The thing to remember about Justice Sammy "The Hammer" is that at heart he's still a constitution-busting ideological goon

The eight other Supreme Court justices agreed that the Westboro Baptist-Scum Church wackos have a First Amendment right to inflict their psychotic homophobia on funeral mourners -- and of course they're probably right. So what's the deal with Sammy "The Hammer"?

""It does not follow, however, that they may intentionally inflict severe emotional injury on private persons at a time of intense emotional sensitivity by launching vicious verbal attacks that make no contribution to public debate."

""Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case."

-- from Justice Alito's dissent arguing in favor of restricting the First Amendment rights of people like the Westboro Baptist-Scum Church

by Ken

Were you, like a lot of folks, surprised to find Justice Sammy "The Hammer" Alito the lone dissenter in the Supreme Court's 8-1 ruling that the goons of the Irreverend Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist-Scum Church have an involable constitutionally protected right to inflict their taunting, psychotic homophobia on mourners at a funeral?

It certainly got my attention. On an issue that finds accord among the High Court's three other rabid right-wing zealots and the four moderates and "Slow Anthony" Kennedy, it's hard not to wonder about that lone dissent. So I was curious about Washington Post reporter Robert Barnes's attempt today to get to the bottom of it ("Alito stands alone on Supreme Court's First Amendment cases").

A lot of attention is being paid to Justice Sammy's loner dissent, in particular to the portion I've quoted at the top of this post. Here's the Post's Robert Barnes:

In Wednesday's dissent in Snyder v. Phelps, Alito said Albert Snyder had an "elementary right" to bury his son in peace. Members of the church had no right to launch "a malevolent verbal attack on Matthew and his family at a time of acute emotional vulnerability."

He added: "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case."

More particularly, in what we might think of as a case of "I believe in the First Amendment as much as the next guy" (though not -- oops! -- if the next guy happens to be Nino Scalia or Clarence Thomas or John Roberts):

Alito rejected the view that the caustic signs carried by the protesters -- "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" are favorites -- were legitimate public speech in a public forum.

"The First Amendment ensures that they have almost limitless opportunities to express their views," Alito wrote about the church's opinion that military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God's punishment for the nation's tolerance for homosexuality.

"They may write and distribute books, articles, and other texts; they may create and disseminate video and audio recordings; they may circulate petitions; they may speak to individuals and groups in public forums and in any private venue that wishes to accommodate them; they may picket peacefully in countless locations; they may appear on television and speak on the radio; they may post messages on the Internet and send out e-mails," Alito wrote.

He added: "It does not follow, however, that they may intentionally inflict severe emotional injury on private persons at a time of intense emotional sensitivity by launching vicious verbal attacks that make no contribution to public debate."

THE FIRST POINT TO MAKE IS THAT JUSTICE
SAMMY'S VOTE WAS UTTERLY IRRELEVANT

You can, of course, find cases where the lone dissent in and 8-1 Court ruling wound up having long-term traction. But I don't think you'd find any where that dissenting ruling. prescient as it may ultimately have proved, actually had any effect on the subsequent evolution in the Court's adjudicating. Practically speaking, I think it's fair to say that the "1" in an 8-to-1 ruling couldn't be more irrelevant, at least with regard to the issue under consideration. When you have eight Supreme Court justices united, that tells you that for the present and foreseeable future, the issue is settled.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Justice Sammy took advantage of his irrelevance on the issue to allow a previously unsuspected bleeding heart to flow. On the other hand, I don't exactly want to rule out the thought that the Sam-man knew he had a "free pass" on this one, to do . . . well, whatever the heck it is he thinks he's done. Put that pesky First Amendment in is place, or something like that.

THE SECOND POINT IS THAT JUSTICE SAMMY
HASN'T SUDDENLY BECOME A CIVIL LIBERTARIAN

The line of inquiry that more or less monopolizes Barnes's attention is the apparent common thread between the just-decided Snyder vs. Phleps and an earlier ruling in which Justice Sammy came out four-square not entirely in favor of the First Amendment.

Last April, the other justices forcefully struck down a federal law aimed at banning depictions of dog fighting and other violence against animals, saying it violated constitutional guarantees of free speech and created a "criminal prohibition of alarming breadth."

That ruling, which like Wednesday's was written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was another ringing endorsement of the First Amendment's protection of even distasteful expression. Roberts called "startling and dangerous" the government's argument that the value of certain categories of speech should be weighed against their societal costs when protecting free speech.

Alito did not.

