Free Republic

Have we reached Peak Reid Demagoguery yet? I thought we had yesterday when Democrats signed onto Harry Reid’s Kochsteria strategy for the 2014 midterms, but we actually missed the new nadir for America’s top-ranked demagogue — but our good friend Larry O’Connor at the Free Beacon didn’t. Yesterday, when addressing the media about the Democratic strategy to undo Hobby Lobby, Reid insisted that the Senate wouldn’t let “five white men” have the last word on contraception mandates.Um …CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later,...

Sahil Kapur, TPMJuly 8, 2014 Senate Democrats are poised to introduce legislation as early as Tuesday to reverse the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling which exempted for-profit corporations with religious owners from the Obamacare mandate to cover emergency contraceptives in their insurance plans. The legislation will be sponsored by Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Mark Udall (D-CO). According to a summary reviewed by TPM, it prohibits employers from refusing to provide health services, including contraception, to their employees if required by federal law. It clarifies that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the basis for the Supreme Court's ruling against the...

Poverty, violence and other issues aside, women everywhere are focused on being depressed after hearing the “anti-woman” ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.and Wheaton College v. Sylvia Burwell last week. Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College became embroiled in litigation due to Obamacare’s requirement that for-profit employers provide abortifacients to employees, despite their owners’ Christian beliefs. As we all know, there is no issue or right more important to women everywhere than to force all employers to subsidize their use of abortifacients. It doesn’t matter that women can easily buy the abortifacient Plan B...

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...

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...

We have all seen the antics of a placard toting liberal as she tearfully protests the upcoming, state sponsored execution of a triple murderer. And when this same purple-haired progressive celebrates a new Planned Parenthood record in abortions performed, is anyone really surprised? After all, liberalism couldn’t exist without these mind-numbing displays of shameless hypocrisy. Frantic challenges to the deserved execution of a merciless killer followed with squeals of delight at the death of some 334,000 infants during the 2011-2012 hunting seasons of America’s abortion titleholder–all in a day’s work for the compassionate left. When the Supreme Court decided in...

Conservatives increasingly see the Supreme Court as a last line of defense against the Obama administration’s agenda. Despite the court’s 5-4 vote to uphold the president’s healthcare law, the justices have more frequently pushed back at what conservatives see as overreach by the White House. A view that the High Court is having more success than the GOP House as a check on President Obama has been developing for some time, but became all the more prevalent after its decisions in the recent Hobby Lobby and Noel Canning cases. “What we are experiencing is a high court reining in an...

Seldom in American history has the Supreme Court unanimously rejected positions advocated by presidents' administrations. But in this respect at least, President Obama has produced the fundamental transformation he promised in his 2008 campaign. Over the last three years, the Court has rejected Obama administration positions repeatedly in unanimous 9-0 decisions. A review of these cases reveals much about the governing philosophy of the Obama administration. One thing is abundantly clear, namely that this administration has a crabbed view of the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion. That is apparent not only in June's 5-4 decision ruling in...

When the rights of individuals clash, both sides should be willing to step back and recognize that both have rights. When in conflict, neither side is truly winning nor losing. Each gets their rights and can disagree. But the political left in America has decided its rights and values are the only acceptable ones in our republic. That they lost in the Supreme Court this past week has sent liberals in America on a weeklong hysterical binge of fact distortion and fabrication. Last Monday, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby's owners do not have to provide four...

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...

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...

Imagine a Fourth of July tradition like Hollywood’s where each year the Oscars pay homage to fallen stars. Liberty-loving Americans would fete public servants who’ve honored Thomas Jefferson’s rule to “leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.” Might celebrating trustworthy stewards inspire Americans to Think Again about our Founders’ insights, ingraining a culture that prizes democratic accountability and lawful government, the one that transformed our risky political experiment into history’s freest and most prosperous society? We’d be celebrating two recently passed stalwarts who put country and constitutional order before party: Sen. Howard Baker, the Senate Watergate Committee’s ranking...

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....

The Obama administration, arguing that the steps it has taken to protect religious objections to birth control by non-profit colleges, hospitals, and other charities satisfy federal law, urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday not to expand the exemption. A religious college in Illinois is not entitled to the temporary aid that the Court gave to a Colorado charity in January, the newly filed brief contended. This was the first court filing by the federal government in the wake of Monday’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and it made clear that officials will continue to resist efforts by non-profit religious...

In spite of having mastered the frequently demanding practice of deceit, once in a while genuine motivation breaks through the left’s façade of compassion and caring. Though not widely recognized, it happened in the Hobby Lobby case decided by the Supreme Court on Monday. In the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, Congress provided the option of going to court to anyone who sought religious based exemption from a federal law. In providing this statutory right to religious objectors, Congress wrote that “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed that its decision a day earlier extending religious rights to closely held corporations applies broadly to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the new health care law, not just the handful of methods the justices considered in their ruling. The justices did not comment in leaving in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all 20 methods of government-approved contraception....

When they started chanting: “We are the pro-choice generation” I wanted to just start weeping. Little do they know how wrong they are.  Young people that respect the sacredness of life is on the rise.

The U.S. Supreme Court had a banner day, a crackerjack day, with horns and ice cream, as it trumped the federal government's brazen claim of power and authority to define which religious convictions, if any, have a proper place in the health care arena. Hooray for the Hahn and Green families for carrying to the high court their plea to be released from the duty of providing employees with contraceptive coverage under Obamacare. Never mind (as the government saw it before the court's 5-4 ruling) the two families' religiously grounded conviction that the mandate violated their religious beliefs and moral...

It was a good week for the rule of law in the never-ending case, challenge and general struggle of U.S. v. Obama, which is sure to be continued. Thursday the Supreme Court of the United States ruled -- unanimously -- that a president of the United States can't make recess appointments while, as it happens, Congress is not in recess. How about that? The justices must have read the Constitution of the United States at some point during their distinguished legal careers and, even more impressive, decided to heed it. Which is more than one can reliably say about Current...