It's the Globe's lead story:
"Civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers, Supreme Court rules" by Adam Liptak New York Times, June 15, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for LGBTQ equality a stunning victory.
“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6-3 ruling.
That opinion and two dissents, spanning 168 pages, touched on a host of flashpoints in the culture wars involving the LGBTQ community — bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, pronouns, and religious objections to same-sex marriage. The decision, the first major case on transgender rights, came amid widespread demonstrations, some protesting violence aimed at transgender people of color.
Our culture is finished.
For three decades, Massachusetts has had similar protections for LGBTQ workers, joining several other states, but until Monday’s decision, it was legal in more than half the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual, or transgender.
The vastly consequential decision thus extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with his two appointments.
The decision achieved a decades-long goal of gay rights proponents, one they had initially considered much easier to achieve than a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, but even as the Supreme Court established that right in 2015, workplace discrimination remained lawful in most of the country. An employee who married a same-sex partner in the morning could be fired that afternoon for being gay.
Monday’s lopsided ruling, coming from a fundamentally conservative court, was a surprise. Gorsuch, who was Trump’s first appointment to the court, was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
Looks like Gorsuch and Roberts have been outed.
Supporters of LGBTQ rights were elated by the ruling.
“This is a simple and profound victory for LGBT civil rights,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia. “Many of us feared that the court was poised to gut sex discrimination protections and allow employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity, yet it declined the federal government’s invitation to take that damaging path.”
The question for the justices was the meaning of a statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. They had to decide whether that last prohibition — bias “because of sex” — applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.
Gorsuch wrote that it did.
They co-opted your movement, ladies.
Obviously, no one should face discrimination for any reason (unless white), but this is going to open up a further thicket of divisive side issues (probably the point of the ruling).
Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the majority had abandoned its judicial role. “There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation,” Alito wrote. “The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.”
“A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall,” he wrote. “The court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous.”
Related:
"The Supreme Court ruled Monday that insurance companies can collect $12 billion from the federal government to cover their losses in the early years of the health care law championed by President Barack Obama. Insurers are entitled to the money under a provision of the “Obamacare” health law that promised the companies a financial cushion for losses they might incur by selling coverage to people in the marketplaces created by the health care law, the justices said by an 8-1 vote. The program only lasted three years, but Congress inserted a provision in the Health and Human Services Department’s spending bills from 2015 to 2017 to limit payments under the “risk corridors” program. Both the Obama and Trump administrations had argued that the provision means the government has no obligation to pay, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her opinion for the court that the congressional action was not sufficient to repeal the government’s commitment to pay."
The Corporate Court comes together on something, but who was the dissenter and why?
Alito looks like the only judge who is not compromised -- at least for now, and I judge them as such: Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, Roberts, Gorsuch, Breyer, Kagan, Ginsburg.
The common understanding of sex discrimination in 1964, Alito wrote, was bias against women or men and did not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. If Congress wanted to protect gay and transgender workers, he wrote, it could pass a new law.
You see, he is right about that. Congre$$ needed to pass a law to fix it.
Alito added that the majority’s decision would have pernicious consequences.
He said the majority left open, for instance, questions about access to restrooms and locker rooms. “For women who have been victimized by sexual assault or abuse,” he wrote, “the experience of seeing an unclothed person with the anatomy of a male in a confined and sensitive location such as a bathroom or locker room can cause serious psychological harm.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring dissent.
Kavanaugh will elaborate later; however, how ironic it is that he rose to the defense of real women after what he went through! A fine justice he.
Gorsuch responded that the court’s ruling was narrow. “We do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind,” he wrote. “Whether other policies and practices might or might not qualify as unlawful discrimination or find justifications under other provisions of Title VII are questions for future cases, not these.”
Like I said, all those cases will come up later.
This was my print version:
Nor did the majority address, Alito said, how its ruling would affect sports, college housing, religious employers, health care or free speech.
“Although the court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long,” Justice Alito wrote. “The entire federal judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the court’s reasoning.”
That was the point!
Justice Gorsuch added that Title VII itself included protections for religious employers and that a separate federal law and the First Amendment also allow religious groups latitude in their employment decisions.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump’s other appointment to the court, issued a separate dissent making a point about statutory interpretation. “Courts must follow ordinary meaning, not literal meaning,” he wrote, adding that the ordinary meaning of “because of sex” does not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Seneca Falls was not Stonewall,” he wrote. “The women’s rights movement was not (and is not) the gay rights movement, although many people obviously support or participate in both. So to think that sexual orientation discrimination is just a form of sex discrimination is not just a mistake of language and psychology, but also a mistake of history and sociology.”
