Free Republic

A Florida judge has temporarily blocked a ban on abortions after 15 weeks that was set to begin Friday. Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union and abortion providers filed suit to stymie the law, arguing that it violated the state’s constitution. Leon County Judge John C. Cooper handed down his ruling from the bench after two days of arguments and said he would issue a written injunction. State officials are expected to fight the decision. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the 15-week abortion ban this past April, prior to the Supreme Court’s momentous reversal of Roe v. Wade last...

A Florida judge on Wednesday ruled against Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration for a second time over school mask mandates, allowing school boards to require that students wear face coverings. Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper again sided with parents who said an executive order from DeSantis (R) overstepped the state’s authority in restricting school districts from requiring masks. “We have a variant that’s more infectious and more dangerous to children than the one we had last year,” Cooper said when issuing his ruling. “We’re in a non-disputed pandemic situation with threats to young children who, at least based on...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Saturday evening reversed a lower court’s block on certifying the state’s elections issued Friday night, dismissing with prejudice a lawsuit brought by Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives that sought to have the results nullified over constitutional concerns about a 2019 change in absentee ballot rules. The lead plaintiffs in the case are Rep. Mike Kelly and Sean Parnell.

President Trump, in the wake of Thursday's defeat at the Supreme Court in his efforts to repeal the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, called for new justices as conservatives took aim at Chief Justice John Roberts for what they called a “pattern” of siding with the liberal wing in key decisions. “The recent Supreme Court decisions, not only on DACA, Sanctuary Cities, Census, and others, tell you only one thing, we need NEW JUSTICES of the Supreme Court. If the Radical Left Democrats assume power, your Second Amendment, Right to Life, Secure Borders, and m Religious Liberty,...

Washington — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that it is illegal for an employer to fire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, delivering a major victory in the fight for civil rights for LGBT people. The court's 6-3 ruling extends the scope of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion, to include LGBT people. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority's opinion, joined the liberal wing of the bench in ruling that "an employer who fires an...

Five Central American asylum seekers ordered to remain in Mexico by federal authorities will be able to reunite with their families in Massachusetts until their immigration cases are decided, a federal judge in Boston ruled Thursday. . . . American authorities have said the “Remain in Mexico” policy has helped significantly reduce illegal border crossings. Civil rights groups complain it violates constitutional rights.

U.S. District Court Judge Carlos Murguia will resign from the bench effective April 1, 2020. In a resignation letter addressed to President Trump, Murguia wrote, “I have been honored to serve in this position since 1999, and my tenure on the Court has been the highlight of my professional life. In recent months, it has become clear that I can no longer effectively serve the Court in this capacity.” Murguia, a native of Kansas City, Kansas, was publicly reprimanded Sept. 30, 2019, by the Judicial Council of the Tenth Circuit. The Council found that Murguia “gave preferential treatment and unwanted...

The Federal Judges Association will hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss concerns members have over President Trump and top Justice Department officials intervening in the case of longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone. The association has more than 1,000 members, and says it supports a "fair, impartial, and independent judiciary." The group's president, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, told USA Today that members decided they "could not wait" until the organization's spring conference to address the matter. "There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about," added Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee. "We'll talk all...

A federal judge delivered a speech Thursday lambasting President Trump’s administration, saying the president has selected judicial nominees that do not represent the diversity of America. During a speech at the University of Virginia School of Law, Judge Carlton W. Reeves, an Obama appointee, compared the president to the Ku Klux Klan and called his administration a “great assault on our judiciary.” “When politicians attack courts as ‘dangerous,’ ‘political,’ and guilty of ‘egregious overreach,’ you can hear the Klan’s lawyers, assailing officers of the court across the South,” the judge said. He noted 90 percent of the president’s picks for...

On July 27, 2017, Johnny Wheatcroft was a passenger in a silver Ford Taurus when a pair of Glendale police officers pulled in front them in a Motel 6 parking lot. The stop was for an alleged turn signal violation. Minutes later, Wheatcroft was handcuffed lying face down on the hot asphalt on a 108-degree day. He'd already been tased 10 times, with one officer kneeling on his back as another, Officer Matt Schneider, kicked him in the groin and pulled down his athletic shorts to tase him a final time in his testicles, according to a federal lawsuit and...

