Yea it’s funny. If you’re an originalist aka the law is what the people originally intended then there’s no way in hell the people in 1866 or 1964 or whatever intended the bill to be used to prevent black people from helping other black people. In order to get there you have to do a judo move to be like, no what they really meant was to be completely color blind and therefore you can’t do that.
It’s an interesting (read horseshit) approach where what they’re doing is clearly living constitutionalism where you say what do we now in the present moment mean by this and by that standard you could say yes we’re going a completely colorblind route, but they can’t say they’re doing living constitutionalism because that opens the door to all sorts of progressive policy that originalism was designed to prevent.
Judge James Ho—sworn in by Clarence Thomas in Harlan Crow’s library in 2018—said anti-abortion doctors have standing in the abortion pill case because they like looking at babies. He cites “aesthetic injury” from cases involving wild animals and plants
I don’t know. You can’t get a medical procedure because it’d make your doctor sad seems like stretch. More of a stretch than conservationists saying they like looking at beetles and whatnot.
James Ho is one of those dumbshit FedSoc judges whom Trump appointed. He is a class A idiot. He would also enthusiastically award that zygote an AR-15 at the first opportunity.
On September 29, 2022, Ho delivered a speech at a Federalist Society conference in Kentucky and said he would no longer hire law clerks from Yale Law School, which he said was plagued by “cancel culture” and students disrupting conservative speakers. Ho said Yale “not only tolerates the cancellation of views — it actively practices it.”, and he urged other judges to likewise boycott the school.[19][20] U.S. Circuit Judge Elizabeth L. Branch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit confirmed her participation in the Yale boycott in a statement to National Review. Branch told the National Review that Ho raised “legitimate concerns about the lack of free speech on law school campuses, Yale in particular,” and that she would not consider students from Yale for clerkships in the future.[21]
Yale participates in “cancel culture.”
CANCEL YALE!
On April 18, 2018, in his first written opinion as a Fifth Circuit judge, Ho dissented from a denial of a rehearing en banc in a case regarding a limit on campaign contributions. The Fifth Circuit three-judge panel upheld the constitutionality of a City of Austin ordinance setting an individual campaign contribution limit of $350 per election for candidates for mayor and city council, rejecting the plaintiff’s claim that the limit violated the First Amendment. In his dissent, Ho argued the court “should have granted rehearing en banc and held that the Austin contribution limit violates the First Amendment” and asserted that “if there is too much money in politics, it’s because there’s too much government.”[22][23][24]
One thing I like about 5 - 4 is they demystify the judiciary and how Ho, Kacsmaryk, and others are all auditioning for the Supreme Court by doing and writing more outlandish culture war bait to get their name out there.
In 2018, after a teenage gunman murdered 14 students and three faculty members at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Jennifer Birch, fearing for the safety of her own children, decided to join the fight against gun violence. “My kids were the same age, in high school,” she told Slate, “and it was enough to say: I have to do something now.” What Birch could never have anticipated is that five years later, she would find herself in the basement of a courthouse poring over 150-year-old county archives. Birch’s mission, as part of a volunteer force for the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, has been to identify Santa Ana, California, firearm regulations from the 1800s and earlier—all part of an effort to satisfy the Supreme Court’s increasingly preposterous whims about what’s necessary to prove a firearm regulation is constitutional.
A representative sampling: In the 19th century, the concealed carry of firearms was expressly forbidden in Memphis, Tennessee; Jersey City, Hoboken, and Plainfield, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; New Orleans, Louisiana; Olympia and Wilbur, Washington; and Denver, Colorado. More than 50 local governments outlawed the firing of any weapon within city limits. About 30 localities restricted or outlawed the storage of gunpowder, including Santa Ana. A dozen localities limited, heavily taxed, or banned shooting ranges. (In 2017, a federal appeals court struck down a Chicago law that restricted—but did not outlaw—shooting ranges within the city, finding no “history and legal tradition” to support it.) More jurisdictions banned guns in private establishments; for instance, an 1817 ordinance in New Orleans barred citizens from carrying weapons into a “public ball-room.” (In January, a federal judge blocked a New Jersey law that banned guns in bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues, finding that it was not supported by “the nation’s historical tradition.”)
