Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in Thursday at noon on 6/30/22!

President Biden nominated Jackson in February, fulfilling a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. https://n.pr/3yx01D4

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protects married couples' ability to obtain and use birth control is "constitutionally unsound," according to Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.

Blackburn made the remarks in a video posted to Twitter on Sunday, as the Tennessee Republican prepared for Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Committee member Blackburn is among other Republicans who have said it is time to reconsider landmark court rulings with an ascendant conservative majority on the Court.

In her video, Blackburn called out the Supreme Court's 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision that struck down a state law banning the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception." The Court ruled the law violated the constitutional right to privacy, which later served as the basis for the right to receive access to abortion care in the U.S.

"Constitutionally unsound rulings like Griswold v. Connecticut...confused Tennesseans and left Congress wondering who gave the court permission to bypass our system of checks and balances," said Blackburn.

In the video, Blackburn questioned the fitness of Jackson, nominated by President Joe Biden last month to be the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court Justice. Blackburn took issue with Jackson not specifying her judicial philosophy during hearings last year for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

[...]

With Roe potentially on the chopping block, some Republicans are hoping the Court will go even further.

Three Republican candidates for Michigan Attorney General said in February that Griswold was wrongly decided, according to a report in left-leaning Mother Jones. Two candidates later told The Detroit News they didn't want a ban on birth control.

Dana Nessel, Michigan's current Democratic attorney general, reacted with a tweet calling the opposition to the ruling "terrifying."

In a 2012 Republican presidential debate, candidates Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney (now a senator from Utah) also said they opposed Griswold.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 4, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Anti-abortion Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker did not, in fact, sue the Daily Beast over the story he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. Instead, his son Christian Walker took to social media to call his father out for lying, abuse, and abandonment and to call out MAGA Republicans for continuing to support his father while claiming to believe in “family values.” Walker’s supporters immediately blamed the son for hurting his father’s campaign. The candidate himself stayed away from the media, attending a private event sponsored by “Prayer Warriors for Herschel.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee, organized to elect Republicans to the Senate, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both reaffirmed their support for Walker. They will continue to keep spending to boost his campaign. Still, concern about the outcome in Georgia has prompted the right-wing super PAC Club for Growth Action to plan a massive $2 million ad buy in Spanish for the Nevada senate race, backing Republican Adam Laxalt against Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a former writer and editor for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart, made the position of party leaders clear: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles,” she said. “I want control of the Senate.” It is unclear if this scandal will hurt Walker with supporters who have already swallowed lies about his businesses, academic achievements, relationship with law enforcement, unacknowledged children, and accusations of domestic violence. But abortion is a key issue—perhaps THE key issue—in this election, and the demonstration that a Republican Senate candidate is calling for a nationwide abortion ban even as he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion will likely not sit well with those upset about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Republicans are determined to take control of the country no matter what it takes. Today, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who is up for reelection, revised his August story about his role in overturning the 2020 election. After saying his part in the delivery of fake electoral votes to the vice president was only “a couple seconds,” he now says that he texted with Wisconsin-based lawyer Jim Troupis, who was working for Trump to overturn the results of the election in Wisconsin, for about an hour. He also downplayed the events of January 6 as not an “armed insurrection.” In the Washington, D.C., trial of the Oath Keepers today, though, prosecutors played a recording of a November 2020 meeting in which Oath Keepers planned to bring weapons to Washington and “fight” for Trump. The gang’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, said it would be “great” if protesters were there, because violence would enable Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. “Pepper spray is legal. Tasers are legal. And stun guns are legal. And it doesn’t hurt to have a lead pipe with a flag on it,” codefendant Kelly Meggs told attendees. A lawyer for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed in court today that the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination when testifying before the committee. Ward was one of Arizona’s false electors. Also today, in a story about Trump’s disregard for the correct handling of classified records, Washington Post reporters Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima, and Jacqueline Alemany said Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, told them that Trump “rejected the Presidential Records Act entirely.” The Presidential Records Act is a federal law. In contrast to the course of the current Republican Party, President Joe Biden has focused on demonstrating that democracy works. Today, the CHIPS and Science Act, which provided $52 billion in public investment in semiconductor manufacture, appeared once again to pay off: Micron announced that it would spend up to $100 billion over the next 20 years to build up to four plants in upstate New York near Syracuse to build computer chips. The company estimates that the project will create almost 50,000 jobs generally over the next 20 years, with about 9,000 of those in the plants themselves. “To those who doubted that America could dominate the industries of the future, I say this,” Biden said in a statement. “[Y]ou should never bet against the American people.” Today, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brought an important new philosophy to the law when the Supreme Court heard arguments over Merrill v. Milligan, a voting rights case. This case concerns Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which, as summarized by the Department of Justice, “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified” in the act. In 2021, Alabama’s legislature cut the state into seven districts that “crack and pack” Black voters. About 27% of the residents of Alabama are Black, but they are either “packed” into one district or “cracked” among the others, diluting their overall strength. Registered voters, the Alabama chapter of the NAACP, and the multifaith Greater Birmingham Ministries sued under the Voting Rights Act. A district court of three judges, two of whom were appointed by Trump, agreed that the redistricting violated the law and gave the legislature two weeks to redraw the map to create two Black-majority districts. The state immediately filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, which was granted, allowing the states to use the original map for this year’s elections. In today’s arguments, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund G. LaCour Jr. claimed that states must draw districts that are “race neutral.” When Justice Jackson pressed him to explain, he turned to the Fourteenth Amendment, saying it “is a prohibition, not an obligation, to engage in race discrimination.” Jackson then turned on its head the so-called “originalism” that has taken over the court. “I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution and what the framers and founders thought about,” she said, “and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment in a race-conscious way.” She’s right, of course, and while she followed up with more Reconstruction history, she could have gone even farther: when President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill on the explicit grounds that it was not race neutral (among other things), Congress repassed it over his veto and based the Fourteenth Amendment on it. Jackson’s approach was about more than this case, important though it is. She brought to the court what has been called “progressive originalism” or, perhaps more accurately, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern’s term “egalitarian constitutionalism.” The Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—give to the federal government the power to protect individual rights in the states, and originalists’ avoidance of them has always stood out. Those amendments launched an entirely new era in our history; scholars call it a “second founding.” Now, it appears, that second founding has an advocate on the Supreme Court.

