Alito

-- appendix to Professor Larsen's paper (click to enlarge)

Hobby Lobby GoalPat Begley [click to enlarge]"If a private company can take its own religious beliefs and say you can't have access to certain health care, it's a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them."-- National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) ExecutiveDirector Rea Carey,

"I disagree strongly with what the Court has done," Justice Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan in what the NYT's Adam Liptak called "an unusually fierce dissent."by KenThe other day I wrote, regarding the last-day-of-term dump of the Supreme Court's Cro-Magnon majority's two most egregious decisions:

House Ethics Committee Chair Michael Conaway (R-TX) -- a fine ethicist who grasps the evil of "duplicative paperwork""These kinds of backroom deals and changing of the rules in the middle of the night is exactly why Congress has a lower approval rating than cockroaches and traffic jams."-- Rep.

Justice Sammy the Hammer was wielding his Sledgehammer of Doom at the Supreme Court today.by KenClearly the Cro-Magnon wing of the Roberts Court has developed a vestigial sense of shame. The two bombshell decisions saved for the final day of the Supreme Court term today (which Howie wrote about in his 2pm PT post) weren't bombshells in the sense of surprise.

This morning's two Supreme Court decisions-- one that allows employers claiming to have religious objections to discriminate against women's health needs and one that says public service unions can't compel members to pay dues-- were both decided late in the afternoon on January 30, 2006 when 19 Democrats crossed the aisle to

The clown justice gets the last laugh.by KenWe've heard and read a lot about the heavy investments made by the billionaires of the Right in the decade before the 2010 census and ensuing reapportionment to gain control of as many governorships and state legislative houses as possible, and we've head and read a lot about the direct effect on legislative agendas -- spearheaded by such luminaries of the rich and reactionary as Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Ohio's John Kasich, Michigan'

The new president signs the Lilly Ledbetter Act in January 2009, with Lilly Ledbetter visible seen behind him and members of Congress looking on.by KenHowie has already called attention to the Roberts Court's extremist coup with its Voting Rights Act slapdown.

It's a shame he already has the nickname Sammy the Hammer.

Justice Ginsburg, who, like Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, went to my high school, James Madison in Brooklyn, knows what she's talking about when she says the decision by the 5 right-wing Republican activists on the Supreme Court, each of whom is also a corporate whore, produced an anti-democratic ruling stinking of "hubris." She pointed out how illogical their nakedly partisan arguments were: