Free Republic

On 15 May, 2018, the Boulder, Colorado city council unanimously passed an ordinance banning the possession of various firearms and accessories.  The ordinance is so new that it has not shown up in the municipal code yet. The ordinance is voluminous and detailed. The brief for the ordinance cites several biased and partisan "studies" to attempt to make the case to pass the ordinance. The ordinance likely violates Colorado's preemption statute and State and Federal Constitutional protections.  The ordinance casts a wide net. Legal pushback, in the form of a lawsuit, followed shortly after passage, as opponents to the...

Scott Anderson and Benjamin Wittes, who is a friend of former FBI Director James Comey, sued the administration on Friday after they failed to initially release the results of the survey, Talking Points Memo reported. The men had initially requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act in April but filed the lawsuit after the federal government didn't hand over the information in the timeframe required by law. The anonymous annual "climate survey" gauges employee's feelings about the agencies and was conducted from February to March, according to the report. The lawsuit argues that there is a high level...

LOS ANGELES, California, May 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) -- California’s Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra is leading a coalition of 20 attorneys general, representing 19 states plus Washington, D.C., opposing a Trump administration rule change that prioritizes abstinence education over contraception distribution in family planning funds. In February, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that abstinence messages and natural family planning methods would be given priority in distributing $260 million worth of family planning grants. The announcement did not mention artificial birth control. In response, Planned Parenthood affiliates in Ohio, Utah, and Wisconsin, as well as the American...

A federal court has ruled that four Christian universities based in Oklahoma will not be penalized for refusing to provide health care coverage for the birth control services they consider contrary to their religious beliefs. In 2013, Mid-America Christian University, Oklahoma Baptist University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, and Southern Nazarene University filed suit against the Obama administration over their mandate that forced most employers, regardless of religious convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs and contraception. A decision released Tuesday by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma granted relief for the four universities, in large part...

WASHINGTON By Washington standards, it shouldn’t be that hard to get money for Interstate 73, a decades-in-the-making, $2 billion project to connect 75 miles of road from the North Carolina border to the tourist hub of South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach. But Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., the local congressman and the road’s key backer, is struggling to get the project going. He does have support from his state’s two U.S. senators. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently called the interstate the second most important economic priority for South Carolina behind dredging the Charleston Harbor. Al Simpson, a well-connected Washington lobbyist who was...

Activists filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block construction of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s historic public parklands. Protect Our Parks Inc. accused organizers of an “institutional bait and switch” by initially advertising the center as the 44th president’s official library. “In August 2016, the City and the Park District publically announced that the Obama Presidential Library, promised to include all of the former President’s official records, would be built in Jackson Park,” the lawsuit reads. “Then, in May 2017, after the Defendants’ public announcement that a true ‘Presidential Library’ would be built, the Obamas did an about face...

On Monday, a divided Supreme Court said a court in a Louisiana murder case couldn’t accept a lawyer’s admission of his own client’s guilt over his client’s objections. In McCoy v. Louisiana, the Court considered a basic question about the proper role of attorneys in murder cases. Robert McCoy originally filed his own appeal directly to the Supreme Court about two questions related to his conviction on three murder charges. McCoy was sentenced to death in the case. McCoy was accused of killing three people in 2008 in a dispute with his then-wife and he was arrested after fleeing to...

The 10th Amendment provides that, if the Constitution does not either give a power to the federal government or take that power away from the states, that power is reserved for the states or the people themselves. The Supreme Court has long interpreted this provision to bar the federal government from “commandeering” the states to enforce federal laws or policies. Today the justices ruled that a federal law that bars states from legalizing sports betting violates the anti-commandeering doctrine. Their decision not only opens the door for states around the country to allow sports betting, but it also could give...

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a federal law that bars gambling on football, basketball, baseball and other sports in most states, giving states the go-ahead to legalize betting on sports. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. The 1992 law barred state-authorized sports gambling with some exceptions. It made Nevada the only state where a person could wager on the results of a single game.

The Supreme Court has struck down a federal law that banned sports betting in almost every state across the country, handing former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) a major win to bolster his legacy. New Jersey has been fighting since 2010 to make sports wagering legal at racetracks and casinos in the state, but had repeatedly been blocked by the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. The Court ruled 7-2 that PASPA’s provisions prohibiting states from authorizing and licensing a sports gabling scheme violates the anti-commandeering rule. In delivering the opinion of the court, Justice Samuel Alito...

