Free Republic

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch formed an unlikely alliance with the high court’s three liberal justices on Tuesday in breaking with the majority’s decision to temporarily keep the Title 42 border policy in place. “The current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” Gorsuch said in his dissent, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency,” he added. “We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.” While they did not join Gorsuch’s dissenting...

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that they did not hear President Donald Trump’s 2020 election case because it did not meet “normal criteria.” Anchor Chris Wallace said, “One of your arguments against seeing the court’s political is the fact that it refused to even hear the appeals from the Trump campaign about the 2020 election. Didn’t even hear it them.” ......SNIP...... Wallace asked, “Why was that?” Breyer said, “Why was it? Because they didn’t bring a case, I guess, that met the normal criteria for being heard. When we decide to...

The Supreme Court on Friday denied an appeal by a Nevada church to allow additional worshipers to join in-person services based on capacity amid the coronavirus pandemic. Nevada has placed a 50-person cap on all places of worship, no matter the capacity of the building, as a part of the state's coronavirus restrictions. But casinos, along with other businesses such as restaurants and movie theaters, may permit up to 50 percent capacity, allowing casinos to grant access to hundreds of patrons at a time. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh all issued dissenting opinions rejecting the constitutionality of...

Conservative lawmakers blasted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he sided with the court's liberal justices in a 5-4 decision Friday that rejected a Nevada church’s request to block the state government from enforcing a cap on attendance at religious services. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning that Roberts had "abandoned his oath." "What happened to that judge?" tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). "Freedom of religion is our first freedom. Yet SCOTUS has ruled that casinos can host hundreds of gamblers, while churches cannot welcome their full congregations. Justice Roberts once again got it wrong, shamefully closing...

In Nevada, it seems being in the entertainment business has more leeway than those exercising their constitutionally protected right to worship. Amid the COVID outbreak, the state has limits on the capacity of certain locations. For churches, it’s no more than 50. For everything else, from movie theaters to casinos, it’s much more than that. It seems a bit unfair. The standard makes no sense, but it seems to be perfectly logical for Chief Justice John Roberts who sided with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court in the case of a church who challenged this unfair standard (via NYT):...

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory. The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The case concerned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. The question for the justices was whether that last prohibition...

In a shocking U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch voted with the axis of evil—that is, with Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the axis of evil decided that in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the word “sex” includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”—both subjectively constituted conditions. As a result, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” now prohibits employers from firing employees who self-identify...

Et tu, Gorsuch? A little over three years into a lifetime appointment, and he's already speaking for Justice Ginsburg when it comes to matters of transsexualism and forgotten all about Justice Scalia's textualism. No matter how hard we try, our "conservative" judges belly-flop into "strict constructionist" poseurs and weak-kneed judicial activists faster than Chief Justice Roberts can rewrite Obamacare into a tax. I mean, you try to keep these "originalist" jurists on a philosophically sound path. You teach them "right" from "wrong." You instill in them a respect for the law and the importance of always telling the truth. You...

Today, Justice Neil Gorsuch threw a little shade at the Trump administration for unilaterally rewriting federal gun laws. "The agency used to tell everyone that bump stocks don't qualify as 'machineguns.' Now it says the opposite. The law hasn't changed, only an agency's interpretation of it," Gorsuch wrote. "How, in all of this, can ordinary citizens be expected to keep up—required not only to conform their conduct to the fairest reading of the law they might expect from a neutral judge, but forced to guess whether the statute will be declared ambiguous….And why should courts, charged with the independent and...

Is the era of Big Judicial Activism over? It might just be. Supreme Court Justic Neil Gorsuch, in a ruling about denying green cards to migrants who come here to be "public charges," something that's plainly laid out in U.S. law as illegal, threw in a special warning to activist judges, all leftists, who have been beavering away to rule from the bench, warning them that he's tired of their shenanigans. It's a specter to behold - a big lion on the Supreme Court who not only cares about rule of law, but is now warning the leftists out there...

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch responded to critics who might think that it is the job of judges to fix politics in an interview with CNN released Tuesday. "Do you really want me to rule the country?" he asked. "It is a raucous republic and the battle of ideas is what our founders had in mind," he continued. What they didn't have in mind "was nine old people in Washington sitting in robes telling everybody else how to live." Gorsuch was appointed by President Trump in 2017 to fill the seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. He told...

Video at link. (CNSNews.com) - Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), one of 22 Democrats seeking her party's presidential nomination, told MSNBC on Wednesday that Alabama's new abortion ban is "draconian and inhumane," and she called for "action" against Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch if they do not uphold Roe v. Wade. Both men are Trump appointees. Gillibrand said President Trump has deliberately selected "radical justices" to "undermine basic reproductive freedoms and civil rights" of women. "And I'm going to lift this up, and as President of the United States, I will not appoint any justice that does not...

If you listen to the Democrats, they claim that President Donald Trump is out to wreck the U.S. government. But when leaders of the party begun by Thomas Jefferson talk about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, they worry that he will affirm the principles held by Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers. This illustrates why President Trump's nomination of 49-year-old Neil Gorsuch is a judicial home run. Gorsuch is a fine successor to Antonin Scalia, who unexpectedly died a year ago. Gorsuch, like Scalia, believes that the Constitution actually means something, rather than being a meaningless collection of words to...