Today in Supreme Court History: July 31, 2018

7/31/2018: Justice Anthony Kennedy retired.

Justice Anthony Kennedy

 

Comments

[Supremacy Claus]

What a disgraceful weasel this Harvard indoctrinated, Deep State member is. I enjoyed watching him beg for pay raises. He then betrayed the country by overturning a statute for woke. Homosexual marriage will never be more than a friendship. Marriage is to force the male in the family so children can be raised by 2 parents. If you hate homosexuals, inflict the torments of marriage. They are smart and rich. They are not falling for this lawyer trap, with a rate under 15%. This decision was to get business for the moribund family law specialty to plunder the assets of the productive party.

[Krayt]

The real marriage to most is by the priest, not a legal slip of paper in a government office. If religious, what do you care what government does? It doesn't count. Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's and so on. If atheist, why let that bugaboo atavism inhabit your mind?

As for tormenting them with the infliction of marriage, that comedy routine has already been done, though I do appreciate the cynicism of lawyers.

[Supremacy Claus]

Only a suicidal fool would get married if productive. The less productive party is collecting a money bounty for destroying the life of the productive party. I once thought the law was biased against males. Then, I listened to the story of a female doctor getting a divorce from her stay home husband, a lawyer. Family court judges are out of control, heartless, little tyrants. They must be severely punished for their state-sponsored family destruction . They are there to enrich the lawyer profession, to destroy the American family, and to attack our nation with big government in utter failure.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

There's also the problem of spouses and free rides. Been ages since I saw anything about it, so some of these details are wrong, but ...

When SSA started in the 1930s, unpaid housewives were assumed covered by the husband's FICA deductions and SSA benefits. As divorce became easier and more common, divorced wives got some SSA benefits without ever having paid FICA taxes, and I don't think the husband's benefits were reduced to even partially compensate. Then the parties remarried, there was more crossing of the streams, and neither FICA taxes nor SSA benefits were properly adjusted.

Teh gay marriage added its own wrinkles. Poly marriage would be much worse.

All because government runs the show. If they had been private pensions from the start, even if mandated by government, they would have been community property or some other form of property with a real and finite value. But not once the politicians stepped in.

Government is always the problem.

[apedad]

You allude to 'Government' as some foreign entity that We the People have no control over.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

A. You are deluded if you do think people control government.

B. You are doubly deluded if you rant about Trump while thinking people control government.

[JasonT20]

A. You are deluded if you do think people control government.

The people do control the government. They just choose not to exercise that power effectively. Some prefer to not think about politics enough to notice how the economic and political elite do what benefits them instead of what benefits the people. Some prefer to focus on things that impact their lives an order of magnitude less (if that) than the policies that politicians enact that are against their wishes and interests. Other voters are happy to pick and cheer the politicians that promise to punish whatever groups those voters don't like. And most voters choose to ignore all the ways that the side they picked works to make their voting choices even less effective.

The voters can vote out a government that they don't like anytime they want to. They are choosing not to do that because they are too afraid that this would mean that the "other side" will win. They don't understand that this is exactly what the people they vote for want them to think. It is exactly how these voters are manipulated into voting against what they want and against what benefits them, over and over and over again.

This is the folly of partisan thinking as voters. No voter is on "your side" and no voter is on the "other side". There is only the side of the people as a whole. Voting is how the whole of the people exercise their power to choose their government. We won't like the choices that the majority makes when we had chosen something else, but that is life. The only method where we always get what we want when we vote is to not let other people vote if they disagree with us.

We should be making our voting choices the same way we choose consumer products. I don't have any feelings, good or bad, toward people that like a different soft drink, or that don't like soft drinks at all. Why should I feel so strongly about how other people vote?

(Of course, I do have strong feelings about people that vote differently than I do. I am criticizing myself with that last question.)

[Supremacy Claus]

The coastal tech and fin bros own the Dem Party and the Deep State. The weapons, energy, crypto bros own MAGA. The regular people, like everyone here, own nothing, and no side is looking out for them.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Come on, when the elective local town council does something, it is some infamous thing worthy of special note, even when the local industrial power broker or the local church very well might have more power in the day-to-day lives of the people of the town.

