The New Neo

The Democrats aren’t having what you’d call a good day. Mama said there’d be days like this, and mama was right.

SCOTUS has handed down some important rulings that didn’t go the left’s way. The first is to allow anti-camping ordinances, and the second is to more narrowly interpret the “interference” statute under which the J6 defendants have been prosecuted/persecuted.

Here’s the first:

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided whether cities should enforce anti-camping ordinances against the homeless in an Eighth Amendment challenge to an Oregon law. The Court held 6–3 that cities may enforce anti-camping ordinances against homeless people even when insufficient shelter beds are available.

Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the Court, which the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Thomas wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, which Justices Kagan and Jackson joined.

So this one broke down in the usual 6/3 conservative/liberal split.

The reasoning:

The Court held that “[t]he enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.”

The Eighth Amendment states, “[e]xcessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

The majority expounded on the history of the Eighth Amendment, which “has always been considered, and properly so, to be directed at the method or kind of punishment,” not what conduct may be punished.

The left continually tries to use the process of legal interpretation to expand the law in the ways the left wishes it would go. They didn’t succeed this time; this SCOTUS decision allows localities to stop their streets from becoming tent cities or worse.

The second decision was on something that should have been a no-brainer – the “liberal” interpretation and stretching of a law to new and partisan political purposes:

In a big decision today, the Supreme Court, in a split that saw KBJ siding with the Roberts majority and ACB writing the dissent joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, rejected the use of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 against a J6 defendant, ruling the statute only applied to interference with records or evidence, not interference with an official proceeding. This has implications not only for other J6 defendants, but also the DC court charges against Trump.

Note the split there; highly unusual.

From the opinion:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 imposes criminal liability on anyone who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” 18 U. S. C. §1512(c)(1). The next subsection extends that prohibition to anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” §1512(c)(2). We consider whether this “otherwise” clause should be read in light of the limited reach of the specific provision that precedes it.

This is a classic method of judicial interpretation of statutes. Again, the left wanted to use this statute in novel ways for political purposes to punish their enemies.

Good day for the Court, for the J6 defendants, and potentially for Trump.

ADDENDUM:

And then there’s the agency case, with a huge win for the right in overruling Chevron. This is a long-hoped-for victory for the right:

The Supreme Court upended the federal regulatory framework in place for 40 years, expanding the power of federal judges to second-guess agency decisions over environmental, consumer and workplace safety policy, among other areas.

The 6-3 decision, along ideological lines, discards a 1984 precedent directing federal courts to defer to agency legal interpretations when the statutory language passed by Congress is ambiguous. Conservative legal activists, Republican-led states and some business groups have argued in recent years that the 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, allows agenda-driven regulators to push the limits of their power.

By abandoning the doctrine called Chevron deference, the justices have given parties unhappy with agency decisions more opportunities to overturn regulations by persuading federal judges that agency officials exceeded their authority.

Again the SCOTUS decision was split along the usual political lines.

The other day I said the Roberts court was cowardly at times, although it was brave in overruling Roe. I’d say this is another brave decision, and a potentially far-reaching one.