SCOTUS: It's all about the pro-Corporate agenda

Submitted by gjohnsit on Sat, 05/07/2022 - 12:18pm

Like most things in America today it's all about the money, even when we are talking about abortion.

The Roe vs. Wade ruling was based on the idea that people have a right to privacy, eventhough it's not specified in the Constitution. Today's SCOTUS didn't attack the right to abortions. It attacked the right to privacy.

"A key part of the rationale of Alito's opinion is that there is no such thing as a right of privacy in the Constitution. That's what the court relied upon in all of these cases," Stone told Insider. "If that's true in Dobbs, then why isn't true in others?"
The inferred right to privacy has served as the foundation to other landmark Supreme Court decisions — including Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, which legalized gay marriage; Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which legalized interracial marriage; and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, which legalized same-sex sexual activity.

Where the SCOTUS has been particularly active in recent years has been in the defense of conservative corporate interests at the expense of the working class. Specifically, major GOP donors.

Instead, it’s shown by a string of rulings stretching all the way back to the Lilly Ledbetter case, if not before, that go against workers, against people of color, against the right to vote, and for corporate domination and control of politics.
The majority’s opposition to Biden’s mandate is in line with an analysis by AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker, testifying before Biden’s Supreme Court reform commission this past June. Becker cited a study commissioned by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a former state Attorney General, who found “80 partisan, 5-4 Supreme Court decisions clearly favoring a big Republican donor interest, all since (John) Roberts became Chief Justice in 2005.

While most people weren't paying attention, the SCOTUS overturned a 50-year old ruling regarding the ability of union's to organize. But it was the twisted reasoning they used to do it that really stands out.

In the Cedar Point case, an agricultural company sued over a California law that allows union organizers to enter their property to talk to workers on 120 days a year for three hours a day (before and after work, and at lunch hour)...
But the majority decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., said the company had been subject to an unconstitutional “taking” of its property even though the regulation in question didn’t affect the value of the property at all.
...
The Cedar Point case alone could open the door to extraordinary restrictions on government’s power to protect consumers. For instance, restaurants could now claim that health inspections constitute a similar “invasion” of their property, and claim the right to bar the door to them. Companies could argue that federal worker-safety inspections are also unconstitutional “takings” of their property.

Way back in 1905, the SCOTUS ruled in the infamous Lochner case that New York state law limiting the hours bakery workers could be forced to work was illegal.
That opened up the window for a series of court rulings overturning law regulating wages, safety and even child labor — usually by asserting that they infringed the right of employers and employees to enter into a “free” contract with one another.

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Submitted by gjohnsit on Sat, 05/07/2022 - 1:03pm

Dems don't care about abortion

Submitted by wokkamile on Sat, 05/07/2022 - 1:51pm

The Framers

acknowledged they couldn't cover all the rights the people would have or retain in their imperfect but pretty good document from 130 yrs ago. This is stated plainly in the 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

See also the 4th Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,..." which seems to clearly imply a right to privacy.

It's overly originalist to expect the Framers to have anticipated all future changes in society and to not have future generations interpret the Constitution according to modern times. It's doubtful the original Framers wanted that document to remain chiseled in stone, frozen forever and subject to only the most narrow literal interpretation, as opposed to being a living document that would continually be flexible enough to meet the demands of the day.

Submitted by QMS on Sat, 05/07/2022 - 1:57pm

"A domestic supply of infants"

Ho, ha that's funny. The oligarchs have outsourced everything else to foreign interests.
Perhaps there is some supply chain bottle neck preventing babies being born in the
good ol' USA? Or is it the high mortality rate? Maybe they can start selling fertility drugs
at Walmart for white people only? Help meet market demands.

Sheesh

Submitted by Snode on Sun, 05/08/2022 - 9:57am

Well, look...

@QMS They need more babies to supply the export market. Remember, as the first black presidents campaign said in 1992, "it's the economy stupid".

Submitted by fire with fire on Sun, 05/15/2022 - 2:56pm

Nothing New From The Supremes

The Lochner Era
.

The Lochner era is a period in American legal history from 1897 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies".[1] The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights.[2][3] The era takes its name from a 1905 case, Lochner v. New York. The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), and its end marked forty years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which overturned an earlier Lochner-era decision.[4]

The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role".[5] The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.[5] The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal.

Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history.[1] Robert Bork called Lochner "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power".[6] In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said: "You go to a case like the Lochner case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law." He added that the Lochner court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.

.
.

My own favorite Supreme Court Decision was rendered in 1810 to resolve a dispute about a Georgia State Legislative enactment that granted the land called Yazoo to a group pf speculators -- Fletcher v. Peck. When I studied this case in law school almost half a century ago, the law professors chortled at the intellectual gymnastics that the early Supreme Court performed in order to rule against the argument that wall to wall bribery of the Georgia Legislature should nullify the State Issued land grant for the Yazoo -- a parcel of land known today as Alabama and Mississippi.

The citizens of Georgia voted every single member of the Legislature out of office in the next election and the newly empowered tribunes of the people passed a law to renege on that crooked deal.

