Tag Archives: court

Read the 7 Most Ridiculous Lines from Justice Antonin Scalia’s Obamacare Dissent

by LavonneGaines Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare’s insurance subsidies in a 6-3 decision penned by Chief Justice John Roberts. Legal experts had long dismissed the merits of the case, and it even turned out that the plaintiffs had questionable standing.

But to three of the court’s conservative justices, the court’s decision to side with the government is a sign not only that the court is full of partisan hacks, but also that words themselves hold no meaning.

In a blistering 21-page dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia accused John Roberts of abandoning his judicial independence to defend Obamacare at any and all costs. “Normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved,” Scalia writes.

Just how absurd is it, in Scalia’s mind, that the court upheld the subsidies? Here are his other prime quotes of indignation at the majority’s opinion:

“Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.'”
“The decision rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare”.
“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.”
“You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it.”
“Impossible possibility, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!”
“Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of.”
“The cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

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Read the 7 Most Ridiculous Lines from Justice Antonin Scalia’s Obamacare Dissent

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Justice Clarence Thomas Cites NFL Player’s Memoir to Support Executing Mentally Disabled Man

by KatheriIVGI Posted on June 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Supreme Court justices generally support their opinions with references to other cases and perhaps the occasional scientific study. But on Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas cited an unusual source in his dissent in a death penalty case: the memoir of a professional football player. The player is also the son of the victim in the case. Thomas’ unorthodox move prompted two of his fellow conservatives to distance themselves from this section of his dissent, which they otherwise supported.

The case in question is Brumfield v. Cain, in which death row inmate Kevan Brumfield argued that the state of Louisiana denied him the opportunity to prove in court that he is intellectually disabled and, consequently, exempt from execution. Brumfield’s attorney had presented evidence that Brumfield was born prematurely, had been in special ed in elementary school, had a low IQ of 75, had been abused by his stepfather, and had spent time in a mental hospital and group homes due to his disability. But he was sentenced to death before a 2002 Supreme Court decision that the Eighth Amendment barred the execution of the intellectually disabled. After that decision, Brumfield petitioned the Louisiana courts to allow him a hearing to show that his disability should exempt him from execution. The Louisiana courts denied his requests, and the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. On Thursday, the Supreme Court majority reversed the lower court and ruled in Brumfield’s favor, sending his case back to Louisiana for further hearings on his mental capacity.

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Justice Clarence Thomas Cites NFL Player’s Memoir to Support Executing Mentally Disabled Man

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The Supreme Court Could Make Abortion One of 2016’s Big Campaign Issues

by AgnesPerin962 Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, does not want to talk about abortion. Specifically, he doesn’t want to discuss the draconian law that he signed two years ago, which was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this week and now threatens to shut down two-thirds of the state’s remaining abortion clinics.

During an interview on Fox News Wednesday, Perry pushed aside questions about the recent court decision. “I think the real issue for me is this has been settled in the state of Texas,” Perry told host Megyn Kelly before changing the subject to the economy, the border, and national security—”the big issues that I think the bulk of the American people really want to focus on.”

But the American people may not be able to avoid the issue of abortion as next November nears. This week’s ruling paves the way for the United States Supreme Court to take up the most important abortion case in more than 20 years to determine how far states can go in cutting off access to abortion. If the high court takes the case, the justices’ decision could be announced right smack in the middle of the 2016 campaign, forcing candidates to discuss abortion whether they want to or not. And, as Perry seems to recognize, that could be bad news for Republicans.

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The Supreme Court Could Make Abortion One of 2016’s Big Campaign Issues

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Government’s Secret Surveillance Court May Be About to Get a Little Less Secret

by AnnetteBadillo Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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When the USA Freedom Act was passed last week, it was hailed as the first major limit on NSA surveillance powers in decades. Less talked about was the law’s mandate to open a secret intelligence court to unprecedented scrutiny.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, often known as the FISA court after the 1978 law that created it, rules on government requests for surveillance of foreigners. Its 11 federal judges, appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, consider the requests one at a time on a rotating basis. In closed proceedings, they have approved nearly every one of the surveillance orders that have come before the court, and their rulings are classified.

