Free Republic

A part of government anti-immigrant policy that President Trump and his aides pursued throughout their four years in office reached its end on Friday in a federal courthouse in California. The aim was to exclude up to 11 million undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 census. Trump’s legal team told a federal judge that the plan cannot be finished before the new Biden Administration opens next Wednesday. Here is what President Trump and his Republican allies are now losing: the chance to gain seats for “red” (Republican-oriented) states in the U.S. House of Representatives and, with that, increased...

An attorney representing President Trump in one of his dozens of lawsuits challenging the 2020 election moved to withdraw from the case on Thursday, telling a federal court that the president used him to "perpetrate a crime." Philadelphia-based attorney Jerome Marcus asked the court to allow him to withdraw, citing concerns over Pennsylvania's professional conduct standards for lawyers. Marcus wrote that "the client has used the lawyer's services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant and with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement."

The 11th Circuit just issued its decision in L. Lin Wood's appeal of the district court's denial of his request for an injunction against the Georgia election results. The decision holds that (a) Wood lacks standing, and (b) even if he didn't, any election challenge is now moot because Georgia already certified its electoral votes.

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin finished its recount of votes cast in this month’s presidential election on Sunday, with only minuscule changes in the results that saw Democrat Joe Biden defeat Republican Donald Trump in the battleground state. Dane County, which includes the state capital of Madison, reported only small changes in its vote totals, mirroring the earlier results of the recount conducted in Milwaukee County. Trump gained 45 votes in Dane County, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Biden won the state by nearly 20,600 votes and his margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties was about 2-to-1. “As we have...

Drugs are winning the war on drugs. [...] But there was one absolutely certain loser last night: the war on drugs. If Americans across the country provided a clear mandate for anything this year, it's ending the hold that drug prohibition has on our country. Of nine drug decriminalization or legalization measures on state ballots last night—including two addressing hallucinogens and one covering all illegal drugs—not a single one failed. These were decisive victories, too, not close calls. And unlike some previous waves of pro-marijuana votes, which were concentrated in predictable areas, successful anti–drug war measures in 2020 spanned a...

Law360, New York (June 17, 2020, 10:47 PM EDT) -- Fox News told a Manhattan federal judge on Wednesday that its star Tucker Carlson did not slander an ex-Playboy model as an extortionist who targeted President Donald Trump, because no reasonable viewer would believe Carlson was stating facts, just opinions. Seeking to dismiss the defamation case, counsel for the news network told U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil that a segment airing on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" could not have slandered Karen McDougal, who claims President Trump paid to silence her about an affair, because Carlson is a commentator, not a...

An Air Force sergeant linked to an anti-government movement was charged with murder and attempted murder on Tuesday in the shooting death of a federal security officer outside a courthouse in Oakland, Calif., last month. The sergeant had expressed his allegiance to the so-called boogaloo movement by writing with his own blood on the hood of a white Toyota Camry and had used the recent protests against racial injustice as a cover to attack law enforcement, according to the F.B.I. Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, 32, is accused of firing an assault rifle from the open back door of a moving...

This decision, and the majority who wrote it, represents the end of something. It represents the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it. After Bostock, that effort, as it has existed up to now, is over. I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism and originalism in order to reach such a decision—an outcome that fundamentally changes the scope and meaning and application of statutory law—then textualism and originalism and all of those phrases don’t mean much at all. And if those are...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s Queen Elizabeth on Monday gave final approval to a piece of legislation which seeks to prevent Prime Minister Boris Johnson from taking the country out of the European Union without an exit deal on Oct. 31.

Jeffrey Epstein is accustomed to having an entourage meet his private jet at the airport; he’s just not used to it being made up of FBI agents. Last Saturday, the billionaire and registered sex offender returned from a trip to Paris only to be arrested. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, famously aggressive in pursuing high-profile prosecutions, charged Epstein last week with child sex trafficking in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1591. These new charges represent the Department of Justice’s attempt to redeem a reputation soiled by the extremely questionable plea deal...

The Knesset voted Wednesday night to dissolve itself after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition, sending Israel to a new election mere seven weeks after the last one. At the heart of the impasse was the issue of drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students: Yisrael Beiteinu's Avigdor Lieberman, without whom Netanyahu can't form a coalition, refused to back down on the bill's terms, while ultra-Orthodox parties claimed they have already yielded enough ground. MK Avigdor Lieberman wrote on his Facebook page that Likud holds responsibility for the repeat election because of its refusal to vote on bill to...

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, N.D., on Thursday became the fourth member of his party’s caucus to tell reporters he would vote against a nomination for former pizza executive Herman Cain to join the board of the Federal Reserve. “If I had to [vote] today, I would vote no” on Cain, Cramer told reporters Thursday on Capitol Hill. Cain has yet to be formally nominated by President Donald Trump, but last week Trump announced that Cain was his pick to fill one of two open seats on the central bank’s board. Trump intends to nominate conservative economist and author...

In a dramatic move Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell withdrew the nomination of President Donald Trump’s pick for the Ninth Circuit, Ryan Bounds, after reports surfaced that his nomination didn’t have enough votes for confirmation. Bounds, an assistant U.S. attorney in Oregon for the last eight years, was the Trump administration’s first nominee to the Ninth Circuit, named in September to replace Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, for whom Bounds clerked. O’Scannlain took senior status at the end of 2016. Both of Bounds’ home-state senators, Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, opposed his nomination. They withheld their blue slips for Bounds,...

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday that Paul Manafort’s prosecution for financial crimes should continue, rejecting his legal team’s argument that the charges should be dismissed because Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office overstepped its authority in bringing them. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III appeared sympathetic to Manafort’s defense in May, aggressively questioning federal prosecutors as to how the charges brought against Manafort, which are related to his foreign lobbying work, were relevant to the special counsel’s probe into election interference. However, Ellis ultimately concluded that Mueller was within his rights to bring the charges, which include financial crimes...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that foreign corporations cannot be sued in American courts for human rights abuses overseas, refusing to revive a lawsuit claiming Jordan-based Arab Bank Plc helped finance militant attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories.The 5-4 decision brought to an end a lawsuit brought by some 6,000 non-U.S. citizen plaintiffs, including survivors and relatives of people killed in attacks, filed under a 1789 U.S. law called the Alien Tort Statute that accused Arab Bank of being the “paymaster” to militant groups. The court ruled along ideological lines, with its five conservatives...

I am going to make a prediction, which is something that I do not often do. Look out your window. If necessary, go out on the porch and look up and down the street. Crane the old neck. I’ll bet — I’d bet almost anything — that you do not see tanks in the street, riots, fires burning, or federal troops and law-enforcement agents running around. I’ll bet you don’t see anything like that on television, either. “Do you know about Q Anon?” Q is the narrator of “The Storm,” the right-wing Internet conspiracy theory du jour. Q claims to...

So, we have a defendant with zero connection to Steinle. He had a history of drug crimes but no known violent crimes. The bullet that killed Steinle hit the ground and then ricocheted upwards. There was a video possibly showing another group of people disposing of the gun where Garcia Zarate said he found it. Reviewing the SIG Sauer website shows these handguns cost $1,000 or more. You can see how defense counsel could easily argue that a homeless illegal immigrant would be unfamiliar with one. All of this adds up to the defense presenting a plausible explanation for how...

No sooner had it become a national holiday than America’s Jews took to its growing repertoire of rituals with gusto. Thanksgiving was a day in which “all classes and masses participated and delivered the same Yankee Doodle with slight variations,” observed one San Francisco Jew in 1884. Much like their neighbors, America’s Jewish citizens prepared a sumptuous repast at home and saw to it that the underprivileged among them, especially those of their coreligionists in orphanages and old-age homes, were treated to a turkey with all the trimmings. [snip] Focusing on what they had in common rather than on the...

An en banc federal appeals court has reinstated an order requiring the U.S. government to allow an abortion for a 17-year-old immigrant who is being held in a federally funded Texas shelter because she is in the country illegally. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a 6-3 order (PDF) that overturned an Oct. 20 decision by a D.C. Circuit panel that had delayed the abortion, report Politico, BuzzFeed News and Reuters. The earlier, 2-1 panel decision had made it possible for the girl to have the abortion without government involvement because it allowed time...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday signaled concern about allowing companies to be sued under American law for human rights abuses abroad in a case involving allegations that Arab Bank Plc helped finance militant attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both conservatives, indicated that U.S. foreign policy tensions that could arise from such cases would be a reason to curb corporate liability. Conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often casts the deciding vote in big cases, also appeared sympathetic to the bank’s arguments. Their remarks during an hour...