Free Republic

A marathon first day in the Senate impeachment trial against President Trump erupted into a shouting match well after midnight early Wednesday morning, as Trump's legal team unloaded on Democratic impeachment manager Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. -- in an exchange that prompted a bleary-eyed Chief Justice John Roberts to sternly admonish both sides for misconduct in the chamber. Nadler began the historic spat by speaking in support of the eighth amendment of the day proposed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, after each of Schumer's previous attempted alterations to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's rules were rejected by a united...

In 2005, George W. Bush appointed John Roberts to SCOTUS and also designated him as the Chief Justice, replacing the recently deceased William Rehnquist in both roles. Question: either now, or when Trump replaces the next departed justice -- can Trump change who is the Chief Justice? Because the Constitution doesn't say anything about how a person is designated to be the chief, I'm wondering if Trump could say, at any time (this is an example): "I'm nominating Amy Barrett to replace Darth Bader Ginsburg, John Roberts will become an Associate Justice, and I appoint Clarence Thomas as Chief Justice."...

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by three women arrested for violating a New Hampshire city ordinance by exposing their breasts in public as part of the so-called "Free the Nipple" movement. The rejection leaves in place a 2019 ruling by New Hampshire's top court that upheld their convictions for violating a Laconia, N.H., measure that prohibits female toplessness in public. The women -- Heidi Lilley, Kia Sinclair and Ginger Pierro -- argued the ban violates the Constitution. The ordinance makes it illegal to uncover female breasts “with less than a fully opaque covering of...

Last month presiding FISA judge Rosemary Collyer announced she would be stepping down early due to ‘health issues.’ Chief Justice Roberts tapped Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee to replace Collyer. On Friday, Judge Boasberg announced in an order that he has appointed Obama-era national security leader at the DOJ David S. Kris as amicus counsel to review the reforms the FBI will be making to its FISA application process. This order was in response to the FBI abusing the FISA process after it obtained a total of four FISA warrants on Carter Page. The government had until Friday January...

The Trump administration's plan to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census questionnaire sent to every U.S. household was thwarted by a June 2019 Supreme Court ruling issued just days before a printing deadline. Just two weeks later, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to allow the Commerce Department on behalf of the Census Bureau to obtain federal agency data on immigration to generate data on the size of the immigrant population, including details on documentation and legal status from the 2020 census responses. On Dec. 27, the Department of Homeland Security publicly released a privacy impact assessment...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or ObamaCare, includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall . . . ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, the individual mandate, after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.” As of January, thanks to a tax reform bill that Congress enacted in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero....

During an appearance on Huntsville, AL radio’s WVNN, Brooks referred to Roberts’ 2012 opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which upheld the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, as justification for his skepticism in the chief justice’s abilities. “Justice Roberts has been mentally erratic in his legal foundation for the opinions he has written,” Brooks said on “The Jeff Poor Show.” “By way of one example, out of nine Supreme Court justices, he was the only one who thought that Obamacare was not socialized medicine, was not some kind of government health care program. He thought...

Presiding FISA judge Rosemary Collyer will be stepping down early due to ‘health issues’ reported NY Times’ Charlie Savage. Chief Justice Roberts tapped Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee to replace Collyer.

WASHINGTON — A bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court appeared likely Tuesday to let the Trump administration follow through on its plan to shut down DACA, the federal program that has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as dreamers, to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S. With hundreds of DACA supporters rallying outside — so many that police shut down the street in front of the Supreme Court — the justices heard nearly an hour and a half of oral arguments. Based on their questions, it appeared that the court's five conservatives were inclined to rule that the...

In an impeachment trial in the Senate, President Trump would look up to see one of his Washington establishment foes, Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., presiding over the historic proceedings from the dais in the upper chamber. Mr. Trump, who has clashed with Chief Justice Roberts over the perceived political bias of the federal courts, would have to count on him for a fair hearing when the fate of his presidency hangs in the balance. It’s a prospect that has caused rumblings in Washington that the chief justice should recuse himself. John Cardillo, a conservative radio personality...

