Free Republic

Normalcy among Democrats is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and her voice scrambler, Kathy Griffin and her bloody head, and Hillary Clinton, the queen of denial. Democrats have been enjoying the difficulty Republicans and the Trump administration have in governing, but their schadenfreude is worse than useless. Cheering the deaths of their enemies’ children is fun for people who are depraved, but it does not heal the hole in their own black hearts. Democrats are sick and getting worse. Emotionally, Democrats are disconnected from reality. Hillary Clinton in an interview blamed her election loss on a combination of Russian and Macedonian conspiracists with...

For generations, we’ve seen the political landscape in this country teeter back and forth between the Left and the Right. Usually about every 8 years or so, whichever political party is dominating Congress, the Executive Branch, and the state legislatures, is kicked out by voters and replaced with the other political party. However, there’s something very different going on this time around. Donald Trump’s ascent to the oval office represents a major shift in our society and culture, and I’m not talking about the intermittent shuffle of politicians that we see every few years. Instead, the pendulum is about to...

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to immediately reinstate its ban on travelers from six mostly Muslim countries and refugees from anywhere in the world, saying the U.S. will be safer if the policy is put in place. The Justice Department filing to the high court late Thursday argued that lower courts that blocked the Trump policy made several mistakes, including relying on statements President Donald Trump made during the 2016 campaign. The legal fight pits the president’s significant authority over immigration against what lower courts have said is a policy that purported to be about national security...

The Supreme Court heard arguments in March and considered the principle of patent exhaustion. This idea stipulates that a patent owner’s rights over a product should vanish once the patent owner sells the product to a consumer. By attaching a post-sale restriction to its single-use cartridge, Lexmark aimed to create a zombie patent that’s never exhausted. You may have bought that cartridge, but Lexmark still controls it. The justices agreed 7-1 that Lexmark can’t do that. (Justice Neil Gorsuch was appointed after the court heard the case.) The court held that Lexmark exhausted its patent rights when it sold its...

Thus making it easier for cops to protect themselves against threats For awhile there, cop-hating liberals and libertarians had themselves a loophole that made it easier to come down on cops who used force in self-defense. According to the so-called “provocation doctrine,” if police had made their way into a situation without satisfying every legal technicality (such as entering a home without a warrant), then they were not necessarily allowed to use deadly force to defend themselves even if another party threatened them with deadly force. In the case in question, police had indeed entered a home without a warrant...

A unanimous Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies in a legal dispute stemming from 2010, when a couple of bystanders were shot while the deputies searched for a wanted man in Lancaster. The justices overturned an award of $4 million in damages to the couple and ordered a lower court to take another look at whether the deputies could be held liable for the shooting. ... Angel wasn’t the suspect they were searching for, and it turned out he was carrying a BB gun. Deputies had been told before they entered the cluttered backyard that...

U.S. Supreme Court limits where patent-infringement cases can be filed; decision could limit venue-shopping “The Supreme Court on Monday limited the ability of patent holders to bring infringement lawsuits in courts that have plaintiff friendly reputations, a notable decision that could provide a boost to companies that defend against patent claims,” Brent Kendall reports for The Wall Street Journal. “The high court, in an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, ruled unanimously that a lower court has been following an incorrect legal standard for almost 30 years that made it possible for patent holders to sue companies in almost any U.S....

You don’t see a Kagan-Breyer-Ginsburg-Sotomayor-Thomas majority often in U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but today that quintet joined together to deal a blow to North Carolina Republicans. In the decision in Cooper v. Harris, the eight-member pre-Gorsuch roster upheld a district court’s ruling that two congressional districts in North Carolina were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, putting an end to one part of a six-year saga that began with redistricting in 2011.

Rumors are flying that the Supreme Court to hear the appeal to the 9th Circuit decision on Peruta v. California.  It makes sense that the Court would agree to hear the appeal now that Justice Gorsuch is on the Court.  From scotusblog.com: There is only one new relist this week – but oh, what a relist it is. Peruta v. California, 16-894, asks whether the Second Amendment entitles citizens to carry handguns outside the home for self-defense – including concealed carry when carrying firearms openly is forbidden by state law. Under California law, openly carrying a handgun outside the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Trump administration on Monday named 10 judges and other law professionals it plans to nominate for key posts as President Donald Trump works to place more conservatives on the nation's federal courts. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that among the candidates are individuals previously named on Trump's list of 21 possible picks for Supreme Court justice. All nominees would require Senate confirmation. The announcement came less than a month after Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed, restoring the court's conservative tilt. Trump will nominate judges John K. Bush of Kentucky...

