Free Republic

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions are victories for anyone dealing with government administrative agencies, say lawyers interested in the cases. One constitutional scholar warns that the decisions are only the first steps in the fight to maintain our form of democracy. “Administrative power is the greatest threat to our constitutional rights,” Phillip Hamburger, a Columbia University School of Law law professor and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), told The Epoch Times. Mr. Hamburger is the author of “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” a treatise on the dangers of administrative law. Lawyers interviewed by The Epoch Times believe...

This Fourth of July, watching people fight over what the Constitution means, I ask people, if you could change the Constitution, what would you change?"The forefathers knew what they were doing," said one woman.But the Constitution originally accepted slavery. It's good that we can amend it.So what should we change?"Add a balanced budget amendment," suggests Glenn Beck.David Boaz of the Cato Institute recommends 18-year terms for the Supreme Court. "Maybe confirmation fights would be less bitter and partisan."Others suggest term limits for Congress. Stossel TV's Mike Ricci takes the idea further. "If your father, mother, siblings, uncle, cousins were elected...

Overview The Commerce Clause refers to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes. Congress has often used the Commerce Clause to justify exercising legislative power over the activities of states and their citizens, leading to significant and ongoing controversy regarding the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The Commerce Clause has historically been viewed as both a grant of congressional authority and as a restriction on the regulatory authority of the States....

I'm looking for a simple explanation of what is causing this backlog of container ships off the California coast. I've been seeing a wide ranges of reasons including: A) environmental California trucking regulations from the California Air Resources Board which mandates all trucks must be 2011 or newer. B) CA law AB-5 which bans bans owner operators which was aimed at Uber and Lyft drivers but encompassed and banned almost all freelance jobs. C) Biden/Newsom vaccine mandates. Is it a combination of all of this and or some other factors? Democrats talk about a lack of truck drivers but why...

California is banning state-funded travel to Ohio over the state’s new law allowing doctors to decline medical services to people on moral or religious grounds. The Ohio measure triggered a 2016 California law that requires the attorney general to prohibit state-funded travel to states that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, according to a Friday press release from California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

The power of Congress to regulate employment conditions under the Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, is derived mainly from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. (Sec. 2(b), Public Law 91-596; U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3; "United States v. Darby," 312 U.S. 100.) The reach of the Commerce Clause extends beyond Federal regulation of the channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce so as to empower Congress to regulate conditions or activities which affect commerce even though the activity or condition may itself not be commerce and may be purely intrastate in character. ("Gibbons v. Ogden,"...

Prioritizing government-owned broadband networks would be inconsistent with the Constitution’s provisions regarding private property and commerce.As part of its massive $2 billion infrastructure proposal, the Biden administration is proposing an ambitious $100 billion broadband plan. The plan overreaches, misdirecting subsidies in ways that are wasteful, such as shoveling funds to areas already served instead of those lacking service. And the plan suggests the need to regulate the broadband prices of private service providers as if they were public utilities. As a matter of policy, these aspects of the Biden broadband plan are serious enough defects. But here we want to...

Today, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future. Joint statement from the governors: COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities. We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or ObamaCare, includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall . . . ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, the individual mandate, after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.” As of January, thanks to a tax reform bill that Congress enacted in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero....

California announced new rules Friday for its state vehicle fleet to reduce pollution and reward automakers that are siding with it against the Trump administration. Officials immediately barred state agencies from buying any sedans that only run on internal combustion engines, with exemptions for certain public safety vehicles. The state has about 40,000 vehicles, about 8,400 of which are sedans. Starting next year, it will require state agencies to buy only from companies that recognize California’s authority to set greenhouse gas and zero emission vehicle standards. Only BMW, Ford, Volkswagen and Honda have decided to back California and endorse stricter...

One Supreme Court case stands behind the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Controlled Substances Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Civil Rights Act. It's been cited in rulings involving hot-button issues such as health care reform and medical marijuana. But chances are you've never heard of it. Despite its wide-reaching influence, hardly anyone outside of legal circles is aware of the 1942 case, Wickard v. Filburn. One man, Gary Marbut of Missoula, Mont., hopes to change that. If Marbut succeeds, we'll also hear about another Supreme Court case: the one that overturns Wickard. ... snip ... The case was...

