So what is it all about?

There isn't much to say about this that isn't already in the text of the dissent. So let's highlight a few things. (full opinion can be found here)

And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015). They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions. The majority (or to be more accurate, most of it) is eager to tell us today that nothing it does “cast[s] doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66; cf. ante, at 3 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (advocating the overruling of Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell). But how could that be? The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 32. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” Ante, at 15. So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

We start with Roe and Casey, and with their deep connections to a broad swath of this Court’s precedents. To hear the majority tell the tale, Roe and Casey are aberrations: They came from nowhere, went nowhere—and so are easy to excise from this Nation’s constitutional law. That is not true. After describing the decisions themselves, we explain how they are rooted in—and themselves led to—other rights giving individuals control over their bodies and their most personal and intimate associations. The majority does not wish to talk about these matters for obvious reasons; to do so would both ground Roe and Casey in this Court’s precedents and reveal the broad implications of today’s decision. But the facts will not so handily disappear. Roe and Casey were from the beginning, and are even more now, embedded in core constitutional concepts of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives. Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American. For in this Nation, we do not believe that a government controlling all private choices is compatible with a free people. So we do not (as the majority insists today) place everything within “the reach of majorities and [government] officials.” West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 638 (1943). We believe in a Constitution that puts some issues off limits to majority rule. Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women—to make their own choices and chart their own futures. Or at least, we did once.

The majority would allow States to ban abortion from conception onward because it does not think forced childbirth at all implicates a woman’s rights to equality and freedom. Today’s Court, that is, does not think there is anything of constitutional significance attached to a woman’s control of her body and the path of her life. Roe and Casey thought that one-sided view misguided. In some sense, that is the difference in a nutshell between our precedents and the majority opinion. The constitutional regime we have lived in for the last 50 years recognized competing interests, and sought a balance between them. The constitutional regime we enter today erases the woman’s interest and recognizes only the State’s (or the Federal Government’s).

And one more thing to share just to drive home the point.

The criminalization of a woman’s right to choose is only the precursor to states removing other freedoms based in privacy. As one freedom is removed from the table, a myriad of others become jeopardized by future government overreach- to which, set by this dangerous precedent,

— del (@so_del_icious) June 24, 2022

Okay and one more in case we want to know what Democrats are doing about it.

As protesters can be heard in the back chanting outside SCOTUS, House Democrats sing “God Bless America.” pic.twitter.com/MjW0cSZ6nY

— Farnoush Amiri (@FarnoushAmiri) June 24, 2022

What's it all about, then? Well, it's about denying basic healthcare to millions of women and putting their lives in danger. It's about denying Americans' fundamental right to privacy insofar as it is understood by anyone born after the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. But one thing it can't possibly be about is holding the middle managers our broken political system entrusts with defending any of this responsible. Why would anyone think that? I mean, aren't the Republicans really the problem?

to me it's like being in New Orleans during Katrina, and shit is flooding, and there's nowhere to go and no help coming, and yelling at the hurricane about it. The Republicans are the hurricane in this analogy for any democratic strategists reading this

— tinybaby (@tinybaby) June 24, 2022

Oh well that is who we are getting

 Biden's probable pick for the open Supreme Court seat. 

Childs’s experience is worth scrutinizing closely. As a lawyer, Childs served as an associate and then partner at Nexsen Pruet Jacobs & Pollard, from 1992 to 2000. At Nexsen Pruet, Childs worked primarily in labor and employment law, principally working on behalf of employers against allegations of racial discrimination, civil rights violations, and unionization drives.

Bloomberg Law has 25 cases registered in which Childs participated during her time at the firm; 23 of those involve alleged employment discrimination or other employment-related civil rights violations. Race and gender were common factors in such suits; seven such cases entailed race-based job discrimination, and another three involved sex-based job discrimination. In all but two registered instances, Childs was not representing the plaintiff but the defendant, meaning that she overwhelmingly represented employers accused of violating civil rights and gender discrimination laws in the workplace.

