Justice Breyer announced he is hanging up his robe tomorrow.
From Fox News:
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has announced that he will step down from the high court effective Thursday at noon.
Breyer, who notified President Biden in January of his intent to retire at the end of the current term, updated the president in a letter Wednesday, after the Supreme Court made it known that it will issue its final opinions of the term Thursday morning.
“The Court has announced that tomorrow, beginning at 10 a.m., it will hand down all remaining opinions ready during this Term. Accordingly, my retirement from active service under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 371(b) will be effective on Thursday, June 30, 2022, at noon,” Breyer wrote.
That statute allows justices to retain their title but step down from active duty and continue to collect a salary if they reach a certain age and serve for a designated number of years. Breyer, who is 83, is well beyond the required 10 years of service for those who retire at age 70 or older, as he has served on the Supreme Court since 1994.
“It has been my great honor to participate as a judge in the effort to maintain our Constitution and the Rule of Law,” Breyer wrote.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will replace Breyer on the bench. Lord help us.
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Enter the Affirmative-Action, non-biologist who can’t define what a woman is.
Yup, when the POTUS* explicitly states he chose her because of her melanin levels and her vajayjay, there is no other logical conclusion… she’s an AA hire and can be expected to perform accordingly. Her moronic statement about not being able to define what a “woman” is because she’s “not a biologist” is a glimpse into the idiotic bullshit to come.
So how can we say for sure that she’ll be the first black woman on the Supreme Court?
There is a bona fide question at this point as to whether a plaintiff alleging sexual discrimination will need an expert witness to testify (I.e., a biologist) at trial. If defendant won’t stipulate as to gender of plaintiff, I think the answer is yes. Jackson could not determine on the bench.
No, there isn’t, because the plaintiff’s gender is irrelevant and doesn’t need to be established at all, let alone by an expert’s testimony.
How do you provide a prima facie set of facts in a discrimination case without asserting the plaintiff’s status?
If I’m a male and I’m alleging “hostile work environment” created by male colleagues against women (and not against me), exactly what are my damages? Why wouldn’t a woman need to state she’s a woman?
That’s not how discrimination law works. It is explicitly not required that the plaintiff be a member of the class discriminated against. All that is required is that the plaintiff suffered damage as a result of that discrimination.
So yes, you can be a man and sue for discrimination against women, if that discrimination harmed you, e.g. because someone thought you were a woman, or because a policy intended to harm women harmed you as collateral damage.
In most such cases, of course, the plaintiff is indeed a woman; but since she needn’t be, she has no need to prove it. As far as the law is concerned it’s irrelevant.
Plaintiff is part of a class alleging gender discrimination against women. Plaintiff is a biological man who thinks she’s a woman. Is she appropriately part of the class?
The class is all those who were harmed by the alleged discrimination, no matter what their sex.
Defendant company is sued by the “women” in the mail room based on gender. All 10 clerks in the mail room sue. Defendant counters with motion to dismiss and says: “What women? There are only men in the mail room.” Plaintiffs’ counsel says, “No, actually, they are all women.”
How is this settled? I guess you would say that they don’t have to prove they are women. They only need to prove that Defendants thought they were women and discriminated against them as such. However, I suspect that Defendant wins on a motion to dismiss, unless plaintiffs can prove they are women.
You suspect wrong. The law is clear on this; there is no need at all for the plaintiff to be part of the class discriminated against. All the plaintiff needs to show is that there was such discrimination, and that he was harmed by it. His own status is simply irrelevant.
“Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has announced that he will step down from the high court effective Thursday at noon.”
WILL
NOT
MISS
HIM
With another POS to take his seat who will vote lefty every time, all the time.
There is a bona fide question at this point as to whether a plaintiff alleging sexual discrimination will need an expert witness to testify (I.e., a biologist) at trial. If defendant won’t stipulate as to gender of plaintiff, I think the answer is yes. Jackson could not determine on the bench.
The plaintiff’s gender is irrelevant.
The only silver lining is that we’re swapping out one nutter for another.
I disagree.
You’re replacing an ideologue that gave undue weight to emotional arguments with an sexist racist ideologue that will give undue weight to emotional arguments.
Are you using one of those “word salads” like Kamala Harris throws at us?
Please stop pretending you can’t understand comments you don’t like. AnAdultInDiapers was very clear and he is correct to.
Please provide a Wikipedia page with multiple sources to support your argument.
But, we are swapping a white male for a black female, and the way these things work, the trouble makers will see to it tgg he at no white or make ever fills that seat again.
