Rare winter quarter case of a major constitutional ruling coming down while I'm teaching con law
One the one hand, the no justice is willing to put their name on the lawless majority opinion, Bush v. Gore style; OTOH the dissenters issue a rare jointly signed opinion
This is simply the meat of the case. The OHSA did exactly what Congress empowered it to do in very clear and explicit terms. That should be the end of this case.
If you're going to issue an opinion that will result in 6500 people dying and 250,000 people going to the hospital, your legal case had better be overwhelming. The Republican majority's is in fact the opposite of that.
It should of course go without saying that the opinion does not meet the standards that apply to granting stays, standards the Court's Republicans have been simply ignoring for years
"OSHA’s rule perfectly fits the language of the applicable statutory provision"
The majority's reasoning for why the plain, explicit language of the statute should not apply is barely different than the reasoning used by the "how can we stop COVID when we can't see it" guy in Wisconsin
The Republican majority's ruling is not consistent with the explicit text, structure, or purpose of the statute. It is simply overriding the will of Congress and the duly elected president because it doesn't like the policy chosen. That's it.
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"Today, we are not wise." The Roberts Court has done many disgraceful things and will do many, many more, but this will rank toward the top. Just pure lawless Guided Age Redux bullshit. Ignoring the plain text of the relevant statute to impose a horrible policy choice.
The same premise as Gorsuch's idiotic question about why the OHSA didn't require the polio vaccine! To state this argument is to refute it, and yet it's pretty much the entire basis for the Republican majority's conclusion
Can we please cut this shit out. "I also don't like certain things about how the DHS operates, so when RFK SHAKES THINGS UP maybe he will do it in a sensible manner I approve of" is the kind of delusional thinking that leads you to President Donald J. Trump in the first place
"When Biden said he would end the war in Afghanistan, he actually meant that he would end all military conflict in the world forever" isn't even goalpost moving, it's like saying the Florida Panthers promised to win the Stanley Cup but are losers because the Marlins are 43-73
Sorry, the scale of drone warfare -- by far the most important metric in determining the hawkishness of a president 10 years ago -- by random coincidence permanently ceased to be a meaningful variable on January 21, 2017. I don't make the rules
"James Comey was in the tank for Hillary Clinton" ROFL. Glenn really should reconsider the "tweeting about dogs in Portuguese" approach to days when something bad happens for his political side
One point to add is that it was incredibly stupid of Comey to think his statement would help clarify why Clinton wasn't indicted (i.e. because nobody ever has been for comparable conduct.) Inevitably, the only message people got was "extremely careless" lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/how-ar…
As Patrick Deneen is making the rounds with a new book generating credulous coverage for claims that "post-liberal" reactionaries are actually more egalitarian than liberals, keep this in mind:
The Biden administration is enacting exactly the kind of pro-labor, pro-domestic manufacturing, pro-environmental industrial policy Deneen and his allies claim to want, and they don't care at all: lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/the-re…
Instead, Deneen's actual friends and allies are all politicians who supported Trump's upper-class tax cuts and Trump's efforts to take healthcare away from tens of millions of people to pay for even more upper-class tax cuts: politico.com/news/magazine/…
It’s worth noting that the only reason Trump is the first former president to be indicted is that Gerald Ford unwisely preempted them lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/its-th…
Ford's pardon was very unpopular -- indeed, it probably cost him re-election -- and should not be seen as establishing some kind of American constitutional tradition that former presidents should be above the law.
Plainly, Alabama should never have panicked and brought in Vladimir Myshkin to start the second period
Meanwhile, in dissent Alito offers the “Martin Luther King’s entire career consisted of one speech which consisted of one sentence” school of statutory interpretation