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The weird thing is that, perhaps unlike Lawrence v. Texas, there were plenty of real cases in the system. The original Masterpiece Cakeshop was such a case, and there have been several others (including more against Masterpiece Cakeshop) since. That it is this case -- one where all parties agree that the harm was merely expected, not actual -- which made it to the Supreme Court for a decision on the merits strikes me as the Supreme Court (or rather, the conservative majority) wanting to make a statement without any particulars to cloud things up.
And of the recent decisions, this is likely to be the only one with any effect. Harvard has already all but announced it'll use Roberts's talisman to get around the affirmative action decision. Biden has already announced he's going to work around the student loan decision AND smack "defect" as hard as he can on the deal which ended the payment moratorium. But this one doesn't provide easy outs and lower courts do accept the First Amendment as something to consider.
Yeah, but the case is in Colorado, which has already demonstrated that the Civil Rights Commission is panting and straining at the leash to hand out smackdowns to Christian businessowners who refuse on religious principle to cater for specifically LGBT requests.
My own view would be "it's just a cake, bake it and let them go to Hell on their own merits" but I'm not as serious or as Protestant. Were I operating in Colorado and likely to go "sorry, I don't do gay wedding cakes or gay websites", then hell yeah I'd want legal advice on "will I be put out of business by the state of Colorado or not?"
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This is my feeling as well (hence my opening comment about doubting the impact of most of this week's cases). What will limit the impact of this case, of course, is just the facts of commerce; most people are pretty happy to take money for whatever, and there are so many alternative cake bakers, web designers, etc. that the freedom to refuse service will generally amount the freedom to get out-competed.
There really does seem to be a bit of a gulf between enforcement on progressive versus conservative court victories. The Supreme Court enforces a novel approach to marriage and we start throwing political dissidents in jail. The Supreme Court says "stop discriminating by race, you can consider its impact in individual lives but you can't make it a determinative factor" and Harvard effectively flips them the bird and says "who's gonna make me?" Not that it would probably be great optics for the right, but can you imagine the president of Harvard going to jail for contempt of court here?
I honestly don't know what Roberts is playing at, in these cases. He seems to have managed to achieve results that are easy to report in maximally inflammatory ways, potentially imposing political costs on right-wing candidates, while failing to generate any rulings that seem likely to noticeably and impactfully protect the interests they purport to protect.
A public official who is jailed for contempt of court for refusing to obey a court order to comply with the law is not being jailed for "dissenting." She was free to quit her job (as many public officials have done in similar circumstances in the past) and picket the clerk's office, or keep her job and picket on her off hours. She was also free to write opeds, to lobby, and to dissent all she wanted in other ways. But she was not free to refuse to do the job that the taxpayers pay her to do. And of course someone who is jailed for contempt of court can be jailed only until she agrees to comply with the court order or it becomes clear that continued imprisonment will not compel her to do so.
This is incredibly common, see public sector unions, SCOTUS justices legislating from the bench, etc. I’m fine if “throw them in jail” becomes the typical response but we know it won’t.
None of those are examples of people refusing to obey a court order, were they? If they were, they should also be jailed for contempt. Which (does indeed happen)[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/nyregion/transit-union-leader-sentenced-to-10-days-in-jail-over-strike.html#:~:text=Roger%20Toussaint%2C%20the%20president%20of,to%2010%20days%20in%20jail.]
And, regardless, the laziness of public sector union members does not transform Kim Davis into someone who was jailed for being a "dissident."
I see little functional difference between “not doing something you’re supposed to” and “doing something you’re not supposed to” other than the placement of the “not”. These sorts of semantic differences are the playground of lawyers though so I don’t expect to make any headway.
? I didn't make that distinction. The difference is between someone who has disobeyed a court order -- whether that be an order to do something, or an order to refrain from doing something -- and someone who has not.
And, again, regardless, the laziness of public sector union members does not transform Kim Davis into someone who was jailed for being a "dissident."
Obergefell is the poster child for legislating from the bench. That’s not the job my tax dollars pay the judicial branch to do. Defying the constitution is fine, but I guess defying a court order is just a bridge too far.
I don’t care much for the dissident discussion, it’s just semantics. I’d say she was definitionally a “dissident”, and she was jailed for it. But Bill Ayers is also a “dissident”. The difference in their treatment at the hands of The Law is very instructive.
It isn't about a bridge too far. People who defy court orders end up in prison for contempt. Had Bill Ayers defied a court order, he would have been jailed for contempt. Just as members of the Chicago Seven were, and members of the Black Panthers were, and plenty of other Ayers-adjacent people. Getting upset because Kim Davis was put in prison for contempt for refusing to comply with a court order is asking that she receive preferential treatment.
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The affirmative action issue is a winning issue for republicans. A large majority of whites, Hispanics and Asians support eliminating affirmative action. It is almost a dead heat amongst blacks.
If Biden tries to make the affirmative action case this term’s Dobbs, he will lose. This is one where there is a big disconnect between the democrat activist base and the population (mirror result of abortion).
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I keep saying that, and people keep complaining I'm too black pilled.
