Free Republic

A federal judge in Seattle blocked, temporarily, President Donald Trump’s attempt to rescind birthright citizenship — the idea spelled out in the Constitution that every person born in the United States is an American citizen. Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour on Thursday was blistering in his criticism of Trump’s action as he granted a temporary restraining order that blocks Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour, an...

SEATTLE (AP) - The federal judge who sentenced an Algerian terrorist to 22 years in prison for attempting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium wildly abused his discretion, said prosecutors who had sought a much longer sentence. Customs agents in Port Angeles, Wash., caught Ahmed Ressam, 38, with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999. The scare prompted the cancellation of millennium celebrations at Seattle's Space Needle. At Ressam's sentencing last summer, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour used the opportunity...