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In a significant ruling late Thursday, Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana sided with American energy advocates, striking down the Biden administration’s eleventh-hour restrictions on a pending offshore oil and gas lease sale. The injunction, favoring the plaintiffs – the State of Louisiana, the American Petroleum Institute (API), and energy giants Chevron and Shell – puts a halt on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) restrictive measures concerning Lease Sale 261. This crucial sale, encompassing vast expanses in the Gulf of Mexico, was scheduled for the following week. The ruling by Judge Cain reiterates the federal...

A federal judge compared Waylon Bailey’s Facebook jest to "falsely shouting fire in a theatre."Back in March 2020, a dozen or so sheriff's deputies wearing bullet-proof vests descended upon Waylon Bailey's home in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, with their guns drawn, ordered him onto his knees with his hands on his head, and arrested him for a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The SWAT-style raid was provoked by a Facebook post in which Bailey had made a zombie-themed joke about COVID-19. Although a federal appeals court recently ruled that Bailey could pursue civil rights claims based on...

A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting an injunction that blocks various Biden administration officials and government agencies like the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big tech firms to censor posts on social media. The injunction came in response to a censorship-by-proxy lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who have accused Biden administration officials and various government agencies of pressuring social media companies to suspend accounts or take down posts. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, wrote in the July 4 judgment (pdf) that various government agencies, including the Cybersecurity and...

Ooooh, this is turning out to be such a good show. Before I get into the latest, let’s recap quickly, shall we? The Missouri v Biden lawsuit sprang from underhanded censorship dealings the Biden administration began with the social media companies almost the second they ascended to the throne. Literally 3 days after Biden took office, the government’s censorship operation was flying. The White House immediately launched a pressure campaign on social media platforms to suppress supposed “COVID misinformation.” The Surgeon General launched his signature “disinformation” initiative at a Virality Project event at the Stanford Internet Observatory. And, Biden himself...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A lawsuit that Louisiana and other Republican-leaning states filed challenging figures the Biden administration uses to calculate damages from greenhouse gasses was dismissed Wednesday by a federal appeals court. The unanimous decision by three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans was the latest defeat for states challenging the Biden “cost of carbon” policy. It leaves the administration to continue using a damage cost estimate of about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions as it develops environmental regulations. That estimate is under review by the administration and could increase. The...

A federal judge ruled against the Biden administration’s efforts to dismiss a case involving online censorship Monday, saying that the states of Missouri and Louisiana had “plausibly alleged” First Amendment violations. United States District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana denied the Biden administration’s motion to dismiss a suit brought on May 5 by Republican Attorneys General Erik Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Schmitt and Landry said the Biden administration colluded with social media companies to censor debate on multiple issues, including the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

I reported earlier on some of the bombshells that the Missouri AG Andrew Bailey announced they’d discovered in the lawsuit against the Biden administration. The lawsuit, filed by the Missouri and Lousiana Attorneys General alleged the Biden administration had been colluding with Big Tech and social media to “suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content” on their platforms with “dis-information,” “mis-information” and “mal-information” labels.The Biden administration’s effort to squash speech extended to some pretty well-known names, including Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and Tomi Lahren. But it was clear that members of the Executive Office of the President were regularly...

A federal judge on Monday ruled in favor of deposing an FBI agent accused of "colluding" with social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana ruled that FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan must be deposed under oath for his alleged involvement in coordinating with Meta to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election. "Chan had authority over cybersecurity issues for the FBI in the San Francisco, California region which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms and played a critical role...

Dr. Anthony Fauci and other White House officials must testify under oath in a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with Facebook and Twitter to suppress free speech regarding coronavirus, a federal court ordered on Friday. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the Biden administration in May 2022, arguing that the White House – and especially Fauci as Chief Medical Advisor to the President – were essentially making Facebook and Twitter arms of the Biden administration, suppressing content that criticized lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and related stories. The case argued that under Norwood...

