Tag Archives: SCOTUS

legal news

Judiciary wins in midterm

Among the many winners who are basking in the glory of the 2022 midterm election result must be those who work within the federal judiciary.

Had the Republicans been able to seize control of the U.S. Senate, GOP leader Mitch McConnell had all but guaranteed that President Biden would have to endure a massive legislative blockade of all his judicial nominees.

Democrats will be in control of the Senate for at least the next two years. That means Biden will be able to fill the 50-some judicial vacancies that have stayed vacant.

Should a vacancy occur on the Supreme Court, the president will be able to nominate someone, who then will be subjected to the senatorial scrutiny required of all such nominees. Remember what McConnell did to President Obama when a vacancy occurred in early 2016 upon the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia, He played a crass game of partisan politics and blocked the man Obama wanted to sit on the court — Merrick Garland — from ever getting a hearing.

That kind of chicanery won’t happen now that Democrats have secured at least 50 seats in the Senate.

Yes, the judiciary emerges as one of the winners of the midterm election.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news

How did Mrs. Thomas keep this secret?

Ginni Thomas says she never has discussed her political activity with her husband, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

That’s right. Mrs. Thomas would have us believe that Justice Thomas, presumably an alert, learned individual, would be oblivious to her involvement in activities involving the overturning of the 2020 presidential election; Ginni Thomas has made no secret of the notion that she believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

So, Justice Thomas, who has taken part in rulings involving the election — who has failed to recuse himself from those decisions — knows nothing about his bride’s involvement. We are asked to believe that?

I believe Ginni Thomas has described Justice Thomas as her “best friend.” I believe “best friends” tell each other, well, everything.

Who in the world is Ginni Thomas kidding? Not me. Not most Americans. My hunch is that her husband knows all about what his wife has been doing when she’s away from the house.

Ginni Thomas told all of this to the House select committee examining the 1/6 insurrection. Chairman Bennie Thompson, as he has done throughout the testimony, swore in Ginni Thomas to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth” under threat of criminal prosecution.

Hmmm. What’s next? There could be a perjury accusation on its way.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news

Let her believe that crap, however …

Ginni Thomas is entitled to believe whatever conspiratorial crap fills her seemingly vacuous noggin, such as the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald J. Trump.

We have no evidence of any such theft. Still, that’s reportedly what she told the House select committee examining the 1/6 insurrection.

Fine, lady. You believe whatever you wish.

However, she occupies an unusual place in the world of public figures. She’s not elected or appointed to any high-profile office. She is, though, married to someone who fits that bill: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Here is where Ginni Thomas’s denials of wrongdoing get a little sticky, not to mention stinky. She insisted to the committee that she and her husband don’t ever discuss politics at home. And yet, she would have anyone with half a noodle in their skull believe that she would ignore what she has told others that the 2020 election was the “greatest political heist” in U.S. history.

Is she going to have us believe she never has said anything to her best friend, the man to whom she’s been married for 35 years about what she believes is the greatest act of theft in the history of our nation?

I am not going to accept that Justice and Mrs. Thomas never have talked between themselves about her political life outside the walls of their home.

The issue came to the fore when Justice Thomas cast the lone dissenting vote as the court ruled that he had to turn over his presidential papers to the National Archives. Every other justice ruled that Trump had to cut them loose; not so, Clarence Thomas ruled.

I will stand by my earlier demands that Clarence Thomas resign from the court. He has no business ruling on matters related to the insurrection when he is married to someone who believes The Big Lie about alleged electoral thievery.

And I do not believe for a nanosecond that Ginni Thomas has never said a word about to the justice.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news, national news

Land of the Free? Hah!

Didn’t this country found itself as the “Land of the Free,” a nation that prided itself on delivering freedom to all Americans, a land that honored our civil liberties?

I ask because of what has transpired in recent months with the U.S. Supreme Court rescinding one of our sacred civil liberties, the one that granted women the right to determine how to control their own bodies, as covered in the rights of privacy spelled out in the U.S. Constitution.