—

Notes:

https://www.justice.gov/crt/section-2-voting-rights-act#:~:text=Section%202%20of%20the%20Voting%20Rights%20Act%20of%201965%20prohibits

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/07/19/gerrymandering-republicans-redmap

https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/10/when-are-majority-black-voting-districts-required-in-alabama-case-the-justices-will-review-that-question/

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126619000/voting-rights-act-supreme-court

Anthony Michael Kreis @AnthonyMKreisI don't care what you think about Herschel or Christian, but this is a human tragedy that nobody deserves. And it is grotesque to see Georgia Republicans comment to the AJC anonymously to try to deflect and not reckon with the fact their nominee may just be a bad person. #gapol Christian Walker @ChristianWalk1rI’ve stayed silent for nearly two years as my whole life has been lied about publicly. I did ONE campaign event, then said I didn’t want involvement. Don’t you dare test my authenticity. Here is the full story: https://t.co/ekVEcz8zq3

2:20 PM ∙ Oct 4, 2022180Likes30Retweets

Kaivan Shroff @KaivanShroffNEW: Dana Loesch confesses what we’ve long known about Republican forced-birthers. All they care about is controlling people. They have no actual values. “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

12:17 AM ∙ Oct 5, 20222,444Likes1,066Retweets

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/politics/herschel-walker-abortion-republican-reaction/index.htm

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/dana-loesch-says-she-doesnt-care-if-herschel-walker-paid-some-skank-for-an-abortion-i-want-control-of-the-senate/

