…[T]here is a huge factual error in the account related by Mr. Patrick. The Supreme Court justices have not met in person for a conference since March. So there is no closed room from which shouting could be heard. If someone were outside the doors of Roberts or any of the other liberal justices, they could have heard one person screaming. If they were outside the conservatives’ doors, they would not have heard anything unless one or more of those justices had a kick-ass sound system.

Makes sense to me.

This tale about Roberts screaming at the conservatives on the Court is the type of story we seem to read about almost constantly. The format has been especially popular during Trump’s presidency, and usually features Trump raging at someone and/or sulking like Achilles in his tent. Some staffer is said to have been privy to these events and is reporting – anonymously, of course – to the media.

You may notice that I usually don’t report such stories, and it’s not just because ordinarily we’re unable to ascertain their truth or falsehood. It’s because it’s my default position that they are probably false. I felt the same about the Roberts story even before I read streiff’s piece. In this case, I think the purpose of the story and the intention of whoever leaked it is to sow even further division and confusion and frustration on the right.

What do I really think is happening with Roberts? The same thing I’ve thought almost from the start, which is that for most situations if he can find any way to avoid changing the status quo he will. For him, it seems to have little to do with the policy itself and whether it’s conservative or liberal, it’s about refusing to try to change things that have already occurred. For example, Roberts turned himself into a pretzel with the tax/penalty question in order to avoid the disruption of overturning or curtailing Obamacare. Two years ago, I described Roberts’ pattern this way:

I’ve noticed a tendency in Roberts—long before Trump became president—to vote in the way that is least likely to upset the status quo apple cart. For example, in the case of Obamacare, Roberts found a “creative” way to avoid a bold overturning of a bill that had been passed by Congress. In yesterday’s injunction case, the path of least resistance was to let the injunction stand rather than to overrule it.

No doubt there are exceptions to the rule, but the recent Texas case certainly isn’t one of them. Even without riots, even without threats, Roberts would go with the low energy state of letting things slide along the way they’ve been going. To do anything out of the ordinary and even hear the case Texas raised – which is, among other things, a case of first impression – goes utterly against Roberts’ grain. Hearing the Texas case could have had immense consequences and could even have ended up ultimately leading to state legislative actions that overturned the results of the 2020 election.

You might say that Roberts is a “conservative” judge if you define (or redefine) “conservative” as meaning keeping things the way they are. The irony is that, in this case. the consequences of keeping things as they are (Biden declared the winner) might end up leading to an enormous and fundamental change in America by utterly empowering the activist left. It might even lead to changes in the composition of SCOTUS itself – court-packing – that one would think Roberts wouldn’t want. Then again, perhaps he’d welcome the dilution of personal responsibility that would go with a greatly expanded number of justices on the Court.

[NOTE: Recall also that in Bush v. Gore the Court voted to keep the status quo; Bush had already been ahead when the Court halted the counting Gore had demanded.]

The post No, Justice Roberts wasn’t screaming at the other justices about <i>Bush v. Gore</i> and riots appeared first on The New Neo.

There’s some interesting legal reasoning from Roberts in the case, which struck down a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges. Roberts was relying on precedent:

“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike,” Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”

What’s he’s saying there is that the Louisiana law was almost exactly the same as a Texas law which had been declared unconstitutional by the Court in 2016, and therefore absent some sort of unusual circumstances the present case had to be decided in accord with the previous one. And yet, in that 2016 case, Justice Roberts had voted against declaring the Texas law unconstitutional. Now he is saying, essentially, that he is required by precedent to vote against himself – not to mention against the legislature of the state of Louisiana. And this is the same Justice Roberts who just the other day had no problem whatsoever overturning precedent to find that “sex” means something quite different, legally, than it has in the past.

Justice Thomas remarked on today’s ruling and pointed out the liberal wing’s (and I include Roberts there) situational and shifting allegiance to precedent:

The plurality and THE CHIEF JUSTICE ultimately cast aside this jurisdictional barrier to conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents. But those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.

Absolutely true. The proper way to have gone about making abortion legal would have been to have an amendment to the Constitution, or to just accomplish it state by state. Instead, the Court reached deep into its creative inspiration and created a federal right that did not previously exist and had no foundation in the Constitution.

[ADDENDUM: Much more here.]

The post It’s official. Apparently, Justice Roberts has been missing Justice Stevens so much… appeared first on The New Neo.

“It’s very important whether or not a group of Democratic activists, part of the Obama-Biden administration were working together for years looking for an opportunity to impeach the president,” Paul explained. He blamed Roberts and the Senate for “selective belief in protecting the whistleblower statute … nobody says they know who the person is. But anybody you say might be all of a sudden is protected from being part of the debate.”

Roberts communicated to senators on Tuesday that he would not read questions that outed the alleged whistleblower, prompting Paul to complain afterward.

Everyone who follows the news at all closely knows the whistleblower’s supposed identity: Eric Ciaramella. It’s not any kind of secret at all. And Rand Paul has said that was the person named in his question.

What a stupid charade – but it’s one that plays quite nicely into Schiff’s hands.

And by the way, it would be different if this was a whistleblower whose identity is protected by statute. It is not.

The post By refusing to read the name of the whistleblower during the impeachment trial… appeared first on The New Neo.