Free Republic

dates for four people, including the only woman in the state on death row. Christa Pike received the death sentence at age 18 for the 1995 torture slaying of Colleen Slemmer, who was a fellow Knoxville Job Corps student. Slemmer, 18, was stabbed and beaten by Pike and Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend at the time, on the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural campus. The court on Tuesday also set execution dates for Tony Carruthers, Gary Sutton and Anthony Hines. Carruthers was convicted in 1996 of robbing and killing Marcellos Anderson, 21, Frederick Tucker, 17, and Anderson’s mother, Delois Anderson, 43, in...

This ruling is part of a series of cases in which the Court is scaling back Congress's efforts to control the presidency in the wake of Watergate. An entire structural edifice of government was created to constrain the executive. And the Roberts Court is now dismantling those structures. I was not alive at the time, but I imagine that Watergate felt something like the resistance to the Trump Presidency. I agree with that Trump is completing Nixon’s aborted second term “by attempting to gain control of the executive branch and tame the Administrative State.” But unlike Nixon, Trump is supported...

Colombia, which is America's strongest ally, has always had the most level-headed voters in the region. They've had two conservative parties, sometimes at once, and voters there have always rejected the crazy left, which in their case, is a Castro-grade revolutionary crazy grade of left, with Bill Ayers-types on steroids. They did, after all, fight a 60-year war against Marxist narcoterrorists, with only a few university wokesters defending them. So it was shocking news that on Sunday, Colombians went and elected just about the worst leftist of this stripe, a former M-19 narcoguerrilla named Gustavo Petro, president, turning one of...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got in a huff with a reporter while insisting Thursday that Supreme Court justices have adequate protection — even after a serious bid to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his Maryland home was foiled just a day earlier. As Pelosi left her weekly press conference, she stopped to address a reporter who shouted: “You said the justices are protected, but there was an attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life.” “And he’s protected,” Pelosi snapped back. “He’s protected. The justices are protected.” Congressional Republicans have urged the House to approve a Senate-passed bill that would give the nation’s...

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Trump to remove a Federal Trade Commission commissioner and agreed to resolve long-standing constitutional questions about White House authority over independent agencies. In an unsigned emergency order, the justices said they would permit the dismissal of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter while the case proceeds. They also agreed to hear arguments in December, signaling that the Court is prepared to revisit—and possibly overturn—a 1935 ruling that limited presidential authority over the FTC and similar commissions. Trump had removed Ms. Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner, earlier this year, contending that the statutory protections...

The high court will also hear arguments about overturning a 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to create independent agencies.The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire the sole remaining Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission, the latest victory in his aggressive push to exert greater control over the federal bureaucracy. The justices overturned a lower-court injunction that reinstated Rebecca Slaughter to her position with the agency that oversees antitrust and consumer protection issues while litigation over her removal works its way through the courts. The ruling — while provisional — is significant because the...

Activists upset with Sen. Susan Collins’s vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh say they will inflict economic damage on the Republican senator's home state by boycotting Maine products and tourism. “Dear Susan Collins – I really struggled with this but my tourist $ just voted against ever visiting Maine while you remain in office,” actor and comedian John Fugelsang said Friday in a tweet that has since been deleted, according to the Portland Press Herald. The tweet garnered hundreds of comments saying they would join Fugelsang in the boycott, with one person canceling a $2,200 reservation at Point...

As SCOTUSblog readers are likely aware, tariffs are taxes charged on goods bought from other countries. In February, President Donald Trump imposed dozens of new tariffs. Now the Supreme Court will decide whether he had the legal authority to do so. The stakes in the litigation are enormous. Tariffs are a crucial part of Trump’s agenda, with huge consequences in the United States and throughout the world. Indeed, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit struck down most of the tariffs, Trump said that their invalidation “would be a total disaster for the Country” and “would literally...

In an investigative report that rocked the legal community, NBC News landed interviews with a dozen federal judges about the Supreme Court’s record of pausing lower court rulings against Donald Trump without explanation on an emergency basis. At least 10 judges denounced the practice, with some warning that the Supreme Court’s unexplained rulings risked validating Trump’s attacks against judges that have sparked a wave of threats from his supporters. One judge expressed concerns that "somebody is going to die” absent efforts to address the situation.

