a Republican court.
Itâs probably low risk-high reward to seize as much power as possible and enact fringe conservative shit across all levels and branches of government. Good luck walking all this back, libs! Let alone actually pursuing any of your own goals.
1 Like
SCOTUS just straight up running the country at this point. Potus is a puppet.