Free Republic

The Supreme Court handed down three blockbuster rulings Thursday focused on hot-button cultural issues, and all three of them went in the conservative direction. That’s not exactly a surprise—the court has a conservative majority, after all. The first real surprise was that the rulings were unanimous. The second real surprise? Each of the court’s three liberal justices wrote one of the opinions. Justice Elena Kagan, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote the opinion in Smith & Wesson v. Mexico, upholding the rights of U.S. gun manufacturers from Mexico’s attempt to sue them, blaming them for abetting cartel violence. ... Justice Sonia...

President Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his own MAGA image. Will he now do the same to the conservative legal movement? During his first term, Trump benefited immeasurably from his association with Leonard Leo, the former Federalist Society official whose advice on judicial nominations helped Trump to transform the U.S. Supreme Court into a conservative legal juggernaut that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, overturned affirmative action in higher education, and expanded the right to keep and bear arms. Such rulings will likely be remembered as Trump's most far-reaching accomplishments as president. Yet now, Trump is denouncing both...

The Obergefell ruling rode rough-shod over religions and dozens of state constitutions on the bases of a moral — not legal — opinion.In late January, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a memorandum calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to “reverse” its 2015 gay marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, “and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.” The memo passed 46 to 24 in the House and is heading to the Idaho Senate. If it passes the senate, it will be sent on to the Supreme Court as one more formal encouragement that...

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson 🚨BREAKING: Trump signs Executive Order clarifying birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. From Trump War Room 7:03 PM · Jan 20, 2025

President-elect Donald Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship for those born on U.S. soil by illegal migrant parents could put to rest a hot-button constitutional debate that’s loomed over the country for decades. The incoming president has repeatedly vowed to end birthright citizenship immediately upon entering office, one of the more ambitious agenda items within his immigration enforcement platform. While the proposal has divided border hawks and immigration advocates, both sides generally agree the debate boils down to interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the conclusion of which will likely fall to the Supreme Court.“Our position is that the 14th Amendment...

America is about to go to war over whether the government has the power to deport entire families of illegal aliens. That question involves “birthright citizenship”—that is, whether a child born in the U.S. to illegal alien parents is automatically a U.S. citizen and, thus, an “anchor baby?” The answer, by any fair reading of the Constitution and history, is “No.”

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal judge has weakened the Biden administration’s effort to use a historic civil rights law to fight industrial pollution alleged to have taken a heavier toll on minority communities in Louisiana. U.S. District Judge James David Cain of Lake Charles handed down the ruling Thursday, permanently blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing what are known as “disparate impact” requirements on the state.... In its lawsuit, the state argued that the Biden administration’s plans went beyond the scope of Title VI.... The state also said the policy is discriminatory because it would allow regulation of...

Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer criticized his colleagues on the high court over their interpretation of the Constitution. The former justice, who retired in 2022, is set to release a book titled Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism, laying out an argument critiquing the methods used by many Republican-appointed justices to interpret the Constitution. “Recently, major cases have come before the court while several new justices have spent only two or three years at the court,” Breyer said in the book, according to the New York Times. “Major changes take time, and there are many years...

The claim that an undesired pregnancy is slavery implies that our very existence is a form of slavery or imprisonment.Motherhood isn’t slavery. This ought to be obvious, but after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the left has pushed a variety of bizarre legal theories as they scramble to ensure that elective abortions continue unabated across the country. They just got a federal judge to consider one of the looniest legal theories — the sort of theory that shouldn’t be heard outside of a mediocre law professor’s late-night conversations with her cats after hitting the wine box a bit...

The Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of “any person” to due process when a state deprives him or her of life, liberty, or property, and to the “equal protection of the laws.” By overruling Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court eliminated Roe’s deeply flawed holding that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” Since a sound case can be made that interpreting “person” to include all human beings is consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s original public meaning, Congress should do so for purposes of its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. KEY TAKEAWAYS...

Federal judges are not historians, but they are increasingly obligated to play them on the bench. In his Bruen decision last June, Justice Clarence Thomas ordered courts to assess the constitutionality of modern-day gun restrictions by searching for “historical analogues” from 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Ever since, judges have struggled mightily with this task—in part because most have no training in real historical analysis, but also because the record is often spotty and contradictory. In light of Bruen’s maximalist language, they have erred on the side of gun owners, finding a constitutional right to buy a gun...

Former Vice President Mike Pence was heckled with calls of “traitor” at a conservative conference Friday as he continues to draw criticism from members of the Republican base for his role in Congress’s certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory. “It is great to be back with so many patriots dedicated to faith and freedom and the road to the majority,” Pence said to applause at the Faith & Freedom Coalition summit before the heckling began. “I’m a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order,” Pence continued, as the hecklers in the audience began to grow louder, yelling...

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., calling the judicial originalism "racist, sexist, homophobic and a fancy word for discrimination" is “patently irresponsible," said Sen. Mike Lee. The term "originalism" refers to a judicial interpretation of the law based on a literal reading. “Of all the irresponsible and inflammatory statements I’ve heard over the last few weeks, and I’ve heard some doozies, this might well be the worst,” Lee, R-Utah, told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday. “If you think about what he is really saying there, Sen. Markey has essentially said that our Constitution is racist. And [that] an effort to understand it,...

Originalism is a mode of legal interpretation by which a judge considers a legal document’s original meaning at the time the document was written. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom Judge Barrett clerked in the late 1990’s, was considered one of the foremost exponents of this judicial philosophy.

In 1987, Robert Bork was denied confirmation to the Supreme Court because his originalist beliefs were deemed a serious threat to constitutional rights. Originalism is no less dangerous for those rights today, yet Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s repeated statements professing her belief in originalism have been met with little objection. Originalists believe that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it was adopted and that it can change only by constitutional amendment. Under this view, the First Amendment means the same thing as when it was adopted in 1791 and the 14th Amendment means the same thing as...

Over the past decade, left-leaning opinion makers have been at war against the U.S. Constitution and our Founders. The nomination of originalist judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court has provoked renewal of the onslaught. The assault takes several forms, which are discussed below. First, however, let’s see what triggered it.The Constitution limits and distributes political power. American “progressives” almost universally favor a very powerful central government so most do not think highly of the Constitution. Throughout the 20th Century, however, they generally avoided direct criticism. Instead, they contended that the Constitution authorizes, or even mandates, their political agenda.A good...

This decision, and the majority who wrote it, represents the end of something. It represents the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it. After Bostock, that effort, as it has existed up to now, is over. I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism and originalism in order to reach such a decision—an outcome that fundamentally changes the scope and meaning and application of statutory law—then textualism and originalism and all of those phrases don’t mean much at all. And if those are...

Pundits often speak of the judiciary in terms of liberal or conservative judges issuing liberal or conservative opinions. The reality is far more complicated—and interesting. As the growing divide among "conservative" judges in criminal justice cases makes clear, such labels frequently obscure more than they reveal.

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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...