• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Everybody saw this coming.

Not all heroes wear capes.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Too inconsequential to be sued

The revolution will be supervised.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Yes we did.

Let there be snark.

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Shelter in place is one thing. Shelter in pants is quite another.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

People are complicated. Love is not.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Mobile Menu

  • Look Forward & Back
  • Balloon Juice 2021 Pet Calendar
  • Site Feedback
  • All 2020 Fundraising
  • I Voted!
  • Take Action: Things We Can Do
  • Team Claire, and Family
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • BJ PayPal Donations
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • Nature & Respite
  • Information As Power
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • On The Road
  • Garden Chats
  • Nature & Respite
  • Look Forward & Back
You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Activist Judges!

Activist Judges!

“A question of judicial modesty”

by Betty Cracker|  October 8, 20192:09 pm| 240 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads

Reuters says the Supreme Court justices “appear divided” as they hear arguments about whether Title VII protects gay and transgender employees from sex discrimination:

Kavanaugh said little to indicate how he might vote. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who missed the opening day of the court’s term on Monday with an illness, was at the arguments but asked no questions, as is his custom.

The four liberal justices on the nine-member court signaled sympathy toward arguments that LGBT workers are covered under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex as well as race, color, national origin and religion.

Some of the five conservative justices expressed reservations toward extending protection to gay employees. However, one of them, Justice Neil Gorsuch, asked questions of both sides indicating potential sympathy for the workers. When analyzing whether a person was fired on the basis of sexual orientation, Gorsuch said sex seemed to be a “contributing cause.”

But Gorsuch later in the arguments voiced concern that the court would be overstepping its role if it ruled in favor of gay and transgender workers instead of letting Congress legislate on the subject. Gorsuch warned of “massive social upheaval” that could result from such a ruling.

“It’s a question of judicial modesty,” Gorsuch said.

Weird how “judicial modesty” doesn’t forbid “conservative” judges from asserting control over women’s uteri, barging into LGBTQ folks’ bedrooms or rifling through their underwear drawers. There’s not a molecule of modesty in the whole bunch.

Open thread.

“A question of judicial modesty”Post + Comments (240)

Cuckoos, Consuls and Courts

by Betty Cracker|  July 6, 201910:15 am| 156 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment

Imagine what a bottomless pit of pure, pulsating neediness you’d have to be to compose this tweet:

I’m not a medical professional, but I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that a person who thanks himself in the third person using his formal title is unwell. I guess we’re lucky Trump doesn’t have any pets to appoint to high office.

On the other hand, a horse, cat, dog or hamster would be infinitely more intelligent than this person, who is deputy communications director for the Trump 2020 campaign:

Flounder here is as dumb as his boss, who also admitted on camera that the case his administration’s lawyers have argued before the court is a pack of lies and that the census question is a power grab, which is 100% obvious to everyone.

To recap, we know the Trump administration wants to insert a citizenship question into the census to bolster the electoral fortunes of “Republicans” and “non-Hispanic Whites,” to quote the dead GOP gerrymandering guru who came up with the idea in 2015. Two Trump administration officials have already perjured themselves about the rationale behind the question, which should be a massive scandal, only the POTUS and the pack of grift-mavens surrounding him do so many crimes that the people in charge who aren’t part of the criminal gang just shrug them off now.

The GOP-heisted SCOTUS gave the Trump administration a huge gift by calling the rationale behind the question “contrived” rather than a pack of lies to advance the cause of white supremacy, which is what it undeniably is. The highest court in the land also green-lighted outrageously obvious cheating at the state level, basically telling a dwindling demographic to knock themselves out in their efforts to impose perpetual minority rule.

But Trump and Flounder aren’t bright enough to keep their big fat mouths shut, and I guess that’s good news? There’s a chance the rubble they’ve made of an institutional guardrail may prevent them from driving us all over the cliff after all. Or not. Gahhhh! It’s crazy-making.

****

A related but separate topic: yesterday, Joe Biden said in an Iowa Starting Line interview that he’d consider nominating Merrick Garland to the SCOTUS again if Biden is elected president. That would be an irretrievably stupid move since Garland is in the bottom half of his 60s and was only nominated as a consensus candidate in a failed attempt to head off McConnell’s theft of the seat. The other side doesn’t give a flying fuck about “fair” — see Garland, Merrick — so a 40-year-old ideological clone of RBG is what we nominate next time.

