A Win for Team Biden on the Mandates

Not their mandate, but it still shows SCOTUS is willing to consider the idea.

BREAKING: Supreme Court Denies Bid To Prevent Enforcement Of New York Vaccine Mandate For Health Care Workers | The Daily Wire

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court rejected two emergency bids seeking to prevent enforcement of the state of New York’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers in the Empire State.

CNBC was one of the first outlets to report on the breaking news:

The legal challenge was filed by a group of 20 doctors and nurses who argued that the state’s vaccine mandate violates the First Amendment to the Constitution because it fails to include a religious exemption.

The request for an injunction had been presented to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is assigned to handle cases from New York.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito — three of the court’s six-member conservative majority — said in the order that they would have granted the bid to block the mandate.

There’s a tug of war here. Anti-mandaters are winning, but they’re not running away with it.

12 December, 2000

Bush v. Gore is resolved by the Supreme Court

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in Florida's 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately.^[1] On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay for Bush, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm."^[1] Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.

In a per curiam decision, the Court first ruled 7–2 (Justices Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting), strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, the use of different standards of counting in different counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. (The case had also been argued on the basis of Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor with only Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist.) Second, the Court ruled 5–4 against the remedy, proposed by Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter, of sending the case back to Florida to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard before the scheduled December 18 meeting of Florida's electors in Tallahassee.^[1] The majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 "safe harbor" deadline set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5, which the Florida Supreme Court had stated that the Florida Legislature intended to meet.^[2] That deadline arrived two hours after the release of the Court's decision. The Court, stating that not meeting the "safe harbor" deadline would therefore violate the Florida Election Code, rejected an extension of the deadline.

I’m Not Sure That I Agree With This

In fact, I’ve often wondered why Democrats have never tried to codify Roe v. Wade into law.

Klobuchar Pushes Abortion Law, Dems May Regret It - Victory Girls Blog

And when asked, Klobuchar left the door open to packing the court to get what the left wants – but acknowledges that it’s too late for this particular case.

Pressed on if she is more open to packing the court amid the abortion conversation, Klobuchar said she has “always been open to looking at the numbers of justices on the Court,” but contended that “most sane route to gets done right now would be to bring this up before the U.S. Senate to codify Roe v. Wade into law.”

There is no way that the Senate gets 60 votes to block a filibuster on this bill. And the Democrat “majority” in the Senate is definitely not a majority when it comes to abortion on demand. Once again, we find Joe Manchin, a Democrat who would like to keep his Senate seat in a deep red state, being the stumbling block to all of the progressive left’s hopes and dreams of killing for convenience’s sake. So while Klobuchar is busy paying lip service to the left, she knows perfectly well that the WHPA is dead on arrival in the Senate.

I think this is overly optimistic. There’s definitely not 60 votes for such a bill, but there might be 60 votes for cloture. I think there’s almost certainly 50+1 votes. And the Democrats might decide that this is the hill to die on for killing the filibuster once and for all.

Frankly, this is the route the left should pursue. I personally don’t think the Court is going to overturn Roe, but I don’t think the left is going to be happy with the decision, regardless. It seems clear that the Court will continue to allow more and more “reasonable” restrictions upon abortion, tearing up Roe bit by bit rather than overturning it explicitly.

OSHA Blinks

Prediction: The OSHA mandate never goes into effect.

OSHA Suspends Its Vaccine Mandate: What That Means, And What’s Next | The Daily Wire

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced Wednesday morning it had temporarily stayed its vaccine mandate for employers of over 100 employees. To date, more than thirty lawsuits have been filed across the country, including the Daily Wire’s

And more here:

[T]he OSHA vaccine mandate’s legality is likely to be decided soon. The Fifth Circuit was unusually quick in its order. The Daily Wire and others have moved in the 6th Circuit to have the entire court hear these cases en banc, bypassing the normal three-judge panel process in order to get a definitive ruling from the 6th Circuit. Litigation would most likely continue to the Supreme Court, appealed by whichever side loses. As of now, employers, if they aren’t healthcare or government contractors, are no longer required by the federal government to mandate employee vaccination.

This is going to the Sixth Circuit which is almost as conservative as the Fifth. It will likely be shot down quickly there also and then possibly go to SCOTUS, if OSHA appeals. I’m not altogether sure that they will. And SCOTUS may decide that since the Fifth and Sixth were in agreement that there is no need to take up the case.

Merrick Garland Is an Easy Target at the Moment

And as I keep saying, “thank God this man is not a Supreme Court Justice.” Those of you on the right who hate Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), just look at this man and remember.

That’s Because It Is

Flagging for Joe Biden and the Democrats, even Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken calls “packing courts” “anti-democratic.” pic.twitter.com/PxXmfjc0fv

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 20, 2021

Oh Noes! We’re Stuck With the Court We Have!

Far-Left Fumes Over Draft From Biden’s Supreme Court Commission On Packing The Supreme Court | The Daily Wire

They don’t think it’s a good idea. Although they do leave themselves some wiggle room.

“Court expansion is likely to undermine, rather than enhance, the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and its role in the constitutional system, and there are significant reasons to be skeptical that expansion would serve democratic values,” the report said, later adding, “Court expansion today could lead to a continuous cycle of future expansions.”

From the actual report:

As we noted in Section I (B), some proponents of Court expansion justify the reform as a response to what they perceive to be a crisis of legitimacy—a concept whose dimensions we delineate in Chapter 1 of this Report. In the wake of bitter judicial confirmation battles, critics charge that Republican lawmakers since 2016 have used underhanded measures to secure a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court.

Critics further worry that this new supermajority threatens to take the law, and particularly federal constitutional law, in a more radical direction than where it was already moving–perhaps by reversing or continuing to revise longstanding precedents in the areas of reproductive rights, affirmative action, gun rights, religion, administrative law, voting rights, and campaign finance law.

See, they try to convince you that there is good reason for this. The conservative court is illegitimate. They don’t quite explain why. It just is. And they realize that court-packing is the response to that and it makes sense to them. But they see it as destined to backfire. Shocking.

Well, I’m glad they got to the right answer, no matter the tortuous route they took to get there.

23 October, 1991

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sworn in as 108th SCOTUS Justice

 

Kavanaugh Is Clean. Period. Full Stop.

Mother Jones to the Left: Stop Jonesing About Brett Kavanaugh | Power Line (powerlineblog.com)

From the article:

The idea that Brett Kavanaugh has taken bribes to sustain his country club lifestyle is one of the hardiest conspiracy theories on the political left. And like most conspiracy theories, this one suffers from some internal logic problems. Yet lots of otherwise smart people who see conspiracy theories as solely a scourge of the right seem to believe[.]

And later:

[T]here is no mystery there. Kavanaugh has, however obliquely, answered the questions to which liberals have demanded answers. Just because he hasn’t publicly disclosed—and isn’t required to produce—tax returns or other documentation revealing all the secrets of his wealth doesn’t mean that Kavanaugh has taken bribes. It also doesn’t square with what we know about him or about the way the federal judiciary works.

And this is all from the lefty Mother Jones.

Maybe people will eventually leave the guy alone. He and his family have suffered quite enough.

Please, We Definitely Need More of One Branch of Government Probing How Another Branch Goes About It's Daily Business

Senate panel to probe Supreme Court 'shadow docket' in Texas abortion case - UPI.com

The Democrats are mad because SCOTUS isn’t doing what they want anymore.

And when Democrats lose, it’s always because of foul play.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin announced Friday that the chamber's judiciary committee will hold a hearing to review the Supreme Court's decision to allow Texas' restrictive abortion ban to stand.

Durbin, who is chairman of the committee, accused the high court of abusing its so-called "shadow docket," a term used to describe expedited decisions made outside the regular docket and without oral arguments.

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 late Wednesday against an emergency application for relief filed by abortion providers in Texas who sought to halt Texas' new law.

This Is the Very Definition of “Gaslighting”

Nadler: ‘We’re Not Packing The Court. We’re Unpacking It.’ | The Daily Wire

On Thursday, defending the plan he has sponsored to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices so that the Democrats have control over the Court, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) insisted, “Some people say we’re packing the Court. We’re not packing the Court; we’re unpacking it.”

The Democrats must change the rules anytime they lose. Their end goal is to change the rules enough so that they never lose again.

Court packing is a stupid idea, though.

Look, I’m not saying there’s something magical about the number 9 and that we must have 9 Supreme Court justices. I’m sure we can make just about any relatively low number work. It used to be 7 up until about 100 years ago.

But packing the court for political reasons is doomed to failure and will only result in escalation. So, the Democrats add four more Justices in 2021. Then the Republicans take back Congress & The White House in 2024, so they respond by adding four more Justices in 2025. Where does it end?

I’m really hoping saner heads prevail on this one, but sanity is not in great supply in Washington, D.C. right now.

Well, Who Didn’t See This Coming?

Biden creating Supreme Court reform commission, incl. expanding size | American Military News

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Friday to create a commission of 36 legal experts to conduct a 180-day study on Supreme Court reform, including expanding the court’s size.

They can’t handle it that there’s a single piece of the government that they don’t control. This will destroy the value of the Supreme Court if it goes through. It will turn the Court into an overtly political body.

You could argue that it’s been turning itself into that over the last couple of decades and you might have a point, but I think for the most part the Justices have tried to resist that, particularly the ones on the right. That will end of Biden gets to pack the Court.

