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

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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Saturday, November 29, 2014

Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Part Three: The Grand Jury Misled by Prosecutors

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Previous Related Posts:
Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Part Two: Darren Wilson's Weird Testimony
Ferguson Grand Jury Decision Part One - No Indictment, but Blame the Victim and Social Media
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The Grand Jury in Ferguson was not only misled by strange testimony from Officer Darren Wilson about the "demon" Mike Brown, but was also misled several ways by Prosecutor Bob McCulloch. While at first we thought McCulloch's main sin was his hands-off approach to steering the Grand Jury one way or another, he may have actually broken the law by giving the jury illegal instructions. And I'm sure there is more to come about how corrupt this process was, not only for Missouri, but for the country as a whole.

Full (and bizarre) Statement from Prosecutor Bob McCulloch in Ferguson, MO.




Ferguson reminds us that we still have a race problem in America. But the face of this problem is not Darren Wilson’s. It’s Bob McCulloch’s.
. . . McCulloch short-circuited the process — reinforcing a sense among African Americans, and many others, that the justice system is rigged. He almost certainly could have secured an indictment on a lesser charge simply by requesting it, yet he acted as if he were a spectator, saying that jurors decided not to return a “true bill” on each possible charge — as if this were a typical outcome.~
~ Dana Milbank on Washington Post

The St. Louis County prosecutors were trying to be clever, repurposing an ancient institution for the contemporary political situation. They seemed to think that, because the grand jury members are drawn from the public, they would create public validation for whatever outcome the grand jury reached.
Yet public validation of ordinary jury trials depends on the public having heard the evidence. The Constitution provides that criminal trials be held publicly, precisely so that the citizenry knows what's going on. Grand jury proceedings are held in secret. That must've appealed to St. Louis County prosecutors, who sought to avoid a media circus. But releasing a summary of the grand jury transcripts afterward is a far cry from a public trial. Secret evidence was unlikely to produce public validation -- as, in fact, it did not.
~ Noah Feldman on Bloomberg

From Think Progress:
Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.
It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.
This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.
In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available.

Bob McCulloch had no answers - the "Fix was In."



According to Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, Jurors were given copies of a 1979 Statute concerning when it is lawful for a cop to shoot a fleeing suspect. The problem is that the law was ruled unconstitutional in the 1980s, so . . . that's a huge problem. How could Bob McCulloch NOT know that the law was unconstitutional?

Via RawStory
O’Donnell said that early on in the jurors’ deliberations, Alizadeh handed them a copy of a 1979 Missouri statute saying police were “justified in the use of such physical force as he or she reasonably believes is immediately necessary to effect the arrest or prevent the escape from custody.” However, he explained, the Supreme Court found those kinds of statutes to be unconstitutional six years later.
As the Daily Kos reported, the high court found in Tennessee v. Garner that “where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force.”
. . . handing the jurors the original statute, O’Donnell said, ...conveyed the message that Wilson did not feel his life needed to be in danger for him to be legally justified in shooting and killing 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9.





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Monday, June 30, 2014

Emotional Reactions to SCOTUS Hobby Lobby Verdict

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Previous Related Post:
SCOTUS Rules in Favor of Hobby Lobby on ACA Birth Control Mandate


The Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that Corporations are allowed to be called religious entities, and therefore are exempt from laws concerning birth control. The Right Wing is rejoicing, because they think this is the next step in overturning Roe v. Wade and making Abortion illegal. Somehow their small minds have morphed birth control into abortion, even if no eggs are ever fertilized. Somewhere Rick Santorum is popping bottles and waving a Bible in the air. The stupid injustice of this ruling burns our country.

If health care is for everyone thanks to ACA, and birth control is supposed to be free for all women, then why should it matter where you work or what your boss thinks about your private choices?

SCOTUS and Hobby Lobby should beware the wrath of women. There are more of us in this country than religious fanatics. People will boycott Hobby Lobby in the short term, but hopefully women will line up to vote in both 2014 and 2016 so that a Supreme change can happen in the future.