[Frank Drackman]

Could all be solved with a simple Pre-Nup, OK I didn’t get one either (good thing, she made more than me and didn’t have any debt)

Frank

[Supremacy Claus]

Pre-nups have severability clauses. Courts do not enforce any prenup clauses about child custody, visitation, or child support. So the addict spouse, carousing with the hood people, can still extort ruinous concessions, enforced by an awful judge. Child support can include a high percent of income. It can include college tuition to graduation.
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[JoeFromtheBronx]

Marriage has various components and has since the beginning of the institution in ancient civilizations.

It has a personal, religious, and legal component.

Before Loving v. Virginia, a white person and a black person could have a private religious ceremony honoring their marriage in every state. The lack of legal recognition would cause problems, given that marriage also has a legal component.

Likewise, people can form families privately, religiously ("Brother" and "Sister" are common terms here), and legally. The personal connections are often the most important.

Nonetheless, legal recognition has an important role too.

[not guilty]

"Homosexual marriage will never be more than a friendship. Marriage is to force the male in the family so children can be raised by 2 parents."

Uh, male/female dyads were pair bonding and rearing* children long before governments were organized to regulate human affairs.

Marriage and childbearing/rearing are often interrelated, but neither is the sine qua non of the other. Conception is the sometime product of the sexual union of a fertile female and a virile male. They may be married to one another. They may be both unmarried. One or both may be married, but to someone other than the other parent. Gametes don't stop and ask their progenitors' marital status before combining to form zygotes.

Same sex couples marry for many of the same reasons that male/female couples marry: love, companionship, emotional security, financial security, sexual availability, access to benefits attendant to marriage, and so forth. Such couples can have children through assisted reproduction or adoption.

And marriage, irrespective of gender, does not "force" either spouse to stay with the family unit.

______________________
* Livestock are raised; children are reared.

[Frank Drackman]

30 years too late

[F.D. Wolf]

On July 31, 1912, Congress passed the Sims Act, which banned the transportation of films of professional boxing matches in interstate or foreign commerce. A violation carried a penalty of up to $1000 fine and a year in prison. The immediate impetus for the Act had been the Jack Johnson-James Jeffries heavyweight title fight of July 4, 1910, and the nationwide race riots that followed.

Jack Johnson had become the first black heavyweight champion when he defeated champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia in December 1908. Johnson was a flamboyant character, married to a white woman, at a time when such behavior could be very dangerous. He was Muhammad Ali decades before Muhammad Ali. He defeated several white fighters to successfully retain his title. James Jeffries had been the world champion from 1898 to 1904, retiring undefeated. Efforts to coax Jeffries out of retirement had begun soon after Johnson had defeated Burns for the title. Writer Jack London coined the term "the Great White Hope" to describe Jeffries. Jeffries, who had not fought in six years and had to lose 100 lbs. to get back to his fighting weight, said, "I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro".

The fight was scheduled for 20 rounds in Reno, Nevada, Jeffries, who had never been knocked down in his career, was knocked down three times in by Johnson. Johnson won by TKO, when Jeffries' manager stopped the fight in the 15th round. Anti-black violent riots erupted throughout the country, killing between 11 and 26 people (depending on the estimate) and injuring hundreds more. Most of the victims were black, including at least one lynching, though whites were also killed and injured, mostly in acts of self-defense by blacks.

Johnson would lose the title to Jess Willard in April 1915 in a match in Havana, Cuba. Some in the media began to have second thoughts about the Sims Act. Surely, the people would want to see this. Soon after the Johnson-Willard fight, Lawrence Weber attempted to bring a film of the fight from Havana into the United States at the port in Newark. The Customs collector refused to allow the film into the country, citing the Sims Act. Weber sought an injunction in federal district court, but was denied. The Third Circuit affirmed the district court. Weber v. Freed, 224 F. 355 (3rd Cir. 1915).

On December 13, 1915, a unanimous Supreme Court, per Chief Justice White, affirmed. 239 U.S. 325 (1915). A unanimous Court had had already held in February that motion pictures were commerce, unprotected by the First Amendment in Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915), so Weber argued that the Sims Act was an impermissible attempt by Congress to use general police power, a power it did not possess and was reserved to the states. The Court disagreed, holding that Congress' power to regulate foreign commerce was near total.

The Sims Act was finally repealed in 1940.

[Frank Drackman]

You left out the most interesting parts of the Johnson-Willard Fight
1: it went 26 rounds,
2: Johnson claimed for years that he took a dive, pointing out that the still photos showed him shielding his eyes while supposedly unconscious, unfortunately, they also showed him a few seconds later with obvious Decorticate posturing
3: Johnson did quite well after leaving the ring, sort of the early 20th Century version of George Foreman

Frank

[Mr. Bumble]

He was also prosecuted and convicted under the Mann Act.
I believe he received a posthumous pardon from Donald Trump.

