Showing posts with label antonin scalia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antonin scalia. Show all posts

Monday, February 15, 2016

Justice Scalia Dies ~ GOP May Never Recover

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The death of Antonin Scalia is "YUGE" for the Presidential Primaries as well as for the fate of our country. He died while President Obama still has many months to go as President, and all Democrats are eager for the conservative Justice to be replaced with someone younger and liberal. However, the Republicans in the Senate including leader Mitch McConnell immediately stated they would not cooperate in confirming a successor to Scalia, once again hoping to obstruct progress for the President.

There are also questions surrounding Scalia's death at a remote shooting ranch in Texas that will feed into the paranoia of conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones for years to come. In fact, Alex Jones has already called it a "murder," and implicated the President as somehow involved.

The death was announced just before a GOP Primary Debate on CBS-TV, and from the out-of-control behavior on the stage, it's obvious the candidates were thrown for a loop by the news.

While many in Washington and the legal community strained to say nice things about the dead man, my reaction like many others was "Ding Dong the Bigot is Dead!" There's no point in sugar-coating his life or opinions when he was so quick to attack every possible group in the U.S. and make laws to oppress them.



From the Washington Post
. . . “It wasn’t a heart attack,” Guevara said. “He died of natural causes.”
In a statement Sunday, the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides security for Supreme Court justices, said Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch, so marshals were not present when he died. “Deputy U.S. Marshals from the Western District of Texas responded immediately upon notification of Justice Scalia’s passing,” the statement said.

. . . Scalia joined about 35 other people invited by Poindexter, who declined to name the other guests.
Later that day, Scalia went out with the group to hunt blue quail. But “he did not exert himself,” Poindexter said. “He got out of the hunting vehicle, and walked around some.’’
Law enforcement officials said Scalia attended a private party that night with the other guests, and left to go to bed early. But Poindexter said that didn’t seem unusual: All of the guests were tired from traveling to the remote ranch, as well as the day’s other activities. Everyone was in bed by 10 p.m., he said.
. . . The next morning, Scalia did not show up for breakfast. Poindexter at first thought he might be sleeping late, but eventually grew concerned. Late Saturday morning, he and one other person knocked on the door to Scalia’s room, an expansive suite called the “El Presidente.” When there was no answer, they went inside.
“Everything was in perfect order. He was in his pajamas, peacefully, in bed,” Poindexter said.

From RightWingWatch
(Conspiracy Theoriest Alex) Jones said that “this is the season of treason, this is the time of betrayal and we would be fools not to ask the question” if Scalia was assassinated, suggesting that bad actors may have slipped something into the justice’s drink to trigger a heart attack.



























Debate Chaos









Conspiracy Theories














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Thursday, June 25, 2015

Tea Party Tantrums Over Second Obamacare Ruling

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Previous Related Posts:

Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare 6-3
From Earlier 2012 Decision on Obamacare:
SCOTUS Upholds Obamacare, Tea Party Heads Explode
Haters Gotta Hate: Ad Hom Attacks on Chief Justice Roberts

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Now that the Supremes have upheld Obamacare twice - today and in 2012 - the same people on the far right still want to blame Chief Justice Roberts for being a traitor to their cause. Never mind how frivolous these lawsuits are, or how many people would suffer if Obamacare was taken away.

The GOP just doesn't want to admit defeat, so they scream, kick, and snarl about Justice Roberts and how "unfair" it is that he upheld a legally passed law giving health care for millions.

Between this ruling on Obamacare and the fact that Confederate Flags are coming down all over the South, this hasn't been a happy week for the Tea Party and their minions. They are all about the butthurt and tears of impotent rage. After they get these Supreme Court Tantrums out of their systems, they can either take a nap or go to the happy chair in the corner.






















































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Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare in King vs. Burwell 6-3 Decision

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The Supreme Court upheld the law about Obamacare subsidies in the states!!! This is a huge victory for the Obama Administration and for the country as a whole.