And the Supreme Court says "no, you can't cancel all the student loans" and Biden goes "We'll figure out another way to do it". And flips the bird to the Republicans about the provision in the debt ceiling deal too. And there's Bruen, the main effect of which has been to make it even MORE illegal to carry a gun in Times Square -- before it required a permit you couldn't get, now it might be easier to get the permit but the permit won't help you.
At this point if Alabama purported to nullify all gay marriages and arrested gay couples claiming to be married... it'd be no more of a lawless action than what the Democrats do.
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People pay a fortune to live in an area with "good schools". Groups that are overrepresented in causing trouble can cost far more money than the revenue they bring in. When I worked in a ghetto the gym I went to had outrageous prices on the door, yet offered discounts to almost every pro social group such as students, office workers, retired people. Basically they priced everyone they didn't want out of the gym.
A handful of crazy people can scare away a hundred mild mannered customers.
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Is there even any mechanism to punish the president or any relevant legislatures if they keep repeatedly enacting something already shown to be unconstitutional?
No. It used to be that you got punished for violating norms by getting banned from the club; having to cry alone in your mansion instead of drinking cocktails at the gala style thing.
That boat sailed with Grover and Gingrich and finally Mcconnell proving positively that norms aren't real and rules that require a majority vote are just loyalty checks.
Just like conservatives are picking up some lib tactics in the culture war; libs are finally waking up to the fact that political compromise is fucking stupid and you can just lie to your opponents and it will never actually come back to you.
Ah, but there are consequences to being unable to make any deals with the opposition. Each day Democrats further retroactively justify Republican obstructionism during the second term of the Obama administration.
Your causal arrows are backwards. Watching Obama get cucked over and over by the legislature (even when he had a majority!) managed to finally penetrate the thick ridge of bone the average congress critter uses to protect the part of their brain that turns sense data into long term memory.
I think the trauma of loosing two seats on the unelected unaccountable high priest council finally traumatized regular dems into realizing that the reps aren't playing the same game as them.
Nah, it's as someone else once said - Republicans defected on a game show, Democrats burned down the set.
Republican obstructionism is not even in the same ballpark as, "Literally every institution in the country must discriminate by race, based on my racial revenge fantasy, without any evidence that this will work, forever. By the way, I'm going to post in major medical journals about how your race should be 'eliminated'."
In my view, as a response it's completely unhinged. I'm closer to thinking the party should be legally dissolved at this point to force a reboot of their coalition than I would like.
I'm prepared to give the Republicans almost anything they want, because "merit is white supremacist" is incompatible with industrial civilization in a way banning abortion is not.
This view is irrational. You are treating your tribal positions as the default.
Until recently, AA with the majority opinion. As in, more than 50% of all people said "yes, good". It is therefore rational in a democracy to implement it. The republicans didn't even give much of a shit about AA because their donor class still could (and still can) just buy seats at whatever table they want.
That is changing now; but only over the last 4-6 years, long after conservative obstructionism hit full swing.
Conservatives deciding to make governance impossible against all norms wasn't some sort of principled stand against the bugbear of AA; it was a realpolitik move to consolidate power.
When team R does X and it works, you can't be surprised when team D does X right back.
You misread the post as referring only to elite college admissions, when actually it refers to incidents like race-based medical rationing based on a "white" vs "everyone else" system which is scientific racism much less sophisticated than conventional race science, major outlets referring to the existence of asians in engineering departments as a "problem", and explicitly race-based debt relief that had to be shut down by the courts. These are all mainstream, center/left-of-center sources.
This is just what ideas like "white privilege" theory and "race conscious" policy mean.
It is true that Republicans were opposed to Democrats in 2010, but this change, kicking off around 2014, is wildly disproportionate to what the Republican Party actually did.
The Democrats are a party of irrational, tribalistic, collective, intergenerational ethnic grievance, as seen by use of terms like "BIPOC" that make no sense as a scientific category. Their proposed interventions have no beneficial effects, and they have abandoned the modest evidence for modest success they used to have for their previous policy set in 2010.
This makes me immensely more comfortable with the manipulation of procedural outcomes to prevent the Democratic Party from gaining more power and resources than I was in 2010. Republicans playing hardball with the Supreme Court was apparently necessary for me to keep my human rights, as seen by the recent rolling back of "corrective" racial discrimination programs.
The Democrats could simply have some frank conversations to break their coalitional interest deadlock instead of doing this weird racialist nonsense that has even less backing than conventional scientific racism. They're not obligated to be, somehow, as inconceivable as it was from 2008, literally color supremacist.
29 days late to the party, I can't even remember what we were talking about lol.
Quick overview: I find your examples to be bad (in the sense that they are bad things to have happened) but totally irrelevant to the argument and your conclusion to be wrong.
basically: Mutually assured obstructionism is bad but inevitable once republicans proved they can break the rules as much as they want and as long as their donor class doesn't get twitchy it doesn't matter.
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Impeachment if you can manage it. Otherwise, revolution.
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The student loan decision did not say that loan cancellation was unconstitutional, but only that the specific statute relied upon by the DOE did not empower them to cancel loans. There is nothing illegitimate in an administration trying to find a legal way to accomplish a goal.
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