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The chief judge of America’s most powerful secret court is a 64-year-old man who has said his path toward the law began in part when he was stopped by police in the early 1960s simply for being black, and who once said he became a lawyer to “make an impact on the quality of life for people of color in this country.” Reggie Walton is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose 11 members are appointed directly by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Revelations of broad spying by the National Security Agency have drawn unusual...

The Supreme Court rejected an emergency request to stop same-sex marriages in California, a lawyer for the gay couples who sued said Sunday. Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., one of the lawyers who challenged Proposition 8, said that he had just received word from the court Sunday morning that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy denied a request by ProtectMarriage, the sponsors of Proposition 8, to halt the marriages.

Rabbi Yoel Schoenfeld, Rabbi of the Young Israel of Kew Garden Hills in Queens, New York, told Arutz Sheva that the decision Wednesday by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down key parts of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), paving the way for greater acceptance of gay marriage, was a major step backwards for humanity that goes all the back to the Biblical Bila'am, whose donkey spoke to him.

You should decide now what kind of Supreme Court you want. Don’t wait until after the Justices hand down the Term’s major decisions. That will be too late....The Justices are being asked to strike down important federal laws that passed Congress with broad majorities. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires states and local governments with a history of discrimination to get approval from Washington for all changes to their voting laws and practices, no matter how minor. This historic, foundational piece of civil rights legislation was recently re-enacted almost unanimously. The Court previously upheld it. A ruling now...

A hallmark of democratic self-government is that the people should discuss, debate, and vote on important policy matters. And in America their votes should count, except when they clearly violate the people’s more settled will as expressed in the U.S. Constitution. Where the Constitution is silent, the task of a conscientious judge is to respect the constitutional authority of citizens and their elected officials. That’s what’s at stake in the two marriage cases on which the Supreme Court is expected to rule within the next week or so.

7-2 decision practically invites Arizona to try again using proper administrative procedures Most of what you have heard in the media about the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona is incomplete to the point of misleading. It is true that the Court held that Arizona’s Proposition 200 (passed in 2004) requiring documentary proof of citizenship was invalid as contrary to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requirement that states “accept and use” the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) voter registration form which merely requires that a registrant affirm citizenship. But, this ruling essentially was...

The CEO of the Tennis Channel, who also bundled millions of dollars for President Barack Obama's presidential campaign and was a co-chair of one of his fundraising committees, compared Comcast to a "brutal captor" and a rapist after the Tennis Channel lost a ruling in a federal appeals court. After a the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled last month that Comcast did not have to include the Tennis Channel on its basic cable package, Ken Solomon, fired off an email to his employees. Solomon was sworn in on Obama's Committee on the Arts and the...

A major investigation is under way in Las Vegas after a court officer is accusing of sexually molesting a woman, and employees and managers allegedly covered up the assault. Video has just surfaced of Monica Contreras, who went to family court with her 2-year-old daughter in August 2011. Ads by Google Windows 7 Driver DownloadWindows 7 Drivers Latest Download. Microsoft Certified. (Recommended) www.Windows-7.DriverUpdate.net Escape from America6 Places to Protect and Grow Your Wealth as US Spirals Out of Control www.Sovereign-Investor.com KLAS-TV reports she was in court for a routine divorce hearing. “According to internal court documents, as Contreras was leaving,...

Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document shows for the first...

President Obama’s healthcare law is under attack in the courts even as the administration sprints toward full implementation. Despite surviving a stiff challenge at the Supreme Court last year, some of the law’s biggest provisions remain at risk from legal challenges. One set of lawsuits accuses the Internal Revenue Service of illegally implementing new subsidies to help people buy insurance. Separately, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging the law’s mandate for health plans to cover birth control. A loss for the administration on the contraception mandate would undermine a key selling point for the law that Democrats used...

