Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs cursed out the country after the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion circulated on Monday night. She capitalized on the incident with a plug to fundraise for her campaign.
“F**k the patriarchy,” said Hobbs. “If you agree, help us defend the right to choose in Arizona.”
State Representative and congressional candidate Walt Blackman (R-Snowflake) criticized Hobbs as not being a serious individual in response.
You are not a serious person.
— Walt Blackman for Congress (@BlackmanForAZ) May 3, 2022
Politico published the leaked opinion on Monday night. Justice Samuel Alito authored the 98-page draft majority opinion, which dated back to February. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett signed onto the opinion.
Tuesday morning, Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the authenticity of the draft. He ordered an investigation into the leak. Although much speculation abounded following the Politico report, no official suspects have been named.
Roberts assured the country that the leak wouldn’t influence the final ruling.
“To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed. The work of the Court will not be affected in any way,” said Roberts.
JUST IN: The Supreme Court confirms the authenticity of the draft opinion revealed last night by Politico. The chief justice has ordered an investigation into the leak. pic.twitter.com/XZweHdyhCG
While Arizona’s Republican elected officials acknowledged the draft opinion’s content, their greater focus was on the individual responsible for the leak. Arizona’s Democratic elected officials, however, focused on their disagreement with the opinion. They didn’t address the alleged impropriety of the leak — some appeared to even justify it.
Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) said that while he agreed with the ruling, he disapproved of the leak and speculated that someone with pro-abortion views was responsible. Congressman Paul Gosar (R-AZ-04) concurred.
The leaked SCOTUS draft was likely from a far left law clerk who is trying to derail the final decision by creating mass outrage, hoping to scare a Justice to change his or her mind.
Congressman Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-07) argued that the bigger issue at hand wasn’t the fact that someone compromised the process of the highest court in the land by leaking sensitive documents unintended for public consumption. Rather, he argued that the bigger issue was how SCOTUSblog, the independent media blog offering Supreme Court reporting, engaged in “inside ball bulls**t.”
Making women second class citizens I think is a graver sin than your inside ball bullshit. https://t.co/7AaRtS6k1c
Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ-02) argued that the draft opinion didn’t reflect the American people’s will. One of the first arguments in the majority draft opinion asserted that both Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood weren’t based on legal rationale. Rather, Alito wrote that both rulings contained arbitrary, legislation-like rules.
There’s been a lot of horrific long-term damaging news over the past several years, none have hit me like this.
We must vocalize our dissent. This is not the will of the American people. https://t.co/DNjYlpfQza
— Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (@RepKirkpatrick) May 3, 2022
Both of Arizona’s Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly didn’t address the leak, just their disagreement with the draft majority opinion.
Vice President Kamala Harris accused the Supreme Court justices of “want[ing] to punish women” by “tak[ing] away their rights to make decisions about their own bodies.” Harris claimed that the ruling threatened the “right to privacy” — a concept not enumerated within the Constitution but contrived in the 1890s by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
President Joe Biden pledged to push for legalized abortion on demand legislation, should the draft opinion become the final ruling.
The leak inspired pro-abortion and pro-life activists to turn up at the courthouse.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) promised to vote for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson about two hours before the Senate voted to confirm her.
Sinema’s remarks mirrored those issued earlier this week by Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ). Sinema emphasized Jackson’s amount of trial court experience, though she didn’t delve into the details of Jackson’s more controversial cases involving violent criminals like child rapists.
“Judge Jackson brings to the bench a wealth of knowledge, more trial court experience than all other current Supreme Court Justices combined, a commitment to respect precedent, and a proven independent, pragmatic approach to judicial decisions. Judge Jackson has exceptional qualifications and will serve our country well in the years to come,” wrote Sinema.
Statement on Voting to Confirm the Nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court pic.twitter.com/gW56qH8ccz
The Senate Republicans known within greater GOP circles as “Republicans In Name Only,” or “RINOs,” were the ones who rejected their party’s stance to confirm Jackson: Mitt Romney (R-UT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AL), and Susan Collins (R-ME).
Judge Jackson’s confirmation was a historic moment for our nation. We’ve taken another step toward making our highest court reflect the diversity of America. She will be an incredible Justice, and I was honored to share this moment with her. pic.twitter.com/K8SAh25NL5
In the weeks before Jackson’s appointment, reporters discovered that the White House briefings of Jackson’s rulings in which she administered punishments below sentencing guidelines excluded the more controversial cases.
On Monday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) announced that he would vote to approve Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the vacant Supreme Court (SCOTUS) seat. Kelly said that he supported all of Jackson’s record on case rulings, which likely included the slew of controversial criminal judgments that gave lenient sentencing to violent criminals.