[Frank Drackman]

For years I thought it was "Man Act"

[ReaderY]

Films remained completely outside the scope of the First Amendment, i.e. neither “speech” nor “the press,” until Burstyn v. Wilson in 1952.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

A small number of people found the Kennedy retirement suspicious and the process of replacing him part of some conspiracy.

I want to be clear that this is a small group of people. I also am not talking about specific red flags, including Kavanaugh's behavior during his confirmation, which led retired Justice John Paul Stevens to change his mind about supporting him.

I focused on a narrower issue.

Kennedy was a justice for thirty years. He was a powerful justice for thirty years. He became more powerful after O'Connor retired. He was still an important swing vote before then. Kennedy was a lower court judge for another ten or so years on top of that.

It was not surprising that a Republican appointed judge resigned at the age of eighty after a long tenure, while a Republican was in office to replace him. With a former law clerk.

The Kennedy and Trump families developed a relationship that helped smooth things along. Kennedy was caught on mic after Trump's recent speech to Congress complimenting him in some fashion. But I don't think much of a "charm offensive" was necessary for an old man to decide to retire in this context.*

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/04/trump-family-anthony-kennedy-brett-kavanaugh-dark-towers

[I also don't think there was some plot involving Kennedy's son in this whole matter. It does show how incestuous D.C. can be.]

Some Trump critics might have -- given some of Kennedy's rulings -- hoped Kennedy would oppose Trump and not retire. That was naive. Kennedy was even part of the joint dissent in the major Affordable Care Act Case. His liberal bona fides, even if he supported same sex marriage and so forth, were exaggerated.

Kennedy decided to fully retire & not go back to working on the lower court like Justice Breyer is now doing. He, from time to time, makes public comments but has generally been ignored.

===

* Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in a somewhat different position when some wanted her to resign during the Obama Administration. She never had similar importance on the Supreme Court, though she had begun to be the leader of the liberal faction.

Her husband had died. She had less desire to retire and enjoy retirement off the bench. Ginsburg likely expected Clinton to win and replace her. When that did not happen, Ginsburg surely did not want Trump to replace her.

Both did serve in the federal courts for a long time -- Ginsburg since 1980. A term limit would help avoid the whole issue.

[Bob from Ohio]

"specific red flags, including Kavanaugh's behavior during his confirmation"

How was a man supposed to react to Dems suborning perjury?

[JoeFromtheBronx]

I'm not going to assume the premise, but people in court have handled alleged false allegations without acting like Kavanaugh.

[JasonT20]

Yes. This is what got me. I'd have to rewatch the interview, but he sat down with his wife beside him for an interview the day before he testified, iirc. He was fairly calm and straightforward there. I feel that his testimony was a performance. Even if he was telling the truth, the outrage and anger struck me as fake. It felt like he was playing up the anger and offense at being accused as a way to strengthen the position of the GOP senators that would vote on his nomination. That is, go on the attack and that will rally support from the base that wants to 'own the libs' every chance that they can get.

[Estragon]

By shouting “I like beer” repeatedly?

[Frank Drackman]

Don't Big Brain Brett "shouting" it, he just said it as a matter of fact, like Bill Clinton saying he liked Strange or Barry Hussein thanking John McCain for not making an issue of "My Muslim Faith"

Frank

[ReaderY]

I disagreed with Justice Kennesy on quite a number of issues. But I find the current tendency to replace discourse with invective horrifying.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Mutual Film stated:

"It cannot be put out of view that the exhibition of moving pictures is a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion."

This is a somewhat absurd piece of hyperbole, especially if it is not limited in certain respects. The use of "for profit" helps a tad.

The opinion acknowledged that film might have other uses, including for instruction. For instance, "in churches, for instance, and in Sunday schools and public schools." It left that open:

Nor are we called upon to say on this record whether such exceptions would be within the provisions of the statute, nor to anticipate that it will be so declared by the state courts, or so enforced by the state officers.

I suppose lower court opinions eventually addressed the reach of Mutual Film before the Supreme Court disposed of it.

[F.D. Wolf]

Yes, the Court's idea that films being exhibited for money made them commerce and not speech was never a particularly compelling argument. It's not as if books and newspapers were generally given away for free.