"The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it most certainly does not protect violent criminal conduct, even if engaged in for expressive purposes," Alito wrote in that case, U.S. v. Stevens . Videos that depict acts of animal mutilation and death "present a highly unusual free speech issue because they are so closely linked with violent criminal conduct."

From this, Thomas C. Goldstein, described by Barnes as "a Supreme Court practitioner who runs scotusblog.com," deduces:

In his view, the First Amendment has a core value relating to political speech. In his view, extending it to protect videos of animal cruelty and exploitation of a military funeral goes too far. The rest of the court obviously disagrees, but his position seems completely coherent.

I should explain that the "coherence" Goldstein is defending has to do with the charge of inconsistency between these votes and the Hammer's lockstep endorsement of the Citizens United that the First Amendment rights of those ineffably fragile entities, corporations, may not constitutionally be impinged upon.

To be honest, I don't rightly know what Justice Sammy believes about the First Amendment. I'm admit I'm kind of surprised that the line he seems to be drawing falls on the near side of the unlimited-free-speech rights of ultra-right-wing crazies, but I don't draw any comfort from this given (a) the very "ultra"-ness of these particular right-wingers and (b) again, the fact that in these cases his vote just hasn't meant squat. Clearly, though, when it comes to speech that isn't comfortably right-wing, the kind of speech that may elicit less protective First Amendment sensibilities from Justices Nino, Clarence, Smirkin' John, and Slow Anthony, any complainant who may hope for protection for the Sam-man is deluded.

Now it's possible that practitioner-blogger Thomas Goldstein may have hit the nail on the head with his speculation that in Justice Sammy's view "the First Amendment has a core value relating to political speech." There's a small problem here, though. The actual First Amendment in the actual Constitution doesn't contain the slightest ghost of a whisper of the shadow of a possibility of a hint of such a distinction -- of some kind of "core" value to the First Amendment that, where speech is concerned, protects only political speech.

BY THE WAY, DOES THE CONSTITUTION
TELL US HOW TO DETERMINE . . .

. . . that the speech of the Westboro Baptist-Scum Church dirtbags is not political? You know, to help us apply this "core" distinction that he Justice Sammy seems to know the First Amendment intends but just never got around to mentioning? Oh, you say, the Westboro Baptist trolls' speech isn't political, it's religious? Uh-oh, maybe you want to take another look at that there First Amendment? And let Mr. Goldstein know what you find. But I suggest you not bother mentioning it to Justice Sammy. He doesn't seem to care. He doesn't seem to know or care what the First Amendment says, just what it means. Which he knows.

For that matter, these "elementary rights" of which our Sammy speaks, like the right to bury your son in peace, the right that he appears to be holding sacred in his dissent -- um, these "rights" are also utterly non-existent in the Constitution, and also, as far as I'm aware, in previous Supreme Court jurisprudence.

And the problem is that Justice Alito is one of the Court's right-wing extremist thugs who brazenly lied his way through his Senate confirmation hearings by claiming that Supreme Court justices aren't called on to interpret the Constitution, just to apply, the standard lying imbecility on which the massed forces of right-wing injustice have settled as the be-all and end-all of elementary qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice -- an unreservedly ideological imbeciliity that the infotainment noozemedia has been only too happy to rubber-stamp. It's not the noozers' job, at least in their little minds, to question publicly declared right-wing imbecilitiess.

In Justice Sammy's defense, sort of, anyone with the tiniest sliver of a working brain knows that this "just apply the Constitution" is the rankest, most hypocritical fraud. It's an absolute impossibility, and anyone who says otherwise is either a legal imbecile or a legal liar. And way high on that list is Justice Sammy "I Lie Because I Am" Alito. Maybe somebody would like to ask him about that "inconsistency." Of course Supreme Court justices don't have to answer nuttin' from nobody, however curious we may be to have one of them explain, say, whether citizens may have an "elementary" right to have their speech protected from the blanketing assault of corporate cash, or whether there is perhaps a "core value" in the Second Amendment (which is actually stated pretty explicitly, unless you happen to be a right-wing crackpot too stupid or dishonest to be able to, you know, read at, say, an elementary-school level).

Our last chance to demand answers from Sammy was at his confirmation hearings. You know, back when he said, in effect, that he reserves the right to lie whenever he feels like it, for as long as he lives, amen. The only recourse we have if we don't like it is impeachment, and that's not going to happen.

But it would be something if the noozemedia began to make clear that the extreme right-wing majority of the current Supreme Court is made up of a bunch of lying sacks of doody.

#