Free Republic

ONE: Barack Obama's pulling the same scam he pulled with the Toomey-Manchin gun control package. Remember the State of the Union refrain: "They deserve a vote!"? So the gullible Republicans gave "them" a vote. And what happened? We won, by the skin of our teeth -- no thanks to the Republicans' partial surrender. (Had Lisa Murkowski flaked, there is no doubt that Reid would have picked up the four "swing Democrats" he had in reserve and achieved victory.) But the GOP paid a horrible price for letting the process go further than it should have gone. Kelly Ayotte, Dean Heller,...

"Supreme Court Appointment Could Reshape American Life." -- Headline from The New York Times, Feb. 18, 2016. Here in the middle of America's ongoing nervous breakdown, strategic thinking comes laboriously if it comes at all. Yet it seems only reasonable to consider Donald Trump's attempted presidential coup d'etat in light of what happens with the vacancy left by death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Prior to Trump's pole vault in South Carolina over the heads of his nearest competitors, the topic that was on all minds: How are we going to keep the Supreme Court at least partly friendly to constitutionalists,...

Of all the threats to free markets, two of the most dangerous are today having an adverse impact on the justice and viability of our patent system. The concept of "venue" plays a critical role in our judicial system in ensuring fairness and due process for litigating parties. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that a company should not be able to attain business success through relationships with government officials alone. However, those who wish to abuse our current patent system for their own advantage are exploiting local laws and loopholes to undermine small businesses and the country's economy as a...

Few people in modern history have fulfilled their oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" more than the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia was so well respected that the Senate voted 98-0 in 1986 to confirm him. These days it would be difficult to get a unanimous vote in support of Mother's Day. It doesn't take a fortune teller to predict the scenario that would present itself if the political dynamics were reversed and a Republican president were in the White House with a Democratic Senate majority. Democrats would be demanding no justice be confirmed until the next president...

In Springfield, Ill., last week, President Obama commemorated the ninth anniversary of his bid for the White House. He admitted that one of his "few regrets" was his inability "to reduce the polarization and the meanness in our politics." To conservative ears, Obama's comments fell somewhere between risible and infuriating. Obama has always done his best to demonize and marginalize his opponents. Either the president honestly cannot see that, or he's cynically pretending that the fault lies entirely with his critics. If only there were some way to figure out whether he's sincere. Well, let no one say the moral...

Scalia Defended Democracy: Liberals Subvert It "I write separately to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy," wrote Justice Scalia in his dissent from last year's Supreme Court decision, where five unelected judges imposed same-sex marriage on all 320 million citizens. "This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves." Exactly. "A system of government that makes the...

The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia is a terrible loss for our nation, and a reason for Republicans to rethink their approach to the judicial branch of our government. Scalia's departure leaves conservatives at a 5-3 disadvantage on the Supreme Court for all-important social issues, with the prospect of a Democratic president increasing that margin to a commanding 6-3 majority. Nearly all the Republican presidential candidates urged the Senate not to allow a lame-duck president to fill that vacancy. They pointed out that this vacancy hangs in the balance for the upcoming presidential election. Several GOP candidates promised to appoint...

It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him. But no one can replace Justice Scalia. He was a giant among jurists. For a third of a century, he led the conservative wing of the high court, creating a new school of judicial thought called "originalism." But originalism is not conservatism, which, in the judicial era that preceded Scalia, often meant court decisions that "conserved" the radical social...

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at 79 has been a gut punch for those who follow the Constitution, and a reason for glee from those who celebrate the death of anyone who disagrees with them. Also, allegedly, it has created a constitutional crisis of monumental proportions as Democrats demand the GOP-controlled Senate confirm whomever President Obama decides to nominate to fill the position. But there is no crisis. There is only one word: No. No, we will not consider any of Obama's nominees. No, we won't vote them. No, we don't care what you say about us on MSNBC....

It's Republican presidential primary "game time", and where the party's candidates stand on the proper role of judges in our representative democracy could not be a more important - or, in most respects, a more unifying - issue. All GOP contenders understand that the next president will shape the U.S. Supreme Court and appeals courts for the next decade, and possibly the next generation, given the ages of jurists and philosophical breakdowns on these courts. The Republican candidates all also share the same view of the judge's role in our system of government. They say they want judges who will...