You learn from mistakes, and that print was replaced by this in the web version:
In remarks to reporters, Trump said he accepted the ruling. “I’ve read the decision,” he said, “and some people were surprised, but they’ve ruled and we live with their decision.” He added that it was a “very powerful decision, actually.”
He doesn't have a choice! It's the Supreme Court. Case closed!
The Trump administration had urged the court to rule against gay and transgender workers, and it has barred most transgender people from serving in the military. The Department of Health and Services issued a rule on Friday that undid protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and insurers.
Those actions involved different laws from the one at issue on Monday, and the Supreme Court has allowed the military ban to go into effect while lawsuits challenging it proceed. Still, the court’s ruling suggested that a new era in transgender rights has arrived.
This society is being changed so rapidly one will not recognize it by next year.
The decision, covering two sets of cases, was the court’s first on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court’s major gay rights decisions. Proponents of those rights had worried his departure would halt their progress.
A large majorities of Americans oppose employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and substantial ones oppose it when based on gender identity. More than 200 major corporations filed a brief supporting the gay and transgender employees in the cases before the court.
The decision was both symbolic and consequential, and it followed in the tradition of landmark rulings on discrimination.....
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You see the forces that can bend the court to its will. Once judicial independence is gone, the country is no more.
"Supreme Court refuses to reconsider immunity that shields police accused of brutality" by Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow Washington Post, June 15, 2020
So they stiffed BLM while dropping to a knee for the trannies, huh?
WOW!
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to review a form of immunity that has shielded police officers from lawsuits alleging brutality and other civil rights violations, an issue that found renewed attention after nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody.
The justices declined to hear eight separate cases presenting reconsideration of the doctrine of qualified immunity that establishes protection from lawsuits for government officials, particularly police officers.
Oh, that's a BIG MIDDLE FINGER right there!
Government is ABOVE the LAW in AmeriKa!
So when does BLM light fire to the court (remember when protesters stormed the court doors a while back? Pathetic wretches whining and crying).
Justice Clarence Thomas issued a six-page dissent, calling on his colleagues to revisit the protections and expressing ‘‘strong doubts’’ about the court’s approach to qualified immunity.
Way to go, brother! Six pages!
The doctrine, created by the Supreme Court decades ago, allows civil suits only when it can be shown that an official’s actions violated a ‘‘clearly established’’ statutory or constitutional right. When determining whether the right was clearly established, courts consider whether a reasonable official would have known that the actions were a violation.
In practice, the ‘‘clearly established’’ test often means that for their lawsuits to proceed, civil rights plaintiffs must identify a nearly identical violation that has been recognized by the Supreme Court or appellate courts in the same jurisdiction.
Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on May 25 amplified calls for the court — and Congress — to act. Changing qualified immunity is part of the House Democrats’ policing reform legislation, and some senators have called for action as well. President Trump has opposed those efforts.
‘‘The Supreme Court’s deeply disappointing decision today to punt on the critical issue of official immunity, in this time of national reckoning over police violence, places the ball squarely in Congress’s court,’’ David Cole, national legal director for the ACLU, said in a statement Monday.
‘‘We have seen the deadly consequences play out on the streets, and Black Americans have largely paid the price,’’ he added.
The court’s qualified-immunity decisions have raised concerns among lawyers and academics for years. An extraordinary coalition of organizations on the left, right, and middle — one federal judge called it ‘‘perhaps the most diverse amici ever assembled’’ — has called on the court to revisit the issue, and so have two members of the court who represent its opposite ideological wings — Thomas and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Way to go, sister!
Thomas, citing leading conservative academics, questioned in 2017 whether the doctrine was properly grounded in common law and the Constitution.
Sotomayor, who did not sign on to Thomas’s dissent Monday, has frequently dissented when her colleagues have granted or upheld qualified immunity in excessive-force cases and said the doctrine has grown from protecting officials from harassing lawsuits into something else.
The court ‘‘routinely displays an unflinching willingness’’ to reverse lower courts that do not give an officer qualified immunity, ‘‘but rarely intervenes where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases,’’ she wrote. ‘‘Such a one-sided approach to qualified immunity transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.’’
Legal scholars have criticized the court for what they say is a rewrite of an important civil rights law meant to ensure that federal courts provide protection to all Americans.
Looks like they do that all the time.
