In the 6-3 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Chevron "defies the command of" the Administrative Procedure Act (the law governing federal administrative agencies) "that the reviewing court--not the agency whose action it reviews--is to decide all relevant questions of law and interpret ... statutory provisions. It requires a court to ignore, not follow, the reading the court would have reached had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA."

Roberts noted: "Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption" (that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations of authority by Congress to federal agencies) "is misguided, because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do."

Roberts added that this decision does "not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful--including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself--are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology." //

Jman98 Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
Congress always had the power, they simply refused to use it. Congress could have always been specific in the language used in any given piece of legislation they wrote and passed. They purposely weren’t because specificity leads to responsibility and they’re not about that. By leaving things to someone else, bureaucrats in the Executive branch, they could then complain about how their purposely ambiguous legislation was badly implemented and dodge responsibility for what they’d done. How many times have they written in legislation “the Secretary shall” so as to punt all responsibility for what happens next? Hundreds, sometimes in the same piece of legislation. This is telling Congress to do their job right the first time. //

Minister of War Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
I agree that the power should be returned to the people & their elected representatives. But Iam hesitant when I hear that the Court thinks that courts know better than anyone else. The SCOTUS may have just granted itself & the rest of the judiciary more power that they shouldn't have to do what amounts to writing laws.

Laocoön of Troy Minister of War
an hour ago
No...they've just thrown down the gauntlet and have warned the Executive to not play so fast and loose with regulation or the courts will take away even more power from them. This entire decision is an unmitigated, magnificent result.

I suspect that the lazy and cowardly Congress will end up forced by their donors and political supporters to stop at least some regulation overreach.

Bottom line: Congress can amend §666 to make it clear that acts like what Snyder did are illegal. What will come of this is bad faith actors pointing at the court and claiming that Snyder is another example of the high court defending corruption. Rather, it is SCOTUS defending liberty and requiring Congress to define criminal statutes with clarity and specificity.

 The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a part of President Trump's 2017 'Tax Cuts and Jobs Act' that levied a tax on capital appreciation is constitutional. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The court ruled 7-2 that the mandatory repatriation tax, or MRT, is constitutional under the taxation regimes defined in Article I and the 16th Amendment. In short, the MRT imposed a one-time requirement for US citizens and companies to repatriate money held overseas. //

The Moores had earned $0 from their investment, but the value of their investment had increased because the business they invested in was successful. Because their investment was successful, that unrealized gain, which could totally disappear in a few months if things went pear-shaped, was taxed.

Why is this important?

The lodestar of the far left is "income inequality." They want everyone to be poor but them. Where their policies are defeated is by frugality and investment. //

The wealth tax's strategy is to prevent the accumulation of intergenerational wealth and penalize those who work hard, save, and invest in favor of those who consume. Every time your stock portfolio or home increases in value, a wealth tax would make that gain taxable, even if you didn't cash out. //

FreeWilledThinker
an hour ago
I just read the opinion and, even though I am a Constitutionalist and favor strict construction, I would have voted with the majority on this one. The reason why is due to the pass-through nature of the company. Every LLC in the U.S. works this way, where you get a K-1 and get taxed, even where not a cent has come into your bank account.

I think the muddy water comes from the ownership mechanism. As a shareholder, the Moore's wish to treat the pass-through as though it is not taxable on the owned company's income, but it would be were it based in the U.S. and did not pay any tax on the base income. //

Buckeye kamief
18 minutes ago
But that interest would be taxable if NOT in an IRA -- which is the crux of this. These folks were catching gains on a foreign corporation NOT in an IRA, yet because of reinvestment, they weren't paying any taxes. Compare to US tax code in existence -- if you have a stock and it's in a dividend re-investment program, which is effectively exactly what they were doing, you DO PAY TAXES on those dividends, even though you chose to re-invest. That's another reason I agree with the USSC on this one. Their Indian corporation was making money, but not calling it a "dividend", and they kept putting it back in....sorry that's basically tax evasion by US code.

 JSobieski
3 hours ago edited
This is nothing new and it is nothing bad.

Scalia and Thomas, while they voted more similarly than any other two justices during their shared tenure, actually had a BIG philosophical difference in how they approached the job. Barrett is kind of taking of making the Scalia-esque point, but because people see things almost exclusively through a political lens, they miss the bigger picture and context for the disagreement.

Justice Thomas is someone who subscribes to the concept of "natural law". A snarky liberal might call this concept the right-wing version of substantive due process, although natural law has a pedigree older than the US. https://www.thepublicdiscou...

