Supreme Court Sounds Disinclined To Rubber Stamp 5th Circuit Extremism In CFPB Case

[cynwhitehead]

I love the doily metaphor, but as someone who tried to crochet a doily when I was young, I can tell you they have a tightly knotted, complex structure as carefully constructed as the best legal argument.

[joelopines]

@wassmuss

is liberal ideology

But it’s also judicial conservatism. Even when “conservative” politicians were actually conservative, liberals backed judicial conservatism, which didn’t truck with crap like Dred Scott, Plessy, The Civil Rights Cases, Lochner and their ilk. Korematsu was made up out of whole cloth.

[timbomov]

It’s the hands pulling his internal strings that are the worrisome part.

[noonm]

@jwbuho

I have a serious crush on Justice Jackson:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also homed in on the absurdities of the argument, asking why Congress determining that, for the foreseeable future, an agency will get a certain amount of money to spend on general purposes is risking “tyranny.”

Francisco pivoted to a separation of powers argument, saying that the CFPB’s structure imbues the executive with the legislature’s spending power.

“You’re saying a provision of the Constitution is unconstitutional!” Jackson said incredulously.

Whisper to me another sweet-nothing-in-your-argument-makes-sense. More, please, more!

Not to downplay Kagan and Sotomayer (who are both excellent Justices), but KBJ is probably the smartest and most qualified Justice currently on the Court.

And it shows in nearly every oral argument or ruling she participates in.

Edit: To emphasize the point, here’s a key argument made by KBJ in the Alabama redistricting case:

One of the points she made concerned a case about Alabama’s new congressional map. A lower court ruled that the map had diluted Black voters’ power. To counter conservative suggestions that the Constitution is meant to be race-neutral, and thus doesn’t offer special protections for those Black voters, Jackson made the case that the historical context of the 14th Amendment, to protect formerly enslaved Black people, was explicitly race conscious. Her comments got a lot of attention. Why?

Her remarks aligned with originalism, an approach that seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was adopted. The theory is generally associated with the conservative legal movement. So it was striking to hear Justice Jackson’s remarks in the Alabama voting-rights case because they were an avowedly originalist exposition of the meaning of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, during Reconstruction. “I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed that race neutrality or race blindness was required,” she said.

While we can never be sure, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that at the end of last year’s SCOTUS term, Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the three liberal Justices in striking down the Alabama map:

Why the Supreme Court's Alabama election map decision was surprising to many

The Supreme Court ruled last week that Alabama’s congressional maps, which were redrawn after the 2020 census, violate Section 2 of the landmark Voting Rights Act by diluting the influence of the state’s Black voters. Section 2 says that states cannot draw maps that “result in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.”

The 5-4 decision effectively strikes down Alabama’s GOP-drawn election map as illegal. Chief Justice John Roberts affirmed a lower court ruling that found Black voters in the state were denied an equal opportunity to select political candidates of their choosing.

“We find Alabama’s new approach to Section 2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice,” Roberts wrote in an opinion joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

KBJ may have very well convinced them based on her originalist argument regarding the 14th amendment.

[trnc]

@noonm

“I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed that race neutrality or race blindness was required,” she said.

This is the polar opposite of Clarence Thomas’ alleged reason for being “conservative,” or more accurately, completely antithetical to anything that benefits minorities. He claims that the goal of white liberal do-gooders is to literally not see people’s color, as if we’re supposed to be stuck in a universe of Steven Colbert satire. He simply can’t imagine that the goal is to recognize that people should be accepted and given the same opportunities even as we clearly see the color of each other’s skin and other physical differences.

[charlie6]

Not only is the conservative majority on the SC changing laws to fit their agenda but they are deregulating everything in sight to leave the American citizen and the resources of this nation vulnerable and available to the predators who fund them.

[euglena4056]

The genesis of it is taxes. Ever since the income taxe was made law, dark money has kept trying to nix it, any way they can.