SCOTUS

[PizzaSnake]

Wonder if Clarence reported all of these “gifts” as income on his tax returns? Obviously, they weren’t things given to him as a result of “detached and disinterested generosity” if I remember the phrase from law school correctly.

Yep, you remember correctly. The seminal case is Glenshaw Glass.

There's plenty of meat here for the IRS. If it is a gift, then the sponsors could not deduct the costs as business expenses. What are the odds the billionaires paid income tax on the amount gifted CT? Further, if it is a gift, then those gifts must be reported by the donors and their unified credit must be reduced. What are the odds these gifts were properly reported as gifts?

If it's not a gift, then you're right - it's income to CT.

But the IRS won't have time for this. Has anyone seen the results of TIGTA investigation into the audit selection of McCabe and Comey?

Not a gift, it’s a grift…

[dislaxxic]

The Most Galling Part of Clarence Thomas’ Latest Ethics Disclosure

Unfortunately, Thomas has not always been on the losing side of these cases; in fact, he wrote the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Florida, a particularly egregious 5–4 decision in 2007. The facts were depressingly familiar: A lawyer for Gary Lawrence, who contested his death sentence, missed a deadline that prevented him from seeking relief. Lawrence asked for an extension, equitable tolling, citing his attorney’s error. Thomas refused. Writing for the court, he explained, “If credited, this argument would essentially equitably toll limitations periods for every person whose attorney missed a deadline. Attorney miscalculation is simply not sufficient to warrant equitable tolling, particularly in the postconviction context where prisoners have no constitutional right to counsel.”

Marvel at this irony: Clarence Thomas had the assistance of every lawyer he could ever want in drafting his financial disclosures. Indeed, he subtly threw some of them under the bus in his Thursday amendments, suggesting that any genuine errors can be pinned back on bad advice received from the Judicial Conference of the United States, which advises and adjudicates judicial ethics compliance and which revised its reporting requirements earlier this year in the wake of the Thomas revelations. The justice has—as is increasingly evident—ample resources to pay his lawyers, unlike the indigent defendants who are often given minimal or substandard representation by attorneys with hundreds of other cases to juggle. He also has ample time in which to comply with a standard disclosure process followed by thousands of other public officials, unlike capital defendants who face onerous deadlines with little or no information on how to meet them.

At the bare minimum, Thomas’ new filing proves that even the most powerful jurists and attorneys make errors, grievous ones, all the time. Instead of stating that with humility and offering the same grace to others, the justice has taken the opportunity to remind us that when his errors are pointed out, it’s a weaponization of the legal system by malign haters. For Thomas, equal justice under the law means that to err is human when the powerful do it, and that deciding which errors are trivial, and thus forgivable, is what makes him nothing short of divine.

..

[dislaxxic]

Brett Kavanaugh’s Whoopsie Forces Groundhog Day at the Supreme Court

Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.


Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.

The third full term in thrall to the 6–3 supermajority is now upon us, and it brings yet another crisis of the court’s own making: The Alabama Legislature has defied meticulous instructions to create a second congressional district in the state where Black residents could effectuate their voting power. In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.

Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.

There’s a lot to hate about starting off a third term of the Supreme Court under the shadow of both ethical scandals and a state’s decision to simply ignore an express opinion of the court while the ink on that decision is still wet. It calls to mind the era in which Southern states disregarded the holding of Brown v. Board of Education because, well, who was gonna make them do otherwise? And indeed, even if one was on the losing side of Milligan, it’s hard to imagine that to any justice on the current court the fact of state nullification feels awesome. No matter where you come down on the issue of judicial legitimacy, states flipping the bird at the highest court of the land is a bad look.

