SCOTUS

[ggait]

Like I've posted before, the diversity-focused form of AA as practiced at the elite schools means increasing ethnic diversity while still keeping the student body wealthy and high stats. So it has had little to do with enrolling promising striver kids (white, black or brown) from humble backgrounds.

While I find the SCOTUS legal reasoning on this weak, activist and outcome oriented, as a policy matter I'm fine with getting rid of ethnic AA that really doesn't target the kids most deserving of a hand up. If I were a university president (and, very importantly, I had enough money to spend) I'd direct my AA efforts to low SES and first gen kids and I would forget about race. That would be a lot more fair and meritorious, and you'd still get a good amount of ethnic diversity. But it would cost a lot of $$$ to meet your diversity goals by taking more inner city kids (black or white or brown) rather than giving the AA tip to black kids who are internationals or suburbanites or immigrants.

End of day, the schools like diversity so long as it doesn't hurt the test scores and tuition revenue too much.

Great NY Times article below on this aspect.


It’s worth remembering that this pattern has existed despite affirmative action. Nearly every college with an affluent enrollment has historically used race-based admissions policies. Those policies often succeeded at producing racial diversity without producing as much economic diversity.

Creating more economically diverse selective campuses is both difficult and possible.

It is difficult because nearly every aspect of the admissions system favors affluent applicants. They attend better high schools. They receive help on their essays from their highly educated parents. They know how to work the system by choosing character-building extracurricular activities and taking standardized tests multiple times. In many cases — if the applicants are athletes or the children of alumni, donors or faculty members — they benefit from their own version of affirmative action.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/05/brie ... ction.html

[Farfromgeneva]

I am not a great believer in economic modeling over longer periods of time. My nephew makes a wonderful living using it as part of his tool box though. I threw the article in as an add on.

Long Term Capital used a model i believe

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-can ... 20-12?op=1

hmmm, kinda depends on the purpose, doesn't it?

Obviously there are too many exogenous factors to have a high confidence in any one scenario, and certainly not recognizing long-tail risks and appropriately hedging against, can be disastrous.

But we don't actually want to think about government policy in short term versus long term, do we? Or any corporate capital allocation for that matter that has long term consequences. Want to think about that down to the individual level as well...

Rather we want to think about both intended and unintended consequences, both short and long, and what we can do to mitigate or react effectively to the unintended.

But we sure as heck should be making policy based on such, not just what gets people worked up in the short term...too much of that in both government and corporations.

We should "reward" leaders in each who build long term value through strategic analysis of the long term, not the short.

How policy is created today

https://youtu.be/jDHe6jbzvN4

[jhu72]

$1.75 trillion in debt spread over 43 million borrowers = ~$40,000 per borrower on average

This is spread across Americans from 18 years old through 62+.
2.4 million Americans 62 or older are still paying off student loans! The average balance owed by this group is $49,000.
14.4 million Americans 35 - 49 are responsible for the largest volume in debt, $622 billion, with average owed of $44,000.

Student debt is a problem all generations have. 90% of loans are cosigned. The bank lobby is against both the repeal of the bankruptcy provision and the debt forgiveness. The Biden plan would have reduced the student loan debt by less than $860 billion (likely only ~$600 billion). 50% of black adults carry student debt. 47% of white adults carry student debt. 37% of Hispanic/Latino adults carry student debt. 47% of females carry student debt. Only 40% of males carry student debt.

[Farfromgeneva]

$1.75 trillion in debt spread over 43 million borrowers = ~$40,000 per borrower on average

This is spread across Americans from 18 years old through 62+.
2.4 million Americans 62 or older are still paying off student loans! The average balance owed by this group is $49,000.
14.4 million Americans 35 - 49 are responsible for the largest volume in debt, $622 billion, with average owed of $44,000.

Student debt is a problem all generations have. 90% of loans are cosigned. The bank lobby is against both the repeal of the bankruptcy provision and the debt forgiveness. The Biden plan would have reduced the student loan debt by less than $860 billion (likely only ~$600 billion). 50% of black adults carry student debt. 47% of white adults carry student debt. 37% of Hispanic/Latino adults carry student debt. 47% of females carry student debt. Only 40% of males carry student debt.

Boy that $120Bn owed by 62+ is just dead money.

Should be able to afford 6-7% of monthly income for it from what I’ve seen. Loanscience does good modeling work on this. $50k over 20yrs is 2,500/yr in principal, $200/mo. Throw on 6-9% interest, was 3-5 for most of the last decade, on an avg balance of half that and you’re at $400-$500/mo which is less than an avg new car payment these days. Typically a 20yr loan add about 1.7% to the interest rate and you get your mortgage/coupon constant rate. (Ie 6-9% + 1.7% is the payment rate)

[jhu72]

I was surprised by the demographic spread of what is owed. The bulk is not owed by those 23 and under, the numbers seem reasonable. The next two age groups covering 26 to 53 is where the problem really begins. People falling behind. You have to do a lot of falling behind to take an original 10K debt and turn it into 40+K debt.

Just for kicks I worked out approx. what ethnic groups owe what. White students owe 57% of the 1.7 trillion; Hispanics owe 29% of the 1.7 trillion; Blacks owe 14% of the 1.7 trillion. These are all poor people.

[Farfromgeneva]

I was surprised by the demographic spread of what is owed. The bulk is not owed by those 23 and under, the numbers seem reasonable. The next two age groups covering 26 to 53 is where the problem really begins. People falling behind. You have to do a lot of falling behind to take an original 10K debt and turn it into 40+K debt.

Just for kicks I worked out approx. what ethnic groups owe what. White students owe 57% of the 1.7 trillion; Hispanics owe 29% of the 1.7 trillion; Blacks owe 14% of the 1.7 trillion. These are all poor people.

It’s the 35-49 that’s concerning but that doesn’t have anything to do with early household formation or buying homes. My sister just paid off her student debt from Emerson college grad school in drama with money from my mothers death. And she stopped stage directing to be a full time mother 20+yes ago (she’ll be 57 end of aug). But while being a true social justice warrior in the Bay Area who’s all for many wealth transfers she looks inwardly first and acknowledges her own choices, profligacy and mistakes in her position. I begged her to move back East to a cheaper spot of years but she liked the impact the area was having on her and her kids. They seem fine now but it was a struggle.

Wiping out debt for 30yr olds now is offensive not to me but to my sister and people like her. To me I don’t care on a personal level because these folks will mess up again and it won’t bite into my lifestyle.

[Seacoaster(1)]

From Linda Greenhouse in the Times:

“The end of a Supreme Court term always sparks a lively conversation about how to characterize what just happened, and this year was no exception. In refusing to weaken the Voting Rights Act any further, did the court show itself to be a bit less dogmatically conservative than the year before? Did the 6-to-3 rejection of a dangerous theory that would have stripped state courts of the authority to review election laws show that the justices could still build bridges across their ideological divide?

Yes, democracy survived, and that’s a good thing. But to settle on that theme is to miss the point of a term that was in many respects the capstone of the 18-year tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts. To understand today’s Supreme Court, to see it whole, demands a longer timeline. To show why, I offer a thought experiment. Suppose a modern Rip Van Winkle went to sleep in September 2005 and didn’t wake up until last week. Such a person would awaken in a profoundly different constitutional world, a world transformed, term by term and case by case, at the Supreme Court’s hand.

To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.

These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them. In fact, to any conservative longing for change, the situation in 2005 must have appeared grim indeed. Not only had the Rehnquist court reaffirmed the right to abortion in the 1992 Casey decision; in 2000 it overturned a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, a law aimed at enlisting the court in a graphic anti-abortion narrative.

On gun rights, the court was maintaining a decades-long silence despite Justice Clarence Thomas’s public call in 1997 to revisit the Second Amendment and the George W. Bush administration’s startling advice to the court five years later that the federal government was ready, for the first time, to support the individual-right position on the ownership of firearms when an appropriate case arrived.

The Grutter decision in 2003, upholding affirmative action in admission to the University of Michigan’s law school, appeared to put racially conscious admissions decisions on a solid footing, at least for 25 more years.

On religion, a 1990 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia held that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause ordinarily did not provide a religious opt out from compliance with laws that applied to everyone. And one of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s last major opinions, Locke v. Davey, called for maintaining a cautious “play in the joints” between free exercise and the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the establishment clause. (“In other words,” as the court put it, “there are some state actions permitted by the establishment clause but not required by the free exercise clause.”) The decision rejected the claim that a state offering scholarships for postsecondary education had to cover study for the ministry as well. There is little doubt that the same case would come out differently today.

Finally, actions of the federal agencies that make up the administrative state were largely insulated from judicial review based on the court’s 1984 Chevron decision, requiring courts to defer to an agency’s plausible interpretation of its own authority if Congress had failed to speak precisely to the question at hand.

That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court.

It’s worth reviewing how the court accomplished each of the goals. It deployed a variety of tools and strategies. Precedents that stood in the way were either repudiated outright, as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did last year to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or were simply rendered irrelevant — abandoned, in the odd euphemism the court has taken to using. In its affirmative action decision declaring race-conscious university admissions to be unconstitutional, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion did not overturn the 2003 Grutter decision explicitly. But Justice Thomas was certainly correct in his concurring opinion when he wrote that it was “clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”

Likewise, the court has not formally overruled its Chevron decision. Its administrative-law decisions have just stopped citing that 1984 precedent as authority. The justices have simply replaced Chevron’s rule of judicial deference with its polar opposite, a new rule that goes by the name of the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court will uphold an agency’s regulatory action on a major question only if Congress’s grant of authority to the agency on the particular issue was explicit. Deference, in other words, is now the exception, no longer the rule.

But how to tell a major question from an ordinary one? No surprise there: The court itself will decide. While the ratio of major questions to ordinary questions of administrative law remains to be seen, it’s hard to envision an issue important and contentious enough to make it to the Supreme Court not being regarded as major by justices who flaunt their skepticism of the administrative state.

Justice Neil Gorsuch was candid about this in a concurring opinion last year when the court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants. The major questions doctrine, he explained, “applies when an agency claims the power to resolve a matter of great ‘political significance.’” What is a better indicator of political significance than sustained conservative backlash? Last year’s environmental case set the stage for the court’s June 30 decision overturning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program.

The Heller decision in 2008 opened the Second Amendment door a crack, granting individuals the right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense. Chafing at Heller’s limited scope, Justice Thomas complained repeatedly over the next 14 years that the court was treating the Second Amendment as a “second-class right.” He finally won the day with the Bruen decision in 2022, a breathtakingly broad opinion rejecting any limitation on gun ownership that can’t be tied to an analogous limitation in the 18th century. On June 30, the court agreed to hear United States v. Rahimi, which will put this approach to the test. The question in the case is whether the Second Amendment allows the government to bar gun ownership by an individual under a restraining order for domestic violence. That the answer actually might be “no” — domestic violence wasn’t even a concept in the 18th century, when the Second Amendment was adopted — is too astonishing to contemplate.

And then there is religion and the case of the web designer who sought the right to refuse to design websites for same-sex couples celebrating a marriage. I was baffled when the court agreed to hear the designer’s appeal in February of last year, and not only because the designer, Lorie Smith, had not yet designed a wedding website for a paying customer and hadn’t turned anyone away — indications that the case wasn’t ripe for review.

Her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom, a hard-right Christian litigating group, asked the court to decide whether Colorado’s law prohibiting businesses from discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. people violated either Ms. Smith’s right to freedom of religion or to free speech. The court agreed to hear only the speech question. I didn’t see how the two questions could be disentangled, given that Ms. Smith sought the right to post a statement on her web page explaining that it was for religious reasons that she was unable to create a website for a same-sex wedding. In other words, it was religion that inextricably fueled her free-speech claim.

Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion, in fact, took pains to nest the religious essence of the case so deeply in the discussion of free speech that even a well-informed reader might not realize what the decision accomplished: The court has created a religious opt-out from compliance with laws that govern the commercial marketplace. He found a First Amendment violation in the fact that if Ms. Smith went into the wedding website design business, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law would require her to take all customers. His opinion cites many First Amendment precedents, including the right not to salute the flag, the right of private parade organizers not to include a gay organization among the marchers and the right of the Boy Scouts not to retain a gay scoutmaster.

But none of those precedents are relevant, because none involved discrimination by a commercial entity. It is only on the first page of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that a reader will comprehend clearly what just happened: “Today, the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

A full understanding of this case, 303 Creative L.L.C. v. Elenis, requires context. It is now eight years since the court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Of the six members in the majority in 303 Creative, three were on the court for Obergefell, and all three — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito — were dissenters. Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion, which Justice Thomas joined, was bitter. The decision would be “used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” he warned. Since then, those two justices have been searching for an Obergefell victim whose plight would vindicate their expressed concern. It wasn’t easy, but finally, despite the appeal’s obvious procedural flaws, in 303 Creative they found one.

My focus here on what these past 18 years have achieved has been on the court itself. But of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t stand alone. Powerful social and political movements swirl around it, carefully cultivating cases and serving them up to justices who themselves were propelled to their positions of great power by those movements. The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize. That may not be apparent on a day-to-day or even a term-by-term basis. But from the perspective of 18 years, that conclusion is as unavoidable as it is frightening.“

[ggait]

NY Times uncovers yet another trove of undisclosed Clarence Thomas freebies from billionaires — free vacations, free private jet rides, sideline or luxury box sports tickets, etc. etc. etc.

[Seacoaster(1)]

The Bruen “history test” would seem to hardly even apply to domestic abusers, basically unknown un-talked about and un-regulated in the 18th century. Now what?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/opin ... court.html

“How much further will the Supreme Court go to assist in the arming of America? That has been the question since last June, when the court ruled that New York’s century-old gun licensing law violated the Second Amendment. Sooner than expected, we are likely to find out the answer.

On March 17, the Biden administration asked the justices to overturn an appeals court decision that can charitably be described as nuts, and accurately as pernicious. The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit invalidated a federal law that for almost 30 years has prohibited gun ownership by people who are subject to restraining orders for domestic violence.

The Fifth Circuit upheld the identical law less than three years ago. But that was before President Donald Trump put a Mississippi state court judge named Cory Wilson on the appeals court. (As a candidate for political office in 2015, Wilson said in a National Rifle Association questionnaire that he opposed both background checks on private gun sales and state licensing requirements for potential gun owners.)

Judge Wilson wrote in a decision handed down in March that the appeals court was forced to repudiate its own precedent by the logic of the Supreme Court’s decision in the New York licensing case. He was joined by another Trump judge, James Ho, and by Edith Jones, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan; Judge Jones has long been one of the most aggressive conservatives on the country’s most conservative appeals court.

Now it is up to the justices to say whether that analysis is correct.

Fifteen years after the Supreme Court’s Heller decision interpreted the Second Amendment to convey an individual right to own a gun, there is no overstating the significance of the choice the court has been asked to make. Heller was limited in scope: It gave Americans a constitutional right to keep handguns at home for self-defense. The court’s decision last June in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen was on the surface also quite limited, striking down a law that required a showing of special need in order to obtain an unrestricted license to carry a concealed gun outside the home. New York was one of only a half-dozen states with such a requirement, as the court put it in the Bruen decision.

What was not limited about the New York decision — indeed, what was radical — was the analysis that Justice Clarence Thomas employed in his opinion for the 6-3 majority. Following Heller, courts had evaluated gun restrictions by weighing the personal Second Amendment claim against the government’s interest in the particular regulation, a type of balancing test that has long been common in constitutional adjudication. The Bruen decision rejected that approach, instead placing history above all else.

“The government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms,” Justice Thomas wrote.

As a result of that decision, Shawn Hubler, a national correspondent for The Times, reported earlier this month, “gun historians across the country are in demand like never before as lawyers must now comb through statutes drafted in the Colonial era and the early years of the Republic to litigate modern firearms restrictions.”

