Robert's is pathetic . He has been a willing participant in the demise of the courts integrity. (citizens united anyone ) ? I think that he " goes along " with the shenanigans, but things have been over the top and his reputation as a "balls & strikes" is toast .
I truly respect the way the Biden’s are dealing with Hunter’s trial. I also love a man who can hug his adult son in public. Has anyone out there ever seen Trump hug any of this three sons? Odd and off isn’t it.
I agree on the fundamental moral question in the abortion debate: Human or not? The life is human life, but even with a human life outside the womb, Doctors do not use the "heartbeat" to determine sustainable life. It is actually, "brain death". So when a brain no longer develops in the womb, or multiple organs stop developing and there is no science to promote their further development, why are we relying on the heartbeat? This is a medical ethics issue that needs to be addressed. Politicians and Supreme Court justices must follow the lead of medical ethicists, not their religious beliefs.
My takeaway from the conversation with Martha-Ann Alito is that Alito is counting the days until a Republican president is in the Oval Office, so Alito can retire and be replaced by a younger version of himself. Hence his wife’s comment about “when {we} are free of this nonsense.” And is the “nonsense” this whole idea of judicial impartiality?? Taken in the whole context of these flag stories, apparently Alito doesn’t believe in being neutral, impartial, or nonpartisan, whatever you want to call it. He seems to believe that’s not required of him.
"[Chief Justice John] Roberts: Yeah, I don’t know that we live in a Christian nation."
Ah, but he does know. And he also knows that those who say this is a "Christian nation" are playing a word game, while those who say it's not are "taking the bait." Why can't people just say it like it is? The US was founded based on Judeo-Christian VALUES. Many Founders were NOT Christians, but Deists and agnostics. Even the Founders who were devout Christians agreed with the others that there must not be any national religion (sorry, Michael Flynn), but rather freedom to practice any religion one wants, as long as it doesn't violate Judeo-Christian values. Many self-described Christians today make a compelling case that today's radical "White Christian Nationalists" (the ones most likely to play the word game) are in fact violating those values.
I am unhappy with Bulwark giving a voice to Kristol. He can’t move on. He’s still beating the GOP is so great dead horse. It’s dead already! Let it go!
Alito was born about a half-dozen centuries too late for his true calling. He would have had a ball as a zealous medieval inquisitor, condemning and burning innocent people for heresy, witchcraft, etc. Instead he was born in our time so he's making do as an exceptionally horrendous SCOTUS judge.
I might be in the minority but don’t read too much into dinner table chatter among strangers at an event. I am not a big fan of Project Veritas and I can’t see where this is any different.
I hope I’m not repeating others here. WRT “Another Headache for the Chief”, I struggle with this statement: “Either fetuses are human beings, and thus deserve protection under the law, or they aren’t and thus don’t.” The problems that arise in human systems are rarely black and white. Indeed, if “being human” is all that’s needed to protect humans under the law, then allowing the mother to die in order to save a fetus would also be unacceptable. Such “not black and white” situations are called moral dilemmas. A resolution on either side of a “right vs right” dilemma can be heartbreaking and difficult. If every question were black and white, we could simply write all the laws and be done with it. There has to be room for compassionate consideration of a case by the people most intimately involved.
When Andrew and Bill title this newsletter, "Roberts the Institutionalist, Alito the Culture Warrior", they are in fact shifting the Overton window in real time: This is how the frog gets boiled, and this is where Orwell's prescient discourse on language is highlighted.
What is described here is clear: Chief Justice Roberts models the response of — not an institutionalist but — a judge, that is, someone who is expert in deconstructing facts, applying laws and statutes, and, when necessary, filling the gaps where existing rules cannot be decided. This is the job of a judge, and the Supreme Court justices are the most important judge positions in the country.
Chief Justice Roberts also demonstrates cognitive responsibility: He explains his state of mind, when he disagrees, he justifies his statements to motivate his belief — and this is reflective of his professional approach, which, naturally as a judge, requires explaining his thought process in every case.
