You know you've made it when Jon Stewart makes fun of you

Forward to the 4:45 mark to see Mark Eiglarsh.

In other news, we may be getting close to impeachment proceedings for Judge Fuller:

The House committee responsible for judicial impeachments has asked for a budget increase in case it needs to initiate proceedings against U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of Alabama, who has been charged with battery.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said this week that the committee may need the extra money to establish an impeachment task force, hire lawyers and conduct an investigation.

Although impeaching Fuller is only a possibility — his colleagues on the federal bench could decide not to recommend that option, or Fuller could resign — the budget request signals Congress is taking steps to prepare for what historically has been a rare but lengthy process.

“We are closely monitoring the recent arrest and ongoing prosecution” of Fuller, Goodlatte told the House Administration Committee on Wednesday.

Joining Goodlatte in presenting the budget request was the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

Fuller, a federal judge in Montgomery since 2002, was charged with misdemeanor battery after an August incident involving his then-wife in an Atlanta hotel room. If he successfully completes a pretrial diversion program of domestic violence counseling and drug and alcohol screenings, his criminal record will be wiped clean.

A five-member panel of federal judges is investigating to decide whether further disciplinary action is needed. If Fuller’s colleagues recommend he be impeached, the process would start at the House Judiciary Committee.

Has the Supreme Court tipped its hand on gay marriage?

Yes, according to Adam Liptak:

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday not to delay same-sex marriage in Alabama offered the strongest signal yet that gay rights advocates are likely to prevail in coming months in their decades-long quest to establish a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The court's decision came with a blistering dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas, who criticized his fellow justices for looking “the other way” as another federal court pushes aside state laws, rather than taking the customary course of leaving the laws in place until the court addresses larger constitutional issues.

Since October, when the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from rulings allowing same-sex marriages in five states, it has denied requests to stay orders requiring other states to let gay and lesbian couples marry. Largely as a consequence of the court’s inaction, the number of states with same-sex marriage expanded to 37 from 19, along with the District of Columbia, in just four months.

Last month, the court agreed to hear four same-sex marriage cases. They will be argued in April and probably decided in late June.

In dissenting from the unsigned order in the Alabama case on Monday, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, suggested that the court was poised to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a question the court ducked in a pair of decisions in 2013.

Justice Thomas accused the majority of an “indecorous” and “cavalier” attitude in refusing to maintain the status quo in Alabama at least until the Supreme Court issues its decision in the four pending cases.

The oldest trick in the book...

The prisoners' we'll-give-you-booze-and-handcuff-you trick worked on these Brazilian prison guards!  From CNN:

Two women, dressed in skimpy, "sexy" police officer costumes, allegedly showed up at a prison in Brazil's interior Mato Grosso state on Thursday, according to local media reports.

The women talked guards into letting them inside and seduced them, spiking their drinks in the process, according to reports.

What happened next is what one might expect when strangers in lingerie appear unannounced at your work place: the guards were found the next morning, naked and handcuffed with little recollection of the night before.

And 26 prisoners had escaped from the prison, located in Nova Mutum, a small city near Cuiaba.

A spokesman for the Justice Secretariat of Mato Grosso, which oversees prisons, confirmed to CNN that officials found bottles of spiked whiskey and a pair of provocative, police-themed costumes next to the handcuffed guards, who were passed out.

"We assume that is what the women were wearing when they seduced the guards," spokesman Willian Fidelis said.

In other news, Alcee Hastings just crushed this dude from Texas:

Big federal bar shindig tonight

It's the 34th annual federal judicial reception.  Click here to get your tickets. 

I wonder if the judges like going to this thing or whether they dread it....

Hell hath no fury....

Congrats to Marc Caputo on his new gig at Politico. His parting piece with the Herald is fittingly on Ana Alliegro here:

David Rivera’s former girlfriend repeatedly told a federal grand jury that the ex-congressman was the mastermind behind a complicated campaign finance scheme that landed her and another in prison.

Nearly two dozen times, Ana Alliegro says, she testified that Rivera supplied more than $81,000 used in the crime, that he plotted the cover-up and he then helped her twice escape to a getaway in Nicaragua.

Yet she’s angry that Rivera has yet to be indicted, despite her hour-long Dec. 18 testimony and a mountain of evidence: corroborating witnesses, a trove of emails, a handwritten note from Rivera and even fingerprints. Also, a federal judge last year demanded that Rivera be named in open court.

“Are politicians above the law? I don’t get it,” Alliegro told the Miami Herald in an interview. Rivera, who has long maintained his innocence, couldn’t be reached.

Should the Yankees trade A-Rod?