The court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal in this country. Over the nearly five decades of its existence, legal scholars and other courts had determined that Roe was “settled law.” In other words, we couldn’t mess with what had become part of the nation’s legal fabric.

Not so, according to the current Supreme Court.

When the court rescinded Roe v. Wade it essentially determined that on this key issue, women are longer free to make critical, gut-wrenching and highly emotional decisions involving their own bodies.

There doesn’t appear to be any remedies available, given the current makeup of the U.S. Senate and certainly given the ideological bent of the court, with its six conservative justices. Senate Democrats want to “codify” legality of abortion legislatively, but they would have to overcome a certain Republican filibuster; they need 60 votes to end such an obstructionist act. A 50-50 Senate split isn’t likely to bend.

Oh, but wait. The midterm election could give Democrats an actual majority, enabling them perhaps to toss out the filibuster. We’ll have to see.

I just am baffled at the frontal attack that the GOP and their allies on the Supreme Court have leveled against a fundamental principle established by our nation’s founders. It is that American citizens enjoy the freedom to make decisions that only they can make for themselves.

I would say that a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy qualifies as a critical component of living in the Land of the Free.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

 

legal news, national news, political news

Ginni Thomas: dangerous conspirator

Ginni Thomas just keeps distinguishing herself in ways that ought to bring shame not just to her but to her husband … who happens to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thanks to some intrepid reporting from the Washington Post, we now hear that Ginni Thomas urged Wisconsin Republicans to do all they could to overturn the results of that state’s 2020 presidential election. She wanted them to flip the results from Joe Biden’s column to Donald Trump.

Why is this important? Because … hubby Clarence Thomas continues to rule on cases involving that election, rather than (a) recuse himself from anything having to do with that event or (b) just resigning from the high court altogether, which is my preferred outcome.

It is an utterly disgraceful display of conflict of interest for Justice Thomas to continue ruling on these matters while his wife continues to roil the faithful with idiotic assertions that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

This matter is so far from being over.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

Pro-life, pro-choice … or both?

Occasionally I have to grapple with my position on abortion. Am I pro-choice? Am I pro-life? Truly, this issue causes me some grief. To alleviate that grief, I have determined I am both.

I now shall explain myself.

If a woman were to ask me for advice on whether to abort a pregnancy, I could not counsel her to do so. Therefore, that resistance to pro-abortion counseling makes me — in my view — pro-life on the issue.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that strips the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling of its power spurs another emotion within. You see, I also believe that government should not govern how women can manage their own reproductive process. That is not a governmental call. Such heart-wrenching decisions belong only to the woman, her partner, her physician, her spiritual leader and, yes, the god she worships.

I have thought about a gentleman with whom I attended church in Amarillo. His name is Doug and he once told a crowd of fellow churchgoers in a voice loud enough for many of us to hear that he was both a “creationist and one who believes in evolution.”

I learned then that Doug, a fellow who is quite a bit older than I am (which is really saying something), takes the same expansive view of Scripture that I do. We believe that the biblical version of “six days” worth of work creating the universe doesn’t mean the same six calendar days we use to measure that length of time.

So it can be with abortion. I see myself as both pro-life and pro-choice on an issue that when all is said about it really is none of my business.

As a 70-something-year-old man I never have had to make that choice for myself, nor will ever have to make it for as long as I walk this good Earth. Nor do I ever expect a woman to ask me whether she should make that choice for herself.

That suits me fine, too … because I never could say “yes” for any woman to commit such an agonizing act.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Kansans send profound message

Dorothy once told Toto that “we aren’t in Kansas anymore.” Indeed, the Kansas that the little girl who sang and danced her way to the Land of Oz knew likely doesn’t exist, either.

Kansas voters this past Tuesday sent the nation a resounding message that they would not accept legislation and court rulings that made abortion illegal. Kansans voting in a statewide referendum rejected a complicated ballot measure that would have endorsed the idea that its legislature can ban abortion.

Not so fast, said the voters of Kansas.

This is the absolute heart of Middle America. For Kansans to reject — in an astoundingly wide margin — a plan to effectively criminal a medical procedure — is stunning in its scope.