In a strong 6-3 decision, Chief Justice Roberts (surprisingly) wrote the the majority opinion in favor of Obamacare, and was joined by Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan. Justice Scalia wrote the conservative dissent, joined (not surprisingly) by Alito and Thomas.



From Huffington Post
The stakes of the case, King v. Burwell, were enormous. Had the plaintiffs prevailed, millions of people who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for insurance would have lost financial assistance from the federal government. Without that money, most of them would have had to give up coverage altogether. And the loss of so many customers would have forced insurers to raise premiums, seriously disrupting state insurance markets.
But two of the court’s conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined the court’s four liberals in rejecting the lawsuit in a 6-3 decision. Roberts delivered the opinion for the majority. And the decision was a concise, stinging rebuke of the plaintiffs, who contended that Congress intended to write a law that would leave so many people without coverage, and cause such disarray.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not destroy them," Roberts wrote.














Scalia was scathing in his dissent. He clearly wanted to give the GOP a victory, so slammed his colleagues for giving the President a huge victory instead.

From Huffington Post
"Words no longer have meaning," Scalia wrote in the dissent he read from the bench.
. . . "Today's interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of," he wrote. That is, strictly speaking, true, since this was a new case.
"We should start calling this law SCOTUScare."
"This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious -- so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it," Scalia wrote, again accurately, though not in the way he meant.
"The Court's next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery..."
"Pure applesauce," he insisted.











Call a Waaahmbulance for Scalia!

Meanwhile, President Obama called for the GOP to move forward and stop trying to repeal Obamacare for the 60th time.
















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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Justice Scalia's Mind-Boggling Dissent

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As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory, subject only to those limitations expressed in the Constitution or constitutionally imposed by Congress. That power to exclude has long been recognized as inherent in sovereignty.

. . . Notwithstanding “[t]he myth of an era of unrestricted immigration” in the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted crimi­nals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration

. . . They may well determine not to remove from the United States aliens who have no right to be here; but unless and until these aliens have been given the right to remain, Arizona is entitled to arrest them and at least bring them to federal officials’ attention, which is all that necessarily entails. (In my view, the State can go further than this, and punish them for their unlawful entry and presence in Arizona.)

. . . What I do fear—and what Arizona and the States that support it fear — is that “federal policies” of non enforcement will leave the States helpless before those evil effects of illegal immigration. . .

The President said at a news conference that the new program is “the right thing to do” in light of Congress’s failure to pass the Administration’s proposed revision of the Immigration Act. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.

. . . Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. Thousands of Arizona’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants—including not just children but men and women under 30—are now assured immunity from enforcement, and will be able to compete openly with Arizona citizens for employment.

. . . If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State. I dissent.

~ Justice Antonin Scalia in a blistering minority dissent over the rollback of Arizona's immigration laws

Complete Supreme Court Opinion on Arizona and Dissenting Views




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Scalia Dissent Reads More Like Blog Post
~ Jeff Fecke on Care2Care Blog

Scalia: If States Can Resrict Those Freed Slaves, Then Why Not Messicans?
~ Headline on Wonkette

Scalia has finally jumped the shark....He claims to respect the founding fathers, but his dissent channels the opponents of the Constitution. Back then, opponents argued that the Constitution denied states their sovereignty by giving too much power to the federal government, as with immigration. Now Scalia echoes their complaints that states are being denied their sovereignty. States are not sovereign when it comes to powers vested in Congress, such as the authority over immigration and naturalization.
~ Adam Winkler, constitutional law professor at UCLA

It struck me as so much crying in the wilderness, to be honest. His view is pretty jurisprudentially extreme, and I think it could likely be the last time that Scalia gets to weigh on in immigration issues during his court tenure.
~ Peter Spiro on WSJ Blog

You don't have to turn to Fox News to hear dubious right-wing talking points on legal issues, you can now hear it in Justice Scalia's rhetoric as well.
~ Media Matters ~ "The Fox-Scalia Echo Chamber"

