Supreme Court Can’t Hear Case Because Majority Had To Be Recused

People are upset about the mention of "court packing", but the founders didn't put judicial review into the Constitution. Toss in that the Supreme Court didn't have ethics rules until 2023!

And when they did adopt ethics rules (from NPR):

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday adopted its first-ever ethics code, bowing to pressure from Congress and the public. All nine justices signed onto the new code, which was instantly criticized for lack of an enforcement mechanism.

In an unsigned statement, the justices said though there has been no formal code, they have long abided by certain standards.

"The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules," they wrote. "To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct."

Public trust in the court has fallen amid revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas received gifts and travel from Harlan Crow, a Republican donor. Justice Samuel Alito has also been criticized for failing to disclose a fishing trip with Paul Singer, a big Republican donor with cases before the Supreme Court.

This gets better

With the release of the code Monday, the court is trying to be somewhat specific about what justices can and cannot do. But, there is a lot they can do and no enforcement mechanism as to what they are supposed not to do.

For example, the code is quite specific about financial transactions: Justices can make a real estate transaction, as long as it's not before the court. But the code simply reaffirms the commitment to the disclosure provisions that are in the existing code for all federal judges.

The code is also specific about recusal if family members, such as spouses, children or grandchildren, have a case before the court or is a lawyer before the court.

But the code also makes exceptions for justices that may not apply to lower court judges. For instance, a justice doesn't have to recuse if his or her relative files a friend of the court brief because the court receives so many of these briefs, sometimes over 100 in a single case, and it has loosened the rules on these briefs being filed.

In recent months, critics have raised concerns about Justice Thomas' wife, Virginia Thomas, and her activities to promote political causes that end up before the court. The code says that if a spouse or child living with the justice has a substantial interest in the outcome of a case — financial or any other interest — the justice is supposed to recuse. That would have meant, for example, that Justice Thomas would have to recuse in cases in which his wife has played a major role. Last year, Thomas did not recuse, and was the sole dissenter, in a case about whether former President Trump's White House records had to be turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, despite Ginni Thomas' texts to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to take steps to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

 I'm sorry, but I have not had respect for the US Supreme Court for a long time. Serious ethics rules would be a start.

Trump has found Gödel's Loophole in the US Constitution which allows the US to become a dictatorship.

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher. He was born in Austria and emmigrated to the United States

When Gödel was studying to take his American citizenship test in 1947, he came across what he called an "inner contradiction" in the U.S. Constitution. At the time, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was good friends with Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern. Gödel told Morgenstern about the flaw in the constitution, which, he said, would allow the U.S. to legally become a fascist state. Morgenstern tried to convince Gödel that this was very unlikely, but Gödel remained very concerned about it. He was an Austrian by birth and, having lived through the 1933 coup d'état and escaped from Nazi Germany after the Anschluss, had reason to be concerned about living in a fascist dictatorship. Morgenstern had secret discussions with Gödel about his concerns and told Einstein about them.

Since the exact nature of Gödel's Loophole has never been published, what it is, precisely, is not known. In his 2012 paper "Gödel's Loophole" F. E. Guerra-Pujol speculates that the problem involves Article V, which describes the process by which the Constitution can be amended. The loophole is that Article V's procedures can be applied to Article V itself. It can therefore be altered in a "downward" direction, making it easier to alter the article again in the future. So even if, as is now the case, amending the Constitution is difficult to bring about, once Article V is downwardly amended, the next attempt to do so will be easier, and the one after that easier still.  Other writers have speculated that Gödel may have had other aspects of the Constitution in mind as well, including the abuse of gerrymandering, prorogation of Congress, the Electoral College, and the presidential pardon.

In any case, the Gödel story is at least plausible. He spent a great deal of time thinking about systems of rules (axiom systems in mathematics), and looking for their limits and what such systems can say about themselves.

It should come as no surprise that when encouraged to look at the US constitution (which is, after all, just a set of rules), Gödel was enthusiastic and his thoughts turned immediately to what the system said about itself – and its limitations. It should also come as no surprise then that when he looked, he found some.

So, maybe the loophole isn't what is written in the US Constitution, but is something which has come about through tradition?  Although, I have come to realise the US Constitution is basically poorly written bumpf. A piece of shit written by a committee. Which is why he couldn't put his finger on one thing. Since as the speculation has pointed out, there are more than enough problems with it.

But Donald Trump pushed the envelope with his attack on birthright citizenship. Which is something I agree about and there is a simple solution which requires an amendment to the Constitution that at least one parent needs to have some legal connection to the United States (Ireland uses this). But instead of following tradition and protocol, Trump has chosen to use the nuclear option.

He's challenging the Supreme Court and its power.

So much for checks and balances.

So, I am going to quote myself on the biggest problem, which is one which custom has allowed to stand.

In fact, those decisions (Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment) should be laughed at. And any academic or practising lawyer who is shit for brains enough to give them the slightest credence should be barred from the practise of law since they ignore a fundamental basis of US Constitutional law.