Justice Scalia in contrast was a strict textualist. This approach is often referred to as "legal positivism". Scalia is famous for ignoring things like legislative history for example. https://www.cmc.edu/salvato... .

These two men agreed on the outcome the vast majority of the time, but their approaches to that outcome were actually quite different. Thomas was called Scalia's lapdog by people who looked at things through a political lens, but philosophically, they were in some ways very very different.

Barrett is apparently Scalia's intellectual heir... at least in this particular dispute.

Tolly JSobieski
2 hours ago
'Justice Scalia in contrast was a strict textualist.'

Agreed. Where some go sideways, I believe, is that some believe "textualism" equates to "originalist". There are distinctions. Those distinctions are many times found whenever the text of an Act are at issue, in the first instance, and when the provisions of the Constitution are in question, in the second.

etba_ss JSobieski
2 hours ago
Well said.

And Thomas' philosophy is superior.

JSobieski etba_ss
2 hours ago
Maybe. It depends on how much your prioritize self government.

There is some validity to the argument that "natural law" is just the right-wing version of "substantive due process", i.e. a doctrine that is sufficiently malleable to reach whatever outcome is desired.

When I was in law school, I agreed with you. But now as a seasoned lawyer and a long time follower of politics, I think strict textualism is the best way to constrain the judiciary. Of course, constraining the judificiary may then in fact enable Congress to overreach---so it is a pick your poison kind of thing.

There is a lot to be said for legal positivism.

Scholar JSobieski
2 hours ago
The question is the preference whether constraining judiciary or the legislature. The Founders preferred the latter as they are the representatives of the people. If Common Law was not so outdated we didn't have to have this dillema.

Tolly JSobieski
2 hours ago
Don't you mean constraining the legislators? If legislation was enacted that respected what the judiciary has already achieved by substantive due process, what then is the need for any other argument than precedent?; or "pedigree rather than principle", as Justice Barrett argues?

JSobieski Tolly
an hour ago
I mean constraining the legislature---the collective action of legislators. I guess you could call taht constraining legislation, but it is more common to think of constraining people. Separation of powers is typically said to constrain the branches of government, not the outputs created by the three branches of government. Same with respect to the constraining impact of federalism (prior to the income tax and New Deal expansion of the Commerce Clause).

Mrs. Alito, in my opinion, is quickly approaching legend/thug life status in my book for how she's responded to the nontroversies, unapologetic while poking a gigantic needle in all the leftist stereotype balloons about supposedly meek and subservient conservative wives.

But beyond that, her remarks have indeed undercut the central argument behind the New York Times' flag hit pieces and the corresponding blowback from left-wing critics and other various and assorted hacktivists. She indeed is the one who flew the flags, not her husband, who she also confirmed is not a flag aficionado at all.

The unanimous court in Vullo held that the National Rifle Association (NRA) had sufficiently alleged a First Amendment claim against the New York superintendent of financial services. While the vindication of free speech rights is the top-line takeaway from Thursday’s 9-0 decision, there is much more to glean from the 20-page opinion and two concurrences. Here are five key points.

1. The Decision Focused Solely on Government Coercion //

2. Some Great Language for Lovers of Free Speech //

“The Constitution does not distinguish between ‘comply or I’ll prosecute’ and ‘comply and I’ll look the other way,’” the Supreme Court explained, stressing whether something is “analyzed as a threat or as an inducement,” is irrelevant—“the conclusion is the same,” namely the communications are “coercive” and thus violate the First Amendment.

This judicial gloss to “coercion” provides a fulsome protection of free speech rights by allowing “coercion” to be established by either “a threat” or “an inducement.” The court’s unanimous opinion includes additional broad language further protecting American rights to freedom of speech. //

3. The Disinformation Industry Are The Baddies at Protecting Democracy

In ruling in favor of the NRA, the Supreme Court stressed that “at the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.” That passage provides an important reminder to Americans of the value of diverse viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas and a warning that suppressing disfavored speech is inherently destructive to a sustained democracy.

Coordinated attacks on SCOTUS’s integrity, led by Democrats and their allies in the corporate media, try to deceive Americans into believing partisans hijacked the highest court in the land and ideologically fractured it into near-dysfunction. The prominence of unanimous opinions and even more unanimous judgments not only discredits this notion but suggests a far more concerning narrative about the politicization of lower courts.

