It was a complete garbage case and that anyone in the federal judiciary gave it credence is a travesty, but I would not have guessed Gorsuch would be one of them (and Kavanaugh, Barrett, Thomas not). I blame those stereotypes about him being relatively technically minded or whatever, which are probably also garbage guidance.
Wasn't Burwell also pretty lame? People were calling it the 'moops case' iirc.
Tweet from scotusblog:
Number of pages written by each justice in the five decisions handed down this week (majority opinions, concurrences, and dissents all included):
Kagan: 0
Barrett: 3
Kavanaugh: 11
Roberts: 15
Breyer: 16
Thomas: 25
Sotomayor: 27
Gorsuch: 28
Alito: 112
I just noticed that unfogged isn't in Mountain time zone anymore. When did that happen?
Wasn't Burwell also pretty lame?
Burwell was lame, but it was a real glitch in the law that someone ideally would have caught. Not nearly at the level of this one, which literally attempted to infer declarations from Congress that it never made.
I think the server clock must just be wrong. I'm posting this at 9:32pm Eastern time. If the post in the other thread is an indication, this will show up as about 6:18pm, which is kind of like Pacific time but not close enough.
It's always been wrong. It just used to be wrong in Mountain time.
Not sure it was the stupidest case, but I think the Alito/Gorsuch dissent may be one of the stupidest dissents. Somewhat surprised that Gorsuch went along for the ride, and that Thomas did not (I wonder if it was tough night when he told Ginny; she might need to drunk text Anita Hill again.)
To me this is the truly breathtaking portion:
The repeal of the tax or penalty also provides no reason to doubt our previous conclusion about Congress's intent. While the 2017 Act repealed the tax or penalty, it did not alter the statutory finding noted above, and the 2017 Act cannot plausibly be viewed as the manifestation of a congressional intent to preserve the ACA in altered form. The 2017 Act would not have passed the House without the votes of the Members who had voted to scrap the ACA just a few months earlier,10 and the repeal of the tax or penalty, which they obviously found particularly offensive, was their fallback option. They eliminated the tax or penalty and left the chips to fall as they might. Thus, under the reasoning of the NFIB dissent, the provisions burdening the States are inseverable from the individual mandate.
In particular the laws that are voted on have very specific language that fucking matters. Trying to link one vote to another (in just the House), and glossing the one vote as merely "scrap[ping] the ACA*" and implying it would have yielded the same result as overturning it in the courts is legally pretty wild in my non-lawyerly opinion.
It reminds me of famous internet troll Antonin Scalia's** invocation of the Cornhusker Kickback, and how "politically easy" of a vote it was to renew the Voting Right Act, but I believe both of those statements were just made in questioning, not in opinions.
*Sure, it did that but it also had a lot of other language and provisions and whatnot.
**Is it worth shaming George Mason U. every time his name is mentioned. Sure it is.
3:. Looks to me like some justices aren't pulling their weight, and one justice deserves a raise
Yeah. Alito effectively proposed a "doctrine of inseverability" by which Congress could be held to repeal all of a law by repealing only the unpopular part of it.