The law is now known to lawyers as Section 1983 of the US Code, and it imposes liability on officials who use their positions to deprive anyone of ‘‘any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution.’’
So when do the flood of lawsuits against governors begin?
There is no exception in the law for police, but beginning in the 1980s, the Supreme Court began providing some immunity for officials, saying that the rights violation must be ‘‘clearly established’’ for a lawsuit to proceed.
They were protecting themselves and their own cla$$, and why must taxpayers always pick up the tab for criminal police conduct? Make them re$pon$ible for it and it will stop immediately!
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The court also flipped the bird to the right wing as well, readers:
"Supreme Court passes up challenges from gun groups on laws they say violate Second Amendment" by Robert Barnes Washington Post, June 15, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up new cases for next term that gun rights groups claimed denied Second Amendment rights.
The court did not accept a batch of cases that gun groups had hoped the court, fortified with more conservative members, might consider. Among them were cases involving restrictions in Maryland and New Jersey to permits for carrying a handgun outside the home.
What is it Jackson once said?
Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it?
The court earlier this term had dismissed a challenge from New York about transporting guns, and three justices objected, with the newest, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, adding that it seemed likely lower courts have been too quick to uphold state and local gun control measures.
Although he agreed the New York case was moot, he added that he shared the ‘‘concern that some federal and state courts may not be properly applying’’ the Supreme Court’s decision recognizing an individual’s right to gun ownership.
‘‘The court should address that issue soon,’’ he wrote.
He and Justice Clarence Thomas objected Monday.
‘‘This court would almost certainly review the constitutionality of a law requiring citizens to establish a justifiable need before exercising their free speech rights, and it seems highly unlikely that the court would allow a state to enforce a law requiring a woman to provide a justifiable need before seeking an abortion,’’ Thomas wrote, regarding the New Jersey case, ‘‘but today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the court simply looks the other way.’’
He has turned into such an outstanding justice! Incredibly, he is filling the huge shoes of Scalia, something I thought could never happen.
The court’s most conservative members at various times have expressed frustration that their colleagues have routinely turned down requests to evaluate laws that impose tough restrictions for permits to carry guns outside the home and ban certain types of weapons.
The reluctance to reenter the gun control debate was almost entirely due to retired justice Anthony Kennedy. He was part of the court’s 5 to 4 majority in 2008’s landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which said the Second Amendment provided a right to gun ownership for personal protection apart from military service, but Kennedy had also insisted in language that presumed states and localities still had leeway to pass gun restrictions.
Lower courts have pointed to that to uphold many restrictions and overturn very few, but Kavanaugh’s replacement of his old boss Kennedy was thought to change the dynamic on the court. Kavanaugh was suspicious of gun restrictions while a judge on the appeals court, and the National Rifle Association was an enthusiastic backer during his selection and nomination by President Trump.....
Doesn't matter; they are standing on principle, the law, and the Constitution.
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"Supreme court won’t hear case on California sanctuary law" by Adam Liptak New York Times, June 15, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal from the Trump administration seeking to challenge a California “sanctuary law.”
Well, they pretty much screwed everyone but the gays and trannies!
As is the court’s custom, its order declining to hear the case gave no reasons. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have granted the administration’s petition seeking review.....
I've seen enough.
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They say mi$ery loves company, and they are not the only entity the court has $crewed lately:
"Supreme Court upholds federal response to Puerto Rico debt" by Adam Liptak New York Times, June 1, 2020
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously upheld a key aspect of the federal response to the worst debt crisis in Puerto Rican history, one that threatened basic services like schools and hospitals, some $50 billion in public pension obligations, and more than $70 billion in debts to bondholders.
The crisis worsened after Hurricane Maria destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure in 2017, with the commonwealth estimating that recovery costs would exceed $139 billion. The court ruled that members of a government board created by Congress in 2016 to clean up the financial mess had been properly appointed.
Had the court come to the opposite conclusion, its ruling could have undone years of work on restructuring the commonwealth’s debts.
The 2016 law at issue in the case — the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA — created an independent entity to restructure the commonwealth’s debt, the Financial Oversight and Management Board. Since then, the board has tried to resolve about 165,000 claims from creditors, not always to their satisfaction.
Aurelius Investment, a hedge fund that had bought distressed bonds, and a labor union representing employees of an electric utility objected to the board’s actions, arguing that its members had been appointed without following the procedures set out in the Constitution, which requires Senate confirmation of “officers of the United States.”
That was a curious case, one where the court has apparently stood up to one of the most ruthless vultures on the planet today.
