Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
Sep 15, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Hard to overstate how incredibly irresponsible it is for the ***attorney general*** to make up stories about criminals paying off postal workers to commit voter fraud. Barr is absolutely out of control.
AG Barr has gone off the rails. He is spreading dangerous disinformation about voter fraud designed to undermine the legitimacy of the election. And he remains the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. His slide into delusional paranoia is profoundly alarming.
Honestly, what may offend me most is that, over the decades, every state has adopted meticulous processes for printing, sending, and counting mail-in ballots, including rigorous security protocols, and Barr appears to know NOTHING about it. He just makes up paranoid bullshit!
Thank you for this man, @FedSoc.

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More from @mjs_DC

Apr 1
Today's decision effectively means that abortion is now illegal in Florida beyond six weeks, before most people know they're pregnant.

BUT: The citizens of Florida will have a chance to enshrine permanent abortion protections via ballot initiative in November.
Note that the Florida constitution already provides explicit protections for the "right to privacy." For decades, the Florida Supreme Court held that this guarantee protected access to abortion. The conservative majority just overturned all those precedents.
Sorry, the six-week ban will take effect in one month, not immediately.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 15
The Supreme Court's third and final opinion of the day is in Pulsifer v. U.S. In a 6–3 opinion, Justice Kagan reads the First Step Act's safety-valve provision narrowly, to prevent many defendants from obtaining relief. Gorsuch, Jackson, Sotomayor dissent. supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…
Today's decision in Pulsifer will be a grave disappointment to many, many individuals seeking relief under the First Step Act from harsh mandatory minimum sentences. It shrinks the law's safety valve by reading the word "and" to mean, in effect, "or." Unfortunate in my view.
In his dissent, Gorsuch explains how the majority effectively rewrites this provision of the First Step Act to make relief far more difficult to obtain. It really does require verbal gymnastics to get there. But six justices did. supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…
Yes, the government’s implicit distribution theory requires a reader to delete words before the em dash. Yes, it requires a reader to reinsert them in three different places where they do not appear. But maybe, the government suggests, Congress implicitly intended for a reader to do all that. Even though what it wrote is susceptible to a far more natural construction requiring none of these gymnastics.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 5
The five-justice majority's opinion in the Trump ballot removal case has a lot of ambiguous language that leaves many questions unresolved. How you read that language, of course, determines how far you think the majority goes to dismantle the insurrection clause. It's debatable!
I tend to think the three liberals are correct that "the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office."

Reading the opinion that way, you easily see how it forecloses any enforcement of the insurrection clause.
But if you want to read the majority opinion more generously—in a way that contradicts what the three liberals claim it says—you certainly can. Such is the nature of ambiguous judicial language.

I agree with @gtconway3d that in some key ways, the opinions just don't line up.
Read 9 tweets
Mar 4
If you double click where it says "JJ." at the top, then copy and paste it, that line reads: SOTOMAYOR , J., concurring in part and dissenting in part.

And if you do a control-F search for "SOTOMAYOR , J., concurring in part and dissenting in part," it highlights that same line. Image
It looks like the liberals' opinion was originally styled as a partial dissent written by Justice Sotomayor, but got changed to a concurrence in the judgment authored jointly by all three liberals. supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…
I see that the copy-paste approach doesn't work on every computer, but the control-F approach should.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 4
🚨The Supreme Court overturns the Colorado decision removing Trump from the ballot, holding that only Congress can enforce the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause against federal candidates. supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…
Image
Despite the unanimous outcome, the reasoning is deeply fractured. The three liberal justices are furious that the majority went too far, attempting "to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office." supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…
Ultimately, under the guise of providing a more “complete explanation for the judgment,” ante, at 13, the majority resolves many unsettled questions about Section 3. It forecloses judicial enforcement of that provision, such as might occur when a party is prosecuted by an insurrectionist and raises a defense on that score. The majority further holds that any legislation to enforce this provision must prescribe certain procedures “‘tailor[ed]’” to Section 3, ante, at 10, ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law. By resolving these ...
To summarize:

All justices agree on reversing the Colorado Supreme Court.

Five justices say only Congress can enforce the insurrection clause.

The three liberals say Colorado can't go it alone, but reject the majority's sweeping holding.

Barrett stays out of that dispute.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 21
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos are legally children is worse than a lot of coverage implies. The majority and the chief justice suggest that EVEN IF the Alabama legislature attempts to re-legalize IVF, the state constitution will forbid it. slate.com/news-and-polit…
In a concurrence, however, Chief Justice Tom Parker spelled out the implications. The people of Alabama, he declared, have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” (If the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t demolished the establishment clause, this opinion would surely violate it.) As a result, Parker continued, the courts have an affirmative duty to protect “the unborn,” including embryos. Any law that “risks the deaths of these little people” is constitutionally suspect. Courts may not engage in the business of “ca...
Instead, the Alabama Supreme Court—and, more explicitly, Chief Justice Parker—laid out an altered version of IVF to protect the dignity of "extrauterine children" (i.e., embryos).

It would be slower, less effective, more painful, and WAY more expensive. slate.com/news-and-polit…
Parker noted that Italy enshrined a similarly restrictive approach into law in 2004. Curiously, though, he failed to note that the country overturned the law five years later because it was a miserable medical failure. It has never been widely practiced in the United States for the same reason. Collura told me that Parker’s approach would radically reduce the quality of Alabama patients’ treatment while increasing the cost exponentially. Why? IVF patients would have to accept the transfer of a single low-quality embryo that is certain to fail—and to do so one embryo at a time. Each transfer...
For IVF to remain legal in Alabama, doctors will have to violate the standards of care and subject patients to inferior treatment opposed by all legitimate health care providers.

Very similar to the devastating impact of abortion bans on obstetrics. slate.com/news-and-polit…
Image
Read 4 tweets

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