Archive for the 'Supreme Court' Category

Ten cases they denied.  Count them.  Ten.

But make sure to note that they expanded the Civil Rights Act to include transgenders.  So here are my predictions based on this ludicrous move today.

First, every military MOS must now be opened to transgenders, in every branch.

Second, there will be quotas just like there are for hiring, college admissions, and everything else.  Companies will be searching for transgenders to hire.  It will be a badge of honor to have transgenders on staff.

Third, this will affect churches.  Churches will now have to hire transgenders in order to maintain tax exempt status.

Fourth, it will affect other aspects of church life.  If a transgender wants to teach a Sunday School class on “Why I Became A Transgender,” s/he must be allowed to do that in order for the church to maintain tax exempt status.

Fifth, self mutilation will become a norm in the upside down world of anti-Christians.

The Supreme Court has now fully and completely thrown off the face of being anything other than an arm of revolution.  The French Revolutionaries in CHAZ want to hang people.  The Supreme Court still hides behind the vestiges and accouterments of robes, but they are no less thugs.

Decision in the dead of the night.

The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement. Our Constitution principally entrusts “[t]he safety and the health of the people” to the politically accountable officials of the States “to guard and protect.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 38 (1905). When those officials “undertake[ ] to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,” their latitude “must be especially broad.” Marshall v. United States, 414 U. S. 417, 427 (1974). Where those broad limits are not exceeded, they should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary,” which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people. See Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 545 (1985).

Meanwhile, the religion of “Home repair and lawn maintenance” remains unabated, with my local Lowe’s and Home Depot parking lots filled to capacity and wall-to-wall people in the aisles.

Welcome to the FUSA.  We have to be medical providers and professionals in order to interpret the first amendment to the constitution.  We’ll leave that to the bureaucracy.

Remarkable decision, with Roberts proving where his fealty lies.

Not so much.

This morning the Supreme Court issued orders from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices did not add any cases to their merits docket for next term, nor did they seek the views of the federal government in any new cases. And perhaps most notably, the justices did not act on any of the Second Amendment cases that they have now considered at three consecutive conferences; somewhat unusually, the electronic dockets for those cases (see, for example, here) all indicated late last week – that is, before today’s order list was even released – that the cases had been relisted for the upcoming conference on Thursday, May 28.

The court also granted a motion to substitute Donna Stephens, the wife of Aimee Stephens, as the respondent in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, in which the justices are considering whether federal employment-discrimination laws protect transgender employees. Aimee Stephens died earlier this month of complications from kidney disease.

But we need to make sure that the rights of transgenders are considered.

Politico.

The battle over the impact of coronavirus lockdown measures on Americans’ religious observances has reached the Supreme Court as a Southern California church and its pastor made an emergency appeal for relief from executive orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Lawyers for the South Bay United Pentecostal Church and Bishop Arthur Hodges asked the justices to step in Sunday after a federal appeals court panel rejected a similar emergency application Friday.

The decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came on the same day President Donald Trump publicly backed churches seeking to escape various stay-at-home orders in place across the country. Trump said he was ordering governors to exempt churches “right now” by declaring religious services to be essential, although he lacks any evident legal authority to impose his view on state officials.

Still, Trump’s pointed rhetoric added new fire to the simmering legal battles, including pledges by thousands of churches to defy local public-health restrictions by holding services on Pentecost, which falls next Sunday.

In the California-focused case that reached the high court Sunday night, a 9th Circuit panel split, 2-1, with the majority declining to disturb the state government’s action in light of the health dangers posed by the ongoing pandemic.

“We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure,’” Judges Barry Silverman and Jacqueline Nguyen wrote. “In the words of Justice Robert Jackson, if a ‘court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.’”

Silverman, a Clinton appointee, and Nguyen, an Obama appointee, were dismissive of the church’s arguments in the Friday order, devoting only two paragraphs to the substance of the dispute.

However, the third judge on the panel — Trump appointee Daniel Collins — weighed in with an 18-page dissent arguing that Newsom’s orders are impermissibly intruding on religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.

“I do not doubt the importance of the public health objectives that the State puts forth, but the State can accomplish those objectives without resorting to its current inflexible and over-broad ban on religious services,” Collins wrote.

Collins noted that the orders allow many workplaces to open, but ban religious gatherings even when they could meet the social distancing standards imposed on other activities that are now permitted.

“By explicitly and categorically assigning all in-person ‘religious services’ to a future Phase 3 — without any express regard to the number of attendees, the size of the space, or the safety protocols followed in such services8 — the State’s Reopening Plan undeniably ‘discriminate[s] on its face’ against ‘religious conduct,’” the judge said.