In a victory for the campaign hopes of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a federal judge has ordered all of Florida’s elections officials to give nearly 4,000 voters — or more than, no one is sure — whose ballots were rejected over mismatched signatures until Saturday to fix the problem and for their votes to count. Judge Mark Walker ruled early today that apparently all of the state’s elections offices have wrongly, or unconstitutionally, applied the state law governing how voters can fix rejected signatures on absentee and provisional ballots. There were a known 3,700 ballots rejected in the Midterm election...

God has blessed We the People with the right man, in the right place, at the right time. He knows we have his six. Let's roll. Things are getting out of hand folks, and I don’t think you need to be especially perceptive to sense it. When will the Rubicon be crossed, the gauntlet thrown, and the point of no return reached? Some would say that we have already reached that point, reached that point and passed it. Activist judges increasingly feel free to “interpret” law according to their own personal biases, instead of using the US Constitution as their...

(The other day) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in Israel to receive an award for her commitment to tikkun olam (“to heal the world” in Hebrew,) a spiritual concept that progressive Jews have long (distorted) so that their malleable religious views could better align with leftist orthodoxy. It’s the sort of convenient philosophy that allows traditions to be subsumed by the vagaries of contemporary politics. So it is with an increasing number of Democrats and the Constitution: a document they seem believe must bend to the will of their policy preferences rather than preserve legal continuity, limited government, individual liberty,...

The Sept. 11-17 poll found that 36 percent of adults surveyed did not want Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court, up 6 points from a similar poll conducted a month earlier. Only 31 percent of U.S. adults polled said they were in favor of Kavanaugh’s appointment...Support for Kavanaugh was higher among Republicans, but fewer than two out of three, or 64 percent, said they were in favor of his nomination...More women--33 percent--opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination...

The federal judge who had ordered the government to restart the Obama-era DACA deportation amnesty in full backed off his decision Friday and said the government does not, after all, have to begin accepting brand new applications. Judge John D. Bates acknowledged the legal mess that’s arisen around DACA and said he didn’t want to make it worse, so he issued a partial stay of his own ruling. That means that while illegal immigrant “Dreamers” who already have had DACA protections can apply for renewals, no brand new applicants can apply to start the process. Judge Bates also delayed part...

President Trump's decision to block his Twitter followers for their political views is a violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, saying that Trump's effort to silence his critics is not permissible because the digital space in which he engages with constituents is a public forum. The ruling rejects administration arguments that the First Amendment does not apply to Trump in this case because he was acting as a private individual. In a 75-page decision, Judge Naomi Buchwald said Trump, as a federal official, is not exempt from constitutional obligations to refrain from "viewpoint discrimination." "No government...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Saturday slammed “activist judges,” whom he accused of overreaching and paralyzing the government by shutting down Trump-era policies they object to via nationwide injunctions. At a Federalist Society event at Georgetown University, Sessions blasted judges who have shut down controversial Trump-era policies such as denying funding for so-called “sanctuary cities” and repealing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. “The court is not superior; the court does not get to have the final word in every dispute, give me a break,” he said. He said the vehicle of choice for "activist judges" is nationwide...

In another striking judicial development, Judge William Alsup, a Clinton appointee from San Francisco, issued an injunctive order Jan. 9 prohibiting President Trump from moving forward rescinding President Obama’s DACA order. Although it only applied to established DACA applicants, and left untouched the ban on future applications, the order is offensive nevertheless, and demonstrates the terrible problem plaguing our country resulting from the actions of activist judges. Essentially, the plaintiffs, which included the State of California, argued that President Trump had acted randomly and capriciously in removing the DACA order because, among other reasons, he did not give notice and...

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday rejected the Trump administration's limited view of who is allowed into the country under its revised travel ban. A three-judge panel decided that grandparents, cousins and similarly close extended family relationships of people in the U.S. shouldn't be prevented from coming to the country. The court also said refugees already accepted by a resettlement agency shouldn't be banned. The appeals court decision upholds a decision from a district court judge in Hawaii, who said the administration's view was too narrow. The decision impacts the revised travel ban, which temporarily suspends new...

Former Vice President Joe Biden defended the courts and the news media, saying attacks against those institutions are dangerous. Biden was speaking Wednesday night at the Newseum in Washington, where he accepted an award from the Bipartistan Policy Center. News outlets report that the Democrat didn’t mention Republican President Donald Trump by name but said he was worried by the “almost drumbeat of denigration of the institutional structures that govern us.” …