Free Republic

If Eric Holder were a baseball player, he’d have been benched long ago — if not kicked off the team. His batting average before the Supreme Court is abysmal, losing again and again in his efforts to undermine the Constitution. This term featured four big strike downs. First was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Supremes tossed out ObamaCare’s contraceptive abortion mandate and upheld the First Amendment rights of several family-owned businesses to make their living in conformance with their religious beliefs. Although the government was not party to another case, Harris v. Quinn, the Justice Department filed an...

The Supreme Court's recent decision in the Hobby Lobby case demonstrates that the court, at least the five justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby, has little concern for, and probably little understanding of, women's health care. By ruling that corporations, on the grounds of the alleged religious views of their owners, can deny women access to some forms of contraception, the court set a horrible precedent that if followed will endanger the health and lives of many American women. The Hobby Lobby ruling may at first seem like a victory for the minority of Americans who think that...

Last week the Supreme Court determined that it was unconstitutional for Obamacare to dictate that for profit companies such as Hobby Lobby must provide certain forms of contraception that they object to due to their deeply held religious beliefs. This all came from the contraception mandate, one of the many Obamacare edicts that mandated companies must provide morning after pills as well as normal contraception or risk paying steep fines and potentially forced out of business. The hysteria that has resulted from the outcome of the Hobby Lobby decision have come mostly from shrieking feminists and liberal beta males seeking...

Today, the Supreme Court granted Wheaton College an injunction pending appeal against enforcement of the contraception mandate, even though Wheaton was eligible for the accommodation HHS has provided for religious non-profits. Specifically the Court ordered: If the applicant informs the Secretary of Health and Human Services in writing that it is a non-profit organization that holds itself out as religious and has religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, the respondents are enjoined from enforcing against the applicant the challenged provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and related regulations pending final disposition of appellate review. To...

We Americans are one lawyer away from losing our right to practice our religion. One more liberal Supreme Court Justice would mean that liberal extremists would be able to use the full power of the government to force people of faith to offer sacrifices at the altars of the gods of liberalism -- abortion, contraception, gay marriage, etc. Liberal Supreme Court judges have said that employers have no religious freedom. If an employee wants something, then the employer must provide it despite the employer’s religious beliefs. No woman needs contraceptives or to be sterilized. Those are not part of providing...

For some time now, Elizabeth Foley and David Rivkin have had two questions about the 44th president: “How is he getting away with this? And why isn’t someone doing something about this?” Foley, a professor of constitutional law at Florida International University College of Law, and Rivkin, lead outside counsel of Florida et al. v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of three Obamacare challenges that ended up before the Supreme Court in 2012, are doing something. They are the architects of the House of Representatives’ likely lawsuit against President Obama, which would challenge the president’s selective...

The economy is shrinking, the Middle East burns, and our southern border is under siege, so with all of that bad news, what do Democrats do? They distort the Supreme Court's decision on the Hobby Lobby case to fan the flames of the phony Republican war on women to score political points. In the Supreme Court's dissenting opinion penned by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, "The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would ... deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs access to contraceptive coverage." She later continued, "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield."...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – ObamaCare's controversial HHS mandate suffered another setback on Thursday, as the Supreme Court voted to allow a Christian college to opt out of signing a form that would result in their insurance company providing employees with “free” birth control and abortifacients. Instead, says the high court, the coverage will kick in after they inform HHS of their religious objection. The 6-3 decision exempts Wheaton College from filing Form 700, which certifies its religious objection to providing abortifacient drugs to women, until the case has been fully adjudicated. In all likelihood, the matter will ultimately be decided by...

Pro-abortion pastors from different “Christian” denominations distributed condoms outside a Hobby Lobby store to protest this week’s Supreme Court decision giving it and other companies the ability to opt out of the Obamacare HHS mandate that compels them to pay for abortion-causing drugs for their employees. This comes after a NARAL board member suggested abortion activists have sex in Hobby Lobby stores as a protest. The Chicago Sun Times has more on what happened: hobbylobby27Christian clergy and activists from different faiths protested outside a Hobby Lobby on Route 59 Wednesday in protest of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that says...