L

https://www.georgiademocrat.org/all-eyes-on-walkers-lies-walker-repeatedly-lied-about-his-academic-achievements/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ron-johnson-acknowledges-texting-trump-attorney-jan-6-rcna50642

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/politics/oath-keepers-secret-recordings-trial-day-2/index.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/04/arizona-gop-chair-pleaded-fifth-jan-6-committee-attorney-00060254

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/cortez-masto-face-2m-spanish-language-attack-ads-home-stretch-tight-ne-rcna50719

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/04/trump-classified-documents-meadows/

Steven Mazie @stevenmazieJustice Jackson's forceful refutation of the notion that the 14th amendment commands color-blindness in this morning's Voting Rights Act hearing. Three uninterrupted trancript pages.

6:10 PM ∙ Oct 4, 20225,531Likes1,338Retweets

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/technology/micron-chip-clay-syracuse.html

https://www.syracuse.com/business/2022/10/micron-picks-syracuse-suburb-for-huge-computer-chip-plant-that-would-bring-up-to-9000-jobs.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/04/statement-by-the-president-on-micron-chips-announcement-in-new-york/

www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2022/10/04/kagan-jackson-put-down-markers-in-major-voting-rights-challenge/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

* * * *

[from comments]

FERN MCBRIDE (NYC)

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed.” That was the chilling comment from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) about escalating threats of violence and other intimidating acts against members of Congress. We would like to think the senator was being hyperbolic, but it’s hard to look at the surge in violent threats and confrontations and not fear the worst.’

‘Political violence has occurred throughout U.S. history, but what is new in modern times — and alarming — is its journey from the fringes to center stage, thanks largely to the dangerous rhetoric of former president Donald Trump. According to the Times, in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, following a campaign marked by his virulent discourse, the number of threats recorded by the Capitol Police against members of Congress increased more than tenfold, to 9,625 in 2021; the first quarter of 2022 saw 1,820 cases opened.’

‘Members of Congress from both parties have been targeted, but the Times’s review showed that more than a third of the threats were made by Republican or pro-Trump individuals against Democrats or Republicans seen as disloyal to Mr. Trump. Nearly a quarter were made by Democrats targeting Republicans, while party affiliations could not be determined in the other cases. Particularly vulnerable are lawmakers of color.’

The preceding was and an excerpt from today’s Washington Post OPINION, By the Editorial Board

NORTH CHARLESTON S.C. - Members of the Black clergy in the Lowcountry are voicing concerns that U.S. Sen. Tim Scott refused to meet with them about their concerns over the confirmation process of the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

ALLOW ME TO RE-INTRODUCE THE 116th SCOTUS JUSTICE JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON 👑⚖️ #OurStories365 👑

Exactly

Did you know that Joe Biden...

Is the first EVER President of the United States who's appointed judges are majority women, racial or ethnic minorities?

I would add that he has also appointed more public defenders and civil rights lawyers, instead of the usual corporate lawyers or ex-prosecutors. Including the first Black woman and first public defender appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

These are changes the effects of which will last long after his presidency, if an American Republican based on the Constitution survives.

While we're talking about representation, we might also note that Biden selected Kamala Harris as Vice President- the first woman to ever hold the office, and in fact the first woman to ever hold Presidential power, when she briefly took over for Biden while he was sedated for a medical procedure.

Justice Brown Jackson Won’t Shift the Court, but Will She Shake Up the Liberals?

How will Justice Brown Jackson vote on the Court? While we don't know precisely. here are some educated predictions on her policy positions.

