From the December 21, 2023 opinion piece:

Lavish world cruises, secret deals with moneyed donors, threats to step down unless someone ponied up with a pay raise, fishing trips with parties who have business before the court, an amicus brief industrial complex wholly bought and paid for by billionaire donations, leaked drafts, and secret speeches are not the stuff of constitutional democracy, or infallibility, or finality. When the hyperpolitical supercharged Trump cases catch up with the court—and that is beginning to happen, right now, this week—all that stench will run headlong into the questions about why the husband of the woman who went to the pep rally for the insurrection and the folks who lied to us all about Dobbs are objective enough to decide the outcome of an election. The same people entrusted with the protecting the reputation of the court have blundered into being wholly responsible for protecting democracy. Not one thing suggests they will take the latter any more seriously than they took the former.

My latest for today's Boston Globe.

Shows how much credibility Scotus has lost.

Even Harvard is *openly* bragging about it’s going to use your own loopholes to ignore you.

I'll keep saying it because it's true: the goal of the Roberts Court is to eradicate equal rights and delegitimize the courts. Expand/ change/ get rid of the corrupt judges of the supreme courts

As The New Republic reports, “Alito is complaining that people who oppose homosexuality were being unfairly branded as bigots, despite that being a dictionary definition of bigotry.” On Tuesday, agreeing the Court should not take a case, Alito wrote he is “concerned” that a lower court’s reasoning “may spread.” He notes that the lower court “reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian.” In that case, several jurors who acknowledged they held anti-LGBTQ views were released from serving on the trial. “That holding exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in 'Obergefell v. Hodges' … namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.'” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “Alito suggests that a trial court violates the free exercise and equal protection clauses when it allows an attorney who represents a gay client to strike potential jurors because they express overt bigotry against gay people.” [...] Attorney Max Kennerly posits, “If we followed Alito’s reasoning that religious beliefs can never serve as a basis to strike a juror, we’d instantly run into a collision with jurors who believe, on religious grounds, the death penalty is wrong. Any guesses how Alito would rule on that? Yeah, exactly.”

Why the condemnation of homosexual behavior by some (NOT all) religious conservatives might legitimately raise questions of bigotry

It seems to me that Alito is acting as if "traditional religious views" about homosexuality are uniform.

Alito doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps is not fully aware) that there are some interpretations of scripture that do not support the condemnation of homosexual behavior or even of same-sex unions. In fact there are some mainstream Christian denominations that allow for blessings of same-sex couples (including recently the very "traditional" Roman Catholic Church). Furthermore, Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative Jewish sects also allow the blessing of same-sex unions.

Given all of the above, one might reasonably wonder why some (not all) conservative Christians or Jews seem to prefer to accept anti-LGBTQ+ translations/ interpretations of scripture, when other translations/ interpretations that are more sympathetic to homosexual behavior are available.

Of course the primary group of religious people in the U.S. that condemns homosexual behavior consists of some (not all) right-wing "Christians" from various denominations. But one also might wonder why these same right-wing "Christians" DON'T seem to want to pass laws banning divorce, adultery, usury, lying, etc., but they DO want to pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation? After all, behaviors like divorce, adultery, usury, and lying are clearly condemned in various parts of the Bible.

One might also ask, why do some of these same right-wing "Christians" who think it is okay to condemn the LGBTQ+ community, not also condemn a prominent politician like Trump, who has been divorced multiple times, committed adultery multiple times, and who lies almost every time he opens his mouth?

It is the picking and choosing of what to condemn, and the hyperfocus on using the law to allow those with certain "religious views" to deny the rights of the LGBTQ+ community (while not choosing to deny the rights of other kinds of so-called "sinners"--NOT that I support that either) that suggests it might be legitimate to question whether some on the religious right use religion as an excuse to hold bigoted beliefs about and/or to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community.

[edited]

This fucking guy.

Because they ARE, you bought & paid for talking chunk of wood. If we allow intolerance to be tolerated, then intolerance will come to dominate. And I think Alito knows this.

(Tolerance, btw, is the absolute minimum. It is grudging acceptance. If you can’t even do that, then go back to your cave. This asshole’s religion tells him to love, not just tolerate. It’s not hard to do.)

How the Republican Supreme Court is celebrating the holiday.

We ourselves should celebrate by brushing up on SCOTUS corruption and conflict of interest.

Here's an interactive SCOTUS corruption graphic. It's best viewed on medium and larger screens for detail.

Supreme Court Corruption June 27, 2023 • Corrupt Supreme Court

Abortion bans brutally triple maternal deaths it’s a betrayal of their right to live.

Republicans want women dead.

They all lied, and contrary to what they are now claiming, Susan Collins and Joe Manchin were not “fooled” by their lies. They knew. We all knew.

The John Roberts Court will go down in history as one of thee most corrupt, regressive, depraved, illegitimate, Christofascist courts in American history, and that’s no easy feat.

👉🏿 https://www.thedailybeast.com/on-roe-are-joe-manchin-and-susan-collins-stupid-or-do-they-just-think-we-are

👉🏿 https://www.npr.org/2022/05/03/1096108319/roe-v-wade-alito-conservative-justices-confirmation-hearings

Corrupt Supreme Court in their boss's shoes.

