Free Republic

After several decades of conservative control of the Supreme Court and a string of rulings against their legislative and social priorities, Democrats and left-leaning media appear to be mounting an all-out assault against the judicial branch, casting doubt on its legitimacy and impartiality, while working to undercut the reputations and credibility of its more conservative justices.Ostensibly conservative since the appointment of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1986, the court has generally not attracted comparable partisan scrutiny to the extent that it has under the Biden administration. The Roberts court, however, currently boasts three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump,...

The Supreme Court seemed to signal interest this week in taking up a challenge launched by Hawaii against big oil companies to hold them liable for climate change, and some Democrats are suggesting the high court is "captured" for the fossil fuel industry. The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Justice Department to weigh in on a petition to hear a lawsuit brought by the City of Honolulu against major fuel companies including Sunoco, Exxon and Chevron, claiming the companies’ products cause greenhouse gas emissions and global warming without warning consumers about the risks. The city employed a series of...

On Friday’s “Situation Room,” CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen lamented the U.S. Supreme Court’s deliberative process for former President Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution immunity claim. Host Wolf Blitzer said, “Norm, it’s interesting that the court isn’t scheduled to issue more decisions until Thursday, further delaying any resolution to Trump’s immunity claim. At what point does holding that trial before the election become totally unrealistic.”

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal ban on bump stocks approved by former President Donald Trump, the latest opinion from the conservative court rolling back firearm regulations. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion for a 6-3 court. The court’s liberal wing, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented. Trump had pushed for the ban in response to a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas. Bump stocks allow a shooter to convert a semi-automatic rifle into a weapon that can fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.

Justice Samuel Alito on Friday asserted that Congress could amend the law to successfully ban bump stocks in an opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to invalidate a Trump-era ban on the devices. The ban on bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, was implemented by the Trump administration in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, where a shooter used a bump stock to kill a total of 60 people and wound hundreds of others — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The Biden administration later defended the...

The U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled unanimously to keep a controversial abortion drug on the market even after the court ruled two years ago to overturn Roe v. Wade. In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of pro-life medical practitioners and their organizations had sued the FDA for relaxing restrictions on mifepristone, the first of two drugs used in a medical abortion. The plaintiffs argued that these relaxed standards would "jeopardize women’s health across the nation." SCOTUS justices apparently considered the case on technical grounds rather than on the ethical issues regarding killing unborn children and ruled...

The Supreme Court issues opinions this morning at beginning 10:00 from cases from the October 2023 term.After yesterday's opinions there are now twenty-seven cases remaining to be decided. Of note is the Trump vs. U.S. immunity case, the Chevron deference cases(Relentless and Loper Bright), and the Fischer case regarding charges related to the January 6, 2021 protests.There is also the Cargill case where at issue is whether a bump stock device is a “machinegun” as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b). Another 2nd Amendment case is U.S. v. Rahimi where the question is whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits...

A parents group is questioning Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to open an investigation into purported threats and acts of violence against school boards across the U.S. after the group discovered that the attorney general’s son-in-law is the co-founder of an education company that uses critical race theory in its work. ... “His daughter is married to the cofounder of @PanoramaEd which is under fire for its multimillion contracts with school boards,” she added. “At @DefendingEd, parents sent us tips. We raised the alarm. Now Garland is trying to silence parents.”

While Russia and Santa Cruz aren’t often mentioned in the same breath, when it comes to Wilder Ranch State Park, a shared history features betrayal and a land grab. The sprawling 7,000-acre park just 4 miles west of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk is filled with coastal views, but on a recent morning, I found myself entranced by a local historical tale involving a husband accused of forging documents to remove his wife and her family from the deed. When hiking through this part of the California coastline — where sandy beaches, marine life and a magical sea cave coalesce —...

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a legal challenge to the expanded use of the abortion pill mifepristone, allowing the current level of restrictions to stand for now. The Court, however, did not rule on the merits of the case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM) v. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but ruled unanimously that the doctors who filed the lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration did not have legal standing to sue. In doing so, the Court did not rule on whether or not the FDA acted lawfully when it lifted the REMS [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies]...

