Posts Made By: Rod Kaufman

Originally Posted by James Brown

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, the Supreme Court confirmed California’s right to aggressive retaliatory gerrymandering in a one sentence unsigned opinion.  Rod Kaufman was so apoplectic given the brevity of the court’s sinister “shadow docket“ ruling, he was rendered unable to post anything here. 😲

Originally Posted by James Brown

I’m not picking on you Russ, I hope you understand that. You’ve got me thinking…

The bolded part is correct, only if Congress, the executive, or a State  is violating the constitution or a federal statute.  I think this is a super important point that a lot of people get wrong.

Politically motivated gerrymandering, along with a whole lot of other policies the public hates, do not violate the constitution or a federal statute. In these cases, the court should not, and usually will not interfere.

I mention this because a couple of weeks ago you used the metaphor of the court as an impartial umpire. I think that is a valid metaphor, but the court can only act when they have constitutional authority to do so, specifically, interpretation/enforcement of the constitution or interpretation/enforcement of a federal statute. 

to complete the metaphor, a baseball umpire has authority to interpret and enforce the rules of the game. The baseball umpire does not have authority to change or rewrite the rules of the game. And the baseball umpire does not have authority to enact any policies outside of the rules of game, for example, they cannot set the price of tickets, decide whether or not to serve beer, or select the hotdog vendor.

not sure this is a useful post, but I was thinking about it this morning.

Originally Posted by Brian McFarland

I predict Trump will double down on the stupidity and declare that the DOJ needs to investigate those unpatriotic justices.