The progressive one-way ratchet.
The Democrats play these kind of political games as a strategy to hopefully one day regain a majority on the Court, but it’s more than noteworthy that the Republicans amassed basically a conservative supermajority on the Court with no discernable strategy whatsoever, other than winning key presidential elections.
FIFY.
“It has been my great honor to participate as a judge in the effort to
maintainundermine our Constitution and the Rule of Law,” Breyer wrote.Beat me to it. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Unfortunately his replacement is even worse.
I’m ready to laugh.
…with a richly credentialed flaming lunatic in the wings.
Hey, I’m relieved that no conservative justice keeled over in the meanwhile, allowing K-J to take HIS seat.
That’s a scary thought Henry.
And the amazing thing about it is that I only just now realized it.
I have heard of no conservative commentator who even considered it.
Stephen Bryer decided to step down following an extraordinary campaign designed to pressure him to retire and make way for a younger person.
Following that reasoning, Biden should’ve retired many moons ago.
A highly intelligent white man is being replaced by a very stupid black woman. And, it will make zero difference to the court.
If you rephrased that to apply to the White House instead of the Supreme Court it would look something like this:
“A highly unintelligent white man is being replaced by a very stupid black woman. And, it will make zero difference to the country.”
Although nobody will care, my question is whether Ketanji has been duly confirmed? At the time of her confirmation, there was only a potential vacancy. Breyer had not actually retired at that point so her confirmation was peremptory. Can the Senate give its advice and consent in anticipation of a vacancy. If so, could a president submit a name for confirmation when a justice is really old, or ill?
The answer is yes, there is no doubt that it is valid. There’s no constitutional or legal reason why it can’t be done. All the constitution says is that the president can make appointments with the senate’s consent; it doesn’t say when that consent must be obtained. It’s been done several times before and nobody has ever objected.
And yes, of course he can; there’s no difference between a vacancy sure to happen and one that is merely likely to happen. For that matter a president could nominate someone without an anticipated vacancy, and get the senate’s consent in advance to appoint that person should a vacancy ever come up. The only practical problem with that is that it might happen that no vacancy will come up, or that by the time one comes up the senate will have changed its mind and withdrawn its consent, and then the candidate will have gone through the ordeal of a modern nomination process for no reason. So why would anyone consent to be nominated?
With no loving in our souls
And no money in our coats
You can’t say we’re satisfied
But, Ketanji, I still love you, baby
Everywhere I look, I see your eyes
There ain’t a woman that comes close to you
Come on, baby, dry your eyes
Ketanji, Ketanji
Ain’t it good to be alive?
Ketanji, Ketanji
They can’t say we never tried
With hat tip to The Rolling Stones
You can only fake being a judge for so long. They’ve got fresh blood coming, though! And she ain’t no biologist!
Liberal judicial philosophy: “If I want it, it must be in the Constitution somewhere, so I’ll just make it up, and my legal training will make it sound defensible.”
When Ketanji Brown Jackson could/would not identify a woman to the Senate that made it clear she was a useless Judge and only played to the base of liberals. I do not like Breyer but I have much more respect for him then her.
We ain’t living long like his.
Roe’s regrets. Ruth’s remorse. Breyer’s bomb.
Ketanji’s affirmative action.
I’ve got a sawbuck that says a year from now Kagan and Sotomayor will be muttering, “WTF was Biden thinking when he put this chick on the bench?”
We will be better off with the imbecile affirmative action replacement.
The Opinions “she” comes up with will, like Sotomayor and Kagan’s, be based entirely on emotion and won’t even reference the law – much less the Constitution.
What made Breyer, and worse – Ginsburg, dangerous was that they took the trouble to try to make it seem like their results-oriented, ideologically based opinions had some legal support.
With this new crop of radicals on the Left end of the Bench, even when they manage a majority Opinion, it will be so much easier to overturn later.
Right now, the only truly dangerous (to our Rights and the future of our Republic) Justice is the Chief – Roberts.
For example, in his Obamacare decision he didn’t refuse to toss that Un-Constitutional garbage because of some “studies” he cited, or because of some policy based rational. No, he declared that the Mandate was indeed a violation of the Constitution, but then invented the notion that the government’s power to Tax is absolute and has no limits whatsoever.
Therefore, it is permissible to enforce an Un-Constitutional mandate by means of taxing non-compliance with it.
This is literally the worst ruling, from a legal standpoint, in the entire history of the Supreme Court.
