Truth will Out

 

If there is any doubt that  Mitch McConnell pulled off a judicial coup over the last year of the Obama administration and into the waning months of the next one, the jury is in. His unconstitutional foul play might well be the partisan accomplishment of the decade and perhaps more than that.

By announcing that he would not allow Obama to appoint the current attorney general to the vacancy that suddenly appeared as Justice Scalia dies in his sleep at  an isolated far west Texas get-away lodge for the super rich, (Mick Jagger stays there), McConnell fundamentally changed the make up of the court. For almost a year, he sandbags the President.  Then, when RBG passes, he rams through the Republican Judge Amy Barrett through in record time.

This from Wikipedia:

On October 26, the Senate voted to confirm Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court, with 52 of 53 Republicans voting in favor, while Susan Collins and all 47 Democrats voted against; Barrett took the judicial oath on October 27.^[2] Democrats rebuked Republicans and accused them of hypocrisy, stating that they had violated their own interpretation of the Biden rule, which they set in 2016 when they refused to consider then-President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland more than nine months before the end of his term.^[3] The 35 days between the nomination and the 2020 presidential election marked the shortest period of time between a nomination to the Supreme Court and an election in U.S. history.

All of these new judges are determined to reshape America. And now we have the receipts.

First, there was the reversal of Roe, and now today we have these jaw droppers.  They are all bad, but striking down affirmative action is a big victory for the white team. This from Scotus Blog:  

In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the admissions programs used by the University of North Carolina and Harvard College violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars racial discrimination by government entities.

The majority effectively, though not explicitly, overruled its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s consideration of race “as one factor among many, in an effort to assemble a student body that is diverse in ways broader than race.”  

For the minority, Sotomayor emphasized that the majority’s decision had rolled “back decades of precedent and momentous progress” and “cement[ed] a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.”

On the culture front, the court handed a major victory to business owners who oppose same-sex marriage for religious reasons on Friday. A six-justice majority agreed that Colorado cannot enforce a state anti-discrimination law against a Christian website designer who does not want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples because doing so would violate her First Amendment right to free speech.

Interestingly, the website designer had not actually designed any websites when she filed the lawsuit, and the request that she purportedly received turns out to be a fake as well as a day after her filing. She perjured herself before the court by saying so.

And finally, in the flurry of a unbridled political judiciary, and by a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority last year when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans. The Biden administration had said that as many as 43 million Americans would have benefitted from the loan forgiveness program; almost half of those borrowers would have had all of their student loans forgiven.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court in Biden v. Nebraska, characterizing the decision as a straightforward interpretation of federal law. The HEROES Act, Roberts emphasized, gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify” laws and regulations governing the student-loan programs. Congress’s use of the word “modify” means that the Biden administration can make “modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions,” Roberts wrote, “not transform them.” 

Roberts apparently chose to ignore the first word in the law which also gave the secretary the right to waive.

It could be worse.

Earlier in the week, the Court rebuffed a legal theory that argued that state legislatures have the authority to set election rules with little oversight from state courts, a major decision that turns away a conservative push to empower state legislatures.

By a 6-3 vote, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” theory in a case about North Carolina’s congressional map. The once-fringe legal theory broadly argued that state courts have little — or no — authority to question state legislatures on election laws for federal contests.

The court’s decision in Moore v. Harper closes the path to what could have been a radical overhaul of America’s election laws.

A particularly robust reading of the theory — which the court turned aside — would have empowered state legislatures to make decisions on all aspects of elections, from congressional lines to how people register to vote and cast a ballot, without any opportunity for challengers to contest those decisions in state courts under state laws or constitutions. Opponents of the theory argued that it could have led to unchecked partisan gerrymandering, and laws that would make it harder for people to vote.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s opinion, joined by the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with two conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. 

This of course would have been a huge shot in the arm to the guy who tried to stay in office after losing by 7 million votes by implementing exactly this view employing the power of  state legislatures in federal elections.

Maybe Alito and Thomas will miss a turn while on another unreported billionaire hunt to west Texas.

Maybe Roberts will get control of his court.

Maybe we vote the Rs out.

Maybe Truth will Out.

 

 

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