Trump's "Pervy Page" And Sotomayor's Dissent On ICE Profiling

 

Stephen Colbert discusses the release of several pages of notorious sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book, including a salacious verse and doodle by his best friend the convicted sexual abuser Malignant Fascist;  and Justice Sotomayor's dissent on the Republican Supreme Court's ugly and un-American decision allowing ICE goons to racially profile and target Latinos for deportation, citizens or not.  Colbert read a succinct summary of the issue from Sotomayor's dissent:

“We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work in a low-wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our Constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

Justice Sotomayor was a guest on the show, and you can see Colbert's interview with her here.

QOTD -- Six Murderous Hypocrites

 

"On October 1, 2017, a shooter opened fire from a hotel room overlooking an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Nevada, in what would become the deadliest mass shooting in U. S. history. Within a matter of minutes, using several hundred rounds of ammunition, the shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500. He did so by affixing bump stocks to commonly available, semiautomatic rifles. These simple devices harness a rifle’s recoil energy to slide the rifle back and forth and repeatedly 'bump' the shooter’s stationary trigger finger, creating rapid fire. All the shooter had to do was pull the trigger and press the gun forward. The bump stock did the rest.

"Congress has sharply restricted civilian ownership of machineguns since 1934. Federal law defines a 'machinegun' as a weapon that can shoot 'automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.' 26 U. S. C. §5845(b). Shortly after the Las Vegas massacre, the Trump administration, with widespread bipartisan support, banned bump stocks as machineguns under the statute.

"Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of 'machinegun' and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose. When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires 'automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.'  §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent..." -- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Garland v. Cargill (pdf), in which the illegitimate Republican Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to lift the ban on bump stocks that even the Malignant Loser's regime supported.  In their utter, shameless hypocrisy, the six repellant Republican "justices" who are so devoted to "life" that they struck down Roe v. Wade (thereby impacting and imperiling the lives of millions of American women), have now said this murderous device can be loosed again into the population.  Mark these words:  they will have blood on their hands.

Quotes Of The Day -- On Trump Immunity Claims

 

“The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to.  And, you know, not so surprising, they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”  -- Justice Elena Kagan at yesterday's hearing at the corrupt Republican Supreme Court on the Malignant Loser's claim of absolute immunity for crimes committed while in office.

____________________

“If he’s not covered by the criminal law, he can’t be impeached for violating it at all.”  -- Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the same hearing pointing out the absurdity of the Malignant Loser's argument.

QOTD -- Profoundly Wrong

 

Excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in 303 Creative LLC, et al., where the Republican Supreme Court supermajority ruled that discrimination against LGTBQ people is allowed in a public business:

... Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website- design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public. The Court also holds that the company has a right to post a notice that says, “no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages.” [snip]

And not just at the Court. Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar. When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims. 

Now the Court faces a similar test. A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner's religious belief that same-sex marriages are “false.” The business argues, and a majority of the Court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services. That is wrong. Profoundly wrong. As T will explain, the law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group. I dissent...

Expect the bigots in our midst to continue to chip away at the rights and freedoms Americans have enjoyed for decades, and for those bigots to be supported and enabled by the 6 lying, Republican pols- in- robes on the corrupt Supreme Court.  

There are no precedents, there are no super- precedents.  In the future, that should also apply to Supreme Court justice tenure and number of justices.  The dam has been breached.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor presses the ball releasing the giant New Years Ball in New York City's Times Square last night.

(photo:  Timothy Clary, AFP/Getty Images)

BONUS: Even if we weren't Anglophiles, we'd have to love this video of New Year's celebrations in London (watch full screen):

Waiting For A Porn Case To Ask Questions?

Think Progress notes that new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (yes!) has asked more questions during oral arguments in one hour than right-wing Justice Clarence "Uncle" Thomas has asked in several years. Uncle Thomas once went three years without asking a question during oral arguments. That's hard to believe; the Court must have had pornography cases to consider during that time. . . .
(photo: Uncle Thomas asks, "Could I see those pictures again?")