It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling.
Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.
> For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided.
Watching from across the Atlantic, I was always fascinated by Scalia's opinions (especially his dissents). I usually vehemently disagreed with him on principle (and I do believe his opinions were principled), but I often found myself conceding to his points, from a "what is and what should be are different things" angle.
Because in practice the US Supreme Court is a partisan body, the United States is deprived of the potential for excellent jurists you'd expect with a population of hundreds of millions and some of the world's best law schools. Only a subset of your best will exhibit the desired partisan skew.
Despite the larger population and improved access, my guess is that the quality of Supreme Court Justices today is probably worse than in 1927 when it decided Buck v Bell (which says it's fine for states to have a policy where they sterilize "unfit" citizens, straight up Eugenics)
It would be worth looking at how other countries with comparable legal systems do it.
Eg., members of the Supreme Court of the UK are appointed by the King on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is required by law to recommend the person nominated by an independent commission.
The selection must be made on merit, in accordance with the qualification criteria of section 25 of the Act, of someone not a member of the commission, ensuring that the judges will have between them knowledge and experience of all three of the UK's distinct legal systems, having regard to any guidance given by the Lord Chancellor, and of one person only.
This seems to work fairly well and, although specific decisions are argued over as part of normal political discourse, it is generally seen as being non-partisan.
Ireland (which also has a common law legal system) has a similar setup, with the President appointing supreme court justices based on the recommendation of the government who, in turn, are advised by an independent panel. That advice is technically not legally binding, so this is in theory a less-strictly non-partisan system - but in practice it works out about the same.
Given that the current system maximises partisan bias, it's actually hard to do worse.
Ideally you'd want to reform this hierarchically, but supposing we can only fix that final court, you want say a committee consisting of roughly a couple of academics who've taught this stuff, a couple of real on-the-ground attorneys who've argued before this court, a couple of retired judges from this court (if it had age limits, but today it does not) or the courts below it who've done this job, and five otherwise unconnected citizens (no specific business before any court now or expected) chosen at random the way most countries pick their juries.
That committee is to deliver a list of several people best qualified to fill any vacancies on the court which arise before the next committee does the same, if such a vacancy arises you just go down the list.
Kavanaugh clearly isn’t in the same bucket. His votes go either way. I don’t recall seeing a single decision this administration where either Alito or Thomas wrote against a White House position. Not just in case opinions but even in an order. I don’t think we’ve seen a justice act as a stalking horse for the president in this way since Fortas.
Kavanaugh strikes me as principled, but in kind of a Type-A, "well, actually" sort of way where he will get pulled into rabbit holes and want to die on random textual hills.
He is all over the map, but not in a way that seems consistent or predictable.
His dissent in this case was basically "Don't over turn the tariffs because it will be too hard to make everyone whole" Which doesn't strike me as "principled" at all.
Wasn't it JFK who said "We choose to Not do these things bc they're kinda hard actually"? /s
This is nonsense, and the same nonsense as we heard in the insurrectionist ruling. Allowing fascism "Because it's inconvenient to do otherwise" is bonkers.
Kavanaugh votes either way, but I don't think this is out of principle... I just think he's just kind of an idiot and thinks he can write a justification for just about any of his biases without making those biases obvious. It's kind of apparent if you read his opinions; they tend to be very verbose (his dissent here is 63 pages!) without saying a whole lot, and he gets sloppy with citations, selectively citing precedent in some cases while others he simply hand-waves. Take his opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (the "Kavanaugh stop" case): there's a reason why no one joined his concurrence.
You need to be cautious with the notion of “his votes go either way”. In Hungary, where I’m from, and a Trump kinda guy rules for 16 years, judges vote either way… but they vote against the government only when it doesn’t really matter for the ruling party. Either the government wants a scapegoat anyway why they cannot do something, or just simply nobody cares or even see the consequences. Like the propaganda newspapers are struck down routinely… but they don’t care because nobody, who they really care about, see the consequences of those. So judges can say happily that they are independent, yet they are not at all.
This fake independence works so well, that most Hungarians lie themselves that judiciary is free.
> Weren’t Sotomator and Jackson the same with Biden? Kagan is much more principled
Very respectfully, there is no comparison between Trump and Biden in this respect. Indeed, the court adopted a new legal concept, the Major Questions Doctrine, to limit Biden continuing the Trump student loan forbearance.
FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. is an example of the same principle without the name (afaik it wasn’t named that until later.)
Basically the FDA tried to use its powers to regulate drugs and devices to regulate nicotine (drug) via cigarettes (device.) The conservatives on the court said, in effect, “look obviously congress didn’t intend to include cigarettes as a medical device, come on.”
Then Congress passed a specific law allowing the FDA to regulate cigarettes. This is how it should work. If congress means something that’s a stretch, they should say so specifically.
I think that's a fair example but it had the wrinkle that an FDA commissioner explicitly changed what the Agency's position on tobacco regulation was [1].
I don't have as much time to offer a similar assessment of the first two 'official' Major Questions Doctrine cases in the Biden administration, but neither was nearly as contentious as the FDA reversing its prior position.
For this reason, I see this decision as an argument against an agency changing course from an accepted previous (but not Congressionally defined) perspective. However, Chevron—at least according to interviews with lawmakers responding to the 'MQD' usage—ran counter to what the supposed understanding of how agency work would function. Again, I can find primary sources later.
You phrased something very poorly. Someone replied and you moved the goalposts; claiming that you were actually referring to the majority using a concept. And now you’ve moved the goalposts again.
I don’t know why you’re doing backflips to avoid admitting that you were wrong.
I wasn't wrong - the first time the concept was named in a decision was in the Biden administration. It sounds like you're not actually reading any of these, or aware of this issue?
I do agree that the idea that some agency actions should be used appeared in the case OP cited. But it's obvious that SCOTUS is using this concept much more broadly now.
Alito is one of the original proponents of the unitary executive theory (way before he was a Supreme Court justice). Everything he does should be looked at as an attempt to impose said theory and destroy America.
its truly bizarre that anyone with this view could get approved by congress. its so antithetical to the entire american political system. just blows my mind how spineless congress as an institution has been for decades.
Repealing the 17th amendment will once again incentivize the Senate to choose Supreme Court justices who seek to strengthen federalism & decentralize power
The dissent seems to be "Ignoring whether or not the President acted lawfully, it would sure create an awful big mess if we undid it. And he's gonna try again anyways, and maybe even succeed in that future attempt, creating an even bigger mess. So for these reasons, it shouldn't be undone."
When all of your decisions can be predetermined without even knowing the context of the matter you are surely a hack. It goes like this.....'Does this matter benefit Trump, corporations, rich people or evangelicals?'. Yes? Alito and Thomas will argue its lawful. Every single time.
Thomas isn’t a hack, he’s a shill. And he’s not even trying to be subtle about it. He’s somebody’s bitch and he literally drives around in the toys they bought for him as compensation.
If any justice deserves to be impeached it’s him. I can’t believe they approved him in the first place. Anita Hill sends her regards.
But the toys are so cheap. It can’t possibly be just a matter of the money, there has to be some blackmail involved. Either that or he was always self hating.
Then why accept them and face the embarrassment of being found out not reporting them properly?
You are correct compared to the $320k/year salary these empty nesters pull these things seem not that expensive. So why not just save up and buy them himself?
Yes, RED FLAG. Because apparently he likes nice things and spending money so much he can't seem to afford them himself or forgo the gifts and spare himself the scandal.
It’s not an absurd scenario. The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.
The nuance is that nothing Congress passed granted to right to tax. Additionally, they did grant the power to partially block imports. Nothing says you have to enact “no imports from Japan” vs. “no imports of networking equipment from Lichtenstein.”
>The law was written specifically to allow blocking imports from a country.
The precise wording is regulate. The idea that "regulate" means you can turn it on or off with no in-between is beyond parody. Absurd. Hilarious. Farcical.
That said the headline is misleading and should be renamed, nothing is changing from this ruling.
If you listen to the oral arguments, this issue was discussed at length.
There are two reasons for this distinction:
1. That's what congress decided. They get to determine tariffs, not the president. If the president doesn't like the law congress passed, he doesn't get to just ignore it.
2. Congress is very jealous of the right to tax and spend. They do not want to hand over this power to the president. Tariffs are taxes. If the president can just impose whatever tariffs he wants, he can raise revenue without asking congress for permission. That would grant the president enormous power to go around congress. Banning imports from a country does not bring in revenue for the president, so it doesn't pose the same risk to congress' power.