It completely turns the Constitution on its head. Congress, and State legislatures as well, now have the ability to bypass any and all Constitutional restrictions on their power simply by structuring the laws they write to enforce compliance with Un-Constitutional requirements by taxing non-compliance.
Most people completely missed the significance of this, focusing on the fact that Congress had actually never intended the PPACA to be a tax. And, obviously, the fact that Roberts ignored the requirement that tax bills originate in the House, while the PPACA in its final form that passed into law actually originated in the Senate (Harry Reid, to bypass the 60 vote Cloture vote he could no longer get after Senator Kennedy died and was replaced with a Republican, took a completely unrelated bill that had already passed Cloture, stripped out 100% of its language and inserted all of the Obamacare bill’s language in its place).
This is all garbage. He made no such declaration.
He didn’t declare that “the mandate” violates the constitution; he declared that had Congress imposed a mandate it would have violated the constitution, but in fact there was no mandate in the first place and thus nothing to strike down.
And no, the taxing power is not absolute. But the 0bamacare tax is completely within that power’s limits. What limit do you allege it exceeded?
On the contrary. You have it exactly backwards. The whole basis of the opinion was that when Congress tries to enforce an unconstitutional mandate by disguising the penalty as a “tax”, the courts quite properly recognize that deception and strike it down. They say, “This is not a tax, it’s an illegal penalty”. He cited precedents where exactly this had happened. Therefore, he wrote, it must work the other way too; when Congress passes a tax by disguising it as an illegal penalty, the courts must recognize that deception too, and therefore uphold it.
It is the anti-PPACA argument, that the courts must take Congress’s word for what it has passed, that would allow what you suggest. If that were so then all Congress would have to do to pass an illegal mandate would be to call the penalty a tax.
No, he did not. The bill that passed originated in the House, as you yourself go on to admit. There is NO SUCH REQUIREMENT that the “final form” of a tax bill must originate in the House! That would mean the senate can’t amend tax bills, which is obviously not true! Gutting a bill and replacing its entire text (or all words after the first “that”) is a standard parliamentary maneuver, not something Reid invented, and it’s perfectly legal.
The House bill on Obamacare, HR 3962, is NOT what became the PPACA.
The US Senate never voted on this bill.
Instead, the Senate wrote its own bill, and bypassed the need to have a Cloture vote with 60 Senators by the parliamentary trick noted above, voted on it, and then sent it to the House. The House took up this Senate bill as HR 3590 and passed it.
Basic facts that literally everyone has at their fingertips.
Your statements on Roberts’ Obamacare ruling are entirely at odds with the text of that decision, which you clearly have never read.
Here is what he actually wrote: “The Affordable Care Act is constitutional in part and unconstitutional in part. The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. That Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, not to order individuals to engage in it.”
Your contention that, “he declared that had Congress imposed a mandate it would have violated the constitution, but in fact there was no mandate in the first place and thus nothing to strike down.” is provably false. He fully recognized that the mandate was a mandate and also noted that the mandate was Un-Constitutional and explained exactly why.
On the invention of a new definition of Taxation, this was widely reported at the time, as noted in this Forbes article detailing the debates among the Justices prior to the ruling (which, btw, notes Justice Kennedy’s firm stand against Roberts precisely on the point of the Un-Constitutionality of the mandate that you falsely claim did not exist). Money quote: “The irony is that Roberts didn’t have to rewrite the statute in order to issue a judicially minimalist opinion. He could have done what the Obama administration asked him to do: if the individual mandate is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause, also sever the law’s guaranteed-issue and community rating provisions, and leave the rest of the law intact.
Instead, he invented out of whole cloth a new definition of taxation that contravenes long-standing precedent.”
You post a lot of garbage here, Milhouse. The overwhelming majority of your posts are provably false.
You have single-handedly turned the comment section for this blog into a wasteland that few bother to visit, as debunking your lies is a complete waste of time. You never admit when you are wrong, and you repeat the same proven lies over and over again every time a subject comes up again in a future article.
Link to the Forbes article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/07/01/the-supreme-courts-john-roberts-changed-his-obamacare-vote-in-may/?sh=729e2cc3d701
Sorry, but while the House did pass H.R. 3962 as its own version of Obamacare and the Senate ignored it and went another direction since whatever could get 60 senators in favor would be the bill that became law, you are not correct as to the rest of what happened legislatively that resulted in PPACA.
