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Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
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10 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This is long overdue. Andrew Saul and David Black were two especially noxious Trump holdovers who actively sought to sabotage the Social Security Administration.

Here's the OLC memo Biden relied on for legal authority to fire them. It's airtight: justice.gov/olc/file/14107…
The Supreme Court's decisions in Seila Law and Collins v. Yellen obviously allow Biden to fire Trump's terrible Social Security Commissioners. It would've been astoundingly naive and foolish for Biden to let them keep subverting Social Security—and undercutting his own agenda.
In June, Justice Kagan explicitly noted that the Supreme Court's recent "unitary executive" decisions give the president authority to terminate the head of the Social Security Administration, as Biden just did.
supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
Does this set a bad precedent? Well, if you honestly thought the next Republican president was going to let Biden's Social Security Commissioner stay in office, you are not living in reality. The right's bad-faith cries of norm-busting are just demands for unilateral disarmament.
This captures just a fraction of the obstruction that the Biden administration faced from Andrew Saul (whom Trump nominated because he is a Republican donor who advocated cuts to Social Security). He delayed stimulus checks and slashed disability benefits. washingtonpost.com/politics/andre…

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More from @mjs_DC

Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
8 Jul
Shoutout to the Supreme Court's conservatives, whose 2010 decision in Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB allowed Joe Biden's SEC chair to replace every member of a Trump-stacked board that oversees audits of public companies. wsj.com/articles/audit…
Biden already fired William Duhnke, Trump's chair of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Now he'll replace the entire board with progressive regulators. All thanks to SCOTUS's conservatives, who struck down removal protections for the board. wsj.com/articles/sec-r…
As I've noted before, the conservative legal movement's assault on removal protections at independent agencies—a scheme that sought to blow up countless regulations—has completely backfired and instead allowed Biden to seize control over these agencies. slate.com/news-and-polit…
Read 5 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
2 Jul
The Supreme Court has released its end-of-term "clean up" orders list: supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…
By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court refuses to hear Arlene's Flowers, which involves a florist who refused to serve same-sex couples. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent. supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…
Gorsuch joins Thomas in suggesting that the Supreme Court consider overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, which provides strong First Amendment protections against defamation lawsuits brought by public figures. supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…
Read 20 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
1 Jul
The Supreme Court's FIRST opinion of the day is in Brnovich, the Voting Rights Act case. It's a 6–3 decision with Alito writing the majority. All three liberals dissent. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
The Supreme Court holds that neither of Arizona's challenged voting restrictions violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
The Supreme Court weakens, *but does not eradicate,* the Voting Rights Act's "results test"—which gauges the impact of voting restrictions on minorities—in cases (like this one) that involve "vote denial" rather than "vote dilution." supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
Read 11 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
29 Jun
As @ClaraJeffery has pointed out, RCV is ***not*** the reason for the delayed results in New York. RCV does not delay results. The wait is due to other factors, particularly a grace period for late-arriving ballots. Lowry's criticism is extreme bad faith.
fairvote.org/ranked_choice_…
Also, to claim that ranked choice voting somehow delays election results is to reveal that you have no fucking idea how ranked choice voting actually works. What absolute inanity. If he has the capacity for shame, which I doubt, Rich Lowry should be ashamed of himself.
What do conservatives think they have to gain by lying about ranked choice voting, anyway? It doesn't have a partisan valence. Or is this just another phase of their ongoing campaign to undermine confidence in the integrity of any election a Republican doesn't win?
Read 4 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
29 Jun
The Supreme Court's FIRST decision of the day is in Minerva Surgical v. Hologic. It's a 5–4 decision, with Kagan writing the opinion for the court upholding and "clarifying" assignor estoppel.

There will be more opinions. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
Minerva Surgical is another 5–4 decision with Roberts, Kavanaugh, and the three liberals making up the majority, for those keeping score.

The next opinion(s) could come from anyone except the three Trump nominees. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
While both Alito and Barrett dissented, they did so on very different grounds, and argued with each other over (among other things) what Scalia would've done in this case. supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf…
Read 14 tweets
Mark Joseph Stern Profile picture
28 Jun
The Supreme Court takes up two new cases involving free speech and immigration and issues two per curiam decisions. Full order list here: supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…
SCOTUS' new cases are Austin v. Reagan National Advertising (another First Amendment case about sign regulations!) and Patel v. Garland (limited to question 1 below), which sounds like a @ReichlinMelnick case. The court will hear these cases next term.
supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…
Here's the big news: In what appears to be a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court *reverses* an 8th Circuit decision that found officers used no excessive force when they killed someone using brutal tactics reminiscent of George Floyd's murder. supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…
Read 10 tweets

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