Running SCOTUS thread

That Twitchy's two appointed justices, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, thumbed their noses at him in both these cases heartens me. The time will come in late November and early December when they'll be asked to reject challenges to an untold number of states that flipped from red to blue. I hope Texas is one of them.

 

Shocking that SCOTUS justices didn't realize this fact en banc more than 40 years ago: Being a swing vote makes you much more powerful as a justice.

You can hew to one side of the aisle or the other, but that makes you what you are, a judicial hack. O'Connor and (subsequently) Kennedy realized these powers and played them to the max.

Sure seems to me that a greater number of today's justices, Chief Roberts particularly, are starting to recognize that they can gain more power by exploring the bounds of their boxes, and are doing so with some gusto. This is a delicious and delightful development.

 

The right whined about judicial activism for decades. Now it’s been delivered for real on a platter by the Federalist Society.

It makes me think there really is a God and he is a real prankster.

 

Even though it's factually incorrect, I'm drawn to the moment in the musical "1776" where the meek character representing the swing vote for Pennsylvania realizes how his place in history suddenly depends on where he'd rather be one of a nameless, faceless majority or "the man forever known for blocking independence."

Funny how history is sometimes made not by those placed there to in order to keep the status quo but by those more concerned with how they may be regarded by it.

 

Short of being served a Novichok milkshake, I think Chief Justice Roberts is well on his way to being one of the SCOTUS GOATs. Right up there with Warren, Holmes and Taft.

 

He's still gotta wear Citizens United and Shelby Co. v. Holder around his neck forever, as far as I'm concerned.

 

The Political Genius of John Roberts

It is worth asking what Roberts will do when Trump eventually leaves office, when the chief justice no longer feels obligated to prove that his court is not beholden to a singularly toxic and corrupt president. To be sure, this chief justice is still not a centrist; he remains devoted to his pet projects, like blessing voter suppression laws or hobbling administrative agencies’ independence. It is simply too soon to tell whether Roberts has really had a change of heart on hot-button issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, or if he just wants to shield his court from political blowback in an election year. While he has succeeded in lowering the temperature of SCOTUS discourse, he has not clearly abandoned those conservative crusades that evoked so much Democratic outrage in the first place. Citizens United is still on the books. The Voting Rights Act in still in grave peril.

The Roberts Court has set democracy back 70 years.

 

Some late-night fun:

 

Wait specific prisoners or was there a federal moratorium on executions?