"But, the reasonable-cause standard goes far beyond simply fine tuning the traditional criteria to the §10( j) context—it substantively lowers the bar for securing a preliminary injunction by requiring courts to yield to the Board’s preliminary view of the facts, law, and equities."

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available. The court found unanimously that the group of anti-abortion doctors who questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions making it easier to access the pill did not have legal standing to sue.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Tuesday said they will be introducing legislation in response to the increased ethics concerns related to the Supreme Court. Ocasio-Cortez and Raskin, who serve as the ranking and vice-ranking members, respectively, on the House Oversight Committee, were part of a committee roundtable Tuesday regarding these concerns. They explored various “avenues” for holding Supreme Court justices accountable, they told MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes. “And so, it is not a question…of if Congress has jurisdiction and power over the Supreme Court. It is, what power are we going to exercise in order to...

Transcript from Mark Levin video:The federal government is being affected by a federal election, a presidential election. The entire campaign law process at the federal level is now influenced by this one court and this one state. We need to address this issue, and there's only one institution with the power to do that: the United States Supreme Court. This is the court that, if you can get your case to it and find a procedural pathway, has the national authority over a presidential election if the Constitution is violated. You might wonder, has the Supreme Court ever intervened in...

Let’s not beat around the bush. It is more likely than not that Donald Trump will return to the White House next year. Right now, polling averages show Trump with a slight popular vote lead over incumbent President Joe Biden. And, even if Biden overcomes this small deficit, the Electoral College system effectively makes Trump votes count more than Biden votes. Although there may be signs that the Republican Party’s advantage in the Electoral College is fading, that advantage was substantial in the last two presidential elections. Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 2016 by more than two points in...

A liberal activist who posed as a Christian conservative to record Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts is the latest shot in a left-wing fight to undermine the high court. Liberal activist Lauren Windsor attended the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3 and secretly recorded her conversations with both Alito and Roberts. Windsor’s recording comes as various activists and media outlets have hounded Alito in recent weeks over two separate instances involving flags flown at his homes: one instance in which an inverted flag flew at his primary residence and a separate instance...

The Supreme Court is about to drown us in a deluge of explosive and massively consequential decisions involving some of the most controversial issues of the day. Right now, the justices are scrambling to complete blockbusters involving abortion, guns, homelessness, unions, social media, online disinformation, pollution, the administrative state—and, oh yes, hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions, including Donald Trump’s. Yet at the moment, there’s a logjam: The court, which likes to wrap up decisions by the end of June, is way behind schedule, releasing just a trickle of minor cases several weeks in a row. Even if it stretches into...

The Second Amendment case of Morin v Lyver, granted certiorari, vacated, and remanded back to the First Circuit, has been decided in favor of the plaintiff, Alfred Morin.In June of 2022, the Supreme Court published a clarification of how the Second Amendment should be treated by the Courts in the Bruen decision. Bruen gave clear guidance on how Heller should be applied. This was necessary because the Circuit courts had created a complicated two-step process that was used to sidestep the Heller decision. In Bruen, the court said the two-step process was one too many. The Court laid out a...

So apparently the US Supreme Court has just given 40 US states the green light to begin issuing their own gold and silver-backed currencies. Quote from the SC decision: “The United States maintains a dual system of banking, made up of parallel federal and state banking systems. That dual system allows privately owned banks to choose whether to obtain a charter from the Federal Government or from a state government.” www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-529_1b7d.pdf

The special prosecutor’s overreach and the trial judge’s open bias are equally disturbing. Just when you thought the “swamp” judicial system could sink no lower, an Elon Musk-X petition to the Supreme Court reminds us about Jack Smith’s and a leftist judge’s complete disrespect for Americans’ constitutional freedom from intrusive government searches. The information emerges in X Corp.’s petition for a writ of certiorari relating to a court order arising from a search warrant that special counsel, Mr. Jack Smith (yes, that one), served on X demanding data and records from former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The problem from...