Privacy advocates say those secret deliberations have created a black box that keeps the public from seeing both why the government makes key surveillance decisions and how it justifies them. But the new law passed by Congress last week may shed some new light on these matters. “The larger step that the USA Freedom Act accomplishes is that it is bringing those things out to the public,” says Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy advocacy group. The new law mandates that FISA court rulings that create “novel and significant” changes to surveillance law be declassified—and it is up to the judges to determine if the cases reach that threshold—though only after review by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. While FISA court rulings have been leaked and occasionally declassified, the new law marks the first time Congress has attempted to make the court’s decisions available to the public.

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Government’s Secret Surveillance Court May Be About to Get a Little Less Secret

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Meet the F-Bomb-Spewing Ex-Cop Behind the NRA’s Move to Topple California’s Gun Laws

by CeciliaPlate Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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“The NRA asked me to keep my mouth shut, but I’ve never run from a fuckin’ interview in my life,” Edward Peruta barks into the phone. The 66-year-old Vietnam vet, ex-cop, public-access TV host, worm farmer, legal investigator, crime scene videographer, and serial litigant has never been one to hold his tongue, and he’s not about to start now that he’s at the center of a high-profile case that could upend California’s gun laws and wind up before the Supreme Court. “I am who I am,” he says. “People know there’s usually a hurricane comin’ if they step on my rights.”

Peruta is the lead plaintiff in Peruta v. County of San Diego, a federal lawsuit that seeks to overturn California’s system of issuing concealed-weapon permits. Currently, the state’s police chiefs and sheriffs may require applicants to show “good cause” for carrying a concealed gun in public. Such discretion is applied arbitrarily and violates the Second Amendment, according to Peruta and his legal team, which is backed by the National Rifle Association.

That argument swayed two judges on the 9th Circuit Court, who ruled in Peruta’s favor in February. For a moment, it seemed that California would join the 37 “shall issue” states that issue concealed-carry permits to anyone who meets basic requirements such as a background check. Then California Attorney General Kamala Harris successfully petitioned the court to reconsider the ruling en banc. Next Tuesday, an 11-judge panel in San Francisco will hear oral arguments in the case.

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Meet the F-Bomb-Spewing Ex-Cop Behind the NRA’s Move to Topple California’s Gun Laws

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The Nation’s Most Conservative Court Just Shut Down Two-Thirds of Texas Abortion Clinics

by FVBGertrud Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Federal judges upheld a sweeping anti-abortion law on Tuesday in a decision that will shutter most abortion clinics in Texas.

The ruling held that the law, HB 2, which requires abortion facilities to comply with hospital-like standards, does not pose an undue burden for the majority of women seeking abortion in Texas, millions of whom will now have to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion.

The law calls for clinics to follow the state’s rules for ambulatory surgical centers, facilities that are very costly to operate. In 2013, Planned Parenthood opened a brand-new ASC in Forth Worth at a cost of $6.5 million. Only seven abortion clinics in Texas comply with ASC standards; 13 other clinics face imminent closure.

Whole Woman’s Health, the plaintiff in the case, vowed to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court and to ask the justices to put the ruling on hold immediately. Unless the Supreme Court steps in, the clinics will be forced to close in 22 days. The case, if it goes before the high court, could result in a definitive ruling on when an abortion restriction is too restrictive and constitutes an “undue burden.”

“Not since before Roe v. Wade has a law or court decision had the potential to devastate access to reproductive health care on such a sweeping scale,” said Nancy Northrup, the CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Whole Woman’s Health in the lawsuit.

The ruling is a broad victory for Texas on what most consider the most restrictive abortion law in the country: Other provisions of HB 2, which were not a part of Tuesday’s ruling, have already closed more than 20 abortion providers across the state. Judges were drawn from the most conservative appeals court in the country, US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio are the only cities which have abortion clinics that comply with the ASC standards If the decision goes into effect, more than 1.3 million women of reproductive age in Texas will live 100 miles or more from the nearest abortion clinic. Three-quarters of a million women will live 200 miles away or more. The westernmost clinic in Texas will be located San Antonio, leaving a swath of Texas 550 miles wide without an abortion provider. El Paso, at the western tip of the state, will become the largest US city without an abortion provider.

The ruling also exempts a clinic in McAllen—temporarily—from a portion of the law that requires abortion clinics to have admitting privileges with local hospitals. The McAllen clinic failed to acquire admitting privileges for administrative reasons and was facing immediate closure. It is the only abortion provider in the Rio Grande Valley—the next closest clinic is 200 miles away. For this reason, the judges ruled that the McAllen Whole Woman’s Health can remain open until another abortion clinic opens nearby.

