Gorsuch!
A concurrence for the ages
The “Trump Tariffs” SCOTUS decision on IEEPA has been commented on elsewhere, and I commend those commentaries to you. A funny example. A serious example. A useful example. A sensible example. An in-depth example.
I rise today to address the Neil Gorsuch concurrence.
Dude stuck a big red hot poker into the nether regions of no fewer than SIX of his colleagues.
For Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson (I’m paraphrasing, and tendentiously so, but it’s more fun): “You folks supported every cockamamie ‘emergency’ theory the Dems could concoct. You gave the Biden administration clearly unconstitutional and unjustified powers during COVID, and you accepted a definition of ‘emergency’ so encompassing that the US has apparently been in an ‘emergency’ since before the Declaration of Independence. Now that a Republican is office, you have belatedly discovered that a declaration of an emergency is more plausible if there is actually some emergency. You people are clowns, and you should be embarrassed.” (Remember, these three are Justices that Gorsuch is JOINING, in his opinion; they are on his side!)
For Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas (again, I’m not quoting, not even close): “You folks opposed every action the Biden administration tried to take. Sure, the Bidenites claimed excessive powers. But COVID was at least plausibly an emergency, with both an urgent timeline and potentially dangerous outcomes. Yet you still had this very restrictive doctrine you kept parroting, about how the President can’t do things. That meant that you were basically playing “Calvinball,” with made up rules for why Democrats can’t do things. And now you say none of those rules (some of which were admittedly dumb) don’t apply when a Republican is in office? And when there is no conceivable justification for invoking an emergency? You people are clowns, and you should be embarrassed.” (In fairness to Gorsuch, Kavanaugh in particular wrote an opinion so bizarrely self-contradictory that anyone would have had this reaction privately. But to put it in your concurrence? Damn!)
Me gusta.
UPDATE: An afterthought: IEEPA was passed with a “legislative veto.” Whatever else is true, the implied delegation was much less than Kavanaugh is claiming in his nonsensical screed.
Cut straight to the chase. Gorsuch called out his six colleagues who voted to back their political tribe, in spite of what the Constitution says. The fact that he put it in the official record of the SCOTUS is impressive.
if only all SCOTUS opinions were run through the Munger Unfilter, my guess is that reading SCOTUS opinions would quickly become the new American pastime! 😂