A combination of meaningful threat to life, assets, family or freedom is what the duel accomplished. With the courts packed by unqualified partisan hacks it seems we’re facing an unprecedented danger to democracy and the American experiment.
Every SCOTUS Justice, except for for Thomas, was an absolute top-tier jurist at the time they were appointed.
Every SCOTUS Justice, except Thomas, could have received a tenured professorship at any law school in the country, a partnership at any law firm in the country, editorship of almost any law journal in the country, etc.
Any one, including Thomas, would have been welcome as a professor at the Unversities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sydney, etc; a magic circle UK law firm; or as arbiter in international trade.
Any one, including Thomas, would have been a shoe in for attorney general or solicited general of US. Any one, including Thomas, could have gotten a position as US Attorney in either a Democratic or Republican administration.
We have an insanely well qualified SCOTUS, mostly because of how arduous the confirmation process is.
How do you go 10 years without even asking a question (https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/29/politics/supreme-court-claren...) if you're so good you could be an attorney general.
He's lazy, and that's even worse than just being a sex predator (Anita Hill) in the context of jurisprudence. He writes the shortest, shittiest, least well thought out opinions. He's phoning it in and has been for decades now.
Seems that our best justices are "political hacks" and our worst are those who are excellent lawyers. Maybe that's because lawyers are only slightly above "used car salesman" in terms of honesty?
Shit dude, If law credentials mattered, than Comey wouldn't have ever been an attorney (Cooley law, worst law school in america). Was he also a "political hack"?
Make better arguments please, you showed you were capable of it earlier when you wrote the top level justification. Why not do it here?
The two parties and their friends have submitted mountains of briefings before oral argument. The arguments made in front of the court are already fully baked. Oral argument is only a signal on where the justices' thinking is taking them at the time. All of this is public, by the way. You can go read everything on your own (something more people in this thread should do).
Warren had been elected governor of California on both a Republican and Democratic ticket. That’s the very definition of a politician. I don’t have a good definition of hack.
If our best lawyers are no better than used car salesmen, why are they so well regarded internationally?
Because your fellow jurists ask the questions for you.
He explained this position cogently: he does not want to influence the process or the case being presented to him.
When seniority-based speaking order changed during COVID virtual hearings, he started asking questions again.
How exactly do you think a qualified, non-partisan judge should decide cases?
You will hear the same people arguing that Justice Alito should l recuse himself due to his wife’s taste in flags, but Judge Merchan shouldn’t recuse himself from Trump’s trial and sentencing after having been revealed to have made (trivial) donations to anti-Trump political campaigns. It sure looks to me like people prioritising maximising the odds of their desired outcome over consistent principle.
The “very specific and unprotected groups” you are talking about are political movements (even if non-mainstream) and hence expressing support for them is just as much political speech as any political donation is. All political speech, even extremist political speech, is protected in the US by the First Amendment, unless it incites “imminent lawless action” (see Brandenburg v Ohio), or one of the other narrow exceptions provided for by SCOTUS’ jurisprudence.
Actually, it is allowed to limit free speech to meet “compelling state interests”, and I’m pretty sure SCOTUS would uphold limitations on judge’s off-the-job speech when necessary to maintain the appearance of judicial impartiality as such a compelling state interest. By contrast, I doubt they’d view limiting the speech of a judicial spouse as necessary to an equally compelling state interest.
Furthermore, unless you are a believer in coverture, Alito’s actions are separate from those of his wife, so once he made clear the flag was his wife’s decision not his, I don’t see how it is relevant. The law does not demand judges recuse themselves on the basis of views of their spouses which they may not share-especially when his wife’s expressive act was not directly commenting on any specific case, at most it was a vague expression of political affiliation-and it isn’t even clear what she personally understands that flag to mean.
> This is a fallacious argument at best and smells of bad faith engagement.
It isn’t a fallacious argument. Rather, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with you is guilty of “bad faith engagement”-that’s a fallacious argument.
I heard comments like yours all the time when people were saying we needed to take QAnon more seriously. People thought it was fringe, that people concerned were “terminally online.” Even as we saw their talking points work their way into mainstream conservative outlets.
Then January 6th happened. Everyone knows what QAnon is now.
Did you notice that the link in the comment you were replying to, has a photo of that “Appeal to Heaven” flag from a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020? And it seems clear it was being flown by BLM supporters, not anti-BLM counterprotestors.
You want to claim that other meanings are purely historical and in contemporary usage it exclusively means “white Christian nationalist”. If the only other examples of its usage people could point to were from decades ago, your argument might have some force. But, given we have photographic evidence of people with a diametrically opposite ideology using it less than 5 years ago, your argument is not very convincing.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/former-neighbor-disput...
Their bogus excuse is very damning. Or at least real event they used as an excuse, but the timeline doesn’t make sense, so they’re lying.
The article you are citing is relying on the claims of an angry former neighbour. Why assume that the Alito's are lying or mistaken, when it seems just as possible that their ex-neighbour could be.
In any event, even if we assume the ex-neighbour's claims are 100% true, they still don't prove (1) that Martha Alito flew the flag with intention to express a highly specific political message, (2) even supposing that was her intention, it still doesn't prove Samuel Alito was supporting her expressive act, as opposed to simply allowing his wife to do what she wants to do.
Getting abstract and dissembling about it doesn't change the fact that the meaning is clear and obvious to anyone who isn't sea lioning. It's clear to their supporters because it needs to be to be effective.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/former-neighbor-disput...
We can dispute the specifics of his motivations but clearly these have not been simple cases of “I just like the flag.” It’s also pretty bizarre to fly the flag upside down for fun.
My point was not to attack this person individually so you’re right I shouldn’t have worded it in those terms. My point was that virtually everyone who thinks the current Supreme Court is “unqualified” also likely thinks “emanations from penumbras” are constitutional law. It’s like listening to anti-vaxxers talk about the qualifications of doctors.
Almost everyone agrees with you on the emanations of penumbras. Nobody wants that. It was rectified by Casey in 1992.
Roe also claimed abortion was a right because doctors should not worry about the law. Women didn’t have a right to abortion at all. Doctors did. That was fixed by Casey in 1992, and probably a bit early.
Roe hasn’t been the defining law on abortion since 1992 because so many people, pro-choicers especially, regarded it as very flawed.
You are attacking straw men. Please stop.
Casey was the start of the self-licking ice cream cone the abortion right eventually became—asserted to exist because it was said to exist by a precedent nobody could defend.
That says that the list of rights enumerated in the constitution is non-exhaustive. That just means that rights can exist in other places besides the Constitution. But if you want to say there is such a right, you have to identify that right in some other source.
But the “emanations from penumbras” language isn’t referring to a non-enumerated right found somewhere else. It’s saying that the privacy right originates in the “emanations from penumbras” of the constitution. So it’s saying the constitution itself creates that right.
I don’t know how justices should decide cases (not a constitutional law scholar, what are your credentials?) but I know that the majority in this one is wrong and should be impeached. The federalists are a cancer on the legal profession. Failure to self police has allowed them to fester when healthy communities would properly ostracize and treat such demented people but here we are.
Perhaps we can all band together to gift these clowns rvs and luxury vacations to get a public healthcare option for everyone?
Impeach them and ring the Russian Republicans up their hard earned espionage charges
If you don’t know how judges should decide cases, how do you know they are wrong?
Are any of the SCOTUS justices “unqualified”? I think all of them have the kinds of backgrounds you’d expect from a Supreme Court justice-law professorships, appellate courts, etc
Are they the best legal minds available? Arguably not, on both sides - in recent decades, both major parties prioritise political/ideological reliability over legal brilliance. Consider someone like Richard Posner, formerly of the 7th Circuit - many consider him one of the brightest legal minds of his generation, and surely the Supreme Court would have benefited from his membership in it - but he never had much hope, because he was too conservative for Democrats, not conservative enough for Republicans.