Alito's response betrays that he is not a judge. This is someone who does not know how to follow causal inference properly, or how to apply deductive reasoning — which is elementary for a doctor in law. He is someone who rather than starting from our shared set of facts, is drawing from a completely different set, for instance "They really can't be compromised" in reference to "fundamental differences" (Chief Justice Roberts models what an appropriate response would look like, so I won't comment further). Furthermore he says "return our country to a place of godliness" when our country was founded on the right of each and everyone of us to experience "godliness" in their own way, and Catholics were not just a minority but one that was for a time reviled, and here is a Supreme Justice completely clueless about the history of his own country, unlike, you will notice, Chief Justice Roberts.
So from this conversation alone, one would assume: Chief Justice Roberts is a lawyer who became a judge and, Alito is... something else.
The closest one can get to describe Alito is a process mistake: He is someone who Congress mistakenly let in, because based on the ability to reason he demonstrates in this conversation, this is not someone you want as the ultimate umpire of the US legal system.
So back to the beginning: We should be calling this out! We should be describing Alito as out of his league, we should be describing Alito as incompetent in his lawyering skill and question his ability to serve effectively as the supreme authority.
Instead, a title like "Roberts the Institutionalist, Alito the Culture Warrior" makes it sound like this kind of behavior is just one variety of different kinds of Supreme Court Justices. It legitimizes Alito's incompetence by passing it as competent ideology.
Whatever Alito's partisan beliefs are, Chief Justice Roberts (whose beliefs are likely similar) models how you can have partisan beliefs, but still be professional in terms of applying rules like a judge is supposed to do.
Roberts does not have much control over associate justices. He does have control over SCOTUS ethics, which he has essentially punted on, and Alito and Thomas have thumbed their noses at that. He also could have gone and testified to Congress as requested instead of raising B.S. separation of powers arguments to avoid the conversation.
Roberts is worse. He sees what is going on and lets Alito and Thomas sully themselves as naked partisan hacks and simply shrugs his complicit shoulders. He COULD do something. He CHOOSES not to. One has to surmise he approves of the outcome. THAT is the most detrimental and diabolical. Don’t give me a pass and build his cover story for him. He owns this shit show
Whether Roberts approves or not there is little he can do. He cannot dictate ethics, he cannot remove them from the court, he cannot demand they recuse. Alito and Thomas are what they have always been, partisan hacks itching to impose their will on the people, neither have ever had any use for the law or the constitution except how it can be used and twisted to impose their will. All they needed was enough less than stellar compatriots who could be corrupted, welcome Kavanaugh, Coney and Gorsuch
Concerning the Supreme Court: wasn't that the project? All of that Federalist Society and affiliated organizations, wasn't that supposed to produce exactly this? In my mind Alito is being flat honest, and Roberts is hedging just a bit. I say that because this tape has been out, Thomas' revelations have been out and .... nothing.
I understand that the Chief Justice does not have that kind of power over the Associate Justices, (someone let me know if I am wrong), but is there NOTHING he can do to help the average American trust the court?
Regarding Trump sentencing (ONE CAN DREAM)...how about the judge giving Trump options and seeing which he'd choose. :).
a) public apology (social media, TV, Truth Social, etc) stating (pick from the following list): admitting his relationship with Stormy, admitting he knew the payments were to silence her because of the election vs concerns about Melania: admitting he knew he paid Cohen for reimbursement of moneys to Stormy; admitting he was aware of the intent to portray the reimbursement as normal legal fees; etc; apologizing for disrespecting "the court/legal system")...(Note not including the Big Lie's falsehood as that's outside the scope of this case)
b) incarceration (after appeals run out)
c) probation including 2000 (pick your number) of hours of SUPERVISED community service
We know he won't pick a) but that his refusal to do so could then be used to say HE CHOSE b) or c) and the judge tried to give him an easy out. No monetary fine...too easy on him.
IF he chose option a) and if he subsequently violated those terms and said stuff contrarily, that could be grounds for the judge to revert to b) or c).
Roberts the "institutionalist" is no doubt what Roberts hopes he'll be remembered for. More likely he'll be remembered as trying as hard as he could to defend SCOTUS against the charges that it has become an institution untethered from ethical guardrails (as evidenced by Thomas and Alito) which smugly keeps pretending the Court is not just a bunch of political hacks.
Also I am pretty shocked at how no one feels ill at ease or questions the ethics of Lauren Windsor's sneak attacks on both Justices.
