Free Republic

Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and others in the Trump administration are openly challenging the centuries-old power of the nation’s judiciary, foreshadowing a possible constitutional breakdown of American government.It’s not simply that the new administration has flouted a raft of federal statutes and prompted a flood of legal challenges. It’s that some of Donald Trump’s top advisers have cast doubt on whether rulings on those lawsuits would even constrain the president.There are signs that some judges’ orders have been disregarded. On Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island found that the administration has violated the “plain text” of his...

Anne Gorsuch, a former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, cut a flamboyant, defiant figure in early 1980s Washington as she slashed air and water quality regulations. She fought with environmentalists, was held in contempt by Congress and eventually resigned under pressure from the Ronald Reagan White House that had championed her. Her memoir was, appropriately, entitled: “Are You Tough Enough?” Her son Neil Gorsuch, a Supreme Court justice since 2017, has shown his own brand of defiance and anti-regulatory fervor. In recent years, Justice Gorsuch has voted against regulations that protect the environment, student-debt forgiveness and Covid-19 precautions. During...

Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrated their collective power at America's highest court on Thursday. They fueled the Supreme Court's limited opinions on Obamacare and religious liberty, in action that marks a twist for the conservative-dominated bench and adds to the suspense of the next two weeks as the court finishes its annual term. An overriding question going into the session that began last October was whether Roberts would still wield significant control, after former President Donald Trump appointed Barrett to succeed the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and created a...

Republicans have been successfully leveraging the Supreme Court balance of power as a major campaign issue to ignite their base since the 1980s. For Democrats, the 2020 election may mark the first in modern times that they unite around the high court as a driving force in a presidential election. Democratic candidates are increasingly advocating "court packing," that is, upping the number of Supreme Court justices to balance the bench -- or ensure a liberal majority. The idea is unlikely to succeed for historical and practical reasons but its resonance on the campaign trail reflects Democrats' new emphasis on the...

A new book on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts offers new details of his negotiation with liberal justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer to save ObamaCare ahead of the court's landmark ruling in 2012, according to excerpts released on CNN. In Joan Biskupic's "The Chief" which is scheduled to release next Thursday, she writes that Roberts originally opposed upholding the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate that required people to buy insurance, and cast his initial vote to strike it down, but he did join the liberal justices in voting to uphold Medicaid expansion, according to the book. He later...

If this court is going to break out of its predictable political mold on major legal controversies in America, it will be up to the inscrutable 63-year-old chief justice, whose ideology now lands him at the center of the bench, between the four liberals and the four most dependable conservatives. Yet unlike Anthony Kennedy, who Kavanaugh succeeded, Roberts is no centrist conservative with a record of joining the left on closely watched social policy disputes, such as to uphold abortion rights. The instincts of Roberts, who rose in Washington as he served Republican administrations, have always rested with the right...

Love him or hate him, Antonin Scalia has had a greater influence on the way Americans debate the law today than any other modern Supreme Court justice. Conservatives hail Scalia as the founding prophet of their true faith — the Jurisprudence of Original Understanding — and the leader of the opposition to moral relativism and judicial imperialism in the age of Obama. [...] It’s hard to write a fair-minded biography of such a polarizing figure, but that’s what Joan Biskupic has done with “American Original.” ... On the court, Scalia has shown a disdain for elites that keeps him not...