The Supreme Court takes a (small) stand in favor of pregnant women, and it's (real) news

Peggy Young with her daughter Triniti, now seven

"The U.S. Supreme Court sided with a woman who was faced with the choice to either work her labor-intensive job during pregnancy at the United Parcel Service or go on unpaid leave without benefits. In an opinion issued Wednesday morning, the justices ruled 6-3 that Young should at least be given a full opportunity to make her case in court that she was not given the same accommodation as other employees considered injured or disabled."

-- ThinkProgress's Nicole Flatow, in "U.S. Supreme Court Sides With Pregnant Worker In Major Discrimination Case"

by Ken

They didn't do all that much for the petitioner. In fact, you could describe it as what most observers would have considered the very least they could, in good conscience, have done. Be that as it may, though, it counts for something that the Roberts Court -- with, in fact, Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts voting in the minority -- ruled today, in Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals erred in refusing to allow Peggy Young to present her case to the court that UPS had violated the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act by refusing to allow her to go on "light duty" during her pregnancy.

Still, the High Court at least did that much. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in an opinion joined by the three other moderate justices and Chief Justice Roberts, "Ultimately the court must determine whether the nature of the employer's policy and the way in which it burdens pregnant women shows that the employer has engaged in intentional discrimination." (Kind of amazingly, Justice "Sammy the Hammer" Alito also sided with the plaintiff, accounting for the 6-3 vote, but had to offer a concurring opinion to explain how you get to that point in Hammerland. I assume you don't need to be told who the left-behind "3" are.)

Let's let ThinkProgress's Nicole Flatow summarize the case:

Young was tasked with lifting boxes as heavy as 70 pounds in her job as a UPS worker. When she got pregnant, her midwife recommended that she not lift more than 20 pounds, and wrote a note asking her employer to put her on light duty. Had Young been written a similar note because Young broke her arm carrying boxes, or suffered from a disability, UPS would have put her on what is known as “light duty.” But UPS wouldn’t do it for Young on account of her pregnancy. The alternative was to take unpaid leave without medical benefits.

It shouldn't come as a titanic shock that the Fourth Circuit said "F.U." to the plaintiff. There's been personnel movement since the late Sen. Jesse Helms was forced to give up his guardianship of Big No. 4, but his spirit still hovers over it. And the mighty Fourth decided, as Nicole puts it, "that granting 'light duty' to Young would give pregnant employees an advantage over other other employees and that Young didn't suffer pregnancy discrimination," and couldn't for the life of it think why the bitch plaintiff should be allowed "to go to trial and prove all the elements of her claim."

That's the "oops" the High Court today declared on the Fourth Circuit.

"The Pregnancy Discrimination Act," Nicole explains (links onsite),

prohibits employers from treating pregnant women differently from other employees who are “similar in their ability, or inability, to work.” The act was passed in response to rampant mistreatment and misperceptions of women workers. But these misperceptions persist, even as women now make up about half of the workforce and a large proportion of them will either leave the workforce at some point to have a child, or may be viewed as a woman with the potential to one day leave the workforce for that reason.

In fact, complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging pregnancy discrimination have only increased, prompting the Commission to remind employers recently that they still can’t discriminate against pregnant women.

As a group of women’s advocacy groups and law professors pointed out in their brief, a ruling against Young would have harmed the women most in need of pregnancy discrimination protection — those in “low-wage jobs and traditionally male-dominated occupations who are most likely to experience temporary conflicts between the physical effects of pregnancy and job requirements,” and who already experience disproportionate discrimination, according to recent statistics.

Which brings us to the counter-arguments brought before the Supreme Court. Um, well, and this is kind of embarrassing for the judges of the Fourth Circuit, there don't seem to have been any.

UPS didn’t have many advocates in this case other than the federal appeals court judges. Briefs filed on behalf of state and local lawmakers, national medical associations, the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Solicitor General, and even 23 pro-life organizations defended Young’s right to a work accommodation. They said the Fourth Circuit’s ruling was counter to the intent of anti-discrimination laws, that it was bad for the health of mothers and children, that it was bad for the economy, bad for business, and even could encourage women to get abortions. In all, 11 amicus briefs were filed supporting Young and none supporting UPS.

Then comes one of my favorite touches:

Even the members of Congress who passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act explained that they intended for the act the court was interpreting to protect people just like Young, and that the court ruling against her “ignored the unambiguous mandate of the PDA requiring employees to consider only the ability or inability to work in determining a pregnant worker’s entitlement to benefits.”

Oh my! If the question was what's covered by the PDA, and you know, it kind of was, then you might think the case should have been open-and-shut. As long as you bear in mind that this Court only considers the actually expressed intent of Congress that actually expressed intent reinforces the justices' personal blind prejudices.

Nicole notes that today's ruling, "as expected by many advocates," was "rather narrow in its holding," and it's not just that the ruling gave Peggy Young nothing more than the right to make her case in court. In addition, the ruling --

took into account neither a 2008 change to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, nor new 2014 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines that bolster protections for pregnant women. What’s more, UPS announced since Young’s lawsuit that it would change its policy going forward and allow workers to stay on the job performing light-duty work.

But the ruling is important nevertheless.

[T]he National Women’s Law Center’s Emily Martin told ThinkProgress earlier this year that any ruling for Young would help many pregnant women. “Even if the law has changed, it will only make it easier for those women,” Martin said. A recent survey by NWLC found that many women who felt they needed to alter their work duties or take more frequent breaks still fear requesting those accommodations.

What’s more, the ruling comes as a sigh of relief to many who worried about what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referred to as the court’s “blind spot” on women’s issues. In 2007, the court’s five conservative male justices rejected Lilly Ledbetter’s fair pay lawsuit, in a decision later overturned by an act of Congress. In 2011, they turned back the largest-ever class of women alleging gender discrimination by Wal-Mart. And in 2013, that same voting bloc held that many corporations get to decide when their female employees should have access to contraception. Commenting on this blind spot, Ginsburg said in an interview recently, “[T]he justices continue to think and change so I am ever hopeful that if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Well, in this case two of the Court's right-wing extremists went off the reservation. (Note that "Slow Anthony" Kennedy, wearing his right-wing-extremist robe, stayed behind, as the sole support for the Scalia-Thomas axis.) That counts for something, no? If only for a day.

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"Justice Ginsburg explains everything you need to know about religious liberty in two sentences" (Ian Millhiser)

Plus: Justice Nino daydreams about mandatory polygamy


"Unlike the exemption this Court approved in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., accommodating petitioner's religious belief in this case would not detrimentally affect others who do not share petitioner's belief. On that understanding, I join the Court's opinion."

-- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ruling
with a unanimous Court today in Holt v. Hobbs

by Ken

The case itself, this Holt v. Hobbs, turned out to be so simple constitutionally that not only was the Supreme Court's verdict unanimous, but even dim bulb "Sammy the Hammer" Alito actually got it well enough to explain it almost right in the Court's ruling.

The "almost right" refers to the distinction Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood was necessary to set forth, which she did in the two sentences quoted above, the two sentences in question in Ian Millhiser's ThinkProgress post "Justice Ginsburg explains everything you need to know about religious liberty in two sentences."

The one tricky thing about the case was that it called on the Roberts Court to apply the religious liberties it has become so protective of to a non-Christian. And this court, in common with the far-right-wing ideology it now champions, while pretending to be great believers in "freedom," in fact generally supports only the precise kinds of freedom for the precise kinds of people it believes are right -- meaning, usually, Right. However, in this case even the easily fooled Sammy the Hammer wasn't fooled.

The case concerns a Muslim inmate in an Arkansas maximum-security prison, one "Gregory Houston Holt AKA Abdul Maalik Muhammad," who claims that preventing him from growing even the half-inch beard he's willing to settle for violates his religious requirement to have a beard, without the legal justification in terms of actual harm required by the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. And Justice Alito agrees in his ruling that Arkansas prison officials haven't met the test of RLUIPA, to provide credible examples of how allowing the limited beard imposes a security burden on the prison.

IN THE ORAL ARGUMENTS --

The justices devoted a fair amount of questioning to the half-inch-beard standard, understandably wondering if there is an enforceable standard. Justice Ginsburg began by raising the utterly reasonable question: "If this prisoner wanted to have a full beard, would RLUIPA require that the prison administration allow him to do that?" Again, it's a fair question, even though, as the petitioner's advocate pointed out, 40 other state prison bureaus allow beards without any restriction of length, and it would seem under RLUIPA that it's the prison's burden to establish the dangers of the requested beard. But Justice Scalia, pointing out rightly that the actual Islamic requirement would be for a full beard, not a half-inch one, pursued his questioning with the analogy of a hypothetical religion that requires polygamy, and whether that requirement would be satisfied by allowing just two wives.

Now, let's assume in the religion that requires polygamy. I mean, could ­­-- could I say to the prison, well, you know, okay, I won't have three wives; just let me have two wives. I mean, you're still violating your religion, it seems to me, if he allows his beard to be clipped to one ­­ one inch, isn't he?

Again, there's a legitimate issue thrashing around in this thicket, but it's couched in such a whacked-out form as to raise two obvious questions: [1] Would Justice Scalia conjure such a bizarre analogy in discussing possible limitations of a Christian religious requirement? [2] What the hell is wrong with that man?

ANYWAY, JUSTICE SAMMY DID SEEM TO GRASP . . .

. . . in his opinion that the Arkansas prison folks had failed to make the kind of need-based case justifying a religious infringement which would be required under RLUIPA, and that's pretty much the end of the story.

Except that, as Ian notes, it's not quite the end of the story. At least it wasn't for Justice Ginsburg. Ian explains (links onsite):

Though Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins Alito’s opinion, she also penned a two sentence concurring opinion explaining why Tuesday’s decision is a proper application of an individual’s religious freedoms — and why she believes that the Court’s birth control decision in Hobby Lobby was erroneous. “Unlike the exemption this Court approved in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.,” Ginsburg explains, “accommodating petitioner’s religious belief in this case would not detrimentally affect others who do not share petitioner’s belief. On that understanding, I join the Court’s opinion.”

Prior to Hobby Lobby, the Court’s precedents honored a careful balance between religious liberty and the legal rights of others. People of faith have robust rights to honor their beliefs and act on their conscience, but they couldn’t interfere with someone else’s legal rights. Indeed, Hobby Lobby’s claim that they could defy a federal rule requiring them to include birth control in their employee health plan was especially weak because Hobby Lobby is a for-profit business. As the Court held in United States v. Lee, “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

Unlike Hobby Lobby, Muhammad sought a concession to his faith that has no impact on anyone other than himself. As Alito’s opinion in Holt lays out, the prison’s concerns about the consequences of allowing him to grow a beard were unwarranted. And no one else will have to do anything with their facial hair (or, for that matter, lose access to important medical care), because Muhammad will be allowed to grow a beard.

Score a good catch for Ian, I would say, and a good catch for Justice Ginsburg.

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Sammy Alito-- The Worst Of The Supremes... And The Democrats Who Allowed Him To Be Confirmed

With the retirements of Tim Johnson (D-SC) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and the defeats of Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) this year, only 3 Democrats remain in the Senate who were among the 19 Dems who voted with the GOP on January 30, 2006 to cut off debate and, in effect, allow Alito to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. The remaining Alito-Democrats still voting in the Senate today: Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Bill Nelson (D-FL). It's worth noting that both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were two of 25 Democrats who voted against ending the debate. In other words, both were serious about not confirming the calamity the Democrats well know was looming for the country in the form of Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito. Even conservative Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Evan Bayh voted against cloture.

A man with virtually no ethical standards of decency, Alito is the ultimate hack judge for the corporatocracy and for conservative-- or even reactionary-- Establishment power. He is not, nor has he ever been, a man to question authority or, worse, authoritarianism. The only Republican to vote against Alito was Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee, who stated flatly that "I am a pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-Bill of Rights Republican, and I will be voting against this nomination." I announcing their opposition to conformation, the American Civil Liberties Union, which had only opposed two Supreme Court nominees in its entire history, was prescient. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero justified the decision by saying that "At a time when our president has claimed unprecedented authority to spy on Americans and jail terrorism suspects indefinitely, America needs a Supreme Court justice who will uphold our precious civil liberties. Unfortunately, Judge Alito's record shows a willingness to support government actions that abridge individual freedoms."

No Democrat who voted to allow Alito to be confirmed didn't know what they were agreeing to. A pig for sure, but a pig in a poke he wasn't. Predictably, Alito has been on the wrong side of ever Supreme Court decision-- no exceptions-- since ascending to the Court, from Citizens United, Hobby Lobby and Hamdan v Rumsfeld, to McCutcheon and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire . Needless to say, he had also been in the minority that tried to throw out the Affordable Care Act by circumventing the Constitution. Alito has clearly always going to be the most grubbily partisan member of the Court-- with an agenda to turn back the clock on working families overall and especially on women. He has been the best friend of the Chamber of Commerce on the Court, even worse than Scalia.

Why bring this up today, almost a decade later? The DCCC is, once again, out recruiting conservatives to run for Congress. Ben Ray Luján has already shown himself to be a make-no-waves carbon copy of the execrable and disastrously failed Blue Dog Steve Israel. He's working on re-recruiting pathetic failure Emily Cain, a New Dem, in Maine and a Republican, Monica Vernon, in Iowa. And, a man with no vision whatsoever, he's looking towards Blue Dog Mike McMahon or anti-Choice Democrat Mike Cusick to run in the special election for the seat Michael Grimm was just forced to resign from. What does that have to do with Alito being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice? Fill the party's lower benches up with hacks like Cain, Vernon, McMahon and Cusick and eventually you wind up with compromised corrupt conservatives like Pryor and Landrieu casting the deciding votes on nominees like Alito. It's why we have to be absolutely vigilant and work to prevent the DCCC from slipping ever more right-wing Democrats into the congressional delegation. Count on Blue America to do just that-- all through 2015 and 2016.

There's "Trouble with Amicus Briefs" at the Supreme Court -- notably an increased reliance on "facts" that aren't

-- appendix to Professor Larsen's paper (click to enlarge)

The amicus brief has served a valuable role over time in educating Supreme Court Justices and supplementing the arguments the parties can make. But times have changed. There is a new emphasis in Supreme Court decision making on generalized factual claims and a turn toward empirical factual support for legal arguments. There is also a brave new world of factual data that can be marshalled easily and quickly by any interested party who can call itself an expert. The Court seems hungry for factual information; it consumes it at a greater rate than the parties and the record can provide. But by turning to motivated interest groups to fill the need – and indeed relying on the amicus briefs themselves as evidence on factual claims -- the Court risks tainting its decisions with unreliable evidence. It is time to rethink the expertise providing role of the Supreme Court amicus, and to refashion this old tool for the new purpose to which it is currently being used.

-- the "Conclusion" to Prof. Allison Orr Larsen's
paper "The Trouble with Amicus Facts"

by Ken

Going by such numbers as we have here at DWT, I notice that when I write about the doings of the Supreme Court, and especially what we know about its workings, reader interest usually drops off a cliff. (Okay, maybe "rolls down a perceptible hill" would be more like it.) Which makes me wonder whether it's perhaps for reasons somewhat similar that Adam Liptak's intriguing NYT report "The Dubious Sources of Some Supreme Court 'Facts'" came to be dumped into the Labor Day Weekend trough.

