> The Founders were more concerned about facing a duel than a criminal conviction.
This is because "their class of people" were an honor-based society, in which reputation was the currency of power, and people with honor were expected to prioritize the national interests above their own. That is no longer the case.
In other words, there hasn't been a duel. So there should be another enforcement mechanism for making Presidents prioritize the nation above themselves that actually works.
A combination of meaningful threat to life, assets, family or freedom is what the duel accomplished. With the courts packed by unqualified partisan hacks it seems we’re facing an unprecedented danger to democracy and the American experiment.
Earl Warren was a political hack. William Douglas was a political hack.
Every SCOTUS Justice, except for for Thomas, was an absolute top-tier jurist at the time they were appointed.
Every SCOTUS Justice, except Thomas, could have received a tenured professorship at any law school in the country, a partnership at any law firm in the country, editorship of almost any law journal in the country, etc.
Any one, including Thomas, would have been welcome as a professor at the Unversities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sydney, etc; a magic circle UK law firm; or as arbiter in international trade.
Any one, including Thomas, would have been a shoe in for attorney general or solicited general of US. Any one, including Thomas, could have gotten a position as US Attorney in either a Democratic or Republican administration.
We have an insanely well qualified SCOTUS, mostly because of how arduous the confirmation process is.
He's lazy, and that's even worse than just being a sex predator (Anita Hill) in the context of jurisprudence. He writes the shortest, shittiest, least well thought out opinions. He's phoning it in and has been for decades now.
Seems that our best justices are "political hacks" and our worst are those who are excellent lawyers. Maybe that's because lawyers are only slightly above "used car salesman" in terms of honesty?
Shit dude, If law credentials mattered, than Comey wouldn't have ever been an attorney (Cooley law, worst law school in america). Was he also a "political hack"?
Thurgood Marshall was a widely respected trial attorney. He never held elected
office. No he was not a political hack.
Warren had been elected governor of California on both a Republican and Democratic ticket. That’s the very definition of a politician. I don’t have a good definition of hack.
If our best lawyers are no better than used car salesmen, why are they so well regarded internationally?
The justices can function just fine without asking questions. The courts work is almost written. The only important questions are dry, procedural ones. This is how courts work.
Not in constitutional law hearings, this is the exact moment when oral arguments are extremely important. They write them down after they're made, not before.
Make better arguments please, you showed you were capable of it earlier when you wrote the top level justification. Why not do it here?
> this is the exact moment when oral arguments are extremely important. They write them down after they're made, not before.
The two parties and their friends have submitted mountains of briefings before oral argument. The arguments made in front of the court are already fully baked. Oral argument is only a signal on where the justices' thinking is taking them at the time. All of this is public, by the way. You can go read everything on your own (something more people in this thread should do).
I'm sorry, I can't read "unqualified partisan hacks" uttered as a phrase by someone I assume believes that "emanations from penumbras" qualifies as good constitutional law.
How exactly do you think a qualified, non-partisan judge should decide cases?
I looked through the comments of the person you're replying to and they didn't say anything about Roe. There are all sorts of uncharitable assumptions I could make about what you might or might not believe based on your political party that'd be similarly out of line. Please stop it.
Is it “uncharitable” to assume that someone thinks Roe is how judges should decide cases? Because if so, fair enough.
My point was not to attack this person individually so you’re right I shouldn’t have worded it in those terms. My point was that virtually everyone who thinks the current Supreme Court is “unqualified” also likely thinks “emanations from penumbras” are constitutional law. It’s like listening to anti-vaxxers talk about the qualifications of doctors.
When I studied politics as an undergraduate, my insanely liberal professors said: “Roe was a terribly decided decision. It was sloppy legal reasoning, and overall pretty embarrassing. That was rectified by Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992.”
Almost everyone agrees with you on the emanations of penumbras. Nobody wants that. It was rectified by Casey in 1992.
Roe also claimed abortion was a right because doctors should not worry about the law. Women didn’t have a right to abortion at all. Doctors did. That was fixed by Casey in 1992, and probably a bit early.
Roe hasn’t been the defining law on abortion since 1992 because so many people, pro-choicers especially, regarded it as very flawed.
Casey was eloquently written, but relied on Roe for the existence of the underlying abortion right, without offering a more rigorous foundation. It still ultimately rests on Griswold’s “emanations from penumbras.”
Casey was the start of the self-licking ice cream cone the abortion right eventually became—asserted to exist because it was said to exist by a precedent nobody could defend.
You’re talking about the ninth amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
That says that the list of rights enumerated in the constitution is non-exhaustive. That just means that rights can exist in other places besides the Constitution. But if you want to say there is such a right, you have to identify that right in some other source.
But the “emanations from penumbras” language isn’t referring to a non-enumerated right found somewhere else. It’s saying that the privacy right originates in the “emanations from penumbras” of the constitution. So it’s saying the constitution itself creates that right.
So say we had an abortion decision decided as RBG wanted it based on the privileges or immunities clause (as per Reva Siegel) You would still oppose that because it’s at the federal level?
I don’t know how justices should decide cases (not a constitutional law scholar, what are your credentials?) but I know that the majority in this one is wrong and should be impeached. The federalists are a cancer on the legal profession. Failure to self police has allowed them to fester when healthy communities would properly ostracize and treat such demented people but here we are.
Perhaps we can all band together to gift these clowns rvs and luxury vacations to get a public healthcare option for everyone?
> don’t know how justices should decide cases (not a constitutional law scholar, what are your credentials?) but I know that the majority in this one is wrong and should be impeached
If you don’t know how judges should decide cases, how do you know they are wrong?
Do you have any idea what sort of chaos impeaching six Supreme Court justices would cause? Do you really think it would pass Congress, and do you think the Republican Party wouldn't retaliate?
Frankly. I don’t give a single fucking iota of concern to what republicans care about. Their party is putting their political aims above the good of the country and people of such poor character are a danger to humanity if given power.
Impeach them and ring the Russian Republicans up their hard earned espionage charges
Some of you act as if you really want a civil war. And I'm not at all excluding Republican voters from also acting that way. Go see the recent Civil War movie for how that might play out in today's world. It's a lose-lose across the board for everyone.
“Conflicts of interest” are often in the eye of the beholder. And my impression is a lot of people’s concern about this is very slanted by their pre-existing ideological commitments.
You will hear the same people arguing that Justice Alito should l recuse himself due to his wife’s taste in flags, but Judge Merchan shouldn’t recuse himself from Trump’s trial and sentencing after having been revealed to have made (trivial) donations to anti-Trump political campaigns. It sure looks to me like people prioritising maximising the odds of their desired outcome over consistent principle.
Publicly displaying symbols identifying one’s affiliation with very specific and unprotected groups is not comparable to political speech. This is a fallacious argument at best and smells of bad faith engagement.
> Publicly displaying symbols identifying one’s affiliation with very specific and unprotected groups is not comparable to political speech.
The “very specific and unprotected groups” you are talking about are political movements (even if non-mainstream) and hence expressing support for them is just as much political speech as any political donation is. All political speech, even extremist political speech, is protected in the US by the First Amendment, unless it incites “imminent lawless action” (see Brandenburg v Ohio), or one of the other narrow exceptions provided for by SCOTUS’ jurisprudence.
Actually, it is allowed to limit free speech to meet “compelling state interests”, and I’m pretty sure SCOTUS would uphold limitations on judge’s off-the-job speech when necessary to maintain the appearance of judicial impartiality as such a compelling state interest. By contrast, I doubt they’d view limiting the speech of a judicial spouse as necessary to an equally compelling state interest.
Furthermore, unless you are a believer in coverture, Alito’s actions are separate from those of his wife, so once he made clear the flag was his wife’s decision not his, I don’t see how it is relevant. The law does not demand judges recuse themselves on the basis of views of their spouses which they may not share-especially when his wife’s expressive act was not directly commenting on any specific case, at most it was a vague expression of political affiliation-and it isn’t even clear what she personally understands that flag to mean.
> This is a fallacious argument at best and smells of bad faith engagement.
It isn’t a fallacious argument. Rather, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with you is guilty of “bad faith engagement”-that’s a fallacious argument.
