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In separate pleadings, Black Knight and Intercontinental Exchange asked a federal court judge to declare the Federal Trade Commission's structure unconstitutional. The filings, both made on April 25, were in response to the FTC seeking an injunction against their merger in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco. Now, both Black Knight and Intercontinental Exchange, are seeking their own injunctive relief against the FTC. These latest pleadings make similar separation of power arguments that were included in their responses made on March 20 to the FTC's filing for an administrative hearing to quash the...

A federal court on Thursday nixed a Trump-era rule that limited state and tribal authority to block projects that could impact their waters, including pipelines. California Federal Judge William Alsup vacated the rule and sent it back to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for further proceedings. The Clinton appointee's move came after the agency asked the court to remand the issue back to the EPA amid litigation filed by states and environmental groups... ...The now-vacated rule had limited states’ authorities to block projects by giving them a strict one-year time limit to do so before the federal government could decide...

Judge Carol Bagley Amon’s opinion exposed the deceit of abortion apologists and the symbiotic relationship between them and the New York attorney general’s office.On Friday, in a rare move, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals pulled a 100-plus page opinion it had issued in March against a group of pro-life protestors. The short three-sentence order in People of the State of New York v. Griepp—in which the court, without elaboration, granted rehearing of the case, vacated its previous opinion, and reinstated the district court’s decision—tells none of the bigger story of this continuing saga: a story of complicity between the...

As expected, a federal judge who has ties to Planned Parenthood permanently blocked undercover journalist David Daleiden this week from releasing additional videos that Daleiden says show evidence of infanticide in the abortion industry. U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued the permanent injunction at the request of the National Abortion Federation (NAF) and demanded that Daleiden turn over the video footage, according to lawyers representing NAF. The order applies to about 200 hours of video footage that Daleiden and other undercover investigators with the Center for Medical Progress recorded at a NAF conference. Additionally, the judge granted NAF lawyers’ motion...

The government is exceeding its authority for trying to ban illegal immigrant child abusers, drunk drivers, and a series of other violent criminals from getting asylum in the United States, according to open borders groups challenging a Trump administration rule scheduled to take effect this month. A Clinton-appointed federal judge agrees with the leftist nonprofits and has blocked implementation of the policy issued jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to ban foreigners with serious criminal histories from being rewarded with asylum and all the taxpayer-funded perks that come with it. This includes disqualifying...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Trump Administration rule that opponents said would have harmed the bargaining rights of more than 500,000 home healthcare workers in California and several hundred thousand additional workers across the nation. San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria found that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rule changing Medicaid state payment requirements would have made it tougher for states to deduct employee benefits and union dues from workers’ paychecks... ...The agency had said it was required to make the change because the old system was barred by federal...

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just got to the official end of the line with her efforts to divert $16 million in public school COVID-relief funding to private schools. U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California James Donato signed a permanent injunction–made public Monday–that will formally end litigation begun last summer against the Department of Education (DOE). In July, Judge Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he called DeVos’s justification of the DOE’s pro-private school policy “interpretive jiggery-pokery in the extreme.” The Congressional CARES Act earmarked approximately $16 billion to help elementary...

A federal court in California on Thursday ruled against President Trump's order to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count for apportioning congressional seats, dealing the administration its second court loss over the July executive memorandum. A panel of three judges for the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California ruled that the memo was unconstitutional and violated laws governing the census. "The policy which the Presidential Memorandum attempts to enact has already been rejected by the Constitution, the applicable statutes, and 230 years of history," the panel wrote in a 90-page decision. The order forbids the Commerce...

-The Supreme Court on Tuesday paved the way for the Trump administration to end field operations for the 2020 census, blocking a lower court ruling that had prolonged the count. -As is usual for emergency situations, the ruling came in an unsigned order. -Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

The Trump administration can end counting for the 2020 census after the Supreme Court approved a request for now to suspend a lower court order that extended the count's schedule. The high court's ruling, following an emergency request the Justice Department made last week, is the latest turn in a roller coaster of a legal fight over the timeline for the count... Justice Department attorneys say the Census Bureau is under pressure to meet a legal deadline of Dec. 31 for reporting to the president the first set of census results — the latest state population counts that determine each...

Bloomberg link only: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-13/supreme-court-lets-trump-administration-end-census-count-early?srnd=premium

On Monday, Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that denying incarcerated prisoners stimulus checks is unlawful, paving he way for prisoners to receive $1,200 checks in the near future, pending appeal.

From Wikipedia, Government image Public Domain, cropped and scaled by Dean Weingarten  On 29 September, 2020, the State of California, the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and others, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California. The lawsuit is an attempt to force the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to change current federal regulations so as to render illegal much of the current manufacture of firearms by individuals for personal use. The Court is in the Ninth Circuit. It is a fools errand. Practical experience, in numerous countries around the...

The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to act on a Trump administration request to reinstate a rule mandating that abortion-inducing drugs be taken in the presence of a doctor Instead, the justices returned the case to a federal trial court in Maryland and gave the judge there 40 days to rule on the administration's request. The administration is expected to ask the judge to either lift or narrow an order he entered in July that suspended a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule requiring women to take abortion pill in the presence of a doctor. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang,...

A federal judge says the IRS can't keep withholding coronavirus relief payments from incarcerated people, potentially clearing the way for at least 80,000 checks totaling more than $100 million to be sent to people behind bars across the United States. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton late last month gives the IRS until Oct. 24 to reconsider the payments for those who were denied or had their money intercepted solely because of their incarceration.

A federal judge has stopped the 2020 census from finishing at the end of September and ordered the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident to continue for another month through the end of October, saying a shortened schedule likely would produce inaccurate results. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California made her ruling late Thursday, two days after hearing arguments from attorneys for the Census Bureau, and attorneys for civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the Census Bureau in an effort to halt the 2020 census from stopping at the end of the month. Attorneys for...

“Nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program,” President Reagan once said. That adage certainly applies to the Temporary Protected Status program. TPS was intended to give only short-term permission for aliens to be in the U.S., but that permission has often gone on seemingly without end. Fortunately, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, has just dissolved an injunction that prevented the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from ending TPS for illegal aliens from Sudan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti who have been in the U.S. for decades. As Judge Consuelo Callahan...

U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler blocked an order by the Trump administration on Sunday that would have banned Chinese-owned messaging application WeChat from the Google and Apple app stores. Judge Beeler said that the order presents First Amendment concerns for users of the platform. According to a report by CNBC, a California judge blocked an order by the Trump administration that would have effectively blocked the WeChat messaging application from popular mobile app stores. Some analysts feared that the China-based applications posed information security concerns for American users. The group of plaintiffs that filed a lawsuit believe that the order...

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Twitter to reveal who was behind the account that allegedly spread the conspiracy about the death of slain Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich. U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu in Oakland, Calif., ordered that Twitter must turn over information about the account @whyspertech. That account allegedly forged FBI documents falsely linking Rich’s killing to the Wikileaks hack of Democratic emails and provided them to Fox News. NPR first reported on the order. Twitter has sought to keep the identity of the user secret, arguing that disclosing that information would violate the First Amendment....