Err, seriously?

by liberal japonicus

Janie mentioned that she wanted to maybe talk about the wedding website decision so I'm putting this up. Here is the SCOTUSblog summary. What baffles me is that apparently, the request was faked

This week, I decided to call Stewart and ask him about his inquiry.

[...] It took just a few minutes to reach him. I assumed at least some reporters over the years had contacted him about his website inquiry to 303 Creative—his contact information wasn’t redacted in the filing. But my call, he said, was “the very first time I’ve heard of it.”

Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)

“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”

I shouldn't be surprised, the Affirmative Action granted standing to Blum because he said he was representing Asian students who wished to be anonymous, which seems to make a mockery of the notion of standing, but I am a bit baffled that you can toss up fake evidence without any problems. An NPR article also points out that the web designer in question wasn't even designing websites when she filed the suit.

Her lawyers maintained Smith did not have to be punished for violating the law before challenging it. In February 2017 they said even though she did not need a request in order to pursue the case, she had received one.

Anyway, a place to talk about that.

Comments

[Nigel]

Kagan said it in her dissent to the affirmative action ruling.
The majority opinion steps beyond the bounds of the Court's constitutional role.

Robert's, of course, had a public fit of the vapours about that.

[Nigel]

Autocorrect and apostrophes are a match made in hell.
Roberts.

[Nigel]

Having grumbled, I must now grovel.
Kagan's dissent was, of course, in the student loan case (where the question of standing was every bit as doubtful).

..The plaintiffs in this case are six States that have no personal stake in the Secretary’s loan forgiveness plan. They are classic ide- ological plaintiffs: They think the plan a very bad idea, but they are no worse off because the Secretary differs. In giv- ing those States a forum—in adjudicating their complaint— the Court forgets its proper role. The Court acts as though it is an arbiter of political and policy disputes, rather than of cases and controversies...

[liberal japonicus]

Jamelle Bouie keys in on that dissent in the NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opinion/elena-kagan-dissent-supreme-court.html

She didn’t just challenge the chief justice’s reasoning, she questioned whether the court’s decision was even constitutional.

“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” Kagan wrote. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.”

She continued: “That is a major problem not just for governance, but for democracy too. Congress is of course a democratic institution; it responds, even if imperfectly, to the preferences of American voters. And agency officials, though not themselves elected, serve a President with the broadest of all political constituencies. But this Court? It is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic. That is why the Court is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies, and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.”

The court, Kagan concluded, “exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

It’s a remarkable statement. To say that the Supreme Court can violate the Constitution is to reject the idea that the court is somehow outside the constitutional system. It is to remind the public that the court is as bound by the Constitution as the other branches, which is to say that it is subject to the same “checks and balances” as the legislature and the executive.

[JanieM]

Thanks for this too, lj. This business of standing is partly why I wanted a place to discuss the decision. I keep thinking that there's nothing more that can surprise me that this rogue faction on the court will do, and I keep being wrong. I can't imagine being Kagan or Sotomayor or Jackson and actually having to come into contact with the other six on a regular basis.

Roberts with the vapours: poor baby. He probably took lessons from Susan Collins.

Sadly (from the POV of this thread), I've got to go hang out with the wee grandchild for a couple of days. I'll be in and out, but if luck holds, this thread will still be here.

[JanieM]

PS If I were this Stewart guy I would be looking into suing the website designer, her lawyers, and every court that let the matter pass, all the way up to the top. Expose these charlatans for the ideological hacks they are.

Of course, IANAL so I suppose there's some way that plan would be a dead end.

[CharlesWT]

I can't imagine being Kagan or Sotomayor or Jackson and actually having to come into contact with the other six on a regular basis.

It's hard to know how the justices interact with each other in chambers. There may even be some shouting matches. But if there's a serious conflict, it would probably leak out. They are likely pretty collegiate. At their level, they're a bit above the fray of partisan politics. Sotomayor has had good words to say about Thomas.

"“Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories,” she said.

“He’s the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida,” she added."
Sotomayor praises Clarence Thomas: ‘He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution’

[JanieM]

@CharlesWT -- well, yes, and RBG used to go to the opera with Scalia, and they were friends.

Seems like this right here (Kagan's dissent and Roberts's vapours) is conflict leaking out....

[wj]

janieM - I keep thinking that there's nothing more that can surprise me that this rogue faction on the court will do, and I keep being wrong. I can't imagine being Kagan or Sotomayor or Jackson and actually having to come into contact with the other six on a regular basis.

CharlesWT - It's hard to know how the justices interact with each other in chambers. There may even be some shouting matches. But if there's a serious conflict, it would probably leak out. They are likely pretty collegiate.

I recall reading stories mentioning that, off the bench, Ginsburg and Scalia were quite friendly. As in, getting together for BBQs at each other's homes. I would be surprised, however, if the current crop have that kind of relationship. Scalia, after all, showed signs of having actually read the Constitution, however baffling his interpretations of it.

[Pro Bono]

The strange thing about the ruling in Creative LLC v Elenis is that the dissent offered what looks like a perfectly reasonable way out without requiring the risibly twisted logic of the majority,

The company could, for example, offer only wedding websites with biblical quotations describing marriage as between one man and one woman.

I don't understand why all the Justices couldn't agree to that.

Perhaps it's just that the majority had written such rubbish in Department of Education v Brown, both on standing and on substance, that this one was the merest gnat.

[Nigel]

This is a great article, and I think, pretty well correct.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/07/supreme-court-john-roberts-winning-americans-losing.html
… Next term, the high court has agreed to decide whether the Chevron doctrine still requires judicial deference to federal agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous statutes, and whether a federal law prohibiting individuals from “possessing a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order” is unconstitutional. If we assess the next term based only on the 60-some merits decisions the court will make, rather than what happens on the emergency orders docket, we will miss a significant portion of its action. And if we continue to assess those 60-some cases as “wins” or “ties” without accounting for why the court agreed to hear these cases at all, we are evaluating a data set that was crafted to seem moderate, when it is in fact unthinkable. Calling Barrett and Kavanaugh centrists because they have cottoned on to the net benefit—long understood by the shrewd, if disingenuous, chief justice—of forever shifting the Overton window while calling the occasional staggeringly radical appeal “too much” is credulous and myopic. This is a checkerboard constructed on its own terms, paid for by revanchist billionaires, and we keep trying to stretch the rules of the game to cover it.…

[Cheez Whiz]

The Republican Party and its greater network (the Federalist Society, Hoover Institute, ALEc, and so on) have been pretty clear for all of my 70+ years that liberalism in general and especially as practiced by the judicial system is unfounded, corrosive, and ultimately illegitimate. A fundamental disagreement on the purpose and scope of government and the federal government specifically. The flexible view on norms like standing and precedent are in service of a greater goal, the restoration of the proper focus of government. Of the Furious Five, only Alioto seems to sincerely focus on grievance as a legitimate argument. Roberts is a trimmer trying to keep the long con of restoring the Guilded Age going, Thomas is sui generis, Gorsuch an ideologue with his weird Indian thing, and Barrett and the Boof seem to be trying to keep their heads down. But they all agree liberalism is a virus that must be contained and stopped. Outrage is fine, but no one should be suprised.