She noted that “cases now explore weapons bans in early saloons, novelty air rifles on the Lewis and Clark expedition, concealed carry restrictions on bowie knives and 18th-century daggers known as ‘Arkansas toothpicks,’ and a string-operated ‘trap gun’ that may or may not be comparable to an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.”

Judge Wilson, in his opinion for the Fifth Circuit, said the prohibition on gun ownership by a person under a court-ordered restraining order for domestic violence failed “the historical tradition” test crafted by Justice Thomas. While there were laws at the time of the country’s founding that disarmed people who were deemed “disloyal” or “unacceptable,” Judge Wilson asserted that the purpose of those laws was to safeguard the “political and social order” rather than to protect individuals from violence. Consequently, he said, the old laws were not sufficiently “relevantly similar” to the modern law, known as Section 922(g)(8) of the U.S. Code, to meet the Supreme Court’s history test.

The defendant in this case, Zackey Rahimi, was under a restraining order after he allegedly assaulted and threatened to shoot his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, when he went on a shooting spree, firing a weapon on five different occasions around Arlington, Texas. He pleaded guilty to violating Section 922(g)(8) while at the same time challenging the law’s constitutionality.

Mr. Rahimi, “while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless among ‘the people’ entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees,” Judge Wilson wrote. Noting that a court-ordered restraining order is civil rather than criminal in nature, Judge Wilson asked rhetorically whether, if Mr. Rahimi’s civil offense was enough to disqualify him from owning a gun, as the law required, a similar disqualification might apply to those who violate a speed limit or fail to recycle.

Clearly, the question now for the Supreme Court is not only the validity of one statute but also how the Bruen decision’s newly minted “historical tradition” requirement will apply to any and all gun regulations. The Fifth Circuit offered a lazy and cherry-picked history that “missed the forest for the trees,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the government’s Supreme Court petition.

While it was clear that “dangerous individuals could be disarmed” at the time of the Constitution’s framing, she wrote, the Fifth Circuit treated “even minor and immaterial distinctions between historical laws and their modern counterparts as a sufficient reason to find modern laws unconstitutional.” Under such an analysis, she argued, “few modern statutes would survive judicial review.” (While the Supreme Court is not obliged to hear the government’s appeal, United States v. Rahimi, the court almost never declines to review a decision that has invalidated a federal statute.)

In a forthcoming article, Professors Joseph Blocher of Duke Law School and Reva B. Siegel of Yale point out that there is a reason for the failure of early American lawmakers to consider domestic violence a reason to take away an abuser’s gun: The very concept of domestic violence was alien to the Constitution’s framers because wives were completely subordinate to their husbands and wife beating was widely tolerated.

In enacting Section 922(g)(8) in 1994, they write, “Congress acted to alter the government’s historical refusal to intervene in intimate partner violence — a failure that was rooted in the belief that a man had authority to ‘correct’ subordinate members of the household, including his wife.” They note that “government response to violence between intimates only began to shift in the 1970s as this system of gender hierarchy began slowly to break down.” Protecting women from intimate partner violence is thus inherent in, and not — as the Fifth Circuit assumed — different from protecting the “political and social order.”

There is no doubt that under the old interest-balancing test, the government would prevail. The interest in keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers is that obvious, as even the Fifth Circuit found in 2020. “The parties agree,” the court noted then, “that reducing domestic gun abuse is not just an important government interest, but a compelling one. They only dispute whether §922(g)(8) is reasonably adapted to that interest. We hold that it is.”

The government’s petition points out that there are more than one million acts of domestic violence in the United States every year “and the presence of a gun in a house with a domestic abuser increases the risk of homicide sixfold.”

Will a fact like that matter to the Supreme Court? Do facts still matter at all? That may now be the most urgent question this case presents, not only to the court but to the country.“

[MDlaxfan76]

I'd be willing to bet that this Court upholds the radical decision of the 5th Circuit, using Thomas' quite radical "historical" logic as the basis, and we will go into a death spiral of spreading radical reversals of gun regulation across the country.

