Free Republic

The Supreme Court’s delays in deciding Donald Trump’s immunity case are creating a crisis — a collision between a Justice Department tradition and the necessity of an informed electorate. On one hand, voters deserve a verdict in the trial accusing Trump of attempting to interfere with the lawful transition of power after the 2020 election. On the other, the Justice Department customarily respects “election year sensitivities” — not initiating legal actions that could affect an election in the months immediately before it. This looming conflict was easily avoided. Unfortunately, however, the court’s radical conservative majority rejected three sensible ways to...

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (First Alert 4) - A former Planned Parenthood employee who worked at the St. Louis location is suing the organization for racial discrimination. Teona McGhaw, a Black St. Louis County woman, filed a lawsuit in April against Advocates of Planned Parenthood Of The St. Louis Region & Southwest Missouri for a termination she believes was because of race. According to the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood claimed it fired McGhaw because of a conflict of interest. In 2022, McGhaw was elected president of the Missouri branch of the National Women’s Political Caucus. McGhaw told First Alert 4 she has...

On Friday the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law established by Congress requiring the deportation of foreign nationals who illegally enter the country. It's a blow to President Biden's lax enforcement of deportation laws..... The illegal aliens sued. They demanded that their deportation orders be rescinded. They claimed that they didn't receive proper written notification. They also made technical arguments, such as challenging the definitions of the word 'change' in the order they received. In other words, they were hoping to stay because of technicalities in their paperwork. A majority of Supreme Court justices didn't see it that way. The...

The six Republican justices handed down a decision on Friday that effectively legalizes civilian ownership of automatic weapons. All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented. The Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill involves bump stocks, devices that allow ordinary semiautomatic weapons that can legally be owned by civilians to automatically fire, much like a machine gun designed for that purpose. Bump stocks cause a semiautomatic gun’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger, repeatedly “bumping” the trigger and making the gun rapidly fire. A semiautomatic weapon refers to a gun that loads a bullet into the chamber or otherwise prepares...

After several decades of conservative control of the Supreme Court and a string of rulings against their legislative and social priorities, Democrats and left-leaning media appear to be mounting an all-out assault against the judicial branch, casting doubt on its legitimacy and impartiality, while working to undercut the reputations and credibility of its more conservative justices.Ostensibly conservative since the appointment of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1986, the court has generally not attracted comparable partisan scrutiny to the extent that it has under the Biden administration. The Roberts court, however, currently boasts three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump,...

The Supreme Court seemed to signal interest this week in taking up a challenge launched by Hawaii against big oil companies to hold them liable for climate change, and some Democrats are suggesting the high court is "captured" for the fossil fuel industry. The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Justice Department to weigh in on a petition to hear a lawsuit brought by the City of Honolulu against major fuel companies including Sunoco, Exxon and Chevron, claiming the companies’ products cause greenhouse gas emissions and global warming without warning consumers about the risks. The city employed a series of...

On Friday’s “Situation Room,” CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen lamented the U.S. Supreme Court’s deliberative process for former President Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution immunity claim. Host Wolf Blitzer said, “Norm, it’s interesting that the court isn’t scheduled to issue more decisions until Thursday, further delaying any resolution to Trump’s immunity claim. At what point does holding that trial before the election become totally unrealistic.”

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal ban on bump stocks approved by former President Donald Trump, the latest opinion from the conservative court rolling back firearm regulations. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion for a 6-3 court. The court’s liberal wing, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented. Trump had pushed for the ban in response to a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas. Bump stocks allow a shooter to convert a semi-automatic rifle into a weapon that can fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.

Justice Samuel Alito on Friday asserted that Congress could amend the law to successfully ban bump stocks in an opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to invalidate a Trump-era ban on the devices. The ban on bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, was implemented by the Trump administration in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, where a shooter used a bump stock to kill a total of 60 people and wound hundreds of others — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The Biden administration later defended the...

