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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Trump Administration rule that opponents said would have harmed the bargaining rights of more than 500,000 home healthcare workers in California and several hundred thousand additional workers across the nation. San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria found that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rule changing Medicaid state payment requirements would have made it tougher for states to deduct employee benefits and union dues from workers’ paychecks... ...The agency had said it was required to make the change because the old system was barred by federal...

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just got to the official end of the line with her efforts to divert $16 million in public school COVID-relief funding to private schools. U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California James Donato signed a permanent injunction–made public Monday–that will formally end litigation begun last summer against the Department of Education (DOE). In July, Judge Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he called DeVos’s justification of the DOE’s pro-private school policy “interpretive jiggery-pokery in the extreme.” The Congressional CARES Act earmarked approximately $16 billion to help elementary...

A federal court in California on Thursday ruled against President Trump's order to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count for apportioning congressional seats, dealing the administration its second court loss over the July executive memorandum. A panel of three judges for the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California ruled that the memo was unconstitutional and violated laws governing the census. "The policy which the Presidential Memorandum attempts to enact has already been rejected by the Constitution, the applicable statutes, and 230 years of history," the panel wrote in a 90-page decision. The order forbids the Commerce...

-The Supreme Court on Tuesday paved the way for the Trump administration to end field operations for the 2020 census, blocking a lower court ruling that had prolonged the count. -As is usual for emergency situations, the ruling came in an unsigned order. -Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

The Trump administration can end counting for the 2020 census after the Supreme Court approved a request for now to suspend a lower court order that extended the count's schedule. The high court's ruling, following an emergency request the Justice Department made last week, is the latest turn in a roller coaster of a legal fight over the timeline for the count... Justice Department attorneys say the Census Bureau is under pressure to meet a legal deadline of Dec. 31 for reporting to the president the first set of census results — the latest state population counts that determine each...

Bloomberg link only: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-13/supreme-court-lets-trump-administration-end-census-count-early?srnd=premium

On Monday, Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that denying incarcerated prisoners stimulus checks is unlawful, paving he way for prisoners to receive $1,200 checks in the near future, pending appeal.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that President Trump’s use of emergency powers to allocate millions of dollars in funding for the construction of a southern border wall was illegal, the latest blow to the Trump administration’s effort to limit immigration. In the 2-1 decision, the court upheld a December 2019 district court summary judgment in favor of a request from the advocacy groups the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition against Defense Secretary Mark Esper, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and “all persons acting under their direction ... from using military construction funds...

From Wikipedia, Government image Public Domain, cropped and scaled by Dean Weingarten  On 29 September, 2020, the State of California, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and others, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California. The lawsuit is an attempt to force the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to change current federal regulations so as to render illegal much of the current manufacture of firearms by individuals for personal use. The Court is in the Ninth Circuit. It is a fools errand. Practical experience, in numerous countries around the...

U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler blocked an order by the Trump administration on Sunday that would have banned Chinese-owned messaging application WeChat from the Google and Apple app stores. Judge Beeler said that the order presents First Amendment concerns for users of the platform. According to a report by CNBC, a California judge blocked an order by the Trump administration that would have effectively blocked the WeChat messaging application from popular mobile app stores. Some analysts feared that the China-based applications posed information security concerns for American users. The group of plaintiffs that filed a lawsuit believe that the order...

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Twitter to reveal who was behind the account that allegedly spread the conspiracy about the death of slain Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich. U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu in Oakland, Calif., ordered that Twitter must turn over information about the account @whyspertech. That account allegedly forged FBI documents falsely linking Rich’s killing to the Wikileaks hack of Democratic emails and provided them to Fox News. NPR first reported on the order. Twitter has sought to keep the identity of the user secret, arguing that disclosing that information would violate the First Amendment....

A federal judge says the IRS can't keep withholding coronavirus relief payments from incarcerated people, potentially clearing the way for at least 80,000 checks totaling more than $100 million to be sent to people behind bars across the United States. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton late last month gives the IRS until Oct. 24 to reconsider the payments for those who were denied or had their money intercepted solely because of their incarceration.

A federal judge has stopped the 2020 census from finishing at the end of September and ordered the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident to continue for another month through the end of October, saying a shortened schedule likely would produce inaccurate results. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California made her ruling late Thursday, two days after hearing arguments from attorneys for the Census Bureau, and attorneys for civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the Census Bureau in an effort to halt the 2020 census from stopping at the end of the month. Attorneys for...

“Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program,” President Reagan once said. That adage certainly applies to the Temporary Protected Status program. TPS was intended to give only short-term permission for aliens to be in the U.S., but that permission has often gone on seemingly without end. Fortunately, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, has just dissolved an injunction that prevented the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from ending TPS for illegal aliens from Sudan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti who have been in the U.S. for decades. As Judge Consuelo Callahan...

"Google was one of the three largest bundlers of contributions to President Obama. The year after the America Invents Act was passed, Google contributions were almost $1 million. Google spent $18 million on lobbyists. What did Google get for its money? A new, weaker patent system that allows challenges to patents outside of court, without a jury, without presumption of validity, using a low standard of proof. Google and friends killed the presumption that makes patents valuable. The expectations of patent owners that their rights would be enforceable against infringers.... "As the U.S. weakens its patent system, other countries are...

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said Levandowski, who was convicted on Tuesday following a March plea agreement, said Levandowski could enter custody once the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided. Alsup said a sentence short of imprisonment would have given “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets,” comparing what Levandowski took to a “competitor’s game plan.” The 75-year-old judge, who has been involved in Silicon Valley litigation for nearly five decades, described Levandowski’s conviction as the “biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen.” “Billions [of dollars] in the future were at play, and...

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Trump administration cannot withhold federal grants from California sanctuary cities, affirming previous rulings in the state. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco said its ruling that the Justice Department cannot block police funds from cities not enforcing immigration laws does not extend nationally, Bloomberg News reported. The decision follows rulings from three other regional federal appeals courts against the administration. But a New York court unanimously ruled in February that the department had the authority to withhold funds from the cities that do not comply with federal authorities' enforcement of...

A federal judge cast doubt on Bayer AG ’s proposal to neatly resolve all future lawsuits over the safety of its Roundup weedkiller, potentially snagging the German company’s attempts to move past the massive liability. Bayer said recently it would pay up to $10.9 billion to settle tens of thousands of current Roundup cases and create a system for handling future cases. The deal came after three juries in recent years awarded large verdicts to plaintiffs alleging Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma, spooking investors. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, who must approve the class action, said Monday he...

A federal court in the San Francisco Bay Area has determined that churches do not contribute to a vibrant and fun atmosphere and therefore may be excluded from Salinas’ downtown area. New Harvest Christian Fellowship has rented space along Main Street in Salinas for more than 25 years. Their growing congregation prompted leaders to recognize several years ago that the church needed a larger facility. In the meantime, the church has had to limit or even discontinue some ministries because of the space limitations. In 2017, it seemed the church’s prayers were answered when a larger building just across the...

Tesla Inc. TSLA 5.05% has asked a federal judge to allow the electric-car maker to reopen its lone U.S. assembly factory, calling a local government’s insistence that it remain closed to fight the spread of Covid-19 a power grab that defies the U.S. Constitution. “Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant “Interim Health Officer” of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!” “Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain...