SCOTUS opinion watch

[muon2]

Sean Trende branches out from being an electoral statistician, to playing Supreme Court bingo. FWIW, his reading of the tea leaves is that the AZ commission is in deep trouble, even if the decision is written by Ginsburg.

Please stop linking trash from Sean Trende.

His analysis isn't very different than at ScotusBlog. Are they trash, too?

[muon2]

Perhaps Scalia's dissent effectively morphs Pelosi's famous quote from "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," to "But we have to pass the bill so that SCOTUS can tell us what is in it."

[muon2]

My crazy tea party relatives are saying Roberts was blackmailed into his decision.

What is he hiding in their minds?

I refuse to click the links, so I don't know exactly.

This is the one I got on Facebook though, feel free.

It looks like fairly standard conspiracy thoughts - conservatives hate Obamacare, conservatives have a court majority, Roberts is a conservative, Obama's agencies control all sorts of secrets on DC higher ups, Obamacare survives. Conclusion - Obama's agencies must have secrets on Roberts to force his hand.

[muon2]

ScotusBlog just announced four boxes today.

[muon2]

I found Roberts' SSM dissent interesting after his opinion on the ACA yesterday. He seems to have a very clear personal philosophy about what constitutes judicial activism. In King he goes on at length to say that the legislative intent as read in its voluminous text has more weight than the desire to reach a narrow textual conclusion based on a justice's desired outcome (observers have noted that one could find for either position by skillful use of limited parts of the text). In Obergefell he points at the intent of the legislatures and popular referendums of the states as the source of weight, not the philosophical desire of the justices. In the first case he ends up returning to an older style of statutory interpretation, but in the second case it causes him to decry a majority that returns to an older interpretation of substantive due process.

[muon2]

Muon, I think it's not surprising that a conservative justice thinks differently about the Constitution differently from a law passed a few years ago. 

The Obamacare case was about statutory interpretation.
The gay marriage case was about substantive due process and whether or not you view LGBT people as equal human beings.

In both cases he was writing in a way that seems to oppose to judicial activism by means of preserving the maximum role for the legislative process. After reading both opinions and the main dissents, I think he sees the whole question of judicial activism differently than his colleagues on either side. It seems like a blend of modern ideas and older ideas that had fallen out of favor, and clearly not the way Scalia sees it.