It seems that when James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team misrepresent themselves and "get the goods" on their targets it is an outrage but when someone on the left does this they get lionized on MSNBC?
I find both O'Keefe and Windsor reprehensible, and they would have no place in public discourse except for the power of the antisocial media.
What is the ethics at issue here, and if this kind of secret recording under an assumed identity is unethical, how unethical is it? I assume it is a violation of journalistic ethics and can understand why it would be. On the other hand, if an undercover cop gets the goods on a mobster by secretly recording a conversation under false pretenses, that is simply a fulfillment of professional duties, and we would hardly consider it to be unethical. Doing this as a kind of saboteur in service of revealing important truths does not clearly fall under either of this paradigms of unethical or ethical behavior even though it might strike one as a bit shady. IMO, the question of ethics here is not clear cut. I am not comfortable with it, but neither do I feel a “sense of outrage.”
I appreciate — sincerely — your apartisan disgusts at the methods, but I would like to suggest that you are doing "bothsideism": There is no equivocation between what O'Keefe is doing and what Windsor is doing.
O'Keefe's stunts rely on misrepresenting quotes, taking conversations out of context, and goading people into saying things that *may* connect to a conspiracy theory. O'Keefe tries to misrepresent that some person in Planned Parenthood is speaking for the entire Democratic Party — this is a complete stretch, even if the specific person O'Keefe is targeting is crazy. This is called nutpicking.
Windsor tried to get the Justices, who are important people that we *all* depend on, on the record in a very clear narrative. This is not some conspiracy theory, it is just asking them some garden variety question about what they think of the governance of this country.
Furthermore, Windsor had the honesty to both ask the same questions of everybody (so she was not really trying to customize her deception), and to share her conversations with everyone — including the ones with Chief Justice Roberts, which make him look rather good. She's not trying to embarrass anybody so much as reporting on important states of mind that we don't get anywhere else because of what some consider an oversight of the Constitution.
It's important to realize that O'Keefe and Windsor are not at all the same person. One is a propagandist, and the other is a journalist.
And I appreciate your fair and balanced evaluation of my post. I don't think this is really both siding because we all know James O'Keefe has no ethics and is a regular target of Lauren Windsor himself. Which I applaud.
Sasha Baron Cohen's comedy does the same thing but simply for entertainment.
I dispute your characterization of her as a journalist. Some call her an "advocacy journalist" others an "activist journalist." These are not in the strict sense journalists beyond the fact that they both use a keyboard.
The editor of a journalist would actually contact the subject and tell them that they will be publishing the comments and give them at least an opportunity to explain themselves. Instead she goes straight to the antisocial media and launches a million clicks, posts, reposts and essentially confirms that with which most of us already believe that Alito has some pretty far out (but not impeachable) opinions and that Mrs. Alito is an unhinged harpy. I also have to wonder whether the Alitos might have responded the same had she just presented herself as a journalist. I do believe Alito considers himself bulletproof and some of his opinions from that recording will show up in his next dissenting opinion!
Thanks for this link. I also read the Vox article linked to in the Joyce Vance article. It's pretty scary and infuriating to read that a Supreme Court Justice has adopted an "ends-jusitifes-the-means" view of jurisprudence ("I'm not all that concerned with what the law says - as long as my side wins, I'm sure I can come up with some legal-sounding wording to make it seem OK"). And the cherry on top is that this perversion is coming from the side that has always touted itself as simply following the law. Remember how Sotomayor got into "trouble" because she said her Latina upbringing in a poor family would make her a better justice? And the Right went wild with accusations that she wasn't going to follow the law. But Alito can say that we need more religion (I wonder which one?) in today's America and the Right completely ignores it.
I didn't read this but the musing of the author "I will be surprised if Alito survives this" is just silly. The only way to remove Alito is impeachment. A republican house would not impeach Alito for anything. It used to be said a politician and lets face it Alito is could survive anything except being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. I don't think they would touch Alito for either. And neither Thomas no Alito have any shame at all.
Robert's is pathetic . He has been a willing participant in the demise of the courts integrity. (citizens united anyone ) ? I think that he " goes along " with the shenanigans, but things have been over the top and his reputation as a "balls & strikes" is toast .
