Free Republic

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could determine whether users can challenge social media companies on free speech grounds. The case, Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, No. 17-702, centers on whether a private operator of a public access television network is considered a state actor, which can be sued for First Amendment violations. The case could have broader implications for social media and other media outlets. In particular, a broad ruling from the high court could open the country’s largest technology companies up to First Amendment lawsuits. That could shape the ability of companies like...

Why did the Democrats launch an unprecedented smear campaign against a Supreme Court nominee? The matrix of motives centers on a cynical midterm ploy to boost turnout, appeal to suburban female voters in swing states and, hopefully, defer the nomination to a Dem Senate. But that’s the short game, not the long game. The attack on Brett Kavanaugh was not just an assault on a man, but an attack on an institution. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 85 years old and Stephen Breyer is 80 years old. Presidential incumbents tend to win reelection. Even if the Democrats take the Senate, the...

Less than a month after the confirmation of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh entrenched a 5-4 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, leading law professors are urging Democrats to expand the size of all of the nation's federal courts and pack them with liberals. Far-left Harvard professors Mark Tushnet and Laurence Tribe are lending their support to the so-called "1.20.21 Project," which was launched by political science professor Aaron Belkin on Wednesday to counter "Republican obstruction, theft and procedural abuse" of the federal judiciary. That rhetoric reflects the professors' apparent surprise after Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election, which they had...

Need evidence that Twitter’s priorities are severely out of whack? Look no further than what they’ve done to @GayPatriot. After suspending him for a tweet referring to Chelsea Manning as Bradley Manning and a traitor, and again for no clear reason, Twitter has axed Bruce Carroll’s @GayPatriot account permanently: Amelia ✔ @AmeliaHammy Update on @gaypatriot’s suspension. He’s now permanently banned for being “hateful.” Here’s a screenshot of the email he received informing him of that fact.

The son of former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, a pro-Trump College Republicans leader, is pressing “full charges” against a fellow Stanford University student who he says assaulted him at an event supporting new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. John David Rice-Cameron, Rice’s son and president of the Stanford College Republicans, alleges that fellow Stanford sophomore Melinda Hernandez physically assaulted him last Tuesday at the California school.

"It was heartbreaking. But I think women are not going to recede," Waters said. "Women are going to continue to confront what took place in that confirmation and him. And he won't rest easy in his job." . . Waters has encouraged harassment of public officials in the past, famously telling supporters to "create a crowd" when they see Republican officials to "tell them they're not welcome." This comment led to some censure from leaders in the Democratic Party, but Waters said she will continue to back such direct action.

I’ve raised six boys to manhood and I think I have a pretty solid handle on what would solve the anger of feminists at men. But they won’t like the answer. Really won’t like the answer. This thinking is spinning off from the political hackery against Brett Kavanaugh that also exposed some really strong emotions from a subset of women against men. Kavanaugh personally may have been innocent of the evidence-less accusations, but he acted as a locum for the generic anger this group of women have for men — for myriad reasons. For some, there is real cause to...

Patrick Bumatay is the second openly gay person to be nominated by Trump to be a federal judge. President Donald Trump recently announced another wave of judicial nominees, and among them is an openly gay conservative, Patrick Bumatay. Trump nominated Bumatay to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, the nation’s largest federal appeals court. It hears cases from nine Western states and has 29 judges; there are currently six vacancies. Bumatay is an assistant U.S. attorney in California handling various criminal issues, including opioid abuse and transnational organized crime, according to...

North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp apologized Tuesday for publishing a Sunday ad listing alleged sexual assault survivors, a number of whom said they had not given their permission to be in the ad or were not survivors of sexual assault. “I deeply regret this mistake and we are in the process of issuing a retraction, personally apologizing to each of the people impacted by this and taking the necessary steps to ensure this never happens again,” Heitkamp said in a statement

A group of states from across the country is backing a challenge to New York City’s restrictive gun laws. Led by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, they filed a brief last week in the pending request for cert of three NYC gun owners — Romolo Colantone, Efrain Alvarez, and Jose Anthony Irizarry — who argue the city’s “premises permit” scheme, which drastically restricts the ability to leave one’s premises with a firearm, is unconstitutional. The gun owners are licensed to have handguns on their residence or business but under current law can only leave with them to go to a...

It’s one thing to lose an election; it happens to everyone in politics. It’s one thing to lose a sports match; it happens in every sport. But something even rarer is happening in American politics right now, the losers don’t know why they’re losing and many of them don’t even realize they’re losing at all. In this case, the losers are the Democrats. They not only lost the 2016 presidential election, but continue to lose major battles with the Republicans over key issues like tax reform and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation. Many of them are shocked by these...

<p>TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida's next governor will get to pick three new justices to the Florida Supreme Court, the high court ruled Monday in a rebuke to Gov. Rick Scott.</p> <p>Three justices appointed by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles will retire next January, the same day Scott leaves office.</p>

Faced with a 5-4 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, some liberal Democrats want to pack the court to reverse the balance. Once the Democrats regain control of the White House and the Senate, so the argument goes, the new Democratic president could create enough new seats on the Supreme Court to ensure a liberal majority. The last time the Democrats tried that was in 1937. President Franklin Roosevelt had just been re-elected by the largest majority in American history. He carried all but two states, Maine and Vermont, and racked up unprecedented Democratic majorities in the Senate and...

A group of women in Chicago say they operated a covert abortion network for years in the 1960s and early 1970s, skirting the then-federal ban on abortion by discreetly sending messages to one another about abortion services. “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane,” read a 1969 newspaper advertisement from the “Jane Collective,” The New York Times reported Sunday. Formerly known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, the Jane Collective helped women have abortions before Roe V. Wade made it legal in 1973, according to TheNYT. Roe v. Wade gave women the permission to abort until the point...

when it comes to the real barometer of presidential truthfulness — keeping his promises — Trump is a paragon of honesty. For better or worse, since taking office, Trump has done exactly what he promised he would. Trump kept his promise to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something his three immediate predecessors also promised yet failed to do. He promised to “crush and destroy ISIS,” and two years later, he is on the verge of eliminating the Islamic State’s physical caliphate. He promised to impose a travel ban on countries he saw as posing...

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Republicans are going to remain in control of both the House and the Senate in a couple of weeks. Since their flawless victory over the Democrats in the fight to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Republican base is more energized now than at any point since November 2016. They say pictures are worth a thousand words… so, here’s one. And if you don’t think the person that is most worried about this picture is Hillary Clinton, then you haven’t been paying attention. But, to get to Hillary, I’ll...

There are a lot of reasons I’m not a Democrat. For example, I believe that… 1. Jesus, America, and capitalism have been the three greatest forces of good in world history. 2. An attractive woman posing with an AR-15 beats a screaming feminist in a pussy hat 10 times out of 10. 3. You can’t #believeallwomen or #believeallmen; you have to #believetheevidence. 4. It’s wrong and disgusting to harass people in restaurants and at their home just because you disagree with them politically. Also if you block traffic to get attention for your cause, whatever it may be, I am...

In true, bizarre New York fashion, a bookstore in Brooklyn is hosting a pro-abortion “hex ritual” to curse U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh this Saturday. Newsweek reports Catland Books, a “metaphysical boutique and occult bookshop,” is hosting a “Ritual to Hex Brett Kavanaugh.” Dakota Bracciale, co-owner of the bookshop and event organizer, claims witches at the event will “make Kavanaugh suffer.” Invitations to the event have been sent out via Eventbrite. The event, which is scheduled for Oct. 20, will include effigies, coffin nails, graveyard dirt and a spell, according to the report. The ritual description says that Kavanaugh...

Kanye West visited President Donald Trump at the White House last week, appearing with football legend Jim Brown at the Oval Office. The meeting, designed to bring attention to prison reform, took a dramatic turn when West engaged in a protracted monologue covering topics such as his love for President Trump, the power of the MAGA hat, and the link between welfare and the Thirteenth Amendment. Needless to say, the speech, which was all over the map, was vintage Kanye, inclusive of a few bad words that ought not be uttered in a public forum held at the Oval Office...

Sasse went on to first praise the “#MeToo” movement as “really important,” saying that Ford “needed to be heard,” but he said that the investigation and lack of corroboration from 4 alleged witnesses led him to vote to confirm Kavanaugh. Behar tried to argue with Sasse claiming the people named simply “didn’t remember it” and were “probably drunk.”