Supreme court

No, Kamala Harris will not be Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Steven Breyer when he retires from the Supreme Court later this year. “Imminent Supreme Court retirement?” ejaculated CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin earlier this month. “Longshot: VP Kamala Harris,” he suggested. NBC scooped on Wednesday that Breyer would step down at the end of this term — and more cranks joined the Kamala chorus. “Kamala Harris for the Supreme Court. #KHive She cannot win election with these numbers (yes it’s unfair, but Kamala is a pragmatist) she’s young, she’d be a great justice — and she’d spend a lifetime on the bench,” tweeted Louise Mensch. “@amyklobuchar for Vice President.” “Straightforward from here,” wrote Bill Kristol.

In the months before and after the 2020 presidential election, I was ready to take the blackpill. I had become convinced that our culture was on an irreversible decline into ever greater depths of progressive depravity and that reactionary politics would only make things worse. Trump had poured fuel on the fires he was supposed to be extinguishing. Every institution that had been neutral in 2016 was overtly woke by 2020. Even as he was emboldening the left, Trump was also corrupting the right. People I love were becoming crude, cruel, and cultish. The Christian right had utterly beclowned itself at the Jericho March.

What should we make of the Times story yesterday, which appeared under the headline ‘Boris Johnson Plans To Let Ministers Throw Out Legal Rulings’? The impression given is that ministers will somehow be handed powers by the Prime Minister simply to ignore court rulings that they do not like. That would lead to an extraordinary constitutional crisis, involving either the arrest and imprisonment of ministers for contempt of court, or the arrest and imprisonment of judges with the government exercising Erdogan-style despotism. Nobody can seriously believe that this is what is intended, and the rest of the Times story makes clear that it is not.

Nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade unleashed a constitutional right to abortion and redefined modern American politics, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has arrived as its foil. In a term already packed with high-profile cases ranging from gun rights to religious liberty to the death penalty, the Supreme Court has announced it will hear arguments in Dobbs on December 1. In doing so, the Court has opened the door to overturning Roe and its sister case, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, sending the question of legal abortion back to the states. The case itself centers on a 2018 Mississippi law that, with limited exceptions, bars abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy.

For a people supposedly united by their great and abiding love of freedom, the pandemic year has been an interesting test of Americans' commitment to their country's founding principles. Sure, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are great — but have you tried surveilling, spying and snitching on your neighbors amid an endless state of emergency? Turns out, many folks in the US are quite willing to sacrifice various freedoms if it means they get to scold and punish others, particularly their ideological opponents, for breaking the rules. The past two years have seen many Americans embrace their inner authoritarians, treating shamings like a spectator sport and excoriating the noncompliant with evangelical zeal.

The battle to overturn Roe v. Wade is nearly over. The battle to end abortion is about to begin. When the Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law banning abortion after six weeks, the pro-life movement won its first significant victory in decades. Next year, SCOTUS will rule on a Mississippi law that directly challenges Roe v. Wade. If Roe survives, the fight to overturn it is over, at least for our lifetimes. Abortion as a constitutional right will become truly settled law. If Roe falls, or is narrowed, the fight will turn to the states. Either way, the war is about to enter a new phase, and to that end pro-lifers should keep three things in mind. 1.

In a statement which will doubtless surprise the scores of lawyers, democratic politicians and human rights activists who are currently in jail awaiting show trials under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, the UK Supreme Court today made an announcement which is the best piece of free PR that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam has had in years. The President of the Supreme Court, Lord Reed, has issued a statement saying that UK judges will be staying on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal and that ‘the judiciary in Hong Kong continues to act largely independently of government and their decisions continue to be consistent with the rule of law.

The Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting laws on Thursday in a case that could have major implications for election integrity across the country. The two Arizona laws at stake in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee prohibited ballot harvesting — which most commonly refers to political operatives collecting voters's ballots en masse and turning them in to polling places on their behalf — and tossed ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct. The DNC argued in its initial lawsuit that the laws violated the Voting Rights Act because they were discriminatory against minorities and did not appear to prevent voter fraud.

A striking curiosity of American life is that the names of legal cases can insinuate themselves into everyday dialogue. None more so, of course, than Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision where a majority-liberal Supreme Court extracted from the Constitution’s protection of life, liberty and property a constitutional right to abortion: absolute in the first trimester, qualified in the second, and, in rare cases, even in the third. In a 1992 fine-tuning exercise, the rule was re-written as a right to abortion unless and until the foetus was viable at about 24 weeks. But the principle remains. Southern and rural states always saw Roe v Wade as a liberal aberration. Three years ago, Mississippi, where public opinion remains obstinately pro-life, threw down the gauntlet.

Poor Colin Kahl. The Stanford professor is qualified, experienced, and shares President Biden’s views on defense and foreign policy. Ordinarily, that would be enough to get confirmed to a job like undersecretary of defense for policy. But no more! Three and a half years after #MeToo, the casting couch has migrated from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, thanks to Sen. Tammy Duckworth. On Tuesday, Sen. Duckworth announced that, since President Biden’s political appointees were insufficiently diverse, she would be voting against any Biden nominees with white skin color, starting with Kahl. The only exception, Duckworth said, would be for LGBTQ nominees. Well, Kahl will have a hard time pulling off a racial rebranding this late.

Shamima Begum is back in the news. Firstly because she’s had a makeover. She can be seen on the front page of today’s Telegraph sporting long, flowing locks, trendy shades and Western clothing. Is Shamima the Islamist now aspiring to be Shamima the celeb? Perhaps she’s angling for her own reality TV show: The Real Housewives of Raqqa. But the second reason she’s in the news is because the British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor has expressed sympathy for her. He says she’s a victim of British racism. I really wish Sir Anish would stick to what he’s (very) good at — public art installations — and leave the Shamima business alone. Because his comments are risible.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most important cases for voting rights in decades. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee centers on two Arizona measures aimed at voter integrity. The first prevents individuals from casting their ballot in the wrong precinct and the second prohibits ballot harvesting. The question at stake is whether these measures and others like them violate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election rules from disenfranchising minorities. The DNC's lawyers seem to argue that any election safeguard measure is discriminatory. If Biden thinks people of color don't know how to use the internet, then the DNC thinks they can't follow election laws.

‘Disappointed but not surprised.’ I suppose that describes my initial feeling about the summary dismissal by the Supreme Court last night of the ‘audacious’ (the New York Times) lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on December 8. In essence, Texas argued that those four states had trespassed on the civil rights of citizens by favoring some voters over others in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amusing and perspicacious commentator known as Ace of Spades added a bit of hot sauce in his response to the news of the Court’s ruling. ‘The ultimate Friday Night News Dump,’ he wrote.