{Image descriptions. First is a simple vertical flow chart from “we sign a contract and pay a deposit” to “the contractor’s employees come to our house and remodel” to “we’re done.” Second is a scrambled and dysfunctional flow shart with aproximately 20 boxes connected with straight, overlapping, and squiggly lines. The contents of the boxes can be read (I hope) in this pdf.}
http://abovethelaw.com/2015/06/biglaw-firm-decimates-summer-associate-program/
But think of the SOCIETAL cost as packs of feral law students roam the hot summer streets in their new suits looking for $100 lunches and getting in knife fights over memo formatting.
Yesterday we demonstrated that Justice Roberts’s grasp of the Constitution was sort of tenuous, in that he seemed to think that the right to due process and equal protection had to be put to popular vote.
Today, thanks to the intrepid frustrated anthropology majors at the Washington Post, we can examine Justice Roberts’s grasp of that subject.
Justice Roberts’s dissent in the marriage equality case provided examples of long-standing, widespread history of sanctimonous sanctified man/woman marriages, harrumphing that, with the Obergefell decision,
the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?
Before we get to anthropology, I’ll visit the last question quickly: I hope you think you’re Supreme Court justices, because that’s what we’re paying you to be. In that case, again Con Law 101, you get to “say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 177 (1803).
But the WaPo had some fun with Roberts’s reference to the Kalahari, the Chinese, the Carthaginians, and the Aztecs. Read the whole article, but here are some highlights:
Human sacrifice as shown in the Codex Magliabechiano, Folio 70, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
All of the justices have law clerks, who are all the biggest nerds from each Ivy League law school class each year. Justice Roberts’s clerks couldn’t find examples that were not deflatable by a couple of minutes of Google research by a WaPo intern?
********
* Possibly Justice Roberts was comparing the Han Chinese to American government of the the Republican variety, where conservative lawmakers inveigh against marriage equality while keeping gay lovers or picking up guys in airport bathrooms.
** Again, Roberts may have been thinking of the subset of Republican marital values embodied by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Bree Newsome, a courageous, badass, and very athletic civil rights hero climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina statehouse and took down the symbol of treason to our country and oppression of so many of our fellow Americans.
While she was clinging to the pole with the flag in hand, Newsome shouted: ‘You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence.
‘I come against you in the name of God.
‘This flag comes down today.’
As she calmly descended the pole and lowered the flag into the waiting arms of police, Newsome said ‘the Lord is my light and my salvation’ and announced she was prepared to be arrested.
She is my hero.
Photo credit Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141473/Woman-removes-Confederate-flag-SC-statehouse.html
She deserves the same respect as others who took down symbols of oppression and/or treason, for example the courageous Hungarians who toppled the statue of Lenin,
People gather around a fallen statue of Soviet leader Josef Stalin in front of the National Theater in Budapest, Hungary, in this Oct. 24, 1956 file photo. (AP Photo/Arpad Hazafi, file)
the jubilant people of Baghdad who pulled down the statue of Saddam,
Photo credit: CNN
the jubilant Germans who “tore down that wall,”
Photo courtesy of the ITAR-TASS News Agency, via gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/after/fall.php
and even the patriots who tore down the statue of George III.
Manhattan Patriots tearing down statue of King George III. By William Wallcut, 1854. Image from http://danielhutchinson.squarespace.com/hi334
We didn’t put the statues of George III or Saddam back up, but they did put the Confederate flag back up — just in time for the pro-treason flag rally later in the morning.
Thank God for Bree Newsome, for Jim Obergefell, and for so many others who see something that needs to be done and go do it.
Chief justice decries decision that does not ‘celebrate Constitution’ | TheHill.
“Indeed, however heartened proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause,” Chief Justice Roberts said in his dissent.
Wow – just think of all the opportunities we fans of civil rights have lost!
And so on. You get the idea.
Dear Chief Justice Roberts:* “RIGHTS” —
********
* Wow. That scans just like “Dread Pirate Roberts.”
[Updated: edited for grammar. #wordnerd]
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
It is so ordered.
Obergefell v. Hodges, No. 14-556, 2015 WL 2473451, at *23 (U.S. June 26, 2015).
Chief Justice Roberts quietly burns Scalia in the Obamacare decision – The Washington Post.
From the WaPo article:
The main question in the case is about the subsidies used to buy health insurance by people who otherwise can’t afford it. Roberts and Scalia disagree on whether Congress meant for the subsidies to be available through the federally run insurance marketplace set up under the law, as the Obama administration argued, or if Congress wanted to give subsidies only to people who bought insurance through an exchange operated by a state government, as the law’s opponents claimed.
Roberts agreed with the administration. He wrote that it was “implausible” for Congress to set up a system in which people who used the federal marketplace wouldn’t be able to get financial help buying insurance. Scalia disagreed. But, back in 2012, he had written that without subsidies, “the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended.”
And then there was this, from yesterday’s decision affirming the validity of the disparate impact theory of fair housing decision. The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy explains that the Court had previously held similar language in Title VII and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) to support that theory. Regarding the ADEA decision, Justice Kennedy wrote:
In a separate opinion, Justice SCALIA found the ADEA’s text ambiguous and thus deferred under Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulation interpreting the ADEA to impose disparate-impact liability, see 544 U.S., at 243–247 (opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment).
Texas Dep’t of Hous. & Cmty. Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., No. 13-1371, 2015 WL 2473449, at *8 (U.S. June 25, 2015). In other words, in 1984, Scalia believed that the language of the ADEA was ambiguous on the question of disparate impact and deferred to the regulations, something he refused to do with respect to the Fair Housing Act yesterday.
And this was just gratuitous, as I’m confident there are approximately 10,000 statutory construction treatises Kennedy could have quoted from:
Against this background understanding in the legal and regulatory system, Congress’ decision in 1988 to amend the FHA while still adhering to the operative language in §§ 804(a) and 805(a) is convincing support for the conclusion that Congress accepted and ratified the unanimous holdings of the Courts of Appeals finding disparate-impact liability. “If a word or phrase has been … given a uniform interpretation by inferior courts …, a later version of that act perpetuating the wording is presumed to carry forward that interpretation.” A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 322 (2012).
Id. at *11.
Such weird unpredictability from someone who believes the meaning of the constitution was fixed in 1787.
[Updated to add the second Inclusive Communities quote.]
We had a major hailstorm — along with a tornado warning that actually had us sheltering with the dogs in the approximately 10 square feet of the house not adjacent to a window — that left some significant leaf carnage in the back yard.
Still some hail in the lawn three hours later.
Denver in the summer!
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Virginia’s McAuliffe plans to phase out Confederate flag license plate – The Washington Post.
Easily the most depressing thing about the move to remove the Confederate flag is learning all of the places that — 150 years after we defeated these racist traitors — continued to display or sell this racist, traitorous symbol. WTF, Virginia? You had this on your license plates? Even Texas went to the Supreme Court to resist putting the flag on their plates FFS. Wal-Mart? Amazon? Sears? Etsy?? WTF?
WTF eBay:
Contemporary? CONTEMPORARY? It’s been a symbol of divisiveness, racism, and TREASON for over 150 years. You had to wait for nine people to be slaughtered in a place of worship AND for popular opinion to tip the economic scales AND THEN you remove the flag?
*head explodes*
Thought Snax 