“After speaking with Judge Jackson and reviewing her record and approach to deciding cases, I believe her to be very well qualified and having demonstrated a commitment to fairly interpret and uphold the Constitution on our nation’s highest court,” said Kelly.
After meeting with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, it is clear that she has achieved incredible success throughout her legal career while demonstrating a commitment to ensuring all Americans have a fair shot at justice.
On Sunday, a day before Kelly’s announcement, the New York Post reported that one of the convicted child rapists who’d received lowered sentencing twice from Jackson had been arrested for assault. Sex offender Leo Weekes received one year in prison with credit for time served for failing to register as a sex offender, a classification he earned for raping his 13-year-old niece four years earlier. Jackson’s sentence allowed Weekes to be released five months later. The federal guideline minimum for Weekes’ crime would have been two years in prison. A year later, Weekes was arrested for the attempted sexual assault of his sister-in-law, though she dropped the charges; prosecutors claimed that Weekes paid her off. Several years later, Weekes was back in court for failing to register as a sex offender and violating multiple stipulations of his probation, again coming before Jackson. Again, Jackson gave Weekes a punishment lower than what the guidelines suggested: a 24-month sentence overlapping with his punishment for the previous assault conviction.
As the New York Post report noted, the Weekes case was not included among the seven cases given to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration. The requested cases were to clarify Jackson’s habit of sentencing below federal guidelines and the requests of prosecutors.
A day prior, the New York Post also broke the story that Jackson gave lenient sentencing to those convicted of multiple counts of child torture during hearings on eight child porn cases. For those cases, Jackson argued against applying recommended sentencing because she disagreed with the relevance, severity, and logic of child pornography law. Like with Weekes, Jackson reduced one defendant’s original sentence of 60 months, the mandatory minimum that fell under the average sentence of 81 months for similar cases, by giving him credit for time served, thereby reducing his sentence to 38 months.
To another defendant last year charged with child porn distribution, Jackson expressed sympathy and called family members’ letters portraying the defendant in a positive light, “mitigating factors.” Jackson said she wasn’t persuaded by the prosecution’s display of the more “egregious or extreme” child porn distributed by the defendant.
Jackson also advocated for the release of all those imprisoned in Washington, D.C., at the start of the pandemic. She managed to grant several releases to those charged with or convicted of major crimes, such as the member of a fentanyl trafficking ring and a serial bank robber.
Despite this track record, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats portrayed Jackson as tough on crime.
Republican Senators confirmed Judge Thapar, who told a child pornography offender "There [are] much more heinous criminals." But some won't confirm Judge Jackson, who told an offender "your crimes [are] among the most serious criminal offenses that this Court has ever sentenced."
— Senate Judiciary Committee (@JudiciaryDems) April 4, 2022
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) announced earlier this month that it would consider the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), federal law that determines when states can rescue abused or neglected Indian children, as well as foster rules. This law applies to tribal children and those eligible to live on a tribe but living off of a reservation. Essentially, ICWA does all it can to keep Native American children within their own families or with other Native Americans, and requires state officials to apply a higher degree of scrutiny over abuse to determine whether abuse exists. While other children’s cases need only present “clear and convincing evidence” of abuse, Native American children’s cases would need to present “without a reasonable doubt.” ICWA was enacted to prevent the government from taking Native American children from their families.
Phoenix’s nationally-acclaimed public policy research and litigation organization, the Goldwater Institute, requested SCOTUS to review ICWA; they’ve challenged the federal law for years. In light of the SCOTUS announcement, Goldwater Institute Vice President of Litigation Timothy Sandefur discussed ICWA on the “Andy Caldwell Show.”
Sandefur described the law as unconstitutional and depriving children of fair treatment. He noted that Native American children are at greater risk for molestation, abuse, gang membership, and suicide, arguing that already-vulnerable children were only hurt more by ICWA.
“The rules that [ICWA] sets for child protection are actually less protective for a child than the laws that apply for every other racial group,” said Sandefur.
TUNE IN today at 4:30 PM MT/6:30 ET!
Goldwater's @TimothySandefur will be on the @ACaldwell_Show to analyze SCOTUS' decision to hear a challenge of the unconstitutional federal law that discriminates against Native American kids.
— Goldwater Institute (@GoldwaterInst) March 1, 2022
The case SCOTUS will consider, Brackeen v. Haaland, comes from a culmination of different cases brought by several parents desiring to adopt Native American children but were denied due to not being Native American themselves.
