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The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

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Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday police must almost always obtain a warrant before searching mobile devices seized when arresting someone, extending constitutional privacy protections to the increasingly vast amounts of data Americans keep on smartphones, cellphones and other hand-held digital technology.

The court, in a unanimous ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts, said both the quantity and quality of information contained in modern hand-held devices is constitutionally protected from police intrusion without a warrant.
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As many of us had expected, and hoped...
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

LynahFan said:
Disagree. [To me,] The more correct analogy is that someone has set up a for-profit business to go into public libraries and copy entire books for their paying customers. The company is profiting from the taxpayer-provided content (library books/OTA TV), not from content that the customer already owns.
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The customer already owns the right to view broadcast TV over their own antenna. That's exactly what Aereo delivers. Your own language should direct you to the same conclusion, no?
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

FreshFish said:
The customer already owns the right to view broadcast TV over their own antenna. That's exactly what Aereo delivers. Your own language should direct you to the same conclusion, no?
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The customer already owns the right to use a public library, too, but they don't own the library itself - they can't make copies of every book there, nor can they pay someone to go mine copies for them.
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

Not SCOTUS, but the warm-up act.

I would have said 2025, but it's starting to look like 2015. Maybe the arc of the moral universe actually does* bend towards justice.

(* spoiler: it doesn't. There is no arc of the moral universe. But there are good people fighting evil, hard, every day, for years and year and years.)
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

The Aereo case is one of those fascinating instances where it's difficult not to be drawn back and forth between one side and the other depending upon whether your focusing on details or looking at the big picture.
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

LynahFan said:
The customer already owns the right to use a public library, too, but they don't own the library itself - they can't make copies of every book there, nor can they pay someone to go mine copies for them.
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I had no idea that 3 million people could check out the same library book simultaneously! ;)

My inference is that the 6 Justices who voted against Aereo were subconsciously afraid to overturn such a widespread and well-established business model. By this ruling, if I lived on a hill and all my neighbors lived in a valley, I couldn't let them use my TV antenna to watch broadcast TV in their houses merely by running a long wire from my antenna to their houses. There are lots of places where you cannot get reception of broadcast TV at all. Those folks are told today, "tough luck Charlie, even if it is supposedly 'free' broadcast TV, you're out of luck anyway due to an unfortunate local geography working against you."
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

FreshFish said:
I had no idea that 3 million people could check out the same library book simultaneously! ;)

My inference is that the 6 Justices who voted against Aereo were subconsciously afraid to overturn such a widespread and well-established business model. By this ruling, if I lived on a hill and all my neighbors lived in a valley, I couldn't let them use my TV antenna to watch broadcast TV in their houses merely by running a long wire from my antenna to their houses. There are lots of places where you cannot get reception of broadcast TV at all. Those folks are told today, "tough luck Charlie, even if it is supposedly 'free' broadcast TV, you're out of luck anyway due to an unfortunate local geography working against you."
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Interestingly enough, that's exactly how I grew up - on the side of a hill in East Tennessee on the wrong side of the local antennas. There were only 10 houses on our 1 mile long dead-end street, so it was cost prohibitive to run cable. Result: we didn't even bother to have a TV until I was in high school and we got a VCR.
 
LynahFan said:
The customer already owns the right to use a public library, too, but they don't own the library itself - they can't make copies of every book there, nor can they pay someone to go mine copies for them.
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But they throw dimes into the copy machine.
 
Kepler said:
Not SCOTUS, but the warm-up act.

I would have said 2025, but it's starting to look like 2015. Maybe the arc of the moral universe actually does* bend towards justice.

(* spoiler: it doesn't. There is no arc of the moral universe. But there are good people fighting evil, hard, every day, for years and year and years.)
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Justice Kennedy's opinion and Justice Scalia's dissent citing that opinion opened the door.
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

joecct said:
Justice Kennedy's opinion and Justice Scalia's dissent citing that opinion opened the door.
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Yepper.

In a hundred years people will think Scalia was a champion of tolerance, equality and personal liberty. He'll be like the Anti-Taney, with one aberration coloring an otherwise opposite career. That's the greatest ironic punishment the law gods could ever have devised for him. :-)
 
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Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

Kepler said:
Yepper.

In a hundred years people will think Scalia was a champion of tolerance, equality and personal liberty. He'll be like the Anti-Taney, with one aberration coloring an otherwise opposite career. That's the greatest ironic punishment the law gods could ever have devised for him. :-)
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Justice Scalia, on quite a few occasions, has proved prophetic in his dissents.
 
Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

It will be fascinating to see whether SCOTUS will allow the pending House lawsuit against the POTUS to proceed.

Under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to create and amend laws and the President to faithfully execute them, but Mr. Obama has grabbed inherent Article I powers by suspending or rewriting statutes he opposes. The President has usurped Congress with impunity because he assumes no one has the legal standing to challenge him.

The Washington lawyer David Rivkin and Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Foley suggest a broader approach that doesn't require legislators to act as individuals. They're trying to persuade House leaders to mount an institutional challenge to the White House rewrite of ObamaCare's employer mandate. Here the President is defying the plain language of laws and undermining legislative power. The courts ought to extend standing to the House as an institution to vindicate this injury. Short of impeachment, there is no other way for Congress to defend its constitutional prerogatives and the rule of law.
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I guess Boehner finally listened to them. Some folks think the Court might actually allow the suit to proceed.

More than a few judges and Supreme Court Justices seem to be concerned that Mr. Obama's conduct is undermining the rule of law and political accountability. Already this week the Supreme Court whaled the Environmental Protection Agency for defying the plain language of the law in the name of anticarbon policy, and more rebukes may be coming in the next week on recess appointments and ObamaCare's contraception mandate.
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There's no way any impeachment attempt would fly, clearly no one has the stomach for it. If Article I requires the President "faithfully to execute the laws" and if the President says, "screw that law, I'm not going to obey it," what recourse is there? Is there any recourse at all? or do we tacitly acquiesce to a potential nascent executive de facto dictator?




I thought I had remembered President Jackson ignored a Supreme Court ruling dealing with Native Americans (something along the lines of "Where are Justice Marshall's troops?") but apparently my memory was fallible. SCOTUS ruled that the state of Georgia had no jurisdiction over the Cherokee nation, only the federal government did, and that case was more tangled and complicated than making Jackson the sole scapegoat for the shameful treatment afterward (when the Cherokees were forcibly evicted from their land).
 
FreshFish said:
or do we tacitly acquiesce to a potential nascent executive de facto dictator?
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Multiple WSJ links, lots of rambling about pure GOP talking points, and then this little ditty. What a true independent you are... :rolleyes:

The EPA did not get smacked down nearly as hard as you think, and Scalia is currently throwing a hissy fit about recess appointments in a concurrence that reads like a dissent.

But you're kidding yourself if you think SCOTUS likes congress any more than the executive branch. They could easily say congress's recourse is to impeach the president. And if they don't want to, that's on congress, not the courts.
 
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Re: The Power of SCOTUS V: The Final Frontier

If I had a quarter for every time John Roberts screwed Fishy, I'd be 10 bucks shy of being a Republican myself!

But his fidelity to The Impotent Boner is interesting. Makes you wonder though....:eek:

Boner 1) has no standing to sue, and 2) doesn't even know what he's suing about. So for example he might sue over Obama's order giving federal benefits to legally married same sex couples. In short, he's going to sue to be on the side of discrimination??? Oooookaaayyyy.....
 
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