I truly respect the way the Biden’s are dealing with Hunter’s trial. I also love a man who can hug his adult son in public. Has anyone out there ever seen Trump hug any of this three sons? Odd and off isn’t it.
I agree on the fundamental moral question in the abortion debate: Human or not? The life is human life, but even with a human life outside the womb, Doctors do not use the "heartbeat" to determine sustainable life. It is actually, "brain death". So when a brain no longer develops in the womb, or multiple organs stop developing and there is no science to promote their further development, why are we relying on the heartbeat? This is a medical ethics issue that needs to be addressed. Politicians and Supreme Court justices must follow the lead of medical ethicists, not their religious beliefs.
My takeaway from the conversation with Martha-Ann Alito is that Alito is counting the days until a Republican president is in the Oval Office, so Alito can retire and be replaced by a younger version of himself. Hence his wife’s comment about “when {we} are free of this nonsense.” And is the “nonsense” this whole idea of judicial impartiality?? Taken in the whole context of these flag stories, apparently Alito doesn’t believe in being neutral, impartial, or nonpartisan, whatever you want to call it. He seems to believe that’s not required of him.
"[Chief Justice John] Roberts: Yeah, I don’t know that we live in a Christian nation."
Ah, but he does know. And he also knows that those who say this is a "Christian nation" are playing a word game, while those who say it's not are "taking the bait." Why can't people just say it like it is? The US was founded based on Judeo-Christian VALUES. Many Founders were NOT Christians, but Deists and agnostics. Even the Founders who were devout Christians agreed with the others that there must not be any national religion (sorry, Michael Flynn), but rather freedom to practice any religion one wants, as long as it doesn't violate Judeo-Christian values. Many self-described Christians today make a compelling case that today's radical "White Christian Nationalists" (the ones most likely to play the word game) are in fact violating those values.
YES!
I am unhappy with Bulwark giving a voice to Kristol. He can’t move on. He’s still beating the GOP is so great dead horse. It’s dead already! Let it go!
Alito was born about a half-dozen centuries too late for his true calling. He would have had a ball as a zealous medieval inquisitor, condemning and burning innocent people for heresy, witchcraft, etc. Instead he was born in our time so he's making do as an exceptionally horrendous SCOTUS judge.
I might be in the minority but don’t read too much into dinner table chatter among strangers at an event. I am not a big fan of Project Veritas and I can’t see where this is any different.
I hope I’m not repeating others here. WRT “Another Headache for the Chief”, I struggle with this statement: “Either fetuses are human beings, and thus deserve protection under the law, or they aren’t and thus don’t.” The problems that arise in human systems are rarely black and white. Indeed, if “being human” is all that’s needed to protect humans under the law, then allowing the mother to die in order to save a fetus would also be unacceptable. Such “not black and white” situations are called moral dilemmas. A resolution on either side of a “right vs right” dilemma can be heartbreaking and difficult. If every question were black and white, we could simply write all the laws and be done with it. There has to be room for compassionate consideration of a case by the people most intimately involved.
Apropos of the article in The HIll; maybe Trump should be given extra years...just to be sure.
When Andrew and Bill title this newsletter, "Roberts the Institutionalist, Alito the Culture Warrior", they are in fact shifting the Overton window in real time: This is how the frog gets boiled, and this is where Orwell's prescient discourse on language is highlighted.
What is described here is clear: Chief Justice Roberts models the response of — not an institutionalist but — a judge, that is, someone who is expert in deconstructing facts, applying laws and statutes, and, when necessary, filling the gaps where existing rules cannot be decided. This is the job of a judge, and the Supreme Court justices are the most important judge positions in the country.
Chief Justice Roberts also demonstrates cognitive responsibility: He explains his state of mind, when he disagrees, he justifies his statements to motivate his belief — and this is reflective of his professional approach, which, naturally as a judge, requires explaining his thought process in every case.
Alito's response betrays that he is not a judge. This is someone who does not know how to follow causal inference properly, or how to apply deductive reasoning — which is elementary for a doctor in law. He is someone who rather than starting from our shared set of facts, is drawing from a completely different set, for instance "They really can't be compromised" in reference to "fundamental differences" (Chief Justice Roberts models what an appropriate response would look like, so I won't comment further). Furthermore he says "return our country to a place of godliness" when our country was founded on the right of each and everyone of us to experience "godliness" in their own way, and Catholics were not just a minority but one that was for a time reviled, and here is a Supreme Justice completely clueless about the history of his own country, unlike, you will notice, Chief Justice Roberts.
