Free Republic

Gorsuch joins 4 LIBS to rule much of Oklahoma belongs to INDIANS.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that President Trump is not immune from a subpoena over his financial and tax records to Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., -- and declined in a separate case to issue a definitive ruling on whether congressional committees can have access to Trump's financial records, throwing both issues back to lower courts. Vance had subpoenaed Trump's records as part of a criminal investigation into potential wrongdoing by the president and his organization. Multiple House committees had subpoenaed Trump's records ostensibly as part of an effort at oversight and to inform potential legislation. "President...

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a prosecutor’s demand for President Donald Trump’s tax returns as part of a criminal investigation that includes hush-money payments to women who claim they had affairs with Trump. The court ruled 7-2 in a case in which it heard arguments by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic. The records are held by Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, which has said it would comply with a court order. It probably will be at least several weeks before the court issues a formal judgment that would trigger the turnover of the records. The...

In a major win for religious liberty, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on Wednesday that employers with moral or religious objections would be exempt from the federal mandate that requires company health insurance to cover birth control. The case was a consolidation of The Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Pennsylvania, both of which sought to alter the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA). While the bill itself had no requirements for contraceptive access being guaranteed, this became mandatory through interim final rules (IFRs). While Churches have always been exempt...

Josh Hawley warns Trump on Supreme Court disappointments The GOP senator says the president needs to overhaul his process for picking nominees, in a swipe at top legal conservatives. By MARIANNE LEVINE President Donald Trump counts reshaping the judiciary as one of his greatest accomplishments. But some top conservatives say his vaunted process for picking Supreme Court nominees needs to be revamped. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in an interview that the high court’s latest string of left-leaning rulings suggests Trump should reconsider his vow to release a new list of potential Supreme Court nominees by September in his...

John Roberts is a politician — a politician who consistently makes laws, inconsistently applies the Constitution, and can't be voted out of office. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Unelected leftist politicians in robes with lifetime tenure. Turns out, the Supreme Court is a joke, and the punchline is Chief Justice John Roberts.Two high court decisions this week brought that reality into focus, when the George W. Bush-appointed chief sided with leftist justices to say sexual orientation is “sex,” and that the current commander in chief can’t undo unlawful executive action from a past president because of his reasons.Roberts has quite the...

... Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberals, as he so often has, in ruling that the Trump Administration hadn’t properly followed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The Court remanded the rescission back to DHS to rewrite with a formal rule-making with notice and comment period. This may seem routine, but the problem is that the Obama Administration never followed the APA when it issued Daca in 2012. Daca was never tested in court, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015 issued an injunction against a companion order to Daca. The Supreme Court upheld that injunction, and...

This past week, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. Hailed as a landmark decision for LGBT Americans, the 6-3 opinion written by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch concludes that the use of the word "sex" in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination. This seems like a straightforward question with an easy answer: Should gay and transgender people be discriminated against in hiring and firing decisions? Most would say no. Why should a bank teller be fired for being gay? Why shouldn't an accounting firm...

...The prematurely gray dad of two kicked off his opening statement talking about his wife and family - joking about his daughters, who were probably out "bathing chickens for the county fair," his extended family and childhood pranks, the values of working hard. Gorsuch thought back to the first time he put on his black robe - how it reminded him of the important job he had to do. He told the senators he didn't realize how big it was until he slipped on it and fell. "Everything went flying," he recalled. Now, three years later, that robe is still...

The Supreme Court effectively just told Americans that they must consider men women and women men in the workplace. This will not end well. In a 6–3 decision this past Monday, the Supreme Court rewrote Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While Title VII prohibits discrimination in employment “because of an individual’s sex,” the majority held, in an opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”The judicial usurpation of the legislature’s role, however, was but half of the horror of the Supreme Court’s...

The fact that four justices who complained that the court needed to hear Second Amendment cases passed on 10 chances to do so tells us much about the courtÂ’s 'swing vote.' The U.S. Supreme CourtÂ’s decision to pass on nearly a dozen gun-rights-related cases is breathtaking, not in the denial of hearing any, but in the seeming admission that the conservative associate justices think Chief Justice John Roberts canÂ’t be trusted to protect the Bill of Rights.The nationÂ’s top court denied writ of certiorari to 10 cases. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry trade association, submitted amicus curiae...

Congratulations to Chief Justice Elena Kagan on her big win Monday at the Supreme Court on gay and transgender rights in Bostock v. Clayton County. Ok, she isn’t the Chief, but she might as well be as her redefining of Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence prevailed in a startling 6-3 ruling that included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Kagan didn’t write the majority opinion, but her views are all over Justice Gorsuch's opinion that essentially rewrites Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That law bars discrimination in employment on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex,...

Washington — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that it is illegal for an employer to fire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, delivering a major victory in the fight for civil rights for LGBT people. The court's 6-3 ruling extends the scope of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion, to include LGBT people. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority's opinion, joined the liberal wing of the bench in ruling that "an employer who fires an...

Many on the left have accused originalism of being nothing but a cover for conservatives’ preferred policy outcomes, but Vermeule’s proposal illustrates how restrained originalists have been. “The Republic” often alarms first-time readers. Not only is Plato’s dialogic style foreign to us, the character of Socrates makes bizarre and even wicked proposals as he outlines a supposed ideal polity, such as a communism not only of property, but also of wives and children. Many readers, including some philosophers, have taken Plato literally and seriously, and therefore condemned him as a proto-totalitarian. Something similar seems to have happened in response to...

With three conservatives and three liberals signing on to the originalist ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana, we see more evidence that the 'living Constitution' school of thought is in decline. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that for defendants to be convicted of crimes, juries must decide their guilt unanimously, not by a simple majority or any other fraction. If that seems obvious, it may be because in the federal judiciary and the courts of 48 states, this is already the law and has been for a long time. Oregon and Louisiana were, until this week, the only outliers. In applying...

A group of black pastors has started a petition to urge Congress to censure Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., over his remarks about two Supreme Court justices last week. Schumer has been under fire from Republicans and some Democrats for comments aimed at conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh during a pro-choice rally that many perceived to be threats. "Those remarks, made during a rally at the Supreme Court on a pending case, were clearly intended to influence the decision on that case," a petition from the Coalition of African American Pastors addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch...

Next week—for the first time since Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined the bench—the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case involving abortion. On the docket is June Medical Services v. Russo, a constitutional challenge to a Louisiana law that requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of where the abortion takes place. Life Legal submitted amicus briefs in support of the pro-life law, and we’ll be there on March 4 to watch the Supreme Court argument in this critical case. You can read the brief we filed on behalf of Abby...

WASHINGTON - - The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal of the federal ban on bump stocks, devices that allow semi-automatic firearms to fire rapidly like machine guns. The justices did not comment in declining to review a lower court-ruling that upheld the ban, which took effect nearly a year ago. President Donald Trump said that the government would move to ban bump stocks, following a 2017 shooting in Las Vegas in which a gunman attached bump stocks to assault-style rifles he used to shoot concertgoers from his hotel room. By using the devices, which allow shots to be...

Is the era of Big Judicial Activism over? It might just be. Supreme Court Justic Neil Gorsuch, in a ruling about denying green cards to migrants who come here to be "public charges," something that's plainly laid out in U.S. law as illegal, threw in a special warning to activist judges, all leftists, who have been beavering away to rule from the bench, warning them that he's tired of their shenanigans. It's a specter to behold - a big lion on the Supreme Court who not only cares about rule of law, but is now warning the leftists out there...

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...