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The Supreme Court on Saturday allowed Texas to use its strict voter identification law in the November election. The court’s order, issued just after 5 a.m., was unsigned and contained no reasoning.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether hotel operators have grounds to challenge a Los Angeles city ordinance that allows police to view guest registries, a power that local officials say helps them investigate crimes including prostitution. The City of Los Angeles asked the Supreme Court to intervene after an appeals court said the ordinance violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful searches and seizures. The ordinance requires hotel and motel operators to collect a detailed list of information on each guest, including name and address, car model, license plate number and method of...

In her dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling that Texas could enforce its voter ID law, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote: "The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters." No, Justice Ginsburg; the greatest threat to confidence in our election process is that too many people may vote who are not legally qualified to vote, or that may vote fraudulently. How confident can honest citizen voters...

Overnight the Supreme Court refused to reverse the stay imposed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and thus allowed voter ID to be required in the mid-term election in Texas. This is procedural delay based on the idea that election rules shouldn’t change at the last second. So voter ID gets one last hurrah in Texas. But election integrity advocates shouldn’t celebrate too much. Texas Voter ID is doomed. After this next election, it is prohibited from being used. Nor should much faith be placed in any appeal. The plaintiffs won on two separate theories under the Voting Rights...

The Supreme Court will allow Texas to use its controversial new voter identification law for the November election, the court said Saturday morning, despite a lower court’s ruling that the law unfairly targets minorities. By a 6-3 vote, the majority of justices rejected emergency appeals from the Justice Department and civil rights groups to prohibit requiring voters to produce certain forms of photo identification in order to cast ballots in the state. “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax...

The Supreme Court will allow Texas to use its controversial new voter identification law for the November election, the court said Saturday morning, despite a lower court’s ruling that the law unfairly targets minorities. By a 6-3 vote, the majority of justices rejected emergency appeals from the Justice Department and civil rights groups to prohibit requiring voters to produce certain forms of photo identification in order to cast ballots in the state. “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax...

The Supreme Court said Saturday that Texas can use its controversial new voter identification law for the November election. The Supreme Court's order was unsigned, as it typically is in these situations. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented, saying they would have left the district court decision in place. "The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters," Ginsburg wrote in dissent.

The US government announced Friday it would recognize same-sex marriages in seven additional states, after the Supreme Court declined to take up the debate. A total of 26 of the 50 US states, and the capital Washington, now legally recognize gay and lesbian marriages, giving them the same legal rights and federal benefits as married heterosexual couples. "We will not delay in fulfilling our responsibility to afford every eligible couple, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, the full rights and responsibilities to which they are entitled," US Attorney General Eric Holder said in a video message. "With their long-awaited unions, we are...

Civil rights lawyers on Wednesday asked a U.S. Supreme Court justice to block a Texas law requiring voters in the state to show certain forms of identification in order to cast a ballot. The request, made to Justice Anton Scalia, was filed by lawyers representing various plaintiffs who challenged the law, including the League of United Latin American Citizens.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked key parts of a 2013 law in Texas that had closed all but eight facilities providing abortions in America's second most-populous state. In an unsigned order, the justices sided with abortion rights advocates and health care providers in suspending an Oct. 2 ruling by a panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that Texas could immediately apply a rule making abortion clinics statewide spend millions of dollars on hospital-level upgrades.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia share a famous fondness for the opera, but they don't often find themselves on the same side of divided Supreme Court decisions. So it was noteworthy on Tuesday when, along with conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginsburg and Scalia teamed up to file a strongly-worded dissent in the court's decision to reject an appeal in a crack-cocaine sentencing case. The move to submit a signed dissent, noted first by Reason.com, was rare enough. The Supreme Court denies a vast majority of the petitions it receives, usually without any explanation or dissenting opinions. That's true...

The Supreme Court is allowing California to continue enforcing a law that bans the sale of foie gras. The justices on Tuesday rejected a challenge to the law from producers of the delicacy in New York and Canada. …

Law360, Los Angeles (October 10, 2014, 8:14 PM ET) -- The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to grant an emergency stay preventing Idaho from issuing marriage licenses and recognizing same-sex nuptials from out of state, greenlighting the Ninth Circuit to enter an order allowing its ruling to go into effect. The short order included no reasoning for the decision, stating simply that the Idaho governor's application for a stay, which had been granted by Justice Anthony Kennedy on Wednesday, was denied, and that Justice Kennedy's order was vacated.

A number of black Christian pastors and church leaders slammed the United States Supreme Court justices for turning down a case that would once and for all settle the dispute and divisiveness created by the issue of same-sex marriage. The National Coalition of Black Pastors and Christian Leaders characterized the court's decision -- "not to hear the case" and send it back to the lower courts -- as cowardice on the part of the nine members of the nation's highest court. On Monday, Oct. 6, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court simply stated that it would not review cases which overturned...

With the 35-year marriage between Christians and the Republican Party already on the rocks, a U.S. Supreme Court with a majority of Republican appointees just put the religious liberty of every believer in the GOP base in unprecedented peril. The GOP was already struggling to maintain the loyalty of its conservative base, and one of its last, best talking points was the importance of judicial appointments. Now that talking point has also been blown to smithereens. The John Roberts court gave us Obamacare, the narrowest wording possible when siding in favor of Hobby Lobby, got rid of the Defense of...

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an industry challenge to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations issued by Republican former President George W. Bush's administration that set standards for ozone pollution. By declining to hear the case, the court left in place the so-called primary air quality standards designed to protect public health, which Democratic President Barack Obama's administration defended. Those rules, which set air quality standards that U.S. states and the federal government must implement through regulations, had been challenged by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, which represents electricity-generating companies.

Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear several Appeals Court cases on gay marriages, which resulted in bans on gay marriage being struck down in numerous states across the country. Following the Supreme Court's decision to punt on the issue of gay marriage, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd saw this as a sign that social conservatism was declining and obnoxiously asked "it is time for conservatives to surrender in the culture wars?" After playing a pre-packaged segment on the evolution of social conservatism in the United States, the NBC host did his best to portray social conservatives as...

Friday on PBS's "News Hour," syndicated columnist Mark Shields pointed out, "among young Republicans, 61 percent of Republicans -- young Republicans under the age of 30 are in favor of same sex marriage." New York Times columnist David Brooks "applauded," the GOP for "doing absolutely the right thing in withdrawing" and letting the country have its way. Brooks said "I sort of applaud the minimalism here. Sometimes you let the country have its way and you don't try to determine the shape of the country, you sort of modestly step back and let the country figure out what it believes....

Exclusive: Matt Barber warns, 'The courts are tossing around spiritual nitroglycerin' It’s called Pandora’s Box. And the Supreme Court just opened it. Did you actually think the debate over “gay marriage” was about marriage? Have you really come to believe that this cultural kerfuffle has anything to do with “civil rights” or “equality”? Have you bought into the popular premise that this is a legitimate discussion on federalism – that it’s a reasonable disagreement over whether the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause requires that newfangled “gay marriage,” something rooted in same-sex sodomy, a deviant and disease-prone behavior our Constitution’s framers...

MADISON, Wis. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday may have blocked Wisconsin’s voter identification law, but an election reform expert is calling the decision purely procedural and expects the requirement to be in place at some point in the future. The high court didn’t give a reason for its decision in a brief order overruling the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, but three of the nine justices who dissented said there is a “colorable basis” for the court’s conclusion due to the proximity of the upcoming general election Nov. 4. Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas,...