Free Republic

After several days of bad news on the redistricting front, including a bad decision in North Carolina for the GOP-drawn map there, a big win has been delivered to Republicans. The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to halt a lower court order in Alabama that it must redraw its previously passed Congressional map.That means a 6-1 Republican to Democrat map will now go into effect in 2022, and given the makeup of the Supreme Court, there’s no reason to believe it gets struck down at any point past that.BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the liberals in...

Just days before the FDA was set to release over 12,000 documents related to the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, Pfizer asked a federal court to allow it to intervene before any information is released to the public.Unsurprisingly, the FDA wholeheartedly agreed, asking the court to allow the vaccine maker to ‘help’ curate the documents, which would also buy the agency more time to release the much anticipated, and likely damning, data. (snip) Federal officials in the FDA and DOJ also told the court that they want Pfizer’s ‘help’ with redacting the documents because of “the unprecedented speed with which the Court...

As explained in prior posts, in a lawsuit seeking all of the documents the FDA relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, a federal judge shot down the FDA’s requested rate of 500 pages per month and instead ordered the FDA to produce at the rate of 55,000 pages per month starting on March 1. Since the government has trillions of dollars of our money, it is putting it to good use by fighting to assure that the public has the least amount of transparency possible. To that end, it has now asked the Court to make the public wait...

As a rule, few things are less likely to be the source of humor than court decisions. Sometimes there are excellent puns or low-key snark, but you don’t find belly-laugh material. Usually. Last Friday, a panel of the Ninth Circuit published a decision on a complaint arising from Ventura, California, that covered both the COVID panic and the Second Amendment. During the height of the COVID panic, that county ordered firing ranges, and gun shops closed. Presumably, this is because the Wuhan virus has a particular affinity for recreational venues. Several groups and individuals sued to overturn the order as...

In one opinion published last week, 9th Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke said Ventura County, California, violated the Second Amendment when it shut down gun stores early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In another opinion the same day, VanDyke said the county's policy was perfectly consistent with the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. That second, tongue-in-cheek opinion was meant to illustrate the disrespect that the 9th Circuit and other federal appeals courts have shown for the Second Amendment since 2008, when the Supreme Court explicitly recognized that the provision guarantees an individual right to armed self-defense. The Court may finally...

@julie_kelly2 Brandon Straka, who pleaded guilty to class B misdemeanor of disorderly conduct, berated by Trump judge and sentenced to 3 months home detention, 3 years probation and $5k fine.

A Florida man pleaded guilty to federal charges of threatening to kill Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Palm Beach Gardens resident Paul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, pleaded guilty to interstate transmission of threats to injure in federal court in Ft. Pierce, the DOJ stated. He faces up to 15 years in federal prison. In March of 2019, Hoeffer called the office of the Speaker, stating that he had come a "long way" to "rattle" her head with bullets and threatened to behead her. The DOJ also stated that he had...

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. judge in Texas issued a nationwide injunction on Friday barring the federal government from enforcing President Joe Biden's requirement that federal workers without qualifying medical or religious exemptions be vaccinated for COVID-19. Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of Texas by then-President Donald Trump, ruled that opponents of Biden's vaccination mandate for federal employees were likely to succeed at trial and blocked the government from enforcing the requirement.

A federal court in Texas has issued an injunction against President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the federal workforce, pausing implementation of a requirement for more than 2 million civilian servants. … Judge Jeffrey Brown, appointed by President Trump to the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Texas, said the case was not about whether individuals should be vaccinated or even about federal power generally. “It is instead about whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of...

Just the links for now. More to follow but I wanted to get this out there. “The President’s Authority Is Not That Broad”: Trump-Appointed Judge Blocks Dear Leader Biden’s VAXX-Mandate on Federal EmployeesTrump-Appointed Judge Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate For Federal Contractors Nationwide

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release Pfizer vaccine data within approximately eight months after the agency had asked for 75 years to fully comply with an extensive public records request. President Donald Trump appointee Judge Mark Pittman ordered the agency to produce 12,000 pages of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency’s (PHMPT) request by January 31, 2022, followed by 55,000 pages every 30 days. The first round is due by March 1, 2022. Pittman wrote in part: “Open government is fundamentally an American issue”—it is neither a Republican nor a...

