angelatc
01-10-2019, 11:30 AM
It's a Wall Street Journal article, so you might hit a paywall. Copy the title, then open a private browser and search via Google to read the whole thing if that happens. This link might work - I don't know...Supreme Court Reexamines Touchy Question of State Sovereignty (http://bfy.tw/Lj36)
In a nutshell, liberals are worried about precedents like Roe v Wade.
The justices’ questions Wednesday reflected broader concerns that could frame the
reconsideration of precedents liberal cherish, such as the abortion-rights case Roe v. Wade,
should the court’s conservative majority choose to review them.
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that citizens could use their home-state courts to sue other
states, as nothing in the Constitution said they couldn’t. On Wednesday, Seth Waxman, the
attorney for California’s Franchise Tax Board, asked the court to overrule that precedent,
arguing that it flew in the face of a constitutional structure in which the states retained
sovereign powers, including immunity from lawsuits, that they hadn’t explicitly surrendered
when forming the union.
When Mr. Waxman said that “writings and speeches given by Hamilton, Marshall, and
Madison” supported his view, the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut him off.
“It’s nice that they felt that way, but what we know is they didn’t put it in the Constitution. And
so we talk a lot now about not relying on legislative history, but relying on the plain text,” she
said, pointedly invoking a method championed by legal conservatives such as the late Justice
Antonin Scalia.
Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, reacted with a trace of sarcasm. “We are all always very
vigilant not to read things into the Constitution that can’t be found in the text,” he said.
Link; https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-reexamines-touchy-question-of-state-sovereignty-11547080846?emailToken=071ca407c5755ecdc0574938ed0 87105sHcMml5Beg+dolFkU/1SxSKjIVnAvcFgYw3TfGhlRBliXSBUIx1tI84KB2NQh9e0kQri gRIa0jNhItAC/1D2pWMG30bKGVvy2nb/J4N1++11p3YMcOZb9MN2L4grskdo&reflink=article_email_share
In a nutshell, liberals are worried about precedents like Roe v Wade.
The justices’ questions Wednesday reflected broader concerns that could frame the
reconsideration of precedents liberal cherish, such as the abortion-rights case Roe v. Wade,
should the court’s conservative majority choose to review them.
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that citizens could use their home-state courts to sue other
states, as nothing in the Constitution said they couldn’t. On Wednesday, Seth Waxman, the
attorney for California’s Franchise Tax Board, asked the court to overrule that precedent,
arguing that it flew in the face of a constitutional structure in which the states retained
sovereign powers, including immunity from lawsuits, that they hadn’t explicitly surrendered
when forming the union.
When Mr. Waxman said that “writings and speeches given by Hamilton, Marshall, and
Madison” supported his view, the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut him off.
“It’s nice that they felt that way, but what we know is they didn’t put it in the Constitution. And
so we talk a lot now about not relying on legislative history, but relying on the plain text,” she
said, pointedly invoking a method championed by legal conservatives such as the late Justice
Antonin Scalia.
Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, reacted with a trace of sarcasm. “We are all always very
vigilant not to read things into the Constitution that can’t be found in the text,” he said.
Link; https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-reexamines-touchy-question-of-state-sovereignty-11547080846?emailToken=071ca407c5755ecdc0574938ed0 87105sHcMml5Beg+dolFkU/1SxSKjIVnAvcFgYw3TfGhlRBliXSBUIx1tI84KB2NQh9e0kQri gRIa0jNhItAC/1D2pWMG30bKGVvy2nb/J4N1++11p3YMcOZb9MN2L4grskdo&reflink=article_email_share