Akin to what we're seeing with reproductive rights, it's going to get very, very ugly before reaching a nadir.
(I don't think we've reached it yet with reproductive rights, though the past year it has been stunning to see how radical many legislatures and Governors can be)

But the 'logic' here is the opposite principal of 'state's rights'...with guns we will be subject to the fiat of unelected federal judges on the basis of only their own assumptions of what the Framers meant to achieve with the Constitution, despite decades and even centuries of other federal judges coming to quite the opposite conclusion as to how to balance interests, as they believed the Framers intended to be done on an ongoing basis.

Both logics, 'state's rights' and 'historical', are the made-up out of whole cloth construction of the Federalist Society.

Longstanding precedents and balance of competing interests are tossed out in favor of the ideological objectives of a minority. That's the expressed goal, and they are achieving it bit by bit. And accelerating now...

At what point can this be reversed?

IMO, when swing voters decide that these issues are more important than other reasons to vote for the politicians who pledge themselves to the Federalist Society, whether they do so loudly or quietly.

For instance, perceived economic interests typically drive these choices...but will reproductive rights and gun violence overcome, for a sustained period, perceived economic interests?

But this swing needs to be large and loud, if it's going to actually result in Constitutional amendments or sustained strongly enough to result in a substantial change in the composition of the federal courts and SCOTUS.

Meanwhile, the Federalist Society members of the Court have been creating various barriers to majoritarian outcomes. SCOTUS pulled back from a truly off the wall anti-democratic opportunity to go further this term, but the generalized work to create friction for majorities continues largely unchecked in the states. They know they can't achieve these ideological social objectives through majority voting...

[jhu72]

... where is a Pelican with a long gun when you need one?

[cradleandshoot]

The deep dive is expanding to other justices. Justice Sotomayors staff may have been "encouraging" public colleges where she spoke to "purchase" her book. FTR I have no problem with that. It is easy to see why some people might think that is pretty hinky. It probably is time for ethical standards for the SCOTUS. IMO Justice Roberts has to initiate some process of process to get the ball rolling. Trying to achieve a rough draft would a challenge in itself.

[ggait]

Guess they disagree with Scalia, who said the following in Heller (2008):

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26

26 We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.

As Scalia notes, taking guns away from people who are dangerous, crazy or criminals has long been considered legal. Even by conservatives.

[MDlaxfan76]

Guess they disagree with Scalia, who said the following in Heller (2008):

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26

26 We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.

As Scalia notes, taking guns away from people who are dangerous, crazy or criminals has long been considered legal. Even by conservatives.

Yup, this is radicalism not conservatism.

[get it to x]

Guess they disagree with Scalia, who said the following in Heller (2008):

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26

26 We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.

As Scalia notes, taking guns away from people who are dangerous, crazy or criminals has long been considered legal. Even by conservatives.

Yup, this is radicalism not conservatism.

I am a Constitutionalist, and I agree with you 100%. The fine line is how easy or hard it is to prove who's crazy or dangerous

[ggait]

In this SCOTUS case, it was clearly determined by a court that the dude was very dangerous.

Drug dealer, history of armed violence, threats to shoot the girlfriend, protective custody order, etc.

Maybe this one will turn out to be another one where cjr and bkav decide to back away from the full cray cray.

[Seacoaster(1)]

Great article:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... gance.html

[jhu72]

A second lie discovered in the wedding website case! This SCOTUS ruling cannot be allowed to stand, nor can a court controlled by outlaw justices. The frauds who brought the case must be punished.

[Seacoaster(1)]

Seems a little different than jetting around to hook big fish, or enjoy the yacht:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... pi-ethics/

"One rainy day in April 2019, my phone buzzed and the caller ID lit up with “Supreme Court.” I stared at the two words for a moment. Was I in trouble?

Then I remembered.

