Free Republic

It’s an old story: When people are allowed to get their way for too long, when they’re never told “No!” they may get too big for their britches. They may develop a sense of entitlement and even become narcissistic. And proving that judges are no exception are a number of recent court “opinions” designed to scuttle President Trump’s agenda. One disallows DOGE from scrutinizing Treasury Department data.

Amy Coney Barrett strikes again—alongside Justice Roberts. However, by now, Roberts’ betrayals have become pretty much predictable, but many had high hopes for Barrett, given her history as a clerk for Justice Scalia, one of the greatest Supreme Court Justices of our time. In fact, she was once hailed as “Scalia’s heir.” ... Sadly, that claim couldn’t be further from the truth. In what many conservatives are calling an outright slap in the face, Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts dealt a blow to President Trump and the US Constitution. They got political, sided with the progressives, and ruled...

Danielle R. Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced her resignation in a statement that does not refer to the DOJ directive. Danielle R. Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who was ordered to drop the corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams, has resigned, a senior official said Thursday. The move appears to be a rebuke to the Justice Department. It comes three days after Emil Bove, the acting U.S. deputy attorney general, issued a memo ordering federal prosecutors in New York to drop the...

Blind Items Revealed #12 August 1, 2024 In the past few months, an author managed to track down copies of former leases of an apartment complex in Texas. Why? He had been told that in the 100+ unit complex, the manager had allowed three or four off them to be used by people he had come into contact with in the federal government thirty years previously. The people sometimes needed a quiet place to stay that would keep them off the grid. No hotel rooms. The location was extremely convenient to one of the world's busiest airports. The people would...

When I served as a judicial officer, I leaned into the originalist philosophy championed by Justice Antonin Scalia. His wisdom — that judges must adhere to the Constitution and the law as written, not as they wish it to be — served as a lodestar. As Scalia famously remarked, “The Constitution is not a living document — it is a legal document.” This sharp declaration underscores a vital truth: the Constitution is not a chameleon, changing with the political winds or cultural trends. It is a fixed, enduring framework meant to safeguard liberty and ensure the rule of law. Judges...

Rick Santorum’s Catholic faith is an obvious centerpiece of his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, and it is rare for him to speak without referencing his religious beliefs. It is also rare, however, to hear him speak about his particular church, St. Catherine of Siena, which he and his family have belonged to for at least a decade. Even his 2005 manifesto on his personal faith and politics, It Takes a Family, did not mention the church. I was curious to learn more about it, so last Friday morning, I attended a 9 a.m. Mass there. St. Catherine is...

Are we living in a banana republic? The vast majority of Americans believe so, and if they didn’t before the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home, then they likely do now. The partisanship and lopsided control of our two-tiered justice system is rapidly deconstructing any trust there once was in the way our government operates. Fox News host Will Cain, sitting in for Tucker Carlson, gave one of the most important opening monologues I’ve ever heard. He cut to the core of what the raid on Trump’s home really tells us about our Justice Department. More importantly, he told us...

Arguing that it did, the Casey Court went much further still, making the claim that “liberty” included abortion and much else besides. It became one of the most infamous passages in the entire history of SCOTUS jurisprudence: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Thus, Casey was about so much more than abortion. It offered an understanding of liberty that made the individual the arbiter of everything, including the meaning of the universe. It was the most radical principle of...

If there were a scintilla of doubt that McConnell did the nation a great favor, that doubt should have been put to rest during Garland’s June 15, 2021, speech on “Violent Extremism and Domestic Terrorism.” The ideological purge will make Lois Lerner blush. Mitch McConnell likes to boast, including recently, that his most consequential achievement in his Senate career was keeping Merrick Garland from filling the Scalia seat after the death of the great conservative Justice. McConnell, with a consistency his detractors refuse to acknowledge, followed historical practice and precedent in refusing to allow the Senate to take up the...

Mr. Pendley, a Wyoming attorney, led the Bureau of Land Management for the Trump administration. A few years ago in Casper, I sat in the memento-filled office of the late Mick McMurry, Vietnam Veteran, Midas-touch entrepreneur, and magnanimous philanthropist. As everyone in the “oil patch” knows, Mick discovered the Jonah Field—one of the largest gas province in the country—near Pinedale when he applied the decades old but not fully in its prime technology—hydraulic fracturing or fracking. He took some Bureau of Land Management (BLM) leases that had been worked over without promising results, hired the “best men I could find...