Anyhoo, Biden caught a lot of flak for that, but I thought this was actually the more interesting tidbit from the conversation:

“I think we should have been a whole heck of a lot harder on [Mitch McConnell],” Biden said when asked if there was anything he and President Obama should have done differently on the Merrick Garland nomination.

“I have pretty good relationships on both sides of the aisle,” Biden explained of his efforts during the Garland fight. “I’d say, what are you doing, you’re setting a horrible precedent here. And the answer was, I know Joe, but if I go, I’m in a red state, if I go ahead and just call for a hearing, the Koch Brothers will drop five, ten million dollars on my race. That’s nothing about political courage, it’s a reality.”

It is about political courage, but does this next bit indicate that maybe Biden finally fucking gets what we’re up against?

Biden suggested reforming campaign finance laws to allow for public financing of campaigns to reduce partisanship in judicial nominating disputes. But until that happens, he argued Democrats just need to fight these battles with a Republican Senate just as hard as the other side does.

“The strategy would be to go out and actually beat them,” Biden said of what he’d do as president if McConnell continued blocking judicial appointments, adding Democrats successfully brought that fight in the 2018 midterms. “We took the fight to them [in 2018]. In that case, it was about health care. We got to take the fight to them. Part of this is persuasion, as well. And that’s why I’m not giving up on the South.”

Persuasion tapped out in 2010. But I hope Biden talks some more about what goes on in the Senate and makes that central to the campaign. They all should — we have a senator-heavy race, and that could be an advantage if they use their sausage-making knowledge to emphasize the fact that the Koch Bros. and similar oligarchs have GOP senators’ balls in their grip.

The only way we can really pull this plane out of its nosedive is to take on the Republicans at every level, not after a Democrat is president but starting now, during the campaign. People need to understand that.

Cuckoos, Consuls and CourtsPost + Comments (156)

SCOTUS Open Thread

by Betty Cracker|  June 27, 201910:05 am| 126 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads

Sorry to step on Alain, but it looks like we need a SCOTUS open thread since we may be about to find out if the chief justice openly embraces partisanship in the service of white supremacy. I’m following along at SCOTUSblog.

ETA: The majority punts on partisan gerrymandering. Justice Kagan’s dissent: “the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”

ETA 2: Good-ish news on the census question? From SCOTUSblog: “The majority upholds the district court’s remand to the agency for further explanation of its decision.”

ETA 3: “The Chief Justice explains that, although it is fine when an agency has stated and unstated reasons for a decision — and fine with a new administration comes in with policy preferences — here, the only stated reason for the decision to add the citizenship question seems contrived.”

Ya think? It sounds like the Court Republicans are saying the rule change is fine, but the agency needs to come up with a less obvious lie to justify it.

SCOTUS Open ThreadPost + Comments (126)

John Roberts says “Hold My Beer”

by John Cole|  May 16, 20192:30 pm| 132 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!

Justice John Paul Stevens:

District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution, is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench.

The text of the Second Amendment unambiguously explains its purpose: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” When it was adopted, the country was concerned that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several states.

***

That’s cold comfort. I have written in other contexts that an amendment to the Constitution to overrule Heller is desperately needed to prevent tragedies such as the massacre of 20 grammar-school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, from ever happening again. But such tragedies have indeed happened again. In the course of writing the chapter of my memoir that discusses Heller, on October 1, 2017, a gunman fired from the 32nd floor of a hotel in Las Vegas, killing at least 58 people and injuring more than 500 more who were attending an outdoor concert. I had not yet finished the chapter when another mass shooting occurred, this one involving the death of 26 people—including three generations of a single family—at a church on November 5, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas. More shootings have happened since.

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

John Roberts says “Hold My Beer”Post + Comments (132)

Team Broken Glass (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  April 19, 201911:57 am| 186 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, Activist Judges!, Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Assholes, General Stupidity

It’s safe to say the vast majority of folks who comment on this site aren’t big fans of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). I’m not either. During the 2016 campaign, I went from believing his candidacy would be a welcome opportunity to emphasize important issues like wealth inequality and the out-sized influence of wealthy donors on politics to wishing he’d shut the fuck up and concede the race already to blaming him in part for fracturing the party and contributing to Clinton’s defeat.

That said, if — dog forbid! — Sanders wins the 2020 Democratic Party nomination, hell yes I’ll vote for him. I would not only crawl over broken glass to do so, I’d swim through sewer pipes, climb a mountain of toxic waste, rappel down a cliff face made of rat shit and THEN crawl over broken glass to vote for Sanders.