Scalia, who 25 years ago had a certain gift for pointing out the blindness and hypocrisy of certain versions of limousine liberalism, has in his old age become an increasingly intolerant and intolerable blowhard: a pompous celebrant of his own virtue and rectitude, a purveyor of intemperate jeremiads against the degeneracy of the age, and now an author of hysterical diatribes against foreign invaders, who threaten all that is holy.
~ Paul Campos in Salon

After twenty-five years on the Court, Scalia has earned a reputation for engaging in splenetic hyperbole—but he outdid himself this time.
. . . according to Scalia, if Arizona had known what was coming from his colleagues yesterday, they never would have joined the United States. No other state would have either. The Arizona ruling, in Scalia’s telling, would have destroyed the country even before it was born.
Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker

...for the conservatives, and for Scalia most of all, legal propriety is absurdly quaint. He doesn’t answer to a nation. He answers to a cadre, a vanguard, of which he is a cherished member, which is about as likely to say no to him as the College of Cardinals is to the Pope, and to which all outside criticism is the chirping of crickets. The crickets will be chirping awfully loudly in the coming days, and I hope at least that this self-satisfied martinet gets an ear-splitting headache.
~ Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast

Would this Court, voting as it does today, have upheld the 1964 civil rights bill, the statute which declared it illegal to refuse access to someone because of race, at a restaurant, hotel or gas station restroom? Would Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy have approved such a decision or would they have joined in the dissent? Well, maybe Kennedy would have.
The fact is we have the most conservative Court since the 1930s and maybe more conservative than that. These Justices, led by Scalia, believe in original intent. They want to judge cases based on how the Founding Fathers would. Well, the Founding Fathers, need I remind us all wrote in slavery into the Constitution. It took a civil war and a 13th amendment to get it out.
~ Chris Matthews on Hardball, via RealClearPolitics



















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Sunday, April 22, 2012

Eatin' Broccoli with the Supremes

Originally Posted April 2, 2012 on Livejournal



Last week the Supreme Court spent three days debating Obama's Health Care Bill. Unfortunately at times it was more like theater of the absurd, as several Justices compared complex health insurance problems to whether or not we could be forced to eat our broccoli. *sigh* And it turns out, sadly, the whole broccoli example came from . . . Rush Limbaugh. You can't make this stuff up. Justice Scalia is just another Ditto-head.

Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment (about cruel and unusual punishment)? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? (Laughter.) And do you really expect the Court to do that?
~ Justice Antonin Scalia, quoted on Think Progress

We have a Supreme Court that thinks corporations are people, money is speech and broccoli is health care.
~ LOLGOP on Twitter

Talk of mandated broccoli and cell phones illustrates a general rule: ALL SLIPPERY SLOPE ARGUMENTS ARE STUPID.
~ Richard H. Thaler, Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago on Twitter

I was appalled to see that at least a couple of them were repeating the most tendentious of the Tea Party type arguments. I even heard about broccoli. The whole broccoli argument is beneath contempt. To hear it come from the bench was depressing.
~ Charles Fried, Former Solicitor General under Ronald Reagan, quoted in The Washington Post

Maybe, the GOP Five should just drive down to the National Archives, pry open the case holding the Constitution and pencil in some new words. After the relevant section about Congress having the power to regulate interstate commerce, the GOP Five can scribble in “except for things like purchases of broccoli, gym memberships, cell phones and health insurance.”
~ Robert Parry on Consortium News

I wonder how the Supreme Court would vote if they didn't have the world's best health plan?
~ Albert Brooks on Twitter

The Supreme Court needs less Homophobes and more HMO-aphobes.
~ John Fugelsang on Twitter

Free question for Justice Scalia to use against Obamacare: Why doesn't everyone just get a lifetime appointment with free healthcare?
~ Stephen Colbert on Twitter


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