What we know as Obamacare was made up of not one bill but two, H.R. 3590 and H.R. 4872 (the reconciliation bill). Furthermore, as Milhouse said, what the Senate did with respect to H.R. 3590 was completely normal: It regularly takes up revenue bills already passed by the House and uses them for its own purposes via the amendment process, thus fulfilling the “must originate in the House” requirement (the gun legislation which passed last week was done this way since it had spending provisions). As well, cloture was used during Senate consideration of H.R. 3590.
H.R. 3590 was a bill that originated in and passed the House as something completely different, the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009. The Senate used it as the vehicle for its Obamacare legislation via substitute amendment. Cloture had to be invoked twice during the time the Senate considered it. The Senate considered it between November 21 and December 24, 2009, and it was passed, as amended, by a vote of 60-39 and sent back to the House with a new title, PPACA.
The second bill was a reconciliation bill, H.R. 4872, which only requires a simple majority in the Senate. Why did they have to use reconciliation? Because the plan was for the House to take up what the Senate had sent them December 24, fix a multitude of boo-boos and make whatever other changes they figured they could manage while maintaining 60 votes in the Senate, and ship H.R. 3590 back to the Senate as further amended. Passing amendments between the House and the Senate like this is called ping-pong. But they weren’t able to get it done prior to the January 2010 Massachusetts special election to fill the remainder of Ted Kennedy’s term and the Senate went from 60-40 to 59-41.
Therefore, the original plan had to be tossed aside in favor of using reconciliation, which meant get a limited number of those fixes could be made. The House held on to H.R. 3590 in all its messed-upedness, making no changes to what the Senate had done, and the writing of the reconciliation bill began.
On March 21 the House passed both H.R. 3590 and H.R. 4872. H.R. 3590 was signed into law on the 23rd. Also on the 23rd the Senate took up H.R. 4872. On the 25th the Senate passed it with amendments and ping-ponged it back to the House. That same day the House agreed to what the Senate had done, and H.R. 4872 was signed into law on the 30th.
“And no, the taxing power is not absolute. But the 0bamacare tax is completely within that power’s limits. What limit do you allege it exceeded?”
1) I agree, the taxing power is most definitely NOT absolute. John Roberts majority opinion declared that it is. That’s the point of my post above. This invention by Roberts turns the Constitution on its head by allowing Congress to enforce UnConstitutional provisions of laws by means of a Tax.
2) “But the 0bamacare tax is completely within that power’s limits.” – You imagine taxing people for refusing to comply with an Un-Constitutional mandate is within the taxing powers limits? It absolutely is not, but John Roberts SCOTUS Opinion, which is now the controlling opinion on the matter, declares that it is.
3) “What limit do you allege it exceeded?” – did you not read my post at all? I was crystal clear on this point. You cannot enforce a requirement in a law that even John Roberts acknowledged is a violation of the Constitution (the mandate that Roberts discusses at length in his Opinion) by means of a Tax. That is an end-around the Constitutional limits on Congress’ power. I feel like I already pointed this out. It allows Congress, and State Legislatures, to pass laws that blatantly violate the Constitution, as Obamacare’s mandate does, by means of enforcing non-compliance with a Tax.
None of this is difficult to understand.
“Therefore, it is permissible to enforce an Un-Constitutional mandate by means of taxing non-compliance with it. This is literally the worst ruling, from a legal standpoint, in the entire history of the Supreme Court.”
Hm.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 enforced an unconstitutional mandate (the effective denial of machine-gun ownership (in violation of Tench Coxe’s declaration that “swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans” and Miller v. US’s ruling that the Second Amendment protected ONLY weapons with military usefulness) by means of taxing compliance with it, and punishing non-taxpaying non-compliers.
I’d be hard-pressed to decide in which direction the violation was worse.
So with Breyer gone we are left with 3 women who will vote in lock step. I foresee mostly 6-3 rulings, with Brave Sir Roberts making some 5-4, from here until a new appointment. What do we call the 3 female loons? They need a name.
The Vagina Caucus?
BTW, anyone else notice just how stupid Sotomayor is?
Dumbest. Justice. Ever.
Will Republicans impeach KBJ when she further shows herself to be a liar? Or will having a reality detached Extreme Leftist on SCOTUS simply show why it is necessary to have a conservative non-partisan core?
NotCoach’s point that the Democrat members of the court will all be female and lunatic makes for an interesting point. The Democrat members will all be female, and either Jewish, Hispanic, or Black. Why do Democrats hate White men? For that matter do they hate Hispanic men and Black men? For those who believe in quotas, Democrats are creating a curious conundrum.