One of the loftiest decisions that a president can make is the choice of an individual to nominate to the Supreme Court. On average a new appointment to the Supreme Court is made every 2.5 years. President Trump lucked out in this respect with three nominations.  Four presidents — Andrew Johnson, Harrison, Taylor, and Carter — never had a justice confirmed to the Court while the president with…

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"Justice Elena Kagan memorably castigated him for treating 'judging as scorekeeping,' whining about 'how unfair it is' when he loses, and repeating the same bad arguments 'at a higher volume.' Justice Sonia Sotomayor has repeatedly accused him of outright dishonesty by misrepresenting precedent and dangling false promises. In a fed-up dissent in just her first term, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared a Kavanaugh majority opinion to the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. [Samul] Alito’s rebuttal to Kavanaugh’s dissent in Sackett v. EPAconsisted of exactly one sentence: Kavanaugh’s argument, Alito wrote, 'cannot be taken seriously.'"

Justices are 'losing patience': Brett Kavanaugh skewered as a 'lightweight' in brutal analysis

Hold up.

This guy?

“The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque character assassination will dissuade confident and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country, and as we all know, in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”

This piece of shit?

The guy who spent his entire life as a right wing activist judge, who was part of the Brooks Brothers “riot”, snarled and barked and insulted the Senate Judiciary Committee during his farcical confirmation hearing, who lied repeatedly about his history of sexual assault, his gambling debts, and threatened to explicitly hurt people who he views as antagonistic to him ... turns out to be an intellectual lightweight in the mold of Thomas? He doesn’t give a flying fuck about law or justice or precedent, he just wants to hurt people he doesn’t like under the color of law?

Wow. None of us saw that coming.

Two things seemed clear after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the case concerning whether Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment bars Donald Trump from the presidency as an insurrectionist. First, most of the justices want to rule in Trump’s favor. Second, they’re struggling to figure out how to do so. Maybe Section 3 doesn’t apply to the presidency per se, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson said—and perhaps, along those same lines, it doesn’t prohibit oath-breaking former presidents from holding future office either? Or perhaps, Justice Samuel Alito pondered, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits insurrectionists from holding office, but not from running for it? Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed enamored of the idea that the amendment doesn’t allow states to disqualify candidates for federal office—as Colorado did here—without Congress first giving the go-ahead. In a related line of inquiry, which the justices seemed to coalesce around as arguments went on, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan suggested that perhaps there’s something inappropriate about allowing individual states to make decisions that could potentially determine a national election.

I do love the "something inappropriate about allowing individual states to make decisions that could potentially determine a national election." Perhaps there is something inappropriate about it but that is how the US election system works.

Gonna argue that our election system, like our immigration system, would be unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans for contradictory reasons if they understood how it worked so congressmen can campaign and judges rule based on totally imaginary ideas.

The 2020 Presidential Election, Georgia Senate Runoff, and confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would NOT have been possible without historic Black voter turnout. Now, the right to vote is being attacked. Join us in taking action. Write a letter: http://bit.ly/3OdbHR1

Don’t forget! We are still calling on ONE MILLION people to join us to protect the vote! Add your name now: http://bit.ly/1MSTRONG

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 4, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 5, 2024

Today the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states cannot remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot. Colorado officials, as well as officials from other states, had challenged Trump’s ability to run for the presidency, noting that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits those who have engaged in insurrection after taking an oath to support the Constitution from holding office. The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment leaves the question of enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment up to Congress. 

But the court didn’t stop there. It sidestepped the question of whether the events of January 6, 2021, were an insurrection, declining to reverse Colorado’s finding that Trump was an insurrectionist.

In those decisions, the court was unanimous.

But then five of the justices cast themselves off from the other four. Those five went on to “decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy,” as the three dissenting liberal judges put it. The five described what they believed could disqualify from office someone who had participated in an insurrection: a specific type of legislation.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in one concurrence, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in another, note that the majority went beyond what was necessary in this expansion of its decision. “By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson wrote. Seeming to criticize those three of her colleagues as much as the majority, Barrett wrote: “This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency…. [W]ritings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” 

Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote that “in the course of unnecessarily deciding all of these questions when they were not even presented by the case, the five-Justice majority effectively decided not only that the former president will never be subject to disqualification, but that no person who ever engages in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States in the future will be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, notably did not recuse himself from participating in the case.