The legal dispute may turn on how much weight the justices choose to give to a 115-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a mandatory vaccination scheme for smallpox.

Who wants to lay bets with me?  I say the Supreme Court punts and refuses even to hear the case, leaving it to the cowards in the Ninth Circuit who didn’t even have the courage to hear the case En banc.

Josh Blackman writing at Reason.

Immediately after the case was decided, the Supreme Court distributed 6 Second Amendment cases for the May 1, 2020 conference (H/T to the Duke Center for Firearms Blog.)

1. Mance v. Barr (5th Circuit)—challenge to federal prohibition on out-of-state handgun purchases
2. Pena v. Horan (9th Circuit)—challenge to California’s prohibition on “unsafe” handguns (including “microstamping” requirement)
3. Gould v. Lipson (1st Circuit)—challenge to Massachusetts’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime
4. Rogers v. Grewal (3rd Circuit)—challenge to New Jersey’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime
5. Cheeseman v. Polillo (N.J. Supreme Court)— challenge to New Jersey’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime
6. Ciolek v. New Jersey (N.J. Supreme Court )—challenge to New Jersey’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime

This article was updated.

SCOTUSBlog located four more Second Amendment cases that were distributed for the 5/1/20 conference:

1. Worman v. Healey (1st Circuit)—challenge to Massachusetts ban on “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines
2. Malpasso v. Pallozzi (4th Circuit)—challenge to Maryland’s “may issue” conceal carry license regime
3. Culp v. Raoul (7th Circuit)—Challenge to Illinois’s ban on allowing non-residents to apply for conceal carry license
4. Wilson v. Cook County (7th Circuit)—Challenge to Cook County’s ban on “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines

So the game is up after this point and good men everywhere will have to conclude that the Supreme Court cares nothing for their second amendment rights.  That means no more claims that the courts will overturn infringements.  We’re on our own.

Here’s how we will know.  Four Justices clearly stated that the SCOTUS needs to take up a 2A case and stop the hemorrhaging.  Roberts said nothing of the sort.

If the four justices do not grant certiorari, that means they know that Roberts would not have gone along with the four on the given case, and the four will not risk an awful decision from the SCOTUS.  It’s better to leave the issue alone rather than risk diminution of rights.  It could be that Roberts was behind the curtain saying, “But wait, we have the perfect case coming up.  Let’s tackle more issues than the NY case brings up.”  But the throwdown between Alito and Roberts was so bitter it makes one think that this goes deeper than a chess match.

So we’ll all know very soon where ALL of the justices stand on gun rights.  This is a wonderful thing, yes?  Good times.

WSJ.

What an enormous abdication. The Supreme Court ducked its first Second Amendment case in a decade on Monday, and the only plausible explanation is that Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to avoid becoming a target of vengeful Senate Democrats.

In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the Chief joined the four liberals and a (conflicted) Justice Brett Kavanaugh in declaring moot a challenge to New York City’s onerous gun regulation (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York). At issue is a New York City rule that prevents residents with gun licenses from transporting their guns from their city homes to shooting ranges and homes outside the city. Obtaining even a “premises” license requires a $431 fee and police investigation into an applicant’s mental health, criminal history and moral character. It can take six months.

A few points of order.  First, the SCOTUS didn’t have to drop the case.  They can accept anything they want.  Second, New York can go right back to legislating liberty away now, and an aggrieved party must go through the process all over again.  It games the system, and we and they all know it.

Third, the WSJ is assuming that Roberts is a coward.  This may be true, but it also may be true that he fears nothing from Senators and is simply a controller at heart.  Fourth, assuming that he really was afraid of the Senators and is awaiting a less divisive time to rule on the 2A, he’s ignorant.  America is becoming more polarized, not less.

On the mootness point, Justice Alito also pokes his colleagues with this hypothetical: “A State enacts a law providing that any woman wishing to obtain an abortion must submit certification from five doctors that the procedure is medically necessary. After a woman sues, claiming that any requirement of physician certification is unconstitutional, the State replaces its old law with a new one requiring certification by three physicians. Would the court be required to dismiss the woman’s suit?” You know the answer.

Justice Kavanaugh’s role here is curious because, while he joined the majority on mootness, he wrote a concurrence agreeing with the dissent on the Second Amendment merits. This looks to us as if he is trying to protect the Chief Justice from being the fifth vote, and the sole “conservative,” providing a liberal victory while making clear he’s still a solid vote himself for gun rights. The phrase for this is too clever by half.

