Hear, hear, Linda Greenhouse.
I don’t understand why some high-profile liberals are saying that the Supreme Court is becoming a liberal Court, although I guess that if you think the end-all-and-be-all of Supreme Court jurisprudence is culture-wars cases, then the two end-of-term culture-wars opinions that went liberal, and the gay marriage case last term, is all the proof you need.
In any event, it’s nonsense. And I’m thrilled that I’m not the only liberal who sees that.
Paraphrasing: “It’s NOT a tax, so we can rule on it; it IS a tax, so it’s constitutional.”
Overturning a ruling in the very same ruling really takes the cake. It’s even better than, (paraphrasing) “Based on the precedent we set just a few minutes ago, where we said the government can do such-and-such under the General Welfare clause because of the threat of the malady’s spreading from state to state, the government can do that thing for any reason whatsoever.”
Yea Bev:
Before we get all teary eyed that we won a few, I think we need to step back and take a breath. We just have been lucky.
Greenhouse’s point is correct: the Court isn’t becoming more liberal, but the reactionary march to undo the liberal accomplishments of the past has, for the moment, been checked. As long as Roberts rules, though, which will be for a very long time, and as long as Alito and Thomas remain, “conservatives”, who aren’t really interested in conserving anything, remain a force.
However, the four liberals on the Court really are liberal, and Clinton’s coming nominations will — ought to — throw the balance in favor of liberalism, or at least establish a stronger bastion to thwart the generally reactionary tendencies of the others.
When the Chief Justice rules that the law does not say what it says, he’s not conservative.
Lordy, Warren. This is an illustration of why the conservative-media-industrial-complex is so dangerous. The conservative justices do that all the time. I mean, ALL THE TIME. Huge parts of what the Conservative Legal Movement has made the law, via the Supreme Court occurred in exactly that way. But people who get their information only from the conservative-media-industrial-complex have no idea that that is so, because they only hear about when Kennedy or (so rarely) Roberts strays to the other side in a culture-wars/anti-Obama case. So you all think this occurs only in those instances. It really, really, really doesn’t.
Give us an example, Beverly.
Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 Voting Rights Act case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
Citizens United is another.
Ashcroft v. Iqbal–a major one completely rewriting Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a), concerning pleading sufficiency of complaints.
The entire line of recent opinions rewriting the Federal Arbitration Act.
The entire line of cases rewriting the main habeas corpus jurisdiction statute–a very bad statute to begin with, but still not bad enough for them, so they rewrote it to effectively end federal court habeas corpus review of state-court criminal convictions.
Harris v. Quinn, two years ago, creating a bizarre First Amendment issue regarding government-employment labor unions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_v._Quinn
Many, many, many, many more. But that should suffice for now.
When the supreme court takes an appellate case, they’re always making the law. If the matter at question is uniformly understood and consistently applied, then the lower courts decide it and it doesn’t get to the supreme court. The only time anyone even appeals something to the supreme court if one of the parties expects that they can get a different outcome than what is generally understood, or than the variant interpretation they got from their district.
The extent of that power is regulated by Congress. The Supreme Court makes appellate decisions because Congress says they can (or doesn’t say they can’t, if you like).
Ewwwwe. It’s not accurate to say that the only time anyone even appeals something to the supreme court if one of the parties expects that they can get a different outcome than what is generally understood, or than the variant interpretation they got from their district.
Actually, the lower appellate courts are well aware that the Supreme Court hears about 70 cases a year, almost all of them at the behest of state prosecutors (Republican state attorneys general, mostly); or at the behest of a large corporation represented by one of a tiny handful of D.C.-based “Supreme Court specialists”, i.e., a partner at one of maybe five or six firms, whose two or three “specialists” have a cartel there and charge $1,000/hr. simply to put their name on the certiorari petition so that the petition will be read, or on some culture wars case in which the rightwing plaintiff is represented by a Conservative Legal Movement think tank lawyer.
The lower-court judges know this, so it’s a free-for-all for them. They know they can do whatever they want except in the types of situations I just identified, and they do do whatever they want. To borrow from the esteemed presumptive Republican presidential nominee: Believe me.
It is not sufficient. You list a few cases you don’t like, but do not say what the problem with the ruling was. Take Citizens United, for example. You have a problem with the Court’s ruling that corporations are people. But how could the Court do otherwise?
Here is the law:
Title 52, Chapter 301, Subchapter 1, § 30101, (11)
“The term ‘person’ includes an individual, partnership,
committee, association, corporation, labor organization, or any other
organization or group of persons, but such term does not include the
Federal Government or any authority of the Federal Government.”
http://www.fec.gov/law/feca/feca.pdf
Obergerfell is more significant than Greenhouse thinks. Many states to this day have a prohibition on same-sex marriage on their law books. It isn’t as if Ohio legislature rewrote any laws after this decision. Brown was a decision that rejected the clear precedent of Plessy on the basis that Plessy was wrong. Change a few justices and find a state willing to push the matter and conservatives could have their own Brown in the next decade. And it will effect a lot of states. Heck, DOMA I think is still on the books.