The Supreme Court is currently debating whether to consider a challenge to a Mississippi law requiring similar admitting privileges.

Abortion foes cheered Tuesday’s decision. Americans United for Life, the legal arm of the anti-abortion movement, said in a statement that the ruling “advances Texas’ interests in safeguarding maternal health and protecting women from substandard abortion facilities and practices.”

Texas legislators invoked safety standards in 2013 when they passed the law. Abortion providers, however, and mainstream medical organizations, maintain that it is not necessary to do first-trimester abortion in a hospital-like setting in order to perform them safely. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that less than one half of one percent of all abortions involve major complications.

“The justice system and our elected politicians have put a road full of unnecessary hurdles in front of every woman in Texas who has decided to end her pregnancy,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, on Tuesday. “For scores of Texas women, the repercussions of this ruling will be devastating.”

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The Nation’s Most Conservative Court Just Shut Down Two-Thirds of Texas Abortion Clinics

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Denied Birthright Citizenship to American Samoans Using Racist Caselaw

by Janie22Bmqhb Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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American Samoans are the only people born on United States soil but denied birthright citizenship. And so it will remain—at least for now.

On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship does not apply to island territories including American Samoa. Agreeing with the Obama administration’s lawyers, the DC Circuit relied on and even expanded the scope of a set of racially-charged, Colonial-era cases that refer to “savages” and “alien races” to reach their decision.

(Mother Jones covered this case back in February; on his HBO show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver subsequently included the issue in a segment on rights in US territories.)

Opposing a group of American Samoans seeking birthright citizenship, the US government based its argument on a set of cases legal scholars have denounced as racist and imperialist. Known as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court in the early years of the 20th century created a distinction between the rights of newly acquired island territories such as American Samoa and Puerto Rico and territories such as Arizona that they assumed would one day become states—and which were increasingly populated by white people. As Mother Jones reported back in February:

Justice Henry Brown—famous as the author of Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave the court’s blessing to segregation—refers to the inhabitants of the new territories as “savage” and “alien races” in the Insular Cases. Brown contended that Congress would treat the territories well because it was guided by “certain principles of natural justice inherent in the Anglo-Saxon character.” His colleague, Justice Edward White, hypothesized in one case that granting citizenship to an “uncivilized race” in a new territory would “inflict grave detriment on the United States” from “the immediate bestowal of citizenship on those absolutely unfit to receive it.”

The DC Circuit’s unanimous opinion attempts to distance itself from this controversial history before ultimately relying on the Insular Cases to rule against the American Samoans. Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court—comprised of the three most conservative justices on the DC Circuit—Judge Janice Rogers Brown first denounced the Insular Cases as “without parallel in our judicial history” for the “manner in which the results were reached, the incongruity of the results, and the variety of inconsistent views expressed by the different members of the court.” Brown also acknowledged, in the politest way possible, that “some aspects of the Insular Cases’ analysis may now be deemed politically incorrect.”

Nevertheless, the DC Circuit found them “both applicable and of pragmatic use in assessing the applicability of rights to unincorporated territories.” In fact, the court expanded the scope of the Insular Cases, becoming the first court to explicitly apply the Insular Cases to the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That wasn’t the only way the DC Circuit’s opinion broke ground in this case. As Neil Weare, the civil rights lawyer who argued the case in February on behalf of a group of American Samoans, noted in a statement Friday, “Today marks the first time a federal court of appeals has ruled that citizenship by birth on US soil is not a fundamental right.”

Though the group of American Samoans lost on Friday, their chances of winning an appeal to the entire DC Circuit—which is more liberal than the three conservative judges randomly selected to hear this case—could be higher.

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Denied Birthright Citizenship to American Samoans Using Racist Caselaw

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Most of the Suspects Accused of Attacking Malala Yousafzai Were Secretly Acquitted

by EloisaDesaillly Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Eight of the ten men accused of shooting of education rights activist and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai were secretly acquitted, according to reports released today by the Pakistani government. Following a trial at a military facility in April, news spread that the 10 Taliban gunmen who were accused of involvement in the 2012 attack on Yousafzai had confessed and were sentenced to 25 years in prison—the longest possible sentence in Pakistan.

