HUGE: SUPREME COURT INVALIDATES THE TORTURED INTERPRETATION OF THE LAW USED TO CHARGE 350 OF THE JANUARY 6 PROTESTERS

Before that: Happy Friday!

The word "Friday" come's from Freya or Frey (or, um, Frigga or Frig), who was Thor's mom. The Romans equated her with Venus.

Old English Frīgedæg 'day of Frigga', named after the Germanic goddess Frigga, wife of the supreme god Odin and goddess of married love; translation of late Latin Veneris dies 'day of Venus', Frigga being equated with the Roman goddess of love, Venus. Compare with Dutch vrijdag and German Freitag .

Italian Venerdi, French vendredi. In Spanish it's viern-Olé!, from which we get the term "Fri-Yay!"

On to the Mainstream-Media Level News Product.

@KurtSchlichter

Wow. This has to be the worst 24 hours for the Democrats since Appomattox

Posted by: sharon(willow's apprentice)

The Supreme Court announced three big decisions.

The Court overruled the Ninth Circuit's incredibly destructive ruling that cities could not forbid homeless people from camping out in public places until they did the impossible, which was to provide for good housing for every homeless drug addict everywhere. No one can do that, so the real meaning of the ruling was that public spaces -- parks, sidewalks -- belong the the homeless.

But this ruling only affected the states of the Ninth Circuit, the west coast states, so the damage of this was limited to Oregon, Washington, and California. Now, there are other states in the Ninth Circuit -- in addition to the three coastal states, it includes Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam-- but it's in the progressive coast states where the homeless really made their presence felt in public spaces in the cities.

That ruling is now overturned, and the states and cities of the Ninth Circuit may now clear out the homeless encampments and arrest people for squatting on public land.

The justices overturned the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' decision upholding a 2020 lower court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson that invalidated a southern Oregon city's anti-camping ordinances. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, concluded that the power to decide how to address homelessness largely rests with local officials.

"A handful of federal judges cannot begin to 'match' the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding 'how best to handle' a pressing social question like homelessness," Gorsuch wrote.

Friday's ruling centered on a determination that fining or arresting people for violating local camping bans did not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. The court's three liberal justices dissented.

The Supreme Court also overturned the extremely tendentious twisting of federal law to overcharge the January 6th protesters. They applied the Sarbane-Oxley law, which is all about transparency in corporate governance, and criminalizes burning business records and shredding documents in a federal prosecution.

They twisted the law to claim it applies when protesters challenge an election, because they're trying to "destroy" electoral college ballots, or something.

The law had never, ever been even suspected of applying to protesters -- it's about burning business records while being sued or prosecuted, that kind of thing -- but the lawless criminal gang at the DOJ has removed all guardrails so that they could hunt down the opponents of the Regime.

Legal Insurrection:

In a big decision today, the Supreme Court, in a split that saw KBJ siding with the Roberts majority and ACB writing the dissent joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, rejected the use of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 against a J6 defendant, ruling the statute only applied to interference with records or evidence, not interference with an official proceeding. This has implications not only for other J6 defendants, but also the DC court charges against Trump.

From the Majority Opinion:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 imposes criminal liability on anyone who corruptly "alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding." 18 U. S. C. s. 1512(c)(1). The next subsection extends that prohibition to anyone who "otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so." s. 1512(c)(2). We consider whether this "otherwise" clause should be read in light of the limited reach of the specific provision that precedes it.

In other words, you cannot use a vague catchall term like "otherwise" to mean "We can use this law to jail anyone you want." The meaning of "otherwise" must be read in the context of the other things specified. It's not an all-purpose endlessly-mutable grant of unlimited authority to jail anyone you feel like jailing.

Note that Trump is charged with this in his DC case.

Does this mean the J6 protesters will be released? Mostly no. The DOJ prosecutors really explored the studio space in dreaming up ways to jail the protesters, and overcharged them with a lot of crimes. This only directly affects those charged only with this particular nonsense non-crime.

And a lot of J6ers pled guilty when threatened with this crap charge. The law usually doesn't allow plea deals to be undone when the law used to obtain them changes. We'll see if there's any wiggle room on that.

Full opinion here.

If you can believe it, those aren't even the biggest decisions handed down.

In the modern administrative state, the Executive branch largely writes the laws, contrary to the intent of the Constitution, by calling these laws "rules" and granting the Executive bureaucracy the power to write "rules."