Justice Kavanaugh may agree with the Chief that the Court needs to avoid political controversies, especially with Democrats threatening to pack the Court if they win the White House and Senate in November. But the Court’s timidity on gun rights amid Senate threats means that liberal and media intimidation will escalate. The Court hasn’t taken a Second Amendment case in a decade, even as cities and states erode its landmark Heller decision bit by bit. The Court is sending a signal that the Second Amendment is the exception in the Bill of Rights, a second-class freedom.

“By incorrectly dismissing this case as moot, the Court permits our docket to be manipulated in a way that should not be countenanced,” Justice Alito warns. He’s right but too polite.

The Chief Justice is carving out a reputation as a highly political Justice whose views on the law can be coerced with threats to the Court’s “independence.” The danger for the Court is that, in bending to these threats, the Chief is compromising the very independence he claims to want to protect.

The time for politeness has ended.  The progs declared war long ago, and what’s left of believers in liberty is drinking tea in the front room playing parlor games and making sure their suits don’t get soiled.

Epoch Times.

A coalition of 21 state attorneys general is asking the Supreme Court to strike down a Maryland law that denies concealed carry permits unless applicants can convince local officials they have a “good and substantial reason” to be granted one by local authorities.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, and the other state officials filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court Dec. 18 in a case cited as Malpasso v. Pallozzi. Morrisey and the others want to expand the scope of protection afforded to gun-ownership rights after the high court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller (2010), that the right to possess a firearm is an individual right, and in McDonald v. Chicago (2012), that the right of an individual to “keep and bear arms” applies to the states.

This is a good case in light of the machinations New York just went through to avoid Supreme Court review.  This is an excellent case.

Here’s a prediction.  Roberts will prevent this from ever reaching the SCOTUS.  Good job, W.  That’s a valueless man you’ve got there, just like you.

To The Supreme Court.

There are, after all, substantial reasons to doubt that these ever-evolving developments will actually moot this case, as it is not at all clear that the City has foresworn the power to control where its residents may transport their duly licensed handguns or that there are no continuing effects from past violations of licensing restrictions that the City has consistently maintained are consistent with the Second Amendment. As for the state legislation to which respondents point, it is not even clear that it will ever take effect, rendering the question of what effect, if any, it will have on petitioners’ claims manifestly unripe.

Moreover, a party asserting that its own actions have mooted a case has “the ‘heavy burden of persua[ding]’ the court that the challenged conduct cannot reasonably be expected to start up again.” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Slater, 528 U.S. 216, 222 (2000) (alteration in original) (quoting Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 189 (2000)). That heavy burden should be heavier still where, as here, a defendant’s about-face is unabashedly motivated by a desire to deprive this Court of jurisdiction to review the defendant’s actions. See Knox v. Serv. Emps. Int’l Union, Local 1000, 567 U.S. 298, 307 (2012) (“Such postcertiorari maneuvers designed to insulate a decision from review by this Court must be viewed with a critical eye.”). There are particularly strong reasons to doubt the sincerity of any claim that the City has forever changed its errant ways here given respondents’ declaration that they have no intention of taking any position before this Court on the constitutionality of the rules that they have changed. Indeed, the procedural irregularity of respondents’ actions to date makes plain that their goal is not just to try to moot this case, but to do everything they can to avoid ever having to take a definitive position on those issues. It is hard to understand why respondents are so reluctant to take any position on the questions on which this Court granted certiorari if they have no intention of resuming the challenged conduct or materially similar conduct in the future.

I have in on good authority that in legal circles, they call that the “slamma-jamma body-cramma.”

Prior: New York City Lawyers Argue To The Supreme Court That It Should Dismiss Case Against City’s Weapon Transportation Ban.

Via Codrea, this absurdity.

However, despite the case between Timbs and Indiana making it to the United States Supreme Court last year — and the SCOTUS unanimously ruling with Timbs — the state of Indiana is still trying to argue that even the most petty instances of breaking the law can result in civil asset forfeiture.

According to Reason, that includes a situation involving a vehicle that was stopped for going five miles per hour over the speed limit, if you ask Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher.

“This is the position that we already staked out in the Supreme Court when I was asked by Justice [Stephen] Breyer whether a Bugatti can be forfeited for going over five miles over the speed limit,” Fisher said last week during oral arguments before the Indiana Supreme Court.

“Historically, the answer to that question is yes, and we’re sticking with that position here.”

Ooooo … a lawyer “staked out a position.”  So I guess we’re all supposed to genuflect.  Even though it’s morally and legally wrong, if he’s staked out the position, well then, it must be enforceable even though the highest court in the land said no.