The 2016 law took a different approach, using what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called in a concurring opinion “a labyrinthine procedure.”
The law let the president appoint one of the board’s seven voting members as he saw fit and choose six more from lists compiled by congressional leaders.
If the president followed those procedures, as President Barack Obama did, no Senate confirmation was said to be required.
The US Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, ruled that the appointment procedure ran afoul of the Constitution’s appointments clause because the board members were federal officers.
Lawyers for the board argued that its members were mere territorial officers.
A different constitutional provision gives Congress power over territories like Puerto Rico.
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Closer to home, the Globe is praising the win for gay and transgender rights at Supreme Court while officials and LGBTQ leaders are lauding the Supreme Court decision, but say more work is ahead.
Also see:
"The US Supreme Court let the liquidator of Bernard Madoff’s investment firm press ahead with efforts to recoup $3 billion from European banks and other overseas investors. The justices, without comment on Monday, turned away an appeal by investors led by HSBC who said trustee Irving Picard was impermissibly trying to apply US bankruptcy law to foreign transactions. A federal appeals court let Picard sue the investors. The money is the biggest remaining bucket of cash being sought by Picard as he tries to compensate customers who lost $19 billion in principal after Madoff’s arrest. So far Picard has recovered more than $14 billion and distributed more than $13 billion to victims — significantly more than many predicted when he was appointed in 2008."
Madoff's $in was ripping off other Jews.
Go check the archives:
"Publishers sue Internet Archive, says its free online ‘library’ violates copyright law" by Hillel Italie Associated Press, June 1, 2020
NEW YORK — Four of the country’s biggest publishers have sued a digital library for copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet Archive has illegally offered more than a million scanned works to the public, including such favorites as Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.’’
“Without any license or any payment to authors or publishers, Internet Archive scans print books, uploads these illegally scanned books to its servers, and distributes verbatim digital copies of the books in whole via public-facing websites,” according to papers filed Monday in federal court in New York. “With just a few clicks, any Internet-connected user can download complete digital copies of in-copyright books.”
In March, the Internet Archive said it had established a “National Emergency Library’’ in response to the coronavirus outbreak, which has shut down most of the country’s schools and libraries. According to the Archive, the emergency library would support “remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation’’ with free digital materials.
“We hope that authors will support our effort to ensure temporary access to their work in this time of crisis,” according to a statement on the archive’s web site, www.archive.org. The emergency library is scheduled to last at least through the end of June. The archive also provides free access to more than 1 million older, public-domain books not bound by copyright law.
Founded in 1996 and based in San Francisco, the Archive has defended its recent actions by saying it operates like a traditional lending library, a nonprofit entity providing free books. The publishers have contended the archive does not work like a traditional library in part because it offers scans of paper books without reaching licensing deals with copyright holders. The Archive has said it acquires paperback and hardcover books through purchases and donations and then scans them.
On Monday, Internet Archive cofounder Brewster Kahle called the lawsuit “disappointing.’’
“As a library, the Internet Archive acquires books and lends them, as libraries have always done,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This supports publishing and authors and readers. Publishers suing libraries for lending books, in this case, protected digitized versions, and while schools and libraries are closed, is not in anyone’s interest. We hope this can be resolved quickly.”
The plaintiffs, including Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Wiley, are seeking a permanent injunction against the library and an undetermined amount of money for damages. Court papers refer to page views on the archive site, more than 50,000 alone in New York state, but not to how many books were actually borrowed.
“There is nothing in the copyright law which authorizes the mass copying of and distribution of 1.3 million scanned books to the public, regardless of whether those copies are downloaded by one person or millions,” said Maria Pallante, CEO of the trade group the Association of American Publishers.
Monday’s legal action continues a long battle between traditional publishers, for which copyrights are an underpinning of the business, and the Internet community, which has advocated making as much material as possible available for free. Authors and publishers condemned the March launch of the emergency library, but historian Jill Lepore praised it, writing in a New Yorker essay that “If the books you need aren’t in any bookstore, and, especially, if you are one of the currently more than one billion students and teachers shut out of your classroom, please: sign up, log on, and borrow!”
Over the past 30 years, publishers have battled Google, Amazon and others over digital content. In 2019, several sued Amazon-owned Audible.com over a planned audiobook program for schools that included captions the plaintiffs alleged violated copyright law. The case was settled earlier this year.
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Looks like an open-and-shut case, doesn't it?
UPDATE:
Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to end legal protections for DACA recipients
They have been completely coopted, and is it possible that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Gorsuch are compromised?
