Free Republic

SNAP food benefits could restart as early as Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday morning. Two federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use emergency funds to pay SNAP benefits, which help feed 42 million Americans, during the government shutdown. Judge Jack McConnell of Rhode Island also directed that these be paid out of emergency funds “as soon as possible.” Boston Judge Indira Talwani gave the administration until Monday to tell her if it will authorize at least reduced SNAP benefits for November. The administration was originally set to cut...

President Donald Trump faces a bevy of district court judges issuing restraining orders and injunctions blocking his executive actions, and Josh Hammer suggests the president take a leaf out of Abraham Lincoln’s book on the issue. Trump has responded to the orders with calls for Congress to impeach lower court judges or restrain them in other ways, and observers on the Left have claimed Trump’s actions are creating a constitutional crisis. Chief Justice John Roberts publicly chided Trump over the judicial impeachment call. Hogwash, says Hammer, a lawyer who clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit....

“At the moment, POTUS is sitting on a stack of Trump cards that he’s just waiting to unleash…a royal flush! He has court cases that will go to the Supreme Court and thanks to the Texas case, he’s now aware how to file them properly…under article 3 not 2…so the SCOTUS will be forced to listen…. He now has the DNI report. Barr stepped down and can now be a witness…..he did his job. Durham is special counsel and can prosecute, in any state…. He’s letting civil, criminal and federal courts fail to handle the situation properly….so he can use...

The right to life. The Ten Commandments. Prayer in schools. Flag desecration. Same-sex marriage. As the federal courts consider cases that involve the most deep-seated convictions of Americans and issues upon which Americans are sharply divided, they understandably strike raw nerves. Public frustration is redoubled because, of the three branches of government, the judiciary is the farthest removed from popular election and public influence. It seems to many that the nation is being governed by the “majority vote of a nine-person committee of lawyers, unelected and holding office for life,” as Professor Lino Graglia has said.As the federal courts render...

The Senate is stalling another Bush Administration proposal to effectively fight the war on terror. After the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year that the President does not have inherent authority to try captured terrorists using military tribunals, President Bush asked Congress to grant him that authority in law. The Senate is balking at the President’s proposal, though, claiming that it runs afoul of a portion of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3. But Heritage national security expert James Carafano notes that the administration’s proposal as it exists now would “satisfy[y] U.S. obligations under the Conventions.” In fact,...

CHICAGO - Pro-lifers here have been engrossed in a book issued two weeks ago by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich which may point to a solution to woes social conservatives have with the federal judiciary. Gingrich was a dependable pro-life vote when he served in Congress, but never exactly a champion of the movement. Yet in his book Winning the Future (Regnery, Washington, D.C., 2005), he outlines probably a last-ditch, nuclear strategy that can restore the balance between Congress and the judiciary that the founders intended. The book is ostensibly tied to his possible run for president in 2008: That...

The lack of constituency for Article III in the U.S. Constitution among those so concerned about federal judicial tyranny is an ongoing mystery. Perhaps they have never read it, or having read it never understood the meaning or implications. Maybe they understood it as well as anyone, but rejected that approach in preference for more difficult Constitutional means of restoring the rule of law that federal courts routinely break. The relevant portions of Article III involve only the first sentence of Section 1 and only the first two clauses of Section 2. The essence of those 200 words can be...

The law-breaking branch of the federal government has become more powerful than the law making branch, the President, and even the Constitution. How did five out of nine judges on the U.S. Supreme Court become so infallible that no one questions anything they say? When the Most High Court speaks, the nation must prostrate fall. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, during his confirmation hearings, said that he would not attempt to overturn Roe v.Wade and that he considered it the "settled law of the land." The abortion edicts from the Supreme Court aren't acts of Congress, nor a constitutional amendment,...