The father of Trayvon Martin, the teenager shot dead by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in a case that sparked nationwide protests over racial profiling and police inaction, said Saturday the family is bracing for a "rough road" as Zimmerman's trial nears. "We're going to have to sit through all the negativity," Tracy Martin said at an emotional prayer service in a Miami church nine days before Zimmerman's trial opens in Sanford, Florida. Martin was referring to defense attorney Mark O'Mara's attempts to cast his son as an aggressor whose actions on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, prompted Zimmerman...

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the U.S. government had properly classified top secret more than 50 images of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden taken after his death, and that the government did not need to release them. The unanimous ruling by three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a request for the images by a conservative nonprofit watchdog group. Judicial Watch sued for photographs and video from the May 2011 raid in which U.S. special forces killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after more than a decade of...

Arizona scored a huge victory against President Obama’s tyranny! A federal court UPHELD my Executive Order and Arizona's law denying driver's licenses to illegal aliens who President Obama has allowed to remain in our country under his outrageous deferred action program. The court ruled that Obama’s program DOES NOT preempt Arizona’s ability to determine who can receive a driver’s license. This is a great victory for state’s rights and the rule of law! Let me be clear: this fight has never been about the “Dreamers.” As Governor, I have taken an oath to uphold the laws of Arizona and I...

An appeals court ruling that school districts can no longer automatically withdraw union dues from paychecks will be "devastating" to the Michigan Education Association, said a union president whose teachers left the MEA to start a local union. "They will have to recalculate their loss projections," said James Perialas, president of the Roscommon Teachers Association, which decertified from the MEA last year. "Most union members don't think twice about paying their dues because with payroll deduct options they don't even receive the amount they are paying — it's taken out before they get it. With this decision, members will receive...

Cheerleaders in a small Texas town can continue to display their Bible verse banners at football games, after a district judge ruled Wednesday that their actions did not violate the Constitution. The cheerleaders in the football-dominated town of Kountze garnered national attention when they sued the school district in a case that pitted free-speech rights and religious freedom against the doctrine of separation of church and state. Hardin County 365th Judicial District Court Judge Stephen Thomas said the banners that included religious messages — such as "If God is for us, who can be against us? Romans 8:31" — made...

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, located in Brooklyn, was on lockdown shortly after 4:00 p.m. Tuesday afternoon after an anthrax threat, a court official confirmed to TPM. A source in the courthouse passed along an email from the court clerk informing court personnel of the threat. “An envelope was received with an anthrax threat and a white power and was released in the main clerk’s office on the first floor. Only one staff member came into direct contact with the powder,” the email read. “At this time and until we get an all clear...

The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: "Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense...Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis...”. The statement, released to Fox News, follows a Breitbart News report on Obama administration Pentagon appointees meeting with anti-Christian extremist Mikey Weinstein to develop court-martial procedures to punish Christians in the military who express or share their faith. (From our earlier report: Weinstein is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and says Christians--including chaplains--sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military...

Federal authorities unsealed a 10-page criminal complaint against Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev today, outlining the events leading up to the twin explosions in minute-by-minute detail. The author, Special Agent Daniel R. Genck of the FBI's Boston Field Office, pieced together the events from the footage of several different security cameras that captured Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the minutes before the bombing. Tamerlan was killed in a firefight with police early Friday morning. The complaint, for example, suggests that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have activated the first bomb via cell phone: snip

HAMMOND, Ind. — The losing attorney in a case over Hammond gun-control ordinances vowed to take the matter to the Indiana Supreme Court after a state appeals court upheld a ruling that two area residents weren't adversely impacted by the restrictions because they're moot under Indiana law.

by John HillStand With Arizona The following statement would seem to be a no-brainer: people who vote in national elections must be U.S. citizens. Yet we see bizarre headlines such as this from the Associated Press today: Must voters have to prove citizenship to register?You might as well ask: "Must drivers have to open their eyes to drive"? It is the biggest 'duh' imaginable. Unless of course, you have a vested interest in enabling and expanding voter fraud in the United States. And so we have the U.S. Supreme Court today hearing arguments in Arizona vs. Inter Tribal Council of...