Not considered the "front runner" at the moment, but all the elements are there. Clyburn is pushing for her. Apparently, Lindsey Graham is on board so it's "bi-partisan."  Add to that the concept of a figure who checks all the indentitarian boxes while also upholding a conservative ideology and you've pretty much got the flavor of the moment in Democratic Party politics right now. Hard to imagine this isn't the direction they go in.

 

Plenty time left

Despite the absolutely horseshit claims already emanating from partisan Democrats over the weekend, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is completely irrelevant to the Presidential election.  It's possible that it will still be a thing people are arguing over come November, but the election itself won't determine what happens. Trump is going to appoint the next justice either way. 

“We win an election and those are the consequences,” said the president, who then seemed to signal that he’d be willing to accept a vote on his nominee during the lame-duck period after the election. “We have a lot of time. We have plenty of time. We’re talking about January 20th.”

If Trump wins, then the person he names is the next justice. If Trump loses, then the person he names still becomes the next justice during the lame duck session. If they want to ram somebody through before the election even happens, then that is also something they can do.  But none of it has any bearing on the election itself, nor will the outcome of the election change anything one way or another.

What will be done about that? Not a whole lot. One can only laugh at the notion of Joe "nothing will fundamentally change" Biden packing the court if he becomes President. It would run contrary to Biden's entire political m/o and stated ideological reason for wanting to be President in the first place. 

What could be done about it?  Well... a whole lot, actually. A Democratic Party that actually cared about using power to affect change rather than just, you know, having it sometimes could certainly tack on as many justices as they like. There's nothing stopping them from doing that if they control the congress. They could also follow this example. 

Across the late 1850s, Lincoln argued that “the American people,” not the Supreme Court, were the true arbiters of the Constitution, and that the only way to defeat the proslavery judiciary was through mass political struggle. And after Lincoln and Hamlin were elected in 1860, the new president’s inaugural address articulated this view in perhaps the strongest language he ever used:

[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made . . . the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Once in power, Lincoln and congressional Republicans “reorganized” the federal judiciary and “packed” the court, adding an additional justice in 1863. More fundamentally, though, they simply ignored the proslavery precedents established in the 1850s. In June 1862, for instance, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a bill banning slavery from the federal territories — a direct violation of the majority ruling in Dred Scott. The court meekly acquiesced, recognizing that its political power was long since broken.

Just ignore them.  The City of New Orleans ignores judges all the time. How hard can it be? 

In any case, Trump is definitely going to make the court 6-3 no matter what happens now. This does not mean Joe Biden or any future Dem Presidents  won't have options.  It's just the Dem party as currently constituted is incapable of putting those options to use. Instead they can encourage you to Vote! and pretend that will have been enough. It keeps them in business, anyway, even if they aren't always in power.  So there's plenty time left for them too.  Unfortunately, for most of us whose lives actually depend on the outcome of these games and schemes, there isn't.

"Big fat con"

We've been trying to keep this blog about the local news as much as possible lately. It's not that what goes on in "the heart of darkness, the true wasteland" beyond the city limits isn't important. It's just that we're trying to work under the assumption that the best way to overturn the corrupt oligarchy there is to start by getting a handle on the corrupt oligarchy here. Anything beyond that is just so much faraway TV drama. Getting caught up in it becomes counterproductive.

So it is with a heavy heart that I admit to you now that I did actually watch this Trump press conference yesterday. He played all the hits, the personal grievance, the "fake news," the suggestion that he makes decisions based on how things look on TV. We know all this stuff by now.  Probably the thing most deserving anyone's attention is this.

At first, during the freewheeling questioning from reporters at the 2018 U.N. General Assembly, Trump painted the accusations against Kavanaugh as purely partisan and faulted Democrats that the allegations had come to the surface in the first place.

"[Democrats] are actually con artists, because they know how quality this man is and they've destroyed a man's reputation, and they want to destroy it even more," Trump told journalists in New York.

"And they know it's a big, fat con job," he continued. "And they go in to a room, and I guarantee you, they laugh like hell on what they pulled off on you and on the public, they laugh like hell."

Trump said the allegations of the three women "are all false to me," bemoaning "what they've done to these children — these beautiful children of [Kavanaugh], and what they've done to his wife."

He later went on to say he might change his mind if the witnesses do well on TV because that is exactly what he would say, isn't it. Still, the stubborn refusal to take the allegations seriously is more significant.

It's more indicative of the Republican strategy anyway. No matter what happens in today's hearings, they're going to confirm Kavanaugh. They're going to confirm him because doing so cements a generational conservative project of crippling whatever small semblance of democracy exists in American government. 

With this book (Democracy In Chains) MacLean joins a growing chorus of scholars and journalists documenting the systematic, organized effort to undermine democracy and change the rules. In “Dark Money,” Jane Mayer tells the tale of the Koch brothers. In “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal,” the historian Kim Phillips-Fein shows how a small group of businessmen initiated a decades-long effort to build popular support for free market economics. The political scientist Steven M. Teles writes about the chemicals magnate John M. Olin in “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.”

Democrats are gleeful over how today's events might affect the midterm elections. But Republicans don't really care about that. They already know they are probably going to lose the House in November. No doubt someone will argue this business puts the Senate in play but I don't think I would take that bet.  Anyway they don't care about that either. Individuals running for office might care that their polls take a hit this week. But, as a party and as a movement, they really don't care about one week in one election anywhere near as much as they care about the extreme right wing court they're about to get. You can't "punish" the Republicans by voting out this Congress. They're still winning the long game.

It doesn't even matter if the election leads to a Trump impeachment.  The Republicans have already gotten a judiciary packed full of extremists and a massive tax cut for the super rich out of this President. The effects of both of those are much more far reaching than anything that happens in November will be.  Everybody thought it was funny when Trump bragged about his accomplishments at the UN this week. But he might not have been wrong, exactly. Even if he doesn't entirely get why.

Anyway his political instincts are good.  He knows the game here is about asserting dominance.  A few weeks ago Trump picked a public fight refuting the number of deaths caused by and in the wake of Hurricane Maria.  It was an egregiously ugly thing to do, belittling the scope of that ongoing  suffering at the time of its anniversary. But the political calculus was easy. Never admit any fault regardless of circumstances. Deny anything went wrong at all. Bully the victims. Blame them for their own suffering. To this day, Republicans believe George Bush's real failure during Katrina was not being mean enough about it.

And so that is their only option with regard to Kavanaugh.  Stick to your guns. Blame the victim if anything goes wrong. Your side is always the good guys. Any evidence to the contrary is a "big fat con."

Also this Advocate editorial sure did age well, huh?

It’s time to reconnect with the Senate’s principal role as a body called to deliberation, not demagoguery. Trump’s nominee to replace Kennedy has an impressive resume. Unless some compelling reason for a rejection surfaces during the confirmation process, senators should vote to confirm Kavanaugh, regardless of their party.

 LOL somebody got conned, anyway. 

Wasting no time

The Koch people are ready to drop in the paratroopers.

Now that the ruling has come to pass, the group plans a flood of social media, mail, email, cable television ads, op-eds and phone calls to spread the news about employees’ opportunity to cease paying union fees. Along with going door-to-door, the anti-union activists plan to visit government buildings at which public employees work.

Similarly, the Heritage people have been ready to drop in SCOTUS nominees since before Trump took office. 

As the conversation evolved, an idea emerged: What if Trump could present to the public a list of Supreme Court nominees? DeMint enthusiastically volunteered to help provide one. When he returned to Heritage’s offices, though, some senior staffers balked. One concern they raised was that it would be counterproductive for Heritage to explicitly endorse possible judicial appointees: Because the think tank was considered to the right of the Republican mainstream, its approval of candidates could make them toxic in the confirmation process. But DeMint was adamant, insisting that this was an opportunity Heritage should not pass up. The head of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, John Malcolm, ultimately wrote the list in the form of a post for Heritage’s news and commentary website, The Daily Signal. By then, Trump had already singled out Heritage at a news conference, announcing that it was one of the groups he was working with on a Supreme Court list.

That's the genesis of the list he will be working with now. 

President Trump said Wednesday that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's replacement will come from a list of 25 possible nominees that was released by the White House in November.

Kennedy announced his retirement on Wednesday, saying he will step down effective July 31.

One of the possible nominees, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, tells CBS News he would "of course" accept an offer to serve on the high court.

Mr. Trump released a list of 11 potential nominees after securing the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, one that was heavily influenced by the conservative Heritage Foundation. His campaign expanded the list in the fall of 2016, and it eventually grew to the list of 25 names released last year.

Trump is nutty but the oligarchs have money and they have plans. It would take an act of amazing stupidity for him to mess this up for them.

Supreme Court Justice Roseanne Barr

Congratulations

WASHINGTON — Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced on Wednesday that he would retire, setting the stage for a furious fight over the future direction of the Supreme Court.

Well, you know, in the interest of civility, the Senate really ought to put off consideration of the nominee until after the election..... oh wait... no that was the old thing. This year the op-eds will say,  civility demands we give SCOTUS nominee Attilla the Hun a fair hearing and "up or down vote."  Chuck Schumer will probably say it first, actually.

How long until Mark Janus is laid off?

The gross Supreme Court issued another gross ruling today.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt a major blow to organized labor. By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.

The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see their effectiveness diminished.

The plaintiff in this case was a child support specialist from Illinois named Mark Janus. He has a job right now thanks to a union he doesn't want to join. 

A drastic provision in the state’s “last, best, and final offer” in 2016 would have given Governor Rauner the right to outsource and privatize state employees’ jobs without accountability. Our union is all that’s preventing critical public services from being privatized.

Our agency would be at particular risk, because Illinois already has a longstanding contract with a scandal-ridden, for-profit corporation called Maximus to perform some of our agency’s functions. They modify child support orders and interact with employers about income withholding—pretty simple tasks, yet state employees regularly have to correct their work. If they were to take over more complex tasks, we can imagine how badly that would go! Their concern is for profit, not kids.

If the governor could get away with it, it’s very likely he would expand the Maximus contract to privatize jobs like mine and Mr. Janus’s. He already did something similar to nurses in the prison system. But our union has to be consulted before the state can outsource anything. And when they do outsource, we monitor the contract and discuss how long it will continue. I go to those meetings for our union. Right now, instead of letting management expand its deal with Maximus, we’ve been pressing to cut that contract.

They don't want you to vote

There is no rationalization or pretense to this that passes any kind of smell test.  The simple fact is they don't want people to vote anymore. That's all any of these "reforms" are about.  Also, what a time to be alive when these people own the courts.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s aggressive efforts to purge its voting rolls.

The court ruled that a state may kick people off the rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state election officials. The vote was 5 to 4, with the more conservative justices in the majority.

Imagine you live in a place like Louisiana where *some say* that we have "too many elections" (I would dispute that but it's not important right now.) And say you just couldn't bring yourself to get too involved in the last three heated contests for Clerk Of Court between another random Landrieu and whoever the latest creature they've grown in a jar over at Adams and Reese. Well, too bad, you have forfeited the right privilege to vote. 

Ok it's not quite that bad in our state yet. But Cameron Henry has been kind of busy this year crashing the budget. Give him time to get back around to this part of the agenda. 

Anyway, if you haven't come across Nancy MacLean's book about James Buchanan yet, I think this would be a good time to pick it up. It's apparently struck a nerve since she's been making the rounds again lately answering criticism.  Here she is on a recent Dig podcast talking about all of that.  But that's not why I'm bringing up the book here.

I have an economics degree from LSU. The reason for this is I am a glutton for self abuse. The other reason for this is because I accumulated a requisite number of credit hours listening to professors drone on about the virtues of Buchanan's "Virginia School" of Public Choice Theory. It was so central to the econ program at our state's flagship university that it is impossible for a non-libertarian person to come through it without a keen and permanent sense of impending doom.  So, you know, that explains me a little bit.