Because progs like the courts when it suits them, and they ignore the courts when it doesn’t.  So put that in your ecumenical pipe and smoke it, Justice Roberts.  Or stick it somewhere else.  He doesn’t give a rat’s ass what your court said.

Guns.com:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously agreed that sheriff’s deputies used reasonable force when in a 2010 shooting that left two wounded.

Falling back on a longstanding objective reasonableness argument in use-of-force case law, the high court overturned a previous ruling in the case of Angel Mendez and Jennifer Garcia, between them shot 15 times by Los Angeles County deputies conducting a search.

Two deputies, Christopher Conley and Jennifer Pederson, were part of a larger force of officers looking for a dangerous parolee when they came across the couple living inside a primitive shack behind the property being searched. Without a warrant or announcing their presence, the officers opened the door to the shack which prompted a napping Mendez, who had a BB gun on his futon that he used to kill rats with, to stand. Conely yelled, “Gun!” and the deputies opened fire, hitting both individuals. Mendez, shot 14 times, had to have a leg amputated while Garcia, pregnant at the time of the shooting and hit once in the back, feared to lose her child.

Citing excessive force and civil rights allegations, the couple sued the county in 2011 in federal court, with U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald in August 2013 granting over $4 million in damages to Mendez and Garcia. The ruling, upheld by the U.S. 9th Circuit on appeal last year, was overturned by the Supreme Court this week.

The deputies, previously cleared after the shooting by the LASD’s Office of Independent Review, used reasonable force as noted by the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito for the eight-jurist panel that did not include newly added Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was not part of the court when the case was argued.

The court fell back on the 1989 Graham v. Connor ruling which held that objective reasonableness must be used when determining if excessive force was used by police, with courts basing their decisions on the information the officers had at the time.

What Alito took exception to was the 9th Circuit’s use of the so-called provocation rule to find the deputies liable for $4 million in damages, pinning it on a “murky” connection to a Fourth Amendment violation of search and seizure rights to label it excessive force. The logic of the 9th Circuit’s decision in citing the provocation rule was that the deputies lost their immunity from damages after they entered the shack without a warrant.

While I’m not a legal scholar, with all due respect to the writeup at Guns.com, this is a complex ruling and the Supreme Court is famous for deciding cases within a very limited framework.

The decision can be found here.  Alito had a problem with invoking a Ninth Circuit rule that he believed didn’t apply and could be used for nefarious reasons in the future.  Here is the money quote.

The rule’s fundamental flaw is that it uses another constitutional violation to manufacture an exces­sive force claim where one would not otherwise exist.

But if Alito has destroyed the Ninth Circuit “provocation” rule, in one and the same sentence he has destroyed the notion that there can ever be such a thing as excessive force.  He takes aim at the provocation rule, but in the process he runs roughshod over the specifics of the case where LEOs shot up two people who posed no danger to them because of “information they had at the time.”

Whether they should have had better information is left unaddressed, as it always will be.  Whether the safety of the innocents should be as important (or more important) than safety of the officers is left unaddressed.  Moreover, while the Supreme Court is protected by their own security, Alito doesn’t address the fact that we – the ordinary peasants – simply cannot wait for alleged LEOs to finish their business while we lie around unmoved as I’ve observed before concerning a case of armed men dressed in SWAT uniforms who invaded a home.

In addition to your felt need to “go home safely at the end of your shift,” we have an equivalent need to be safe in our own homes, to prevent flash-bang grenades from being thrown into our toddler’s cribs, to prevent your reflexively shooting our family dogs, and to prevent street thugs like this from raiding our homes under the guise of being police officers.

You see, we can’t just lay down and let people screaming “police, police, get the fuck on the floor, police, police” … come into our homes without countering those efforts with close quarters battle.  Because they may not be police.”

But in fact the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did just this, i.e., the gave LEOs a pass for shooting an innocent man on bad information because they invaded his home and he resisted, not knowing who the invaders were.  So while the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals beclowned themselves with an idiotic ruling that could make the founders turn in their graves, the U.S. Supreme Court played one-upmanship in the parade of the ridiculous.

For LEOs, it’s okay to shoot a man who poses you no danger if he has a BB gun, as long as the information you have at the time, correct or incorrect, makes you believe you are in danger.  Warrant or no warrant.  It makes no difference.  Alito found that there was no excessive force.  Nothing else matters, and there will never be any recollection of the Ninth Circuit’s “provocation” rule or what Alito said about it.  This is all that matters.

If you were ever waiting on the Supreme Court to come to your aid regarding overbearing and dangerous police actions, you can disavow yourselves of the notion that there will be any aid forthcoming.  You’ve been taken.