Christian right's plan is simple: Dominate courts, state legislatures, and push their twisted morality on all of us. “If fascism comes to America, it will not be identified with any “shirt” movement, nor with an “insignia,” but it will probably be “wrapped up in the flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution,” wrote in a 1936 issue of The Christian Century. Nobel Laureate recipient Sinclair Lewis put it even more succinctly when he warned, “It [fascism] would come wrapped in the flag and whistling the Star Spangled Banner.” No one who has followed the...

Why are women’s rights stalling even as other societal advances are made? The answer is a disaster for the right. Progressives often comfort themselves that while they’re losing a lot of economic battles, at least they’re winning the so-called culture wars. New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a staunch proponent of both gay marriage and tax cuts for the wealthy, symbolizes that political paradox for the left. But lately it’s impossible not to notice that even our culture war victories are uneven. They mostly involve gay rights, particularly marriage equality, and rarely women’s rights. In the same few years that...

In a decision that drew an unusually fierce dissent from the three female justices, the Supreme Court sided Thursday with religiously affiliated nonprofit groups in a clash between religious freedom and women’s rights. The decision temporarily bars the government from enforcing against a Christian college part of the regulations that provide contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The court’s order was brief, provisional and unsigned, but it drew a furious reaction from the three female justices — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan — who said the court had betrayed a promise it made on Monday...

As has been mentioned a lot lately due to the Hobby Lobby decision, the Supreme Court is made up of six Roman Catholics and three Jews. I have been meaning to post about this for awhile and it seems like an appropriate time to. For me, as an evangelical, I've found it increasingly troubling that all five conservative-voting justices are Roman Catholic. My belief on it is that the trend to select Roman Catholics as the "conservative" pick seems to come from the sense that they are, overall, less likely to strictly follow God's Word than would be an evangelical...

Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federal government after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify...

Today’s Supreme Court decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA is potentially a huge setback for the climatistas and the Obama administration’s recent proposal to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act, though it is a complicated opinion and will take a while to unravel.  It is a typical 5 -4 ruling along the usual lines, but in some ways appears to be a 9 – 0 vote against the EPA on the narrow holding, as the Court’s opinion features multiple partial concurrences and partial dissents about various sub-parts of the opinion that make it confusing to unravel. ...

RedState.com quotes a Huffington Post article wondering whether there are too many Catholics on the Supreme Court? At present there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court. 3 are Jewish ( Kagan, Breyer, and Bader ) and the remaining 6 are Catholic. It's been noted that the Supreme Court has never reflected the demographics of the country. The Court was all white until 1967 with the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, and Sandra Day O'Conner became the first female SC justice in 1981. Andrew Jackson appointed the first Catholic SC justice, Roger Taney, in 1836. The largest Protestant group in the...

Supreme Court: Obama Is Out of OrderPosted By Matthew Vadum On July 3, 2014 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments The Supreme Court has wrapped up its 2013-2014 term by handing stinging defeats to the increasingly unpopular President Obama.Doing its job for a change, the high court reined in the power of the Executive Branch of the federal government, striking down a forced unionization scheme, an abortifacient mandate, and improper recess appointments. The Court also rejected the Obama administration’s contention that police be allowed to search Americans’ cellphones without warrants.In the nearly five and a half...

Abortion-rights protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court building on Monday holding signs that read "Birth Control: Not My Boss's Business." Much to their chagrin, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. Of course, that's not how supporters of the government's contraception mandate see it. They actually believe that birth control is their boss' business, and they want the federal government to force employers to agree. More on that later, but it's first worth noting how we got here. First, contrary to a lot of lazy punditry, there is no Obamacare contraception mandate....

Chris Christie is running for president in 2016. That is perhaps why his seemingly evasive response when asked for an opinion on the recent Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case was so disconcerting for many on the right. In a heated exchange with CNBC’s Squawk Box hosts on Tuesday, the New Jersey governor defended his pro-life views under a withering barrage of questions about how that point of view may “bog him down” with the broader electorate, and whether he or other Republicans “should run on taking away the right to choose” from women. When asked if...

The team here has had plenty of great coverage since the Hobby Lobby decision came down, but there are still elements of not only the court case, but the highly vocal opposition to it which leave me puzzled. There has been plenty of analysis regarding the religious freedom aspect of the case, particularly from Ed, and that is certainly an important facet of the discussion. But I find myself even more perplexed by the arguments I’ve been seeing regarding the nature of personhood vis-à-vis corporations and how they shouldn’t be eligible for the various assurances found in the bill...