The article goes on that, perhaps, it doesn’t matter because the Supreme Court can just Calvinball what counts as a valid example of gun control. Thomas has already done that with his “territories and anything after 1920 doesn’t count” argument. It’d still be useful to highlight the lie that Thomas’s originalism is not actually originalism but his personal preferences hidden behind a fig leaf of objective historical record
In Rio Bravo, John Wayne has his deputy, Dean Martin, confiscate all guns of everybody coming into town and lay them on the corral fence. Martin has to shoot one dude’s reins out of his hands to show he’s serious. Pretty common tv/movie western thing.
The recent series on revisionist history is about the gun debate in the US. First episode is about the main historical case used to defend the Bruen Decision. In what will surely be a shock to nobody here, the case is utter bullshit and actually says the opposite of what the Maga justices claim.
p.s. everyone can save the Gladwell is the devil posts. I’ve no interest in that debate.
After winning a U.S. Supreme Court case to get his coaching job back and igniting a firestorm over praying in public schools, Joe Kennedy resigned only one game into Bremerton High School’s football season.
In a resignation letter obtained by The Seattle Times, Kennedy said, “It is apparent that the reinstatement ordered by the Supreme Court will not be fully followed after a series of actions meant to diminish my role and single me out in what I can only believe is retaliation by the school district.”
He gave no indication of such feelings in an interview last week and declined to go into details Wednesday. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a picnic and it wasn’t,” he said, adding that his “role and responsibilities” at Friday’s game were “not what I signed up for.”
The third full term in thrall to the 6–3 supermajority is now upon us, and it brings yet another crisis of the court’s own making: The Alabama Legislature has defied meticulous instructions to create a second congressional district in the state where Black residents could effectuate their voting power. In last June’s Allen v. Milligan , the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.
Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan , Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.
But there’s something else happening here, and it’s worth a mention. It’s not just that state legislators and lower court judges have become so certain that they have six justices to rubber stamp anything that they are now prepared to try anything. It’s also that they no longer believe in the legal process at all; as the Nation’s Elie Mystal noted, drug dealers display more transactional deftness than Alabama lawmakers. Years ago, there was an elaborate ritual dance: Justice Clarence Thomas would drop a line in an opinion or a dissent that someone should bring a challenge to X or Y, and in the fullness of time, some group would bring the challenge. It would take a few years, sure, but the case would be tried, a record would be developed, an appeal would be filed, and the case would duly arrive at the court, awaiting its resolution. The nondelegation doctrine. The individual right to bear arms. The end of preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. The return of state-sponsored prayer. The gutting of the Eighth Amendment. Thomas precipitated all of these developments by putting out a call for a case that was answered by conservative litigators plotting their next challenge.
But Kavanaugh finds himself at this unfortunate moment in Supreme Court history in which nobody cares to do any of those steps anymore: He sends his smoke signal to the litigants, and they just straight up defy the court’s orders. It’s not just that the dog has caught the car with the conservative legal movement’s capture of the Supreme Court. It’s that the dog has eaten the car and spits it out anytime its honks are not to the dog’s liking. Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Milligan does not read as a road map for Alabama to disobey this very ruling ; rather, it appears to be a warning that the justice may not enforce the Voting Rights Act in future rounds of redistricting over the coming years. In the old days, litigants would’ve grasped this distinction. When Thomas mused that the Second Amendment might protect a personal right to own firearms in 1997, he was not encouraging gun owners to start ignoring state gun regulations, but planting the seeds for a someday in the future ruling (which came with 2008’s D.C. v. Heller).
With characteristic ineptitude, Kavanaugh tried and failed to pull off this same trick, vastly overestimating the patience of the modern conservative legal movement. It has not been three decades or three years since Milligan , but three months; it’s the same exact case with the identical damn facts. And yet, here we are, waiting to see if the outcome will flip just because Alabama lawyers copied and pasted Kavanaugh’s concurrence into their new briefs. And while we all wait to find out, Alabama voters find themselves in the same posture they were in for the months and years they waited for judicial relief. As Sherrilyn Ifill would remind us: Is this how we do law now?
It’ll probably work. They’ll probably come back with ‘welp it’s too close to the election now. Looks like we don’t have any choice but to use their maps for this election.’