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).

It's one of the first cases any constitutional law class covers, which is why anyone who gives Heller and McDonald a shred of legitimacy should be barred from the practise of law. Why? First off.

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, was a U.S. Supreme Court case that established the principle of judicial review in the United States, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws, statutes, and some government actions that contravene the U.S. Constitution.

Judicial review for constitutionality is not a power granted by the US Constitution: it comes from this case.

More importantly it centred around a clause in the US Constitution (hint, hint, for those shit for brains who want to call themselves "Constitutional Scholars").

My question when Heller came down was how does the system handle an out of control Judiciary? The obvious answer is that it defers to tradition. On the other hand, Trump is pointing out that the emperor is naked. Does the Supreme Court, or the Judiciary, have any real power to enforce its decisions? 

So, maybe the reason Gödel didn't tell anyone what this loophole happened to be was because it is that the entire constitution is a house of cards. Gödel could see this since English wasn't his first language and he was a logician. The loophole isn't something which is written into the constitution, it is something which was attributed to the constitution.

And as I have pointed out, proper legal method requires that something needs to be explicitly mentioned in the Constitution for it to be constitutional. Gödel's loophole is the deference given to concepts which are not explicitly written into the Constitution. Assumptions made by the founders which can be exploited by those with malicious intent. And the fact that language changes meaning.

The Second Amendment was the perfect example of this.

So, two people whose mother tongue is not English can agree on this. It's not what is written, it is what ISN'T written. Or is subject to misinterpretation.

Scalia was very wrong when he said: "Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."

That is precisely what he needed to do before he set in motion the destruction of the United States.

And the "scholars", politicians, and lawyers who allowed this should resign their positions for someone who is competent.

Lieberman's Folly

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Amendment XIV, Constitution of the United States

This amendment, enacted after the civil war, sets the standards for citizenship in the United States. It has been used, over the years, to also extend many of the protections found in the Bill of Rights to state criminal proceedings, such important protections as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, protection from illegal search and seizure, etc. Many people today, however, only focus on the last part of this clause, forgetting about the first part, which defines citizenship in our great country.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof..." means exactly what it says. If a person is born on US soil, regardless of their parentage, they are a US Citizen. Recently, Sen. Joe Lieberman, (Republican in all but name- Connecticut) introduced a bill which would amend 8 USC 1481 and add providing material support for any organization which is on the Secretary of State's terrorism list as grounds to revoke citizenship.

In Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheaton 738 (1824) Chief Justice Marshall, held in dicta that "[The naturalized citizen] becomes a member of the society, possessing all the rights of a native citizen, and standing, in the view of the constitution, on the footing of a native. The constitution does not authorize Congress to enlarge or abridge those rights. The simple power of the national Legislature, is to prescribe a uniform rule of naturalization, and the exercise of this power exhausts it, so far as respects the individual." at 827. The history of citizenship in the US was then discussed in great detail in Afroyim v. Rusk 387 US 253 (1967)

Rather than force the reader to read this case, let's summarize. From the founding of the Republic it was widely accepted that Congress had the right to determine the qualifications for citizenship. As early as 1794, many members of Congress held the English common-law doctrine that provided for perpetual allegiance and many doubted that a person could in fact renounce citizenship. A bill that would have allowed a US Citizen to state before a magistrate that he was renouncing citizenship and then departing the country was defeated in Congress in 1794 and in 1818. There the matter stayed until the 14th Amendment which was ratified in 1868. There it was established that all persons born in the United States were citizens. Congress, in the Nationality Act of 1940, established naturalization procedures and requirements for naturalization. It set a number of ways in which a person could lose one's citizenship as well, including voting in a foreign election, etc. Most if not all of those ways, except for express renunciation of citizenship, have been found to be unconstitutional. The essential rule of the Court announced in Afroyim was that a person cannot be deprived of citizenship without his/her express act renouncing such status.

Senator Lieberman is an attorney, having a law degree from Yale. As a graduate of one of the top law schools in the US, Sen. Lieberman should know better, and/or should have staff who know how to research the status of the law. The cases at point in this, Afroyim and the debate in Congress years before would have given Sen. Lieberman and his cronies a good civics lesson and show how valuable US Citizenship truly is. The supporters of this law, in a knee-jerk reaction, seem to think that by revoking someone's citizenship, they can prevent terrorist actions. That is closing the barn door after the horse has already fled. It is true that in this case, the "wanna bomber" had been naturalized for a little under a year. However, he just as easily could have been here as a lawful permanent resident, (green card) or have even been here illegally. It would not have stopped the attack. The threat of losing citizenship would have no effect whatsoever, and would not give the US any further protection against terrorism.

This bill, riddled with constitutional infirmities, a knee jerk reaction of "patriots" who obviously forgot their high school civics lessons, should be quietly filed away and forgotten, never to see the light of day.