| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9300
|
 Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2024 3:59 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
| Unanimous |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
real-human
Joined: 02 Jul 2011
Posts: 14892
Location: on earth
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2024 7:56 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| MalibuGuru wrote: | | Unanimous |
for the general, but not the decent is the second imaginary part.. got to like the part where the liberal noted there was to the affect of an "inserection and attempted overthrow of the government".
The 5 supreme idiots of the right decided the 14th amendment is not real.... ie congress has to make a law. again making it up...
also they did a unprecedented release not even in session ... IE they said they are not political but did it this way vs the norm in a few weeks. Again Bush V Gore they did in one week... but they did it before super tuesday not in session. political hacks that they are.
and yet bush v gore stopping the count when it was running down, and making a decision to limit states rights for elections. gee three of the present supreme court justices were in the legal team to stop the count for Bush. But now the other ruling is a president above the law on slow track. Kavanaugh was involved in Clinton-Starr and Rappy boy lying Kav wanted Clinton to go to jail and be convicted while president at that point. he never told Clinton he was above the law for acts while president.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/supreme-court-trump-colorado-ballot-disaster.html
The Supreme Court’s “Unanimous” Trump Ballot Ruling Is Actually a 5–4 Disaster
| Quote: |
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a Colorado Supreme Court decision removing Donald Trump from the ballot because of his engagement in an insurrection on Jan. 6. But that top-line holding is where the unanimity ended because five conservative justices just couldn’t help themselves: They went much further than the case required, announcing an entirely new rule that Congress alone, through “a particular kind of legislation,” may enforce the constitutional bar on insurrectionists holding office. As the three liberal justices pointed out, in a separate opinion that glows white-hot with indignation, the majority’s overreach “attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.” They are, of course, correct. After this decision, it is impossible to imagine a federal candidate, up to and including the president, ever being disqualified from assuming office because of their participation in an insurrection.
Monday’s case, Trump v. Anderson, is proof positive that the Supreme Court can act at rapid speed to resolve a dispute of national importance—at least when Trump’s own interests are under threat. The Colorado Supreme Court disqualified Trump on Dec. 19. SCOTUS took up the case on Jan. 5 and heard arguments on Feb. 8. Now, less than a month later, the justices have resolved the case in Trump’s favor. The court’s ultra-accelerated consideration of Anderson sits in sharp contrast with its treatment of Trump’s claim of absolute immunity in his criminal trial over Jan. 6, which the justices have, by comparison, slow-walked to the point that it appears unlikely the former president could face trial before November. This disparity alone may provide a clue that there is something other than law afoot in these cases.
ADVERTISEMENT
Anyone in need of another clue can look to the majority’s unsigned opinion in Anderson shielding Trump from removal by the states. This case involved a genuinely difficult dispute: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War, bars former insurrectionists from reclaiming office but does not explain how this bar should operate. A group of voters urged the Colorado courts to enforce the amendment on their own, under a state law that lets voters challenge any candidate’s legal qualifications for office. The Colorado Supreme Court heeded the call and dumped Trump from the ballot. All nine justices have now agreed that states may not unilaterally disqualify a presidential candidate. Doing so, they reasoned, would allow a handful of states to effectively determine the outcome of a presidential election, undermining the inherently national nature of both the election and the presidency itself. The Constitution’s division of authority between the federal and state governments cannot permit a state’s go-it-alone effort to disqualify a federal candidate who’s running to represent the entire country.
That, however, is where the agreement ends. Five justices—Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—went further: They declared that only Congress may enforce the insurrection clause against federal candidates. How, exactly? The majority says that Congress must “prescribe” specific procedures to “ascertain” when an individual is disqualified under the 14th Amendment. Such procedures, of course, do not exist today. And without them, the majority insists—in just a few paragraphs of sparse reasoning—the insurrection clause cannot be enforced against office seekers. It derives this conclusion from two primary sources: “Griffin’s Case,” an 1869 opinion written by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, acting as a circuit judge, and Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which says, “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The three liberal justices wrote a separate opinion, authored jointly, to explain why this reasoning fails. First, Griffin’s Case was, until Monday, widely discredited as the political handiwork of a chief justice plotting to run for the presidency as a great conciliator between North and South. It is “a nonprecedential, lower court opinion by a single Justice in his capacity as a circuit judge,” as the liberal justices wrote. Moreover, Sen. Lyman Trumbull, an author of the 14th Amendment, resisted the logic of Griffin’s Case, declaring that while congressional legislation might provide a “more efficient and speedy remedy” for disqualifying a candidate, it is the 14th Amendment itself that “prevents a person from holding office.”
