Free Republic

The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday voted 9-6 to keep the block on DOGE’s access to social security data. The court’s entire slate of judges (en banc) weighed in on Wednesday: Chief Judge Diaz (Obama), Judge King (Clinton), Judge Gregory (Clinton), Judge Wynn (Obama), Judge Thacker (Obama), Judge Harris (Obama), Judge Heytens (Biden), Judge Benjamin (Biden), and Judge Berner (Biden) voted to deny the motion to stay. Judge Wilkinson (Reagan), Judge Niemeyer (George H.W. Bush), Judge Agee (George W. Bush), Judge Richardson (Trump), Judge Quattlebaum (Trump), and Judge Rushing (Trump) voted to grant the motion to...

The Justice Department states that the judge who ruled Kilmar Abrego Garcia had to come back to the U.S. overstepped authority. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a lower court order to return a Maryland resident, who is also a Salvadoran national, mistakenly deported last month to El Salvador. The Justice Department is arguing before the high court that the judge who ruled the deportee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, must be returned overstepped his authority. The administration also argued since Garcia was no longer in U.S. custody there was no way to get him back, according...

Yet another crazy far left “judge” tried again to stop DOGE over USAID. Got overturned by Court of Appeals, Bottom line from Court of Appeals: DOGE does not run USAID, Department of State does through Secretary of State Marco Rubio. DOGE investigates and makes recommendations as advisors to Department of State for them to get rid of corrupt USAID employees etc.

While numerous federal district court judges have issued ill-conceived restraining orders against the administration, I have long believed that it will prevail in its efforts to place control of the state in the hands of the elected executive, away from the deep state bureaucracy and its black-robed judicial allies. As the litigation of these matters proceeds, I think my belief will be justified. We will return to a constitutional republican form of government. For a day-to-day look at the progress of these multiple cases, I urge you to go to X and follow Professor Margot Cleveland who is (bless her)...

Huge win for President Trump and America. A federal appeals court on Friday evening lifted a block on two of President Trump’s executive orders aimed at eliminating Marxist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. President Trump previously signed two Executive Orders that instructed agencies in the executive branch to end discriminatory DEI policies: One EO directed DEI policies to be eliminated in federal agencies and the other EO targeted recipients of federal grants. Last month, a Biden-appointed federal judge entered a preliminary injunction against Trump’s Executive Orders. On Friday evening, a three-judge panel on the Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of...

A federal appeals court decided this week to allow Davina Ricketts, a former North Carolina high school student, to continue pursuing her racial discrimination lawsuit against the Wake County Public School System, its board of education, and numerous school officials. Ricketts alleges that school and district officials did not intervene and were “deliberately indifferent” to the racial harassment and cyberbullying she endured from other students during and after a student council election in 2016.... When election day came, Ricketts discovered her name and the names of the other three Black candidates were not on the junior class ballot. The omission...

From U.S. v. Saleem, decided [yesterday] by Judges J. Harvie Wilkinson, Steven Agee, and Allison Rushing: The Supreme Court in Heller defined "arms" as "any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another." Therefore, "the Second Amendment extends … to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding." While a silencer may be a firearm accessory, it is not a "bearable arm" that is capable of casting a bullet. Moreover, while silencers may serve...

What Maryland is trying to do, with the help of the Fourth Circuit, is to make gun ownership so burdensome as to discourage it, and self-defense, entirely. The Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision held, with crystal clarity, the Second Amendment is an individual right, which extends to keeping and bearing arms not only in one’s home or on one’s property, but in public, with some limited exceptions. Not only did Bruen reaffirm the Second Amendment as a fundamental unalienable right--no second-class right—it established strict scrutiny, the highest level of judicial analysis, for Second Amendment cases. Equally important was this holding:...

Afederal appeals court on Friday upheld Maryland’s handgun licensing requirements, rejecting an argument from gun-rights activists the law violated the Second Amendment by making it too difficult for people to obtain guns. A majority of judges from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, affirmed a district court judge’s ruling in favor of the state of Maryland. The majority rejected the plaintiffs’ argument the state’s handgun qualification statute tramples on applicants’ Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. The law requires most Maryland residents to obtain a handgun qualification license before purchasing a handgun. Senior Judge...

