Seems to fall under the possible appearance of impropriety, at least in my mind. Nothing blatant like what is going on with Gorsuch. Or Roberts. Or Thomas. Of course. And Sotomayor fully disclosed everything. But yeah. Still is a little unseemly, at least in my mind.
Um... Que?Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 6:16 pm He’s scum. I had forgotten about that. He and Cosby are from the same generation, no?
I remember that very clearly. When I read your post I knew exactly what you were talking about.Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2023 12:47 pm Wow. That’s not what I meant at all. Wtf you guys.
There’s a generation of Black men (11 years is well within the definition of a generation) who were seemingly mortified by hip-hop culture because it was a dividing line as clear as anything between white and Black culture and they didn’t want that line. I’m not sure if societal color-blindness was their dream or exactly what. There was discussion in the media about this way of thinking but you two ( from other countries) must have missed it.
You get this in pretty much any marginalized group, a split between people who want to build a unique identity and those who want to take their place alongside the powerful and get their chance to kick down. It is not that they do not want lines, they want to be on the winning side of it and they typically have an enemy list of groups weaker than them that they are just waiting to discriminate against.Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2023 12:47 pm There’s a generation of Black men (11 years is well within the definition of a generation) who were seemingly mortified by hip-hop culture because it was a dividing line as clear as anything between white and Black culture and they didn’t want that line. I’m not sure if societal color-blindness was their dream or exactly what. There was discussion in the media about this way of thinking but you two ( from other countries) must have missed it.
I thought SCOTUS voted not to hear the case, which meant the finding in favor of the book publisher stands. If Sotomayor and Gorsuch had recused themselves it would have made no difference, as there still would not have been four justices necessary to vote yes to hear the case.raison de arizona wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 3:14 pmSeems to fall under the possible appearance of impropriety, at least in my mind. Nothing blatant like what is going on with Gorsuch. Or Roberts. Or Thomas. Of course. And Sotomayor fully disclosed everything. But yeah. Still is a little unseemly, at least in my mind.
They paid her $3M.
She ruled in their favor.
Did the $3M have anything to do with the ruling? Probably not. But as stated above, not great optics, at minimum.
Harlan Crow Sure Isn’t Paying for Your Kid’s School
Of all that’s come out of the past few weeks, this is perhaps the most insulting.
By Dahlia Lithwick May 08, 20233:01 PM
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In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat at the Supreme Court for accepting $15,000 in exchange for a series of paid lectures at American University. Part of the Fortas scandal also involved news of him accepting a stipend for doing legal work for a very rich friend (money he had actually returned when the benefactor was indicted and before the outcry).
None of Fortas’ colleagues defended him for this. No one blamed the press or even the Nixon administration (which very much orchestrated the ouster). It was widely understood that Fortas had done something that undermined the public legitimacy and independence of the court and that he had to go.
Over the past few weeks we have learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took multiple luxury vacations, valued in millions of dollars , over many years, paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire GOP donor who has business before the court. We know Crow had also contributed the $500,000 seed money that became Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central, which paid her salary. We also know that Harlan Crow purchased the home in which Justice Thomas’ mother currently resides, rent free. And late last week, we learned that Crow paid years’ worth of private school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody and whom Thomas was, as he put it, “raising as a son.” Justice Thomas knew such gifts needed to be disclosed because he did so with another tuition payment gifted to Martin in 2002. But he did not report the tuition Crow paid.
Harlan Crow's full letter to the Senate: https://documentcloud.org/documents/238 ... -to-senateJay Willis @jaywillis wrote: Harlan Crow's lawyers fired off a pound-sand letter to the Judiciary Committee explaining why investigating Crow's patronge of Clarence Thomas "raises substantial separation of powers concerns," and all due respect to "Michael D. Bopp" but I don't think this is your call dude
I get why Clarence Thomas would invoke separation of powers here, but Harlan Crow is not a government official, he's just a guy, what the fuck are we doing here lmao https://documentcloud.org/documents/238 ... -to-senate
https://www.levernews.com/clarence-thom ... -payments/Clarence Thomas Reversed Position After Gifts And Family Payments
The Supreme Court justice switched sides on a landmark legal doctrine, satisfying his benefactors’ conservative advocacy machine.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas changed his position on one of America’s most significant regulatory doctrines after his wife reportedly accepted secret payments from a shadowy conservative network pushing for the change. Thomas’ shift also came while he was receiving lavish gifts from a billionaire linked to other groups criticizing the same doctrine — which is now headed back to the high court.
The so-called “Chevron deference” doctrine stipulates that the executive branch — not the federal courts — has the power to interpret laws passed by Congress in certain circumstances. Conservatives for years have fought to overturn the doctrine, a move that would empower legal challenges to federal agency regulations on everything from climate policy to workplace safety to overtime pay.
Thomas wrote a landmark Supreme Court opinion upholding the doctrine in 2005, but began questioning it a decade later, before eventually renouncing his past opinion in 2020 and claiming that the doctrine itself might be unconstitutional. Now, Thomas could help overturn the doctrine in a new case the high court just agreed to hear next term.
Groups within the conservative legal movement funded by Leonard Leo’s dark money network and affiliated with Thomas’ billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow have organized a concerted effort in recent years to overturn Chevron. That campaign unfolded as they delivered gifts and cash to Thomas and his family in the lead-up to his shift on the doctrine.
https://apple.news/AL1UUhzYKR56IC46dht0uSQWhy the Supreme Court Keeps Unanimously Gutting Anti-Corruption Laws
MAY 13 2023 12:30 PM
The Supreme Court handed down a pair of unanimous decisions on Thursday vacating the convictions of Louis Ciminelli and Joseph Percoco. Ciminelli tried to rig the bidding process for “Buffalo Billion,” a key economic project of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Percoco, a former Cuomo aide, accepted payments to help secure state funding for a private development company. Both men were found guilty of violating federal laws against fraud; both argued that their unsavory conduct fell outside the scope of these laws. With no dissents, the Supreme Court agreed—striking another blow against prosecutors’ efforts to bring federal charges against self-dealing politicians.
On this week’s Slate Plus segment of Amicus, Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discussed the cases and their bleak implications for American democracy. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: Before we get into the details of these cases, I’d just like to note the hilarious irony of the court weighing in on corruption at this moment.
Mark Joseph Stern: And on the side of the criminals! This is really a cross-ideological project to hollow out federal anti-corruption laws. The project began in proper with the Bob McDonnell case, in which the court unanimously ruled in favor of McDonnell, the former governor of Virginia who was involved in super sleazy and sordid schemes to enrich himself and his wife. Chief Justice John Roberts said: Just because this behavior is sordid doesn’t mean it’s criminal. That continued in 2020’s Kelly v. U.S., the Bridgegate case. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a unanimous court, said: Sure, Bridgegate was gross, and maybe it was illegal under state law, but this was not a form of property fraud. So the conviction got tossed.
That leads us to Thursday, when more clearly corrupt dudes got their convictions unanimously thrown out the window. Basically, every justice of this court thinks that the federal anti-corruption laws, like honest services fraud and wire fraud, are way too broad, so the courts have an obligation to narrow them to cover a limited subset of explicit corruption—bribery, extortion, an exchange of actual property or money in return for a government favor. Anything short of that, the court reiterated on Thursday, is just not going to cut it, because the court is really worried these laws sweep too far and give prosecutors too much leeway to charge a bunch of behavior that, while sordid, is not clearly prohibited by these statutes.
Moar here: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/1 ... 4-00096311A controversial legal theory that could completely upend American elections may not be resolved by the Supreme Court this year. Some legal experts warn there will be chaos ahead of 2024 if the high court doesn’t act.
Some conservative legal scholars and attorneys have been advancing a once-fringe idea known as the independent state legislature theory, which gives state courts little — to no — role in interpreting election laws set by state legislatures.
But now the future of the key Supreme Court case addressing the theory — Moore v. Harper — is in question because a state-level ruling could make it moot. The nation’s highest court has also signaled that it may skip out on issuing a decision. That concerns even some strident critics of ISL, who worry that the lack of a clear decision risks injecting disarray into the 2024 election and the litigation that is guaranteed to accompany it.
You can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy.
Supreme Court rules Twitter not liable for ISIS content
By Amy Howe
on May 18, 2023 at 1:03 pm
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against the family of a 2017 ISIS attack victim who sought to hold tech companies liable for allowing ISIS to use their platforms in its terrorism efforts. The lawsuit seeking to hold Twitter, Facebook, and Google liable for aiding and abetting international terrorism cannot go forward, a unanimous court found. And based on that decision, the justices sidestepped a major ruling in a separate case on the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which generally shields tech companies from liability for content published by users. The justices sent that case, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, back to the lower court for another look – suggesting that it too was unlikely to survive.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for a unanimous court in Twitter v. Taamneh, a lawsuit filed by the family of a Jordanian citizen, Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in an ISIS attack on an Istanbul nightclub in 2017. The lawsuit relied on the Antiterrorism Act, which allows U.S. nationals to sue anyone who “aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance,” international terrorism. The Taamneh family argued that Twitter and the other tech companies knew that their platforms played an important role in ISIS’s terrorism efforts but nonetheless failed to take action to keep ISIS content off those platforms.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit allowed the family’s lawsuit to go forward, but on Thursday the Supreme Court reversed. Thomas noted that the “mere creation of” social-media platforms “is not culpable,” even if “bad actors like ISIS are able to use” those platforms for “illegal — and sometimes terrible — ends. But the same could be said of cell phones, email, or the internet generally,” Thomas emphasized.
Instead, Thomas explained, what the family’s argument really boils down to is that the tech companies should be held liable for “an alleged failure to stop ISIS from using these platforms.” But the family has not demonstrated the kind of link between the tech companies and the attack on the nightclub that it would need to show to hold the companies liable, Thomas reasoned. Instead, he observed, the companies’ “relationship with ISIS and its supporters appears to have been the same as their relationship with their billion-plus other users: arm’s length, passive, and largely indifferent.” And the relationship between the companies and the attack on the nightclub is even more attenuated, Thomas wrote, when the family has never alleged that ISIS used the social-media platforms to plan the attack.
Indeed, Thomas noted, because of the “lack of concrete nexus between” the tech companies and the Istanbul attack, allowing the family’s lawsuit to go forward would effectively mean that the tech companies could be held liable “as having aided and abetted each and every ISIS terrorist attack” anywhere in the world.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a brief concurring opinion in which she stressed that the court’s opinion, which she joined, was “narrow in important respects.” In particular, she wrote, although the family’s claims cannot go forward here, “[o]ther cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions.”
The court’s decision in the Twitter case was followed closely by its opinion in Gonzalez v. Google, a lawsuit filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American woman who was killed in the 2015 ISIS attack on a Parisian bistro. The Gonzalez family argued that Google (which owns YouTube) aided ISIS’s recruitment by allowing ISIS to post videos on YouTube that incited violence and sought to recruit potential ISIS members, and by recommending ISIS videos to users through its algorithms.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/supr ... s-content/
I disagree with the fact that either Gorsuch or Sotomayor did anything egregious in the publisher cases. In both cases, the publisher had won at the lower court. It takes four justices to decide to take up the case. In both cases, the Supreme Court did NOT take up either case. Yes, both Gorsuch and Sotomayor did not recuse themselves, and both of them voted "no" to take up the case. But if they had recused themselves, there still would not have been four votes to take up the cases. I'm not aware that if two justices recuse themselves then that reduces the number of "yes" votes required to take up the cases. Whether they recused or voted as they did, the cases still would not have been taken up, leaving the publishing house as the winner since it had won in the lower court.raison de arizona wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 3:14 pmSeems to fall under the possible appearance of impropriety, at least in my mind. Nothing blatant like what is going on with Gorsuch. Or Roberts. Or Thomas. Of course. And Sotomayor fully disclosed everything. But yeah. Still is a little unseemly, at least in my mind.
They paid her $3M.
She ruled in their favor.
Did the $3M have anything to do with the ruling? Probably not. But as stated above, not great optics, at minimum.
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