Free Republic

One question before the Supreme Court this term was a big one: As technology evolves, how do our laws governing commerce evolve with it? The answer, issued in the ruling held in a 5-4 decision on Thursday, is a bad one for taxpayers. Many proponents of an online sales tax have argued that we must completely revisit what we know about interstate commerce, and create illusory tax regimes to contemplate a brave new order of online transactions. In reality, none of this is true. For one, while it has been 26 years since the Supreme Court visited the issue in...

What is Justice Elena Kagan doing? So far this term, the liberal justice has crossed ideological lines at least three times to join the Supreme Court’s conservatives. Most recently, on Thursday, Kagan authored the majority opinion in Lucia v. SEC, a huge case that threatens to erode the political independence of multiple federal agencies. Tearing down the “administrative state” is supposed to be Justice Neil Gorsuch’s pet project. In Lucia, though, it was Kagan who took the lead in undermining the civil service, authoring an opinion that prompted a sharp dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who accused her colleague of...

"I would prefer not to." That was the invariable reply of the title character of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener," when asked by his employer to perform a task. It's also a phrase you might use to describe the opinion of the Supreme Court in its latest redistricting -- or gerrymandering -- case, Gill v. Whitford. This was expected to be a closely divided case and one that many observers hoped would establish a clear legal standard to overturn partisan gerrymanders. But all nine justices concurred in the central point of Chief Justice Roberts' opinion, that the plaintiffs...

The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of digital privacy. In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices decided that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for trials. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Sixth Circuit court's decision. Carpenter v. United States is the first case about phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov. 29. The dispute dates back to a 2011 robbery in...

Cell phones perform their wide and growing variety of functions by continuously connecting to a set of radio antennas called “cell sites.” Each time a phone connects to a cell site, it generates a time-stamped record known as cell-site location information (CSLI). Wireless carriers collect and store this information for their own business purposes. Here, after the FBI identified the cell phone numbers of several robbery suspects, prosecutors were granted court orders to obtain the suspects’ cell phone records under the Stored Communications Act. Wireless carriers produced CSLI for petitioner Timothy Carpenter’s phone, and the Government was able to obtain...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court gave presidents more control over key jobs in federal agencies on Thursday, ruling that the way the Securities and Exchange Commission selected in-house judges who enforce investor protection laws violated the U.S. Constitution. The justices agreed with President Donald Trump’s administration that the SEC, in having low-level staff install administrative law judges, infringed upon powers given to the president in the U.S. Constitution’s “appointments clause” regarding the filling of certain federal posts. The ruling could reverberate through the federal government, which has nearly 2,000 administrative law judges who....

Ray Lucia, who gives investment advice in a nationally syndicated radio program, today (June 21) won his case at the Supreme Court. The high court split 7 to 2 in Lucia’s favor. It was not a surprise, because of the court’s current conservative bent. An administrative law judge had banned Lucia from the securities industry in 2013 on the grounds that his Buckets of Money investment strategy used false information. In September of 2015, the full commission upheld the administrative law judge’s ban.

Online shoppers could find costs going up after the Supreme Court did away Thursday with a decades-old precedent limiting the ability of states to collect sales tax on certain out-of-state Internet purchases. The 5-4 ruling called the current rules “unsound and incorrect.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says states can force online shoppers to pay sales tax. The 5-4 ruling Thursday is a win for states, who said they were losing out on billions of dollars annually under two decades-old Supreme Court decisions that impacted online sales tax collection. The high court ruled Thursday to overturn those decisions. snip “Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States. These critiques underscore that the physical presence rule, both as first formulated and as applied today, is an incorrect interpretation of...

The Supreme Court’s 9-0 nondecision in Gill v. Whitford was more than a little anticlimactic. The Court had been asked to decide if extreme partisan gerrymandering can be challenged in federal court and if so, what standard should apply. (Extreme partisan gerrymandering allows a party to maintain disproportionate control of a state’s legislature or congressional delegation even if the majority of the state’s voters cast their ballots for candidates of the other party.) The Court decided neither question, ruling unanimously that the plaintiffs — Democrats in Wisconsin challenging the legislative map Republicans put in place after the 2010 census —...

