Before anyone goes on and gets away with telling you that today’s Heller decision was all because of four right-wing nutjobs and a rube they were able to trick into agreeing with them, do tell them to take a look at the Morgan Stanley Capital Group v Public Utilities Department #1 of Snohomish County that also came out today.
Snohomish County is the one on the northern border of King County here in Washington. The county officials fell for the signing of big contracts to buy for energy back in the late 1990’s from, you guessed it, Enron and the like. They figured that with these contracts, they’d be saving their taxpayers money because the cost was going up so fast.
The bad part was that the county officials who made the decision to sign these contracts were idiots. Enron fell out, the price of energy stabilized, and now they owe big buckaroonies to Morgan Stanley. They’ve been trying since 2002 to get out of having to honor these contracts.
The local federal courts said that the PUD had to honor the contracts.
The Ninth Circus said they didn’t.
And today, the SCOTUS, in a 5-2 decision, with Scalia writing the Majority opinion, being concurred with by Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, AGREED that the PUD didn’t have to honor the contracts, but that the Ninth needed to study their regulatory law a little bit more because they had their reasoning backwards.
Roberts and Breyer stood down because of conflicting issues (I believe they own stock in the MSCG or some such) and Stevens and Souter dissented together (which sounds dirty, but isn’t).
Now take a look at the names in this very non-conservative decision. They match, Justice for Justice (minus the non-participants) the Heller decision.
Granted, I’m not a Snohomish County rate payer, but in my opinion, they should have fired and voted out of office the idiots who had the idea to sign the contract in the first place and bit the bullet and finished it out.
Yes, there was market manipulation happening in the cost of energy. And yes, it would have sucked. But there is still market manipulation going on right now. PLUS, the people of Snohomish County entrusted these officials with their power rates and they were failed by them.
Sadly, they still have a number of the same idiots in charge, and they’re trying to squeeze out of paying up for their dumb voting habits.
They learned nothing; Either the voters or the officials.
The court’s job is to decide issues in a fair manner. While the Ninth is somewhat like Judge Maybelline, the SCOTUS’s job isn’t to get you out of a dumb decision scott-free.
Yet that was their call on this.
The left-wing Constitutional extremists, who believe that the 2nd Amendment is a “collective” right, are wailing up and down at the exact same Justices who they are praising in the MSCG v PUD#1 of Snohomish County decision.
If they know this fact, they are lying bastards who deserve a good beating about the head and shoulders.
If they don’t know this fact, they are too ignorant to continue an intellectually honest discussion with on any topic.