Free Republic

All 4,000 Navy members seeking a religious exemption to the abortion-tainted jab have been granted a temporary reprieve.FORT WORTH, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — A federal district court judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Navy from requiring 4,000 service members to take abortion-tainted COVID jabs. Judge Reed O’Connor issued a preliminary injunction on Monday against the Department of Defense (DOD) jab mandate. He previously stopped the DOD from enforcing it against dozens of Navy SEALs in a January 3 ruling. The ruling covers the 3,320 active-duty sailors and 864 reserve sailors who have religious objections to the COVID vaccines....

A judge on Tuesday hit former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman with a $61,585 penalty for ignoring her duty to file a financial disclosure report after she was fired from her post as a communications aide to President Donald Trump in December 2017. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon rejected Manigault Newman’s claims that her firing was so abrupt that she did not have a chance to collect her personal files, which contained financial details she said were necessary for the filing.

On Monday the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Navy's request to reinstate the U.S. Navy's COVID-19 vaccine requirement. In November, dozens of U.S. Navy SEALs claimed they were wrongfully denied COVID vaccination exemptions on religious grounds. The suit, which lists 35 unnamed service members, argues that that the Defense Department's mandate violates their First Amendment rights. While the percentage of vaccinated active duty personnel in each service is at 95 percent or higher, the number of unvaccinated personnel is close to 30,000. The Navy itself has previously said that it has not granted an exemption to any...

In U.S. Navy Seals 1-26 v. Biden, (5th Cir., Feb. 28, 2022), the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the Navy a partial stay of an injunction issued by a Texas federal district court protecting 35 special warfare personnel who object on religious grounds to complying with the military's COVID vaccine mandate. The court said in part: Defendants have not demonstrated “paramount interests” that justify vaccinating these 35 Plaintiffs against COVID-19 in violation of their religious beliefs. They insist that “given the small units and remote locations in which special-operations forces typically operate, military commanders have determined...

WASHINGTON — A Florida man who bragged he "broke the internet" when he was photographed carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's podium during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 75 days in prison on Friday. Adam Johnson, a stay-at-home father of five boys, traveled to D.C. in support of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton sentenced Johnson to prison on Friday, saying Johnson made "a mockery" of the events by grabbing Pelosi's lectern and...

Mariposa Castro, also known as Imelda Acosta, was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton. She also received a $5,000 fine from the judge, who said the January 6 attack had "totally undermined" the peaceful transfer of presidential power, NBC News reported. Throughout the day, Castro posted videos on her Facebook account showing the riot from inside the building and outside on restricted grounds. One video shows her climbing through a broken window, using the platform located at the lower west terrace of the Capitol, according to court records. As she was entering the Capitol, she could be heard...

Gray wolves will regain federal protection across most of the lower 48 United States following a court ruling Thursday that struck down a Trump Administration decision to take the animals off the endangered species list. Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White, of United States District Court for the Northern District of California, found that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, in declaring wolf conservation a success and removing the species from federal protection, did not adequately consider threats to wolves outside of the Great Lakes and Northern Rocky Mountains where they have rebounded most significantly. Although the decision to...

A federal judge on Monday ruled that the Air Force must pay more than $230 million to survivors and victims' families of the 2017 shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Driving the news: U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez in July ruled that the Air Force holds 60% of the responsibility for the shooting in the Texas church because it failed to enter the shooter's criminal history into a federal background check database used for gun purchases. More than 25 people were killed in the shooting.Rodriguez on Monday ordered the Air Force to pay millions, which will compensate more than 80 family...

After several days of bad news on the redistricting front, including a bad decision in North Carolina for the GOP-drawn map there, a big win has been delivered to Republicans. The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to halt a lower court order in Alabama that it must redraw its previously passed Congressional map.That means a 6-1 Republican to Democrat map will now go into effect in 2022, and given the makeup of the Supreme Court, there’s no reason to believe it gets struck down at any point past that.BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the liberals in...

Texas law barring state contractors from boycotting Israel violates firm’s free speech, federal judge rules Texas is one of more than two dozen states with laws that seek to limit boycotts, divestments and sanctions of Israel over its treatment of Palestine.Texas can’t forbid an engineering firm from boycotting Israel as part of its contract with Houston City Hall, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen on Friday stopped short of fully blocking a state law that prohibits government agencies from doing business with certain companies that boycott Israel. But his ruling said the free speech rights...