A few months earlier, I’d sent Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor a letter inviting her to speak at the Mississippi Book Festival, which runs every August. Our offer was the same as it had been for other authors: a $250 stipend, a ride to and from the airport and a large, appreciative audience. In addition, we would purchase 1,500 copies of Sotomayor’s books to give to students. Could the justice please travel to Jackson, Miss., to talk to kids for two days? In the hottest time of the year?

My rainy-day call was a response from her assistant, Anh Le.

I have lately been double-checking my communications with Le in light of the Associated Press report saying Sotomayor’s staff “has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009.” Like many Americans, I’m appalled by reports of private jets, yachts, fishing trips and other lavish gifts accepted by some of our Supreme Court justices. I went back to my emails and notes and wondered: Had I “bribed” Justice Sotomayor to come to Mississippi?

I help run a family foundation that focuses on education and literacy, especially for disadvantaged young people. Among the things we support are college scholarships, book groups in prisons, a community reading program and the Mississippi Book Festival — which includes an event called KidsNote, where children can meet featured authors and receive a copy of their books. We look for authors with a new book that will appeal to young readers.

Sotomayor’s “Turning Pages,” aimed at children ages 4 to 8, had come out in 2018. In her 2013 memoir suitable for young adults, “My Beloved World,” Sotomayor wrote about reading and the importance of education in her life, as well as her challenges with diabetes. I was sure that both books would resonate with Mississippi students. During our call, Le said the offer was interesting; the justice had never been to Mississippi. I outlined the potential impact Sotomayor would have on students, noting our state’s high poverty rate and its problem with childhood diabetes.

Le said she would get back to me.

And she did, with a few more questions — details about flight connections, book-signing and so on. I said we would be happy to upgrade her flight. Nope, the publisher was handling her flight. I said we’d be happy to upgrade her hotel room. Nope, the justice was fine with a Marriott, plus her security detail was familiar with the layout.

So far, so good.

Subsequent emails and phone conversations were similar. No, Le said, the justice did not need us to provide lunch or dinner. No, she could not accept the $250 stipend.

Did Le urge me to buy more books? No. She did ask whether we wanted any of the copies of “My Beloved World” to be in Spanish. In fact, we did, and I hadn’t thought to order them.

When Sotomayor came to Jackson, we had her speaking in the sanctuary at Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, the church where Eudora Welty once worshiped. Backstage, Sotomayor smiled when she saw my clipboard of questions. She helped me with my tote bag full of books. She then clapped her hands together and said something like, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

In addition to our planned onstage interview, she said, she wanted the freedom to go off-script. “They’re children,” I recall her saying. “I want to be sure I get to their questions.”

“Perfect,” I said.

So the justice took a seat in one of the side pews and watched as Dav Pilkey, the author and illustrator of “Captain Underpants,” entertained a delighted audience of about a thousand students, drawing cartoons as he spoke. Then, it was our turn on the stage. I asked my clipboard questions and Sotomayor answered. Afterward, she got up and spoke from the heart, walking up and down the aisles.

In answer to the students’ questions, she told them about growing up in Puerto Rico, eating mangoes off the tree, going away to college for the first time and working in a male-dominated court system.

She talked to these kids. She asked them their names, what they liked in school, what they wanted to do with their lives. She hugged them and posed for pictures with them. After she finished, she signed their books and took more pictures.

“My success came about because I read,” she told them.

The following morning, we did it all over again for another packed sanctuary, with Sotomayor telling even more personal stories about her life and talking about a civics program she and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch work on. She also gave us homework: Go out and make friends with someone who doesn’t look like you.

My only regret is that we ran out of books. I wish we had ordered more.

There very well might be a culture of poor ethical conduct in the Supreme Court, but there is no moral equivalency between justices accepting rides on private jets to vacation with friends who had cases before the court and Sotomayor talking about her books and her life to a crowd of mesmerized young readers.

The standard royalty rate for authors is less than 10 percent of the sales price. I don’t know anything about Sotomayor’s deal with her publishers, but 10 percent would make her cut of the 1,500 books our foundation purchased approximately $2,250 — for which she had to fly to Mississippi and give two presentations. During the hottest month of the year.

Was that a bribe? You be the judge."

[Typical Lax Dad]