The Biden administration has been granted the request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by more than 20 GOP attorneys general challenging the revocation of the Keystone XL Pipeline’s permit. In his ruling, Judge Jeffrey Brown of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas ruled that because TC Energy, the pipeline company, abandoned the project, he could not determine whether Biden’s action was constitutional. TC Energy announced on June 9 that it would permanently stop construction on the pipeline and focus on other projects. Upon taking office, Biden canceled the pipeline’s federal permit by executive order on...

A federal appeals court upheld a decision to temporarily block the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors in three states.A judge in Louisville, Kentucky, issued a ruling blocking the mandate for Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee in November. And on Wednesday, the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the injunction in a 2–1 ruling.The Sixth Appeals Court majority wrote in its Wednesday order that the injunction was upheld “because the government has established none of the showings required to obtain a stay.”States are “imminently threatened in their proprietary capacities should they renew those existing contracts (thus triggering the...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to produce, at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, the documents it relied on to license the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The rate of 55,000 pages a month would mean the FDA has just over eight months to fully produce all of Pfizer’s pre-licensure safety data. That is much faster than the 500 pages-per-month rate the FDA proposed in December 2021. That rate would have effectively given the agency roughly 75 years to fully produce the data, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on the case, previously observed.

A federal district court judge granted the Biden administration’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by more than 20 Republican attorneys general challenging the Keystone XL Pipeline’s permit revocation. Judge Jeffrey Brown, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, ruled that he couldn’t determine the constitutionality of President Joe Biden’s action because TC Energy, the pipeline’s developer, had abandoned the project. On June 9, TC Energy announced its intention to permanently halt construction of the pipeline, saying it would focus on other projects. Biden canceled the pipeline’s federal permit immediately after taking office on Jan. 20...

This afternoon a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected the Biden Administration's request for a stay of a lower court injunction barring enforcement of a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for employees of federal contractors in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Judge Bush wrote for the court in Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Biden, joined by Judge Suhrenreich. Judge Cole (who recently announced his intent to take senior status upon the confirmation of his successor) dissented.Here is how Judge Bush summarizes his opinion:In 1949, Congress passed a statute called the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act ("Property...

Judge rules against Proud Boys using First Amendment defense in Jan. 6 case A federal judge emphatically rejected the claim by four members of the white nationalist Proud Boys that they were only exercising their First Amendment rights by attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said on Tuesday that the extremists are facing felony charges because they allegedly led a violent effort to overturn the presidential election not for speaking out against supposed election fraud as they claimed. “Defendants are not, as they argue, charged with anything like burning flags, wearing black armbands, or participating...

United's mandate "reflects an apathy, if not antipathy, for many of its employees' concerns and a dearth of toleration for those expressing diversity of thought," District Court Judge Mark Pittman wrote in his decision. United Airlines employees who have been granted exemptions to the company's COVID-19 vaccine mandate are allegedly being placed on indefinite unpaid leave, unable to seek employment elsewhere within the industry, access their 401(k) retirement savings, or file for unemployment. United Airlines Capt. Sherry Walker, who has been placed on indefinite unpaid leave, told Just the News that United employees seeking reasonable accommodation regarding the company's vaccine...

"Jason Todd walked into Friends Steakhouse in Clanton where his band was playing the final set one summer night three years ago. Tonya Anderson, his wife, stood outside in the parking lot, drunk, demanding to drive herself home. Todd told her she could not drive, and he would take her shortly after he paid his tab. “I’m not mad at you” he repeated. Belligerent, she threatened to leave. “Fine, walk home,” said Todd, believing she would not. Anderson began walking, as spelled out in court records and police reports, and did not make it far before being struck and killed...

You can rarely be sure that judicial incompetence will kill people, but Federal District Judge Terry Doughty crossed that line when he issued an injunction blocking the Biden administration's requirement that nursing home personnel be vaccinated for COVID-19.(The injunction, which the administration is appealing, has since been modified by a higher court to apply only in the 14 states that sued.) This week, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch produced something worse than incompetence. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that nursing home patients are far more likely to die of COVID if there are many...