It tells me that conservatives in Congress — as well as those on the nation’s highest court — have overplayed their hands.

And they have handed millions of Americans who disagree with their ham-handed approach to legislating morality — not to mention their effort to repeal “settled law — a potent weapon for the upcoming midterm election … and far beyond.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Cruz is correct on gay sex? Wow!

It surely doesn’t occur often, when U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and your friendly blogger — that would be me — are on the same side of an issue.

Get a load of this: The Texas Republican junior senator told the Dallas Morning News that the state needs to repeal its decades-old law that bans gay sex. How come? Because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling that declared the state gay sex ban is unconstitutional.

“Consenting adults should be able to do what they wish in their private sexual activity, and government has no business in their bedrooms,” Cruz’s spokesperson told the newspaper.

I need to shake my marbles loose. I am shocked to hear such wisdom coming from Cruz or from any of his spokespeople.

Ted Cruz says Texas should repeal its now-defunct anti-sodomy law | The Texas Tribune

The state also had a law on the books that banned same-sex couples from engaging in intimate activity. They called it the “anti-sodomy law.”

I am not going to gush freely over what appears to be a sort of epiphany from the Republican lawmaker. As the Texas Tribune reports: But questions over the future of that precedent have surfaced after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. Both the 1973 abortion case and the gay sex case, known as Lawrence v. Texas, were decided based on the idea of a constitutional right to privacy.

The court’s overturning of Roe caused some to wonder whether other cases based on that privacy right would be next — and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas had suggested that the court reconsider the Lawrence precedent.

I have this nagging concern that should the Supreme Court rule in the future that “rights of privacy” also no longer apply to sexual relationships, that it might decide that states, indeed, can make laws such as the Texas ban on same-sex marriage.

What would Cruz say about that ruling? I guess I have come down on my belief that I don’t trust Ted Cruz to stand by what looks like a reasonable statement.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Contraception is alive, but struggling

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill that allows Americans to take measures to avoid pregnancy when they engage in intimate activity.

Sounds, well, rather normal, right? Not if you’re a Texas Republican member of Congress. You see, all GOP House members from Texas voted against this modern, common-sense, rational bill. That means my congressman, Van Taylor of Plano, has something against allowing his constituents to use contraceptives during sex.

What the hell?

Someone has to explain to me the reasons behind the partisan resistance to this measure.

GOP Texans in Congress vote against bill to protect right to contraception | The Texas Tribune

It appears to be some additional blowback to the Supreme Court decision to overturn the law that made abortion legal. Justice Clarence Thomas — the right-wing king of the high court — let it be known that the SCOTUS might next take aim at same-sex marriage and, yes, allowing contraception.

Good grief!

The 50-50 U.S. Senate isn’t likely to follow the House’s lead, given that the GOP side of the divide is wedded to this idiocy that contraception is some sort of Satanic mischief.

Well, it’s as clear as deep blue sky that the Texas Republican congressional delegation has swallowed the swill that now governs GOP policy these days.

They sicken me.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Back to the beginning on marriage?

Wow. I didn’t ever think we would reach this point after the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that men could marry men and women would marry women.

We’re now watching the U.S. House of Representatives enacting legislation that makes same-sex marriage — and same-sex intimacy — legal all over again. A bipartisan bill seeks to head off a possible future Supreme Court ruling that could make gay marriage illegal in this country.

What in the world are we doing to ourselves?

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently said the SCOTUS ruling legalizing gay marriage was wrong. Cruz is wrong. Not the court, which ruled that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to due process and equal protection under the law.

But wait a second! The nation’s highest court struck down the law legalizing abortion and is sending signals it could do the same thing to gay marriage and perhaps even interracial marriage.

Yikes, man!

The House vote doesn’t codify what shouldn’t even be on the table. The Senate has to approve it but needs 60 votes to make it law. A 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans, though, signals that the Senate might not have the votes to do the right thing.

That would be to enact a federal law that strengthens the high court’s decision legalizing gay marriage.

I am shaking my noggin utter disgust.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com