News Briefs – 06/28/2024

A bankruptcy judge on Thursday put on hold an attempt by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim to seize the business bank accounts of the Infowars broadcaster Alex Jones.

Really, really dumb move by the lawyers. This was a blatant and open attempt to end-run the bankruptcy judge. The judge said

“Let’s just do this with process and transparency,” Judge Lopez said in the hearing, held in Houston. “The last thing I want to do is start hashing out another dispute about two sets of families that have been through enough already.”

That’s leaving a lot of tone out, because judges know that the written record is what goes. There was probably not yelling, but a degree of raised voice there.
Bankruptcy court is a court of equity, not law. That means that the judge can essentially just do what he thinks is “fair,” (which is also what all the SJWs want to do — replace the law courts with equity courts) and that makes it an even worse place to just piss the judge off. This makes all the Sandy Hook families look like money grubbing trust fund kids fighting over an estate.
(To be clear, an equity court can’t do anything it wants — they are fenced in by a few laws and the general constitution — but it’s a circus compared to the normal court procedure, where the judge is generally hemmed in left and right by statutes, rules, and common law.)

SCOTUS opinions was a big day.
Biggest was Fischer, the J6 case. Like a lot of people (including me) were saying from the start, the “obstructing an official proceeding” charge was on an Sarbanes Oxley law, and it was about Enron document shredding. It made it a felony to shred documents to cover your crimes. There is an “otherwise impeding” clause in it, and the prosecutors tried to drive a truck through that. The SCOTUS just shit on that truck and lit it on fire.
SCOTUS holds that the law (18 USC 1512) applies to documents. Duh. The ‘otherwise’ has to tie to documents somehow, and the example they gave is that someone might forge evidence rather than destroy it. It does NOT cover things like, some folks took tours of Congress and this made gin-soaked Pelosi weep London Dry in a simulacrum of tears and kept Congress from voting. SCOTUS has reversed and remanded (meaning it goes back down to the original court) and instructed the court to follow its narrower ruling, meaning that the charges are either going to be dropped or dismissed.
If I remember correctly, this is the VAST majority of the felony charges on the J6 defendants, and other than a few violent assholes, everyone else just has misdemeanors other than this.
The Loper Bright case is also huge. Short version: The Chevron doctrine is dead, dead, dead. Chevron held that if Congress was open-ended or ambiguous on the powers that it gave a federal agency, the the courts had to just take that agency’s word on how much power Congress gave it. It sounds incredibly stupid when you say it like that, because it was that stupid.
This one is huge, and is probably even a bigger deal than Fischer in the long term. This is going to effect essentially everything some alphabet regulator has done since 1985. All the EPA bullshit, all the BATF bullshit, all the NTSB bullshit in cars, the BLM regulations on ranchers, all of it is now up for review by the courts, the courts are instructed NOT to just assume that agency knows what it is talking about, but to do their jobs.

Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency acts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

Last opinion released would be the big opinion on any other day, but the two above are huge. Grants Pass v Johnson is about an anti-camping law. These are essentially vagrancy laws, preventing bums from setting up shanties and ramshackle hovels in their hobo jungles in the middle of town. Pro-hobo activists claimed that these laws are Cruel and Unusual Punishment because it makes being a poor a crime.
SCOTUS called bullshit, especially since the plaintiffs themselves were “homeless” only because they wouldn’t go to the town shelter, where they had to smoke outside and not be drunk. Anti-camping laws now have full effect again (which also applies to Texas, which makes me happy that the police have to do something about the hobo jungle down the street from me.)