Monthly Archives: December 2019

SCOTUS For The Average Joe

Average Joe SCOTUS: Rotkiske v. Klemm

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General deadbeat Kevin Rotkiske, who suffers from eye problems, because he can’t see paying his bills, racked up some debt in 2003-2005 that he failed to pay.

Respondent Klemm, was a debt collector hired by the people Rotkiske owed money to, and Klemm went after Rotkiske for the deadbeat that he is in 2008.

Part of suing someone is obviously serving them papers that they are supposed to appear in court.

Rotkiske being the wile deadbeat he is, moved around a lot, and was no longer at the address Klemm had on file. But some dumb fuck that lived at the address now, signed for the summons, apparently not realizing their name wasn’t Rotkiske. Real fucking genius, there.

Anyway, Rotkiske, blissfully ignorant of all this shit, didn’t appear, and thus a judgement was given to Klemm.

Fast forward to 2014, and this deadbeat scumbag Rotkiske tried to finance a house. And surprise! You can’t finance shit, motherfucker, you’ve got a judgement against you. So Rotkiske was like, WTF? How do I have a judgement against me when I’ve never been summoned to court?

So after figuring out what happen, Rotkiske sued Klemm, because apparently this is the kind of country we are, that we’ll let a fucking deadbeat who didn’t pay his bills sue the people who just want him to pay his fucking bill.

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) has laws to protect deadbeats from mafioso type debt collectors, which I suppose I’ll grant may have some good facets to it. So this is the law in question here. I’m not sure how the fuck Klemm has done anything wrong here, since it was the dumb fuck who wrongly signed the fucking summons who caused the issue. Blame the fucking person who served the papers, right?

Anyway, Klemm felt like the courts should drop this shit, because the state of limitations on such violations is one year, and that shit happened back in 2008, or six years prior to 2014 when they were sued by Rotkiske.

But Rotkiske was like, “Fuck you, assholes. I didn’t know about this shit until 2014, and I took action immediately. How the fuck am I supposed to act when I don’t even fucking know it’s a problem.

So one court sided with Klemm, another with Rotkiske, as is usually the case, and now he we are at SCOTUS determining if a statute of limitation started in 2008 when Klemm got a bogus signature, or if it started in 2014 when Rotkiske first found out.

8:1 Judgement for Klemm, Ginsburg being the lone holdout. But the majority argued that the clock starts from the violation, in the text of § 1692k(d) of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. So fuck you, Rotkiske. Pay your fucking bills.

Ginsburg’s dissent was some half-hearted bullshit where she agreed with them on one point, and disagreed on the other. Who cares, though, right?

Read about the case, or hear oral arguments here.

SCOTUS For The Average Joe

Average Joe SCOTUS: Knick v. Township of Scott Pennsylvania

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Seven years ago, Scott Pennsylvania passed a law to protect cemeteries, and make them accessible to the public during all daylight hours.

The idea being, the poor or whatever, should always be able to visit their loved ones in their final resting place, without having to pay to do it.

Rose Mary Knick owns property in this township, and a township officer entered her property without a warrant, found some stones he deemed to be gravestones, and basically ordered her property be protected as a cemetery.

Rose was like, “WTF? First of all, where’s you’re fucking warrant for coming on my property?” Then Rose was like, “If you’re going to commandeer my fucking property, you have to pay me for it. There’s this thing called the constitution. Have you ever heard of it assholes?”

The Township merely protects these properties for people to visit their loved ones, so somehow, they’re trying to argue that Rose was unable to even show damages here. In other words, they’re not building something on the property and taking it away from her, they’re just protecting it.

I know, that’s the bullshittiest argument that ever bullshitted, right?

They also wanted to argue that they were going to reimburse her, but she didn’t give them time. They have a process for doing that, AFTER they’ve taken her property (the after being the part the Knick has a problem with), and she didn’t follow it. This bitch went straight to “sue those motherfuckers.”

While the lower courts seemed to think it was perfectly OK for the state to take Knick’s property over this bullshit, without first paying her, SCOTUS was unimpressed to the tune of 5:4, and told Scott Pennsylvania to either pay her up front, or give her her property back. You don’t get to set some long ass drawn out process for her to get paid, and meanwhile she’s without her property, and her compensation. That’s fucking ridiculous.

The dissent from the left-leaning justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan , was largely over when Knick can make her claim. They didn’t seem to dispute she should be compensated. They just think she had to jump through the hoops the state set forth. And then, if she doesn’t feel she was made whole, she can sue.

Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan trust the state to handle it properly with due process. But the rest of SCOTUS realizes this is dumb as fuck, and you can’t trust government to do a fucking thing right.

There was a state Supreme Court decisions, Williamson County Regional Planning Comm’n v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, that sided with Scott Pennsylvania, and SCOTUS told Pennsylvania they could shove that squarely up their ass, too. Overturned, bitches!