But after reporters from the British newspaper the Daily Mirror were unable to locate the 10 in Pakistani prisons, the court published new findings that revealed only two had in fact been convicted and the rest had been quietly released due to “lack of evidence.”

The Pakistani officials who failed to correct the initial reporting now deny confirming the convictions, and the New York Times reports that the government will likely seek an appeal for the decision.

Yousafzai was 15 at the time of the attack and has since become a global voice for girls’ education rights. In 2013 she published a memoir, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, and the following year, at the age of 17 she became the youngest Nobel Peace Peace Prize winner. She is currently attending school in Britain, where she and her family have relocated.

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Most of the Suspects Accused of Attacking Malala Yousafzai Were Secretly Acquitted

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How Mitch McConnell Tried—and Failed—to Weaken NSA Reform

by RogerFegan Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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The USA Freedom Act, the bill that reforms the Patriot Act and stops the US government’s bulk collection of phone records, finally passed the Senate on Tuesday after the chamber rejected three amendments from GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) aimed at weakening the bill’s reforms.

McConnell originally supported leaving the Patriot Act with all of its surveillance powers intact, but he faced resistance from both Democrats and Republicans, including die-hards such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who were happy to let bulk collection simply disappear without creating a replacement. So McConnell agreed to proceed with the USA Freedom Act, but proposed four amendments to address what he called the bill’s “serious flaws.” (He withdrew one of them.)

Harley Geiger, chief counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, called McConnell’s amendments “unnecessary for national security” and said that they would “erode both privacy and transparency.”

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How Mitch McConnell Tried—and Failed—to Weaken NSA Reform

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SCOTUS Delivers Good News for Abusive Trolls

by ZenaidaNeblett Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Trolls and libertarians rejoice. In a highly watched case that explored the tough question of what distinguishes protected free speech from illegal threats, the Supreme Court on Monday made it harder for the government to prosecute individuals who are making threatening statements toward others.

The court voided the conviction of Anthony Elonis, who was found guilty of issuing unlawful threats over Facebook with rants that referred to killing his estranged wife. Elonis argued that his posts, which were presented as rap lyrics, were a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. He was convicted in federal district court in Pennsylvania under the “reasonable person” standard: Would a reasonable person consider Elonis’ posts threatening?

In a 7-2 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the reasonable person test wasn’t sufficient for a criminal conviction like this one. Avoiding touchy First Amendment questions, the court determined that Elonis’ posts should have been evaluated under a tougher standard that takes his mental state into account. That is, did he intend to follow through on his threats or did he know that his words would be seen as a threat?

“Elonis’s conviction was premised solely on how his posts would be viewed by a reasonable person, a standard…inconsistent with the conventional criminal conduct requirement of ‘awareness of some wrongdoing,'” Roberts wrote. He noted that a criminal conviction could only be supported “if the defendant transmits a communication for the purpose of issuing a threat or with knowledge that the communication will be viewed as a threat.”

The case presented a difficult First Amendment question pitting freedom of expression against the freedom to not be threatened with violence. But the justices ducked the matter. The ruling was predicated on a statutory interpretation.

Elonis was sentenced to 44 months in prison for threatening to harm and even kill his estranged wife in Facebook posts—threats that left his wife afraid for her safety. Elonis fought the charges, arguing that he could not be imprisoned because he never intended to hurt his wife. A criminal conviction for someone who had no intent to harm, he contended, violated the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech. But the trial court disagreed and instructed the jury to use the reasonable-person standard.

The federal government argued that the reasonable person test is the best way to determine whether a statement is a threat. Its lawyers maintained that even if there is no intent to harm, such threats can severely disrupt the lives of those people targeted.

Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, supported Elonis, fearing an encroachment on free-speech rights. Advocates for victims of domestic violence, though, argued that victims of domestic abuse “suffer the devastating psychological and economic effects of threats of violence, which their abusers deliver more and more often via social media,” according to an amicus brief. This brief, filed by the National Network to End Domestic Violence and a number of state-based anti-domestic-violence groups, argued that threats are often a precursor to actual violence.

The Elonis case was argued before the court in early December and the justices took a full six months to decide the case. Roberts was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and the court’s liberal wing. Justice Samuel Alito joined in part and dissented in part. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

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SCOTUS Delivers Good News for Abusive Trolls

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