Elizabeth Warren, meet Clarence Thomas. Senator Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, was in the headlines recently for joining with Senator Cory Gardner, a Republican who represents Colorado, to introduce the Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States Act. That legislation would, as Warren put it in a tweet, “let states, territories, & tribes decide for themselves how best to regulate marijuana — without federal interference.” Justice Thomas is Warren’s natural ally on the issue. He wrote an emphatic dissent in the 2005 Supreme Court case Gonzalez v. Raich. Gonzalez was President George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, and Angel...

One question before the Supreme Court this term was a big one: As technology evolves, how do our laws governing commerce evolve with it? The answer, issued in the ruling held in a 5-4 decision on Thursday, is a bad one for taxpayers. Many proponents of an online sales tax have argued that we must completely revisit what we know about interstate commerce, and create illusory tax regimes to contemplate a brave new order of online transactions. In reality, none of this is true. For one, while it has been 26 years since the Supreme Court visited the issue in...

Elizabeth Zemba of Mt. Pleasant, a daily Pennsylvania Turnpike traveler, turned to art and creativity to express frustration with the highway's ever-rising tolls. She created an Internet meme. A photo of a turnpike tollbooth is overlaid with the logo: "Pennsylvania Turnpike re-inventing highway robbery since 2009." For many, annual turnpike toll increases simply have become too much to bear. Two weeks ago, a coalition of truckers and motorists advocates filed a class action suit against the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, PennDOT and Gov. Tom Wolf, seeking to recoup "excessive fees" that went to underwrite projects other than the operation of the...

A great many people – especially conservatives – reverence the Constitution, consider that it has been abused and that if only the doctrines expressed within were revived and respected, all would be well with America again. This, of course, is a kind of children’s bedtime story – and approximates reality to about the same degree as the story of the Three Little Pigs. The Constitution was peddled and imposed on us by men like Alexander Hamilton, a grasper after power who very openly loathed the ideas expressed by men like Jefferson in his Declaration (and even more so in his...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — More than a dozen states banded together Monday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block a California law requiring any eggs sold there to come from hens that have space to stretch out in their cages. In a lawsuit filed directly to the high court, the states allege that California's law has cost consumers nationwide up to $350 million annually because of higher egg prices since it took effect in 2015. The lawsuit argues that California's requirements violate the U.S. Constitution's interstate commerce clause and are pre-empted by federal law. A federal appeals court...

Social reform requires big government. Big government requires an obedient court, which fosters a "living constitution". In "Social reform and the Constitution", progressive reformer Frank Johnson Goodnow wrote the following regarding the courts: (page 31) The result is that the constitutional law of the country is not, either necessarily or actually, uniform. For a state court may declare unconstitutional from the point of view of the federal constitution an act of a state legislature which would have been regarded as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court. If, therefore, the state courts are more conservative than the Supreme Court, and...

... First, SCOTUSblog’s profile on Gorsuch highlights cases in which his “opinions also reveal a measure of distrust towards unwritten constitutional provisions like the dormant commerce clause”—a useful clue: Gorsuch’s opinion shows respect for the doctrine’s “[d]etractors,” like Scalia, who “find dormant commerce doctrine absent from the Constitution’s text and incompatible with its structure.” Though Gorsuch’s personal constitution seems to require him to write clearly about the many unclear aspects of the doctrine, his opinion plainly takes some joy in the act of demonstrating that not only does the dormant commerce clause not apply — the doctrine also doesn’t make...

Public agencies with toll-setting authority should take note of a recent federal court decision relating to the uses of user fees and toll revenue, as well as the stated goals of the plaintiff in that case.The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York recently clarified the constitutional uses of toll revenue in American Trucking Associations v. New York State Thruway Authority, 13 Civ. 8123 (CM) (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 10, 2016). In this case, commercial trucking companies and the American Trucking Associations (ATA) claimed that the New York State Thruway Authority violated the Constitution by charging inflated toll rates...

A divided Supreme Court said Monday that Maryland’s income tax law is unconstitutional because it does not provide a full tax credit to residents for income tax paid outside the state, a ruling likely to cost Maryland counties and localities across the country millions of dollars in revenue. The court voted 5-4 to affirm a 2013 Maryland Court of Appeals decision that the state’s practice of withholding a credit on the county segment of the state income tax violated the Commerce Clause because it might discourage individuals from doing business across state lines. In most states, income from elsewhere is...