Sandefur described one case that the Goldwater Institute worked on, in which a mother wanted to terminate the rights of her abusive husband so that her new husband could legally adopt her son. If the child had been any other race, the rights could’ve been terminated. However, ICWA applied. Under ICWA, it was “prohibitively difficult” to terminate an abusive parent’s right, even in the case of a mother requesting that action.
In a press release, Sandefur also noted that ICWA also violates the separation of the federal and state governments by requiring states to enforce federal law and interpret their own laws differently.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The recent US Supreme Court decisions around mask mandates have understandably generated a great deal of media coverage and comment. Many conservatives have praised the Supreme Court’s decision to affirm the stay on the nationwide OSHA vaccine mandate. But as a lifelong prosecutor and judge, I can assure you the true and most significant factor has been overlooked. Specifically, based on the Court’s decision to vacate the stay regarding the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers (the “CMS Mandate”), the President, with no constitutional or legal authority, has been allowed to order ten million healthcare workers to receive a vaccine or risk losing their jobs and their livelihood. And while state legislatures, exercising their police powers, have imposed vaccine requirements on healthcare workers in the past, no President has imposed a nationwide mandate involving such a permanent, personal healthcare decision. Simply put, as Judge Sutton recently stated in In re MCP No. 165, unlike masks or gloves, “vaccines cannot be removed at the end of the shift.”
The underlying legal justification for overturning mask mandates on businesses is the same legal basis that should have driven a decision to roll back a mask mandate for our health care workers. In both the OSHA and the CMS cases, the issue was not whether vaccines were a wise or effective measure against the spread of COVID-19. Rather, the issue was simply whether the President has the constitutional authority, through executive branch administrative agencies, to impose nationwide vaccine mandates. In the OSHA case, the Court held, by a vote of 6-3, that because Congress never clearly delegated such authority to the President, he lacked the authority to impose such a mandate. However, in the CMS case, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh switched their votes on the grounds that Congress had delegated such authority to the President based on a hodge-podge of Social Security statutes. But these statutes provide no such authority. Indeed, the purported delegation for the CMS mandate was less clear and more strained than the statutes offered to justify the OSHA mandate. So, what explains the puzzling switch of two purportedly conservative Justices on essentially the same issue?
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Roberts and Kavanaugh, at least at some level, sought to appease the public’s concern over COVID. Thus, in effort to “soften” the public’s reaction to the OSHA decision, they justified the switch by relying on the purportedly stronger policy arguments for mandating vaccines for healthcare workers to protect hospital patients from COVID. But while politics and the will of the public has rightfully driven decision-making in our Executive and Legislative branches of government, our Judiciary was set up by our Founding Fathers to make judgements based on the law and precedent. The Supreme Court does not have the authority to determine whether vaccine mandates are good policy, nor may the Court violate the Constitution in the interests of promoting political harmony or the popularity of the Court. As Justice Scalia once stated, “If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
With these recent decisions around mask mandates, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh have dangerously broken through that critical differentiation, opening the Court up to the influence of the day’s ever-changing political environment. Judges must have the courage and resolve to enforce the Constitution, even when the results may be unpopular. It may appease some that the OSHA stay was upheld, but it was denied for healthcare workers. But either way, the result is the same: a precedent has been set by the Court allowing the President to use any crisis labelled a “medical emergency” to expand his power. The consequences of this decision will inflict grave damage to the rule of law. As Justice Jackson stated in his dissent in Korematsu v. United States, when the Court permits another branch to set aside constitutional protections to address emergencies, such decisions lie “about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”
Of course, looming in the background is the Supreme Court’s pending abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. There are sound legal grounds set forth in Dobbs for modifying, if not overruling Roe v. Wade, and allowing the legislative branch to decide the abortion issue. But mark my words, the Supreme Court, led by Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh, will land on a more muddled, middle of the road, politically crafted decision that attempts to please everyone. They have shown their hand in the CMS case.
Andrew W. Gould was appointed as a Justice to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2017 after serving 5 years on Division One of the Arizona Court of Appeals. He retired from the Supreme Court in March 2021. Prior to his appointment to the Court of Appeals, Justice Gould spent 11 years as a Judge of the Superior Court in Yuma County, where he served as both Associate Presiding Judge and Presiding Judge.
Andrew received his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law in 1990. He began his legal career in Phoenix, Arizona, practicing in the field of civil litigation. In 1994, he became a Deputy County Attorney, prosecuting major criminal cases for Yuma and Maricopa Counties. He served as Chief Civil Deputy for the Yuma County Attorney’s Office from 1999-2001. Justice Gould has previously served on the Arizona Supreme Court Commission on Technology, as the President of the Arizona Judges’ Association, and has taught at the Judicial Conference and New Judge Orientations.