Other companies will use this ruling to cut costs by suddenly finding religion, which is a shame for all their female employees. The slippery slope is that these companies will keep trying to push the envelope further and further with their hope of a forced-pregnancy white-male-authoritarian all-Christian America.


From Think Progress
If you’re one of the estimated 14,000 individuals who work at Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood — the companies who represented the two plaintiffs in the case — then you’re most immediately affected by Monday’s decision. Your employers no longer have to cover several types of birth control that they’re opposed to.

Both companies object to covering emergency contraception, which they falsely claim is a type of abortion despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. Hobby Lobby’s owners also take issue with two forms of intrauterine devices (IUDs), long lasting forms of birth control inserted in the uterus, for the same unscientific reason. So the workers employed by those businesses won’t be able to use their insurance coverage for those types of birth control anymore. They’ll presumably be able to continue using their health plans for other methods, like hormonal birth control pills, that their bosses don’t have a problem with.

But even if you don’t work at Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood, there’s a chance that your birth control coverage may be put into question. More than 70 other companies also sued for the right to stop following Obamacare’s contraceptive provision. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 48 of those cases are still pending. Now that the Court has sided with Hobby Lobby, it will be much easier for some of those companies to win their suits and opt out of covering certain types of contraception.

On Hardball last night, the Attorney for Hobby Lobby's Green family wouldn't say if they are satisfied with Justice Alito's "remedy" of letting the government cover female employees with the types of objectionable birth control. Watch attorney Lori Windham waffle on the question at about 8:07:



Rachel Maddow talked about the so-called "narrow scope" of the ruling. Alito says that groups such as Jehovah Witnesses can't use it to limit blood transfusions, or vaccines, or mental health, etc. But some other corporations wish to object to ALL birth control, so in the future the ruling will probably allow almost any restriction by employers based on THEIR religious beliefs, regardless of the "burden" on the employees.


















































































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SCOTUS Rules in Favor of Hobby Lobby on Birth Control Mandate

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The country sitting on pins and needles waiting for the Hobby Lobby case to be announced at the Supreme Court. Today is the last day of the session, and people are still reeling from the smackdown of Buffer Zones around abortion clinics.

Breaking - They've ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby - "closely held" corportations don't have to provide birth control if it is against their religion. Therefore, a corporation is now identical to a person with religious beliefs. Not to mention that this is a sexist verdict because it only applies to women, and puts their health care in jeopardy. Idiots!!!!!!











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Sunday, June 29, 2014

Supreme Injustice - Ruling Against Abortion Clinic Buffer Zones

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Previous Related Posts:
Revolting Justice Scalia Urges Tax Revolt
Supreme Court McCutcheon Ruling on Elections
SCOTUS Brings Back Jim Crow
Republicans Attack Chief Justice Roberts Over Obamacare
Take Two Aspirin and SCOTUS in the Morning
Eatin' Broccoli with the Supremes

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The Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that "buffer zones" around abortion clinics in Massachusetts shouldn't include public sidewalks. The ruling was in favor of "free speech" by the so-called "Abortion Counselors" who stand outside clinics with pictures of dead babies while screaming Bible verses at women seeking medical procedures.

From the Boston Globe
The US Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down a Massachusetts law that banned protesters within 35 feet of abortion clinics, ruling that the law infringed upon the First Amendment rights of antiabortion activists.
The decision effectively overturns about 10 fixed-buffer-zone laws across the country, from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, but offers a framework for more limited restrictions around clinic demonstrations, legal experts said.
“They’ve approved the idea of this kind of law, just not the mechanism,” said Jessica Silbey, a Suffolk University Law School professor. “It was too broad.”

Attorney General Martha Coakley, whose office defended the law in arguments before the court, said the decision left intact part of the law banning deliberate obstruction of clinic entrances.
“We will utilize all of the tools we have available to protect everyone from harassment, threats, and physical obstruction,” said Coakley, adding that her office’s Civil Rights Division was prepared to issue injunctions against “those who would threaten or harass.”