Justice Sotomayor wouldn't say... but she answered lots of other questions yesterday in Palm Beach:

Being the first Hispanic justice of the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t the only characteristic that sets Sonia Sotomayor apart from her colleagues, the 60-year-old native New Yorker told a capacity crowd at the Palm Beach County Convention Center on Monday.

The most obvious differences are entertainment choices. “My colleagues all love the opera,” she said. “I like jazz and dance.”

But, she said, the key distinctions run far deeper.

“I come from a background they don’t,” she said. “It’s not just dancing salsa but a little bit from the passion of my personality.”

That passionate personality, which she said prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to dub her a “bulldog,” stems from her hard-scrabble life growing up in housing projects in the South Bronx as the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. While she got her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her law degree from Yale Law School, her Ivy League education came from scholarships, not birthright

She recalled cockroaches scurrying across the floor of her family’s “tenement” and mice nestled in boots kept in the bathroom on winter days. “You change, yes, but you don’t become completely someone else,” she said. “You carry with you that background.”

The luncheon speech, sponsored by the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the county bar association, attracted a record-breaking crowd of more than 1,200 people.

Shunning a podium, Sotomayor walked among the dozens of tables in the cavernous ballroom, offering her thoughts about TVs in the courtroom, judicial activism and even Billy Joel.

Happy Groundhog Day

Somehow it's already February...

Interesting story last week about Judge Rakoff. He got annoyed and resigned from a forensic panel he was on because DOJ was dictating what evidence would get disclosed to the defense. But DOJ has backed off and Rakoff is back. From the Washington Post:

A federal judge Friday returned to a presidential commission on forensic science after the U.S. Justice Department reversed a decision to bar the panel from discussing changes that would give criminal defendants more information about forensic evidence before their trials, a federal official said.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York had resigned in protest Wednesday from the Obama administration panel, accusing the department of placing “strategic advantage [for prosecutors] over a search for the truth.”

However, Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates invited Rakoff to return, saying she had not been aware the commission had worked openly on its plans for nearly a year.

Yates told the National Commission on Forensic Science that “it seemed only fair” that it “make its determination as to what information should be provided to the Attorney General.”

“This is obviously a critically important issue to the Department,” Yates said. “We take very seriously our obligation to ensure that defendants receive a fair trial.”

A Justice Department official said the initial decision that pretrial evidence discovery rules were beyond the commission’s scope was made by Yates’s predecessor, James Cole, before his departure Jan. 8. The official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added that Yates may not agree with the panel’s suggestions.

Rakoff, the commission’s only federal judge, thanked Yates and said he looks forward to a discussion “on the merits.”

Good for Judge Rakoff.

Here in the SDFLA, we have a visitor from the High Court. Justice Sotomayor is speaking in WPB:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will be at the Palm Beach County Convention Center today, speaking at a luncheon gathering of the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches and the county Bar Association.

With 1,250 tickets sold, the event is sold out.

The revolution will not be televised

Forget about TV, you can't even get a seat inside the Supreme Court. From USA Today:

The dignified calm of the U.S. Supreme Court was broken recently when seven protesters, one after another, rose to shout epithets about the growing power of money in American politics — a trend the court has hastened through its rulings.

It was a rare moment of chaos in the court. When the episode ended, Chief Justice John Roberts told spectators, "We will now continue with our tradition of having open court in the Supreme Court."

Roberts' off-the-cuff remark was significant, reminding the public that the nation's highest court is indeed open — and openness can sometimes be messy in a democracy. But as the court continues to add blockbuster cases to its docket, the unfortunate narrow scope of the court's openness deserves scrutiny.

In the next three months, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on three extraordinary landmark issues: same-sex marriage, the future of Obamacare and the constitutionality of lethal injections for capital punishment.

Roberts is correct that the court will be open when those cases are argued — but only to 200 or so members of the public lucky enough to obtain seats. Many will wait in line for days in advance. If past experience is repeated, wealthy individuals who want seats will pay thousands of dollars for others to wait in line for them — an unseemly business that tarnishes the court's image of openness.

Why will only a relative handful of people be able to witness history at the court? Because, as open as it is, the court has long refused to let cameras record or broadcast its proceedings. We have written about this before, but the court's policy continues to amaze people — especially young people, who take transparency and access for granted.

Recent polls have shown strong approval for cameras in the Supreme Court (71%) and record-high agreement that the court should be more open and transparent generally (95%).

The group Fix the Court, which advocates for greater transparency at the Supreme Court, posted an amusing video recently in which random Americans were told that the Super Bowl will not be televised. The interviewees refused to believe it — and, no worries, it will be. But when those interviewed were told that a slightly more important institution — namely, the Supreme Court — is never televised, they were incredulous, and upset.