SCOTUS Chastises Congress and the Executive Branches
by run 75411
Update: Beverly Mann adds this note lifted from comments:
The Supreme Court is rarely in session. It’s seasonal, part-time work. They usually hear argument in 10 cases a month, seven months a year. In December, they didn’t hear even that many.
There’s really sooo much that can, and should, be said about the issue of (virtually universal lack of) access to the Supreme Court, and its repercussions. Roberts’ bizarre, cutesy annual report is … oh … I don’t know …characteristically hubristic?
SCOTUS Chastises Congress and the Executive Branches
A pencil and piece of paper was all Clarence Earl Gideon needed to state his case of being denied council in court after being accused of robbery and sentenced to prison. Gideon did get a review of his case under a violation of his 6th Amendment rights to council. Today it is near to impossible for the same to occur and the probability of achieving a review by SCOTUS would be akin to a grain of sand on a Florida beach. The highest court in the nation reviews issues and issues opinions for an ~85 cases/year few of which would be of the same stature as Gideon’s. It is all about who gains access to the court. Filing a petition is no easy task and the cost of which runs ~$3,000 for a dozen or so copies. The days of Gideon are long gone.
Why would I bring this up on an Economics board? Most recently Chief Justice Roberts got into the Congressional/Executive fray and their battle over finding a solution to the hypothetical fiscal cliff.
“Our country faces new challenges, including the much-publicized ‘fiscal cliff’ and the longer-term problem of a truly extravagant and burgeoning national debit,” he wrote. “No one seriously doubts that the country’s fiscal ledger has gone awry. The public properly looks to its elected officials to craft a solution.”
Chief Justice Prods Congress to Resolve Budget Talks and Control National Debt, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/us/chief-justice-roberts-prods-congress-on-fiscal-matters.html?_r=0
Roberts goes on to add;
The federal judiciary makes do with a budget appropriation of about $7 billion, he wrote, “a mere two-tenths of 1 percent of the United States’ total budget of $3.7 trillion.”
“Yes,” he went on, “for each citizen’s tax dollar, only two-tenths of one penny goes toward funding the entire third branch of government!”
That is notable cost control and Roberts cites how much it costs each citizen to have access to SCOTUS. The Robert’s SCOTUS saw an ~ 64 cases last year which is down from the typical 75-85 cases seen yearly and down even further from the 1963 cases reviewed by SCOTUS. By reviewing fewer cases, the Roberts SCOTUS controls costs and further reduces the probably of another Gideon achieving review. This is not true cost control, his waxing elegantly on how SCOTUS achieves reduced costs is suspect, and comes at the expense of the citizenry. Instead of working 8 hour days (if they were hourly), SCOTUS now works 7 hour days and produces less.
Less throughput and a selective one at best.
The name of John Roberts will be cursed by generations unborn.
2 tenths of 1% for the part of the economy that according to the World Bank 2005 report on what generates wealth is somewhere around 57% of our “intangible capital”. Intangible capital is 77% of our total capital when it comes to creating wealth in this nation.
Just for good measure, education is 36% of that 77%.
Go ahead, keep believing and voting as if the reason you have no money in you pocket is because the government spends too much.
Ha, we should probably have 5 supreme courts right now, to handle a larger US population and greatly expanded legal code.
The Supreme Court is rarely in session. It’s seasonal, part-time work. They usually hear argument in 10 cases a month, seven months a year. In December, they didn’t hear even that many.
There’s really sooo much that can, and should, be said about the issue of (virtually universal lack of) access to the Supreme Court, and its repercussions. Roberts’ bizarre, cutesy annual report is … oh … I don’t know …characteristically hubristic?
Bev:
What comes to mind is our own Cert Petition as written by a famous constitutional attorney which was denied. Even with his name on it, we could not get through the door with a more than worthy cause. Thanks for posting here.
Robert’s comments seem very ill timed coming from the third branch of government which is supposed to not make legislation, but rather rule on conflicts brought about by legislative action. Chutzpah or foot in moth disease? Let’s hope his comments come back to bite him in the butt.
What’s especially outrageous is the type of situation you’re talking about, Bill: The Supreme Court almost never agrees to hear cases on “direct appeal” (a legal term of art) from state supreme courts, in criminal or civil cases, with the major exception that they do often agree to do so in criminal cases when it is the state (i.e., the prosecution) that is asking them to hear hear the case in order to overrule a (rare) state supreme court ruling in favor of the criminal defendant. In state-court criminal cases, when it is the defendant who is asking the Supreme Court to hear the case in order to overturn a conviction, on constitutional grounds, the Supreme Court seems to figure that the criminal defendant can file a habeas corpus petition in a lower federal court.
Which they can, but the Supreme court has made that right an all-but-empty one–just a shell game, really–by interpreting a 1996 “jurisdictional” statute in a way that bars the lower federal courts from throwing out the state-court conviction on constitutional grounds in almost every case. With each passing Supreme Court term, the right to federal habeas review becomes even narrower, a seeming impossibility until it happens. In the last two years, the Supreme Court has treated that right as all but nonexistent. So the almost-total lack of access to the Supreme Court on direct appeal by state-court criminal defendants effectively removes access to constitutional review in federal court.
This is even truer in civil cases, thanks to a set of perverse, gimmicky Supreme Court-created “jurisdictional” doctrines, which the Supreme Court has stood by and watched metastasize to remove any access to federal court in order to make a constitutional challenge, except for ExxonMobil, which asked the Supreme Court to limit the doctrine at issue, which the Court did, so narrowly as to apply in almost no other case,especially since the other, relted doctrine actually bars access in the circumstance in which ExxonMobil was allowed to have it. (Sort of like Bush v. Gore.)
Anthony Kennedy, the leader of this state-courts-have-sovereignty-and-dignity! juggernaut, likes to say this is done in the name of liberty. (Isn’t everything the rightwing wants done in the name of liberty?!) Which reminds me of a political science class I once took on Maoism. Which included, basically, the routine use of Orwellian language, in which everything is the opposite of what its name or description indicates.
Of course, the current Supreme Court’s goal–the goal of the legal right since the early 1980s–is to turn the law into nothing but circuitous yellow-brick-road procedure: a dead-end labyrinthe whose very purpose is its circuitry and fruitlessness. They’ve come incredibly close to succeeding.
IMPEACH THIS TURKEY, not because of his private opinions, but because he is setting himself up publicly as dogmatically and economically superior to the coequal branches of the duly elected Congress and President!