Justice Alito tells Congress he will not recuse from Jan. 6-related cases

politics @lemmy.world – 226 points – 1 months ago

He has something of a history of flying flags in support of the insurrection.

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Alito is either a traitor or too stupid to recognize what would make him appear to be a traitor. In either case, unfit to serve in any office, let alone sit on SCOTUS.

if there are no teeth in the apparatus to remove him, it doesnt matter what it looks like.

the corrupt congress has led to a corrupt supreme court.

That's not entirely fair, there's a lot more the executive branch could be doing to try to fix this too

Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455. The Constitution has come into play in several recent Supreme Court decisions striking down rulings by stubborn judges in lower courts whose political impartiality has been reasonably questioned but who threw caution to the wind to hear a case anyway. This statute requires potentially biased judges throughout the federal system to recuse themselves at the start of the process to avoid judicial unfairness and embarrassing controversies and reversals.

boom, so both branches are complicit. got it.

Yep, but I don't know if they're complicit because they genuinely like the way things are heading or complicit because they worry if they push back at all our society could totally break down into factions and they're not sure which side the cops and soldiers will choose, and those are two very different reasons for going along with things

Also, regardless of all of this - just by virtue of the fact that the Democratic party at the very least has to keep up the appearance of opposing the Republicans, we're all a lot better off with them winning elections, so I do recommend voting for them whenever you get the chance, just realize that's only step 1

e; words is hard sometimes

agreed. the people yelling 'both sides' are ignoring the fact that only one side has been actively interfering with peoples ability to vote for decades now.. you may not like the democrats, but at least they arent attempting to remove your ability to vote

Let’s be perfectly clear here: Mitch McConnell has led to a corrupt SCOTUS, not Congress.

congress could remove alito today, if they wanted.

so, why havent they? oh yeah, a huge percent of them are his corrupt allies.

annnnnnd its well known that mcconnel was just the front man taking the heat for our shitty congress . he wasnt working alone, in a vacuum. he took the brunt of the bad because there are so many incredibly stupid people in the his home state as to make he re-election a given.

You're using the word "Congress" to refer to Congressional Republicans, and it's disingenuous.

naw. i meant what i said. dems are complicit here.

hell, the if dems had any testicles they would remove the filibuster and get on with actual governing.

hell, the if dems had any testicles they would remove the filibuster and get on with actual governing.

They did... That's why McConnell was able to get the current picks in. SCOTUS picks just need a simple majority in the Senate.

Dems removed filibuster for all appointment except scotus in 2013 then R’s removed for scotus in 2017. Now republicans could have done it anyway on 2017 even without precedent, and Democrats could have forced merick garland in if they had gone fully nuclear. I’d call it equally shared

He's a supreme Court justice, he doesn't get to play the stupid card.

the only method to prevent him from playing the stupid card would take a coordinated effort from congress, who have proven themselves non-coordinate-able