It’s a very narrow decision that makes sense given the case.
Come on, Randy - who’s going to look out for these baker snowflakes if SCOTUS doesn’t?
Dammit, I posted about this under the wrong thread. Sorry!
Anyway, this doesn’t really decide the issue, so we’ll get another case just like it next term, I’m sure.
This is a weird one, because this isn’t the Supreme Court siding with this bigot over the cake baking, but they are siding with the bigot over the Colorado Civil rights board fucking up their ruling.
This cake baker is a bigoted asshole, but that doesn’t mean that the civil rights board should be able to target this man because of his religion, which is what they did.
This case doesn’t really make any big waves, and more has to deal with the Colorado Civil rights commission screwing up their job.
I’m going to go full Negative Nancy on this one. Now that there’s precedent on the books, it’s child’s play to find pretty much any attempt to apply law to a “god-fearing” business as government being overly hostile to religion and thus overrule any application of public accommodation (or even other) law. This opinion isn’t necessarily as narrow as one would wish.
It’s pretty narrow, in that it specifically hinges on the state of Colorado being openly antagonistic to religious people.
I think I got that :)
I can easily foresee this current court, let alone one where one of the three justices to the left is replaced in the current atmosphere*, continuing to find unique instances of innate hostility to religion, and holding that some future hypothetical case would find them able to uphold a particular application of law to a “religious” business.
*where the median vote would then have to look to their left to see where Scalia used to sit
I think this is the right decision, although it certainly won’t be easy for anyone trying to run a small business in the ridiculously complex world of sales tax laws. But I suspect it will not take long at all for some of the big names in payments (i.e. Square) and tax software providers (i.e. Vertex) to figure out an offering for them. It’ll be an added expense, yes, but I doubt we’re looking at the huge burden that some business advocates have been predicting.
Can anyone explain this to me? How does this not violate the commerce clause?
Doesn’t the constitution also say something about powers not given to the feds can be used by the states?
California currently requires a form every year from businesses showing what you bought online and it’s value, so they can then charge you a tax on it.
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will chime in, but my limited understanding is that we’ve already had rulings allowing state tax on activity crossing state lines:
That’s a bunch of legalese (which I found on a summary of this case) but if I’m reading it right, it means that the state can tax out-of-state entities as long as they have a “substantial nexus” which means basically that the retailer does enough business in the state to matter. Also, don’t discriminate. It would be uncool to have a higher sales tax on the same product from an out-of-state retailer. But if it’s the same sales tax no matter which retailer you get it from, that’s fine.
Of course we know SCOTUS said back in 1992 that you must have a physical presence in the state (or do $500k+ in sales) in order for the state to meet that “substantial nexus” term and thus require sales tax collection. So this ruling is basically the court saying that the world has changed, a physical presence or big sales numbers are no longer required for that “substantial nexus” requirement.
Yesssss. Privacy rights get a major win.
John Roberts to the rescue on this one.
Interesting that each of the conservative judges who dissented in this decision filed separate dissents. It will be interesting to get more information on each of their reasoning.
Conservative judges ignore that pesky equal protection clause in the Constitution.
As African American political organizers often say to African American audiences, if voting wasn’t important, Republicans wouldn’t work so hard to prevent them from doing it. And while Democrats are asking themselves whether they should avoid being rude to people who work for President Trump, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court just delivered another victory to the broad and deep GOP effort to make sure that American elections are rigged in conservatives’ favor.
And here’s a long reddit post that explains the case and highlights Sotomayer’s 46 page dissent (emphasis mine.)
TLDR of this Gerrymandering Monstrosity: 5-4 along party lines. Dissents typically state something along the lines of, for these reasons I respectfully dissent. Sotomayor’s dissent (on behalf of all 4 dissenters) removes the word respectfully from her opinion. Take that as you will though if you read the dissent it basically states the majority willfully ignored most of the cases factual record, and twisted the portions of the record it bothered to acknowledge at all to come to the Majority result. Entire opinion can be read here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-586_o7kq.pdf
The dissent in part: “…after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination,minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process. Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their communities and minimize their political will. The fundamental right to vote is too precious to be disregarded in this manner. I dissent.”
Merits Summary to the best of my ability and short enough that people might read it: (Note 1: there’s a statutory interpretation argument on appellate jurisdiction where the majority flips their typical opinion on the subject at the start but the main blow to everyone’s right to vote is in the merits.)
The Texas legislature deliberately drew a racially discriminatory map in 2011 which was thrown out and that’s accepted as a factual premise of this litigation.