There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking. 

For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts.

Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

What's Going on With Roe v. Wade (6/24/2022 - 10:20pm ET)

As of this morning, in one of their final decisions of the term, the Supreme Court released a 6-3 decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization stating that abortion is not a constitutional right in the United States.

What this means:

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey have officially been overturned.

The six conservative justices (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett) voted in the majority; the three liberal judges (Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan) dissented. Ketanji Jackson Brown is not on the court yet, but that played no role in the result of the decision, as she'll be replacing Breyer.

13 states have trigger laws that were intended to make abortion illegal as soon as Roe was overturned. This New York Times article details the status of all states regarding their abortion legislation.

It's not clear what this means for other precedents established under the same right for privacy.

Thomas specifically called for the reconsideration of Griswold v. Connecticut (right for married couples to use contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (right to same-sex relationships), and Obergefell v. Hodges (right to same-sex marriage). (He didn't call for Loving v. Virginia to be overturned, funny enough.)

Alito tried to wall off abortion from the above cases because of the "critical moral question posed by abortion", but it's not clear if that will stand.

There are currently protests happening across the country, and there will continue to be more.

What this doesn't mean:

That abortion is illegal everywhere in the United States. A number of states explicitly protect abortion in their own state laws. They are primarily in the northeast and the west coast but also include Alaska, Hawaii, Colorado, Minnesota, and Illinois.

That the fight for abortion rights is over. Some of that will happen in state legislatures, and some will happen in the courts. There is already a lawsuit brought by a synagogue in Florida claiming that a Florida abortion ban after 15 weeks violates Jewish teachings.

What to do next:

Donate. Here is a list of some places to donate to. And another. NARAL. Remember to donate beyond Planned Parenthood

Vote. State-level voting will play a large role in deciding abortion legislation. Federal-level voting will play a large role in deciding who is on the courts.

If you are going to protest, be careful and be safe.

Be consistent in your recognition and support of reproductive rights as impacting people beyond cis women. Be clear in the language that you use--if you're talking about people who can bear children, say people who can bear children. If you're talking about pregnant people, say pregnant people. Not all women have uteruses or can bear children, and not people who have uteruses or can bear children are women.

Take care of yourself and your community. This is a really hard time, and we need to look out for each other.

Unanimous Supreme Court gives transgender woman from Guatemala new chance to fight deportation | AP News

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of a transgender Guatemalan woman who is fighting deportation on the grounds that she would face persecution if returned to her native country.

The court’s unanimous decision in favor of Estrella Santos-Zacaria gives her another chance to argue that immigration officials were wrong to reject her bid to remain in the United States.

Lawyers for Santos-Zacaria, now in her mid-30s, said she first fled to the United States after being raped as a young teenager and threatened with death because of her gender identity in a country that has targeted the LGBTQ community.

But a U.S. immigration judge found that she did not make a strong enough case that she would face persecution if sent back to Guatemala.

The issue at the Supreme Court was more technical, whether federal immigration law was flexible enough to allow her another day in court. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled against her on that point, but other appellate courts had ruled in favor of immigrants on the same issue.

The Supreme Court ruled in an opinion by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that the 5th Circuit was wro

Do you vote green and independent in local elections? Bc everyone who tells me I should never seem to participate in those and that’s where green and independent parties gain traction for generals. There’s just no way you can ask enough people to vote green or independent in a way that will defeat the billions that go into the D/R dichotomy.

I’d love to not vote for Biden, but the prospect of Trump getting to add three new conservative judges to the Supreme Court over the course of another term is something I can’t accept. Presidencies have effects that go well past the four years they serve. I’d rather have more judges like Ketanji Brown Jackson than Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. That’s what I’m voting for

Imagine having this much energy to talk about what little hope and imagination you have. Have fun supporting genocide Joe I guess, sellout... wait, I can't even call you that because you do it for free!