Tag: anthony kennedy
Not A Joke! Retired Justice Kennedy Praises Supreme Court's 'Independence'

Not A Joke! Retired Justice Kennedy Praises Supreme Court's 'Independence'

Retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is very concerned about what is happening with the courts, you guys. No, he didn’t have anything to do with it. Why do you ask?

Kennedy’s remarks came during his Thursday speech at a forum titled “Global Risks to the Justice System—A Warning to America.” He was one of several speakers, including judges from countries where authoritarian crackdowns threatened the independence of the judiciary.

The bravery of those judges most definitely did not rub off on Kennedy, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. In the face of repeated and ongoing attacks on the judiciary by President Donald Trump and his administration, the best Kennedy could do was praise judicial independence, as if that exists on the nation’s highest court any longer.

“Judges decide issues which have political consequences, but they don’t decide in a political way,” Kennedy claimed. “We have to honor the fact that judicial independence does not mean judges are put on the bench so they can do as they like—they're put on the bench so they can do as they must.”

Come on, Tony. Your cute little deal with Donald Trump in 2018, where you personally lobbied him to choose your former clerk Brett Kavanaugh to succeed you, was step two in Trump’s transformation of the court into a conservative grievance machine, following on the heels of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation the previous year.

You were perfectly aware that opposition to abortion was one of Trump’s litmus tests for Supreme Court nominees—he even campaigned on it. You were also perfectly aware that many of his lower court picks during his first term openly held anti-LGBTQ+ views. Trump explicitly chose judges because they would rule “as they like” instead of ruling “as they must.”

Indeed, when judges do rule as they must, and Donald Trump doesn’t like it, he attacks them personally. He called for Judge James A. Boasberg to be impeached after he blocked the administration from deporting Venezuelan immigrants.

At least 11 judges have had their families threatened with violence after they ruled against the Trump administration. Many of the threats occurred over at Elon Musk’s Nazi bar, X, where Musk himself amplified some of them. High-profile Trump supporter Laura Loomer shared a photo of Judge Boasberg’s daughter, alleging that she was helping undocumented gang members and calling for Boasberg and his daughter to be arrested and his entire family to be deported. James Boasberg was born in California to U.S. citizens, so the deportation demand is equal parts chilling and weird.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour faced both a bomb threat and a swatting incident after he ruled Trump’s birthright citizenship order was unconstitutional. During his speech, Kennedy fretted that “Judges must have protection for themselves and their families. Our families are often included in threats” without ever acknowledging who is whipping up those threats.

Congressional Republicans have attacked judges on every front. They’ve called for the impeachment of judges who block Trump’s illegal actions. The Senate tried to get a provision in the Big Beautiful Bill restricting lower courts from issuing preliminary injunctions against the government unless the plaintiff posted a bond equal to whatever the government said were its costs and damages from not being able to do illegal things right away.

Whenever conservatives want to both-sides the threats to the judiciary, they have literally one example: At a 2020 rally outside the Supreme Court, Sen. Chuck Schumer called out Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and said, “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Roberts immediately issued a statement quoting Schumer and saying that “threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.”

But when Trump relentlessly attacks the judiciary, including routinely defying court orders, and elected officials call for judges to be impeached, the best Roberts could come up with was, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

This is equally as mealy-mouthed as Kennedy’s comments that the judiciary should stand for the rule of law and “we must always say no to tyranny and yes to truth.” Notably absent is any mention of who is attacking the rule of law. Notably absent is any mention that the rule of law went out the window when the conservative majority granted Trump immunity. Notably absent is any mention of who is saying yes to tyranny and no to truth.

Kennedy doesn’t deserve praise or a cookie for these vague statements. If he genuinely cared about attacks on the rule of law, he would need to challenge his former colleagues. He would need to challenge Trump, the man he cut a deal with to get Kavanaugh a lifetime appointment. He would need to say that the threats of violence against judges only occur when they rule against the administration. He would need to call out the ceaseless attempts by GOP elected officials to knee-cap the courts.

Kennedy is not going to do any of those things, but he’s probably going to continue to make a lot of high-minded speeches. Feel free to ignore him until he tells the truth.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

What Ted Cruz Got Wrong About Gay Marriage And The Supreme Court

What Ted Cruz Got Wrong About Gay Marriage And The Supreme Court

Anticipating action by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority, Senator Ted Cruz last week said the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide was “clearly wrong.”

Asked about the landmark case, Obergefell v. Hodges, in a video posted to YouTube from his podcast, he claimed, “Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” he claimed.

For many, his comments come as no surprise. In his concurring decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to put a target on the landmark LGBTQ+ case, claiming that the court “should reconsider” its decision in Obergefell.

So Cruz’s comments seem to be merely doubling down on Clarence Thomas’ threat to same-sex marriage. “Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states,” said Cruz. He went further, saying that the Obergefell decision “was the court overreaching.”

But he’s wrong. The United States Congress has passed federal legislation regulating marriage previously, and the Supreme Court has decided cases enforcing those laws over the past “two centuries of our nation’s history.” As early as 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which prevented a person from being married to more than one individual at a time, later amended and strengthened by the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act 1882.

Both laws were later upheld by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. United States (1879) and Late Corp. of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States (1890). Congress also passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, defining a marriage as a union between one man and one woman, which was ultimately struck down by the Court’s decision in Obergefell.

The majority opinion in Obergefell largely rested on precedent from previous cases, including the seminal civil rights case Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down laws that made interracial marriage illegal. The court echoed the words of Loving in its opinion on Obergefell, claiming that marriage, and the freedom to choose one’s spouse, is “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Consequently, the court concluded that “the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and…couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.”

Given the connection between the rights of interracial couples and same-sex to marry, Justice Thomas’ desire to revisit the court’s decision on Obergefell is odd. Would a reconsideration of the principles undergirding the Obergefell decision force the Court to reconsider its ruling in Loving? Given that Justice Thomas, only the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court, is married to a white woman, perhaps he should not throw stones.

To avoid directly stating his own aversion to same-sex relationships, Cruz instead complained that the Court prematurely truncated the democratic process. “Before Obergefell, some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting. And had the court not ruled in Obergefell, the democratic process would have continued to operate,” Cruz claimed. “In Obergefell, the court said, 'No, we know better than you guys do, and now every state must, sanction and permit gay marriage.'”

Cruz’s words are oddly reminiscent of the "moderates" in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, who urged civil rights activists to “wait” for more gradual change. Yet the Court anticipated and answered this objection in its decision. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited Schuette v. BAMN, noting that “when the rights of persons are violated, ‘the Constitution requires redress by the courts,’ notwithstanding the more general value of democratic decision-making. The dynamic of our constitutional system is that individuals need not await legislative action before asserting a fundamental right.”

Perhaps Cruz and Thomas’ opposition to the expansion of human rights is not because of its timing, but because, as Dr. King observed, “privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”

Anthony Kennedy

Retired Justice Kennedy’s Son Helped Trump With Huge Deutsche Bank Loans

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

During Justice Anthony Kennedy's 31 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, liberals and progressives had a love/hate relationship with the Reagan appointee — praising him for his rulings on gay rights and abortion rights while slamming his economic rulings as beneficial to unchecked corporate power. And those who viewed Kennedy as being too quick to side with big business are likely to have similar views on his son, Justin Kennedy, who according to the New York Times, has been very close to Trumpworld and helped Donald Trump secure almost $700 million in loans for a real estate project in Chicago.

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This Supreme Court Disaster Didn’t Have To Happen

This Supreme Court Disaster Didn’t Have To Happen

What once may have sounded like a distant and wonkish abstraction —  namely, the nature of future nominees to the United States Supreme Court — is now upon us as a rapidly worsening catastrophe.

Within the past few days, owing to the seat stolen by Senate Republicans for Neil Gorsuch in 2017, the high court has upheld Donald Trump’s discriminatory travel ban, enabled the deception of desperate women by anti-choice “counseling clinics,” and inflicted a stunning blow from which the American labor movement may never recover.

And yesterday Justice Anthony Kennedy sent a letter to the White House announcing his plan to retire from the court on July 31, which will deliver another seat to a Trump appointee. What that might portend for civil liberties, human rights, consumer protection, industrial regulation, and decent government is difficult to contemplate. But suddenly the most outlandish dreams of the far right are much closer to being realized.

Despite his reputation as a “moderate,” Kennedy was in truth a very bad, mostly right-wing judge and a dim intellect, as his notoriously senseless Citizens United opinion proved. His record on the court was so bad, observes the astute judicial analyst Ian Millhiser, that even a Trump justice may not do much worse. Those who believed that Kennedy wouldn’t surrender his seat to this dangerous executive overestimated his character.

The endless reign of injustice that stretches before us is hardly what most Americans want or deserve, at least as measured by the 2016 election results. If that presidential election was “a referendum on the future of the court and thus the country,” as Trumpist pundit Hugh Hewitt crowed in The Washington Post, the Republicans lost by more than three million votes. And yet they won control of the high court and much of the judiciary for perhaps a generation to come.

As you imagine a nation without reproductive rights, voting protections, or environmental laws, are you looking for somebody to thank? It isn’t hard to compose a list of those responsible for the present disaster, from the ruin of the Supreme Court to the torment of children on our borders and a thousand other disasters large and small. Such a list could include Hillary Clinton herself and her clueless campaign staff. But at least the Democratic nominee tried to warn us about the consequences of electing Trump, including his potential perversion of the courts.

Even more culpable than Clinton, perhaps, is anyone who told voters that she didn’t deserve their support; anyone who complained that she was the same as Donald Trump or even worse; anyone who bloviated that Democrats are no different from Republicans; anyone who urged a ballot for Jill Stein as a way to advance progressive politics and achieve moral hygiene; and anyone who said that electing Trump might even “bring on the revolution.” Trump’s tiny, almost accidental margin in the Electoral College can be directly attributed to voters who acted out their “protest.”

It is now clear that we will endure the consequences of their stupidity for a long time, as will our children. We all ought to have known better after the 2000 election, when a few handfuls of ‘protest’ ballots (and a crooked Supreme Court majority) smoothed the disastrous Electoral College victory of George W. Bush. Will we learn the lesson this time?

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