Since its inception, the Supreme Court has wielded its authority to deliver decisions rooted in bench agreement. In recent years, especially, justices “defied critics” with “historic unanimity” on cases that circuit, appeals, and state supreme courts decided in defiance of the Constitution. Of the 32 cases already decided in the 2023 term, 21 of the judgments were agreed upon by all of the presiding justices. Many of them signaled justices’ concern that lower courts abused their ruling power to violate the Constitution. //

The Supreme Court’s recent string of unanimous decisions not only serves as a reminder that corporate media are deliberately deceptive, but also suggests that lower courts are abusing their power to achieve partisan and, more importantly, unconstitutional results.

A unanimous Supreme Court found that the First Amendment exists even in New York, even when the government hates what you have to say. As unbelievable as it sounds, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the opinion stating, "The critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries." //

The NRA appealed because if the Second Circuit's ruling prevailed, the First Amendment basically ceased to exist. Even the ACLU recognized the danger and represented the NRA.

This decision is a clear victory for the First Amendment and for the NRA. The case is headed back for trial in district court, and given this decision and Sotomayor's reasoning (yes, it's scary to write that), it will be difficult for Vullo to evade what happens next. The only rathole available to her is a claim of "qualified immunity." Sotomayor told the Second Circuit to determine if Vullo was eligible, but the original district court ruling and a footnote in Sotomayor's opinion cast a lot of doubt on that claim.

Like a rabid dog gnawing on a bone, the New York Times will just not let go of the non-story involving Justice Samuel Alito's wife, Martha-Ann, and a 2021 dispute with a neighbor that allegedly culminated in Mrs. Alito "briefly" flying the American flag upside down 11 days after the Capitol riot.

Not even counting the guest essays, letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and Spanish language versions they've published on the issue, by my count they've published nine - count 'em - nine articles over the last two weeks related to flag-flying at the homes of the Alito family, from the upside down one at their primary residence in 2021 to the Revolutionary War-era "Appeal to Heaven" flag that was flown at various points in 2023 at their beach house.

The insinuations have been clear in all of them: In their view and that of their "experts," due to the alleged Jan. 6th symbolism of the flags, Mrs. Alito is sympathetic to the beliefs of the Capitol rioters and as such, her alleged beliefs have compromised Justice Alito's ability to impartially judge cases related to Jan. 6 and the 2020 presidential election. //

We are looking at a completely fabricated outrage, and the press has resorted to reporting on the “growing” tide of indignation to have Alito step down – coming from the press. This lame attempt is producing little more than eye-rolling from the public. The news outlets need to wave their white flags on this issue.

And upside down if they have to.

As Alito has famously said in the past, Congress did not create the Supreme Court, the Constitution did. It is not any Democrat hack's job to "fix" the court, and certainly, no one in Congress has the credibility to do absolutely anything regarding it.

"Fixing" it isn't the real purpose of the current left-wing hysteria, though. The real purpose is to garner more power.

My words will perhaps seem somewhat vintage in character rather than current or up-to-date. In that context, I admit to being unapologetically Catholic, unapologetically patriotic, and unapologetically a constitutionalist.

[...]

Let me offer you, this year’s graduates, a few brief suggestions about making your deposits in the account of liberty. Today is just the end of the beginning of your young lives, and the beginning, the commencement of the rest of your lives. There is much more to come, and it will not be with the guiding hands of your parents—indeed, they may someday need your hand to guide them. Some of you will most assuredly be called upon to do very hard things to preserve liberty. All of you will be called upon to provide a firm foundation of citizenship by carrying out your obligations in the way so many preceding generations have done. You are to be the example to others that those generations have been to us. And in being that example, what you do will matter far more than what you say.

Thomas… described Washington as a place where “people pride themselves in being awful.”

“It is a hideous place as far as I’m concerned,” Thomas said.

“It’s one of the reasons we like RVing,” he added. “You get to be around regular people who don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things merely because they have the capacity to do it or because they disagree.”

Thomas should know—he was at the center of the Anita Hill fiasco—overseen by then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden—where he was subjected to evidence-free, humiliating claims of sexual harassment during his SCOTUS confirmation hearings in 1991. Biden not surprisingly—in a preview of what has befallen us—utterly failed to control the proceedings, and they became a national embarrassment that decades later led to the equally clownish Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process.

Central to the former Justice Antonin Scalia law clerk's arguments in January and Thursday is that when a man becomes president, he becomes a part of the constitutional machinery, no longer a regular citizen.