Art teacher Stacy Bailey was twice selected Teacher of the Year at her Texas elementary school, where she started in 2008, but after she showed her students a photo of her and her then-girlfriend, she was placed on administrative leave. Now, Bailey is suing the district for discrimination. “Stacy is filing this lawsuit and taking this action in hopes of pushing Mansfield [Independent School District] out of the shadows of discrimination and into the sunshine of equal rights,” her attorney, Jason Smith, told NBC 5 in Dallas. Bailey’s lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court and lists the Mansfield Independent...

A lawsuit filed Tuesday by Texas and six other states may finally result in the long-overdue termination of the DACA program, which was created without legal authority by President Obama in 2012 to allow children brought into the U.S. illegally to temporarily remain here under certain conditions. The lawsuit does not address the question of whether allowing the roughly 700,000 illegal immigrants protected from deportation under DACA is a good policy or a bad one. Instead, the suit contends correctly that President Obama exceeded his authority under law and under the Constitution to create DACA without the approval of Congress...

Texas has already caught its first break in its new lawsuit to stop the Obama-era DACA program, after the case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen. A Republican appointee to the bench, Judge Hanen has already ruled against a similar deportation amnesty in 2015. And during that case he expressed skepticism about DACA itself, saying it seemed to stray beyond the bounds of discretion then-President Obama had claimed in setting up the program.

Lawsuit could undercut 2012 amnesty, end ongoing legal battles over Trump phaseoutTexas and a half-dozen other states filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the legality of the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty, opening up a new legal front in the increasingly messy battle over illegal immigration. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in southern Texas, asks judges to rule against the 2012 program that’s granted tentative legal status to more than 800,000 illegal immigrant “Dreamers.”

Andrew Pollack, the father of one of the 17 Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting victims, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against former Broward Sheriff Deputy Scot Peterson, gunman Nikolas Cruz and several others. Peterson, who was the Parkland school’s resource officer at the time of the Feb.14 attack, has come under immense public criticism for failing to enter the building while the shooting was taking place.

One of the passengers on the Southwest flight which made an emergency landing following engine failure has filed a lawsuit against the airline, as well as the makers of the plane and engine. When the engine exploded, pieces of it blew out a window on the plane, causing a woman to be killed when she was partially sucked out the window.Lilia Chavez filed suit against Southwest Airlines, GE Aviation, Safran Aircraft Engines and CFM International, a supplier of jet engines, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Thursday. Chavez alleges in the lawsuit that the companies "unforgivably breached" the trust...

A Manhattan judge has ruled that a bar that ordered patron who was wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat to leave had a right to do so under the New York constitution. The judge rejected Greg Piatek's argument that he wore his MAGA hat to pay "spiritual tribute" to 9/11 victims and was thus discriminated against for his religious beliefs. Instead, the judge cited the state constitution which does not bar discrimination based on politics. Washington Times: “The purpose of the hat is that he wore it because he was visiting the 9/11 Memorial,” Piatek attorney Paul Liggierisaid in court Wednesday, according...

Of all the acts of #resistance to the Trump administration, few have been as brazen and dangerous as a series of lawless and transparently frivolous federal judicial rulings designed to thwart Trump-administration policies. Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Hawaii’s challenge to Trump’s travel ban — a court case in which a federal judge granted standing to a state to file suit on behalf of tens of millions of citizens of foreign countries, and that featured unprecedented parsing of campaign statements to divine the “true” intent of a presidential executive order. But the travel-ban decisions — as egregious...

During arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the justices seemed, by a narrow margin, to be leaning toward upholding the the third iteration of the Trump travel ban. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is often the deciding vote in close cases, for example, made repeated comments suggesting that the court does not usually second-guess a president's national security decisions — even in the context of an immigration law that is seen as banning discrimination based on nationality. If the court does decide in favor of the government — a decision is expected in June — it would be a big...

Deepest blow yet to Trump’s phaseout ....Judge John D. Bates’s ruling would require a full restart, meaning even illegal immigrant “Dreamers” who’d never been approved before would now be able to apply for DACA.... judge imposed a 90-day delay on his own ruling to give the government a chance to reargue its case, but for now the ruling stands as the most severe blow yet to Mr. Trump’s phaseout. Judge Bates said the government’s reasoning for revoking DACA wasn’t convincing enough, and so it amounted to an “arbitrary and capricious” decision, which makes it illegal under the Administrative Procedures Act....