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d — allegedly — joined with the conservatives in a case boiling with political repercussions only to think better of it and swing around to the liberal position. Everyone’s heard the stories by now about Roberts supposedly wimping out in the ObamaCare ruling seven years ago, initially agreeing with Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito that the individual mandate was unconstitutional and then getting cold feet. Result: A tortured and dubious majority opinion upholding the constitutionality of the mandate as a tax. Rumors swirled within days of the decision that Roberts had switched his...

diGenova said Inspector General Michael Horowitz has determined all four FISA warrants against one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page were illegally obtained. ... DiGenova said if he were attorney general, any officials involved in obtaining the Page FISA warrants who are still in the department would be "gone." He singled out Dana Boente, who is the general counsel now under FBI Director Christopher Wray. The April 2017 FISA renewal was approved by Boente and former FBI Director James Comey, ... DiGenova also discussed the two people he wants to hear from after the FISA report is released. He said he...

The LGBT agenda is like a hydra; a multi-headed monster that attacks society on several different fronts. At first, the movement gained acceptance through positive portrayals in the entertainment arts. Later on, the LGBT mafia began infiltrating the education system, imposing its rather totalitarian brand of “inclusion” on children and families. Lastly, they are ratcheting up their efforts to reshape society through state and federal legislation. Saints, we can turn off the TV or boycott certain shows, we can pull our children from schools that shove sexual perversion down their throats, but what recourse will we have if these people...

Are we a nation of laws or a nation of men? Previously, the most radically leftist federal judges had failed this test on cases pertaining to the Trump administration. Now the highest court in the land has joined them.The fight over whether the simple question, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” could appear on the 2020 U.S. census already implicated major issues of public policy, including immigration, national sovereignty, and voting rights. But the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the matter has now transcended these issues to challenge the rule of law itself, once again raising...

Chief Justice Roberts, joined by the four liberal justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor), declared that “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.” The “sole stated reason” for adding the citizenship question to the census, he observed, “seems to have been contrived.” Federal agencies must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public.” Otherwise, judicial review becomes “an empty ritual.” In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, correctly called the...

In a much-awaited decision, the Supreme Court held on Thursday in a 5-4 decision that partisan gerrymandering is a political question beyond the reach of the federal courts. This should come as no surprise, since it’s the same conclusion the court reached the last time this issue was before it in 2004 in a case out of Pennsylvania, Vieth v. Jubelirer. This time, plaintiffs in both Maryland and North Carolina challenged congressional redistricting maps, claiming they discriminated against Republicans in Maryland and Democrats in North Carolina. They argued that such partisan redistricting (i.e. engaging in politics when drawing legislative district...

<p>But then, you might not be taking into consideration two things: Chief Justice John Roberts and his disdain for the current occupant of the Oval Office, President Donald Trump.</p> <p>Thanks to Roberts, who was appointed by an establishment ‘conservative’ president, George W. Bush, the Census Bureau will likely not be able to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census because…well, because.</p>

(Image via Wikimedia) Today the Supreme Court issued two major opinions with profound implications for American politics. It blocked, for now, adding a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census in Department of Commerce vs. New York . In Rucho v. Common Cause , the Court permanently killed off allowing federal courts to decide that a legislative map gave one side too much of a partisan advantage. It was a bad day for the right, a very bad day for the left, and an extremely bad day for Chief Justice John Roberts. First, the very bad day for the...

If Joe Scarborough is right, there is something seriously wrong with Chief Justice John Roberts and his Court. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough claimed, "I know the Roberts Court is not going to overturn" Roe v. Wade because a recent poll shows only 13% of Americans want it overturned. Refusing to apply the Constitution, bowing instead to the public sentiment of the day, would represent an appalling abdication of the Court's duty. That is particularly so regarding Roe, a decision that even many supporters of abortion rights, and an MSNBC legal analyst, recognize was decided on dubious-at-best constitutional grounds. Get...

There’s an odious Supreme Court case from 1971, Palmer v. Thompson, that most people don’t remember and that most who do remember wish they could forget. It’s a relic of a bygone era—one of the last pieces of the Jim Crow system that the Supreme Court ever sustained. On our current Supreme Court, Palmer v. Thompson looks to be having a moment. Its reasoning stealthily drove last year’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii, in which the court’s five-justice conservative majority upheld the travel restrictions that the president had planned during the campaign to be a “Muslim ban.” And this week’s...