The Supreme Court said, "Nerts!" The business interest of enforceable contracts prevails and the bribery is irrelevant to the case. The buyers are entitled to get what they paid for. (Slight snark added on that last point.)

As a predictable side bar, a collateral issue in the case was whether the native inhabitants of Alabama and Mississippi had anything to say about who owned the dirt under their feet. I'll leave it to C99 members to guess how that turned out.

Everybody of course has heard of the Dred Scot decision.
.

From the earliest days of the Republic, the Supreme Court has been a political institution and there is no way to avoid that. Double talk is the usual means of pretending to abstract political considerations from the Court's impartial enforcement of the law and the Constitution. You can't hardly argue that your party needs to win elections to "protect Roe v. Wade" and then claim that you do not think the Court is political. No the argument is to prevent the Other Side from usurping the integrity of The Law with political bullshit.

And, ahem, all the arguments about judicial legislation actually apply right on the Nose of Roe v Wade. You might be able to deduce a Right of Privacy from the text of the constitution, but you will not find the word, "trimester," anywhere in the Constitution. Just like another great Warren Court policy making case, Miranda, the "remedy" ordered is a little statute spelling out the wording of the famous warning that you see in every cop movie or TV show since the sixties.

Personally, I do not have a problem with the politicization of the Court, just as I have no problem with the idea of death and taxes. No avoiding it, period. Nor does it bother me that the Warren Court departed from the judicial tradition of just deciding the case before them and instead imposing binding new regulations of public officials. That is legislation.

My only point with all of this is that getting indignant about the Supreme Court making political decisions is both hypocritical and bad politics. The best argument on the politics of this is that the Dems never tried to pass legislation to protect the rights that were literally created by the Warren Court.

I'm giad that Warren and Douglas and the rest of them used their power for small d democratic goals. But there is no reason to assume that the Supreme Court decisions are some sort of Holy Writ, unsullied by politics.

It is a political institution and it has to be.

FDR's biggest political setback came with his Pack the Court idea. He was right and the people were wrong to oppose him. But the Idea of Impartial Law is pretty much a necessity for civilization And people get irrationally torqued about the idea of "political" decisions -- unless, of course, the decision was in your favor.

—

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Submitted by wokkamile on Sun, 05/08/2022 - 11:31am

FDR's court reform

@fire with fire bill certainly was a bold stroke as he was feeling his oats after a massive re-election landslide. I sort of wish Obama had more bold stroke instincts in this area. For instance, nominating someone a little bolder on the liberal side of things than the moderate and mild Merrick Garland, almost the exemplar of a nominee designed not to offend either side.

Obama also could have shook things up by insisting the senate hold hearings immediately and then a floor vote shortly thereafter. Failing to do so, Obama should have arranged to have Garland take his seat on the Court when McC made his announcement about no hearings, or have done so when the Court went into recess at the end of its term in June. The Constitution and prior practice permit this. If the senate refuses to undertake its responsibility to give "advise and consent" on a nominee, the president should step in to complete the process started despite the senate's obstruction.

But all that was not in the moderate and mild Obama's nature. In fact, I don't recall much public comment by him after McC announced the nominee would not be given a hearing. Obama seemed to just accept the situation and went quietly on to other things. Not my idea of leadership.

The Lochner Era
.

The Lochner era is a period in American legal history from 1897 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies".[1] The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights.[2][3] The era takes its name from a 1905 case, Lochner v. New York. The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), and its end marked forty years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which overturned an earlier Lochner-era decision.[4]

The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role".[5] The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.[5] The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal.

Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history.[1] Robert Bork called Lochner "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power".[6] In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said: "You go to a case like the Lochner case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law." He added that the Lochner court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.

.
.

My own favorite Supreme Court Decision was rendered in 1810 to resolve a dispute about a Georgia State Legislative enactment that granted the land called Yazoo to a group pf speculators -- Fletcher v. Peck. When I studied this case in law school almost half a century ago, the law professors chortled at the intellectual gymnastics that the early Supreme Court performed in order to rule against the argument that wall to wall bribery of the Georgia Legislature should nullify the State Issued land grant for the Yazoo -- a parcel of land known today as Alabama and Mississippi.

The citizens of Georgia voted every single member of the Legislature out of office in the next election and the newly empowered tribunes of the people passed a law to renege on that crooked deal.

The Supreme Court said, "Nerts!" The business interest of enforceable contracts prevails and the bribery is irrelevant to the case. The buyers are entitled to get what they paid for. (Slight snark added on that last point.)

As a predictable side bar, a collateral issue in the case was whether the native inhabitants of Alabama and Mississippi had anything to say about who owned the dirt under their feet. I'll leave it to C99 members to guess how that turned out.

Everybody of course has heard of the Dred Scot decision.
.

From the earliest days of the Republic, the Supreme Court has been a political institution and there is no way to avoid that. Double talk is the usual means of pretending to abstract political considerations from the Court's impartial enforcement of the law and the Constitution. You can't hardly argue that your party needs to win elections to "protect Roe v. Wade" and then claim that you do not think the Court is political. No the argument is to prevent the Other Side from usurping the integrity of The Law with political bullshit.

And, ahem, all the arguments about judicial legislation actually apply right on the Nose of Roe v Wade. You might be able to deduce a Right of Privacy from the text of the constitution, but you will not find the word, "trimester," anywhere in the Constitution. Just like another great Warren Court policy making case, Miranda, the "remedy" ordered is a little statute spelling out the wording of the famous warning that you see in every cop movie or TV show since the sixties.

Personally, I do not have a problem with the politicization of the Court, just as I have no problem with the idea of death and taxes. No avoiding it, period. Nor does it bother me that the Warren Court departed from the judicial tradition of just deciding the case before them and instead imposing binding new regulations of public officials. That is legislation.

My only point with all of this is that getting indignant about the Supreme Court making political decisions is both hypocritical and bad politics. The best argument on the politics of this is that the Dems never tried to pass legislation to protect the rights that were literally created by the Warren Court.

I'm giad that Warren and Douglas and the rest of them used their power for small d democratic goals. But there is no reason to assume that the Supreme Court decisions are some sort of Holy Writ, unsullied by politics.

It is a political institution and it has to be.

FDR's biggest political setback came with his Pack the Court idea. He was right and the people were wrong to oppose him. But the Idea of Impartial Law is pretty much a necessity for civilization And people get irrationally torqued about the idea of "political" decisions -- unless, of course, the decision was in your favor.

Submitted by fire with fire on Tue, 05/24/2022 - 4:46pm

For posterity

@fire with fire
.

By the way, the law professors mentioned in the prior post were Charles Alan Wright and Lucas A. Powe, a huge name and fairly large name in legal scholarship.

Charlie Wright was Nixon's lawyer (for a while) in Watergate.

The Lochner Era
.

The Lochner era is a period in American legal history from 1897 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies".[1] The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights.[2][3] The era takes its name from a 1905 case, Lochner v. New York. The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), and its end marked forty years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which overturned an earlier Lochner-era decision.[4]

The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role".[5] The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.[5] The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal.

Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history.[1] Robert Bork called Lochner "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power".[6] In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said: "You go to a case like the Lochner case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law." He added that the Lochner court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.

.
.

My own favorite Supreme Court Decision was rendered in 1810 to resolve a dispute about a Georgia State Legislative enactment that granted the land called Yazoo to a group pf speculators -- Fletcher v. Peck. When I studied this case in law school almost half a century ago, the law professors chortled at the intellectual gymnastics that the early Supreme Court performed in order to rule against the argument that wall to wall bribery of the Georgia Legislature should nullify the State Issued land grant for the Yazoo -- a parcel of land known today as Alabama and Mississippi.

The citizens of Georgia voted every single member of the Legislature out of office in the next election and the newly empowered tribunes of the people passed a law to renege on that crooked deal.

The Supreme Court said, "Nerts!" The business interest of enforceable contracts prevails and the bribery is irrelevant to the case. The buyers are entitled to get what they paid for. (Slight snark added on that last point.)

As a predictable side bar, a collateral issue in the case was whether the native inhabitants of Alabama and Mississippi had anything to say about who owned the dirt under their feet. I'll leave it to C99 members to guess how that turned out.

Everybody of course has heard of the Dred Scot decision.
.

From the earliest days of the Republic, the Supreme Court has been a political institution and there is no way to avoid that. Double talk is the usual means of pretending to abstract political considerations from the Court's impartial enforcement of the law and the Constitution. You can't hardly argue that your party needs to win elections to "protect Roe v. Wade" and then claim that you do not think the Court is political. No the argument is to prevent the Other Side from usurping the integrity of The Law with political bullshit.

And, ahem, all the arguments about judicial legislation actually apply right on the Nose of Roe v Wade. You might be able to deduce a Right of Privacy from the text of the constitution, but you will not find the word, "trimester," anywhere in the Constitution. Just like another great Warren Court policy making case, Miranda, the "remedy" ordered is a little statute spelling out the wording of the famous warning that you see in every cop movie or TV show since the sixties.

Personally, I do not have a problem with the politicization of the Court, just as I have no problem with the idea of death and taxes. No avoiding it, period. Nor does it bother me that the Warren Court departed from the judicial tradition of just deciding the case before them and instead imposing binding new regulations of public officials. That is legislation.

My only point with all of this is that getting indignant about the Supreme Court making political decisions is both hypocritical and bad politics. The best argument on the politics of this is that the Dems never tried to pass legislation to protect the rights that were literally created by the Warren Court.

I'm giad that Warren and Douglas and the rest of them used their power for small d democratic goals. But there is no reason to assume that the Supreme Court decisions are some sort of Holy Writ, unsullied by politics.

It is a political institution and it has to be.

FDR's biggest political setback came with his Pack the Court idea. He was right and the people were wrong to oppose him. But the Idea of Impartial Law is pretty much a necessity for civilization And people get irrationally torqued about the idea of "political" decisions -- unless, of course, the decision was in your favor.

—

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Submitted by Snode on Sun, 05/08/2022 - 10:02am

It's all about the pro-Corporate agenda

seems like a good candidate to replace "e pluribus unum" on our currency.