The flags a blatant dog whistle for stop the steal white Christian nationalists. If you’re not discussing this fact you’re not having the same conversation and I’m not engaging with people who pick what’s convenient to their agenda.
If you legitimately believe that, you are spending too much time being radicalized on the internet. The flag has been used by hundreds of groups across its 200+ year history, right and left.
It doesn’t matter how it has historically been used, it matters how it is being used now. What they are describing is accurate.
I heard comments like yours all the time when people were saying we needed to take QAnon more seriously. People thought it was fringe, that people concerned were “terminally online.” Even as we saw their talking points work their way into mainstream conservative outlets.
Then January 6th happened. Everyone knows what QAnon is now.
> It doesn’t matter how it has historically been used, it matters how it is being used now. What they are describing is accurate.
Did you notice that the link in the comment you were replying to, has a photo of that “Appeal to Heaven” flag from a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020? And it seems clear it was being flown by BLM supporters, not anti-BLM counterprotestors.
You want to claim that other meanings are purely historical and in contemporary usage it exclusively means “white Christian nationalist”. If the only other examples of its usage people could point to were from decades ago, your argument might have some force. But, given we have photographic evidence of people with a diametrically opposite ideology using it less than 5 years ago, your argument is not very convincing.
You can’t divorce his politics from the discussion. The people who he politically/ideologically agrees with on the right fly this flag specifically. Other groups also fly it. It can mean different things to different people. My argument is not nearly as myopic as you’re making it out to be.
You keep on assuming his politics is the same as his wife’s. Even if they are both on the right, the right is a very big place, where people have different positions on various issues. Even assuming that flag tells us where exactly on the right Martha resides - and I’m not sure it does, maybe she flew it because she liked how it looked as opposed to as an exercise in political expression - we still can’t assume that Samuel resides in the same political location.
There are two different flags at issue here–the upside-down American flag, and the "Appeal to Heaven"–the former was flown at their main residence, the second at their vacation home. Both have long histories of being used all over the political spectrum (both right and left), to mean lots of different things.
The article you are citing is relying on the claims of an angry former neighbour. Why assume that the Alito's are lying or mistaken, when it seems just as possible that their ex-neighbour could be.
In any event, even if we assume the ex-neighbour's claims are 100% true, they still don't prove (1) that Martha Alito flew the flag with intention to express a highly specific political message, (2) even supposing that was her intention, it still doesn't prove Samuel Alito was supporting her expressive act, as opposed to simply allowing his wife to do what she wants to do.
And would you say Alito's wife is flying it for her support for BLM or... something else?
Getting abstract and dissembling about it doesn't change the fact that the meaning is clear and obvious to anyone who isn't sea lioning. It's clear to their supporters because it needs to be to be effective.
Is it not possible to simply fly a flag for the love of the flag? I own a number of flags from various countries and periods. I have no particular attachment to the Whiskey Rebellion, but I like the flag and fly it regularly.
We can dispute the specifics of his motivations but clearly these have not been simple cases of “I just like the flag.” It’s also pretty bizarre to fly the flag upside down for fun.
Typical doublespeak. Hitler stole the swastika and christofascists stole another flag. I’ve been following white nationalists for long enough to have seen this dynamic countless times. Old dog whistle gets them too easily identified so a new one gets picked up and then the cycle repeats.
> With the courts packed by unqualified partisan hacks
Are any of the SCOTUS justices “unqualified”? I think all of them have the kinds of backgrounds you’d expect from a Supreme Court justice-law professorships, appellate courts, etc
Are they the best legal minds available? Arguably not, on both sides - in recent decades, both major parties prioritise political/ideological reliability over legal brilliance. Consider someone like Richard Posner, formerly of the 7th Circuit - many consider him one of the brightest legal minds of his generation, and surely the Supreme Court would have benefited from his membership in it - but he never had much hope, because he was too conservative for Democrats, not conservative enough for Republicans.
This is because "their class of people" were an honor-based society, in which reputation was the currency of power, and people with honor were expected to prioritize the national interests above their own. That is no longer the case.
In other words, there hasn't been a duel. So there should be another enforcement mechanism for making Presidents prioritize the nation above themselves that actually works.