In an early show of independence, Justice Neil Gorsuch declined to join the Supreme Court’s “cert pool,” an administrative division of labor that allows for efficient review of the deluge of petitions the justices receive each term. snip On the other hand, it may simply reflect a preference for the work product of his own clerks, an inclination shared by other federal judges including Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He may also feel that opting out of the pool ensures greater scrutiny is given to each petition. The decision also suggests Gorsuch might share...

He hasn’t been wearing the robes very long, but Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch (and I swear I will never get tired of typing that phrase) is striking out on his own path at the nation’s highest court. The Daily Caller put up this report yesterday and it deals with a somewhat controversial decision that Gorsuch made pretty much as soon as he’d taken his seat. It has to do with what’s referred to as the “cert pool” which is the method the court uses to determine which of the thousands of petitions they receive every year are...

President Trump will stick with the same list of potential nominees for the next Supreme Court vacancy, he told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview in which he also waved aside the lack of a honeymoon from Capitol Hill, saying Republicans are “going to get there” and Democrats are still smarting over losing an election they thought they couldn’t lose. .. He also said he expects the near-universal opposition to his agenda from congressional Democrats to wane. “I notice it calming down,” he said. Reflecting on his first weeks, the businessman turned statesman took pride in having upended traditional...

The shutdown showdown seems like a wild train ride and the political aftermath is only just picking up steam. I think it is important to be clear about what the faithful few are actually fighting for (and against) during the shutdown showdown. Let me reset the framework in the simplest possible terms, so that we don’t forget the essentials. Our federal government, created by the States in 1787, was designed to be a limited and defined federal government. Not my words, but the words of the people who created it - easily researchable and verifiable. James Madison (called the Father...

It’s not every day that you get such a collection of entertaining quotes from Supreme Court justices. Last week’s oral arguments in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer will decide whether a state can exclude a religious entity from a public grant program just because the entity is religious. These four entertaining moments from those arguments indicate the court will likely rule for the church in this case.

It’s not entirely fair to judge a Supreme Court justice based on his first vote. Urgent matters arise unexpectedly, and the court must sometimes act quickly. Still, it’s worth paying special attention to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s vote late Thursday night to deny a stay of execution for Ledell Lee, an Arkansas man who was sentenced to death in 1995 for murdering a woman named Debra Reese with a tire thumper. After Justice Gorsuch, along with the four other conservative justices, denied his final appeal without explanation, Mr. Lee, who maintained his innocence until the end, was executed by lethal injection....

President Trump planned to have dinner with the justices of the Supreme Court on Thursday evening, but the White House said Sunday evening the event will take place on a future date because of scheduling conflicts. Newly confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch was slated to attend, but it was not clear which of the eight other justices might be present. Trump’s successful nomination of Gorsuch to the court is seen as a key accomplishment of his first 100 days in office, as he made good on a major promise of his campaign to fill the vacant seat left by Justice Antonin...

Talk is already heating up that President Trump could have a chance to appoint a second person to the Supreme Court. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said this week that another opening could come as soon as this summer, and there have been rumors that Justice Anthony Kennedy, often a swing voter on the court, could retire soon. Kennedy, 80, was nominated to the court by President Reagan....

While the chattering class was lamenting the delay on ObamaCare repeal and replace and promised tax reform, they ignored perhaps the most importance consequence of President Trump’s election, a major accomplishment in his first 100 days, the transformation of the Supreme Court into a conservative and constitutional bastion of freedom. The appointment and confirmation of Judge Neil  Gorsuch has already borne fruit as he cast the deciding vote allowing the execution of multiple Arkansas death row inmates to proceed. As Bloomberg Politics reported: Justice Neil Gorsuch took his first major action on the U.S. Supreme Court by casting the deciding...

On Thursday night, Arkansas executed Ledell Lee—the state’s first execution in 12 years. Lee is one of eight men whom Arkansas originally planned to kill over 11 days before one drug in the three-drug lethal injection cocktail expires. Four of these men have received stays of execution, but Lee’s final plea to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected by a 5–4 vote. Justice Neil Gorsuch cast the deciding vote allowing Lee to die. It was his first vote cast as a justice of the court.