Unanimous Supreme Court Decisions

Brookswood

Brookswood

Senior Member
You probably won’t hear or read about it in the news media because it’s not controversial and nobody is going to demonstrate, get angry and throw threats around. Today the Supreme Court rules 9-0 that states can’t use fees to extort property owners to do things they don’t want to do.

Good news. A unanimous Supreme Court on Friday ruled (Sheetz v. County of El Dorado) that the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause applies to legislatures that impose excessive fees. This is an important constraint on greedy governments.
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Also, last year the court ruled 9-0 that state and local government cannot take all the value of a property to pay back taxes and penalties. After a forced sale they can only are what is owed. Not the entire amount of the sale of the property. This allows an old woman who is sick to keep. $45,000 of the $50,000 her house sold for. The other $5000 is what she owed the county government. The SC told the county to give that money back to the former owner of the house.
 
I have been in the old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol building. Taft was instrumental in persuading Congress to provide funds for their own building.
 

Brookswood said:
Also, last year the court ruled 9-0 that state and local government cannot take all the value of a property to pay back taxes and penalties. After a forced sale they can only are what is owed. Not the entire amount of the sale of the property. This allows an old woman who is sick to keep. $45,000 of the $50,000 her house sold for. The other $5000 is what she owed the county government. The SC told the county to give that money back to the former owner of the house.
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Hope they had to pay lots more on top of that. Everyone knows it was wrong and simply theft.
 
Lawrence00 said:
Hope they had to pay lots more on top of that. Everyone knows it was wrong and simply theft.
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I agree. But state laws permit this and her appeals to local and state representatives and judges changed nothing. If not for the SC this lady would have been helpless. . And, by the way, others have had the same problem in other states. This is not unusual. So now governments have to actually keep only what they are owed. Imagine that!

What I find interesting is that ONLY the Supreme Court stood up for this lady. And they did it in a big way, 9-0. Every other government institution blew her off.
 
Brookswood said:
I agree. But state laws permit this and her appeals to local and state representatives and judges changed nothing. If not for the SC this lady would have been helpless. . And, by the way, others have had the same problem in other states. This is not unusual. So now governments have to actually keep only what they are owed. Imagine that!

What I find interesting is that ONLY the Supreme Court stood up for this lady. And they did it in a big way, 9-0. Every other government institution blew her off.
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Lucky for her, the SC has never benefited in any way from this method of state larceny.
 
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that a government employee was denied his legal right to appeal a decision that cost him $3000 in pay. This has been going on for many years, partly due to an appeal board that could not manage a quorum for five years. Once they finally had a quorum, they denied his claim. When be went to court to appeal he was told he was out of luck due to missing a 60 day deadline for appealing the decision. But, due to a government email system change, he never received the notice of the board’s decision. The man has not yet won his $3000 but not can take it back to a lower court and argue that the decision to deny him the money was improper.

It’s kind of amazing that the Supreme Court has to be involved in such a minor matter. OTOH, it’s nice to know they are sticking up for the rights of the little guy against the government bureaucracy.
 
It was not a minor issue. It involved a claim of a federal employee with the Merit Systems Protection Board.
 
Here’s another one that came down earlier this week:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that the National Rifle Association’s allegations that New York state officials coerced private companies to blacklist the group because of its political views stated a claim under the First Amendment, reversing a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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As Justice Sotomayer’s opinion noted, “At the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society. … The takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech.”
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Note that the NRA is still potentially in trouble for selling certain insurance policies that might not be legal in the state. What the court ruled against is misuse of regulatory power:

Before the case reached the Supreme Court, the NRA sued Maria Vullo, who was the superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) in 2018, after she leveraged her regulatory power over banks and insurance companies to coerce them into denying basic financial services to the NRA and, in Vullo’s own words, “other gun promotion” groups.
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Openly claiming that she sought to penalize the NRA because she disapproved of its political advocacy, the NRA’s complaint alleged that Vullo issued formal guidance to every bank and insurance company in New York urging them to “sever ties” with the NRA, promised lenience to certain insurers if they would stop doing business with the NRA, and required the group’s three principal “affinity insurance” providers never to provide such insurance to the NRA again.
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What do you know? Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down four more unanimous rulings.

Fun fact: In the 2024 session, 46% of the Court’s rulings were unanimous.

This makes me wonder what it feels like to be a lower court judge whose decision has been overruled by every justice on the Supreme Court.
 
I feel a bit comforted when there is a unanimous ruling. It shows that the Justices can..and will work together if the law provides common ground. Some of the cases being put before the court these days are pretty darn challenging with much pressure upon the justices to lean a particular way. Let us hope they are developing respect for each other during these times.
 

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