Free Republic

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship regardless of the parents’ immigration status. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour ruled in the case brought by the states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon, which argue the 14th Amendment and Supreme Court case law have cemented birthright citizenship.

A federal judge in Seattle blocked, temporarily, President Donald Trump’s attempt to rescind birthright citizenship — the idea spelled out in the Constitution that every person born in the United States is an American citizen. Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour on Thursday was blistering in his criticism of Trump’s action as he granted a temporary restraining order that blocks Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour, an...

Afederal appeals court in Louisiana has ordered the release of two leaders the election watchdog group True the Vote after they were detained for contempt of court late last month. A panel of three GOP-appointed judges for the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals late Sunday ordered group President Catherine Engelbrecht and one-time board member Gregg Phillips to be released, show court documents obtained Monday by Just the News. A spokesperson for True the Vote told The Epoch Times Engelbrecht and Phillips are expected to be released Monday, "when the paperwork is complete." The two leaders were sent to jail...

A U.S. federal judge on Thursday rejected Parler’s demand that Amazon.com Inc restore web hosting services for the social media platform, which Amazon had cut off following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said Parler was unlikely to prove Amazon breached its contract or violated antitrust law by suspending service on Jan. 10, and that it was “not a close call.” She also forcefully rejected the suggestion that the public interest would be served by a preliminary injunction requiring Amazon Web Services to “host the kind of abusive, violent content at...

A federal judge in Kentucky tossed Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann's massive defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post on Friday. What did the judge say? U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman said the Post was within its First Amendment rights to publish the subjective opinion of Native American Nathan Phillips, whose account of what happened on the Lincoln Monument fueled outrage against Sandmann and his classmates. "The Court accepts Sandmann's statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Philip's his intent was to calm the situation and not to impede or block anyone," Bertelsman said in...

A federal judge in Kentucky Friday threw out a defamation lawsuit filed against The Washington Post by Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann and his family over the paper's reporting of an incident between the young man and a Native American man this past January in Washington. The lawsuit, which was filed in February, sought $250 million in damages and accused the Post of practicing "a modern-day form of McCarthyism" by targeting Sandmann and "using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles ... to smear...

A federal judge in Kentucky Friday threw out a defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post by Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann and his family over the paper's reporting of an incident between the young man and a Native American man this past January in Washington.

A federal judge dismissed Friday the $25 million defamation lawsuit filed against the Washington Post by Kentucky teen Nicholas Sandmann over the newspaper’s coverage of his viral encounter with an elderly Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial. Senior U.S. District Court Judge William O. Bertelsman found that activist Nathan Phillips may have been wrong when he said he was “blocked” by the teen and not allowed to “retreat,” but that such statements represented opinion protected by the First Amendment. “And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions, for the reasons discussed in this Opinion,” said the 36-page...