Two Supreme court rulings today created jobs for thousands of lawyers who can file motions to overturn legal decisions, that and more hatchets to U.S. law and wishful protection for Deposed Donald Trump (DDT):
Fischer v. United States:
DDT may not need to pardon January 6 insurrectionists on January 6; five conservative Supreme Court justices and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have tried to do exactly that. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts narrowed the charge, writing that prosecutors must show that a defendant “impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so.” The high court did rule that rioters could be charged with evidence that they were trying to stop the arrival of certificates to count electoral votes for the election certification.
Although Jackson concurred with the majority, she wrote that it didn’t necessarily apply to many January 6 defendants, including Joseph Fischer, the defendant in the case. He tried to stop an “official proceeding,” according to Jackson.
Although the ruling seemed disastrous for prosecutions, AG Merrick Garland noted that “the vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6 will not be affected by this decision” because insurrectionists were charged with multiple offenses. Yet he condemned the ruling, calling January 6 an “unprecedented attack on the cornerstone” of government. About 25 insurrectionists in prison of the 350 charged with that statute might be affected by the ruling.
Posting “BIG WIN,” DDT hopes the decision would exonerate him from his indictment in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but he is charged with a broader conspiracy to subvert the election than storming the Capitol. DDT also had documents when he used the fake electors scheme in his attempts.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, stating that SCOTUS made “textual backflips” to justify the ruling. Two justices in the majority—Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—had already demonstrated their support for the insurrection. Of the 15 judges to rule on the law’s interpretation, only one, a DDT nominee, agreed with the Supreme Court’s narrow view. The D.C. Circuit Court also disagrees.
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo; Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce:
Roberts gleefully wrote, “Chevron is overturned.” The six conservatives in the Supreme Court have overturned a 40-year precedent and the most cited in U.S. history, known as the “Chevron rule” in which courts must defer to agency rules if Congress does not have a specific law. At least 18,000 decisions have been based on the 1984 Supreme Court decision Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council including 70 citations from the Supreme Court. Overturning it will result in mass disruption. The opinion assumes that judges are as highly knowledgeable as experts in all aspects of U.S. agencies—science, business, education, etc.
The conservative opinion made right-wing and industry organizations—the Koch network, Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society, etc.—very happy. DDT’s strategist for overturning the government, John Eastman, has also tried to overturn Chevron for years. Anti-abortionist activists want to use this decision to get rid of medication abortion.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has already proved his ignorance by using the term “laughing gas” (nitrous oxide) instead of “smog” (nitrogen oxide) five times in his official opinion on rejecting an EPA rule preventing “downwind pollution”—and his mother was in charge of the EPA. The opinion had to be corrected. Judges’ ignorance leads ideological courts to being hoodwinked as DDT-appointed federal judge Matthew Kaczmarek was in accepting lies about the dangers of the abortion drug mifepristone.
The watch-dog group, Demand Progress, made this statement:
“The Supreme Court is threatening safeguards that protect hundreds of millions of people from unsafe products, bad medicines, dangerous chemicals, illegal scams, and more. By handing policy decisions usually deliberated over by experts to lower-level judges, the Supreme Court has set off a seismic political shift that primarily serves only the most powerful corporate interests.”
Kagan read her scathing dissent from the bench pointing out judges’ inadequacies in making decisions on their own with questions like “when does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a ‘protein’?” She added that “it’s the Wildlife Service and not any court that knows about” the intricacies of squirrel population. The Supreme Court’s majority demonstrated that it “disdains restraint, and grasps for power” and called them “administrative czars,” Kagan concluded.
Grants Pass v. Johnson:
According to critics, the Supreme Court just criminalized homelessness in its decision that the punishment for sleeping outside isn’t covered by the Eighth Amendment that overturned a 9th Circuit Court ruling. The same six conservatives determining Loper (above) ruled that cities may ban homeless residents from sleeping outside, that punitive measures are not “cruel and unusual punishment.” Referring to past Supreme Court decision, many social media users posted that “corporations are people” but “the homeless are not.” The ruling doesn’t exempt Grants Pass (OR), which brought the suit, from state law requiring that the restriction to use a blanket or pillow to keep warm and dry outside must be “objectively reasonable.” Gorsuch stressed the position that the Eighth Amendment refers to methods of punishment, not the ability to criminalize specific conduct, therefore not applying to fines and jail sentences.
In a dissent, Sotomayor wrote:
“I remain hopeful that someday in the near future, this court will play its role in safeguarding constitutional liberties for the most vulnerable among us.”
In the past, both Justices Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh hoped that people will not see SCOTUS as “a bunch of partisan hacks.” In an AP-NORC poll, 70 percent of people think just that, thinking current justices are “more likely to be guided by their own ideology rather than serving as neutral arbiters of government authority.” Last summer, a Quinnipac poll found the same thing, and in 2021, In 2021, a national Grinnell College/Selzer poll found that a bipartisan two-thirds agree that politics drives Supreme Court rulings. Those polls are all before the latest batch of opinions.
The only good news from the high court on Friday was that it turned down an appeal from DDT’s adviser Steve Bannon to stay out of prison with no dissents.
Of this session’s 61 cases, four Supreme Court cases remain without announcements, supposedly to be made Monday: DDT’s plea for absolute immunity, two cases about how Texas and Florida law can limit social media platforms’ regulation of content, and one about government regulation on debt card “swipe fees” brought a decade after the regulation was finalized. So Monday, the conservative justices can delay DDT’s trial for overturning the government by stalling a decision, order private businesses to follow its ideological position, and destroy more abilities by government agencies.
Responses to the June 27 presidential debate on the next day:
“Biden had a sore throat. He needed a lozenge. Trump lied about absolutely everything.” – Frank Vyan Walton
Jonathan Last from the GOP Bulwark:
- Debating is easy when you are allowed to lie with utter impunity.
- Donald Trump’s mendacity and cognitive impairments were striking, even by his own standards.
- CNN committed malpractice. (Especially when he called DDT “President Trump.)
- Joe Biden clearly had a cold.
- We often over-weight events in the moment.
I wrote yesterday that everything DDT said at the debate were lies. I was wrong: while talking about how climate warming doesn’t need to be stopped, he said,
“We have H20.”
Yup, we have water—at least temporarily. Otherwise Glenn Kessler’s factchecking.
In recommending that people should take the long view instead of a kneejerk reaction to the debate, history scholar Heather Cox Richardson wrote:
“This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
“It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020….
“A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register.”
Satirist Andy Borowitz brings this humor to the debate:
“Alarmed by what she observed in the first presidential debate, a New York woman said on Friday that she was in ‘a state of total panic’ at the thought of four more years with Donald J. Trump.
“She urged all Americans to ‘work harder than ever’ to “prevent such a ghastly outcome from becoming a reality.”
“’We cannot—we must not—let this happen,’ she said. ‘Now is not the time to say, “I don’t care, do u?”
“She also blasted the CNN moderators for failing to fact-check Trump during the debate, adding, ‘I know better than anyone how hard it is to keep up with his lies—but come on.’”
Nel's New Day 
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