A federal judge rejected a plea deal Monday afternoon that would have allowed one of the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery to avoid a federal hate crime trial. U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood heard arguments Monday from Arbery’s family and prosecutors after the Department of Justice struck a plea deal with Arbery’s killers Gregory and Travis McMichael over the weekend. Travis McMichael, the man who fatally shot Arbery, had his plea deal tossed out by Wood. A decision was not yet made on Gregory McMichael’s plea deal. Arbery’s family was outraged that the plea would allow the McMichaels to...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham contrasted President Joe Biden’s vow to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court to replace outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer with then-Sen. Biden’s opposition to and multiple filibusters of the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the federal bench by then-President George W. Bush in 2003 and 2005 and remarked that “race and gender, they only count if you’re thought to be a committed judicial activist, judicial leftist.” Ingraham said, [relevant remarks begin around 2:50] “I’m thinking back on the nomination of what would’ve been another first,...

Sen. Joe Biden said Sunday that if President Bush nominates recently confirmed Circuit Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats will launch a filibuster. "If [Bush] sent up Edith Jones, I could assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight - and she would probably be filibustered," Biden told CBS's "Face the Nation." In the next breath Biden corrected himself, saying, "I misspoke, I misspoke. Janice Rogers Brown is what I meant to say." Asked whether that would break the Senate's much heralded compromise last month not to...

The GOP-controlled Senate on Tuesday ended a nearly two-year Democratic filibuster of California judge Janice Rogers Brown, putting her on track to become the second black woman on what many people consider to be the nation’s second highest court. The 65-32 vote virtually assures the conservative jurist and Alabama native’s confirmation Wednesday evening to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, part of a historic deal to avert a partisan showdown over judicial filibusters. It takes 60 votes to bypass a filibuster. In November 2003, Brown’s Republican supporters were able to get only 53 votes for...

Washington – A South Carolina man who traveled to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021 and later assaulted officers outside the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 44 months in jail on Wednesday. Nicholas Languerand, an avowed follower of the QAnon conspiracy, pleaded guilty in November to assaulting officers and faced a maximum of 20-years prison sentence. However, prosecutors asked the court to sentence Languerand to 51 months. While Languerand admitted he had participated in the assault on the Capitol, investigators say he showed little remorse and even indicated that he wanted to see more violence, alleging he had sent a...

In one opinion published last week, 9th Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke said Ventura County, California, violated the Second Amendment when it shut down gun stores early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In another opinion the same day, VanDyke said the county's policy was perfectly consistent with the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. That second, tongue-in-cheek opinion was meant to illustrate the disrespect that the 9th Circuit and other federal appeals courts have shown for the Second Amendment since 2008, when the Supreme Court explicitly recognized that the provision guarantees an individual right to armed self-defense. The Court may finally...

As a rule, few things are less likely to be the source of humor than court decisions. Sometimes there are excellent puns or low-key snark, but you don’t find belly-laugh material. Usually. Last Friday, a panel of the Ninth Circuit published a decision on a complaint arising from Ventura, California, that covered both the COVID panic and the Second Amendment. During the height of the COVID panic, that county ordered firing ranges, and gun shops closed. Presumably, this is because the Wuhan virus has a particular affinity for recreational venues. Several groups and individuals sued to overturn the order as...

Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last September, Assembly Bill 173 amended state firearms laws to allow California to turn over gun owners’ personal information to gun violence researchers. Finding there was no “emergency” to warrant restraining California from sharing millions of gun owners’ personal information with gun violence researchers, a federal judge Wednesday declined to block the state’s enactment of Assembly Bill 173.U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns heard from attorneys for Jane and John Does and Attorney General Rob Bonta regarding a constitutional challenge to Assembly Bill 173, a law which amended California firearms laws to authorize...

Dulles, Virginia – A federal courthouse is not typically the terrain on which Navy SEALs fight on behalf of their fellow Americans, but this week it proved to be a decisive venue for them. On January 3, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor issued an injunction against the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Navy, barring them from taking adverse action against 35 servicemembers who sought a religious exemption from DoD's vaccine mandate. The group includes Navy SEALs and other members of the Navy Special Warfare Command who hold strong religious convictions preventing them from taking the vaccine while remaining true to...

A federal judge on Monday barred the Defense Department from punishing a group of Navy SEALS who sought a religious exemption to the federal vaccine mandate.Responding to a lawsuit filed by First Liberty on behalf of the 35 special forces service members, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who pointed out that the Navy had not granted any religious exemptions, issued a preliminary injunction blocking the department from enforcing the mandate. "The Navy servicemembers in this case seek to vindicate the very freedoms they have sacrificed so much to protect,” O’Connor wrote in the decision. “The COVID-19 pandemic provides the government...