The federal judiciary has a big credibility crisis

Actually, what many of us have long known is now being openly affirmed. And it's not just Bush/Trump-appointed "judges," either.

But it’s not just our highest court that is mired in a well-earned legitimacy crisis; it’s all of them. The corruption of the federal judiciary system, both ideological and financial, has become so total that Alito’s comments were barely the most scandalous or incendiary that the country’s justice system sustained (two weeks ago).

In an incredible report from The Wall Street Journal, the paper found “more than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock … judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010.” Two-thirds of all federal district judges disclosed stock holdings, the report found, and 1 in 5 of those “heard at least one case involving those stocks.” These were judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, a bipartisan affair spanning appointees from LBJ to Trump. - The American Prospect

The new reality on abortion rights

I never seriously believed that even this SCOTUS wouldn't block the Texas vigilante law. They may still be working on how to block that part of it, while also providing a guide for a six-week ban they will uphold. But, hell, I don't know.

Still, the work remains. And today, at West Alabama Women’s Center, and in clinics across the country, it was mostly business as usual. Looking ahead, (Robin) Marty is already reflecting on how people will likely step up in really incredible ways, which she ironically worries could serve as a defense for future abortion litigation. “If we as activists, and as clinic workers, and as the movement itself manage to help people get care, that is obviously good for pregnant people. But in the grander scheme of things legally, that actually then serves to show that, ‘Hey, this law did not have nearly the devastating impact that people claimed that it would,’ and the courts are going to use that as an excuse to say, ‘Look, it can stay in effect. Look, more states can pass this,'” she says. “So our choices right now are to either mitigate as much damage as we can, and then hope against hope that the courts don’t see that as, ‘Hey, look, it’s really not that bad,’ or just watch people harmed and forced into pregnancies or into dangerous situations or sued or fined or in jail. There’s no win for us.”

Marty’s book, which lays out how to get care if you need an abortion and cannot access it, is quite literally a guide to what happens next in this country. It’s also a call to action. “It’s a to-do list of how to protect yourself during civil disobedience and, more importantly, how to figure out if you’re the sort of person who should do civil disobedience because it is privileged people who need to step up and do it,” she says. - Mother Jones

SCOTUS taking up CFPB case is not what you may have feared

Anyway, it’s certainly not what I feared, when I first saw the headlines.

Nerves frayed among progressive judiciary watchers on Friday afternoon as the Supreme Court announced plans to take up Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This case will decide whether the bureau’s leadership structure, in which a single director can only be removed by the president for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” is constitutional...

Everyone expects that the Court will follow Kavanaugh’s lead from 2016, and will grant the president the power to fire the CFPB director for any reason. But this could be a very positive step in the current context. It would mean that an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (or likely any Democratic) administration wouldn’t be stuck with anti-regulatory director Kathy Kraninger in place until December 2023. - The American Prospect

Concerns that the radical-right brigade on SCOTUS might take this as an opportunity to quash the CFPB, and even Dodd-Frank, entirely, are addressed later in the article.

SCOTUS stuns forced-birth zealots

This doesn’t guarantee anything in the longer term. All they did was grant a stay. But the news could have been a lot worse.

This probably is another indication, though, that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t intend for “his” court to go down as a thundering bastion of radical-right extremism, which wouldn’t look good in the history books. Not to mention which could produce huge electoral backlashes, amplifying those already created by the ultimate embodiment of “movement conservatism,” namely, putting a massively narcissistic and delusional, corrupt beyond description, treasonous, and most of all just an absolute god-damned fucking pitiful idiot in the White House.

In June 2016, an eight-member Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that required doctors who perform abortions to have the authority to admit patients at a local hospital. The makeup of the court has changed significantly since then: In 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died a few weeks before the Texas case was argued, and Justice Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018 and was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But although the court by most measures has become more conservative, the justices (yesterday) granted a request from abortion providers to block a similar Louisiana law from going into effect while the providers appeal a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in a dispute that some court-watchers regarded as a bellwether for the court’s possible direction in future abortion cases. - SCOTUSblog