Free Republic

The Supreme Court ended its term divided into partisan blocs, with the Republican appointees ruling in favor of former President Trump’s claim of immunity while the three Democratic appointees voiced a bitter dissent. It’s exactly the result many critics of the court might have expected, with politics driving the law. It’s also what Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has tried hard to avoid — at least most of the time. For much of this year, Roberts and the justices succeeded in defusing partisan splits with narrow or procedural rulings. By a 9-0 vote, they threw out a Texas lawsuit...

It wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court for the first time struck down a gun control law, ruling the 2nd Amendment protected the "right of law-abiding, responsible citizens" to keep a handgun at home for self-defense. Last year, the court went a step further and said an "ordinary law-abiding citizen" also has a right to a state permit to carry a concealed weapon in public for self-defense. Now the justices face a new frontier: Do gun rights extend to dangerous people and dangerous weapons? In just the last year, accused criminals and felons including drug dealers and domestic abusers...

The young attorney decided the president deserved to be forced from office for “his pattern of revolting behavior” and the “sheer number of his wrongful acts.” “The president has disgraced his office.… He has lied to his aides. He has lied to the American people,” Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 1998 memo to his colleagues. “I’m strongly opposed to giving [him] any ‘break’ … unless he either resigns or … issues a public apology.” Kavanaugh, a fast-rising Republican legal star, then 33, went back to work on a 132-page memo to his boss, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, that outlined the...