The Supreme Court Will Not Save You

Council or whatever they called. It's like the Jedi Council. God, it's it's a problematic comparison in a lot of ways, but like, the thing I immediately think of is the extent is like like Iran, Like I don't like you do not like right, But Iran gets so much shit for having the Surer Council, right, which is like this council that's like above their parliament, above their president, and it can make a bunch of decisions as a bunch

of power. It's like, we also have a Surer Council, except instead of protecting the Islamic Revolution, it's designed to protect like the ideology of a bunch of right wingers from Harvard. And it's like, well this is great for sure, Like yes, yeah, we we have a group of elected, half dead people whose entire thing is to protect like capital and specifically the theft of land from indigenous people.

hasn't been. Yeah, So all right, let's just start with Texas Bill four, a very basically just like a turbo fascism bill that lets Texas police racially profile someone and go, I think this person's here legally and immediately arrest them.

like constitutionally like it is. The Constitution is very clear that that immigration is is, you know, constitutionally the purview of the federal government. It's very funny reading like Scotus Blog because people have to sort of pretend that like people are making real legal arguments here. Yeah, it's like when when Donald Trump is ever like we're we're looking

at Donald Trump's policies next week spoiler alert. But like I've been writing about his proposed immigration policies and you have to be like, no, this shit's just fucking it's not legal. It's just not like, yeah, some crackpot old dude who thinks the fringe is on the flag mean that you're under arbraltry law, that he's got a fucking argument, but he's wrong, Like this is ready to illegal shit. Yeah, and so so this bill was supposed to go into effect.

There's a whole series of very convoluted court battles over it, and this real court was just like, yeah, this can go into effect, and this until basically until the case goes on, and then it is eventually didn't go into effect because another another federal court was like, obviously this is insane. We can't let this go into effect. What the fuck are you guys talking about? And like this this bill, the legal justification for this is batshit. It's

so okay. They're trying to invoke the state war Clause, which is this is this really like old timey law. Okay. So the thing the thing about like the seventeen hundreds, in the eighteen hundreds is that it takes a significant amount of time to get people from I don't know, you're you're drawing your like border militia from Kentucky and you're you're moving it to Texas, right, That takes a

lot of time. And so basically it was like, okay, so if you're Texas and you're getting attacked by someone, you're supposed to be able to use your own troops to defend it. You're supposed to be able to like sort of semi autonomously run your own defense policy, right, And that was supposed to be a thing to let to allow states to like you know, use their militia

to do stuff before like federal troops got there. Abbott is arguing that people crossing the border from Mexico is an invasion and that this allows him to like legally allows him to start doing this stuff. And this is like, it's it's funny because you can even see that the Biden administration people being like, you've got to be fucking kidding me, because like obviously, like I mean, it's not like Biden doesn't want to murder people coming over the border.

But you know, Biden's people are like, well, okay, like, no, obviously this is not a war, right, I mean just a no in fact, the war we're talking about.

talking about? This has nothing, like, this is nothing. This is literally nonsense. Like it is. They are pointing at the sky and going the sky is orange, and the press is going, well, if you like, if you stare directly into the sun and then blink, it looks like maybe the sky is a little bit or just like, what the fuck are you people doing? It's it's it's genuay at least, it's some of the worst shatalistic about

practice I've ever seen. You see this like every single time trying to do this sort of like ah, balance, it's like, no, there's no actual sort of balance here.

But on the other hand, this doesn't matter because the Supreme Court was just like, yeah, this can go into effect, right, And like the other thing you'll see, like I guess this is more in the Trump era, right, was like you'd see someone Trump would do a thing and everyone rather than just being like if this one's fucking illegal, everyone,

can we just wrap this up? Seth Aberton would write seventy five thousand tweets about how like it was going to result, and people began to have this belief that like the fucking Supreme Court was made up of like magical rainbow unicorns who were gonna sweep in and save us all from fascism, Like these are the same people who are hanging out with the guys who had the like fascist statues and yeah, taking massive kickbags. Like it's

just I know it, none of this legality stuff. I guess, No, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

to do whatever the fuck you want. One of the strategies they've been using has, like if specifically, to get this bill through, is by just having judges issue like temporary injunctions and other injunctions to like allow them to go into effect, but then you know, with the intention

of just never letting them expire. Right, So what you're getting basically is just judges implementing policy by FIA by continuously going, oh, well, this can go, this can go because we're giving like a where we're you know, we're on like our thirty eighth one month injunction and you know, and this is the thing that like the Biden administration's plan to deal with this is to be like, well, you shouldn't be able to do that, but like, how

are you going to stop them? Right? The court system is set up in such a way that these people are just feudal lords. They're almost completely autonomous. The only people who can over rule them are the people above them. But the problem there too, and this is like the Republicans have been using very effectively, is that it takes time for a court above it to, you know, just to overrule the like insane thing the court below them

is doing. And if the cort below them is just constantly churning out just nonsense over and over again, then they can just do whatever the fuck they want. Because even if the court above them actually did want to do something about this, which in a very rare cases sometimes happens, they literally can't because they've just been you know, because they're just sort of swamped by all of this just absolute bullshit that's being thrown out.

For instance, California's gun laws. Right, California passes so many fucking gun laws so often that the time that it takes for even if they are like contravening something like the Brewin decision, right or the spirit of the Brewing decision, it takes so long for them to pass all the way up and maybe eventually go to Supreme Court, maybe not right, that that in effect California can do things which seem like the Supreme Court would say they were unconstitutional.

It doesn't really matter because they can still do them right. And with the go go to the Night Circuit in California, you can make decisions that affirm those in and like it doesn't matter, It doesn't matter what's constitutional or more importantly, like what's just.

We've seen that a lot with African migrants in Tichuina, But like a lot of the people going to Texas, it's because that's the land route walking north and they

don't have the finances to go anywhere else. And those people are extremely like they're like there are any number of reasons why they have a legitimate right to asylum or just a right not to be fucking profiled, or like any other person of kind of living in Texas has a basic right note to be profiled, and demonizing those people is being used like a trojan horse just to do straight up racism law.

bent is in corrupt. I'm not using a homophobic slur. No, this is the way that's a homophobe. Yeah, I think it's really a British English wild Yeah, I've never heard of either of those. I really.

nuts great, it's not. There are a couple of other cases coming down the pipeline that we wanted to talk about because so obviously the Streame Court you know, has directly already done stuff with s before, but the lass there's still still in the processure to lawsuit. There's also a case about MEPhI prestone, which is in a border factor, which is, you know, one of the ways that if you are you're in a place where it is illegal for you to normally get a this is a way

you can do it. So okay. The basis of this case is that in twenty sixteen twenty twenty one, the FDA did one of the few good things it's ever done, and there were some sort of changes to legal classifications around for pristone that allowed you to get it, not allowed you to get it without having to get it directly prescribed by a doctor, so you know, you could have the rest practitioners do it. And also it was a thing that didn't work like you can get it

over the counter like it was. It was not a thing that suddenly that requires an enormous amount of sort of doctor bullshit, and it also used to require physical visits, so you'd have to go find a doctor in another state and get into priority to you. And so that

all went away. You were able to get it through telemedicine and immediately basically after I get I guess probably the peak of the Republican counter revolution in the last four years, where they destroyed the national well, they destroyed the tatted remains of ROW. A bunch of like deranged right wing groups set about to get messapristone bands and

so basically what they're trying to do is overturn. They're trying to get its approval by the FDA overturn, and also they approval for the generic version of it overturned, right, And this is the whole strategy here is very weird because okay, so this is a one of the things about the US and part of the reason all of this court stuff is so weird because of the structure of the sort of regional autonomy. Off the courts. You

can basically just do court shopping. You can go find some like guy who's basically a feudal baron in Texas and be like, hey, you hate abortion, Like here write some piece of paper that says this is legal. Now. So there have been a series of sort of battles over different levels of courts, you know, like approving or

disapproving some things. This is actually this is one of these cases that's actually so obviously it's the immediate consequence here is if the Supreme Court decides that you can ban this, it's going to get really, really fucking bad for a lot of people. But this is also a case stuff feeds into another trend that's been happening, which is the Republicans attempting to use the court system to

just completely annihilate the federal bureaucracy. Because the other thing that's at stake here and this is you know, obviously the people's access to getting abortions is the most important

part of it. The subsequent less important part of it is that right now there is a eight there are national standards for for prescriptions, right there's unified national like the FDA is unified national standards for sort of food safety and like, and if this gets knocked out, that's like gone, yeah, And so suddenly large massive parts, i mean, like courts having the ability to just sort of go in and nuke like FDA approvals for stuff, right, or states being able to like this is going to rip

like tear, like tearing the fucking guts out of the entire American sort of like legal bureaucracy. It's it's coming apart, Yeah, it's yeah.

cases like this too. One of the one of the things that looks like that they're trying to do is get we're gonna I'm gonna do a full upside about this at some point when I can get a good labor lawyer to talk about it. But they're trying to overturn the National Labor Relations Act, which is the act that basically sets up the right to unionization and the whole the whole process of how how labor mediation works.