Tucson Federal District Court Judge David Bury issued a decision on December 30 denying a retrial for imprisoned former Congressman Rick Renzi of Arizona, developments which I've been tracking over the last six months. Bizarrely, at the same time, Bury admitted in his nine-page opinion that virtually everything factual Renzi had asserted in his motion for a retrial regarding the prosecution's misconduct was true. The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from Renzi's defense — which likely would have changed the jury's mind — not just once, but multiple times. Some of it was not discovered until after the trial was over,...

Last week, after a federal judge ruled that Utah's governor had the power to block state funds to Planned Parenthood, it seemed to be a step forward for the pro-life movement in the state. Unfortunately, the effort came to a crashing halt on Wednesday. A federal appeals court issued a temporary injunction putting the brakes on the state's effort to deny $275,000 in state Medicaid contracts. "We are thrilled with [the] decision, which will allow our trusted health care providers and educators to continue serving the thousands of Utahns who depend on us as the appeals process proceeds," Karrie Galloway, CEO of the...

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION is once again before the Supreme Court. The case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, arose from the usual scenario: A white student applied to the university but was denied admission, while black applicants with weaker academic credentials were admitted because of racial preferences designed to favor minorities. It's no mystery why Abigail Fisher, the rejected student in this case, would object to that racial double standard and take her protest all the way to the Supreme Court. What's less clear is why the University of Texas embraces such a double standard. For decades, America's public colleges...

LONDON -- Set aside for a moment the violent incidents associated with people claiming to act under the authority of their Islamic faith and consider instead what passes for normalcy. Some in Britain would like to elevate to the level of wide-scale acceptance Sharia law, an Islamic legal system predicated on the religious tenets of Islam. "A number of Sharia councils operate in the UK to offer resolution to disputes," writes The Express, but currently "they have no jurisdiction in criminal matters." Not yet, anyway. There is a campaign underway to make a UK suburb Britain's Sharia-law zone. "Former archbishop...

The case of the corrupt prosecution against imprisoned former Congressman Rick Renzi continues to explode with new evidence of wrongdoing - literally every few weeks something else comes out. It is beginning to look like Fast and Furious as more information pours out implicating the government. As I've explained previously, the crux of the case against Renzi was he had proposed a federal land exchange that allegedly would have benefited himself. Evidence came out during the trial and especially afterward revealing this wasn't true. The FBI offered to give money to the government's key witness/"victim," Philip Aries, to change his...

In an incredible new development in the criminal case of imprisoned former Congressman Richard Renzi, Federal District Court Judge David Bury has agreed to hold an evidentiary hearing on October 26th in Tucson to look into FBI corruption and consider RenziÂ’s motion for a new trial. This comes due to new information that emerged after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal earlier this year. RenziÂ’s new-trial motion reveals a significant and appalling pattern of misconduct by the FBI during both the investigation and prosecution of his case. Renzi was targeted by Democrats within the U.S. AttorneyÂ’s Office...

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” declared Chief Justice John Marshall in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison. For centuries this statement has stood as one of the most famous in American jurisprudence. It was a declaration of the role and duty of the judicial branch within our constitutional structure. The Constitution provides for three separate and distinct branches of government, each having a “check” on the other, thus allowing, as James Madison wrote, for ambition to “counteract ambition.” As our government has grown and the issues we...

First, I urge you to watch this short video about the Little Sisters of the Poor. Then, try to wrap your mind around the fact that today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that the religious order must comply with Obamacare’s abortion mandate, forcing the group to pay for birth control and other drugs that may cause abortions. More from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty: The Tenth Circuit heard oral argument in this case in December of last year, when for the first time since the case began, Sr. Loraine Marie Maguire, Mother Provincial of the Little...

I in no way assert that I am an expert on the Supreme Court. I have read many books about Supremes such as Felix Frankfurter and John Jay, but that only gives me an inkling of insight. Listening to tapes of the testimony of the most famous cases gives me a little more knowledge. When the decisions came down last week, I relied on experts on both sides to give their thoughts and interpretations. Yet, they missed the key point of what occurred last week. A few got close. You see there was a court case in 1984 called Chevron...

According to the birthdates listed on the Supreme Court website, the court's nine current justices will have an average age of 75 by the time the next presidential term ends on Jan. 20, 2021. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest justice, was born on March 15, 1933. She is now 82. When the next presidential term ends she will be 87 years and 10 months old -- or 87.8 years old. Antonin Scalia, the second oldest justice, was born on March 11, 1936. He is now 79. When the next presidential term ends, he will be 84 years and 10 months...