21 thoughts on “Open Forum, Debate-Free Zone”

  1. What happens to the hundreds of fools on January 6th who let themselves be caught up in mob mentality now that the SCOTUS has ruled that the obstruction charges did not apply?

    Granted, some of them were charged with other things, but this will surely affect a number of defendants. Where do they go from here?

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  2. Excellent question on the obstruction charges — don’t know just how much this DOJ will really follow this ruling.

    The other case announced today where SCOTUS ruled against the Chevron deference is also interesting.

    I think a general theme of this court is to send some pointed messages to Congress that it really needs to get back into the business of passing laws to govern the country. It’s not enough to issue vague statutes and let the bureaucracy use them to do whatever it pleases.

    I cannot conceive of a bureaucracy — no matter liberal or conservative — that wouldn’t do whatever it could to grasp and maintain its power if given the opportunity, and Congress has certainly given them that.

    The message to Congress is long overdue: Do your job. We need to reinforce it by the people we elect.

    It is also not the job of Congress to blackmail the states into doing what the powers that be in Congress want rather than what the individual states want. One of the early cases I’m thinking of was the 55 mph speed limit. I think much of what the Education Department does is of this ilk — do this or we’ll take away your money.

    Of course, it’s easy to say to the states not to get so addicted to federal funds, but that’s become a hard ask.

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      • This session has been remarkably good with one glaring exception: Murthy v Missouri. Setting aside the fact that it was found to lack standing (who gets hurt if the gov puts its finger on the scale of social media censorship? Everyone), many of the justices seemed way too sympathetic to the idea that government officials, as government officials, should get to suggest behavior to private companies.

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          • Seriously- if the leftists on twitter are any reasonable indication- these guys are livid about chevron.

            I really expected for the most part everyone across the board would be pretty nonplussed about the ruling.

            But these guys genuinely are disturbed by the loss of bureaucratic ability to self assign power…

            Between this and the desire for democrats to turn the president into a tribune of plebs by getting rid of the electoral college above all things should really uncover their true desire for naked power.

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            • So the chevron oriented spin is generally coalescing now the left trying to scare people into thinking that unelected courts now can control the details of American lives.

              Yep. That’s how they’re spinning a ruling that actually takes away unelected bureaucrat’s ability to arbitrarily self empower their own efforts to control American lives, by making Congress give clear definitions via law what agencies can and can’t do.

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            • Nixon launched the EPA as the environmentalist movement was gaining power, and Chevron used the public concern over pollution to create a sweeping excess of agency power across the government. It was a classic opinion-weird, 6-0 with three SCOTUS justices not participating—that didn’t consider the likely consequences of giving unelected bureaucrats such power to essentially write their own laws.

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  5. Here is what should at least be an ethical quote of the week.

    Our commitment to equal justice and the rule of law requires the courts to faithfully apply criminal laws as written, even in periods of national crisis

    –Justice Ketanji Jackson-Brown

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