In this construct, the president is always the president, and the only way to laicize him is through a House impeachment and a Senate conviction for conduct that then becomes vulnerable to criminal prosecution. //

etba_ss Cappy Hamper
2 hours ago
It is actually worse. Roberts is the worst sort of justice, where in an attempt to preserve the "integrity" of the Court and avoid wading into political matters, his decisions are always guided by politics, not the law. In an effort to appear above politics, he is the most political creature on the Court.

Not political in the sense of advancing one party, but political in that every decision is filtered through the lens of how it will be viewed, the consequences, attacks, and preserving the Court's power. He sees himself as the hero of the SCOTUS, whose job it is to protect its power far more than to correctly interpret the Constitution and the law. This is why he upheld Obamacare under the "tax" provision, while ignoring that he had to disagree with his own opinion to take the case up. This is why he wanted to uphold the LA law in Dobbs, but not overturn Roe.

I think it would be preferable if they had pictures of him. Instead, he really just is this cowardly, feckless, weak and depraved. //

Random US Citizen etba_ss
2 hours ago
Roberts has turned the SC in to My Lai--he's destroying the court in order to "save" it. History isn't going to look kindly on that, either because constitutional order will fail and Roberts attacks on the rule of law will be seen as one cause of the collapse, or because constitutional order will prevail (an unlikely outcome) and he'll be seen as an obstacle that had to be overcome.

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. //

anon-of-yo-biz
2 hours ago
Is it really being argued that Bin laden was a "political" enemy? Was Hitler a "political" enemy? Can we never object against tyranny, hatred, and murder unless we have compatible political or religious views? It seems that the word bigot has grow to include all forms of just resistance. //

Cafeblue32 anon-of-yo-biz
an hour ago edited
This is intentional. The left is destroying language by making specific terms no longer their definition, or getting rid of them altogether. The purpose of language is clear and precise comminication so as to not be misunderstood and creat a bunch of unneccesary problems.The left's purpose is to deconstruct language to be less clear, so specific sexes become they/thems, Catperson, or whatever the hell. They remove gender indicators in gender-specific languages. They use persons instead of men and women, family units instead of marriage and family, how is everyone instead of "How are you guys doing?" The more generic they can make the language, the more they can re-invent it to mean whatever they want it to mean.

And here we are-men are women, Israel is genocidal, Palestine is a legitimate state, Putin is ready to roll into New York, illegal able bodies men wearing expensive jeans and sneakers are refugees, illegal squatters are residents, the American flag is racist and the LGBTGFY flag is to fly high above them all everywhere an American flag is flown around ther world. Working class conservatives are racists and fascists while Palestininas calling for the end of Jews and demand for sharia law are freedom fighters. Etc etc.

Rush said it long ago: words mean things. That's why they work so hard to destroy them.

Blue State Deplorable
5 hours ago

Justice Alito just asked Dreeben about the wisdom of his approach to just rely on the discretion and good motivations of Justice Department officials given the history of abusive, partisan prosecutions...

That’s one hellluva rebuke right there from Justice Alito. 😂

2E Son of Nel
5 hours ago

Roberts just slammed the lower court "a former president can be prosecuted for his official acts because the fact of the prosecution means that the former president has acted in defiance of the laws."

Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty? "The fact of prosecution" does not mean that he has "acted in defiance of the laws." It merely means that he's accused of acting in defiance of the laws. Presumably the accuser still has to prove his case.

Roberts was entirely correct here. But with Democrats prosecuting Republicans it's always "the seriousness of the charges" and not the evidence that matters. //

Min Headroom llme 2E Son of Nel
3 hours ago edited
I found the argument that being prosecuted is proof that the defendant broke laws breathtaking. It’s worthy of Stalinist Russia, and if democrats want to blather about threats to democracy, then this is it. //

bpbatch
5 hours ago
The breakneck speed that all of these trials are occurring and the reaction immediately necessitated by SCOTUS is more Cloward/Piven "flood the system" Marxist garbage in real time. Pray the Court takes the time to breathe and make an intelligent, measured, and patient decision in all of these matters. //

To this point, the conservative justices have shown some skepticism of the government's case, which U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is presenting. On that front, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked a question that many of us have been pondering. Namely, he asked whether Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who pulled a fire alarm before an important House vote and impeded a congressional proceeding, could be charged under the same statute. Astonishingly, the government responded with a "no." //

Returning to Bowman, he pulled a fire alarm during a voting session in the House of Representatives. Congressional members had to be evacuated, and the vote was postponed. That is a textbook example of obstructing an official proceeding, and the government's justification for not charging him is basically "because we say it doesn't count." //

etba_ss
an hour ago
I'm not sure they really care at this point. They've milked and milked and milked J6 as much as they can. They've set an example and a standard that they can do whatever they want to you if your politics do not align. The time to have been providing relief in these cases is not April 2024, but in April 2021.

