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Comment by yourduskquibble | Hacker News Reader

There is a LOT of nuance in every Supreme Court case and this author either doesn't understand it, or chooses not to; and both of those options are dangerous to helping the public better understand the reasoning behind any decision handed down by the Supreme Court.

> in their quest to utterly dominate the global political economy

> featuring Justice Neil Gorsuch rather than Judge Merrick Garland

> Supreme Court rulings like the lifeline given to the practice of gerrymandering, the endorsement of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, the gutting of public sector unions, and the defense of bakers who don’t want to serve gay people

To me, there is extremely biased (political) language throughout the entire piece.

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The article demonstrates an unfortunately narrow view of supreme court cases - seeing them as something that should constantly side on a certain moral answer to the object-level question (a specific case), rather than something that upholds important (or at the very least, consistent) terminal values on the meta-level.

Similar to how some people decide to side against freedom of speech when it starts to benefit their opponent more than it helps them, even though a matter like that should be decided on a higher principle than "someone says things I wish they wouldn't be allowed to say".

As far as this article goes I'm not sure I buy some of what the author is saying, partly due to the language they use, but also due to a lack of evidence and sufficient information in some areas. We'll have to wait and see.

Not sure why you are being down voted. For people down voting, let's look at some of the rulings.

1) gay marriage and the baker. This was a 7-2 ruling that basically set zero precedent. It just ruled that the council that ruled on the case originally was extremely biased in their ruling.

2) unions: only 28 states have forced union dues for collective bargaining. As well, the Federal government does not allow forced union dues. As an example of a union that exists without the protection of forced dues: the postal service union. Public unions aren't dead, but will need to try harder to keep their members now. The federal unions have shown that they can still exist without forced dues.

3) travel ban: while this law was the third attempt at it, and was rooted in some very horrible rhetoric from Trump, the judges that ruled in favor of it to reaffirm that the president has the executive power to do such. The majority was very clear they were not happy with his actions, but the law is written as such to allow him to do what he did here.

If you read the dissent on the travel ban decision, you can understand why it is bad and also deeply ironic. The Supreme Court sided with the government in the original Korematsu case saying that the government did indeed have the constitutional right to throw people of Japanese descent into camps.

They overturned Korematsu in this decision, only to uphold something similar with similar racist sentiment behind it. Whenever you think of the Supreme Court affirming that the executive has the power to do something, you should always keep in mind that they had originally considered the executive had the power to toss people in camps for 'security' purposes.

And on a similar note, the punting they did on the Baker case was almost entirely made up by the court based on a completely irrelevant line by someone tangentially related to the case. I highly recommend listening to episode 180 of the Opening Arguments podcast to understand how utterly ridiculous their decision was.

Baker: there were a number of reasons I believe SCOTUS punted on the case. (1) it was founded on a bad initial ruling and they would rather have a cleaner cut case to actually evaluate. (2) It originated in 2014, before the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case (that allowed gay marriage). So Colorado didn't even allow gay marriage yet. With the above 2 points, it complicated their ruling to be able to set a larger precedent.

Travel Ban: Korematsu was about American citizens being detained, and as the majority said was a horrible ruling the day it was set. The travel ban is going after countries that are unable to vet their citizens that were trying to travel to the US (non-US citizens). US Citizens are able to apply to get around the ban. Also, there were a few countries on the list that were not Muslim majority countries (Venezuela, North Korea, and Chad). The law outlined ways for countries to get off the list, which Chad succeeded in doing.

For the first: your facts of the case are wrong. It originated in 2012 and in 2014 Colorado allowed for same-sex marriage. However that's irrelevant to the case because even though same-sex marriage was not allowed, Colorado had the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act prior which prevented businesses from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, among other things. Saying it was a bad initial case is outright wrong considering the facts they make up in their ruling.

The travel ban is also incredibly racist. North Korea being on the list doesn't matter because North Korea rarely allows people to travel to the United States and the Venezuelan ban only bars a few high-level officials. Those countries added to the list are an excuse for the government to say 'look we're not racist we have non-Muslim countries on the list!' while the rest have little to no actual security rationale behind it.

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