The Texas Attorney General who was in the middle of defending the 2011 map in 2012/2013 recommended the state pass a new map in order to cut off there being any remedy for the finding that the 2011 map had been found to be racially gerrymandered. Basically they wanted to throw out the 2011 case by saying look, that map doesn’t exist anymore this litigation is moot (over) after they had lost the 2011 case.
(Note: A legislature conducts fact finding then makes factual determinations which they have to state are the basis for the the map it draws.) The Texas AG then wrote a set of legislative facts which he gave to the legislature and which they then adopted as their “legislative facts” with no actual real legislative fact finding. Meaning the “legislative facts” that the new 2013 map is based on were both not actually found (outside of being adopted in whole), but were given to the legislature by their attorney after being specifically drafted to sound not racially motivated. This overall plan was proposed by the Texas AG to in his own words, “insulate” the map from federal judges.
The 2013 Texas legislature then adopted a new almost identical map in a special session requiring less notice to the public and less votes to pass than it would in a normal session. This was despite the Texas legislature’s own non-partisan legal office advising them the new map did not cure the gerrymandering issues in the 2011 map. (The one difference in the 2013 map which rules through 2020 is that it is slightly more racially discriminatory than the 2011 one was as a practical matter. This being true as a practical reality is conceded even in today’s majority Supreme Court opinion).
The lower courts, and the Dissenting opinion here, look at this and say this new 2013 map is a blatant bad faith attempt to re-draw the same map while pretending to have different motives. Basically the courts said Texas you can’t pass that map it is racist. Texas then passed the same map based on a piece of paper outlining legislative facts that their Attorney wrote to sound as un-racist as possible without bothering to go through any real legislative process to determine or consider those facts.
The Majority opinion basically argues the lower courts found that 2013 map to be racially motivated simply because the 2011 map was racially motivated. And that by doing so the lower court swapped the burden of proof from the plaintiff to the state regarding the 2013 map when it is the Plaintiff who must prove their case. Because the lower court did not require sufficient proof that the new 2013 map was biased the Plaintiffs lose and the new map stands.
I won’t get into it but most of the dissent is explaining why this is B.S., that the lower courts specifically acknowledge the correct burden multiple times, and then lists/analyzes what the dissent claims is quite a lot of evidence specifically that the 2013 is biased. The dissent then claims the Majority just ignores the majority of the lower court opinion because if it didn’t, then the majority opinion could not come to the conclusion that it wanted.
My thoughts, essentially the Majority has created a road map for every state that when a map is struck down for gerrymandering all they need to do is re-pass the same map with different reasons and not state publicly that is what they are doing. Feel free to disagree but that’s the case in a nutshell to me and there isn’t really much arguing going on about the legal mode of analysis in these cases. It’s mostly just about whether the Court will actually look in this stuff and how to interpret what the lower court did/found which you can find in the actual opinion linked above.
I’ll close by quoting Sotomayor’s conclusion in the dissent.
"The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and §2 of the Voting Rights Act secure for all voters in our country, regardless of race, the right to equal participation in our political processes. Those guarantees mean little, however, if courts do not remain vigilant in curbing States’ efforts to undermine the ability of minority voters to meaningfully exercise that right. For although we have made progress, “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.” Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 536.
The Court today does great damage to that right of equal opportunity. Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement. The Court intervenes when no intervention is authorized and blinds itself to the overwhelming factual record below. It does all of this to allow Texas to use electoral maps that, in design and effect, burden the rights of minority voters to exercise that most precious right that is “preservative of all rights.” Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 370 (1886); see Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, 584 U. S. __, __ (2018) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 5) (“Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote”). Because our duty is to safeguard that fundamental right, I dissent. "
To be fair, they sent it back to a lower court for a technicality on standing.
Which is pretty bullshit in my book, but that’s how they do things.
I feared that one of your links might have said that Kennedy WAS retiring. Not just noting that yep, he is pretty old.
I like this depiction of the court:
I mean, I don’t LIKE how ancient and presumably increasingly decrepit our justices are. But this graph shows just how old they are and how long they have been serving, and the blues are more faded than the reds. (Fortunately Kagan and Sotomayor are comparative spring chickens compared to RBG.)
Seeing Gorsuch on there burns my ass so hard.
I hope McConnell gets to experience true suffering proportionate to his evil before he feeds the worms.
Just brutal week - all that bullshit from McConnell delaying that open SCOTUS seat, the Russian meddling… all of it is hitting hardest there on the court.
I would not be opposed to a Democrat expanding the court when the Dems regain power.
The real question is how may retirements will be announced in the months after a Dem wins the presidency next. 2? 3?
Yup. McConnell’s straight up unconstitutional BS has led to this.