The U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled unanimously to keep a controversial abortion drug on the market even after the court ruled two years ago to overturn Roe v. Wade. In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of pro-life medical practitioners and their organizations had sued the FDA for relaxing restrictions on mifepristone, the first of two drugs used in a medical abortion. The plaintiffs argued that these relaxed standards would "jeopardize women’s health across the nation." SCOTUS justices apparently considered the case on technical grounds rather than on the ethical issues regarding killing unborn children and ruled...

The Supreme Court issues opinions this morning at beginning 10:00 from cases from the October 2023 term.After yesterday's opinions there are now twenty-seven cases remaining to be decided. Of note is the Trump vs. U.S. immunity case, the Chevron deference cases(Relentless and Loper Bright), and the Fischer case regarding charges related to the January 6, 2021 protests.There is also the Cargill case where at issue is whether a bump stock device is a “machinegun” as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b). Another 2nd Amendment case is U.S. v. Rahimi where the question is whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits...

A parents group is questioning Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to open an investigation into purported threats and acts of violence against school boards across the U.S. after the group discovered that the attorney general’s son-in-law is the co-founder of an education company that uses critical race theory in its work. ... “His daughter is married to the cofounder of @PanoramaEd which is under fire for its multimillion contracts with school boards,” she added. “At @DefendingEd, parents sent us tips. We raised the alarm. Now Garland is trying to silence parents.”

While Russia and Santa Cruz aren’t often mentioned in the same breath, when it comes to Wilder Ranch State Park, a shared history features betrayal and a land grab. The sprawling 7,000-acre park just 4 miles west of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk is filled with coastal views, but on a recent morning, I found myself entranced by a local historical tale involving a husband accused of forging documents to remove his wife and her family from the deed. When hiking through this part of the California coastline — where sandy beaches, marine life and a magical sea cave coalesce —...

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a legal challenge to the expanded use of the abortion pill mifepristone, allowing the current level of restrictions to stand for now. The Court, however, did not rule on the merits of the case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM) v. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but ruled unanimously that the doctors who filed the lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration did not have legal standing to sue. In doing so, the Court did not rule on whether or not the FDA acted lawfully when it lifted the REMS [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies]...

"But, the reasonable-cause standard goes far beyond simply fine tuning the traditional criteria to the §10( j) context—it substantively lowers the bar for securing a preliminary injunction by requiring courts to yield to the Board’s preliminary view of the facts, law, and equities."

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available. The court found unanimously that the group of anti-abortion doctors who questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions making it easier to access the pill did not have legal standing to sue.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Tuesday said they will be introducing legislation in response to the increased ethics concerns related to the Supreme Court. Ocasio-Cortez and Raskin, who serve as the ranking and vice-ranking members, respectively, on the House Oversight Committee, were part of a committee roundtable Tuesday regarding these concerns. They explored various “avenues” for holding Supreme Court justices accountable, they told MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes. “And so, it is not a question…of if Congress has jurisdiction and power over the Supreme Court. It is, what power are we going to exercise in order to...

Transcript from Mark Levin video:The federal government is being affected by a federal election, a presidential election. The entire campaign law process at the federal level is now influenced by this one court and this one state. We need to address this issue, and there's only one institution with the power to do that: the United States Supreme Court. This is the court that, if you can get your case to it and find a procedural pathway, has the national authority over a presidential election if the Constitution is violated. You might wonder, has the Supreme Court ever intervened in...

Let’s not beat around the bush. It is more likely than not that Donald Trump will return to the White House next year. Right now, polling averages show Trump with a slight popular vote lead over incumbent President Joe Biden. And, even if Biden overcomes this small deficit, the Electoral College system effectively makes Trump votes count more than Biden votes. Although there may be signs that the Republican Party’s advantage in the Electoral College is fading, that advantage was substantial in the last two presidential elections. Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 2016 by more than two points in...

A liberal activist who posed as a Christian conservative to record Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts is the latest shot in a left-wing fight to undermine the high court. Liberal activist Lauren Windsor attended the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3 and secretly recorded her conversations with both Alito and Roberts. Windsor’s recording comes as various activists and media outlets have hounded Alito in recent weeks over two separate instances involving flags flown at his homes: one instance in which an inverted flag flew at his primary residence and a separate instance...