Recent SCOTUS updates vs BlueAnon

Our newest Supreme Court justice got a bit of hagiography treatment last week.

As pictured at left, the details of that photo will be explained near the bottom.

All nine justices, essentially, threw the National Labor Relations Board under the bus in its attempt to intervene to block the firing of Starbucks employees by trying to obtain an injunction against that.

Yes, all nine. Apparently, BlueAnon reading comprehension isn't perfect:

"JACKSON, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, dissenting in part, and concurring in the judgment."

"Concurring in the judgment" is pretty clear by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Look, if you want to save face by calling it 8-0-1 because she would have used a different "fork" in the process, OK, I'll give you that. But, 8-1, it was NOT. As I told one person on Twitter, she may be the best current justice, but, as a non-duopoly leftist, I don't have to put her on a pedestal.

And, I quote from her CONCURRENCE:

I agree with the majority that nothing in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) clearly strips courts of their equitable discretion to determine whether to issue a so-called §10(j) injunction. And I concur in the conclusion that we should vacate and remand for the Sixth Circuit to reevaluate this case under our traditional four-factor test for assessing requests for preliminary injunctions. But I cannot join the majority in ignoring the choices Congress has made in the NLRA about how courts should exercise their discretion in light of the National Labor Relations Board’s authority over labor disputes.

Seems pretty clear here, namely, that she's disagreeing about that "fork" in how the court got to this point, contra the BlueAnon who called me obtuse. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate and others also called it 8-1 and are also wrong. Shock me. 

To put it another way? I'm not a lawyer, but I am a journalist and I know how to read English.

Not being an open BlueAnon, Ronald Mann at SCOTUSBlog knows how to read. And, his last graf, quoting from her, actually shows how she punted:

Jackson joined her colleagues in the decision to send the case back to the lower court for reevaluation under the four-factor test. But she differed on the court’s conclusion about the likelihood-of-success factor. Thomas’s opinion, she wrote, ignored Congress’s “clear and comprehensive” directives in the NLRA on how courts should exercise discretion when it comes to the NLRB’s authority over labor disputes. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “today’s decision appears to be another installment in a series of labor cases in which this Court has failed ‘to heed Congress’s intent.’” And in what may come to ring like a theme for the term, Jackson closed by saying, “I am loath to bless this aggrandizement of judicial power where Congress has so plainly limited the discretion of the courts, and where it so clearly intends for the expert agency it has created to make the primary determinations.”

You may be "loath to agree," but .... YOU DID!

"Law Dork" Chris Geidner also got it wrong at Substack. When I restacked his piece with a note, he didn't like being called a "BlueAnon" and responded. I replied that, regardless of his real or coy denials of being a BlueAnon, he still got it wrong.

I quote from him:

In Starbucks v. McKinney, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson continued her role from last term of eagerly being the sole justice standing up forcefully in protection of labor rights.

Last term, she issued a solo dissent about the essential nature of “the right to strike.”

This term, on Thursday, she issued a solo partial dissent...

Geidner didn't get it AS wrong as Stern, but "solo partial dissent" is still not right, in my book. Per that big pull quote, if she really thought the wrong "fork" was being used on review, and on how that affected the likelihood of success, she would have done a full dissent. PBS, after all, notes that the ruling "tightened the standards." They weren't alone. CNN's header said "makes it harder." LA Times: "Limits power to protect ..."

(Update: Steve Vladeck [shock] also got it wrong.)

Again, if Jackson REALLY had a problem, she would have done a FULL dissent. Period.

Side note: I am also of raised eyebrows over the "KBJ" meme on Twitter. I know where that's coming from; it's a riff on the overrated, BlueAnon cult legend Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barf me.

And, in celebration of this? The mugshot up top? Via one of those free "morpher" websites, it's KBJ morphed into RBG. Notoriously morphed.

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The mifepristone ruling? Was it simply a dodge to rule unanimously (against Matthew Kacsmaryk) on the standing issue, as Slate (and likely other BlueAnon outfits) claim? I think not. I think that the nine will smack the Fifth Circuit or whomever even harder if they don't toss the state AGs' parallel action on standing grounds as well. Tis true that Kavanaugh, in his opinion for everybody but the concurring Thomas, did leave some doors open. But, even with that, he only left the door open for challenges to the FDA's second, and expanded, 2021 approval beyond the original 2016 approval.

That said, we once again have Slate saying, but, but. That's for political campaigning, advertising or other dinero and eyeball reasons. Don't be fooled.

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In the "even a blind hog occasionally finds an acorn" moment, Larry Tribe, he of 2A flip-flopping, thinks the egregious fees justices are taking for things like foreign travel leaves them open to removal from office on "good behavior" grounds.

But, he ignores one problem. Outside of impeachment, the Constitution specifies no other mechanism for removal enforcement.