What began as a self-righteous crusade to supposedly save the Republican Party from Donald Trump has now morphed into an explicit enterprise for personal profit.What began as a self-righteous crusade to supposedly save the Republican Party from Donald Trump has morphed into an explicit enterprise exposing who they were all along: financial opportunists capitalizing on media-fomented Trump Derangement Syndrome for personal profit while masquerading as white knight Republicans.More than any other culprit — the Bulwarks, The Dispatches, the legacy papers promoting ex-GOP columnists as “conservative” — the vile con artists at the Lincoln Project reveal the left-wing campaign purportedly about...

Summary: Video interview of witness (poss johnheretohelp from twatter) outlining how Epstein allegedly facilitated adoption of kids (non bio siblings) for CJ Rob from Wales via Ireland as a favour for future favours. He said kids used as currency by these people and no one is trusted u less they are compromised by using kids as currency. Also outlined a plot to take out judges and SC judges in first year of Hilldawgs admin to allow the court to be packed and taken out 2A. Scalia was an obstacle due to his conservative views and was taken out by 3...

October 2010 marked the 24th anniversary of Justice Antonin Scalia's appointment to the US Supreme Court. Well known for his sharp wit as well as his originalist approach to the Constitution, Justice Scalia consistently asks more questions during oral arguments and makes more comments than any other Supreme Court justice. And, according to one study, he also gets the most laughs from those who come to watch these arguments. In September 2010, Justice Scalia spoke with UC Hastings law professor Calvin Massey. Series: "Legally Speaking" [3/2011] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 20773]

The chief justice is an especially potent swing voter, because he also has the power to assign authorship of the majority opinion, including to himself. That can help shape a decision’s scope and direction—usually, in Chief Justice Roberts’s case, by making it more tentative. If the chief justice is in dissent, however, the assignment power falls to the most senior associate justice in the majority. Clarence Thomas is now the most senior justice, so he will assign authorship any time he is in the majority and Chief Justice Roberts dissents. Justice Thomas is something of an anti-Roberts. His lone concurrences...

Ten years before Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the landmark Second Amendment opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller crystallizing the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right, he was welcoming a young clerk to chambers by the name of Amy Coney Barrett. There were no Second Amendment cases before the Supreme Court that term. In fact, before Heller, the court had not taken up a Second Amendment case since 1939 — and before then, only twice in history, both in the 19th century. The court has decided three Second Amendment cases since Heller...

A close look at Amy Coney Barrett's legal writings indicates deep respect for the precedent set by landmark Supreme Court cases. President TrumpÂ’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is a welcome choice. Senate confirmation cannot come soon enough. Judge Barrett clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for two years and considers the great conservative jurist her mentor. That is heartening.But it is not the herald of coming victories that the pro-life movement wants it to be. Any euphoria among pro-lifers is premature at best. Celebrating BarrettÂ’s nomination as the long-awaited death knell for Roe v....

Although Amy Coney Barrett is the president's choice to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she is more aptly described as heir to another departed Supreme Court justice: conservative hero Antonin Scalia. Like Scalia, for whom she once clerked, she is a committed Roman Catholic as well as a firm devotee of his favored interpretation of the Constitution known as originalism. Those qualifications delight many on the right but dismay liberals and others who fear her votes could result in the chipping away of some laws, especially the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. President Donald Trump announced his choice of...

Conservative Legal Circles Buzz With Rumor that Justice Gorsuch Will Defect to the Liberals and Rule That Transgenders Are Women For Title VII Posted by: Ace at 05:04 PM The debate is whether Title VII's protections of discrimination "because of... sex" applies to sexual orientation and "gender" expression. Does a man who claims to be a transwoman actually get protections based on "sex" when his sex is male? The liberals are solid for answering "yes," of course. And chatter in conservative legal circles is that Justice Gorsuch will join the liberals. There is a rumor rapidly circulating in legal conservative circles that Gorsuch...

It’s a new year, but nothing much has changed since 2019 as far as how dumb and ignorant some college kids can be. Yeah, you can chalk it up as kids just being young and dumb, but when a graduate student and some other college kids from several of America’s most prestigious law schools and colleges decide to express their deep disdain for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, well, some of us take notice. Daniel Espo, who according to his Facebook profile is studying or had studied at Harvard Law School, expressed his distaste for the late Justice...

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...