Why? Here’s one reason: Trump was tacky and ghoulish enough to announce to cronies that he is “saving” a far-right religious nut judge named Amy Coney Barrett for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat.

Now, I hope that when Trump finally drops dead, Ginsburg attends his funeral wearing a red dress and a mysterious smile and then goes on to live for a thousand more years. But the fact is, we’ll be lucky to hold Trump’s SCOTUS picks to the two disasters he’s already placed on the court. Whoever wins in 2020 will probably get to choose at least one and possibly two.

In 2020, I hope to Christ it doesn’t come down to a choice between Trump or Sanders, but there’s a non-zero chance it will. Sanders, for all his myriad faults, wouldn’t appoint a Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Barrett to the SCOTUS. Trump has/would. So yeah, Team Broken Glass. Any questions?

Team Broken Glass (Open Thread)Post + Comments (186)

Manafort in for 7.5 years

by David Anderson|  March 13, 201912:10 pm| 99 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, An Unexamined Scandal, Open Threads, "Lock Her Up!!", All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Are these Nazis Walter?, Assholes

BREAKING: Paul Manafort has been sentenced to:
– Count 1: 60 months, with 30 months concurrent with EDVA sentence
– Count 2: 13 months, to run consecutive to count 1 and the EDVA sentence

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) March 13, 2019

47+43 = 90 Months for Manafort https://t.co/nVgij1zhWg

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) March 13, 2019

Open thread

Manafort in for 7.5 yearsPost + Comments (99)

At Least This Debate is Forever Over

by John Cole|  March 8, 20196:38 pm| 169 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Post-racial America

Well, Mueller gave it his all, but at the end of the day he just couldn’t turn Manafort into a black guy.

— David Mazel (@david_mazel) March 8, 2019

Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, just started serving a sentence of five years for casting an illegal ballot because she didn’t know her felony made her ineligible.

Paul Manafort will finish his sentence before Crystal Mason.

Watch whiteness work.

— Charlotte Clymer?️‍? (@cmclymer) March 8, 2019

The one positive outcome of the ridiculously lenient sentence Manafort received yesterday is that it should forever end any fucking debate about whether or not our justice system is racist as fuck:

Judge Ellis is quite a piece of work. In 2009, when Democratic congressman William Jefferson of Louisiana famously got caught with 90-grand in cold, ill-gotten cash in his home freezer, Ellis threw the book at him, sentencing Jefferson to 13 years, the longest bid ever doled out to a congressman in a bribery case. Jefferson, it should be noted, was black.

It is. And it’s not just racist judges, because mandatory minimums tie the hands of fair judges. The end.

At Least This Debate is Forever OverPost + Comments (169)

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to page 5
  • Go to page 6
  • Go to page 7
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 82
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Do Something!

Call Your Senators & Representatives
Directory of US Senators
Directory of US Representatives

I Got the Shot!  (Month 2)
I Got the Shot!

 

🎈Ways to Support Our Site

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal
Shop Amazon via this link to support Balloon Juice ⬇  

Recent Comments

  • cain on Open Thread: Actual Golden Calf (Feb 26, 2021 @ 4:13pm)
  • David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch on Friday Morning Open Thread: Minimum Wage vs. Pandemic Relief? (Feb 26, 2021 @ 4:09pm)
  • Ruckus on Open Thread: Actual Golden Calf (Feb 26, 2021 @ 4:08pm)
  • Kent on Open Thread: Actual Golden Calf (Feb 26, 2021 @ 4:06pm)
  • Gravenstone on Open Thread: Actual Golden Calf (Feb 26, 2021 @ 4:05pm)

Team Claire, and Family

Claire Updates
Claire is Home!

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year

Featuring

John Cole
Silverman on Security
COVID-19 Coronavirus
Medium Cool with BGinCHI
Furry Friends

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Submit Photos to On the Road
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Meetups: Proof of Life
2021 Pets of Balloon Juice Calendar

Culture: Books, Film, TV, Music, Games, Podcasts

Noir: Favorites in Film, Books, TV
Book Recommendations & Indy Recs
Mystery Recommendations
Netflix Favorites
Amazon Prime Favorites
Netflix Suggestions in July
Longmire & Netflix Suggestions

Twitter

John Cole’s Twitter

[custom-twitter-feeds]

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2021 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc