Just a short note based on one of several first impressions over the last couple of days (there will be more to follow, I'm afraid):
Friday, 30 Jun 2023, 1000edt, 1 First Street NE, Washington, DC: It's Karens' Day today. If there is one unifying factor in today's decisions, it is that the Jurisprudence of Being a Karen underlies them.
- Rejecting relief on student loans is perhaps the most obvious one, particularly since the rejected mechanism is one that this Court — indeed, five of the same members of this Court — has approved in other contexts (particularly those related to immigration and, most egregiously, the necessary logical underpinning of the Muslim-exclusion decisions). The "distinction" — if there is one — is that when there's relief from a burden at issue and not an absolute bar, the government has less authority to interpret or relieve the burden so long as there's another government unit that would be inconvenienced. (We'll leave aside that the other government unit that would be inconvenienced in this instance has a half-century tradition of evil at its core.)
But that's a post hoc rationalization at best. What there was, instead, was an alignment of those who personally (or who had family members) who both truly needed student loans and undertook substantial post-student-loan careers not focused on accretion of wealth above all else, against those who… didn't. There are more of the latter on this Court. And that's where one finds Karens. Especially since they're all wearing black dresses, leading into…
- A pathetic attempt to make something hard into something very easy and subject to a bright-line test, in the factually dubious (which bears reconsideration on remand… because a court has a continuing obligation to confirm its jurisdiction, including "injury in fact," at all stages of a case — even after judgment) instance of a website designer who wants insulation from potential legal consequences of her theocratically-rationalized bigotry. The looming shadow of police unions and police union officials who continue institutionalized bigotry, and the snickering of every elected sheriff or county prosecutor who has ever fired a subordinate for seeking election to the same office, are still there. Because that's a line that has been drawn: Call it "political disagreement" and it's essentially immunized. One wonders what the National Socialist White People's Party would do with that kind of immunity from consequences. It's not hard at all to wonder what Karens do; the one I observed berating a Latinx restaurant employee for not understanding an order a couple weeks ago, for instance…
Don't kid yourself. This isn't just about "gender identification issues" — a trip over to chapter 10 of Genesis and contemplating its fallout (not to mention the doctrine of the Dutch Reformed Church) should disabuse you of that overoptimistic interpretation rather quickly, especially once considering that Karens are definitely not descendants of Ham.
- But what does extraterritorial trademark infringement have to do with Karens? This is a lot harder to see, and it requires understanding a great deal more about what wasn't before the Court: Who were the real parties in interest, and more particularly how did those real parties in interest obtain those interests? It's not so much that this Court would, or based upon generations of past self-imposed restrictions could, actually directly take note and do something here; "identity of the litigants" is not supposed to matter to the rightness of legal doctrine.
But it inevitably does. That is, after all, the entire point behind the election-law decision earlier in the week…