Tag: scotus

Republicans Received Judge Jackson Records Hours Later Than Democrats

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee received Judge Kentaji Brown Jackson’s court records hours after Democrats received them, Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) admitted.

Since before Jackson’s hearings began, Republicans have said that they were having trouble receiving the full documents of Jackson’s record with the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a group created in 1984 for the stated purpose of “[reducing] sentencing disparities and [promoting] transparency and proportionality in sentencing.”

“So far, the Sentencing Commission has refused to turn over all Judge Jackson’s records from her time there,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in a March 16 Twitter thread discussing Jackson’s “alarming pattern” of leniency toward those in possession of child porn. In light of what we have learned, this stonewalling must end. We must get access to all relevant records.”

During the first round of Jackson’s hearings Monday, Judiciary Republicans still had not received the documents.

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Ketanji Brown Jackson Is A Trustee At School That Hosts Racially Segregated ‘Affinity Groups’ For Middle-Schoolers

Georgetown Day School, where Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson is a member of the board of trustees, hosts racially segregated clubs, euphemistically referred to as “affinity groups,” for middle- and high-schoolers.

GDS describes these racially segregated groups as “safe spaces.” The website says that “most” of them are open to “allies” but goes on to define an affinity group as “​​a group whose members share a particular identity,” continuing to note that the groups “can help identify, interpret, interrupt and dismantle sources of oppression or discrimination.”

The only two middle-school affinity groups are for “Students of Color Mentoring,” which exclude white students. The description for the middle-school mentoring program reads:

“The MS SOC Mentoring Program continues to provide community support for any and all students who identify as Black/African/African-American, Asian/Asian-American, Middle-Eastern/Middle-Eastern American, Native-American/Native/American Indian, Latinx/Hispanic, and/or of Bi-racial/Multi-racial descent.”

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Dick Durbin blocks documents showing Ketanji Brown Jackson’s judicial record

The Senate hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination are not going well.

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin is blocking the release of documents showing Brown Jackson’s actual record as a judge, taking a page from the tactics of impeachment-obsessed Rep. Adam Schiff. That’s how Democrats do hearings these days.

 According to John Solomon’s Just The News:

The Biden administration is keeping more than 48,000 pages of records about Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson from senators reviewing her nomination, including documents about her time at the U.S. Sentencing Commission that she has made a central part of her professional story.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is “hiding” records from Jackson’s time as vice chair of the Sentencing Commission, where she championed leniency for child predators, says Michael Davis, former chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Monday that 16,000 pages of substantive content has been released on Jackson, compared to the 48,000 pages withheld by the White House under the Presidential Records Act and FOIA exemptions.

…and…

“Durbin has refused a request by Republican senators to look at her records on the sentencing commission,” Davis told “Just the News – Not Noise” on Monday, hours after Jackson’s first day of testimony in front of the committee weighing her nomination to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Which signals that there is something they are trying to hide.

According to the Article3Project, Brown Jackson sentenced perverts, predators, and child molesters to less-than-recommended jail and prison time on a consistent basis.

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MSNBC Regular Elie Mystal: Josh Hawley Is Trying to Get SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘Killed’

Saturday on MSNBC’s “Cross Connection,” The Nation’s Elie Mystal, a regular on MSNBC, accused Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) of trying to get Biden-appointed Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson “killed.”

He argued that Hawley’s opposition to Jackson, based on alleged leniency on sex offenders, was a ploy to put her in harm’s way.

“[S]he is going to be confirmed, and she is going to be well-liked while she’s confirmed,” he said. “So them going to the mattresses against her is kind of a waste of their time. But I don’t want to let the Josh Hawley thing lie, because here’s, you know, like — here’s where I need the Democrats to step up — because when they try to smear her, I need the Democrats to get up there and defend her just as vociferously as Lindsey Graham defended alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh.”

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SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Record on Sex Offenders Raises Concerns in the Senate

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s judicial record is facing increasing scrutiny as the Senate confirmation hearings for President Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer draw closer, and one subset of the cases she handled has Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) demanding answers.

In a thread posted on Wednesday evening, Hawley pointed out that during his review of Judge Jackson’s past decisions, speeches, and writings he “noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children.”

According to Hawley’s review, “Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker,” and that pattern is one for which “[s]he’s been advocating…since law school.” As Hawley points out before listing several examples, Judge Jackson’s position “goes beyond ‘soft on crime'” and shows “a record that endangers our children.”

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The Supreme Court Uses Twisted Logic to Protect US Agents Committing Torture

The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than a form of legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. Why should anyone expect justice from a Supreme Court that covers up torture?

In 2002, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian radical, in Pakistan, mistakenly believing he was a kingpin with al-Qaeda. The CIA tortured him for years in Thailand and Poland. As dissenting Justice Neil Gorsuch noted, the CIA “waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours,” and brutalized him to keep him awake for six days in a row. The CIA has admitted some of the details and Zubaydah’s name was mentioned more than a thousand times in a 683-page Senate report on the CIA torture regime released in 2014.

This case turned on the invocation of a holy bureaucratic relic of dubious origin—state secrets. As the court’s 6–3 ruling, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, noted, “To assert the [state secrets] privilege, the Government must submit to the court a ‘formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter.’” After a government agency claims the privilege, the court “should exercise its traditional “reluctance to intrude upon the authority of the Executive in military and national security affairs,” Breyer wrote. And the most important role for the Supreme Court nowadays is apparently to sanctify the privileges it has awarded federal agencies that committed crime sprees.

The court upheld a “state secrets” claim to block Zubaydah’s lawyers from serving subpoenas on the psychologist masterminds of the CIA torture program to learn the details of his interrogation in Poland. The court’s ruling also blocks Polish investigators seeking information about the crimes committed at a CIA torture site in their nation. 

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Supreme Court Sees Nothing Wrong with Prolonged, Warrantless Spying of One’s Home by Police Using Hidden Cameras

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time. In refusing to hear an appeal in Travis Tuggle v. U.S., the Supreme Court left in place a lower court ruling which concluded that no “search” in violation of the Fourth Amendment had occurred because the private activity recorded by the hidden surveillance cameras took place in public view. The Rutherford Institute and the Cato Institute had filed an amicus brief in Tuggle warning that without adequate safeguards in place, there would be no turning back from the kinds of intrusions posed by such expansive, ever-watching surveillance technology capable of revealing intimate details of a person’s life.

Jim Harper with TechLaw at the University of Arizona College of Law assisted The Rutherford Institute and the Cato Institute in advancing the Fourth Amendment privacy arguments in Tuggle.

“Unfortunately, we are steadily approaching a future where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “As the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals recognized, ‘Foreseeable expansion in technological capabilities and the pervasive use of ever-watching surveillance will reduce Americans’ anonymity, transforming what once seemed like science fiction into fact.’”

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Stephen Breyer’s Retirement Is Good News for the Fourth Amendment

When President Bill Clinton tapped Stephen Breyer to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, he told the country that Breyer would be a justice who would “strike the right balance between the need for discipline and order, being firm on law enforcement issues but really sticking in there for the Bill of Rights.”

The news of Breyer’s impending retirement at the close of the Supreme Court’s current term gives us an opportunity to weigh Clinton’s words against Breyer’s record. Alas, the former president proved to be only half right. Breyer was certainly “firm” in his deference toward law enforcement. But that same judicial deference often led Breyer to do the opposite of “sticking in there for the Bill of Rights” when major Fourth Amendment cases arrived at SCOTUS.

Take Navarette v. California (2014). At issue was an anonymous and uncorroborated 911 phone call about an allegedly dangerous driver which led the police to make a traffic stop that led to a drug bust. According to the 5–4 majority opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas, “the stop complied with the Fourth Amendment because, under the totality of the circumstances, the officer had reasonable suspicion that the driver was intoxicated.” Law enforcement won big and Breyer signed on.

The deficiencies of that judgment were spelled out in a forceful dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia. “The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail,” wrote Scalia, who was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. “All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, by the police.” That disturbing scenario, Scalia wrote, “is not my concept, and I am sure it would not be the Framers’, of a people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.” Breyer was apparently untroubled by that Fourth Amendment–shredding scenario.

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