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Obama Family Vacation Breaks the Bank at Taxpayer Expense Judicial Watch Files for Contempt in Supreme Court against State of Hawaii Judicial Watch Comes to the Rescue of Congress in Climate Change Scandal Obama Family Vacation Breaks the Bank at Taxpayer Expense I hope your Christmas and holiday season has been wonderful. The Christmas holidays are a busy time of year for Judicial Watch because corrupt politicians and bureaucrats often leak embarrassing scandal information during a time when many Americans aren't focused on the news (and many reporters are on vacation). Sure enough, we received a Christmas document dump...

Almost everyone has seen the iconic 1977 movie Star Wars. And most people remember the scene where Princess Leia records a message to Obi-Wan Kenobi. She tells him, "Help me Obi-Wan. You are my only hope."Today conservatives are in the position of saying, "Help us Ted Cruz. You are our only hope."There is one compelling reason why Ted Cruz is the only hope for conservatives in this election.What is it?At this point, there are only three candidates who have any shot at the GOP nomination. They are Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. The rest at this point are just...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 100% directly mentioned the need to pick correctly hard liners in a recent debate. He alone is likely to give us the best chance to not make a critical selection choice by listening to the wrong people, as Rubio did on gang of 8, as as Bush 1 did with Souter. We cannot afford another Souter. We have to have someone who will pick a Bork and keep picking only those until they pass the senate. We need a constitutional scholar who is aware of the need to comb records to find only those who are...

MADISON, Wis. - The conservative targets of a politically driven John Doe investigation say they have learned to never underestimate the vindictiveness of the people who have spent years intimidating them. Despite little chance of success, the Democrat district attorneys who signed off on the unconstitutional probe filed a motion Friday to intervene in the legally dead Doe in hopes of taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, the Democrat who launched the secret procedure in August 2012, filed the motion under seal in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Dane County District Attorney Ismael...

Part 307 of 306 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wis. - With a state Supreme Court deadline looming, a conservative target of Wisconsin's notorious John Doe investigation is urging Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm to take his case to the court. Political activist Eric O'Keefe believes there's a teachable moment here for the partisan DA who launched the investigation more than three years ago. O'Keefe in a statement issued Wednesday said Chisholm should file to intervene in the Wisconsin Supreme Court's recent ruling that reaffirmed the politically driven probe into dozens of conservative groups and the campaign...

Defenders of racial preferences are good at two things: ignoring the real-world consequences of their policies, and attacking anyone who notices the consequences. At the recent argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Justice Scalia asked a question that illustrated that the victims of racial preferences in college admissions include not only the people denied admission because they are not the preferred race, but also the people preferences are designed to help. At oral argument, Justice Scalia said: There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas...

The case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving racial double standards in admissions to the University of Texas at Austin, has an Alice-in-Wonderland quality that has been all too common in other Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action in academia, going all the way back to 1978. Plain hard facts dissolve into rhetorical mysticism in these cases, where evasions of reality have been the norm. One inconvenient reality is that racial double standards by government institutions are contrary to the "equal protection of the laws" prescribed by the 14th Amendment to the constitution. Therefore racial double standards must be...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is siding with many Democrats in criticizing conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia over comments he made about African American student achievement during oral arguments earlier this week of the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas. "I thought his remarks were very tough,"Trump said of Scalia in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper that aired Sunday. "They were very, very tough to a certain community," the Republican front-runner continued. "I thought it was very tough to the African-American community." Scalia's remarks, made Wednesday, drew accusations of racism from Democrats and liberal activists who...

Chief Justice John Roberts is "disgraceful'' and a "disappointment'' to conservatives, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Saturday, while praising Associate Justice Clarence Thomas as his favorite member of the U.S. Supreme Court. "Justice Roberts really let us down. What he did with Obamacare was disgraceful, and I think he did that because he wanted to be popular inside the Beltway,'' Trump told about 4,000 supporters. The celebrity billionaire was referring to the chief justice's two votes to uphold key provisions of President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law and to the expressway around the District of Columbia, an area...

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is "disgraceful" and a "disappointment" to conservatives, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Saturday, while praising Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is his favorite member of the high court. "Justice Roberts really let us down. What he did with Obamacare was disgraceful, and I think he did that because he wanted to be popular inside the Beltway," Trump told about 4,000 supporters. The celebrity billionaire was referring to the chief justice twice voting to uphold key provisions of President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law and to the expressway around the District of Columbia, an...

