Free Republic

While campaigning in Iowa, Joe Biden was asked if he would consider nominating Barack Obama to the Supreme Court. I guess it was a serious question, and Joe Biden actually responded: "if he'd take it." Wall Street Journal reporter Ken Thomas was the first to report this exchange on Twitter. Ken Thomas Biden asked here in Washington, Iowa, if he would ever nominate former President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court. “If he’d take it, yes,” Biden says. 110 1:14 PM - Dec 28, 2019 Biden has never missed an opportunity to namedrop Barack Obama and remind voters he...

Presidential historian Doug Wead joined Fox News‘ Molly Line on Thursday morning to discuss the upcoming impeachment trial. (Video below) Line first asked Wead for his take on reports that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is “disturbed” over Mitch McConnell’s approach to the trial, which frankly, I see as a non-story. Line asked specifically if Wead thought Murkowski’s position could throw a monkey wrench into McConnell’s plan for a quick trial. The very amiable Wead replied, “I think this is Sen. Murkowski signaling who she is. She’s an establishment Republican…but I don’t think it’s going anywhere and it’s certainly not outrageous...

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska expressed unease in an interview broadcast on Tuesday with the Senate majority leader’s vow of “total coordination” with the White House on impeachment proceedings against President Trump, a potentially significant crack in Republican unity. Ms. Murkowski, a moderate with an independent streak, told Anchorage’s NBC affiliate KTUU she opposed “being hand in glove with the defense” and voiced other concerns as the Senate prepares to hold a trial over the two articles of impeachment that the House approved earlier this month. Ms. Murkowski’s views could prove important. She rarely speaks publicly against Republican leadership, but...

After being a reliable ally to President TrumpÂ’s judicial nominees in 2017 and 2018, Susan Collins is suddenly opposing some of TrumpÂ’s court picks Some believe Collins may be trying to win some over some goodwill from Democrats in what may be a difficult reelection cycle. Per a PPP poll in October, Collins is unpopular, with only 35% of voters approving of the job sheÂ’s doing to 50% who disapprove. She trails a generic Democrat for reelection 44-41. That represents a big drop for Collins compared to a poll we did last September when she led a generic Democrat by...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or ObamaCare, includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall . . . ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, the individual mandate, after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.” As of January, thanks to a tax reform bill that Congress enacted in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero....

Vox.com noted last week: There’s no completely objective way to measure legal ability, but a common metric used by legal employers to identify the most gifted lawyers is whether those lawyers secured a federal clerkship, including the most prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court. Approximately 40 percent of Trump’s appellate nominees clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and about 80 percent clerked on a federal court of appeals. That compares to less than a quarter of Obama’s nominees who clerked on the Supreme Court, and less than half with a federal appellate clerkship. In other words, based solely on objective...

Subtitle: Gerrymandering and School Busing – No Justiciable Standard Few take more delight in hammering Scotus than your’s truly. Being supposedly apolitical, it is often anything but a neutral expositor of the law and regularly wanders into societal and political controversies in which it has no legitimate authority. After decades of watching the Supremes divine political matters in which they substituted their conclusions for those of state legislators, I was astonished with their June 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause. Finally, after decades, Scotus threw up its hands and decided to stand aside from the always messy post-census state...

Feldman isn’t trying to help the President. He knows the Senate can acquit immediately without waiting for Speaker Pelosi to transfer articles of impeachment, or for House impeachment managers to be appointed. This is because the Supreme Court has ruled – in the Nixon case – that how the Senate goes about acquitting or convicting any impeached person is non-justiciable, in that the Senate’s power is plenary and the Supreme Court may not even review it. This means that if the Senate acquits Trump immediately – without a trial – the Supreme Court has no authority, whatsoever, to review the...

Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas recently sparred over Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, a case involving the disposition of fetal remains by abortion providers. The case addresses two provisions of an Indiana law. The first provision prohibits abortion providers from treating the bodies of aborted children as “infectious waste” and incinerating them alongside used needles and other potentially dangerous items. The second provision made it illegal for an abortion provider to perform an abortion in Indiana when the provider knows that the mother is seeking the abortion “solely because of the child’s race,...

