Free Republic

A New Mexico judge on Friday ruled that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's stay-at-home order does not violate an Albuquerque church's First Amendment rights. The church, First Legacy, sued after Lujan Grisham added churches to the state's list of nonessential activities in an emergency health order on the day before Easter, meaning that no more than five people can gather at a service. In the church's filing, it alleged that the order violated the First Amendment because the church needs more than five people to put on a service. First Legacy asked for a temporary restraining order on Lujan Grisham's executive...

The state of Texas is not going to just roll over and allow a federal judge to authorize Texas abortion clinics to keep killing babies in abortions instead of obeying the governor’s order to halt non-essential medical procedures. The order helps support hospitals and medical clinics that need additional medical gear and supplies to treat patients with the coronavirus. As LifeNews.com reported yesterday, a federal judge in Texas with a long history of siding with abortion advocates ruled today that Texas abortion centers can defy the governor’s order to stop non-essential medical procedures instead of helping coronavirus patients by conserving...

Texas will again be allowed to implement its temporary ban on abortion, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday afternoon. Per the order, any abortion "not medically necessary to preserve the life or health" of the patient must be halted as part of the state's directive suspending "non-essential" medical procedures amid the coronavirus pandemic. The ban was briefly lifted on Monday evening when a lower court ruled the suspension of abortion services was unconstitutional and in violation of Supreme Court precedent, including Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. "I thank the court for their immediate...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A federal appeals court in Cincinnati, for now, has declined to get involved with a lawsuit over how abortion providers in Ohio can continue to provide their services amid a public-health order restricting non-essential surgeries during the coronavirus pandemic. A three-judge panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday issued an order dismissing Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s appeal of a ruling from Senior U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett issued last week. The ruling temporarily blocked Ohio officials from using Health Director Dr. Amy Acton’s health order to completely bar women from access to...

How do you know if killing a baby in an abortion is “essential?” If the abortion clinic says so. That’s akin to letting a rapist determine if his sexual assault truly constitutes rape, but it’s the decision U.S. District Court Judge Michael Barrett just issued in the dispute between the state of Ohio and abortion businesses over whether abortions are medically essential procedures. Ohio is one of several states that included elective abortions in their bans on non-essential medical procedures during the global health crisis. The orders are meant to save lives by conserving medical resources and preventing further spread...

Ohio will suffer more death and destruction after a judge allowed abortion facilities in the state to continue elective abortions during the coronavirus pandemic. Even though there is nothing essential about aborting an unborn baby, Ohio District Court Judge Michael Barrett ruled late Monday that closing abortion facilities would cause “irreparable harm” to women, according to National Review. Ohio is one of several states that included elective abortions in their bans on non-essential medical procedures during the global health crisis. The orders are meant to save lives by conserving medical resources and preventing further spread of the virus. However, Planned...

A federal judge has blocked Ohio’s ban on abortion during the coronavirus pandemic just hours after Planned Parenthood, Preterm Cleveland, and other abortion facilities made the request. Senior U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett temporarily blocked the ban for 14 days, but he also said he may issue a preliminary injunction to allow abortions to continue while the abortion facilities prepare their legal fight. Earlier this month, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sent letters to abortion facilities ordering them to stop committing “non-essential and elective” surgical abortions. The letters were sent after a request was made by the Ohio Department of...

Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion corporation, will be allowed to continue committing abortions in Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic. CBS News reporter Kate Smith broke the news on Twitter, announcing that a federal judge granted Planned Parenthood and the Center of Reproductive Rights a temporary restraining order against Attorney General Ken Paxton’s order for all abortions to be banned. Calling abortions non-essential services during the coronavirus pandemic, any abortion that was considered not medically necessary for the life or health of the mother was not allowed, with abortionists who violated the order facing a $1,000 fine or 180 days...

AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM/CBS NEWS) – A federal judge halted Texas’s temporary ban on abortion on Monday afternoon, allowing the procedure to resume despite the state’s suspension of “non-essential” procedures, which explicitly included pregnancy termination. Judge Lee Yeakel wrote in the nine-page court filing that Texas’s directive to ban the procedure would cause patients to “suffer serious and irreparable harm.”

