Free Republic

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has declared she is “cancer free,” beating the disease for the fourth time after undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer in the summer. The 86-year-old justice, one of the oldest to serve on the Supreme Court, offered the health update to CNN in an interview in her chambers Tuesday evening. “I’m cancer free. That’s good,” Ginsburg said, with CNN reporting that she was “sounding energized and speaking animatedly.”

The Trump administration's plan to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census questionnaire sent to every U.S. household was thwarted by a June 2019 Supreme Court ruling issued just days before a printing deadline. Just two weeks later, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to allow the Commerce Department on behalf of the Census Bureau to obtain federal agency data on immigration to generate data on the size of the immigrant population, including details on documentation and legal status from the 2020 census responses. On Dec. 27, the Department of Homeland Security publicly released a privacy impact assessment...

Washington, D.C. – An amicus brief was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday by Life Legal Defense Foundation and Liberty Counsel on behalf of Operation Rescue in June Medical Services LLC v. Gee, a case reviewing the Louisiana state law that requires doctors performing abortions to have admission privileges at a state-authorized hospital within 30 miles of the abortion center. The brief features several examples from Operation Rescue’s own investigations that reveal that states, including Louisiana, often do not take adequate measures to discipline dangerous abortionists who have multiple documented cases of serious patient injuries. Once such example was...

Ahead of a Supreme Court hearing, more than 200 members of Congress have signed on to support Louisiana’s abortion regulations, and have asked the Court to address Roe’s “unworkable” finding of a “right to abortion.” 39 senators and 168 members of the House representing 38 states signed on to an amicus brief filed on Thursday by Americans United for Life, in the case of Gee v. June Medical Services, LLC. The brief argues that Louisiana’s safety regulations on abortion clinics are constitutional. In the brief, the lawmakers “strongly urge the Court to uphold the decision” that kept in place Louisiana’s...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court bench handed down a ruling Thursday approving the death penalty for people who comment on articles without reading them. In the highly publicized case, State of Texas v. Wilbur, state authorities had found internet user Edward Wilbur guilty of posting a comment on a story linked on his Facebook page, a news story Wilbur “had clearly never read.” While most of those convicted under Texas’ recent state law banning commenting on news stories or opinion pieces without reading them get off with a few months of community service or a stiff...

In a departure from the Democratic Party candidate preoccupation of offering up ever bigger banquets of free stuff to voters, Joe Biden has said something that sticks out. He'd offer a Supreme Court spot to former President Barack Obama, "if he'd take it." Here's a report from the Epoch Times: Former Vice President Joe Biden said that he would nominate former President Barack Obama to the Supreme Court if he won the presidency, according to several reports. “Biden asked here in Washington, Iowa, if he would ever nominate former President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court. ‘If he’d take...

Donald Trump redefined the American political order with his stunning defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a polarizing victory and he’s now under a highly disputed partisan impeachment. . . . Trump has passed broad tax cuts, began a dramatic rollback of regulations and appointed dozens of constitutionalist judges. Despite predictions the stock market would crash, the economy has boomed. He brought North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table — after dire warnings he was provoking a war. He forced the renegotiation of trade relations with Mexico and Canada, and launched a trade war with China...

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...