Free Republic

In the November 16 Presidential Debate, the Democratic candidates argued about the minimum wage. They all favored raising it, with Hillary Clinton arguing for $12 per hour. What she preaches is not what she practices, when running her own campaign. Recently, her lawyers asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for permission to use unpaid interns during "the spring, summer, or fall at the Campaign's headquarters office in Brooklyn." The lucky students would receive nothing from the Clinton campaign. However, Clinton wants the college to give the interns college credit. She also wants the college to pay the student $3,000. The...

One moment in the Supreme Court's oral arguments over same-sex “marriage” reveals what an embarrassment Sonia Sotomayor is as a justice. John J. Bursch, who argued on behalf of marriage, said that the people, not five unelected justices, should be able to decide whether to redefine a pillar of society that predates the government and written history. “This case isn't about how to define marriage,” he said. “It's about who gets to decide that question. Is it the people acting through the democratic process, or is it the federal courts? And we're asking you to affirm every individual's fundamental liberty...

Long Island BT-1000 Knocks CakeFaced MiddleSchool Teacher Out Cold

In a dispatch on King v. Burwell, the closely watched Obamacare challenge, NPR’s Nina Totenberg observed that the plaintiffs’ attorney, Michael Carvin, argued before the Supreme Court with “red-faced passion.” Indeed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor hadn’t even finished the preamble to her first question when Carvin interrupted her to finish an earlier thought. He then caught himself and apologized, at which point Sotomayor tempered him: “Take a breath.” Carvin needed that moment, because Sotomayor was about to ask a bombshell question about federalism, a subject that later dominated a key portion of the hearing.

In December of last year, the Supreme Court continued a decades-long tradition of chipping away at 4th Amendment rights by ruling that police may violate those rights “…if the violation results from a “reasonable” mistake about the law…” In the case of Heien v The State of North Carolina, police sergeant Matt Darisse stopped a vehicle he considered “suspicious” because one of three tail lights was faulty. While writing a warning ticket, he then “became suspicious” of vehicle occupants and “their answers to his questions.” When vehicle owner Nick Heien gave Sergeant Darisse permission to search the car, the officer...

Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor flatly rejected on Monday the view that any U.S. Supreme Court justices practice judicial activism. Speaking Monday to a standing-room only event at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., the 60-year-old justice was asked to give her reaction to those who complain about judicial activism on the one hand, yet want the Court to declare laws unconstitutional on the other. "I think most judges have a definition of judicial activism," Sotomayor said. "It’s a ruling you don’t like."Sotomayor’s assertion that no judicial activism exists — an article of faith...

Police can use evidence seized during a traffic stop even if it turns out the officers initially pulled a car over based on a misunderstanding of the law, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. The 8-1 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts said that such a stop does not violate the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches. The ruling came in a North Carolina case in which a police officer pulled over Nicholas Heien’s car because the right brake light was out, although the left one still worked. A consensual search led to the discovery of cocaine in the trunk. A...

Democrats lost the Senate, but so what? President Obama still has two more years and a veto. But there is at least one area where the GOP’s new Senate majority makes a big difference: a Supreme Court nomination. While it’s still unclear whether Obama will get to nominate another justice, the Republican gains in November make it unlikely a liberal nominee, such as Justice Thurgood Marshall, would be confirmed. And a nominee like the two Obama-appointed justices currently sitting on the court, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, would face a possible filibuster. Only a true middle-of-the-road nominee — such as...

Americans should be more concerned about their privacy being invaded by the spread of drones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an Oklahoma City audience on Thursday. Speaking before a group of faculty members and students at Oklahoma City University’s law school on Sept. 11, Justice Sotomayor said “frightening” changes in surveillance technology should encourage citizens to take a more active role in the privacy debate. She said she’s particularly troubled by the potential for commercial and government drones to compromise personal privacy. Said Justice Sotomayor: There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what...

Their unusually strident dissent written by Sotomayor said the Wheaton injunction threatened the credibility of the Hobby Lobby decision. "Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word," Sotomayor wrote. "Not so today." The point of the dissent? "It is not the business of this court to ensnare itself in the government's ministerial handling of its affairs in the manner it does here," Sotomayor wrote.