A federal court has granted the request of two attorneys general for discovery and documents from top Biden officials and social media honchos so they can to get to the bottom of their collusion efforts to suppress and censor free speech. In May, Attorneys General Eric Schmidt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana filed suit against eight high-ranking Biden Administration officials, including Joe Biden, Jen Psaki, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, for allegedly colluding with social media giants to suppress freedom of speech under the pretense of combatting “misinformation.” 🚨BREAKING: Missouri and Louisiana just filed suit against Joe Biden, Jen...

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Biden administration from ending the Title 42 public health order on May 23 -- stopping the administration from a move that had seen significant Republican and Democratic opposition amid fears it would exacerbate the border crisis. Judge Robert Summerhays, in the Western District of Louisiana, granted a preliminary injunction on the Biden administration’s plan to end the order on May 23. It was in response to a lawsuit by two dozen Republican states, led by Arizona, Louisiana and Missouri.

In the U.S. so far, efforts to enact legislation in Congress to “save the planet” by restricting fossil fuels and transforming our energy economy have gone almost entirely nowhere. President Obama’s big idea of “cap and trade” legislation died early in his first term and was never resurrected. President Biden’s “Green New Deal” has so far suffered a similar fate. If the Republicans retake even one house of Congress later this year, prospects for legislation on this subject may be dead for many years, if not for good. Surely, you might think, without any legislative support from the Congress, the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to put greater emphasis on the potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions when creating rules for polluting industries. U.S. District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana sided with Republican attorneys general who said the administration’s raising the cost estimate of carbon dioxide emissions threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state revenues from energy production. The judge issued an injunction that bars the administration from using the higher cost estimate, which puts a dollar value on damages caused by every additional ton of...

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...

Nov 30 (Reuters) – The Biden administration was blocked from enforcing two mandates requiring millions of American workers to get vaccinated against COVID. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Monroe, Louisiana, temporarily blocked the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from enforcing its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers until the court can resolve legal challenges. Doughty’s ruling applied nationwide, except in 10 states where the CMS was already prevented from enforcing the rule due to a prior order from a federal judge in St. Louis. Doughty said the CMS lacked the authority to issue a vaccine mandate that would...

A federal judge on Monday issued a nationwide injunction on President Joe Biden’s executive order to halt oil and gas operations on all federal lands in the name of fighting so-called climate change.

In Magliulo v. Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, ((WD LA, Aug. 17, 2021), a Louisiana federal district court issued a temporary restraining order barring a medical college from conditioning plaintiff students' enrollment on their receiving a COVID-19 vaccination. The students had requested an exemption from the college's requirements for religious reasons-- they believed the vaccine was derived from aborted fetal tissue. The college would grant the exemption only if the objecting students complied with extensive restrictions. The court held that Louisiana statutes allow students to assert religious or philosophical objections to the vaccine requirement. It also concluded that the...

This will be a weekly post. Count is now 202 judges confirmed. 2 Trade Court judges 145 District Court judges 53 Circuit Court judges 2 Supreme Court justices The Senate Judiciary committee held hearings this week so those will likely be voted to the floor soon.

This will be a weekly post. Count remains at 200 judges confirmed 2 Trade Court judges 143 District Court judges 53 Circuit Court judges 2 Supreme Court justices This week the Senate was mostly working on legislation. However, they did confirm some appointments, including two judges to the Court of Appeals for Veteran's Claims. But these are Article I judges, not Article III judges. This week the Senate voted for cloture for a District judge (vote Monday) and McConnell filed for cloture on another District judge. So there will be judicial confirmations next week.

SHREVEPORT, La. – United States Attorney David C. Joseph announced that Melissa W. Richardson, 44, of Shreveport, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Donald E. Walter to serve one year in federal prison, followed by one year of supervised release, for stealing controlled substances from mail-out prescriptions. Richardson was found guilty on January 17, 2020, by a federal jury in Shreveport, of 15 counts of acquiring a controlled substance by fraud, following a one-week trial.According to evidence presented during trial, on June 9, 2017, Richardson, a licensed pharmacist, who was formerly employed with the Overton Brooks VA Medical...