So from this conversation alone, one would assume: Chief Justice Roberts is a lawyer who became a judge and, Alito is... something else.
The closest one can get to describe Alito is a process mistake: He is someone who Congress mistakenly let in, because based on the ability to reason he demonstrates in this conversation, this is not someone you want as the ultimate umpire of the US legal system.
So back to the beginning: We should be calling this out! We should be describing Alito as out of his league, we should be describing Alito as incompetent in his lawyering skill and question his ability to serve effectively as the supreme authority.
Instead, a title like "Roberts the Institutionalist, Alito the Culture Warrior" makes it sound like this kind of behavior is just one variety of different kinds of Supreme Court Justices. It legitimizes Alito's incompetence by passing it as competent ideology.
Whatever Alito's partisan beliefs are, Chief Justice Roberts (whose beliefs are likely similar) models how you can have partisan beliefs, but still be professional in terms of applying rules like a judge is supposed to do.
Roberts does not have much control over associate justices. He does have control over SCOTUS ethics, which he has essentially punted on, and Alito and Thomas have thumbed their noses at that. He also could have gone and testified to Congress as requested instead of raising B.S. separation of powers arguments to avoid the conversation.
Roberts is worse. He sees what is going on and lets Alito and Thomas sully themselves as naked partisan hacks and simply shrugs his complicit shoulders. He COULD do something. He CHOOSES not to. One has to surmise he approves of the outcome. THAT is the most detrimental and diabolical. Don’t give me a pass and build his cover story for him. He owns this shit show
What is within Roberts' power to do?
Whether Roberts approves or not there is little he can do. He cannot dictate ethics, he cannot remove them from the court, he cannot demand they recuse. Alito and Thomas are what they have always been, partisan hacks itching to impose their will on the people, neither have ever had any use for the law or the constitution except how it can be used and twisted to impose their will. All they needed was enough less than stellar compatriots who could be corrupted, welcome Kavanaugh, Coney and Gorsuch
Concerning the Supreme Court: wasn't that the project? All of that Federalist Society and affiliated organizations, wasn't that supposed to produce exactly this? In my mind Alito is being flat honest, and Roberts is hedging just a bit. I say that because this tape has been out, Thomas' revelations have been out and .... nothing.
I understand that the Chief Justice does not have that kind of power over the Associate Justices, (someone let me know if I am wrong), but is there NOTHING he can do to help the average American trust the court?
Well he did hide the fact Alito leaked the Dobbs decision. I am sure Sammy got a charge out of rubbing Robert's nose in that one.
Regarding Trump sentencing (ONE CAN DREAM)...how about the judge giving Trump options and seeing which he'd choose. :).
a) public apology (social media, TV, Truth Social, etc) stating (pick from the following list): admitting his relationship with Stormy, admitting he knew the payments were to silence her because of the election vs concerns about Melania: admitting he knew he paid Cohen for reimbursement of moneys to Stormy; admitting he was aware of the intent to portray the reimbursement as normal legal fees; etc; apologizing for disrespecting "the court/legal system")...(Note not including the Big Lie's falsehood as that's outside the scope of this case)
b) incarceration (after appeals run out)
c) probation including 2000 (pick your number) of hours of SUPERVISED community service
We know he won't pick a) but that his refusal to do so could then be used to say HE CHOSE b) or c) and the judge tried to give him an easy out. No monetary fine...too easy on him.
IF he chose option a) and if he subsequently violated those terms and said stuff contrarily, that could be grounds for the judge to revert to b) or c).
Like I said...ONE CAN DREAM.
Roberts the "institutionalist" is no doubt what Roberts hopes he'll be remembered for. More likely he'll be remembered as trying as hard as he could to defend SCOTUS against the charges that it has become an institution untethered from ethical guardrails (as evidenced by Thomas and Alito) which smugly keeps pretending the Court is not just a bunch of political hacks.
Also I am pretty shocked at how no one feels ill at ease or questions the ethics of Lauren Windsor's sneak attacks on both Justices.