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Jessica Valenti in The Guardian
The supreme court's decision is not as unanimous as it may seem, and it is not the end: pro-choice activists are expressing outrage, sharing stories and organizing on the Twitter hashtag #protectthezone, and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards says that the Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts is "already working with legislature on a new bill to protect women from harassment".
But for the women seeking abortions in the days and weeks to come - and for the providers, workers and volunteers who put their lives on the line every day to ensure women have access to safe medical care - this ruling will impact them immediately. It will make women less safe, doctors and clinic workers more fearful, and violent harassers emboldened. This is not the "free speech" we're fighting for.



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Sunday, April 20, 2014

Revolting Justice Scalia Urges Tax Revolt

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The Failed Whiskey Rebellion of 1794,
Squelched by George Washington's Troops

Previous Related Posts:
Supreme Court McCutcheon Ruling
#SCOTUS Brings Back Jim Crow
Rachel Maddow Calls Justice Scalia a Troll
Justice Scalia Says Voting Rights Act a Product of Racial Entitlement
Justice Scalia - Supreme Bigot

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Justice Antonin Scalia was talking to some Law Students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and urged them to start an "Revolt" if their taxes go up. Yeah, that's good advice for a group in Law School! Justice Scalia seems to think he is back in Pre-Revolution Pre-TeaParty 'Merica. He must have learned history in the same school as Sarah Palin. He's no George Washington, that's for sure. But Scalia is definitely revolting.

From ThinkProgress
During an event at the University of Tennessee’s law school on Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested to the capacity crowd that perhaps they should revolt against the U.S government if their taxes ever get too high.
During a question and answer part of the event, a student asked Scalia about the constitutionality of a federal income tax. Scalia assured the questioner that the tax was in fact permissible by the constitution, but added that if it ever became too high, “perhaps you should revolt.”
The remark, first reported by the Knoxville News Sentinel, has become a common rhetorical flourish for conservatives nationwide during the Obama presidency.

From Talking Points Memo
"You're entitled to criticize the government, and you can use words, you can use symbols, you can use telegraph, you can use Morse code, you can burn a flag," he told the students.
Scalia also said that he and other justices do not let politics influence their decisions, and that he believes that the U.S. Constitution is a fixed law.
"The Constitution is not a living organism for Pete’s sake,” he said. "It's a law. It means what it meant when it was adopted."

Scalia is a partisan hack who is serving a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land. He may be the worst Supreme Court justice in the history of the nation, and now he is calling for people to disobey their government.
Antonin Scalia has got to go.
~ Jason Easley, PoliticusUSA

At what point does a Supreme Court justice agitating for a seeming violent revolution and calling on law students to put faith above state not make people wonder if we are (at least) tip-toeing around the line that is called 'treasonous'.
Imagine if the Dixie Chicks went on stage and called for a revolution against the US government over any issue..
~ tmservo433 on Dail Kos

So, lesson for all you kids and Tea Party delinquents out there: If you don’t like the law, just protest it with signs and symbols, or revolt against your country. But when it comes to voting and elections, or deciding our leaders and laws for ourselves, just leave all that up to your Supreme Court overlords. Wingnuts know best?
~ The Daily Banter

Something about "treason" This is so awful. No words to explain...A justice of the Supreme Court talking this way...
~ StuartG on Democratic Underground










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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Supreme Court #McCutcheon Ruling Guts Campaign Finance Reform

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Whoa, SCOTUS just made another ruling that could change the course of future elections. While Democrats might also benefit, the answer to creating a stronger democracy can't be to flood political campaigns with even more money! All politicians are too beholding to special interests as they are. *sigh* I guess all Campaign Finance Reform laws are moot now, or will be overturned by the Supremes?

From Business Insider
The Supreme Court struck down caps that individuals can make to candidates or political parties during a two-year election cycle, in an opinion issued Wednesday by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, marks the most consequential campaign finance ruling from the high court since the landmark Citizens United decision in 2010.

Critics immediately denounced the decision, saying it would give wealthy donors more freedom to influence an election.

. . . In 2014, the limit on all contributions was $123,200.

The Supreme Court's decision does not do away with limits on individual contributions to candidates for president or Congress, which now stands at $2,600 an election.























































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