A judge has gutted the Trump administration’s minimal curbs on the many Indian-run companies that import Indian college graduates to take the jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.“A recent federal policy for employers that place H-1B skilled guestworkers at third-party worksites can’t be enforced,” according to a March 11 report in Bloomberg Law. Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Tuesday that a February policy memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services didn’t go through proper rulemaking procedure, and that the agency’s interpretation of the “employer-employee relationship” requirement is inconsistent with its...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a ruling that allows House Democrats to view secret grand jury information from Robert Mueller’s Russia probe that had been redacted from his report. The court’s 2-1 decision agreed with a lower court that the House Judiciary Committee can obtain the information for impeachment investigations of President Trump under an exception for “judicial proceedings,” per the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. ~snip~ The DOJ, opposing the House Democrats, argued that because Trump had already been impeached and acquitted by the time the court was to rule, there was no longer a...

In 2017, as President Trump took office, anti-Trump activists vented rage with pussy hats and other leftist agitprop. But the real work of the #Resistance has been carried out by holdover bureaucrats in the executive branch — and activist judges roaming far beyond their constitutional remit.SNIPJudge Reggie Walton was confronted with a straightforward Freedom of Information Act complaint, a relatively common type of litigation. In this case, the plaintiffs sought an unredacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian “collusion” released last spring.Walton seized the opportunity to excoriate the attorney general, painting a tendentious narrative that set Barr...

Judge Thomas Griffith on Thursday announced plans to retire from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, handing President Trump his third vacancy on the influential bench. Griffith is set to retire in September, just two months ahead of the 2020 election, as politics intensify the focus on Trump's conservative makeover of the federal courts. The judge, a George W. Bush appointee and 15-year veteran of the D.C. Circuit, made headlines last week when he ruled against House Democratic lawmakers who sought to enforce a subpoena against a former Trump aide. In a 2-1 opinion, Griffith ruled that...

WASHINGTON—A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Congress can have access to grand-jury materials from Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, sided with the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee, which sought access to material that was redacted from the 448-page special counsel report. as well as some of the exhibits and transcripts referenced in the report. ... TO READ THE FULL STORY

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Department of Justice to hand over to him a copy of the unredacted Mueller report and accused Attorney General William Barr of misrepresenting its findings in the days before it was submitted to Congress last year. Judge Reggie B. Walton, a federal district court judge in Washington, said that he could not reconcile Barr's public comments in April 2019 about the report with the actual findings that former special counsel Robert Mueller outlined. "The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the...

A federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector on Wednesday, telling the agency that it cannot hold migrants, including families with children, for longer than 48 hours. In his 40-page decision, U.S. District Judge David C. Bury ruled the conditions at the sector's eight stations are "presumptively punitive and violate the Constitution," and he blocked Border Patrol and parent agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection from holding people who have been processed by agents for more than 48 hours from "book-in time." "Detention may not extend into a third night under the 'no longer than...

The entire border needs a wall. Without the entire border walled, the illegal invaders can come through the unwalled areas and, once here, have the freedom of movement throughout the rest of the lower 48 states. But also the detention centers are not something that solves the problems. The Democrats and the MSM have no shame. With every passing day, we see more and more evidence of their hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and evil behavior. Remember when the liberal media shared a touching photo of the little girl Yanela Denise, crying as a U.S. Border Patrol agent patted down her mother....

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden violated secrecy agreements with the U.S. government that allow it to claim proceeds from a memoir he published earlier this year, a judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that Snowden is liable for breach of contract with the government because he published “Permanent Record,” without submitting it for a pre-publication review, in violation agreements he signed with both the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency. In the book, Snowden explains how he viewed himself as a whistleblower by revealing details about the government’s mass collection of emails,...

A judge on Thursday ordered the government to give the results of a hydrology study to the defendants in a federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over whether the building of a private border wall on private land in South Texas violates an international water treaty with Mexico. During a Thursday hearing, U.S. District Judge Randy Crane also scheduled another hearing for Dec. 19 and said he will issue a revised temporary restraining order on Friday that further limits deep digging on the private land on the riverbanks of the Rio Grande. At times, Crane appeared to...

Border wall construction continues south of Mission despite temporary restraining orders granted in both state district and federal court. Last Thursday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order enjoining Fisher Industries, the organization We Build the Wall, and Neuhaus & Sons from continuing construction of a private stretch of border wall along the banks of the Rio Grande in an area near RGV–Bentsen State Park. And just days before, on Dec. 3, state District Judge Librado “Keno” Vasquez granted a TRO against the group after the National Butterfly Center filed a separate suit in his court... Just days after...