Despite national attention and thousands of protesting parents, a federal court is refusing to allow parents to opt their children out of LGBT courses in school. The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decided on Wednesday that Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland does not have to allow parents to opt their children out of LGBT-themed lessons. Judge G. Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee, claimed that the parents seeking to opt their children out of the lessons in question did not provide sufficient evidence to justify a preliminary injunction.In March of last year, MCPS added nearly two...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against two state-level health policies that exclude so-called “gender-affirming” treatments, teeing up potential review by the U.S. Supreme Court...Judge Roger Gregory, an appointee of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote in his majority opinion that the policies’ exclusion of surgeries such as vaginoplasties for certain diagnoses violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.“The coverage exclusions facially discriminate on the basis of sex and gender identity, and are not substantially related to an important government interest,” he said.The 8–6 decision affirmed lower court decisions against West Virginia’s...

Eight Democrat-nominated judges shoved transgender surgery closer to becoming a constitutional right via their decision Monday in a federal appeals court. No Democrat-nominated judges voted with the six Republican-nominated judges who strenuously denounced the court’s decision, further demonstrating how transgenderism has quickly become a litmus test for ambitious progressives in the Democratic Party. The majority decision in the Fourth Circuit federal appeals court said existing constitutional rules forbidding sexual discrimination also forbid denials of transgender surgeries in state-run healthcare programs. Any denial of the surgeries cannot be enforced without first deciding if the patient is male or female by checking...

On Tuesday a 2-1 Democrat majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit invalidated a good West Virginia law protecting girls’ sports against invasion by male-bodied transgender students. The Richmond-based tribunal held that West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act violates the federal Title IX law, which was enacted to protect girls’ sports, and also that West Virginia’s protection of girls’ sports may further violate the Constitution. The Biden-appointed judge who wrote this absurd decision repeatedly used the propaganda term “sex assigned at birth,” as if sex were arbitrary and merely “assigned” to a newborn. On the contrary,...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned the West Virginia law banning transgender girls from playing on girls' sports teams, finding that it violates Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools. The ruling comes amid a wave of anti-trans legislation cropping up across the country, as well as efforts to fight back against it. The ban in West Virginia was originally signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice in 2021, and introduced as the "Save Women's Sports Act." It required that any official or unofficial school-sanctioned event involving athletics determine each athlete's participation in...

Just wanted ones to see wovoted on another liberal Biden nominate to serve as a United States circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit judge moving toward being appointed. Berner is a resident of Montgomery County, residing in Takoma Park, Maryland, where she and her former wife raised their three sons. She is married to civil rights attorney Debra Katz. If confirmed, Berner would be the first openly LGBTQ judge to serve on that court.

Strange events are occurring in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In the Ninth Circuit, it has become clear that when a three-judge panel finds in favor of the Second Amendment as a fundamental part of the Bill of Rights, the case will be sent to an en banc panel to be reversed by the full court. Most of the time, the Ninth Circuit would wait for the three-judge panel to publish their decision before sending the case to the en banc panel. In the Fourth Circuit, en banc panels are snatching cases away from three-judge...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled in favor of a gun rights group, saying Maryland's preliminary handgun-licensure requirement is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled in favor of Maryland Shall Issue, which challenged the law, The Daily Record reported. The decision is a victory for gun rights advocates in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen.

Conservatives were handed another win by the Supreme Court on Thursday when they reversed a ruling by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing the Mountain Valley Pipeline to move forward with construction. At a time when energy independence is slipping from America’s fingers under the Biden-Harris regime, at least one Democrat is pleased by the decision. Senator Joe Manchin has fought to keep the pipeline going, including his spearheading of legislative efforts to improve it in the first place. The story isn’t just good news for Republicans fighting for improved domestic energy production. It also marks another point for...

The Supreme Court may soon weigh in on Mountain Valley Pipeline developers’ request to vacate a federal court’s order to halt construction on the project, which developers argue conflicts with a law Congress passed guaranteeing its completion. Developers of the natural gas pipeline filed an emergency application Friday with Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles petitions from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the Supreme Court to allow the project to continue. The Fourth Circuit sided with environmental groups challenging the pipeline and temporarily halted the project last week, an order the developers argue “flew in the face” of...

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court in Virginia this week delivered a message to Congress, the White House and developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline: not so fast. Pennsylvania-based Equitrans Midstream’s roughly 300-mile pipeline, envisioned to bring shale gas from the Marcellus and Utica in Appalachia to markets in the Southeast, was fast-tracked as part of the Biden administration’s deal with Congress to suspend the debt limit in June. It’s also supported by Pennsylvania congressmen, including U.S. Reps. John Joyce, R-Blair, and Guy Reschenthaler, R-Peters, who joined U.S. Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., to introduce the legislation in May that helped...