But there’s something else happening here, and it’s worth a mention. It’s not just that state legislators and lower court judges have become so certain that they have six justices to rubber stamp anything that they are now prepared to try anything. It’s also that they no longer believe in the legal process at all; as the Nation’s Elie Mystal noted, drug dealers display more transactional deftness than Alabama lawmakers. Years ago, there was an elaborate ritual dance: Justice Clarence Thomas would drop a line in an opinion or a dissent that someone should bring a challenge to X or Y, and in the fullness of time, some group would bring the challenge. It would take a few years, sure, but the case would be tried, a record would be developed, an appeal would be filed, and the case would duly arrive at the court, awaiting its resolution. The nondelegation doctrine. The individual right to bear arms. The end of preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. The return of state-sponsored prayer. The gutting of the Eighth Amendment. Thomas precipitated all of these developments by putting out a call for a case that was answered by conservative litigators plotting their next challenge.

But Kavanaugh finds himself at this unfortunate moment in Supreme Court history in which nobody cares to do any of those steps anymore: He sends his smoke signal to the litigants, and they just straight up defy the court’s orders. It’s not just that the dog has caught the car with the conservative legal movement’s capture of the Supreme Court. It’s that the dog has eaten the car and spits it out anytime its honks are not to the dog’s liking. Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Milligan does not read as a road map for Alabama to disobey this very ruling; rather, it appears to be a warning that the justice may not enforce the Voting Rights Act in future rounds of redistricting over the coming years. In the old days, litigants would’ve grasped this distinction. When Thomas mused that the Second Amendment might protect a personal right to own firearms in 1997, he was not encouraging gun owners to start ignoring state gun regulations, but planting the seeds for a someday in the future ruling (which came with 2008’s D.C. v. Heller).

Read the whole thing.

..

[Seacoaster(1)]

Brett Kavanaugh’s Whoopsie Forces Groundhog Day at the Supreme Court

Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.


Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.

The third full term in thrall to the 6–3 supermajority is now upon us, and it brings yet another crisis of the court’s own making: The Alabama Legislature has defied meticulous instructions to create a second congressional district in the state where Black residents could effectuate their voting power. In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.

Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.

There’s a lot to hate about starting off a third term of the Supreme Court under the shadow of both ethical scandals and a state’s decision to simply ignore an express opinion of the court while the ink on that decision is still wet. It calls to mind the era in which Southern states disregarded the holding of Brown v. Board of Education because, well, who was gonna make them do otherwise? And indeed, even if one was on the losing side of Milligan, it’s hard to imagine that to any justice on the current court the fact of state nullification feels awesome. No matter where you come down on the issue of judicial legitimacy, states flipping the bird at the highest court of the land is a bad look.

But there’s something else happening here, and it’s worth a mention. It’s not just that state legislators and lower court judges have become so certain that they have six justices to rubber stamp anything that they are now prepared to try anything. It’s also that they no longer believe in the legal process at all; as the Nation’s Elie Mystal noted, drug dealers display more transactional deftness than Alabama lawmakers. Years ago, there was an elaborate ritual dance: Justice Clarence Thomas would drop a line in an opinion or a dissent that someone should bring a challenge to X or Y, and in the fullness of time, some group would bring the challenge. It would take a few years, sure, but the case would be tried, a record would be developed, an appeal would be filed, and the case would duly arrive at the court, awaiting its resolution. The nondelegation doctrine. The individual right to bear arms. The end of preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. The return of state-sponsored prayer. The gutting of the Eighth Amendment. Thomas precipitated all of these developments by putting out a call for a case that was answered by conservative litigators plotting their next challenge.

But Kavanaugh finds himself at this unfortunate moment in Supreme Court history in which nobody cares to do any of those steps anymore: He sends his smoke signal to the litigants, and they just straight up defy the court’s orders. It’s not just that the dog has caught the car with the conservative legal movement’s capture of the Supreme Court. It’s that the dog has eaten the car and spits it out anytime its honks are not to the dog’s liking. Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Milligan does not read as a road map for Alabama to disobey this very ruling; rather, it appears to be a warning that the justice may not enforce the Voting Rights Act in future rounds of redistricting over the coming years. In the old days, litigants would’ve grasped this distinction. When Thomas mused that the Second Amendment might protect a personal right to own firearms in 1997, he was not encouraging gun owners to start ignoring state gun regulations, but planting the seeds for a someday in the future ruling (which came with 2008’s D.C. v. Heller).

Read the whole thing.

..