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Nixon v. United States (1993): "the three very specific requirements that the Constitution does impose on the Senate when trying impeachments [are]: The Members must be under oath, a two-thirds vote is required to convict, and the Chief Justice presides when the President is tried. These limitations are quite precise, and their nature suggests that the Framers did not intend to impose additional limitations on the form of the Senate proceedings" (emphasis added) Ergo, if Mad Nan chooses not to 'formally deliver' the articles of impeachment and/or to not send 'managers' to present...

Washington D.C., Dec 18, 2019 / 06:00 pm (CNA).- The U.S. Supreme Court will decide two religious freedom cases concerning Catholic schools during its upcoming term, the court announced on Wednesday, Dec. 18. The court consolidated the cases Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James Catholic School v. Biel, and will consider them together. Both lawsuits concern teachers at Catholic schools who did not have their contracts renewed, apparently after poor performance. In one case, a teacher sued, claiming age discrimination, and in the other, sued claiming that she was discriminated against rights established by the Americans...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke with the BBC this week about the upcoming impeachment trial in the US Senate. During her questioning Justice Ginsburg suggested that US Senators could be disqualified from the proceedings if they are not impartial.

While many Americans focus on upcoming holiday celebrations, some pro-life advocates have been watching developments on a Supreme Court case — and the counternarrative female legislator behind the law being challenged at the high court. In June Medical Services v. Gee, the abortion industry contested a patient protection law that specifies health and safety regulations for medical providers. In June 2014, the Louisiana state legislature passed the law, Act 620, putting abortion doctors under the same regulations as all other outpatient doctors by requiring that any “physician performing or inducing an abortion shall have active admitting privileges at a hospital...

Monday on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin gave credit to his neighbor for making a very good point about the impeachment effort against President Donald Trump. Levin said his neighbor believes that the Democrats want to impeach Trump to have an excuse not to let him appoint another justice to the Supreme Court — whether he wins re-election or not. “I’ll bet he’s right. I’ll bet that’s part of the calculation,” Levin said. “That they want to claim that they’ve crippled this lawless president, that the Republicans wouldn’t remove him from office, and there is no way that the...

States as states do need representation in the federal government. Under the Constitution, they have far too much. The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court spurred a lively discussion about institutional design. After the vote, some noted that the 50 senators who voted to confirm represent about 45 percent of the population. A number of astute constitutional historians quickly spoke up to point out that of course that happens, because the Senate represents states and not people. If you want to see the people represented, look to the House. But of course, the fact that the Constitution does...

It’s practically a foregone conclusion that everyone uses Google in one way or another. Now the company’s reach has expanded even further, acquiring Fitbit in December for a whopping $2.1 billion. Google products are in our homes, its software is on our phones, and its search engine answers over three billion queries per day. Even the word “google” itself has become a fixture in the American lexicon. The tech giant has become so ubiquitous, its influence so massive, that it’s safe to say Google’s effect on public discourse is unparalleled in modern society. Once a mere search engine, the tech...

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shut down President Donald Trump's attempts to discredit the ongoing impeachment proceedings against him by saying "the president is not a lawyer" at an event in New York City, CNN reports. Ginsburg made the remarks at a function where she was awarded the Berggruen Institute Prize for Philosophy and Culture.

Schumer did that again today with his demand for a “fair” trial, meaning to Schumer that Democrats get to reopen the investigation of Trump during the trial, including calling witnesses who did not testify, and doing the job the House Democrats failed to do. A do-over. That’s not usually the way trials work — the pleading of claims and discovery takes place before the trial. House Democrats chose not to do that for key witnesses they wanted — including John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney — because forcing them to testify in the House would have meant court litigation. Democrats were...

The U.S. Supreme Court this week declined to hear an appeal by Lehigh County prosecutors, leaving in place a state court ruling that police can’t detain a person merely for carrying a gun. The high court on Monday rejected a request by the Lehigh County District Attorney’s Office to review a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision throwing out its case against a man stopped by Allentown police after a camera operator spotted him tucking a revolver in his waistband outside a gas station. Michael J. Hicks, who was licensed to carry the gun, wasn’t charged with a weapons offense, but he...

The outcome is a significant victory for homeless activists and a setback for city officials in California and other western states who argued the appeals court ruling undercut their authority to regulate encampments on the sidewalks. Lawyers for the homeless had argued it was cruel and wrong to punish people who have nowhere else to sleep at night. They won a major victory last year when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prosecuting people for sleeping on the sidewalks violated the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.