The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a decision on when partisan gerrymandering goes too far, ruling against the challengers of a Republican-drawn map in Wisconsin and a Democratic redistricting in Maryland. The decisions in the separate cases once again puts off a decision on when courts can find that partisan efforts to keep parties in power goes so far as to be unconstitutional. It was a technical resolution of what has seemed to hold the promise of being a landmark decision about whether extreme efforts to give one party advantage over another were unconstitutional. While the court routinely polices the...

The Supreme Court has a big decision left to make as it heads into its final weeks of the term: whether to strike down a voter map for the first time as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. Experts agree it would be a game changer if the court is able to find a workable test to assess when legislators have gone too far in drawing congressional maps that give their party an edge. The court has longed shied away from policing congressional maps without a clear way to measure how much political bias in redistricting is too much. Court watchers say...

Inspector General Destroys DOJ and FBI Credibility Hearing Set on Motion to Compel Email Testimony from Hillary Clinton Major Judicial Watch Victory! The Supreme Court Decides for Clean Elections in Ohio DOJ Must Provide More Details on Podesta-Clinton Communications Inspector General Destroys DOJ and FBI Credibility The Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s scandalous email practices is out, and as I predicted, it has destroyed the credibility of the Department of Justice and the FBI. It confirms what we have investigated and revealed for nearly two years. The Obama DOJ/FBI investigation of Clinton...

I heard the Lord speak, “I have extended an olive branch of peace to the United States of America and will extend Donald Trump’s presidency into a second term by the power of my right hand. What I have done in the White House will happen with every branch of Government in the United States for I will pull out corruption and plant trees of righteousness that will bear much fruit. Even now the ax is laid to the root of these corrupt trees. Every tree which does not bear good fruit will be cut down, pulled out and thrown...

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Minnesota law banning voters from wearing political apparel to the polls, saying it was too draconian in stifling Americans’ First Amendment rights. The 7-2 decision said it may be possible for states to restrict stridently political T-shirts and buttons, but the justices said Minnesota didn’t justify why its law needed to be so broad.

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s "use it or lose it" practice of cleaning up its voter rolls. In a 5-4 decision, the court’s majority said the practice, known as the “supplemental process,” does not violate the National Voter Registration Act, which bar states from removing the names of people from the voter rolls for failing to vote. The court's five conservative justices voted in the majority, with the court's four liberals dissenting. Under the supplemental process, voters who have not voted in two years are flagged and sent a confirmation notice. Voters who then fail to respond to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is allowing Ohio to clean up its voting rolls by targeting people who haven’t cast ballots in a while. The justices rejected, by a 5-4 vote Monday, arguments that the practice violates a federal law intended to increase the ranks of registered voters. A handful of other states also use voters’ inactivity to trigger a process that could lead to their removal from the voting rolls. Justice Samuel Alito said for the court that Ohio is complying with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. He was joined by his four conservative colleagues. The four...

Ohio’s process for deleting people it deems inactive from its voting rolls is legal, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, in a decision that could boost the movement to clean up voting rolls across the country. The court, in the 5-4 ruling, also seemed to side with those who say the potential for voting fraud exists, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. citing statistics that 2.75 million people are registered to vote in more than one state, and some 24 million names on voting lists are inaccurate.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this Monday on my case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, helped determine that people of faith remain free to pursue our chosen vocations. . . . after decades of developing my craft, my home state took it away from me. My case started in 2012 when I was asked to design a wedding cake celebrating a same-sex marriage. I politely declined that request because of my religious beliefs about marriage. But I told the customers that I would sell them anything else in my shop, or create a cake for them for a different...

It doesn't seem that long ago when I sat down with CBS's "Face the Nation" and told a very surprised Bob Schieffer about the battle for religious freedom that was raging. Like many people, he seemed astonished to hear that any American - let alone the wedding industry - would be punished for their mainstream views on marriage. "I must say this is under my radar. I haven't…I haven't heard this." Today, almost three full years into Obergefell, nearly everyone has heard their stories. And this morning [June 4th], in the same court that created the mess of same-sex marriage,...