The fact that three of the Supreme Court Justices who may decide whether Donald Trump -- and any other President -- should have absolute immunity for things they may have done during their Presidency are unitary executive theory fanboys Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh (two of whom were appointed by Trump) is pretty frightening.

I cannot put into words just how stomach churning it is to read Alito's draft opinion to strike down Roe v Wade and notice that he's citing the opinions of 13th and 17th century European men to support his argument. Particularly Matthew Hale, who had at least two women executed for witchcraft and wrote a treatise on why marital rape is okay. Like this is one of the men deciding that millions of people can't get abortions. It's absolutely disgusting.

This from the guy who cites pre-US witch hunters to make case law oppressing women, who cherry picks what is legitimate and what is not based on his political needs to defend rapists and molesters, and who is chest deep in the middle of what amounts to a decades-long corruption and bribery scandal.

This is the culmination of a century of "separate but co-equal" jibberjabber bullshit theory being spoon-fed to impressionable young minds. Congress is the supreme branch of government. Do I like that? Not really, Congress is mostly incompetent and corrupt. But they absolutely have the authority to regulate the supreme Court just as they have the authority to regulate the president; not without limit, but the authority is there.

Alito's take here will lead, and much sooner rather than later, to a Jacksonian response from both Congress and the executive branch. Is that what he wants? I don't know, but it's what he's going to get if his fellow fashies on the bench follow suit. The hubris of these folks will lead to their downfall, and we can only hope they don't drag the rest of us with them. Though given the Court's history of mostly propping up the worst aspects of the US system, maybe I should be celebrating Alito and Co's myopia.

Six years ago, some of y'all f..ked around and didn't vote for Hillary, and Roe v. Wade was overturned, and now affirmative action has ended. So stop f..king around with "Biden is too old," or "I am not going to vote unless..." before this sh.t turns into The Handmaid's Tale.

Another dangerous ruling by Samuel Alito

The far right justices on the Supreme Court are out of control and appear to be totally lacking concern for the health and wellbeing of their fellow Americans. Samuel Alito decided to trash the meaning of the Clean Water Act by defining “water” in a ridiculously limited way. Now he has opened the floodgates again to massive pollution of our waterways via wetlands. 

Justice Antonin Scalia died more than seven years ago, but the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday shows that this is the “Scalia Court” far more so than when he was alive. [...] The precise legal issue decided in Sackett concerns the geographic scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Congress intended the law to end the practice of the nation’s waterways being used as the unregulated dumping ground for industrial pollution. The effect was transformational: For the first time in the nation’s history, any discharge of pollutants into the nation’s waterways absent a permit was unlawful, making it possible to safely fish and swim waters throughout the country.

Congress was not at all shy about the geographic reach of the Clean Water Act. The statute targeted discharges into “navigable waters,” but Congress also expressly defined that to include all “waters of the United States.” Since the mid-1970s, the courts have uniformly agreed that Congress intended with that expansive definition to extend the law’s protections far beyond traditional navigable waters to include the wetlands, intermittent streams and other tributaries that feed into the nation’s major rivers and lakes.

In a unanimous opinion for the court almost 40 years ago, Justice Byron White explained why. While acknowledging that “on a purely linguistic level, it may appear unreasonable to classify ‘lands’ wet or otherwise as ‘waters,’” the court said “such a simplistic response … does justice neither to the problem faced by the [government] nor to the realities of the problem of water pollution that the Clean Water Act was intended to combat.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion in Sackett, however, embraces the very “simplistic response” that the court rightly criticized in 1985. Relying on a dictionary definition of “waters” and ignoring the Clean Water Act’s purpose, the court’s conservative majority has adopted a radically truncated view of the reach of the law’s restriction on water pollution. Under the court’s new view, pollution requires a permit only if it is discharged into waters that are “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water, ‘forming geographic[al] features’ that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams … oceans, rivers, and lakes.’” And “wetlands” are covered only if they are “indistinguishably part” of those narrowly defined covered waters. [...] The impact of the majority ruling is potentially enormous. It could lead to the removal of millions of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands from the law’s direct protection. Basic protections necessary to ensure clean, healthy water for human consumption and enjoyment will be lost. As highlighted by Justice Elena Kagan’s separate opinion, the court’s opinion “prevents the EPA from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands.”

Nor will the nation’s economy be spared. Myriad businesses rely on clean water for their industrial processes. The fishing, real estate and tourism industries are all highly dependent on the protections that the Clean Water Act has provided over the past half-century.

None of this was compelled by law. Even Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh rejected Alito’s majority view, announcing that he “would stick to the text.” Congress spoke clearly in the Clean Water Act about its ambitions and backed that intent up with deliberately sweeping language to provide the EPA with the discretionary authority it needed to realize those goals. Our nation’s waters are far cleaner as a result. Yet, for the second time in less than a year, an activist Supreme Court has deployed the false label of “separation of powers” to deny the other two branches the legal tools they require to safeguard the public.

[emphasis added]