News

Because we know how well things have turned out when courts, such as the Supreme Court, rules on things it believes are "ambiguous".

Supreme Court Jan. 6 ruling https://archive.is/3YrYN

The obstruction of an official proceeding statute makes it a felony crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to “obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding.”

But the law, first passed in the wake of the 2001 Enron scandal, is vague about what constitutes an official proceeding and what conduct would constitute an illegal effort to obstruct one.

the law, as originally conceived in 2002, was intended to criminalize the type of evidence destruction and witness tampering that stymied Congressional investigators during the Enron collapse. It was not meant, they argue, to apply to any form disruptive conduct that interferes with any act of Congress.

But federal prosecutors and lower courts have ruled that the statute’s language is vague enough to encompass the type of disruption that brought the Congressional certification of the 2020 electoral vote to a halt during the Jan. 6 riot.

the court concluded the obstruction charge was only intended to apply in limited circumstances involving tampering with physical evidence. It doesn’t apply to the type of behavior that disrupted Congress’ certification of the 2020 vote, the majority ruled.

Surely this decision will be a net positive for the average American and won't be used as part of a malicious scheme to widen the wealth gap. /s

Friday June 28th, 2024. The day the Supreme Court forcibly sodomized America.

Speaking of which, I await their 'legalize rape' decision which I'm guessing will be on the docket by 2026.

Fuck it, why not rule that it all has to go through the Fifth Circuit too?

This means that anyone who doesn't like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn't a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.

This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can't actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone's constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.

This is a weird power grab from the court. Chevron already allows that the courts can decide what Congressional intent it. The deference to agencies only comes once they determine the law is ambiguous. In a different world, where we had expert courts full of engineers and analysts, this might even produce better results than the current system, but we do not, and Judges opining on technical fields are probably the only thing worse than engineers opining on the use of language, LOL.

I suppose if Trump wins and guts the career professionals in the executive branch and replaces them with partisan hacks at every level, we could end up glad this ruling happened, but agencies already had to act with a certain respect for internal rules and "reasonableness". What's more likely is that this SCOTUS will make sure it passes the final word on every significant regulatory question that arises in the next 20 years, and somehow magically the status quo that was being abused will become the law, even when it has only the thinnest threads of non-technical justification. Or worse, everything is now up for re-litigation and nobody knows WTF anything will mean anymore.

Fuck