Trump has been trying to create a situation in which he can both raise revenue (through tariffs) and spend it however he wants (e.g., through DOGE's arbitrary changes to government spending) without ever asking congress. If he succeeds, the balance of power will be completely destroyed. The president will rule alone.
If the US really wanted to make a durable shift to manufacturing, presidential tariffs by fiat aren’t a good strategy anyway. Tariffs could be a small part of that strategy but they should be targeted, not broad, and enacted by congress so businesses have the kind of decades-long stability required to invest in factories that take years to pay off.
Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.
Intel has been using a fair bit of TSMC in their CPU manufacturing recently, yes. Most recently they’ve been assembling “tiles” of silicon from many process nodes into a single CPU package and IIRC they have been using TSMC for the GPU tiles.
At first glance that seems to be true, but when you look at the arguments at the time, who made them and how much of it was walked back, it just looks like the usual legislative panic, same as 911. It doesn't make the original intentions wrong, anymore than what happens when you release open source software and it takes on a life of its own under new maintainers. The failure to understand the long term reprocusion of basically ignoring the actual language of the original document puts one in a place where literally nothing matters except what you can ram through congress and get supreme court approval over during a time of panic or before the other side takes over again.
Thats not a constitutional democracy, thats just anarchy and rule by whoever can buy the most seats.
Withdrawing permits for in construction offshore wind projects, and forcing utilities to keep operating coal plants they want to shut down is picking winners and losers.
Probably the worst thing MS did was kill GitHub’s nascent CI project and replace it with Azure DevOps. Though to be fair the fundamental flaws with that approach didn’t really become apparent for a few years. And GitHub’s feature development pace was far too slow compared to its competitors at the time. Of course GitHub used to be a lot more reliable…
Now they’re cramming in half baked AI stuff everywhere but that’s hardly a MS specific sin.
MS GitHub has been worse about DMCA and sanctioned country related takedowns than I remember pre acquisition GitHub being.
as useful as it was before this administration when big tech was sucking up to whomever was running the country (e.g. “macho man” Zuck was getting ready to tattoo DEI on his forehead couple of years ago) or just now it’ll be magically useful?
Destroying things and outsourcing to already-built prisons is easy. Building things is not.
All they have is a demolition site. There's no final design. Trump keeps changing his vision of his mausoleum. They don't have an architect since the previous one quit.
They have less than a week to submit construction plans[1], and they're clearly missing that deadline. It is of course not the end, but it's a sign of things to come, about half a year in.
Trump is personally running the project instead of delegating it and as we all know he's ruled by whims and disorganized plus rapidly mentally deteriorating at 79 years of age. He's talking about getting into heaven and desperately slapping his name on random physical things because he's obsessed with leaving a grandiose "legacy", any kind of mark on history. He will, but it'll rather be as a seditionist and corrupt ravager of civil institutions and the rule of law -- a pitiful despoiler.
There's no section about the ball room in Project 2025, and no one else but Trump cares about this pet project.
Are you sure this is how he'll be remembered? Half the US thought him preferable to AOC and Hillary Clinton. It's hard to conclude in any other way than that the perception of his legacy will be equally divided.
Most of his actions are, to the majority of the population, merely transient actions. A few letters on an arts center are trivial to remove, a cancelled wind turbine farm easy to forget. The CECOT stuff deeply impacts only a small part of the population, so it'll at most be a few lines in a history book.
But demolishing a third of the White House? That'll be clearly visible in every single aerial shot of the building during every single political event for years. It is, quite literally, a scar on the political face of the country.
It's like turning the Pentagon into a Square, or blowing Washington's face off Mount Rushmore, or selling Alaska back to Russia: you're not going to forget when you are constantly being reminded of it.
actions might be transient but, like or not (I certainly do not) will be the President that is remembered and talked about more than just about all of previous ones combined
The problem is, if everyone knows it going to curry favour and you're the odd man out - are you in Violation of your fiduciary duty to your shareholders?
The gamble these executives are making is that prosecutors in a different administration will not prosecute them for bribery.
If you watch House of Cards (based loosely on real life), you can see the degree of separation between corporations/lobbyists and Congressmen. These guys participating in building a ballroom are crossing that line. Juries will not have to connect so many dots compared to before in order to put someone in jail.
Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.
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