“No matter where you come down on the issue of judicial legitimacy, states flipping the bird at the highest court of the land is a bad look.”

And revisiting this decision with anything other than a rebuke of the Alabama Legislature will confirm the Court’s lack of legitimacy as anything like impartial. A short, vicious per curiam order is all that is needed. I’m skeptical that’ll happen with this set of robed politicians, particularly the most political creature of them all, Kavanaugh.

[PizzaSnake]

More evidence of the Solomonic wisdom of John “Balls and strikes” Roberts.

“ The Republican-led legislatures of Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama find themselves backed against courtroom walls this month in strikingly similar circumstances, defending congressional maps that federal judges have said appear to discriminate against Black voters.

It is a familiar position. Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway.

With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states.

Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes.”

What a putz!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/us/r ... siana.html

[Kismet]

ProPublica nails Justice Thomas yet again

https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... nts-scotus
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events
(which he did not disclose - surprise!)

[Seacoaster(1)]

ProPublica nails Justice Thomas yet again

https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... nts-scotus
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events
(which he did not disclose - surprise!)

There’s always more. Just a disgrace.

[a fan]

ProPublica nails Justice Thomas yet again

https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... nts-scotus
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events
(which he did not disclose - surprise!)

There’s always more. Just a disgrace.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/false-l ... reme-court

Headline: False leftist attacks on Justice Thomas are part of pressure campaign to undermine Supreme Court
Justice Thomas has too much moral integrity to be harmed by manufactured leftist attacks


This is why our nation is falling apart: never hold anyone on "your" team to account. Let them them be the biggest POS imaginable, and cheer it on. Trump getting indicted is a point of pride for Republicans.

[Farfromgeneva]

ProPublica nails Justice Thomas yet again

https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... nts-scotus
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events
(which he did not disclose - surprise!)

There’s always more. Just a disgrace.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/false-l ... reme-court

Headline: False leftist attacks on Justice Thomas are part of pressure campaign to undermine Supreme Court
Justice Thomas has too much moral integrity to be harmed by manufactured leftist attacks


This is why our nation is falling apart: never hold anyone on "your" team to account. Let them them be the biggest POS imaginable, and cheer it on. Trump getting indicted is a point of pride for Republicans.

The thing is hes just as crappy a criminal as he is a human being or businessman.

This is an outlaw (one of the baddest tv characters ever-compare and contrast):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6KBbWvEtLEs

[cradleandshoot]

ProPublica nails Justice Thomas yet again

https://www.propublica.org/article/clar ... nts-scotus
Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events
(which he did not disclose - surprise!)

There’s always more. Just a disgrace.

I'll bet dollars to donuts that Justice Thomas doesn't give a rats rear end about what you or any of the other insignificant legal peons think. Why should he?? This black man found his own path to getting reparations from the government. FTR I think he is no legal eagle. He does understand how the system works and takes advantage of every legal loophole. He is no different than every other Senator or Congress person who came to DC without a pot to pee in and leaves decades later a multi millionaire. They all must have really good financial advisors?

[Seacoaster(1)]

Brett Kavanaugh’s Whoopsie Forces Groundhog Day at the Supreme Court

Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.


Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.

The third full term in thrall to the 6–3 supermajority is now upon us, and it brings yet another crisis of the court’s own making: The Alabama Legislature has defied meticulous instructions to create a second congressional district in the state where Black residents could effectuate their voting power. In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.

Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.

There’s a lot to hate about starting off a third term of the Supreme Court under the shadow of both ethical scandals and a state’s decision to simply ignore an express opinion of the court while the ink on that decision is still wet. It calls to mind the era in which Southern states disregarded the holding of Brown v. Board of Education because, well, who was gonna make them do otherwise? And indeed, even if one was on the losing side of Milligan, it’s hard to imagine that to any justice on the current court the fact of state nullification feels awesome. No matter where you come down on the issue of judicial legitimacy, states flipping the bird at the highest court of the land is a bad look.