Or perhaps the timing is simply keyed to the soon-to-happen publication of an article by College of William and Mary law Prof. Alli Orr Larsen, "The Trouble with Amicus Facts," in the Virginia Law Review. Adam L cites Professor Larsen's finding in brief: "The court is inundated with 11th-hour, untested, advocacy-motivated claims of factual expertise." And those "11th-hour, untested, advocacy-motivated claims" are finding their way into lots of real, live Supreme Court opinions.

Adam L begins his piece:

The Supreme Court received more than 80 friend-of-the-court briefs in the Hobby Lobby case. Most of these filings, also called amicus briefs, were dull and repetitive recitations of familiar legal arguments.

Others stood out. They presented fresh, factual information that put the case in a broader context.

The justices are hungry for such data. Their opinions are increasingly studded with citations to facts they learned from amicus briefs.

"A perilous trend" is how Adam L characterizes Professor Larsen's reaction to her findings, and this seems absolutely correct as to both her reaction and her findings. Here is the abstract for her "research paper" (which runs to 57 pages in the downloadable-free PDF file, which I freely confess I haven't read, at least not yet):

The number of amicus curiae briefs filed at the Supreme Court is at an all-time high. Most observers, and even some of the Justices, believe that the best of these briefs are filed to supplement the Court’s understanding of facts. Supreme Court decisions quite often turn on generalized facts about the way the world works (Do violent video games harm children? Is a partial birth abortion ever medically necessary?) and to answer these questions the Justices are hungry for more information than the parties and the record can provide. The consensus is that amicus briefs helpfully add factual expertise to the Court’s decision-making.

The goal of this article is to chip away at that conventional wisdom. The trouble with amicus facts, I argue, is that today anyone can claim to be a factual expert. With the Internet, factual information is easily found and cheaply manufactured. Moreover, the amicus curiae has evolved significantly from its origin as an impartial “friend of the court.” Facts submitted by amici are now funneled through the screen of advocacy. The result is that the Court is inundated with eleventh-hour, untested, advocacy-motivated claims of factual expertise. And the Justices are listening. This article looks at the instances in recent years when a Supreme Court Justice cites an amicus for a statement of fact. It describes the way the brief, rather than the underlying factual source, is cited as authority and the failure of the parties to act as an adequate check. I challenge this process as potentially infecting the Supreme Court’s decisions with unreliable evidence, and I make suggestions for ways to reform it. It is time to rethink the expertise-providing role of the Supreme Court amicus and to refashion this old tool for the new purpose to which it is currently being used.

THERE ARE TWO ISSUES HERE, STARTING
WITH ONE OF BASIC LEGAL PROCEDURE

First, there's the legal question of whether the justices should be marshaling facts of their own at all. As Adam L notes, appellate courts normally "are not supposed to be in the business of determining facts," which is "the job of the trial court, where evidence is submitted, sifted and subjected to the adversary process."

Appellate courts traditionally take those facts, fixed in the trial court record, as a given. Their job is to identify and apply legal principles to those facts.

And one justice has tried to steer his colleagues back to this basic principle. Can you guess who?

Justice Antonin Scalia made this point in a 2011 dissent chastising the majority for its blithe acceptance of “government-funded studies” that “did not make an appearance in this litigation until the government’s merits brief to this court.”

But “Supreme Court briefs are an inappropriate place to develop the key facts in a case,” Justice Scalia wrote. “An adversarial process in the trial courts can identify flaws in the methodology of the studies that the parties put forward; here, we accept the studies’ findings on faith, without examining their methodology at all.”

The net result, he said, is “untested judicial fact-finding masquerading as statutory interpretation.”

And if you look at the chart at the top of this post, provided by Professor Larsen as an appendix to her paper, you'll see that Justice Nino is as good as his word. Of course Justice Nino doesn't need to go searching for facts. He hardly needs facts at all. Oh, he pays lip service to the facts as established at trial, but in reality he's just cherry-pickin' the facts, and the law, and the Constitution, and the original intent of the Framers, to line up with the unerring legal wisdom that comes from the miasma of his intensely ideological stinkybutt.

Still, at least Justice Nino sticks to his guns in his aversion to considering new facts, unlike a colleague who claims to have the same opinion but turns out to be lying his putrid guts out.

Can you guess who this steadfast stinkybutter is? We'll come back to this in a moment.


BUT FIRST WE NEED TO CONSIDER THE OTHER,
MUCH BIGGER PROBLEM: ACTUAL FACTUALITY

With this new practice of "copying" from the Internet, says Professor Larsen, an awful lot of bilge is being imported. Here's Adam L again:

Some of the factual assertions in recent amicus briefs would not pass muster in a high school research paper. But that has not stopped the Supreme Court from relying on them. Recent opinions have cited “facts” from amicus briefs that were backed up by blog posts, emails or nothing at all.

Some amicus briefs are careful and valuable, of course, citing peer-reviewed studies and noting contrary evidence. Others cite more questionable materials.

Some “studies” presented in amicus briefs were paid for or conducted by the group that submitted the brief and published only on the Internet. Some studies seem to have been created for the purpose of influencing the Supreme Court.

Yet the justices are quite receptive to this dodgy data. Over the five terms from 2008 to 2013, the court’s opinions cited factual assertions from amicus briefs 124 times, Professor Larsen found.

The phenomenon is novel. “The U.S. Supreme Court is the only American judicial entity that depends so heavily on amicus briefs to educate itself on factual matters,” Professor Larsen wrote.

And as Adam L points out, the new "facts," not part of the judicial record, to which Justice Nino objected so vociferously in that 2001 dissent: (1) were at least government-funded studies, and (2) "were submitted by a party to the case and thus were likely to be closely examined by the other side."

Most of the information from the amicus briefs recently cited by the justices was not subjected to even that level of adversary scrutiny. Only 28 percent of the cited materials drew a response from one of the parties in the case.

And in the Hobby Lobby case, Adam L writes,

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. pushed back against the recent trend, refusing to consider “an intensely empirical argument” in an amicus brief. “We do not generally entertain arguments that were not raised below and are not advanced in this court by any party,” he wrote.

OOPS! WE HAVE TO REMEMBER THAT SAMMY
"THE HAMMER" IS A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR

Or maybe he's simply so blinkered by his rigidly far-right ideological view of the world that he sincerely doesn't recognize where reality ends and his delusions begin. Whatever the process, Professor Larsen begs to differ with The Hammer. Adam L quotes from a recent blogpost of hers, "Allisn Orr Larsen on Intensely Empricial Amicus Briefs and Amicus Opportunism at the Supreme Court":

"This descriptive statement by Justice Alito about Supreme Court practice is simply incorrect."

"Consider these examples," writes Adam L.

In a 2011 decision about the privacy rights of scientists who worked on government space programs, Justice Alito cited an amicus brief to show that more than 88 percent of American companies perform background checks on their workers.

“Where this number comes from is a mystery,” Professor Larsen wrote. “It is asserted in the brief without citation.”

In a 2012 decision allowing strip searches of people arrested for even minor offenses as they are admitted to jail, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy cited an amicus brief to show that there are “an increasing number of gang members” entering the nation’s prisons and jails. The brief itself did little more than assert that “there is no doubt” this was so.

And in a 2013 decision, Justice Stephen G. Breyer cited an amicus brief to establish that American libraries hold 200 million books that were published abroad, a point of some significance in the copyright dispute before the court. The figure in the brief came from a blog post. The blog has been discontinued.

While I realize that what I'm about to say can be dismissed as my own ideological bias, I strongly believe it isn't, being based on extended exposure to the legal thinking and writing of the justices involved. You'll note from Professor Larsen's table that Justice Breyer, who notched only one fewer amicus-brief citations than the champ, "Slow Anthony" Kennedy" -- and also only one more than Sammy "We Do Not Generally Entertain Arguments That Were Not Raised Below and Are Not Advanced in This Court by Any Party" the Hammer -- is trying, however fumblingly, to get a handle on the reality of the case at issue.

One might wish Justice Steve would be more careful about establishing his "facts," but what we're seeing here seems to me a now-familiar left-right divide between means and goals we see played out time and again, as for example in the confirmation hearings that regrettably allowed Clarence Thomas to slither onto the Supreme Court. While the center-lefties are trying to grope their way to "truth," the righties are looking only for results.

It's the basic modus operandi of right-wing "journalism," where the "journalist" starts with "the truth," as divined from the deep recesses of his stinkybutt and then for his "reporting" goes in search of factoids, or anything at all really, that buttress his "truth." Stinkybuttresses, we might call them. And when he still can't find anything, he can always just make stuff up -- like, apparently, the source cited by Sammy the Hammer for that unsourced "88 percent" number.

So is it any surprise that, when it suits Sammy the Hammer's convenience -- as, for example, arriving at the repellent conclusion the majority arrived at in the Hobby Lobby case -- he will get on his high horse to denounce the practice of "entertain[ing] arguments that were not raised below and are not advanced in this court by any party."  One might suggest that those arguments could show him up for the prejudging intellectual hooligan he is.

The Hammer is, after all, one of the Court's foremost practitioners of the out-of-left-field amicus stealth bomb. In his defense, one might point out that since just about every word he said at his confirmation hearings was a lie, he might consider that he was unusually forthcoming in the "What You See Is What You'll Get" department.

Adam L concludes his piece:

Kannon K. Shanmugam, a lawyer with Williams and Connolly who argues frequently before the court, said the justices’ quandary was a common one.

“The Supreme Court has the same problem that the rest of us do: figuring out how to distinguish between real facts and Internet facts,” he said. “Amicus briefs from unreliable sources can contribute to that problem.”

Which is true as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it applies only to situations where a person is looking for "real facts," and not just stinkybuttresses.

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Since Sammy "The Hammer" Alito is such an obvious liar, LGBT folk can't have employment-discrimination protection

Hobby Lobby Goal

Pat Begley [click to enlarge]

"If a private company can take its own religious beliefs and say you can't have access to certain health care, it's a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them."

-- National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) Executive
Director Rea Carey, to the Washington Post (see below)

"[A] coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights said in a joint statement that they also would be withdrawing support [for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)]. The bill’s religious exemptions clause is written so broadly that 'ENDA's discriminatory provision, unprecedented in federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, could provide religiously affiliated organizations -- including hospitals, nursing homes and universities -- a blank check to engage in workplace discrimination against LGBT people,' the group said, adding later that if ENDA were to pass Congress, 'the most important federal law for the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community in American history would leave too many jobs, and too many LGBT workers, without protection.' "

-- from "Gay rights groups withdraw support of ENDA after Hobby
Lobby decision," on washingtonpost.com's "Post Politics" blog

by Ken

Sammy "The Hammer" Alito lied his putrid guts out to worm his way onto the Supreme Court, and I guess he decided that since it worked then, there isn't any reason for him ever to tell the truth.

Not that anyone should be surprised, but as the fallout from his (in)famous Hobby Lobby ruling falls out, it turns out that just about everything in the ruling was a lie except the part where it says, or implies that if you're a God-fearing far-right-wing Christian corporation that feels your religious liberty is being encroached upon by federal law, just come to the Supreme Court and we'll take care of you, 24/7.

For some reason, ultra-radical right-wing ideologues don't seem to like being thought of as "extreme," in kind of the way that obvious and virulent racists have kittens when they're called racists. This is the only reason I can think of why The Hammer felt obliged to pretend in the Hobby Lobby ruling that it would have only the tiniest sliver of applicability, so slim as to be barely worth discussing.

In the first place, he told us, the opportunity for nonprofit corporations to claim religious exemption from the contraceptive provisions of ACA-mandated insurance coverage would be oh-so-limited, to just a tiny number of "closely held" (and therefore, we were clearly meant to assume, small) companies that could show centuries of deeply held corporate religious convictions. In the second place, this tiny new window of corporate religious exemption would apply only to this narrow issue of contraceptive means thought by this handful of divinely inspired profit-makers to be objectionable for possibly being abortion-producing.

April Fool's! Or July, or whatever kind of fools we are for paying attention to a raging ideologue's transparent lies.

(For the record, there was a less obvious lie that didn't come to the fore until three days later. The Hobby Lobby ruling's invention of this new corporate religious exemption was based on the Court majority's assertion that it could be easily applied, since the Obama administration had already worked out an admirable system for granting legally established religious exemptions for non-profit institutions. On Thursday, however, the Court majority granted injunctive relief to Illinois's Wheaton College, which claimed among other things that those very procedures which the Court had found so admirable on Monday had by Thursday become potentially unacceptable.)

In the first instance, since there were already, what?, a hundred or so corporations lined up with Hobby Lobby in demanding their corporate religious exemption, the notion that its applicability was an out-and-out lie on the face of it -- it seems obvious that this already large group was, and was meant to be, merely the tip of the iceberg. It would be more accurate to say, as I did in the title for my post on the High Court's Wheaton College whopper three days later: "The Supreme Court opens a drive-through window for right-wing zealots with (right-wing Christian) corporate religious objections to the law."

(Of course Justice Sammy didn't specify the part I put in parentheses: that the newly concocted corporate religious exemption applied only to far-right-wing Christians. For that, you have to know how to interpret the winks of the blink-blinkety-blink Court's reigning far-right-wing majority. But as a practical matter, if you're a corporation that has religious convictions of other than the far-right-wing Christian kind and you want to see what the Supreme Court might be willing to do for you, I would suggest that you save yourself the legal fees.)

And as to the second instance, the bald claim that the new corporate religious exemption applies only to this contraception-abortion gray area . . . well, for Pete's sake! Is there anyone so foolish as to have failed to notice that this was asserted with no backup or foundation of any sort? When the High Court begins to dish out future corporate religious exemptions, there's nothing here that they'll even have to overturn -- this is just words, words that don't mean a darned thing.


AS WE LEARN WITH THE CRUMBLING OF ENDA

Lest anyone think I'm being merely theoretical here, we already have the first major reverberation from The Hammer's Hobby Lobby lies. As the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe reported late this afternoon:

Several major gay rights groups withdrew support Tuesday for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would bolster gay and transgender rights in the workplace, saying they fear that broad religious exemptions included in the current bill might compel private companies to begin citing objections similar to those that prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case last week. . . .

[T]he groups said they can no longer back ENDA as currently written in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down a key part of President Obama’s health-care law. The court ruled that family-owned businesses do not have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the owners’ religious beliefs. . . .

Signs of crumbling support for ENDA came first Tuesday from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, one of several gay rights group that has aggressively pushed Obama to expand gay rights through executive action since the start of his presidency.

Rea Carey, the group's executive director, said in an interview that “If a private company can take its own religious beliefs and say you can't have access to certain health care, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them. We disagree with that trend. The implications of Hobby Lobby are becoming clear."

"We do not take this move lightly," she added. "We've been pushing for this bill for 20 years."

Separately, a coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights said in a joint statement that they also would be withdrawing support. The bill’s religious exemptions clause is written so broadly that “ENDA’s discriminatory provision, unprecedented in federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, could provide religiously affiliated organizations – including hospitals, nursing homes and universities – a blank check to engage in workplace discrimination against LGBT people,” the group said, adding later that if ENDA were to pass Congress, “the most important federal law for the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community in American history would leave too many jobs, and too many LGBT workers, without protection.”

OK, ENDA WASN'T GOING TO BECOME LAW ANYWAY

The House Republican majority of predators and mental and moral defectives has seen to that. Why, the very idea of the federal government protecting lesbians, gays, transgenders, and bisexuals from employment discrimination, that's just disgusting! As if they were, you know, normal people! Shocking!

At the same time, in fairness to Justice Sammy and his transparent tissue of lies, he was writing, or rather obfuscating, for the longer term, when there might not be a house of Congress controlled by people who should be either in institutions or in cages. So no, I don't think he gets a free pass on this count.

Just to be clear, for all the progress that has been made on the marriage-equality front, an awful lot of LGBT folks have believed strongly, all through that fight, that it was of less practical importance to many LGBT people, especially those outside the more liberal and urbane urban centers, than some kind of enforceable legal protection against anti-LGBT discrimination in employment and housing. I still don't think most Americans understand that in an awful lot of the country people can be denied jobs and/or housing because they're L, G, B, or T. Republican sociopaths, and not a few Democratic ones too, believe that the right to discriminate against LGBT people is sacred, and will give no ground on it till they're forced.

There are, in other words, a lot of Americans who won't hear the pain when NGLTF's Rea Carey says of her group's decision to withdraw support for ENDA: "We do not take this move lightly. We've been pushing for this bill for 20 years."

But then, we wouldn't want the Supreme Court to be complicit in the restriction of korporate krazy kultists' right to inflict their korporate kultist kraziness on non-kultists. After all, corporate religious convictions are corporate religious convictions. Why do we have Supreme Court if not to, by God, protect them?
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The Supreme Court opens a drive-through window for right-wing zealots with (right-wing Christian) religious objections to the law

"I disagree strongly with what the Court has done," Justice Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan in what the NYT's Adam Liptak called "an unusually fierce dissent."

by Ken

The other day I wrote, regarding the last-day-of-term dump of the Supreme Court's Cro-Magnon majority's two most egregious decisions:

Was there any doubt that the Cro-Magnon Five knew that these exhibitions of thuggery were going to produce firestorms? Possibly the atmosphere around the place is getting testier as the four Court moderates understand just what contempt they're held in, and some of the venom that's creeping into their dissenting opinions is also being vented in chambers, and some of the more tender-eared C-Ms are actually noticing. In any case, it seems pretty clear that the release of the Hobby Lobby and Harris rulings was a dirty dump-and-run job.

There may have been an additional consideration here in that both decisions were announced by that fumbling fool Sammy "The Hammer" Alito, and when The Hammer drops an opinion, the ignorance and stupidity start flaking off before the thing hits the ground. You'd like to think that some at least of the C-M justices are capable of some level of embarrassment.

It appears that mounting tension between the Court moderates and the rampaging Cro-Magnons isn't a figment of my imagination. Yesterday Justices Sotomayor, in what the NYT's Adam Liptak describes as "an unusually fierce dissent" -- a dissent joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan (the Court's three women, in case you weren't counting) -- went kind of nuclear on what she views as the Cro-Magnon Five's legally meritless and precedentless granting of injunctive relief, in an unsigned opinion, to sectarian Wheaton College, staying the school at least temporarily from having to follow the procedures established under the ACA for nonprofit religious instuttions to hand off responsibility for providing contraceptive coverage to its employees.

Now you may be thinking, well, nonprofit institutions with religious convictions are a different class from the for-profit companies who were allowed by the Hobby Lobby ruling to escape contraceptive coverage. Actually, as Justice Sotomayor points out, this isn't so. It's true that the nonprofit religious institutions were indeed already covered by the exemption already worked out by the Obama administration, establishing procedures for handing off the legally mandated coverage to third parties. This, the Court announced just Monday, "constitutes an alternative that achieves all of the Gov- ernment’s aims while providing greater respect for reli- gious liberty."

But, as Justice Sotomayor notes, the very existence of these procedures was an essential underpinning of Monday's ruling -- since these swell and minimally burdensome procedures had already been worked out, the same procedures could simply be applied to religiously objecting for-profit companies (provided they satisfy the laughably loose criteria noted by Justice Sammy the Fool).

But now, says Justice Sotomayor, the anonymous majority decision grants injuctive relief to a party that not only has no valid legal claim, and no clear expectation of prevailing on appeal, but is seeking to invalidate the very procedures the Court just said on Monday were so swell.

Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today. After expressly relying on the availability of the religious-nonprofit accommodation to hold that the contraceptive coverage requirement violates RFRA [the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act] as applied to closely held for-profit corporations, the Court now, as the dissent in Hobby Lobby feared it might, see ante, at 29–30 (GINSBURG, J., dissenting), retreats from that position That action evinces disregard for even the newest of this Court’s precedents and undermines confidence in this institution.

In fact, Justice Sotomayor demonstrates pretty convincingly that the majority ruling comes in blunt defiance of every Supreme Court procedure, precedent, and standard of evidence.

Sammy the Fool's dribbling excuse for a ruling, you'll recall, had depended, not on the Constitution, but on application of the RFRA. The RFRA is indeed a monstrosity, and provided legal cover for Sammy the Fool to dribble forth the ruling he was determined to make anyway. However, Justice Sotomayor argues that "Wheaton has not stated a viable claim under RFRA." It simply claims that filling out the form established for the purpose, which the Court was so enthusiastic about on Monday, "impermissibly burdens Wheaton’s free exercise of its religion."

OF COURSE WHEATON AND THE CRO-MAGNONS DON'T
TRULY CARE ABOUT "FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION"

Nobody is trying to interfere with the college's "free exercise of its religion" -- just trying to get it to follow the law, as established to enable it to maintain its religious convictions, as attested to just three days earlier by the very same judicial Cro-Magnons. Justice Sotomayor writes:

I have deep respect for religious faith, for the important and selfless work performed by religious organizations, and for the values of pluralism protected by RFRA and the Free Exercise Clause. But the Court’s grant of an injunction in this case allows Wheaton’s beliefs about the effects of its actions to trump the democratic interest in allowing the Government to enforce the law.

And of course as many commentators have pointed out, if the challenge in Monday's decision had come from, say, Muslims trying to guard the free exercise of their religion, the Catholic bigots in the C-M majority would probably have spat in their faces.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR WRITES: "I DISAGREE
STRONGLY WITH WHAT THE COURT HAS DONE"

Wheaton asks us to enjoin the enforcement of a duly enacted law and duly promulgated regulations before the courts below have passed on the merits of its legal challenge. Relief of this nature is extraordinary and reserved for the rarest of cases. With good reason.

She goes on to demonstrate that the majority action tramples on all the standards previously established for action in those "rarest of cases."

Furthermore, Justice Sotomayor seems singularly unimpressed, actually pretty pissed, by the ruling's blithe rewriting of HHS procedures. It's not just that the Court's just formally announced its approval of those very procedures. Or even that the new ruling's alternative procedures would be both more cumbersome and ineffective than those just lauded by the Court. When, she wonders, did the Supreme Court become a rule-writing authority?

To the Cro-Magnon majority none of this matters, any more than the Constitution and laws it's supposed to be upholding matter, when the get in the way of the C-Ms' radical right-wing agenda. In the end, the Cro-Magnon Five seem to be saying, is that We're in Charge, and the minority moderate justices might just as well occupy themselves with more productive activities -- perhaps cooking and cleaning. Or perhaps the C-Ms have some socks that need mending? Maybe they can find some good use for having three ladies on the Court after all.

Justice Sotomayor concludes her dissent:

In granting an injunction concerning this religious nonprofit accommodation, the availability of which served as the premise for the Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby, the Court cannot possibly be applying our longstanding requirement that a party’s entitlement to relief be indisputably clear.

Our jurisprudence has over the years drawn a careful boundary between majoritarian democracy and the right of every American to practice his or her religion freely. We should not use the extraordinary vehicle of an injunction under the All Writs Act to work so fundamental a shift in that boundary. Because Wheaton cannot justify the relief it seeks, I would deny its application for an injunction, and I respectfully dissent from the Court’s refusal to do so.

Oh pooh, Justice Sonia! Nobody cares! In the end, despite Justice Sammy's idiotic claims about the Hobby Lobby ruling having limited application, both in terms of who may claim the religious exemption and what they may claim religious exemption from (why on earth should it be limited, as he insists, to contraception?), the clear intent of the ruling was to send a happy "howdy" from Your Down-Home Supreme Court to right-wing zealots across the land:

"Come on in, buddy! We're here for you!"

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So, freeloading House GOP junketeers really do have some sense of . . . well, not shame exactly, but something sort of related

House Ethics Committee Chair Michael Conaway (R-TX) -- a fine ethicist who grasps the evil of "duplicative paperwork"

"These kinds of backroom deals and changing of the rules in the middle of the night is exactly why Congress has a lower approval rating than cockroaches and traffic jams."

-- Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA)

by Ken

We've gotten so used to thinking of the rampaging hordes of right-wing political scumbagger as "shameless," as truly beyond any sense of human decency, that it's almost comforting to find the need to pull back just a tad. It seems the boys—and they are still overwhelmingly boys—may actually have some tiny, primitive-brain sense of, well, not shame exactly, but some level awareness of their reprehensibleness.

Again, even in the cases I'm about to cite, there's no evidence that the dolts involved actually feel bad about what they've done. It's more like, having done things they know are going to cause people to yammer at them, they just don't like being yammered at for their misbehavior.

One example I already mentioned on Monday, in connection with the Supreme Court's careful end-of-term scheduling, which left to the very last morning the dropping of this term's big ideological dirty bombs. Now there are many considerations in arranging the High Court's schedule, all of them of course under the tight control of the High Court itself. But was there any doubt that the Cro-Magnon Five knew that these exhibitions of thuggery were going to produce firestorms? Possibly the atmosphere around the place is getting testier as the four Court moderates understand just what contempt they're held in, and some of the venom that's creeping into their dissenting opinions is also being vented in chambers, and some of the more tender-eared C-Ms are actually noticing. In any case, it seems pretty clear that the release of the Hobby Lobby and Harris rulings was a dirty dump-and-run job.

There may have been an additional consideration here in that both decisions were announced by that fumbling fool Sammy "The Hammer" Alito, and when The Hammer drops an opinion, the ignorance and stupidity start flaking off before the thing hits the ground. You'd like to think that some at least of the C-M justices are capable of some level of embarrassment.

I loved this description from Dana Milbank's Washington Post column yesterday, "In Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court uses a 'fiction,' " which had the virtue, as so many of Dana's columns do, of his shoe-leather approach to the job, whereby he actually goes out to observe firsthand the craziness he's reporting on.

There was a certain risk in having Alito deliver the 5-to-4 opinion defending corporate personhood, because his mannerisms are strikingly robotic for a human. Assigned both of Monday’s opinions, Alito delivered a 33-minute monologue — his only departure from the text before him was to raise his head mechanically at intervals and glance at a table to his right — that seemed to have a soporific effect on his colleagues. Clarence Thomas rubbed his head, Anthony Kennedy rested his head in his right palm, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was to read her dissent in the Hobby Lobby case) drank a large quantity from her coffee mug, and the others stared ahead with unfocused gazes.

Alito, seated between Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan, and his colleagues in the majority also may not have considered how flesh-and-blood humans might perceive the ruling — the five men of the conservative bloc allowing restrictions on birth control over the objections of the three women on the court.

I can't tell you how much I love this image of Justice Clarence driven to rubbing his head and "Slow Anthony" to resting his head in his palm by their droning colleague. Do I need to add that it's only in Justice Sammy's muddled head that he's a hammer of virtue (or something)? Well, in his head and in real life, considering that he has one of nine votes on the U.S. Supreme Court -- or, more to the point, one of five votes in the Court's ruling Cro-Magnon majority.



MEANWHILE BACK IN THE VILLAGE

For our other working example of Republican not-quite-shame, kudos to DailyKos's Jed Lewison for latching onto Shane Goldmacher's Monday National Journal scoop, "Congress Quietly Deletes a Key Disclosure of Free Trips Lawmakers Take." As we'll see, the feat accomplished here required some still-unexplained House Democratic collusion, but there doesn't seem to be much doubt who the movers and shakers here were.

Actually, here I think we need to include the deck written for Shane G's report: "House Ethics reverses decades of precedent as lobbyist-sponsored lawmaker travel expands." Shane begins:

It's going to be a little more difficult to ferret out which members of Congress are lavished with all-expenses-paid trips around the world after the House has quietly stripped away the requirement that such privately sponsored travel be included on lawmakers' annual financial-disclosure forms.

The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings.

"This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "There's no legitimate reason. There's no good reason for it."

Oh, Melanie, Melanie, Melanie! Expecting "legitimate" reasons for the behavior of House Republicans!

Let's go a paragraph deeper into Shane's report:

Free trips paid for by private groups must still be reported separately to the House's Office of the Clerk and disclosed there. But they will now be absent from the chief document that reporters, watchdogs, and members of the public have used for decades to scrutinize lawmakers' finances.

Ding ding ding ding!

Melanie Sloan obviously understands what's going on.

"The more you can hide, the less accountable you can be," Sloan said of lawmakers. "It's clear these forms are useful for reporters and watchdogs, and obviously a little too useful."

Ding ding ding ding!

The good news, at least for would-be House junketeers, is that, however secretly, the clamps are coming off some of the fun behavior that's been made so inconvenient since that rat bastard Jack Abramoff got caught doing all those naughty things -- or rather got them caught doing all those naughty things. Ah yes, Jack Abramoff. There's a name we haven't heard in a while.

The change occurs as free travel, which critics have criticized as thinly veiled junkets, has come back into vogue. Last year, members of Congress and their aides took more free trips than in any year since the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to prison. There were nearly 1,900 trips at a cost of more than $6 million last year, according to Legistorm, which compiles travel records.

Now none of those trips must be included on the annual disclosures of lawmakers or their aides.

The tabs for these international excursions can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. One trip to Australia earlier this year cost nearly $50,000. Lawmakers are often invited to bring along their husbands or wives, fly in business class, and stay in plush four-star hotels. In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, lobbyists were banned from organizing or paying for these travels. But some of the nonprofits underwriting them today have extremely close ties to lobbying groups, including sharing staff, money, and offices.

You see why I say there's no indication on the part of the House Republicans of shame. It's not that they have any compunctions about taking these trips. They'd just rather not have inappropriate people, like us, knowing about it.

Which is what's so hilariously right about the House GOP's furious antics aimed at keeping this little technical adjustment under wraps. National Journal, you'll recall, "uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings." Which still put them ahead of a lot of folks on Capitol Hill -- including, apparently, House Democrats.

The only indication that these trips no longer need to be disclosed on annual reports came in the instructions booklet issued to lawmakers in 2014. The guidelines for the new electronic filing system tell lawmakers and staff they "are no longer required to report privately sponsored travel" on the form.

Perhaps because the ethics committee's edict was issued so quietly, disclosure remained uneven.

For instance, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who led a GOP delegation of lawmakers to Israel last summer paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, which is closely tied to the pro-Israel lobby, did not include the trip on his annual form. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, who led a similar trip for Democrats, did include it on his form. But some of the rank-and-file members who went on the trip with Hoyer did not.

In case you still don't grasp why it seemed like such a nifty idea to keep this change as quiet as possible, just look what happens when people start finding out.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the consumer group Public Citizen who closely tracks the international travels of lawmakers and the actions of the Ethics Committee, said he was "completely unaware" of the change until contacted by National Journal.

"There's seems to be no reason I could imagine why the Ethics Committee would minimize the amount of information that gets reported," Holman said.

Holman took solace in the fact that the post-Abramoff reform law included mandatory disclosure of such trips on the clerk's website. But he said he was still was concerned about their absence from the annual reports, which he called "a critical element for understanding the finances of our elected representatives."

"It's always good to have more disclosure than less," he said. "It just seems a little odd that the Ethics Committee would pass such a rule change."

Oh, Craig, Craig, Craig! You're just being modest. I'm absolutely sure you can imagine perfectly well "why the Ethics Committee would minimize the amount of information that gets reported." You know as well as anybody that if those mooks give up their right to silence, anything they say can be used against them in a court of law, or in the court of public opinion, just as if they were common criminal suspects.

As of Monday, the House Ethics Committee (don't you have to smile just a little when you say "House Ethics Committee"?) was still cocooned in its Cone of Silence. (We'll have further developments to report in a moment.)

House Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, R-Texas, did not return a call for comment; ranking member Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., referred questions to committee staff. The committee declined to comment.

ONCE THE YOU-KNOW-WHAT HIT THE FAN --

By Tuesday, however, which is to say after the National Journal report appeared, the House Republican beast roused from its slumber. As Shane G reported in his follow-up yesterday, "Nancy Pelosi Says Decision to Delete Reporting Requirement for Free Trips 'Must Be Reversed,'" a spokesman for House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner, Michael Steel, commented, "Rep. Pelosi's staff needs to talk to her representative on the Ethics Committee, who signed off on this bipartisan change to reduce duplicative paperwork."

The Ethics Committee, you'll recall, isn't like any other congressional committee, being made up of equal numbers, four each, of Democrats and Republicans -- basically, we might say, to ensure that neither party can do anything that would be, shall we say, awkward for the other party. (Awkwardness is, of course, of far greater concern to members of Congress than ethics.) "That means," Shane G wrote yesterday, "that ranking member Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., and her Democratic colleagues (Reps. Michael Capuano, Yvette Clarke, and Ted Deutch and Del. Pedro Pierluisi) had to have approved the deleted disclosure requirement, along with Republicans led by committee Chairman Michael Conaway of Texas." Ranking Member Sanchez, you'll recall, on Monday "referred questions to committee staff."

Yesterday even the Ethics Committee itself was heard from! In what Shane describes as "a rare public statement,"

Tom Rust, the committee's chief counsel, said that "the committee's nonpartisan staff recommended a number of changes to the financial-disclosure forms, including eliminating the need to report less information about private travel than the traveler had already publicly disclosed."

I'm not sure this actually makes sense ("eliminating the need to report less information about private travel than the traveler had already publicly disclosed"? huh?), but it seems to have been good enough to satisfy the not-very-curious Ethics Committee Dems, while being readily understandable to lots of House Republicans. Minority Leader Pelosi seems to have been genuinely unaware of the change until Monday, and you'll recall that Minority Whip Hoyer in fact did report a trip he didn't have to under the new rules.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that making a rule change you're eager to make for selfish reasons while camouflaging it as reducing "duplicative paperwork" (which after said reduction becomes invisible) is in fact a textbook case of this thing that's not really shame over bad behavior so much as it is a hope of being able to go on doing the bad behavior while keeping it under wraps.

Iowa Dem Dave Loebsack, whom we heard from at the top of this post, said Tuesday that he's going to introduce legislation to undo the rule change following the House's 4th of July recess. Whether the GOP leadership is prepared to allow such tinkering with this "bipartisan change" remains to be seen.

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Today it was Justice Sammy "The Hammer" Alito's big chance to bludgeon a hapless Constitution

Justice Sammy the Hammer was wielding his Sledgehammer of Doom at the Supreme Court today.

by Ken

Clearly the Cro-Magnon wing of the Roberts Court has developed a vestigial sense of shame. The two bombshell decisions saved for the final day of the Supreme Court term today (which Howie wrote about in his 2pm PT post) weren't bombshells in the sense of surprise. They were just more of the all-but-impossible-to-avoid IEDs that have become the manner of "justice" meted out these days by the High Court, now that the full counter-constitutional system is in place, with the Cro-Magnons being fed cases by the country's powerful right-wing illegal system, cases that allow the C-Ms to continue pushing their constitutional forced march back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition. The C-Ms had timed it so that they could drop their dirty bombs and immediately begin their long slither back under whatever rocks they come out from.

Veteran court-watchers had already deduced that one of today's big opinions would come from Sammy "The Hammer" Alito, but I don't know that anyone realized they both would. Once it was established that The Hammer was wielding his proverbial bludgeon over both cases, the rulings were a foregone conclusion. The only thing to watch for was just how much further the Constitution would be debased by the ruling Cro-Magnons. I guess in some marginal ways both decidsions coulda been worse, but it's bad.

By afternoon there was already lots of good coverage from our friends at ThinkProgress.

On the Hobby Lobby fiasco, our legal eagle Ian Millhiser looks at "the bait-and-switch behind the decision," beginning [links onsite]:

For many years, the Supreme Court struck a careful balance between protecting religious liberty and maintaining the rule of law in a pluralistic society. Religious people enjoy a robust right to practice their own faith and to act according to the dictates of their own conscience, but they could not wield religious liberty claims as a sword to cut away the legal rights of others. This was especially true in the business context. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Lee, “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

With Monday’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, however, this careful balance has been upended. Employers who object to birth control on religious grounds may now refuse to comply with federal rules requiring them to include contraceptive care in their health plans. The rights of the employer now trump the rights of the employee.

To achieve this outcome, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on behalf of a bare majority of the Court engages in a kind of legalistic bait-and-switch. It takes a law Congress enacted to serve one limited purpose, and expands that law to suit Hobby Lobby’s much more expansive purpose. . . .

Meanwhile, ThinkProgress's Jack Jenkins has an interesting take: "Why Today's Hobby Lobby Decision Actually Hurts People Of Faith" [links onsite]:

[W]hile conservatives would have the American public believe that protecting Hobby Lobby is about protecting all religious people, the reality is that today’s ruling actually hurts people of faith. In fact, a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey conducted in early June found that a substantial majority of almost every major U.S. Christian group support the idea that publicly-held corporations and privately-owned corporations should be required to provide employees with healthcare plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost. This is likely why so many progressive Christian leaders have vocally opposed Hobby Lobby in the press, why Americans United for the Separation of Church and State submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court opposing Hobby Lobby on behalf of nearly 30 religious organizations, and why both the Jewish Social Policy Action Network and the American Jewish Committee submitted their own amicus briefs decrying the corporation’s position.