Another tipping point in the fall of America.

Talk Like This is Insane–And isn’t Helping

Mike Lindell says Donald Trump could be back in office in August | One America News Network (oann.com)

It’s hard to prove to the center and to the left that you’re not crazy when there are statements like this.

According to Mike Lindell, President Trump could be back in office by August. The MyPillow CEO made the comment during a weekend video appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

Lindell said all the evidence he’s compiled showing fraud in the 2020 presidential election will be shown to the Supreme Court. He expects that evidence will be enough to overturn the results of the election.

The Supreme Court is not overturning the election. There is zero percent chance of that happening. Accept that. Understand it. Move on.

I don’t know what they will decide. They may decide that many of the states violated voters Constitutional rights. They won’t see evidence of fraud, but they might see evidence that fraud was possible.

But I can guarantee you that once SCOTUS is done, Joe Biden (D-USA) will still be President.

Well, This Will be a Fun SCOTUS Decision

9th Circuit Court: 'No right' to carry guns in public - Washington Times

That’s a tricky end around on the 2nd Amendment. You have the right to keep & bear arms. In your own home.

George Young applied twice for a firearm carry license, but was denied. He unsuccessfully sued Hawaii officials over the restrictions.

“There is no right to carry arms openly in public; nor is any such right within the scope of the Second Amendment,” the court ruled in an “en banc” decision that involved 11 of the panel’s judges.

“We can find no general right to carry arms into the public square for self-defense,” the majority wrote, claiming that the Second Amendment applies to the “defense of hearth and home.

I think that to make this argument work, you to have to show that was the Founders intention, or at least show some other right that the Founders implied you have, but only in the privacy of your own home.

I’m not sure that’s doable. And I think it sets a dangerous precedent on how we interpret the Constitution if such a ruling is allowed to stand. Can we then argue that freedom of speech is only allowed in your own home as well? What about the Eighth Amendment? You are only protected from “cruel and unusual punishment” inside your own home?

I have a hard time believing that you can even get most of the liberal justices on the Supreme Court to go along with this, but I’ve been surprised before.

CNN Continues to be the Fake News Network

I really should find a good synonym for “Fake” that begins with “C”.

But I digress.

CNN Ripped For ‘Bizarre Distortion’ Of Clarence Thomas Dissent In PA Election Case | The Daily Wire

Justice Clarence Thomas aligns with Trump on baseless election fraud claims: https://t.co/hwjyWTJkOR

— Joan Biskupic (@JoanBiskupic) February 22, 2021

“A longtime conservative, Thomas’ legal views naturally aligned with the Trump administration,” she continued in the article. “But his dissent stands out for how much it subscribed to the Trump worldview of fraud, a notion debunked by election law experts and that has failed overwhelmingly in dozens of state and federal court challenges.”

National Review’s Ed Whelan hit back:

“I’m amazed to see that Thomas’s dissent somehow generated this wildly distorted article from CNN’s veteran Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic,” he wrote.

“A trusting reader might imagine that Thomas’s dissent is replete with references to Dominion and Smartmatic and to various of Trump’s other allegations of fraud,” Whelan continued. “In fact, Thomas makes no mention of such allegations. Nor does the word ‘Trump’ appear a single time in his opinion.”

“Moreover, Thomas states in his opening paragraph (and repeats twice later) that the Pennsylvania supreme court decision that the Court was asked to review ‘seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election,’” added Whelan. “That’s not a statement you ever heard Donald Trump make.”

It’s bad enough that CNN continues to publish #FakeNews on President Donald Trump (R-USA). But someone assigned to the Supreme Court beat should be above such pettiness. If she’s the best they have at Court reporting, they should just drop coverage of SCOTUS, because this isn’t coverage, it’s propaganda.

This is CNN.

I Still Don’t See How this is Legal

Twitter Confirms Ban On Trump Permanent, Even If He Runs In 2024 | The Daily Wire

Twitter confirmed Wednesday that former President Donald Trump [(R-USA)] will always be banned from their platform, even if run decides to run for office again in 2024.

“As for Trump returning to Twitter one day, the company’s CFO Ned Segal made it clear Wednesday that’s not an option,” reported CNBC. “Segal told CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box‘ Wednesday that Trump would never be allowed to return to the site, even if he decides to run for office again.”

Being the Twitter candidate helped Trump win the White House. They won’t let that happen again.

But here’s the problem from my perspective. Trump was legally required to make his tweets available to the public. He was not allowed to block anyone. SCOTUS said so.

So, how is it that Trump isn’t allowed to block any of his followers, but Twitter can block all of Trump’s followers?

The inconsistency is mind-boggling.

February 5, 1937

FDR attempts to pack the Court.

