SMH

How is this Hobby Lobby crap not cut and dry?

3/26/2014 10:22:30 AM

http://reason.com/blog/2014/03/25/will-the-supreme-court-save-obamacare-ag

Quote :

"Yet when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli attempted to make his case this morning, Roberts wasted little time in attacking the government’s blanket standard. “Every court of appeal to have looked at the situation have held that corporations can bring racial discrimination claims as corporations,” Robertts told Verrilli. “Does the government have a position on whether corporations have a race?” Roberts asked. Verrilli conceded that “corporations can bring those claims.” So why should we view this case differently, Roberts' questioning plainly asked. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan appeared to agree that the government’s stance on for-profit corporations lacked a firm legal footing. You may be able to argue that a specific entity such as Hobby Lobby should not prevail on the merits, Kagan told Verrilli, but “I’m not sure I understand it as a threshold claim that this—that the claim is not recognizable at all.”"

That's sort of the problem the government has in presenting this case.

3/26/2014 7:42:26 PM

Well, we've crafted this legal definition of a "minority owned business" that many kinds of business can certify as. We've also written many protections and benefits into law for those certified businesses. We don't really have that for Christians (yet).

Despite that, in order to claim discrimination, they used the civil rights act which I believe only uses the word person. So they are still relying on corporate personhood. I think racial extension to corporations should be reviewed along with religion.

3/26/2014 10:29:10 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/us/supreme-court-blocks-order-to-restore-7-days-of-voting-in-ohio.html

10/1/2014 5:19:59 PM

Bump for discussion of upcoming shenanigans

6/25/2015 6:24:48 AM

Have the announced what two decisions they're releasing today and tomorrow?

6/25/2015 8:37:09 AM

I don't think they announce the date specific decisions will be released, for whatever reason.


edit:

oh dang, here is a good explainer on how they release decisions:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/supreme-court-explained-obamacare-gay-marriage

Quote :

"How do you know which opinions will come down on which days? You don't. There is no prior notice of how many opinions, or which ones, will drop on any given day. In part, this is because the justices are often finalizing opinions until the last minute—perhaps the day prior. The justices likely want the option to press the pause button on releasing an opinion at any time without the public knowing that they had changed their minds or were continuing to quibble over a case. Some court experts also speculate that financial markets might be a consideration. If the outcome of a case could influence the price of a company's stock, for example, it could be disruptive to announce ahead of time when that opinion is coming."

[Edited on June 25, 2015 at 8:57 AM. Reason : link]

6/25/2015 8:50:37 AM

Yeah, I never got all the media rules for SCOTUS. It's like they're still in the 1800s

6/25/2015 8:57:00 AM

Looks like they upheld Obamacare 6-3, no surprise there.

They also released the Housing Authority case down in Texas, which I know nothing about.

I guess we have to wait till tomorrow or Monday for gay marriage and the EPA mercury rules, which were the two I was most interested in.

6/25/2015 10:20:08 AM

aaronburro is going to be PISSED

6/25/2015 10:25:43 AM

Apparently Scalia wrote the dissent and its full of "zingers toward the majority," (My guess is because his actual arguments are so weak) so I'm sure conservatives will be able to get some mileage out of that.

6/25/2015 10:34:43 AM

that's every decision Scalia writes

6/25/2015 10:38:54 AM

haha troof!!

6/25/2015 10:39:32 AM

Best outcome for the GOP. They can cry and get angry to rile up their constituents but don't have to shoulder the responsibility of fixing something that would have hit deep red areas hard..

6/25/2015 10:44:38 AM

Good shit, this line from the majority is the clincher,

Quote :

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them."

6/25/2015 10:49:10 AM

I was thinking they would overturn it, on the basis that congress shouldn't write technically ambiguous law, but looks like they went with the common sense approach, where it was pretty obvious what the law actually intended.

Congress still needs to pass legislation to fix parts of the law that aren't working though.

6/25/2015 11:28:57 AM

Poor aaronburron

6/25/2015 12:20:15 PM

Republicans would have been screwed if it went the other way. they would have been forced to fix the law they have claiming they are against(yet they keep funding it). would have been kinda funny

[Edited on June 25, 2015 at 1:11 PM. Reason : a]

6/25/2015 1:02:18 PM

You know they would have put that shit off until after the election

6/25/2015 1:14:01 PM

^i dunno, if 8.7 million people lose their health insurance on the same day dont think that's something you can wait around to address.

6/25/2015 1:16:57 PM

^ yeah they would have been forced to put their hands into ACA, and formally make it part of their platform.

As it is now, it's only tacitly part of their platform.

This does allow them to keep attacking ACA until the election though, so it's good in a way they don't have to do anything about it.

The more they can just ignore the law, the more they can blame any democrat for it next election time.

6/25/2015 1:21:16 PM

Robert's opinion is pretty interesting. He didn't go with Chevron deference nor did he buy the government's argument that "Exchange Established by the State" was a term of art. Instead, he basically said the law as written made no fucking sense and was unworkable, so it was the court's job to rewrite it in a way that does make sense. Not sure I agree, but it definitely kills this issue for good because no future President could withhold the subsidies based on the text of the law now.

[Edited on June 25, 2015 at 4:19 PM. Reason : .]

6/25/2015 4:15:44 PM

Yea, it's actually a stronger position than using deference to the agency, pretty surprising.


People that watch the court closely are predicting Scalia to author the Michigan v EPA decision. That does not bode well

6/25/2015 5:11:21 PM

Yeah well, a conservative court wasn't going to give us all liberal opinions. Between EPA and Burwell, I'm glad they saved Obamacare.

6/25/2015 5:41:51 PM

Quote :

" Instead, he basically said the law as written made no fucking sense and was unworkable, so it was the court's job to rewrite it in a way that does make sense. Not sure I agree"

Ditto. It's pretty hoffific reasoning honestly. It sets some pretty terrifying precedent IMO with regards to what the court can do. They aren't really supposed to interpret the intent of a piece of legislation or debate its merit. Their job is to determine constitutionality.

[Edited on June 25, 2015 at 8:05 PM. Reason : Dhdjd]

6/25/2015 8:01:34 PM

Obergefell v Hodges decision today?m

^ is there not a good deal of precedent (or canon or whatever you want to call it) for statutory interpretation?

[Edited on June 26, 2015 at 7:38 AM. Reason : X]

6/26/2015 7:36:50 AM

It's a good precedent that the Supreme Court can interpret laws and not just defer to agency interpretation

6/26/2015 9:31:09 AM

Same sex marriages must be granted, 5-4 with 4 dissents written.

6/26/2015 10:05:54 AM

Quote :

"Ditto. It's pretty hoffific reasoning honestly. It sets some pretty terrifying precedent IMO with regards to what the court can do. They aren't really supposed to interpret the intent of a piece of legislation or debate its merit. Their job is to determine constitutionality. "

I could have chosen my words my words more delicately, he didn't say "the law as written made no fucking sense", it was that two specific sections of the law seemed to be in direct conflict so it was up to the court to resolve it in a way that fit the law's overall intent. Specifically "such Exchange" implied that HHS Exchanges were functionally identical to State Exchanges, while "established by the State" suggested there was some difference. So what he did was look at the rest of the law which made it clear that no, there was never supposed to be any difference between them and that subsidies were always meant to be available on both.

Also, hurray for gays!

[Edited on June 26, 2015 at 10:32 AM. Reason : .]

6/26/2015 10:30:56 AM

Um, Clarence Thomas' dissenting opinion reads like in a different time he would have ruled slavery as constitutional .. Wow.

6/26/2015 10:31:31 AM

Yeah, Thomas and Scalia's opinions are "If it's cool with the majority, it's cool with us"

6/26/2015 10:33:57 AM

It looks like aaronburro was right after all; Gay people are totally free to get married!

6/26/2015 10:42:38 AM

With that and the ACA ruling, I bet he's having a wonderful birthday.

6/26/2015 10:43:45 AM

Scalia's dissent is amazing, it's hard to believe an actual Supreme Court justice wrote this. It reads more like a rant from the conservative blogosphere.

6/26/2015 12:33:01 PM

if anyone else wrote that about their job and posted it, they'd be fired

he can do it because he can't be

6/26/2015 12:35:34 PM

^^what an eye-roller. When has the Court EVER been representative of the country - NEVER, and they've ruled on plenty of similar cases. They aren't ruling on the definition of marriage, they're ruling on due process and equal protection of laws.

At least he is consistent in this case. Here is his dissent from Lawrence v Texas when he tried to convince us that anti-sodomy laws are constitutional

Quote :

" Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.... [T]he Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. ........... So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously "mainstream"; that in most States what the Court calls "discrimination" against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal."

Da HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA strikes again!!!!!!!111oneone What a self-righteous, Ham-fisted blowhard.

I hope whoever dissents in the EPA case on Monday gives him equal venom!!!

6/26/2015 1:50:59 PM

Scalia has always been way too happy to forsake his legal views and come up with some bend-over-backwards batshit rationalization to vote with his moral beliefs.

6/26/2015 7:32:09 PM

Thomas is the one who gets me. The dignity of slavery.....

And Scalia didn't invent any new, funny phrases in this dissent, so I am not sure how serious he is.

6/26/2015 7:47:23 PM

The Gaypocalypse has already begun



[Edited on June 26, 2015 at 9:18 PM. Reason : .]

6/26/2015 8:53:54 PM

Quote :

" is there not a good deal of precedent (or canon or whatever you want to call it) for statutory interpretation?"

Yes, but that's not really what he went with. What his majority opinion says is that what matters is not what the law says, but rather what the intent was when it was passed, which is a bit of a mindfuck. ACA was passed to try to improve access to insurance, so even though what it says in the text is one thing, the intent was to make it more accessible and affordable, therefore we must prop it up and not make the legislature go back and try again with a law that isn't sloppy and full of legal and logical inconsistencies.

It's disconcerting and kind of scary that they ruled this way. I'm sure congress intends all kinds of shit when they pass a law, but intended and unintended consequences of the legislation should not simply be stamped out of existence via the judiciary.

6/27/2015 10:24:20 AM

You're doing some selective omission there. While he does talk about congressional intent, it's totally based on the text of the law, not things congressmen were saying in 2010. The law itself made it clear what congress's intent was, and you can't take 3 words out of context to pervert that intent. It's not disconcerting or scary, it's statutory interpretation 101. It's why morons like me who've never attended a single credit hour of law school can understand it.

[Edited on June 27, 2015 at 10:59 AM. Reason : .]

6/27/2015 10:53:36 AM

I respectfully disagree, and it was apparently a strong enough argument for it to make it to the courts and a strong enough argument to convince 3 judges. The plain language of the law is pretty clear, there wasn't actually much to interpret. It's not far off from the way that they rewrote it the fist time to make it the individual mandate fine into a tax. It's demonstrably clear that it wasn't what the law said, so they chose to ignore that and "interpret" it as a tax.

It's settled law now, but we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that SCOTUS makes the logically or even Constitutionally correct decision every time. These are the fine folks who gave us Citizens United and Kelo v. New London as well. Sadly the court is often far too much of a political entity and not a dispassionate judiciary as they should be.

6/27/2015 11:13:07 AM

^ Hit the nail on the head.

Quote :

"What his majority opinion says is that what matters is not what the law says, but rather what the intent was when it was passed, which is a bit of a mindfuck."

The ridiculous thing is that we have explicit statements from people shortly after the law was passed saying what the intent of the section in question was, but that, apparently doesn't matter. We also have email exchanges from congressmen during the bill crafting stating their explicit concern that states who didn't set up exchanges wouldn't be eligible for subsidies under the wording of the law, but that, too, apparently doesn't matter. Basically, the court used anomalous "congressional intent" to determine if the text was ambiguous, which has little to no precedent in history. Instead, they usually used intent to resolve ambiguity. Here, they just threw out text because it was inconvenient, which almost unheard of in statutory interpretation. This is a purely political decision with absolutely no basis in sound judicial practice.

6/27/2015 9:25:03 PM

For today:

The drug used in that botched execution is fine to use
Arizona Legislature lost and has cede the responsibility of redistricting to an independent commission
EPA must consider the cost of its regulations

6/29/2015 10:40:14 AM

The EPA decision is horrible, the whole point of the EPA rule was to put protecting the environment over costs, like basically every other thing they do. The good news is that most power plants have already made the necessary changes or have invested in doing so since the rules been in effect for 3 years. Democrats need to make protecting the environment a lynchpin issue for 2016 now.

[Edited on June 29, 2015 at 10:59 AM. Reason : .]

6/29/2015 10:56:32 AM

Yeah, the EPA thing is kinda
The death penalty thing I'm good with, but I think we really should move to inert gas suffocation.
The gerrymandering thing is common sense.

6/29/2015 11:00:15 AM

According to a lot of judicial wonks, it's not that big of deal. They'll just reissue the rules with some specific accounting for costs.

6/29/2015 11:21:35 AM

I wonder how the Affirmative action case will go next term

6/29/2015 11:28:59 AM

i have a feeling that a lot of people who have a problem with the supreme court interpreting "by the state" will have no problem with the court interpreting "appropriate" in regards to the EPA decision

6/29/2015 11:43:43 AM

Quote :

"The EPA decision is horrible, the whole point of the EPA rule was to put protecting the environment over costs"

OK, I probably lean more towards being pro-environment than not (or maybe it's that the right has gotten so fringe that they're damned near disdainful of even considering environmental impacts of anything, which may be because over there years, many on the left have done some impractical, silly shit for the cause of environmental protection...)

What I'm getting at is that yes, the whole point of the EPA/environment protection in a broader sense is that we are prioritizing the environment over economics. A market's metric is money, and often short/medium-term money at that. That's why I'm totally comfortable with being a very pro-market capitalist, yet also leaning towards environmental protection--market self-regulation is a wonderful thing, but not always the right metric to evaluate the worth of nature with.

That said, there's a difference between "put[ting] protecting the environment over costs", and "disregarding costs (to include opportunity costs)". The environment shouldn't be an untouchable trump card; that's just as dumb as sacrificing the Earth on the alter of the dollar at every turn without consideration and balance.

[Edited on June 29, 2015 at 1:30 PM. Reason : all of that is abstract and strictly in response to what I quoted; I haven't read the EPA decision]

6/29/2015 1:29:56 PM