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Thread: Supreme Court of the United States

  1. #311
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    I'm not saying she's dead im saying that. It's more like she's in a far worse condition then her press team/ supporters claim she's in. Because they don't want a panic or a circus.

  2. #312
    Senior Member Frequent Poster NanduDas's Avatar
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    Ah yeah, that I can agree with.
    "The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer." -Theodore Roosevelt

  3. #313
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Scotus confirms that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be on the bench today, as the justices kick off the February sitting.

    Ginsburg had cancer surgery in late December

    https://twitter.com/AHoweBlogger
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
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    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  4. #314
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    UNNAMED SOURCES

    Scoop: Trump "saving" Judge Amy Barrett for Ruth Bader Ginsburg seat

    By Jonathan Swan and Sam Baker
    Axios

    As he was deliberating last year over replacing Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, President Trump told confidants he had big plans for Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

    "I'm saving her for Ginsburg," Trump said of Barrett, according to three sources familiar with the president's private comments. Trump used that exact line with a number of people, including in a private conversation with an adviser two days before announcing Brett Kavanaugh's nomination.

    Barrett is a favorite among conservative activists, many of whom wanted her to take Kennedy’s spot.

    She's young and proudly embraces her Catholic faith.

    Her past academic writings suggest an openness to overturning Roe v. Wade.

    Her nomination would throw gas on the culture-war fires, which Trump relishes.

    But Trump chose to wait.

    Some Trump advisers worried Barrett's staunch opposition to abortion rights would lose the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). But there wasn't consensus; some advisers argued they would ultimately "do the right thing" and vote for Barrett.

    Trump came to doubt that "the women" (his shorthand for Collins and Murkowski) would support Barrett, according to sources who discussed the situation with Trump at the time.
    Some of Trump's aides also felt confident about picking up more Senate seats in the 2018 midterms (which they did), meaning a more conservative pick might stand a better chance later.

    Yes, but: There's no guarantee Trump will get another Supreme Court pick. It's very unlikely Ginsburg will retire while he’s in office. And though she's 86 and has had 3 bouts with cancer, she's on the bench now and appears healthy.

    Barrett isn't a lock even if Trump does get to make another appointment, the people familiar with his thinking said.

    Barrett has the inside track "in a very specific sense," said a source who's discussed Barrett with Trump. "She is the most known quantity right now amongst the women on the list. ... And she also has the inside track in the sense that she was kind of battle-tested for having gone through a confirmation already."

    Between the lines: Trump changes his mind all the time, and Barrett would need to undergo a fresh round of vetting to review the rulings and public comments she's made since confirmed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017.

    "The Supreme Court judicial selection process with the president is a very fluid one," said a source familiar with Trump's thinking on the subject. "He floats in and out of these discussions over a period of time."

    Barrett's education didn't appeal to Trump, according to sources familiar with his thinking. She went to law school at Notre Dame, and Trump prefers candidates with Harvard and Yale on their resumes.

    Why it matters: Trump has already pulled the court well to the right. If he gets to replace Ginsburg, especially with Barrett, he would cement a young, reliably conservative majority that could last for decades.

    https://www.axios.com/supreme-court-...d197707c8.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #315
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Alfred's Avatar
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    The last few weeks I hear more and more about the possibility of "court packing", which, apparently, means increasing the number of justices on the court to, for example, 15.

    Some democrats have played with this idea to overcome a conservative court that Trump will leave behind. Do you guys think Democrats may actually do this if they get a new president after another Trump term (when Ginsburg and possibly Breyer have been replaced by Trump)?

    Apparently the President only needs a simple majority to enlarge the court.

  6. #316
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    FDR and Carter pulled this move enlarging the courts and both times it bit the party in the butt. However the judiciary today is far different and way more radical I wouldn't put it past them to do this since they have already done it.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #317
    Moderator mostlyclassics's Avatar
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    Here's a quote from history.com. It makes the Supreme Court packing situation clear and concise:

    The U.S. Constitution established the Supreme Court but left it to Congress to decide how many justices should make up the court. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number at six: a chief justice and five associate justices. In 1807, Congress increased the number of justices to seven; in 1837, the number was bumped up to nine; and in 1863, it rose to 10. In 1866, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act, which shrank the number of justices back down to seven and prevented President Andrew Johnson from appointing anyone new to the court. Three years later, in 1869, Congress raised the number of justices to nine, where it has stood ever since. In 1937, in an effort to create a court more friendly to his New Deal programs, President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to convince Congress to pass legislation that would allow a new justice to be added to the court—for a total of up to 15 members—for every justice over 70 who opted not to retire. Congress didn’t go for FDR’s plan.