So it was a little bit surprising to me when I read MacClean's book to see that  this demon who haunted my undergrad years was an obscure figure to her.  Maybe he is unfamiliar to you as well. In which case, you really should read her book. Or at least take a look through the reviews.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.

Any clash between “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.” Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was a “constitutional revolution”: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

They don't want you to vote. It's not good for their "freedom."

The coarsest, meanest prick in Washington bemoans the "coarseness of the culture"

Antonin Scalia doesn't care for modern manners.

One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can’t go to a movie—or watch a television show for that matter—without hearing the constant use of the F-word—including, you know, ladies using it. People that I know don’t talk like that! But if you portray it a lot, the society’s going to become that way. It’s very sad.

And you can’t have a movie or a television show without a nude sex scene, very often having no relation to the plot. I don’t mind it when it is essential to the plot, as it sometimes is. But, my goodness! The society that watches that becomes a coarse society.

Yes, the ladies on TV are sadly quite pottymouthed these days.

But at least they aren't weighing in on landmark Supreme Court decisions with opinions to the effect that legalizing gay marriage discriminates against homophobes (Specifically it hurts their feelings.) 

The most notable portion of Scalia’s dissent isn’t the point about the court’s lack of jurisdiction, but the portion where he engages in straight-up right-wing victim-complex self-pity of the sort that would not be out of place in a Maggie Gallagher column. (Indeed, Maggie approvingly quotes this very passage.) Scalia moans at length that Justice Kennedy’s decision is mean to anti-gay marriage people. It is so mean to them! People who oppose gay marriage are the Real Victims here, because Justice Kennedy has accused them of demeaning gay people simply by wishing to deny them the right to marry:

But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence — indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

I suppose the coarse ladies could also move to strike down key parts of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that it "perpetuates racial entitlement."  The pottymouth ladies haven't done that. Nor have they engaged in any of this coarse language.

Another great thing about the coarseness on TV or in the movies is that it doesn't carry the kind of legal weight that affects how people are allowed to live their lives.  Which is different from what Scalia's can do.

Also.. coarse.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who once made headlines nationwide after the Herald photographed him making what he called a “Sicilian” gesture with his hand under his chin, said in Medford yesterday he’s not afraid of the Boston newspaper.

“Can’t scare me,” the famously feisty judge told a Herald reporter yesterday in front of a laughing crowd at Tufts University. “I have life tenure.”

Also he believes in the Devil.  But, of course, this is a man who has gone hunting with Dick Cheney so that's understandable.
 

In other news, this was still a particularly terrible SCOTUS session

Charles Pierce:

As we learned this week, in which a series of Court decisions made gay people who want to get married happy, and virtually everyone else—especially employees and minorities who may want to vote—miserable, the real walking id of the Court’s preposterously Janus-faced conservative faction is Justice Samuel Alito, who turns out to be not only a reliable reactionary voice on almost every issue, but a colossal dick besides.

Shelby decision is just the worst

Read this.

The majority opinion in Shelby acknowledges that racial discrimination in voting continues, but notes that the situation has improved since 1965 and that the procedures in the current Voting Rights Act do not make a clean fit with the current forms and pattern of discrimination. Ordinarily however a federal statute is not invalidated on the ground that it’s dated. I hardly think the Supreme Court justices believe (as did Alexander Bickel) that “desuetude” is a constitutional doctrine. And the criticisms of the statute in the majority opinion are rather tepid. That’s why the court’s invocation of “equal sovereignty” is an indispensable prop of the decision. But, as I said, there is no doctrine of equal sovereignty. The opinion rests on air.

Yay DOMA is dead

So what we've learned from the court this week is that equal protection under the constitution is a pretty important thing.. except for when it applies to your right to vote, I guess.

I'm not someone who buys into the feel-good line about the "arc of history bending toward justice."  I don't think there really is much of an arc to history.  And justice under the law is a thing that exists sometimes for some people in some places but only until it doesn't anymore. Or until someone inevitably shows up and tries to take it away.  For example, get ready to watch last night's situation in the Texas legislature play out again in several states next year as Republicans try to re-write the voting laws in light of the Shelby decision.  Can't imagine they'll lose every filibuster.

But let's not be too grouchy.  A stupid stupid law is gone and that's a good thing. Even if it only took two decades to happen. 

QOTD

From one of the approximately 50,000 pieces of SCOTUS tea-leaf reading I've seen in the past hour.


"Congress’ capacity to react in a sensible way also came into some question"

Third World Justice

Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton on that recent Supreme Court ruling which held that the New Orleans District Attorney's office cannot be held responsible when its representatives suppress evidence in capital cases.

The majority wants to make the suppression of the lab report into a momentary failing of a single man. Thomas concludes that the prosecutors are guilty of only a single “Brady violation”—that is, a violation of the duty to turnover exculpatory evidence—and that this is not enough to justify the defendant’s case against them. But in fact, the suppression continued over many years and involved faulty judgments by a number of people in the prosecutor’s office. Moreover, misconduct of Orleans Parish law enforcement officials has emerged as an embarrassment to the United States on the world stage, figuring even in discussions before monitoring human rights bodies and triggering federal prosecutions. Justice Ginsburg has the better of the argument, pointing to the majority’s dodgy presentation of the facts:

What happened here, the Court’s opinion obscures, was no momentary oversight, no single incident of a lone officer’s misconduct. Instead, the evidence demonstrated that misperception and disregard of Brady’s disclosure requirements were pervasive in Orleans Parish.

Update: More on the Thompson ruling from Slate's Dahlia Lithwick

In the 10 years preceding Thompson's trial, Thomas acknowledges, "Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office." Yet somehow this doesn't add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn't blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn't be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.

Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady, acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult." As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had "considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

Meanwhile, why does Ed Murray want to allow HANO (one of the city's most notoriously dysfunctional entities) to create its own armed police force?

Bad Apples

Like Jarvis DeBerry, I kind of understand the fiscal benefits of the DA's office not having to pay $20 million. At the same time, it seems a strange thing to tell the current and any future District Attorney that one thing they don't have to worry so much about is whether or not the bad apples in their department are respecting and upholding the law.

Also anyone who has been around long enough will understand that this wasn't an isolated incident in the Connick era. Also also Thompson gets 18 years on death row and a "thank you very much for playing" which, to me, seems kind of crappy.

Again, The Future, not so great

NYT: Roberts Put His Stamp on Supreme Court in Latest Term

“They’re fearless,” Lisa S. Blatt, who served in the solicitor general’s office for 13 years before joining Arnold & Porter last year, said of the justices in the majority. “This is a business court. Now it’s the era of the corporation and the interests of business.”

Show Us Your Guns

Sorry about the poor video. It's the best I could find.

Supreme Court limits local gun bans

Free Dollar Bill?

This week the Supreme Court answered former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling's appeal of his fraud conviction by very nearly striking out the "honest services" corruption statute underpinning his and numerous well-known public corruption convictions. One such example is that of former Congressman William Jefferson who now stands a chance of significantly reducing the sentence against him as a result of this ruling. Although, according to this, he probably won't get away entirely.

"It's a significant development for Jefferson's case, but it doesn't mean he will walk free," said Randall Eliason, former chief of the Justice Department's corruption and government fraud section.

Jefferson was convicted of three explicit honest services counts, and some of the remaining eight guilty counts -- there's disagreement on whether it's as few as two or as many as six -- may have included some elements of the honest services statute.

Everyone there is a "political actor"

We might wish it to be otherwise but it's just a plain fact. All this pretense of decorum doesn't sit well with me. I'd rather have all the assholes out there where I can see them.

Remember what happened this day

It will become more and more significant as your democracy accelerates its crumbling.