With lifetime appointments, it’s not unusual for Supreme Court justices to serve well past the average U.S. retirement age of 63. (Ruth Bader Ginsberg died at age 87 while still serving on the court and Antonin Scalia died at age 79 while still a Supreme Court justice.)

But in the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to put restrictions on the court when it came to age. Largely seen as a political ploy to change the court for favorable rulings on New Deal legislation, the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, commonly referred to as the “court-packing plan,” was Roosevelt’s attempt to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court for every justice older than 70 years, 6 months, who had served 10 years or more.

Fortunately for us, even the Democrats of his time were upset with this idea. Actually, at that particular time they were upset with a lot of President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D-USA) ideas. So, FDR’s plan went nowhere.

If President Joe Biden (D-USA) suggested such a thing today? Who knows.

Biden’s Executive Order on Keystone XL in Jeopardy Because of…DACA?

Wouldn’t that drive the liberals bananas?

This Legal Hurdle Could Trip Up Biden’s Cancellation of Keystone Pipeline (dailysignal.com)

President Barack Obama’s executive action, which allowed illegal immigrants brought to the United States as minors to  stay legally under certain circumstances, created an expectation among people in the country. Thus, if the U.S. government wanted to scrap the DACA policy, it would have to go through an administrative procedure.

This created a “reliance interest” in the policy, the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts said.

TC Energy and the Canadian government likely also would have a reliance interest, said Canaparo, who has been researching potential legal avenues for the pipeline case:

In DHS v. Regents, the court found that Trump couldn’t rescind DACA even though it was an executive action, because there was a reliance interest. That could be a stumbling block for Biden with regard to the Keystone pipeline. … The administration did not consider any reliance interest.

I might not be able to get to sleep tonight from giggling.

SCOTUS Rules ObamaCare Mandate is a Tax--Here’s Why

The short version is this: the states never really took the tax argument seriously, and didn’t prepare an adequate defense.

Here’s the longer version.

The tax argument was something of a Hail Mary pass by the government. They believed that ObamaCare is constitutional because of the Welfare clause, the Commerce clause and the Necessary and Proper clause. But they threw the tax argument in as a last resort, basically saying “just in case you don’t agree with us on these three, we still have this arrow in our quiver.”

The states defense against the tax argument amounted to “Nuh uh. It’s not called a tax in the law, and they never called it a tax before. They can’t call it a tax now.”

SCOTUS’ response was “Nuh uh isn’t a valid argument. And it doesn’t matter what it’s called. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

SCOTUS envisions that the way this will work is that there will be a line on your income tax form that says something like “Provide proof of health care insurance”, and if you don’t, then the next line will be “Otherwise, pay $XXXX”.

While SCOTUS doesn’t say this directly—at least that I’ve seen so far—this is similar to the child care credit. If you provide proof of child care, you get a tax credit for it. Yes, the health care provision works in the opposite direction, in that it’s a penalty, not a credit. But it could have easily been written the other way, to match the child care scenario. Of course the reason it wasn’t is then it would be impossible to argue that it’s not a new tax, which was one of President Barack Obama’s (D-USA) original statements.

The court makes a good point here, and one that it’s really hard to argue against. And maybe the reason the states didn’t prepare a proper defense against this argument isn’t that the didn’t take it seriously, but that there isn’t one.

Still, regardless of what you think of this argument, there’s no doubt that today’s decision is a loss for defenders of personal liberty and freedom in the United States, and a victory for the socialist movement. We must now pin our hopes upon repeal. That won’t be easy, either though. The stamp of approval by SCOTUS will sap quite a bit of the political will for repeal on Capitol Hill. It’s time for the Tea Party to truly show it’s strength, or to quit and admit that the American experiment is a failure.

SCOTUS to Uphold ObamaCare Because It’s Messy?

That’s the meme that’s going around today. Apparently, the SCOTUS tea leaf readers think that since there was quite a bit about the problems of severing the mandate from the rest of the law, that SCOTUS might just decide to uphold the whole law after all.

Ummm…in a word…no.

The Supreme Court Justices understand the word “precedent” better than just about anyone in America. They know that every action they make, every opinion they give, even dissenting ones, sets a precedent.

If they decide that the individual mandate is unconstitutional but separating it from the rest is impractical, and therefore they uphold the law, it will set a very loud precedent.

It will tell Congress that anytime they’re worried about the constitutionality of a given bill, just boost the baby up to about 3,000 pages and turn it into a tangled mess. Let me assure you that there is not one single justice on the Supreme Court that wants to send that message to Congress.

Sorry, but it ain’t gonna happen. The end result of today, if you want to go reading tea leaves (and I advise strongly against it), is that the Supremes may be leaning towards chucking the whole law. But they won’t uphold the law, just to avoid a “mess”.