    Source
    The President can't just pack the court all on his lonesome.

    It's up to Congress (both houses, House and Senate — plus, of course, the President to sign the bill into law) to alter the number of Supreme Court justices. To pack the court, you'd have to have a majority of the House of Representatives, control of the Senate and the President all of the same party. How likely is that to happen?
    "Sorry for the delay, I got caught in traffic." — Rodney Scott Berget, South Dakota, October 29, 2018 — final words.

  8. #318
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Kavanaugh, Roberts Hold Death Penalty Power After Bitter Term

    The gloves are off at the U.S. Supreme Court after a bitter death penalty term that could be a sign of things to come, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh now in control of how hard a line the post-Anthony Kennedy court will take in capital cases.

    With swing vote Kennedy out and Kavanaugh in, a more solidly conservative bloc is taking an austere stance toward death row prisoners’ efforts to halt their executions, while states seek to carry out what they see as long delayed justice.

    Though capital punishment has been a hot-button issue at the court for years, it was particularly fraught this term, with liberal frustration showing in late-night dissents over what they see as rushes to the execution chamber, and conservatives equally frustrated with what they see as unwarranted delays and misplaced prioritizing of convicts’ pain at the expense of victims.

    It’s a long-simmering tension on the court that “reached a full-boil” this term, said Dale Baich, a capital litigator at the Arizona federal public defender.

    Bernard Harcourt, another capital litigator and a Columbia law professor, said that he’s “concerned that these new frictions at the Court may break bad, at the expense of the condemned and their constitutional right to be heard without the taint or shadow of this emerging bitterness.”

    But against this bitter backdrop Roberts and Kavanaugh have emerged as the new middle, by occasionally voting for the condemned, or by issuing relatively moderate concurrences.

    The New Middle

    “For nearly three decades, Justice Kennedy served as a swing vote on the death penalty issues. Now, there seem to be five solid votes to uphold death sentences in almost every case,” said South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman.

    Still, during heated exchanges, Kavanaugh and Roberts have at times staked out relative moderate positions in contrast to the harder-line trio of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

    One of the court’s most controversial rulings of the term was a solid 5-4 split along ideological lines, but Kavanaugh would write a concurrence in a factually similar case later.

    In February, Alabama death row prisoner Domineque Ray wanted his imam with him in the death chamber, but the state only offered a Christian minister who was on the prison staff.

    A court divided along ideological lines gave the green light for Ray’s execution without an imam, citing what it said was the last minute nature of the request.

    Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent for the liberal bloc, calling the state’s practice discriminatory and the majority’s move “profoundly wrong.”

    Ray’s execution sparked condemnation “from the entire political spectrum,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

    In a similar case the following month, the high court granted a stay to Buddhist prisoner Patrick Murphy. Thomas and Gorsuch noted at the time that they would have ruled against him.

    Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence siding with Murphy, but observing that the state of Texas could just deny ministers to people of all faiths. The state later took him up on that offer, changing its practice and barring all faith ministers from the execution chamber.

    The dispute sparked an unusual set of after-the-fact opinions weeks later, revealing that Roberts, alone among the conservatives, agreed with Kavanaugh’s approach.

    Softening the Blow

    Even in the strongest statement by the court that it was taking a hard-line on capital claims, Kavanaugh threw “quite a big bone” in the direction of death row inmates, said Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert at Fordham Law.

    In April 1’s 5-4 decision in Bucklew v. Precythe, Gorsuch wrote the opinion against Missouri death row prisoner Russell Bucklew, joined by the conservative wing in full.

    Bucklew argued the state’s preferred lethal injection execution method will cause a gruesome execution, due to a rare disease that will cause tumors growing in his head, neck and throat to rupture. He wants lethal gas instead.

    But he can’t show the state’s method “superadds” pain to the death sentence, Gorsuch wrote.

    Delay tactics were on the majority’s mind there, too, with the conservatives reasoning that condoning the longtime death row inmate’s argument would invite others to play games with litigation to avoid execution. “The people of Missouri, the surviving victims of Mr. Bucklew’s crimes, and others like them deserve better,” Gorsuch wrote.

    The Bucklew case is “the defining moment for the Supreme Court in terms of cases that arise during death warrants,” Dunham said. He said the “emotional callousness” of the decision was shocking to many. It wasn’t that the court “recognized that executions may unintentionally be painful, it’s that it appeared to accept that executions could be unnecessarily cruel,” he said.

    But Kavanaugh’s concurrence seemed designed to “soften the blow” of the ruling, Denno said.

    Kavanaugh wrote to emphasize what he called the court’s “additional holding” that alternative execution methods don’t need to be authorized under current state law. It’s an issue that had been uncertain before Bucklew, he said.

    It’s a point that “sort of got lost in the shuffle” and is “a pretty big bonus” to capital litigators, Denno said.

    Still, Kavanaugh and Roberts fell in line with their conservative colleagues not just in cases like Bucklew but in another case later that month that laid bare the liberals’ frustration.

    Death row prisoner Christopher Price raised a similar claim to Bucklew’s and the five conservatives overturned lower court stays in his favor, saying Price also waited too long to bring his claim.

    An impassioned dissent from Justice Stephen Breyer for the four liberals called the majority out, leveling charges of arbitrariness and unfairness.

    Breyer wrote that the majority acted in a way that “calls into question the basic principles of fairness that should underlie our criminal justice system. To proceed in this matter in the middle of the night without giving all Members of the Court the opportunity for discussion tomorrow morning is, I believe, unfortunate.”

    Breyer’s discussion of the court’s internal procedures in his opinion was an “unorthodox step,” Blackman said. It’s “a signal that the progressive Justices are frustrated, and feel like they have no other choice.”

    Meanwhile, capital defenders will continue the “recent trend of narrow, focused challenges” to the death penalty, “with an eye to appeal to the Chief Justice or Justice Kavanaugh,” Baich said.

    Roberts peeled away in other death penalty cases this term as well, including casting a tie-breaking vote for an elderly Alabama prisoner with dementia, and for an intellectually disabled prisoner in Texas. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented in both cases.

    https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law...er-bitter-term
    "How do you get drunk on death row?" - Werner Herzog

    "When we get fruit, we get the juice and water. I ferment for a week! It tastes like chalk, it's nasty" - Blaine Keith Milam #999558 Texas Death Row

  9. #319
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens dies at 99

    By MARK SHERMAN and CONNIE CASS
    The Associated Press

    John Paul Stevens, the bow-tied, independent-thinking, Republican-nominated justice who unexpectedly emerged as the Supreme Court's leading liberal, died Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after suffering a stroke Monday. He was 99.

    During nearly 35 years on the court, Stevens stood for the freedom and dignity of individuals, be they students or immigrants or prisoners. He acted to limit the death penalty, squelch official prayer in schools, establish gay rights, promote racial equality and preserve legal abortion. He protected the rights of crime suspects and illegal immigrants facing deportation.

    He influenced fellow justices to give foreign terrorism suspects held for years at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base the right to plead for their release in U.S. courts.

    Stevens served more than twice the average tenure for a justice, and was only the second to mark his 90th birthday on the high court. From his appointment by President Gerald Ford in 1975 through his retirement in June 2010, he shaped decisions that touched countless aspects of American life.

    "He brought to our bench an inimitable blend of kindness, humility, wisdom and independence. His unrelenting commitment to justice has left us a better nation," Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement.

    He remained an active writer and speaker into his late 90s, surprising some when he came out against Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation following Kavanaugh's angry denial of sexual assault allegations. Stevens wrote an autobiography, "The Making of a

    Justice: My First 94 Years," that was released just after his 99th birthday in April 2019.

    At first considered a centrist, Stevens came to be seen as a lion of liberalism. But he rejected that characterization.

    "I don't think of myself as a liberal at all," Stevens told The New York Times in 2007. "I think as part of my general politics, I'm pretty darn conservative."

    The way Stevens saw it, he held to the same ground, but the court had shifted steadily to the right over the decades, creating the illusion that he was moving leftward.

    He did change his views on some issues, however. He morphed from a critic of affirmative action to a supporter, and came to believe the death penalty was wrong.

    His legal reasoning was often described as unpredictable or idiosyncratic, especially in his early years on the court. He was a prolific writer of separate opinions laying out his own thinking, whether he agreed or disagreed with the majority's ruling. Yet Stevens didn't consider his methods novel. He tended toward a case-by-case approach, avoided sweeping judicial philosophies, and stayed mindful of precedent.