Second, it is bizarre to claim that the insurrection clause requires enabling legislation by Congress when the remainder of the 14th Amendment—indeed, all three amendments ratified after the Civil War—is “self-executing” (meaning it does not require congressional action for enforcement). Everyone agrees that Congress need not pass a law to ensure that all persons have due process, equal protection, and freedom from enslavement. Why, the liberals wondered, did the majority create “a special rule” for the insurrection clause alone? They added that the clause does mention congressional action, but only to say that Congress may lift a disqualification by two-thirds vote: “It is hard to understand why the Constitution would require a congressional supermajority to remove a disqualification if a simple majority could nullify Section 3’s operation by repealing or declining to pass implementing legislation.”
These disagreements matter a great deal. As the liberals point out, the majority’s sweeping Congress-only approach “forecloses judicial enforcement” of the insurrection clause—in, for instance, the context of a criminal trial involving an insurrectionist. It also bars future enforcement on the basis of “general federal statutes” that compel “the government to comply with the law,” since the majority says any congressional enforcement must be “tailored” to the insurrection clause. And it even empowers the Supreme Court to prevent Congress from disqualifying an insurrectionist in the future, because the court can claim that any enabling legislation did not adhere to the made-up rules in Monday’s opinion. By blocking off these pathways, the liberals wrote, the majority “foreclose future efforts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.” They continued:
Section 3 serves an important, though rarely needed, role in our democracy. The American people have the power to vote for and elect candidates for national office, and that is a great and glorious thing. The men who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, however, had witnessed an “insurrection [and] rebellion” to defend slavery. They wanted to ensure that those who had participated in that insurrection, and in possible future insurrections, could not return to prominent roles. Today, the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.
Notably, the liberals actually had Justice Amy Coney Barrett on their side too. She authored a separate opinion expressing her disapproval of the majority’s overreach but declining to say more because “the court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” So, in effect, Anderson is a 5–4 decision, with a bare majority effectively repealing the insurrection clause for federal officeholders. The liberals’ disapproving citations to Bush v. Gore and Dobbs give a sense of how disastrously they believe the majority went astray.
It should go without saying that Congress will not enact legislation enforcing Section 3. The Republican Party is about to renominate the alleged insurrectionist in this case as its candidate for the presidency in 2024. The party is complicit in the violent events of Jan. 6. It will not allow any insurrection-related laws to clear the Senate filibuster. The whole point of a written constitution is that it can protect individual rights and democracy even when the democratic process itself is corrupted or compromised. SCOTUS has backtracked from that guarantee just when American democracy needs it most.
In their incandescent opinion, the liberal justices walk right up to the line of accusing the majority of doing a special favor for Trump. They are right to do so, and they would have been justified to cross it. The majority had no reason to nullify the insurrection clause other than an obvious desire to ensure that no other federal candidates are nixed from the ballot because of their participation in Jan. 6. An optimist might say that by doing so, the majority was just trying to inject stability into the upcoming election. But close court-watchers know that every time this Supreme Court waves the flag of stability, it does so on behalf of Trump and his allies. Anderson’s bottom-line outcome is certainly defensible. But the rest of it serves as an unwarranted gift to Donald Trump and the oathbreakers who violently assisted his efforts to overturn a free and fair election. |
_________________
when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
real-human
Joined: 02 Jul 2011
Posts: 14892
Location: on earth
|
| Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2024 2:55 pm Post subject: |
|
|
of course they would allow bribery the right wingers gave us citizens united.. Thomas tells us lies about him and wife on the road on their motorhome, to find out he never paid for it and was going on private jets all over the world for free vacations at billionaires homes.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-supreme-court-is-about-an-inch-away-from-legalizing-bribery/ar-BB1kaAqV?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=2ac8f0cee2cd4142920d1da762511955&ei=27
The Supreme Court Is About an Inch Away from Legalizing Bribery
| Quote: | hile we’re on the subject of the Nine Wise Souls, I’d like to thank Katya Schwenk of The Lever for hipping the shebeen to an upcoming Supreme Court case that could radically change how we prosecute public corruption in this country—which is to say, crippling that process for good. But first, a thought experiment.
Say you’re the mayor of a small Indiana city. Your salary is, oh, say, $62,000 per annum. But you’re overextended. Plus, your business has failed. Plus, the IRS is after you. Plus, it’s Christmastime. So you go to a local manufacturing concern to which you’ve previously thrown a couple city bucks and you ask, flatly, for some cash. The company ponies up, calling it a “consulting” fee despite the fact that you don’t seem to have consulted on much of anything. Here is today’s question, class:
Have you taken a bribe?
Common sense says yes, you have. Federal law as of this writing also says yes, you have, which is why you were arrested, tried, and convicted for accepting the money. Alas, in its infinite wisdom, the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that this is an open question. So on April 15, the Court will hear the case of Snyder v. United States, in which James Snyder, the mayor of Portage, Indiana, was convicted for accepting $13,000 from Great Lakes Peterbilt, a company to which he’d granted two contracts with the city for consulting work he never did. He was convicted of accepting a bribe, He has appealed his conviction all the way up the line. From the Chicago Tribune:
A decade later, that agreement in a small office in northwest Indiana is the focus of a legal battle that has wound its way all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has decided to take up Snyder’s appeal and render a decision that could change the face of public corruption prosecutions across the country, including Chicago. At issue in Snyder’s case is a nuance in the federal bribery statute that makes it illegal to “corruptly” offer something of value to reward a public official for an official act. Chicago-area defense attorneys have long complained that relatively vague language has been exploited by federal prosecutors to criminalize a wide range of normal political give-and-take, be it a steak dinner or the hiring of a political crony, even when there was no quid pro quo agreement.
Either way, legal experts told the Tribune the Supreme Court weighing in on the subject has been a long time coming. Stuart Green, a professor at Rutgers Law School who has written extensively on white-collar crime, told the Tribune the Supreme Court in recent years has “had a tendency to read a number of different important white-collar crime statutes very narrowly,” effectively raising the bar for prosecutors to bring a corruption case. “This court might want to clip the wings of prosecutors who have been too aggressive in using these rather vaguely worded statutes,” Green said. Green acknowledged it’s always difficult to read the tea leaves on what the Supreme Court might do. But if the court holds that gratuities do not apply, it surely would make politicians in Chicago and Springfield breathe a whole lot easier. “It really creates this giant loophole in the law where public officials might feel free to accept all kinds of gifts that they otherwise would not,” he said.
Schwenk makes it clear how wide this loophole would be. It would embed in the law the notion, preposterous in the real world, that an ex post facto payoff is not a bribe, whereas a quid pro quo prior to a desired governmental action still is.
The plaintiffs in Snyder are arguing that the Supreme Court should significantly limit its interpretation of the law, and rule that it should not bar “illegal gratuities,” or rewards given to an official as a thank-you for a governmental action. Legally, this is distinct from a bribe, which involves a prior agreement to exchange money before an action is taken. The law, Snyder’s defense claims, should only criminalize explicit, quid-pro-quo bribery, which is far more difficult to prove to a jury.
The Roberts Court has been notable in its ability to ignore how the real world actually works in those decisions that conform to the politics of its carefully manufactured conservative majority. This is how we got former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s stunningly obtuse observation in Citizens United: “We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” It is what allowed Chief Justice John Roberts to declare the Day of Jubilee while gutting the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County. And it is what enabled Justice Sam Alito to base his grotesque decision in Dobbs on the judicial philosophies of British witch hunters of the seventeenth century. Given these decisions, it’s not a leap to speculate that the carefully manufactured conservative majority will decide that an obvious payoff is not a bribe, especially, as Schwenk reports, when important elements of the wingnut welfare network are pushing the notion.
This argument is backed by the array of powerful conservative groups that have flocked to file amicus briefs in the case, including the James Madison Center for Free Speech, an organization founded by conservative lawyer James Bopp, a key architect of the monumental 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that legalized unlimited dark-money political spending as corporate free speech. “The Snyder case involves no quid pro quo,” said Bopp in an interview with The Lever. “There was no, ‘Here’s a campaign contribution. I want you to, you know, vote for me on X, Y, or Z.’ If the Supreme Court backed such a framework, Bopp claimed, it “would make every campaign contribution a bribe.”
If the Court rules for Snyder, it would throw political-corruption prosecutions, and the appeals thereof, into chaos, and judges in those cases have interrupted them pending the Supreme Court’s decision. This includes a high-profile political-corruption case in neighboring Illinois involving former Speaker of the Illinois House Michael Madigan and various Chicago political fixers. Again, from the Trib:
The bribery vs. gratuity issue also recently came up in the trial of former Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, who was convicted of racketeering conspiracy on Dec. 21, a case that included several counts under the federal bribery statute. After the Supreme Court’s decision to take up Snyder’s case came in on Dec. 13, one of Burke’s attorneys remarked to U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall that it would not help their client to have his case overturned five years from now, when he’d be 85. No formal motion related to Snyder has so far been filed in Burke’s case.
Meanwhile, the investigation into ComEd’s efforts to woo Madigan took the idea of “rewards” to a whole new level. According to that indictment, the utility embarked on a nearly decadelong effort to keep Madigan in its good graces by secretly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the speakers’ friends in “consulting” fees when they did little or no actual work. The scheme, which was allegedly orchestrated by Madigan’s longtime confidant, Michael McClain, also involved the utility giving business to a Madigan-preferred law firm, hiring summer interns sent from the 13th Ward ahead of better-qualified applicants, and putting a Madigan-approved political operative on its board of directors.
He brings a case. You bring a Supreme Court. That’s the Chicago way. |
_________________
when good people stay silent the right wing are the only ones heard. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
real-human
Joined: 02 Jul 2011
Posts: 14892
Location: on earth
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
|
Search
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Register