I don't mean to say that it doesn't matter, but this is one of those issues that the damage has largely been done on. The whole point of J6 is to influence elections and suppress dissent, including covering up fraud and electioneering during the 2020 election. All serious efforts at exposing the issues in 2020 stopped after J6. That was the main purpose and it was instantly successful.

The time is coming where Governors, state legislators, sheriffs, etc. decide if they will follow the law and the Constitution or the federal government and the court system. The two things are not the same. We shouldn't ignore the courts for "light and transient causes", but if our Founders were willing to pick up a musket and risk the very real possibility of being hung for traitors, telling the federal government and/or the federal courts "no" isn't too much to ask. Again, you don't do this because you disagree with some largely irrelevant statute, but when it comes to such basic things as border security, liberty and political prosecution, those things aren't "light and transient causes", but ones that are fundamental to the existence of a constitutional republic. //

etba_ss Hallen
38 minutes ago edited
The problem with the court upholding the law, even if they thought it was valid and could be applied is that selective prosecution violates a higher law. The Constitution is supreme to the court or to any Congressionally issued statute or law. The Constitution includes "equal protection under the law". Selective prosecution on the basis of political connections or ideology is a direct violation of the US Constitution. So Congress could pass a law saying that it is illegal to be a Republican. That law would violate the Constitution and be thrown out.

So either the law itself must be thrown out, or at least its application in this case must be thrown out. It is a gross violation of the Constitution, which is what Gorsuch is pointing out.

As you may have noticed, I’m a fan of history. So, I’ll close with a piece of historical trivia:

Only one man has ever been both president (1909-1913) and then on the Supreme Court, weighing 320 pounds at 5-foot-11. That was Ohioan William Howard Taft, who liked steaks so much he would at times have one at every daily meal.

Taft was a friendly man, the first president to own a car, and the last to keep a cow at the White House for fresh milk. He also began the presidential tradition of throwing out the first baseball of a new season.

Taft lost reelection in 1912 to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1921, President Warren Harding named him Chief Justice.

Taft took retirement in February 1930. It was brief. He died one month later.

Irrespective of how it comes down in this case, the federal government’s position combined with the clear-cut support from the court’s three left-most judges speaks to the extent to which free speech is in deep trouble in this country.

What follows are some of the most critical, and often disturbing, takeaways from oral arguments.

1. Feds Are Appalled at the Probing of Their Speech Policing

2. Feds Believe Their Censorship Is Legitimate So Long as it Doesn’t Strong-Arm Anyone

3. Feds Framed Their Censorship as a Right to Speak

4. The Feds Want SCOTUS to Bless Their Speech Policing During the Election

5. Public Health Emergencies Justify Censorship, Feds Argue

6. Justice Jackson Revealed Her Radical Anti-Speech Position

7. Justice Kavanaugh Seems Likely to Cave

8. The Plaintiffs Backed Down Under Duress, and That’s Concerning for All of Us

If this view prevails, we will face an extinction-level event for the First Amendment, or at least what’s left of it.

Anya Bidwell, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, the organization representing Gonzalez claims the city arrested the former councilmember as retaliation for her constant criticism of the mayor and other officials.

“In America, we don’t arrest our critics," she said.

The arrest led to Gonzalez’s lawsuit against the city, which invoked qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil liability unless it is established that they violated a Constitutional right.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling on this case could reach far beyond Castle Hills. It could redefine the landscape of free speech and government accountability. Depending on how the court decides, it could become harder for government officials to use their positions to punish those who criticize them.

Again, though, this says nothing about the merits of Fikre's claim (or the government's maintenance of such a list). It just says the government cannot render a case moot merely by undoing what it initially did without some reasonable demonstration that it won't turn right back around and do the same thing.

So why is Ford back in the news? On the surface, it's to make money off her new memoir, but that only speaks to her motivation. The motivation of ABC News and other outlets to once again platform her is not some book that likely won't sell well. It's to ramp up attacks on the Supreme Court during an election year.

Members of the press and the Democratic Party are currently in the midst of a war against the nation's highest court, and the goal is to discredit it by any means necessary heading into November. The more anger is driven at the Supreme Court, the more the left feels it will benefit from voters who disapprove of recent decisions spanning abortion to gun rights. Marching Ford back into the spotlight is yet another way to act as if the current makeup of the court is illegitimate.