Papantonio: SCOTUS Is Rotten At The Top
The recent Supreme Court decision in the McCutcheon case proved that the Roberts court removed all doubt that the court is in the pocket of big business. And it goes even further than just being pro-business – the court has been completely corrupted. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio talks about this with attorney Joe Cotchett.
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If you want to point fingers you need to go to the source.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bush v. Gore
Full case name
George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr. and Joseph Lieberman, et al.z
Holding
In the circumstances of this case, any manual recount of votes seeking to meet the December 12 “safe harbor” deadline would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Florida Supreme Court reversed and remanded.
Court membership
Chief Justice
William Rehnquist
Associate Justices
John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor
Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
David Souter · Clarence Thomas
Ruth Bader Ginsburg · Stephen Breyer
Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), is the United States Supreme Court decision that effectively resolved the dispute surrounding the 2000 presidential election. Three days earlier, the Court had preliminarily halted a recount that was occurring. Eight days earlier, the Court unanimously decided the closely related case of Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000).
In a per curiam decision, the Court, by a 5-4 vote,[1][2] ruled that no alternative method could be established within the time limit set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5 ("Determination of controversy as to appointment of electors"
, which was December 12.
We shall see how Scalia comes down. I think the Smith/marjuana case kind of boxes him in, but Scalia is such a scoundrel, so low that it may turn out that he twists him mouth and turns his Smith decision into a "go for it" to Hobby Lobby. He is that twisted and malign. We shall see.
I think if he decides in favor of Hobby Lobby, he will be viewed as Papantonio said of Roberts, as "just a politician."
Here, Scalia reviewed the precedents he thought relevant to the Smith decision:
Our most recent decision involving a neutral, generally applicable regulatory law that compelled activity forbidden by an individual's religion was United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. at 258-261. There, an Amish employer, on behalf of himself and his employees, sought exemption from collection and payment of Social Security taxes on the ground that the Amish faith prohibited participation in governmental support programs. We rejected the claim that an exemption was constitutionally required. There would be no way, we observed, to distinguish the Amish believer's objection to Social Security taxes from the religious objections that others might have to the collection or use of other taxes.
If, for example, a religious adherent believes war is a sin, and if a certain percentage of the federal budget can be identified as devoted to war-related activities, such individuals would have a similarly valid claim to be exempt from paying that percentage of the income tax. The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge the tax system because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.
Id. at 260. Cf. Hernandez v. Commissioner, 490 U.S. 680 (1989) (rejecting free exercise challenge to payment of income taxes alleged to make religious activities more difficult). [p881]
The only decisions in which we have held that the First Amendment bars application of a neutral, generally applicable law to religiously motivated action have involved not the Free Exercise Clause alone, but the Free Exercise Clause in conjunction with other constitutional protections, such as freedom of speech and of the press, see Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. at 304, 307 (invalidating a licensing system for religious and charitable solicitations under which the administrator had discretion to deny a license to any cause he deemed nonreligious); Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105 (1943) (invalidating a flat tax on solicitation as applied to the dissemination of religious ideas); Follett v. McCormick, 321 U.S. 573 (1944) (same), or the right of parents, acknowledged in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), to direct the education of their children, see Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972) (invalidating compulsory school attendance laws as applied to Amish parents who refused on religious grounds to send their children to school). [n1] [p882] Some of our cases prohibiting compelled expression, decided exclusively upon free speech grounds, have also involved freedom of religion, cf. Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977) (invalidating compelled display of a license plate slogan that offended individual religious beliefs); West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) (invalidating compulsory flag salute statute challenged by religious objectors). And it is easy to envision a case in which a challenge on freedom of association grounds would likewise be reinforced by Free Exercise Clause concerns. Cf. Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609, 622 (1983) ("An individual's freedom to speak, to worship, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances could not be vigorously protected from interference by the State [if] a correlative freedom to engage in group effort toward those ends were not also guaranteed." .
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/494/872
Scalia will look ridiculous if he decides in favor of Hobby Lobby. He will look like a Catholic using his position on the Supreme Court to impose his personal beliefs about sexual morality on the rest of the country.
It is difficult for ordinary Americans to understand Citizens United and other pro-corporate decisions by this conservative Court, but I think they will understand what is going on with the Court if it decides against birth control in the Hobby Lobby case. That decision could affect many, many American families and finally stir the liberal religious community to action.