AS FOR HARRIS V. QUINN, THE RULING THAT LAYS
GROUNDWORK FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF UNIONS --

Ian Millhiser notes ("Supreme Court Deals Sharp Blow To Public Sector Unions") that this is "a First Amendment decision" -- the latest effort by conservatives to use the First Amendment as their weapon in order to implement their preferred policies through the judiciary." Ian writes [links onsite]:

The purpose of the First Amendment, is to ensure a robust debate where no ideas are suppressed, so that the American electorate is best equipped to make choices at the polls. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explained in 1919, “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”

Harris, however, turns this principle on its head. As Justice Elena Kagan laid out at oral argument, [s]ince 1948 . . . there has been a debate in every State across this country about whether to be a right-to-work State and people have disagreed. Some States say yes, some States say no. It raises considerable heat and passion and tension, as we recently saw in Wisconsin. And — but, you know, these are public policy choices that States make.” The plaintiffs in Harris argued, in Kagan’s words, that “people have been debating the wrong question when they’ve been debating that, because, in fact, a right-to-work law is constitutionally compelled.”

The purpose of the First Amendment, according to the plaintiffs in Harris, is not to foster democracy, it is to render democracy irrelevant. This is a radical rethinking of our Constitution. And it was just embraced by five justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Ian also cautions: "[T]he case hints that the Court will deal additional blows to public sector unions in the future. Alito labels a seminal Supreme Court opinion allowing unions to collect reimbursements from nonmembers 'questionable on several grounds.' "


LOOKING FOR A RAY OF SUNSHINE? ZACK FORD
NOTES ONE THING THE COURT DIDN'T DO TODAY

In "One Good Thing The Supreme Court Did For Gay Rights Today," Zack writes [links onsite]:

It remains unclear what consequences the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision might have for LGBT equality, but the Supreme Court did take one other action Monday that is actually a small win for gay rights. Before issuing the day’s two big decisions, the Court refused to grant cert to a case challenging California’s ban on ex-gay therapy for minors, leaving the ban in place. . . .

THE BOROWITZ REPORT IS ON THE CASE!

June 30, 2014
SUPREME COURT MAJORITY CALLS CASE A DISPUTE BETWEEN WOMEN AND PEOPLE
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — By a 5–4 vote on Monday, the United States Supreme Court settled a dispute that Justice Samuel Alito said was “at its core about the rights of women versus the rights of people.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Alito wrote, “It is the duty of this Court, whenever it sees that the rights of people are being threatened, to do our best to safeguard those rights. In this case, it is clear that people’s rights were being threatened by women.”

Acknowledging that some women “might argue that they, too, have some claim to being people,” Justice Alito wrote, “That is an interesting question for another day.”

While the Court’s decision caused an uproar across the country, it received a big thumbs-up from one of the Justices who voted with the majority, Antonin Scalia.

“This has been a crappy year or so around here, what with all that gay-marriage stuff, but at least we finished strong,” he said.

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How Susan Collins (R-ME) And Mary Landrieu (D-LA) Wrote Those 2 Supreme Court Decisions Today

This morning's two Supreme Court decisions-- one that allows employers claiming to have religious objections to discriminate against women's health needs and one that says public service unions can't compel members to pay dues-- were both decided late in the afternoon on January 30, 2006 when 19 Democrats crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans against the Democratic filibuster against New Jersey corporate whore Sam Alito. Almost all of them-- from Lieberman to Blanche Lincoln to Max Baucus and Ben Nelson-- are gone from the Senate now, but these 7 Alito-enablers are still calling themselves Senate Democrats:

• Maria Cantwell (WA)
• Tom Carper (DE)
• Tim Johnson (SD)
• Mary Landrieu (LA)
• Bill Nelson (FL)
• Mark Pryor (AR)
• Jay Rockefeller (WV)

Among those with the foresight and understanding to vote to make sure Alito would never become a Supreme Court judge-- and do what he did today (yes, he authored both the opinions-- were Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), John Kerry (D-MA), Harry Reid (D-NV), as well as Joe Biden (D-DE), Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and… Barack Obama (D-IL). Every Republican voted for Alito, including fake moderate Susan Collins (R-ME). It's worth noting that two actual moderates, Vermont's Jim Jeffords (who had just switched from Republican to Independent) and Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) opposed Alito on the final confirmation vote, unlike Susan Collins.

That's what you can expect when you vote for Republicans and conservative Democrats: garbage in the judiciary like Alito. A new poll showed that a majority of Americans oppose letting employers, based on their religious views, exclude certain contraceptives from workers’ insurance coverage. That only 35% of Americans agreed with the Hobby Lobby arguments didn't slow down Alito and his right wing brethren on the Court.

Maine progressive Democrat Shenna Bellows is very much not Susan Collins, nor anything like her. She would not have enabled these two awful Supreme Court rulings by voting to confirm Sam Alito and today she spoke out forcefully against both of them. "The working people of this country earn higher wages and better benefits when they bargain collectively," she said in regard to Harris v. Quinn. "The labor movement brought Americans out of an era when pay was abysmal, health care coverage was often nonexistent and child labor laws were weak. Today we're facing challenges just as serious: weakening pensions, a badly out-of-date minimum wage, a Social Security system under constant political attack and endless fights over wage and labor standards that shouldn't be controversial. Organized labor raises the living standards of millions of Americans, helping them pay their bills and take care of their families. Today's ruling strikes another blow against the support system those families rely on. Every public sector union worker today wondering who will stand with with them in the next Congress should know I'll have their back. They need allies to fight with them against the Court's steady erosion of their power, and I can't wait to join them as Maine's next senator."

Progressive thought leaders Shenna Bellows and Marianne Williamson

Before we get to what Shenna had to say about Hobby Lobby, I want to mention that I was at an event for her last week and ran into Marianne Williamson there, another stalwart progressive who recently ran for Congress and lost, in part, because a conservative Democrat, Wendy Greuel, smeared her as being "more anti-Choice than Texas." This morning I asked Marianne about her reaction to the Supreme Court ruling. Her perspective-- the reason why Blue America backed her-- is unique, thought-provoking and very much outside-the-box.

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision claims to show respect for people's religious views, but in fact it shows no respect for anyone or anything except some supreme right of our new business overlords to make whatever decisions they damn well please.

The current majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is a bunch of political hacks, there not to show respect for the Constitution so much as to pave the way for unprecedented corporate rule in the United States.

The danger here is to something even more important than a woman's right to have her birth control paid for by insurance. The danger is that this court is taking away basic hope from its most important place of residence: the mind of the U.S. citizen. No longer can we say with any seriousness at all that no matter what, we will always be able to take an issue to the Supreme Court in order to gauge its alignment with our Constitutional rights. With the make-up of this Court, that very idea has become almost a joke. And the problem is no longer simmering. It is starting to boil.

This is from the Shenna Bellows press release that went out this morning after the decision was handed down:

"Neither your boss nor the government should interfere in your personal decisions about whether or when to use birth control. Today's horrible Supreme Court decision disregards women's health and opens the door to religious discrimination by employers. We need leadership in Congress who will stand up for reproductive freedom without exceptions."

In 2012, Republican Susan Collins voted in favor of this very outcome when she voted in favor of the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed companies to deny reproductive health care coverage to their employees based on a moral preference.

Sen. Collins also supports a large religious exemption loophole in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which recently passed the Senate. Bellows opposes the loophole and recently proposed a national Human Rights Act, modeled after Maine's, that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT Americans with no exceptions. You can read about that proposal and Bellows' leadership on LGBT issues in her widely read Huffington post article.

"Religious exemptions-- whether in health care law or anti-discrimination legislation-- are nothing more than an excuse to allow certain people to impose their own moral standards on others and deny freedoms to those who work for them," Bellows said. "Employers' personal beliefs have no place blocking freedoms guaranteed to Americans in the US Constitution."

If you want to make sure there are no more Justices like Sam Alito writing these kinds of horrifying decisions, help replace Susan Collins with Shenna Bellows. This isn't about when an FEC quarter ends; it's about when we take control back of our country from corporate interests.