But there’s something else happening here, and it’s worth a mention. It’s not just that state legislators and lower court judges have become so certain that they have six justices to rubber stamp anything that they are now prepared to try anything. It’s also that they no longer believe in the legal process at all; as the Nation’s Elie Mystal noted, drug dealers display more transactional deftness than Alabama lawmakers. Years ago, there was an elaborate ritual dance: Justice Clarence Thomas would drop a line in an opinion or a dissent that someone should bring a challenge to X or Y, and in the fullness of time, some group would bring the challenge. It would take a few years, sure, but the case would be tried, a record would be developed, an appeal would be filed, and the case would duly arrive at the court, awaiting its resolution. The nondelegation doctrine. The individual right to bear arms. The end of preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. The return of state-sponsored prayer. The gutting of the Eighth Amendment. Thomas precipitated all of these developments by putting out a call for a case that was answered by conservative litigators plotting their next challenge.

But Kavanaugh finds himself at this unfortunate moment in Supreme Court history in which nobody cares to do any of those steps anymore: He sends his smoke signal to the litigants, and they just straight up defy the court’s orders. It’s not just that the dog has caught the car with the conservative legal movement’s capture of the Supreme Court. It’s that the dog has eaten the car and spits it out anytime its honks are not to the dog’s liking. Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Milligan does not read as a road map for Alabama to disobey this very ruling; rather, it appears to be a warning that the justice may not enforce the Voting Rights Act in future rounds of redistricting over the coming years. In the old days, litigants would’ve grasped this distinction. When Thomas mused that the Second Amendment might protect a personal right to own firearms in 1997, he was not encouraging gun owners to start ignoring state gun regulations, but planting the seeds for a someday in the future ruling (which came with 2008’s D.C. v. Heller).

Read the whole thing.

..

“No matter where you come down on the issue of judicial legitimacy, states flipping the bird at the highest court of the land is a bad look.”

And revisiting this decision with anything other than a rebuke of the Alabama Legislature will confirm the Court’s lack of legitimacy as anything like impartial. A short, vicious per curiam order is all that is needed. I’m skeptical that’ll happen with this set of robed politicians, particularly the most political creature of them all, Kavanaugh.

SCOTUS tells Alabama "no."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... stricting/

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused Alabama’s request to hold 2024 elections under a new congressional map judged to be an unlawful attempt to diminish the power of the state’s Black voters.

It was the second time in four months that the high court has sided with a three-judge panel that found that Alabama’s legislature probably violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to create a second congressional district where minority voters have a large enough share of the electorate to elect their candidate of choice. The state has seven districts, and its voting population is about 27 percent Black.

The case has been closely watched because of an unprecedented number of challenges to congressional maps that are advancing in courts throughout the country, enough to give one political party or the other an advantage heading into the 2024 elections. The map courts envision for Alabama, for instance, could mean a second Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation. Meanwhile, federal judges in Georgia and Louisiana have found similar Voting Rights Act violations in maps from those states.

The court gave no reason for denying Alabama’s request, as is customary in emergency filings, and there were no noted dissents.

Alabama essentially had asked the Supreme Court to revisit the issue of voting rights in the state only months after the justices unexpectedly rejected the earlier version of Alabama’s congressional districting map, citing the landmark civil rights law.

That June ruling came as something of a surprise because the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had signaled that it was suspicious of some sections of the Voting Rights Act, and was thought to be sympathetic to Alabama’s argument that the court’s precedents improperly required legislatures to prioritize race over traditional redistricting techniques.

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and fellow conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals in upholding the decision of the lower court, which said the state’s 2021 redistricting packed many of the state’s Black voters into one district, with the rest spread among others so that their voting power is diluted.

The three lower court judges who ruled against Alabama’s map — two of them nominated by President Donald Trump — were applying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids practices that would mean racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”

The judges concluded that Alabama lawmakers should have drawn a second district “in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.”

After the Supreme Court ruling, the lower court judges allowed the Alabama legislature the first crack at coming up with a new plan. But instead of creating a second Black district, the lawmakers drew one in which Black people made up about 40 percent of the population.

Drawing a district with a greater Black population, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) said in a filing to the Supreme Court, would require the state to “sacrifice traditional districting criteria to join voters from different communities, based on their race, to hit a 50 percent racial target, 'or something quite close to it.’”