And I mean then there there's other ones where I mean, like really substantively enormous parts of the American sort of the American state are just being torn apart in ways that are specifically designed to just allow corporations and these like fiefdom judges to have effectively unlimited political power.

win there. I mean, this is this has been the sort of what the political strategy getting back to sort of the civil rights era, and that's it's you can't do this anymore because it doesn't It doesn't even like whether or not you are correct, like like legally correct about a thing, right, which used to be what this was just sort of hinged on and whether you could convince justic this like this doesn't matter anymore, like they've you know, like if if you if you read the

ruling on on like if you actually go through and read the ruling that overturned road View Wade right, like the league the legal logic in there is deranged. It's just like, yeah, we didn't have this X number of years ago, so fuck it, like you can't do this now. It's like this is this is nonsense, but it doesn't matter because the the the actual weight of the law is not is not you know, a sort of like series of debates about like logic or about the efficacy

or the meaning of texts. It's just about who has the power to point guns at people? And the answer is you don't have that you, you, dear listener, do not have that power. Okay, do you know who else is going to destroy the American federal bureaucracy. Oh, yes, yes, I do. Mayeah. It's it's a product and services to support this podcast, and we are back for more hookers.

So we want going to talk about one more case, which is grap Pass versus Johnson, which is a case to decide whether or not you can make it illegal to be homeless. Yeah, yeah, talking pointing guns at people.

It's a city of Grant's Pass, which I guess is a place in Oregon, and it's whether they can criminalize sleeping on the street if there are no safe shelter beds available. So that the idea here being that like again, like this is one has to understand that I'm speaking from the logic of the state when I try and explain this, like that if there is a shelter bed to go to, they can compel you to go to

it with threat of prosecution, right or criminalization. But if there is not a shelter bad to go to, then like you're not somehow your culpability changes, right, Like like you're you're not refusing to take shelter. There is no shelter for you to take. And so Grant's past is obviously trying to criminalize people even when they're a shelter beds available. Now, what's interesting about grants pass is that

not the place to the court case. What's interesting about the court case is that you'll see these big liberal cities filing amicus briefs amaricus. It literally means it's from amicus curie a friend of the court, right, which they can do in favor of either side. San Diego, Los Angeles, other large democratic cities, I'm sure all filing briefs in favor of criminalizing living on the street even when there

are not shelter beds available. Now, if we look at the San Diego context specifically, one of the questions which will come up in this case is what is a

shafe shelter bed. So what San Diego likes to do currently is put people into tents in parking lots where they often flood because San Diego is not designed to deal with rain, and because our city has completely failed to clear out storm drains, resulting in people losing their homes in this winter, right, and so some of these parking lots flood where people have lived are forced to live.

criminalize being on housed in this fashion. But it it does, it represents like a nod from the top down right to go even harder after people who are too poor to make rent at a time when rent is less affordable than it has been in generations. And so like it's one to watch. It's one where like yet again you find like the Democrats, I guess, lining up on the right hand side of the issue, the right wing

side of the issue, the state violence side of the issue. Right, and it will i'm sure, open up the door to more what they call camping bands, which is the euphemism again they are bands on being unhoused within city limits, right, And I think it's one to keep an eye on.

But again, like I don't it's Clarence Thomas, the guy who goes to the billionaire's house with the racist statues and the Nazi statues, Like he's not the guy who's going to come in swinging for the person who has to sleep under the underpass because they can't make rent, you know, like.

it was. It should have been a very very basic you are guaranteed due process thing right under the Fourth Amendments and this, and in a nine o decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the the cops are allowed to violate people's due process because if they didn't do this, there couldn't be a functional police force in this country because this is how the police were doing all their

fucking work. So if you think those people right, that was nine oh nine zero decision, that wasn't that was a fucking Ruth Bader Ginsburg special, Right, you mean those people are going to be like, oh, hey, damn, maybe maybe people who don't own property have rights like how no?

your un house neighbor dying is you. It's not an NGO, it's not the city, it's not the county, it's not the feds. Those people fundamentally that they're the incentive is not for them to care. Like your incentives as a person who shares humanity with that person is to care and to do something. And like, yeah, I guess, like, don't wait, take the time you would have spent reading about a fucking Supreme Court case and make sandwiches and go hand them out, because that is the only way we solve this.