In a semi-stealth promotion, a major Barack Obama fundraiser who served as a defense lawyer for a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist is scheduled to become the third-highest ranking Department of Justice executive. California-based attorney Tony West was named Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, making him the No. 3 man at the Justice Department. Here you have a man linked to a terrorist group who is now a top Justice Department official. It smacks of corruption," said political strategist and attorney Michael Baker. West assisted candidate Obama in raising tens of millions of dollars as a co-chairman for Senator Obama's...

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday took to the Senate floor to attack Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's comments during an affirmative action case as "racist," and sought to tie him to Donald Trump and Republicans. The Nevada Democrat was responding to a line of questioning from Scalia during oral arguments at the court on Wednesday in an affirmative action case, Fisher v. Texas. Scalia seemed to suggest that some African-Americans don't belong in top colleges.

WASHINGTON — An affirmative action plan at the University of Texas seemed to be in trouble at the Supreme Court on Wednesday. By the end of an unusually long and tense argument, a majority of the justices appeared unpersuaded that the plan was constitutional. A ruling against the university could imperil affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation.In a remark that drew muted gasps in the courtroom, Justice Antonin Scalia said that minority students with inferior academic credentials may be better off at “a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.”

Supreme Court justices found themselves enmeshed in the thorny issue of affirmative action once again Wednesday, hearing a University of Texas case that could determine whether any race-based school admissions plans can pass muster under the court's evolving jurisprudence. For several decades, the court has flirted with the upper boundaries of affirmative action, but a majority has always shied away from delivering a final blow to racial preferences. The case heard Wednesday doesn't directly challenge preferences, but it does give justices an opportunity to make them all but unworkable. Affirmative action supporters walked away from the case fearing that was...

In 2010, five Supreme Court justices invalidated Chicago’s handgun ban, rejecting the argument that the Second Amendment was a “second-class right.” Turns out only two of them — Justices Thomas and Scalia — really meant it. For the last five years, the right to keep and bear arms has been trapped somewhere between legal limbo and constitutional purgatory. The lower courts continue to whittle away the Supreme Court’s rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, while seven justices stand by quietly, refusing to intervene. Twice this year, Justices Thomas and Scalia have called out their colleagues...

The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940, will address a question many thought had been settled long ago: What is the meaning of the principle of “one person, one vote”? The principle, rooted in cases from the 1960s that revolutionized democratic representation in the United States, applies to the entire American political system aside from the Senate, where voters from states with small populations have vastly more voting power than those with large ones. Everywhere else, voting districts must have very close to the same populations. But the Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on who must be counted: all...

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review the ability of cities and states to prohibit semiautomatic high-capacity assault weapons that have been used in some of the nation’s most deadly recent mass shootings. The justices decided not to reconsider a lower court’s decision in a case from the city of Highland Park, Ill., near Chicago. But seven states — Maryland, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York — have similar bans, and all of the prohibitions remain in place. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia said the court should review the ban, which “flouts” the court’s Second...

Congressional Democrats filed an extraordinary brief with the Supreme Court late Thursday urging the justices to overturn a lower court ruling and reinstate President Obama executive amnesty, arguing that the executive branch has a better handle on immigration than Capitol Hill. Led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, the 218 Democrats said Congress intended for Mr. Obama to have sweeping powers to grant proactive stays of deportation, work permits and Social Security numbers to the more than 11 million illegal immigrants estimated to be in the country. "The patterns of immigration are subject to...

Democracy and common sense teach us to seek the truth by listening to one another. If we will not even provide a room for people who want to talk with one another because we do not like what they say, then democracy is impossible.When I was a junior in college and looking for a summer job to defray the next year's tuition, I answered an ambiguous ad in a newspaper and found myself selling high-quality pots and pans, china, and cutlery to unmarried working girls. It actually was a good job for a good company. I ended up selling $20,000...

Full title: Judicial Watch Statement on Supreme Court Order Halting Hawaii from Conducting Race-based Election Pending Appeal (Washington, DC) - Judicial Watch today responded to the Supreme Court's issuance of an injunction halting a race-based "Native Hawaiian-only" election in Hawaii. In August, Judicial Watch filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the five Hawaiian residents and one Texas resident of Hawaiian descent who oppose the discriminatory election process (Keli'i Akina, et al. v. The State of Hawaii, et al. (No. 1:15-cv-00322)). Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton stated: "The Supreme Court today issued an injunction that put a hard stop to...