The lower court said the legislature had defied it and the Supreme Court.

“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote in a nearly 200-page order. “The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

The panel of judges directed a special master and cartographer to propose three districting plans that are legally compliant. Those plans, submitted Monday, each contain a second district in which Black voters are either a majority or close to it. The three-judge panel is scheduled to meet next week to choose one.

The state’s request to stay the lower court order tossing out the new map is “a last-ditch attempt to evade the Voting Rights Act,” wrote lawyer Abha Khanna, representing one group of challengers to the new map. “Having lost once before this Court, Alabama has become even more brazen.”

She said the state “musters neither precedent nor statute, policy nor reason to support its outright defiance of the Voting Rights Act and the courts charged with enforcing it.”

Another group of challengers, represented by the Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU, noted that the Supreme Court issued a stay of the lower court’s first ruling regarding the 2021 map, meaning the 2022 elections took place under a map found to be unlawful. After its June ruling, the court should not do so again, the filing said.

“Alabama’s open defiance of this Court should be condemned, not rewarded with a stay.”

[jhu72]

Looks to me like Clarence "step and fetch it" and his fascist benefactor have blinked.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/p ... quiry.html


“Justice Thomas’s R.V. Loan Was Forgiven, Senate Inquiry Finds
The justice failed to repay much, perhaps all, of the $267,230 loan. His benefactor wiped the slate clean, with ethical and potential tax consequences.”

[CU88a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/p ... quiry.html


“Justice Thomas’s R.V. Loan Was Forgiven, Senate Inquiry Finds
The justice failed to repay much, perhaps all, of the $267,230 loan. His benefactor wiped the slate clean, with ethical and potential tax consequences.”

Astonishing, but I guess I should not be surprised.

[a fan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/p ... quiry.html


“Justice Thomas’s R.V. Loan Was Forgiven, Senate Inquiry Finds
The justice failed to repay much, perhaps all, of the $267,230 loan. His benefactor wiped the slate clean, with ethical and potential tax consequences.”

Astonishing, but I guess I should not be surprised.

Republican voters don't care. If the Republican Voters had Republican Parents...they'd be taken out to the tool shed, and their butts would be so sore, they wouldn't be able sit down for a month.

What happened to these Americans? No moral code anymore---*poof* gone in one single generation.

[njbill]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/p ... quiry.html


“Justice Thomas’s R.V. Loan Was Forgiven, Senate Inquiry Finds
The justice failed to repay much, perhaps all, of the $267,230 loan. His benefactor wiped the slate clean, with ethical and potential tax consequences.”

Should be income to Clarence. Did he report it and pay taxes? Are the Hunter "whistelblowers" all hot and bothered about this one?

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/10/25/poli ... index.html

[Farfromgeneva]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/p ... quiry.html


“Justice Thomas’s R.V. Loan Was Forgiven, Senate Inquiry Finds
The justice failed to repay much, perhaps all, of the $267,230 loan. His benefactor wiped the slate clean, with ethical and potential tax consequences.”

https://m.youtube.com/show/SCGPxemwNDXE ... 1&sbp=CgEx

[Farfromgeneva]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/10/25/poli ... index.html

Cheap asset acquisition.

Meaning the Supreme Court seat. Wish I could find such sell outs so cheaply with such power.

[dislaxxic]

Here’s the Thing About that “New” Supreme Court Ethics Code

Dahlia Lithwick

Props to the justices for signing onto a thing, even if it’s an old thing recast as a new thing, principally drafted with the intention of instructing us that they still can’t be made to do anything. It was probably difficult to get some of the court’s present membership to concede even that the public is hopelessly confused and needs a tune-up. My guess is that this unenforceable new set of old rules will mollify close to nobody. But insofar as it’s phrased to imply, perhaps for the first time since this ethics mess began, that the court is aware of public opinion, it’s a tiptoe in the right direction. Maybe the fact that the court is finally willing to admit that there’s a problem—even while insisting it’s the public with the problem—signals that this is a conversation and not a sermon from the mount. And maybe that’s the best start we can hope for.

..