    The white-haired Stevens, eyes often twinkling behind owlish glasses, was the picture of old-fashioned geniality on the court and off. He took an unusually courteous tone with lawyers arguing their cases, but he was no pushover. After his fellow justices fired off questions, Stevens would politely weigh in. "May I ask a question?" he'd ask gently, then quickly slice to the weakest point of a lawyer's argument.

    Stevens was especially concerned with the plight of ordinary citizens up against the government or other powerful interests — a type of struggle he witnessed as a boy.

    When he was 14, his father, owner of a grand but failing Chicago hotel, was wrongly convicted of embezzlement. Ernest Stevens was vindicated on appeal, but decades later his son would say the family's ordeal taught him that justice can misfire.

    More often, however, Stevens credited his sensitivity to abuses of power by police and prosecutors to what he learned while representing criminal defendants in pro bono cases as a young Chicago lawyer.

    He voiced only one regret about his Supreme Court career: that he had supported reinstating the death penalty in 1976. More than three decades later, Stevens publicly declared his opposition to capital punishment, saying that years of bad court decisions had overlooked racial bias, favored prosecutors and otherwise undermined his expectation that death sentences could be handed down fairly.

    One of his harshest dissents came when the court lifted restrictions on spending by corporations and unions to sway elections. He called the 2010 ruling "a rejection of the common sense of the American people" and a threat to democracy.

    As he read parts of that opinion aloud, Stevens' voice wavered uncharacteristically and he repeatedly stumbled over words. For the 90-year-old who'd worried he wouldn't know when to bow out, it was a signal. "That was the day I decided to resign," Stevens said later. He also disclosed in his autobiography that he had suffered a mini-stroke.

    The retirement of Stevens, known as a defender of strict separation of church and state, notably left the high court without a single Protestant member for the first time.

    "I guess I'm the last WASP," he joked, saying the issue was irrelevant to the justices' work. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined the court in 2017, was raised Catholic, but attends a Protestant church.

    A great-grandfather, Stevens eased into an active retirement of writing and speaking, still fit for swimming and tennis in Fort Lauderdale, where he and his second wife, Maryan, kept a home away from Washington.

    He is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth and Susan, who were with him when he died. Other survivors include nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Stevens' first wife, Elizabeth, second wife, Maryan, and two children died before him. Funeral arrangements are pending, the Supreme Court said in a statement announcing his death. But he is expected to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to Maryan.

    Born in 1920, Stevens was a privileged child of a bygone era: He met Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh at the family hotel and was at the ballpark when Babe Ruth hit his famous "called-shot" home run in the 1932 World Series.

    He joined the Navy the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was awarded the Bronze Star for his service with a Japanese code-breaking team. The code breakers' work enabled the U.S. to shoot down a plane carrying the commander of the Japanese Navy, and that targeted wartime killing later contributed to his misgivings about the death penalty.

    After World War II, Stevens graduated first in his class at Northwestern University's law school and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge. As a lawyer he became an antitrust expert, experience he brought to Supreme Court rulings such as one ending the NCAA's control over televised college football games.

    President Richard Nixon appointed Stevens, a lifelong Republican, to the federal appeals court in Chicago. Judge Stevens was considered a moderate conservative when Ford — whose nominee would need the approval of a Democratic-controlled Senate — chose him for the Supreme Court.

    Stevens won unanimous confirmation after uneventful hearings nothing like today's partisan shows. Stevens' liberal bent once on the high court was "different than I envisioned," Ford acknowledged decades later, but he still supported and praised him as "a very good legal scholar."

    Stevens' influence reached its height after other liberals retired in the early 1990s, leaving him the senior associate justice and the court's leader on the left. For a dozen years after, he proved adept at drawing swing votes from Republican appointees Sandra Day

    O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, often frustrating conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

    Stevens' clout diminished after Roberts arrived in 2005 and O'Connor was replaced by the more conservative Samuel Alito. But he didn't lose spirit. Throughout his career, Stevens unleashed some of his most memorable language in defeat.

    He wrote a scathing dissent in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that ended Florida's presidential recount and anointed George W. Bush: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

    https://news.yahoo.com/former-suprem...004509679.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  10. #320
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    I thought this guy would be the first centenarian justice. Close but no cigar.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

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