JoshL
4689
So your argument is that people who don’t pay attention enough to know that Trump is being impeached will be riveted to the news of his tax returns.
No that people who don’t know the details of impeachment, will actually start paying attention 3-4 months before an election, when the scope of his financial crimes are revealed.
JoshL
4691
I mean, time will tell I guess, but that seems to me like a completely insane thing to believe. In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Trump admitted that he didn’t pay taxes (and that makes him smart), and that he sexually assaults women (and they let him do it). We also found out that he used money that other people donated to his charitable foundation to buy a painting of himself and hang it in his hotel. And that he also used that money to pay court-imposed fines.
I can’t understand why people who voted for him in 2016 will change their minds in 2020 because his tax returns will show that what he said in 2016 is true; that he didn’t pay any taxes. Also, Fox will be telling them that that just makes him smart. And besides, Hunter Biden.
A worried take on this from popehat & co
Another Con Law professor weighs in.
TL:DR 6-3 against Trump, but maybe not a complete victory.
Edit
Pasted correct link
I think you copied the wrong link…
They are more likely to change their minds because Hillary isn’t on the other side.
(Favorite exchange from the reddit thread)
Canuck
4697
Saw this in my feed tonight and my heart leapt into my throat:
https://www.thestar.com/amp/news/world/us/2020/05/05/justice-ginsburg-in-hospital-with-infection-court-says.html
Turns out its related to gallstones. Fucking Toronto Star. November can’t come fast enough. Or is it January? I could imagine them trying to ram something through after the election.
That’s yesterday’s news. She’s doing better today.
And yeah January can’t come fast enough. Of course MoscowMitch would try to shoe-horn in a new Justice on the morning of January 20th.
Have to win the Senate, though. If Biden gets inaugurated on January 20th and the Reps control the Senate, McConnell won’t bring a SCOTUS nomination up for a vote. From his perspective, why would he?
Then you confirm judges, dare the Senate to impeach (and the House might not even send articles) , and then those same judges refuse to recuse themselves on the Constitutionality of their appointment and confirm themselves.
That’s what I would threaten to do if the turtle didn’t give in. You’d take massive blowback for a month, but folks would get over it.
You’d destroy the judicial branch, but the Republicans would have steps to ensure some fairness. (and part of this is that you say you’d support a constitutional Amendment so this stuff never happens again- it’s wrong but you gotta fight fire with fire)
I’m not following that, sorry. Certainly the Court isn’t going to admit justices who haven’t been confirmed. There isn’t any substitute for winning the Senate. Biden winning without the Senate means that we can prevent a conservative appointment to the Court, but we can’t make any appointments ourselves without a majority in the Senate.
As long as they are appointed by the President in a recess fashion, they can sit there until the start of the next Congress. It’s never been used, but it is a power of the President.
The Senate would not recess. It’s easy enough to set up a roster of Senators to show up and gavel the Senate into a pro forma session.
Until somebody with COVID-19 just happens to wander past those Senators…
Timex
4705
So, seemingly bad day for Trump today, but I’ve got a question.
Is this case saying people can’t fire you for being gay actually establishing exactly as a protected class? Or is it less than that?
Sharpe
4706
Basically, this case is saying that the “protected class” which is protected against sex discrimination includes not just sexual category (male/female) but also sexual orientation and transgender status, as they are inherently based on sex. So as a practical matter it’s a clarification of an existing “protected class” to include sexual orientation and transgender, which means, basically an expansion of a protected class. (It’s a bit narrower than that; see the next paragraph.)
In this case, the law says that employers cannot discriminate “on the basis of sex”. Today’s decision established that includes not just the “sexual category” you are in such as male or female, but also sexual orientation and transgender status. The court explained that, for example, if an employer fires a man for being oriented towards men, but does not fire women for being oriented towards men, the employer is obviously discriminating “on the basis of sex” b/c they are treating men differently than women. The same logic applies for transgender issues as well. Keep in mind, this is not so much a formal declaration of “protected classification” as it is a clarification of the extent of a current category where employer discrimination is prohibited. So this is a big win for LGBT rights, but is also a relatively narrow legal opinion.
It’s actually a fairly clearly reasoned opinion based on the plain language of the statute. The reason it was surprising to so many including me is that I fully expected Gorsuch and Roberts to side with the faction that wanted to ignore and overwrite the plain language of the statute by applying “original intent” and other legal doctrines.
The fact that both Roberts and Gorsuch were willing to read the law as written is heartening, although I have heard some speculation that the true swing here was Gorsuch and that Roberts may have joined the majority for tactical reasons. By joining the majority he as Chief Justice had the power to assign the writing of the majority opinion to Gorsuch which resulted in today’s correct but fairly narrow decision; if Roberts had stayed in the minority, the majority opinion would have been written by a Justice assigned by the most senior Justice in the majority (Ginsberg) which likely would have resulted in a much broader and more sweeping opinion, actually extending “protected classification” in a broader way. So in other words, Roberts may have just been angling for “least harm to the conservative position” as opposed to being on the side of right. On the other hand, he did vote in favor of a meaningful clarification/expansion of rights, so I’m not gonna diss Roberts too hard. (But neither am I going to unreservedly praise him; the stench of the Rucho decision will plague him the rest of his life IMO, deservedly.)
Timex
4707
I don’t think you are going to see this much from Gorsuch.
I think that Gorsuch is much more in line with Scalia (a younger Scalia, when his mind was still extremely sharp). You see this in some of his writing as well, as both of them write very good opinions, just from a struggle up writing perspective. And Scalia always defaulted to a textualist interpretation of the law when possible.
When laws are written clearly, then that’s the interpretation you should take. Scalia’s view was, as far as i know, that such an interpretation should always be used, even if that interpretation conflicted with the likely “original intent”. The rationale here is two-fold, and makes sense to me:
- trying to determine intent is always going to be subjective, and almost always going to involve an outcome that ends up reflecting the opinion of the justices as much as the opinion of the legislators. (“Oh, well obviously they meant X, because Y makes no sense.”)
- if the law’s actual text is bad, then the remedy is for the legislature to fix the law. It’s not the job of the court to make up for sloppy legislation.
Now, there are cases where laws are written so badly as to not have any clear meaning, and then courts need to go further, but i think that Gorsuch is going to be like Scalia in that when possible he will likely take a textualist approach.
Alito’s many, many page dissenting opinion is basically that sex is not the same thing as sexual orientation, and so the justices are “writing” legislation in their majority ruling. He may have a point if there were failed attempts to add sexual orientation to the scope of Title VII that failed in the past.