Supreme Court Sides With Christian College In Birth Control Case The three female justices say their colleagues are reversing themselves from this week’s Hobby Lobby ruling. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) BY ROBERT BARNES July 3 The three female justices of the Supreme Court sharply rebuked their colleagues Thursday for siding with a Christian college in the latest battle over providing women with contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act, saying the court was retreating from assurances offered only days ago. In a short, unsigned opinion, the court said that Wheaton College in Illinois, at least temporarily, does not have to comply...

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected on Sunday the notion that alternatives to affirmative action such as income or residency could achieve similar results in diversifying the nation’s colleges and universities. […] Sotomayor is the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court and graduated from Princeton University. She said her alma mater could fill its freshman class with students who scored perfectly on undergraduate metrics, but it chooses not to do so because it would not create a diverse class based on standards the school considers important for success in life. …

Justice Sonia Sotomayor Defends Affirmative Action BY ROBERT BARNES June 22 Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she supports affirmative action in higher education because she believes that alternatives based on geographic or economic status don’t work to ensure a diverse student body. Sotomayor has said race-conscious programs in the 1970s that opened Ivy League schools to minorities were essential to her rise from the Bronx public housing projects to her admission to Princeton and Yale Law School, where she excelled. Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina, was asked by George Stephanopoulos in a segment taped for ABC’s “This Week” about programs that...

My mving to Washington and becoming a Supreme Court justice five years ago was shocking, “like somebody throwing cold water on me,” says Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The transition from being a little known appeals court judge in her hometown of New York to being an easily recognized Washington personality was extremely difficult, Sotomayor said. “People stop treating you like a person,” she said. “It’s hard for someone like me who really likes people and wants to have living room conversations that are not posted on Twitter.” Her comments came in a wide-ranging and, for a Supreme Court justice, unusually candid...

Saturday at the Costco in Arlington, VA, right outside of Washington, DC, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a surprise stop to see former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signing copies of her book, "Hard Choices."

In Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio, both Justices Kagan and, to a lesser extent, CJ Roberts use some pretty strong language to characterize Justice Sotomayor’s dissent. From Kagan’s opinion: •The dissent responds to this fact only with a pair of non-sequiturs. Post, at 18–19 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). •but cf. post, at 14 (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (wrongly stating that under that rule conversion occurs upon the agency’s re- ceipt of proof of the change). •It is, therefore, impossible to understand the dissent’s statement that conversion of such a petition to an appropriate category requires “ ‘substantive alteration’ to [the] petition.”...

Sonia the Quota, aka Sonia Quotamayor, proved what most people have known for years. Affirmative action means hiring, appointing, or promoting people for the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Sotomayor is obviously not where she is because of her character or her qualifications. Her own words prove that she is grossly unfit to serve in any responsible judicial capacity in an equal opportunity society. "[W]e ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile...

Myths, legends, and anthropology all state that the power to name a thing is the power to control or destroy it. A simple and devastating public relations technique is, therefore, to attach a memorable and accurate name to somebody. The Allies, for example, named General Fedor Bock "Der Sterber" ("Let's go get killed") due to his callous remark that it was the function of the German soldier to die for Germany, and they made sure his soldiers knew it. This article will similarly name Sonia Sotomayor, a jurist who seems to confuse the role of the U.S. Supreme Court with...

<p>Anodyne euphemisms often indicate an uneasy conscience or a political anxiety. Or both, as when the 1976 Democratic platform chose “compensatory opportunity” as a way of blurring the fact that the party favored racial discrimination in the form of preferences and quotas for certain government-favored minorities in such matters as government hiring, contracting, and college admissions.</p>

Jennifer Gratz is a model of diversity. The daughter of a policeman and a secretary in Southfield, Mich., she was the first person in her family to apply to college, sporting a résumé that included a 3.8 grade point average, 25 ACT score, and membership in the National Honor Society and student council. She was class vice president. Yet she was denied admission to the University of Michigan because racial preferences stacked the deck against her and her white, Asian, Indian, and Jewish peers by granting 20 points to black or Latino students, on an 80-point scale; a perfect standardized...