Furthermore, the Supreme Court decided (dreadfully) in 1984 that courts were obligated to defer to the "experts" in the bureaucracy. If the "expert" paper-pushers decided that, in their collective civil servant wisdom, that bump stocks should be illegal, well, the courts would have to grant "Chevron deference" to this ruling.

Despite this bureaucrat-made "rule" being created by the branch of government the Constitution says cannot make law.

The Supreme Court has overturned this pernicious, anti-constitutional doctrine of Chevron deference, and all the bureaucrats and Deep Staters are seething at the loss of their unconstitutional authority.

What it means for the Supreme Court to throw out Chevron decision, undercutting federal regulators

Executive branch agencies will likely have more difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues under a far-reaching decision by the Supreme Court.

Oh dear!

The court's 6-3 ruling on Friday overturned a 1984 decision colloquially known as Chevron that has instructed lower courts to defer to federal agencies when laws passed by Congress are not crystal clear.

In other words, federal regulators were not only illegally writing the law -- in the guise of "rules" -- but courts were required to take their interpretation of the law as authoritative. They didn't just write the laws, but also were empowered to act as courts in construing what the law supposedly means.

The 40-year-old decision has been the basis for upholding thousands of regulations by dozens of federal agencies, but has long been a target of conservatives and business groups who argue that it grants too much power to the executive branch, or what some critics call the administrative state.

The Biden administration has defended the law, warning that overturning so-called Chevron deference would be destabilizing and could bring a "convulsive shock" to the nation's legal system.

Oh no, not a convulsive shock to the nation's legal system and the petty tyrannies of the bureaucracy. Anything but that.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said federal judges "must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority."

The ruling does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron doctrine, Roberts wrote.

As earlier stated, "thousands" and thousands of cases have been disposed of by courts just saying "defer to the bureaucrats."

Now all those thousands and thousands of cases are re-opened.

...

With a closely divided Congress, presidential administrations have increasingly turned to federal regulation to implement policy changes. Federal rules impact virtually every aspect of everyday life, from the food we eat and the cars we drive to the air we breathe and homes we live in.

So this lawmaking-by-rulemaking regime allows the Executive to make up its own laws when Congress cannot agree on the law.

If Congress cannot agree to pass a law, that should be the end of the matter.

But no, there's a workaround, the bureaucracy can just write "rules" "supplementing" the existing law.

This ruling does not stop that, but it at least tells courts to stop deferring to federal bureaucrats about their interpretation of federal law. Courts must decide this independently, and not defer to an unelected bureaucrat.

President Joe Biden's administration, for example, has issued a host of new regulations on the environment and other priorities, including restrictions on emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes, and rules on student loan forgiveness, overtime pay and affordable housing.

Those actions and others could be opened up to legal challenges if judges are allowed to discount or disregard the expertise of the executive-branch agencies that put them into place.

With billions of dollars potentially at stake, groups representing the gun industry and other businesses such as tobacco, agriculture, timber and homebuilding, were among those pressing the justices to overturn the Chevron doctrine and weaken government regulation.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief last year on behalf of business groups arguing that modern application of Chevron has "fostered aggrandizement'' of the executive branch at the expense of Congress and the courts.

David Doniger, a lawyer and longtime Natural Resources Defense Council official who argued the original Chevron case in 1984, said he feared that a ruling to overturn the doctrine could "free judges to be radical activists" who could "effectively rewrite our laws and block the protections they are supposed to provide."

"The net effect will be to weaken our government's ability to meet the real problems the world is throwing at us -- big things like COVID and climate change,″ Doniger said.

Oh no, not that.

Senile hard-left professor of law Lawrence Tribe cries out for the Real Victims here -- all of the lawyers who have built specialty practices around arguing about the Chevron deference doctrine. Won't anyone think of these high-paid lawyers' precious careers?!

Again, this ruling does not end the unconstitutional practice of the Executive writing the "rules" that will "fill in the details" of actual laws.

But at least it tells judges they must interpret the actual laws as Congress wrote them, not as a bureaucrat has decided the law really means.

Sorry this is late -- lot to cover in one post.

The Biden Panic post is coming next.

HUGE: SUPREME COURT INVALIDATES THE TORTURED INTERPRETATION OF THE LAW USED TO CHARGE 350 OF THE JANUARY 6 PROTESTERS&bodytext=Before that: Happy Friday! The word "Friday" come's from Freya or Frey (or, um, Frigga or Frig), who was Thor's mom. The Romans equated her with Venus. Old English Frīgedæg 'day of Frigga', named after the Germanic goddess Frigga, wife...&topic=world_news"> posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:25 PM

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