It seems that when James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team misrepresent themselves and "get the goods" on their targets it is an outrage but when someone on the left does this they get lionized on MSNBC?
I find both O'Keefe and Windsor reprehensible, and they would have no place in public discourse except for the power of the antisocial media.
What is the ethics at issue here, and if this kind of secret recording under an assumed identity is unethical, how unethical is it? I assume it is a violation of journalistic ethics and can understand why it would be. On the other hand, if an undercover cop gets the goods on a mobster by secretly recording a conversation under false pretenses, that is simply a fulfillment of professional duties, and we would hardly consider it to be unethical. Doing this as a kind of saboteur in service of revealing important truths does not clearly fall under either of this paradigms of unethical or ethical behavior even though it might strike one as a bit shady. IMO, the question of ethics here is not clear cut. I am not comfortable with it, but neither do I feel a “sense of outrage.”
I appreciate — sincerely — your apartisan disgusts at the methods, but I would like to suggest that you are doing "bothsideism": There is no equivocation between what O'Keefe is doing and what Windsor is doing.
O'Keefe's stunts rely on misrepresenting quotes, taking conversations out of context, and goading people into saying things that *may* connect to a conspiracy theory. O'Keefe tries to misrepresent that some person in Planned Parenthood is speaking for the entire Democratic Party — this is a complete stretch, even if the specific person O'Keefe is targeting is crazy. This is called nutpicking.
Windsor tried to get the Justices, who are important people that we *all* depend on, on the record in a very clear narrative. This is not some conspiracy theory, it is just asking them some garden variety question about what they think of the governance of this country.
Furthermore, Windsor had the honesty to both ask the same questions of everybody (so she was not really trying to customize her deception), and to share her conversations with everyone — including the ones with Chief Justice Roberts, which make him look rather good. She's not trying to embarrass anybody so much as reporting on important states of mind that we don't get anywhere else because of what some consider an oversight of the Constitution.
It's important to realize that O'Keefe and Windsor are not at all the same person. One is a propagandist, and the other is a journalist.
And I appreciate your fair and balanced evaluation of my post. I don't think this is really both siding because we all know James O'Keefe has no ethics and is a regular target of Lauren Windsor himself. Which I applaud.
Sasha Baron Cohen's comedy does the same thing but simply for entertainment.
I dispute your characterization of her as a journalist. Some call her an "advocacy journalist" others an "activist journalist." These are not in the strict sense journalists beyond the fact that they both use a keyboard.
The editor of a journalist would actually contact the subject and tell them that they will be publishing the comments and give them at least an opportunity to explain themselves. Instead she goes straight to the antisocial media and launches a million clicks, posts, reposts and essentially confirms that with which most of us already believe that Alito has some pretty far out (but not impeachable) opinions and that Mrs. Alito is an unhinged harpy. I also have to wonder whether the Alitos might have responded the same had she just presented herself as a journalist. I do believe Alito considers himself bulletproof and some of his opinions from that recording will show up in his next dissenting opinion!
Why not quote Mrs. Alito from Ms. Windsor's tapes? Because she sounds unhinged?https://angrybearblog.com/2024/06/alitos-admission-and-approach-to-religion-and-the-law#more-148388
Agreed. She’s crazy, has a drinking problem, or both. The totality of her behavior in all these flag stories points that direction.
Thanks for this link. I also read the Vox article linked to in the Joyce Vance article. It's pretty scary and infuriating to read that a Supreme Court Justice has adopted an "ends-jusitifes-the-means" view of jurisprudence ("I'm not all that concerned with what the law says - as long as my side wins, I'm sure I can come up with some legal-sounding wording to make it seem OK"). And the cherry on top is that this perversion is coming from the side that has always touted itself as simply following the law. Remember how Sotomayor got into "trouble" because she said her Latina upbringing in a poor family would make her a better justice? And the Right went wild with accusations that she wasn't going to follow the law. But Alito can say that we need more religion (I wonder which one?) in today's America and the Right completely ignores it.
I didn't read this but the musing of the author "I will be surprised if Alito survives this" is just silly. The only way to remove Alito is impeachment. A republican house would not impeach Alito for anything. It used to be said a politician and lets face it Alito is could survive anything except being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. I don't think they would touch Alito for either. And neither Thomas no Alito have any shame at all.