It must have been a frustrating interview for Associated Press Supreme Court and legal affairs reporter Mark Sherman. He was interviewing Justice Amy Coney Barrett about her new book and he could barely get a word out of her on the subject uppermost in his mind: President Donald Trump.This frustration was reflected in the title of his AP story on Monday, "In new memoir, Supreme Court Justice Barrett reflects on historic cases, is largely silent on Trump."Despite the fact that Trump was rarely mentioned in her book, Sherman tried to get Barrett to comment on the one who appears to...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield (D) stated that if President Donald Trump is successful in his legal battle to use emergency powers to implement tariffs, then when a Democrat becomes president, “we’re going to have an emergency on climate change and maybe we’ll start putting tariffs on oil.” Rayfield said, “I wish that we could sit here and have a real, candid conversation with Republicans who support this and say, listen, we’re going to get a Democratic president in here soon, and what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And...

The iconic denim brand Levi Strauss has warned that growing international backlash against President Donald Trump could negatively affect its sales and those of other U.S. companies. In a recent filing with the United Kingdom's national business registry, the California-based company noted the risk of "rising anti-Americanism as a consequence of the Trump tariffs and governmental policies." Levi's warned that this could increasingly push consumers in the U.K. away from American goods and toward non-American alternatives.

A group of anonymous federal judges is criticizing the Supreme Court for overturning lower court rulings and siding with President Donald Trump's administration with little to no explanation, NBC News reported Thursday.

After five brutal months of unrestricted lawfare against the Trump Administration, it looks like the Supreme Court will finally weigh-in on tariffs. On August 29, 2025, a Federal Circuit Court of Appeal decided that President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs were illegal. Specifically, the Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs of unlimited duration, on all goods from all countries. This is because tariffs are not mentioned in the Statute, and even if they were, the tariffs are not credibly related to a national emergency. The Trump Administration is appealing. Solicitor General...

NBC News reported shocking interviews with a dozen federal court judges who hid behind anonymity to attack the Supreme Court for overturning their anti-Trump decisions, accusing the conservative dominated Supreme Court of undermining the judiciary. This is the latest in an ongoing battle this year between anti-Trump Resistance judges on the federal bench using their rulings to enact their preferred policies and the Supreme Court trying to rein them in under constitutional order. With Republicans holding the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrat activists are using their allies on the federal bench to obstruct and delay actions by...

The Republican National Committee was dealt a blow by a unanimous decision of the Third Circuit Appeals Court in the RNC's effort to discard undated and misdated ballots in Pennsylvania. The three-judge panel said in the 55-page ruling that the affected ballots needed to be counted and failing to do so was unconstitutional. Pennsylvania voters are required to write the date on the envelope for their mail-in ballots. "The date requirement imposes a burden on Pennsylvanians' constitutional right to vote," the court ruling reads. "And it culminates in county election boards discarding thousands of ballots each time an election is...

In roughly three years, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has established herself as one of the most recognized members of the Supreme Court — and not in a good way. Despite being the most junior justice on the high court, Jackson has regularly gone out of her way to thumb her nose at her colleagues for upholding America’s constitutional framework. Whether it be through public comments or poorly written opinions, the Biden appointee has shown little respect for the longstanding traditions and collegiality that have defined SCOTUS for generations.

Parents of an 11-year-old girl have asked the Supreme Court to hear their complaint against a Massachusetts school district that secretly transitioned her to (sexual deviancy) — even having her work with a gender-transitioning nonprofit behind their backs. Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri say the Ludlow School Committee, a Massachusetts public school system, socially transitioned their daughter against their wishes. School officials at Baird Middle School in Ludlow allowed her to transition to a (censored) identity, use boys’ facilities, go by a male name and use nonbinary pronouns, the parents’ complaint states. “For more than a century, this Court has...

Today, law enforcement officials shared findings to date of the investigation into the shooting that occurred at the Eugene Simpson Stadium Park on Wednesday, June 14, 2017. Analysis of Hodgkinson’s laptop computers show online activity the night before the shooting; however, no Internet searches were discovered the morning of the shooting. The Internet searches Hodgkinson performed the night before the shooting included a Google map search from Alexandria to his home in Belleville and a Google search of the “2017 Republican Convention.” While online, he also accessed a financial account and one of his Facebook accounts, where he visited a...

The Supreme Court just handed Trump the nuclear key: the authority to fire entrenched Deep State agents embedded across federal agencies. For the first time in 90 years, the President can dismantle the bureaucratic dictatorship that’s hijacked our Republic. FOR 90 YEARS, THE PRESIDENCY WAS A PRISON.. Since 1935, unelected operatives hid inside “independent” agencies like the FTC, SEC, and CPSC. These ideological soldiers wrote regulations like laws. Enforced them like tyrants. And they couldn’t be fired—not even by the President. Until now. THE COURT SWINGS THE HAMMER – TRUMP TAKES THE SWORD.. In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court...