Samuel Alito kicked us in the nuts today, not once but twice. Unlike the normal procedure where you’re doubled over in pain for a while but eventually recover, there will be no recovery from this nut-kicking. These injuries are permanent, at least until such time that there is a liberal majority on the Supreme Court again. Some closely-held corporations are now allowed to have religious beliefs, meaning that people can form corporations for the express purpose of defying the law. And public sector unions can no longer viably organize government employees unless those employees work in traditional jobs on government property.
The pair of 5-4 decisions, both authored by Alito, are a blow to this country that will hurt people every day for the foreseeable future.
Unsurprisingly, the five conservative Catholic male “justices” found that the constitution turns out to be exactly what a conservative pro-life activist wishes it to be! And thus the “rights” of a conservative male business owners to make medical decisions for their female employees trump statutory rights of workers.
This is another lawless decision that not only has no established precedent behind it, it flouts existing precedents–exactly in the “no agenda” (ha-ha) mold of the liar Roberts. I found it kind of comic to read the extensive pre-decision arguments of various law professors about how terrible the arguments for the Hobby Lobby owners were, as though the decision were going to turn on legal principles and logic and existing precedent. Those days are gone, guys….
These are the sort of rulings that will be issued for a very long time, until one of the conservatives drops dead (assuming we have a Dem prez at the time).
Given that we are now stuck with a rightwing extremist court for a very long time thanks to Bushco and the “conservative” movement, the question is whether some political hay can be made of the catastrophic turn that American constitutional law has now taken. It really is past time to explain how we got this collection of rightwing extremists, who they are, and what they are doing. Of course, this is very hard to do. But the transformation of America and its constitutional law is really starting to build to the point that perhaps the Dems can start to make an effective case.
Isn’t that the truth. The depressing truth.
So, yet another baby is badly split, and another can of sick worms, is opened.
Thanks to the 5 conservative trolls in robes on our SCOTUS.
“Corporations are people, my friends, and some people are more equal than others…”
Now let’s have a whole bunch of ‘purity progressives’ on this site start arguing how many angels can fit on the head of a Clinton presidency.
The only thing that matters is the SCOTUS.
.
??? huh ???
Just someone looking to pick a fight, I’m guessing.
The best way for us to show we can’t be taken for granted is to take precisely those steps likely to produce presidents who will put a fifth vote to, for example, override Abood onto the bench…
Send a message! Tell them you won’t be taken for granted.
But I thought Marie2, TarheelDem, and AG (The PermaGov 3) along with “I am God and I know what is Moral and I won’t die on the Hill of Constitutionality because I don’t understand or believe in Democracy because I am God and I know what is and isn’t Moral and so the rest of you plebes don’t get a voice at all!” Seabe had made there case that it wasn’t the SCOTUS R.A.T.S.’s (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia AKA R.A.T.S.) fault because this was the inevitable and preordained outcome the ruling PermaGov wanted and therefore this must be Obama’s and the Dem’s fault as well because they are part of the PermaGov!
Will only speak for myself because what you claim I’ve said is a flat out lie. And your comment is as kneejerk as those that blame these wretched SCOTUS decisions on Nader.
First, I opposed the nominations of Roberts, Alito, and Thomas. WRT to Clarence Thomas he was nominated during the 102nd Congress. Democrats controlled the Senate (House as well not that it matters in this instance). So, please explain why Democrats have no responsibility for this jerkwad sitting on the Supreme Court?
Second, while it would have required filibusters not to seat Alito and Roberts, the Senate Democrats chose to “keep their powder dry. (Note: those nominations were made during GWB’s second term.)
Third, the Hobby Lobby ruling is legally a mess. As Justice Ginsberg noted, extending religious objections to for-profit corporations, even if such corporations are narrowly defined, is unprecedented. However, the biggie that the Catholic mafioso five hung their hat on is the RFRA, passed by the Democratically controlled 103rd Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. Plus this act was used by the Obama administration to carve out an exemption to the ACA birth control mandate for non-profit religious organizations, most of which are corporations.
The legal fiction that is conferred on organizations that choose to incorporate, shouldn’t matter if it’s for-profit or non-profit, comes with benefits not enjoyed by individual people. However, to get those benefits, they shouldn’t also be able to retain the Constitutional rights of people.
Wait… so you’re saying it is the Dem’s fault while alluding to PermaGov, but accusing me of lying because I said that you’d cry that it’s the Dem’s mess, allude to or use the phrase PermaGov directly, and give a mighty cry of “It’s all everyone elses fault!”?
My… aren’t you special.
I never use the term “PermaGov” nor allude to it in any or my arguments. Socialists like me are quite fond of government and want it to be somewhat permanent to protect the rights and well-being of all those living here and not favor the elites and corporations. And we want it to be open and transparent so that citizens have the ability to know what and whom they choose to represent them. The Democratic Party and most of its elected members fall very far short of those standards and often collude with Republicans have no interest in those standards.
Why are you so into denying reality?
It’s Arthur Gilroy that talks about the Permagov, definitely not Marie2.
Keep in mind why RFRA was passed in the first place: Scalia wrote something because he didn’t like the specific beliefs at issue, and could easily have applied to any religious belief.
We were fine with Sherbert; that wasn’t enough for Scalia. Therefore, RFRA.
Sherbert (1963) and Employment Division v. Smith (1990) both concerned eligibility for unemployment compensation. Both hinged on the definition of fired for cause. Generally, a business doesn’t need a reason to fire and employee, but no cause allows the individual to collect unemployment compensation. To deny unemployment compensation, the unemployment office must accept that the “cause” is legal. Sherbert didn’t hold that a company can’t fire a worker that for religious reasons wouldn’t work on the Sabbath, only that firing such an employee makes them eligible for unemployment compensation. SCOTUS (Scalia) determined that Smith didn’t have a religious exemption for use of peyote in religious ceremonies because unlike AZ, CO, and NM, Oregon didn’t have a peyote exemption.
I know what the facts were, but I don’t find Scalia’s reasoning particularly persuasive. Blackmun was more correct in my view.
Scalia’s reasoning is rarely persuasive to very many people. O’Connor didn’t even like it in this case. But her preferred reasoning and recommended remedy were practical.
How we got from a case concerning the use of peyote for a religious ceremony that resulted in the religious adherent being fired and denied unemployment compensation to a federal act supporting the religious adherent that is now being used by for-profit corporations not to comply with the ACA contraception mandate on religious grounds is mind-boggling.
Once you start recognizing religion, you are on a slippery slope. Back in eighth grade (1958), we were told the purpose of freedom of religion was to ban a state church and prevent laws such as England had banning Catholics (and non-Anglican Protestants) from state jobs. Back in the Reformation, your property (and sometimes your life!) were forfeit if you had the wrong religion.
How in the world that became to mean that the State has an obligation to support your religious views is beyond me.
Notice that when Cheney said that “Freedom of Religion” does not mean “Freedom of Religion” so therefore your could be required to have a religion, but you can choose which one, there wasn’t a ripple in the Press?
Thought recently why the 1st Amendment didn’t say both “freedom of” and “freedom from.” They knew they were saying both. But to say both would have been waving red flags in the eyes of the religious nutcases back then. They may have thought that with a more educated populace religious fervor would die down and everyone would agree that separation of church and state was a good thing.
They may not have anticipated how many local and state laws would follow the Constitution and discriminate based on religion. Undoubtedly didn’t anticipate “The Great Awakening” that really screwed things up again. Then the slow speed with which cultures change organically.
So, here we are again — “slut shaming” instead of witch hunts and executions.
The second “Freedom of Religion” should have been “Freedom from Religion”, but I’m sure you recognized the quote.
What is it with the “slut shaming” when their own sexual practices are usually rather bizarre? What goes on in their minds? I’m not sure I want to know. To bad they can’t enjoy the pleasure of free and equal intellectual intercourse with women as well as sexual intercourse. Their lives would be so much happier and maybe they would be more mellow.
Most raised in a patriarchal religion are going to carry a subconscious notion (schema) of women as “less than” unless they challenge it sometime during their process of maturation. Catholics get the added bonus that sex is dirty and sinful unless within marriage and then it’s supposed to be blissful.
How some develop an obsessive focus on the sex lives of others escapes me. Men may have a better grasp of this than women and it does seem to be more common among them.
Does the name Bart Stupak ring a bell? There are lots of squishy Democrats when it comes to both contraception and labor.
And then there were those of us who thought that both Roberts’s and Alito’s nominations should have been blocked in the Senate because they provided insufficient information in their confirmation hearings, but “Two-fisted” Reid wanted to “keep his powder dry”, whatever the heck that meant. This decision was set in 2005 and 2006.
The fact of millions of swirling campaign dollars and a closed network of candidate selection makes the two-party system behave like a permanent corporate government that never looks after the interests of ordinary people. It has gotten worse since the Supreme Court adopted the Republican partisan agenda in 2000 and behaved in a nakedly partisan manner. The appropriate response of the Democratic majorities in Congress at that time would have been to impeach the five justices who voted for Bush v. Gore for meddling in an election.
It’s actually a more complicated system than the label “PermaGov” denotes. There is a national security state that is beyond accountability and has been in place since 1947. There is a the network of relationships between members of Congress, corporate-funded K-Street lobbyists (who often have bipartisan staff), and corporate funded think tanks. There is the revolving door of staff moving among all of these parts of the government and para-government apparatus. And then there are the political consultants and campaign media folk who help select and train the candidates but also shape the issues that get pushed through the corporate-owned media. The groupthink in corporate America and inside the Beltway constitutes a permanent governing class that can quickly co-opt or cast out outsiders.
But within this system, there are lots of personal agendas and animosities and factions and plays using the standards of the traditional US two parties.
We are in a three-branch Constitutional crisis and folks are still limited by thinking in terms of the two parties.
Every president has the right, and one might say a duty, to nominate those persons they feel are eligible to the court. Filibusters and holding up those nominations should be done VERY rarely, and only for very obvious reasons. You are suggesting that BOTH Alito and Roberts should have been rejected. Frankly that is silly and unrealistic. Both Roberts and Alito were qualified for the SCOTUS. You wanted to reject them because they don’t follow your politics, and were obscure in their testimony. That is not a good enough reason.
We already have one political party in this country that wants to reject any governance at all. You want two! ‘Advise and Consent’ does not mean ‘nominate only who I want’, no matter how many sparkly ponies you have under your bed.
Shorter version…… Elections have consequences, and when a republican wins the presidency, we are going to get conservation judges.
Grow up.
..
I am grown.
I have voted straight Democratic tickets for the past 35 years and only departed from that practice once when I voted for a qualified Republican for county commissioner. I have worked on Democratic campaigns, the last for President Obama’s re-election, canvassing in my neighborhood. I have donated to Democratic candidates and to the Democratic Party as finances allowed me.
And I have seen solid Democratic majorities be squandered over the past 30 or so years by putting up wishy-washy candidates who ultimately turned out to be be corrupt or tolerated corruption on their staffs. I have seen lackluster campaigns in the fact of Republican media saturation. And I have seen the Democratic Party elected officials drift farther and farther to the right in the name of “practicality” or from just plain-out ineffectiveness. Hell, I even voted for Erskine Bowles for Senate, who after his loss turned around and tried to stab seniors in the back.
Today’s ruling is proof that the the five justices who wrote the majority, who claim to be “strict constructionists” and read the Constitution for what it says either lied about their approach or are incapable of reading ordinary English. That should disqualify them. It is not a minor not following my politics. It is a fundamental violation of the separation of church and state and extending constitutional rights to legal entities created and privileged by states and not anticipated in the Constitution.
Corporations that can’t be held accountable for wrongdoing have no conscience. How do they possibly be construed as having a religion.
When is the Democratic Establishment going to wake up to the fact that elections have consequences and that policy and performance shapes elections?
Elections have consequences. When is the Democratic Establishment going to play to win on change instead of being “Me too”. In NC, we’re going to lose Mike McIntryre finally to a real Republican. Hopefully the NC Democratic Establishment has some fire to take back the legislature, but I don’t see it yet.
It seems that “grow up” is the current tag for “get used to defeat”.
It is also the current tag for “screw you” or something to that effect (typically after offering a series of condescending remarks), based upon the way folks seem to use that phrase on the Internet Tubes.
You must be very young or have a poor grasp of history (hardly the hallmark of a grown-up).
Ike: Warren and Brennan
JFK: White
Nixon: Burger, Blackmun (nominated after the Carswell and Haynsworth nominations correctly failed)
Ford: Stevens
Reagan: O’Connor generally ruled to support Roe. (Bork not confirmed.)
GHWB: Souter
It would be nice to have some “conservation” (i.e., preserving the environment) judges though. 🙂
Other than her defenses of Roe, O’Connor was almost always an enemy to our movement. Good Lord, BUSH V. GORE, eh? And much more than that: this Wikipedia summary documents O’Connor’s record:
“Initially, her voting record aligned closely with the conservative William Rehnquist (voting with him 87% of the time her first three years at the Court). From that time until 1998 O’Connor’s alignment with Rehnquist ranged from 93.4% to 63.2%, hitting above 90% in three of those years. In nine of her first sixteen years on the Court, O’Connor voted with Rehnquist more than with any other justice.
Later on, as the Court’s make-up became more conservative (e.g., Anthony Kennedy replacing Lewis Powell, and Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall), O’Connor often became the swing vote on the Court. However, she usually disappointed the Court’s more liberal bloc in contentious 5-4 decisions: from 1994 to 2004, she joined the traditional conservative bloc of Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Thomas 82 times; she joined the liberal bloc of John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer only 28 times.”
Did stipulate that it was on “Roe” that she disappointed the conservatives. She also threaded the needle on some affirmative action cases. She is a Republican and a conservative but she was more thoughtful and respectful of precedent than Alito or Roberts. History will not be kind to her for her egregious decision in Bush v. Gore.
Yes, O’Connor was better than Roberts and Alito. Pretty low bar, but a meaningful one. She did prevent some majority decisions from being as bad as they would have been otherwise. Being a most frequent ally of Rehnquist does not make her a good Justice for our views, though.
Stevens, Souter and Breyer are far better examples of SCOTUS appointments by Republican Presidents who became more liberal than might have been expected. It is important to note that there are NO recent Justices appointed by POTUS’s from the Democratic Party who have drifted to the conservative wing of the Court. It is also important to recall that nominations by Presidents from the GOP have failed much more often in recent years than nominees from the Dem side.
So, perspective is important. The best way to improve the Court in the future is not to browbeat Senate Dem caucuses, but to elect Democratic Party Presidents. I’m optimistic on that count. I don’t consider a Hillary Presidency a best-case scenario, but I am confident that she would provide SCOTUS nominees who would stay on the liberal side of the Court.
Worth further discussion. Perhaps you could put up a diary to facilitate one.
True, but largely irrelevant today:
Obamaney Cluelessness: Supreme Court Division
you forget that Bush didn’t win
To be precise, Bush did win in 2004 which predated his nominations of Roberts and Alito.
By “win,” I mean that team Bush was able to cheat enough to win the vote count. In 2000, they underestimated the number of votes that had to be in someway disappeared in FL — and that number was huge and likely several times larger than the number disappeared in OH 2004.
And, as referenced above, O’Connor’s swing vote stole the Presidency for W. Bush.
Lumping Marie and Tarheel in with AG seems a bit odd and dreadfully inaccurate, unless you can offer compelling evidence that they, too, are states’ rights advocates who buy into the same basic conspiracy theories as AG. Good luck with that.
Guess he/she didn’t notice that I’m one of AG’s harshest critics. Or his concession last week that he’s all in with the Paul’s misogyny.
Yes, I was just in the process of going way out on a limb and assuming you aren’t a Paulite.
Correct. I don’t always agree with Marie and Tarheel, but I do respect their knowledge and their views. AG, on the other hand, takes Rand Paul seriously.
Five older Catholic men just decided the Hobby Lobby case, which resulted in the blatant discrimination of women and wreaked havoc upon the 1st amendment and who knows what else. The Republicans and the Catholic hierarchy have had an alliance for quite a while and these 5 justices just signaled their strong support of certain papal teachings, under the cover of 2 other religions. Images of Medieval Europe and Canon Law are conjured up with such rulings. Of course, it was an opportunity to attack Obamacare, as well. It’s political pandering at its worst and I think it will backfire and scare more women in voting Democrat. After all, only women can get pregnant and they are well aware of this fact. (Disclosure: Female and attended Catholic schools from 1st grade through college. Only go inside a Catholic church when there’s a family funeral.)
Considering that the ACA carved out an exception for non-profit religious organizations to discriminate against women, IMHO the larger issue in this ruling was the declaration that for-profit corporations, albeit narrowly defined, can have the rights of people.
Money = Speech.
Only persons can use speech.
Corporations have lots of money, and hence, a lot of speech. They are effectively persons.
Persons have constitutional rights.
I’m not sure about your metaphor in your title; it seems to ignore the group most affected by one decision and the predominant gender of the workers affected in the second decision. But for guys, that works to give an idea of the intensity of the pain that the Republican-stacked court wrought.
So maybe there will be some fire in the Democratic Party to take away some more Republican Senate seats? To take back the House?
The Supreme Court, which made a baby step toward restoring the Fourth Amendment, has now taken a big step backwards in destroying the separation of church and state in the First Amendment and the equal protection of the law in matters of health care.
This Hobby Lobby option provides the opportunity to end the employer-based health care system for good. And roll back the Hyde Amendment. Churches should not have the power to dictate to those whose beliefs are different; I do believe that that is the idea behind the First Amendment separation, despite this rogue Court.
Yo — anagram — last week’s SCOTUS decision to unfairly burden women when they seek reproductive medical care was 1st Amendment case. “Hobby Lobby” decision not decided on 1st Amendment grounds.
So the real question here is it time to get the pitchforks yet?
What type of responses to the SCOTUS have you all seen on numerous other sites?
Do you feel these decisions will motivate you and all you know to vote?
This crowd doesn’t know what harsh critics are out there. Here is harsh:
No one said bmaz was particularly convincing.
PeeClob = Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board for those not in the know.
Thanks. I didn’t.
I’ve heard a lot from blogs and talk show hosts, but not a peep from elected officials. There is no pushback. Democratic politicians pretend to care about women, but they love corporate cash more.
Plenty of elected officials are speaking out — but first pass these days are the blogs and talk radio/TV folks because they speak to their choirs.