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Oh, boy. Saturday, October 20 is turning into a battle of other worldly powers as an occult store in Brooklyn, New York prepares to host a ritual to "hex" newly appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In response, an exorcist in California will be hosting a regularly scheduled mass and will pray for the justice to protect him from " a conjuring of evil." Catland Books in Brooklyn describes their event as "a public hex on Brett Kavanaugh, upon all rapists and the patriarchy at large which emboldens, rewards and protects them." According to the Facebook page for the...

Hours ahead of President Donald Trump’s prime-time announcement of his selection for the U.S. Supreme Court, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey has made up his mind.

Gerawan's employees do not want to be unionized by the UFW or forced into union servitude by the California ALRB Surprising no one, on Nov. 27, the California Supreme Court upheld the dubious Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation law against Gerawan Farming. The California Supreme Court heard the Gerawan case last fall on whether the state’s attempting to force mandatory agricultural labor union contracts violates the constitutional safeguard of equal protection. Fresno-based peach grower Gerawan Farming is one of the largest agriculture employers in the state. The serious wrangling with the United Farm Workers Labor Union and ALRB began again in...

If you listen to the Democrats, they claim that President Donald Trump is out to wreck the U.S. government. But when leaders of the party begun by Thomas Jefferson talk about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, they worry that he will affirm the principles held by Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers. This illustrates why President Trump's nomination of 49-year-old Neil Gorsuch is a judicial home run. Gorsuch is a fine successor to Antonin Scalia, who unexpectedly died a year ago. Gorsuch, like Scalia, believes that the Constitution actually means something, rather than being a meaningless collection of words to...

RUSH: I got an email during the break. “Rush, you confused me on this Rule 19 versus 60 votes. Could you go through this again?” Let me do it very quickly and then I’m gonna go at it the office direction. In the Senate, you need 60 votes for anything. The way it happens, it’s called a filibuster, but it really isn’t a filibuster. It’s just a Senate rule. It’s been around for a long time. Don’t ask why, what’s the logic. It just is. The Senate is supposed to slow down things. Passing laws was supposed to be hard...

What a treasure our Constitution is and how easy to take for granted. In a world facing accelerating change and division, it’s a gift to have an anchor that keeps our freedoms secure. Abraham Lincoln knew the value of that anchor when he said, “Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.” In our recent divisive election, the issue of who would appoint what could be as many as three Supreme Court appointments during the next Presidential term was a major factor in the votes of many citizens...

“Mainstream”. We are having a country-wide civics lesson on who is or is not out of our mainstream: Senate Democrats or the Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he’ll fight “tooth and nail” against any Supreme Court nominee who’s outside the mainstream, and many of his Democratic colleagues have said that means a filibuster, which will require 60 votes to end in the 52-48 Senate. Tuesday night President Trump nominated Judge Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s seat on the high court. We’ll now see who is in the mainstream – this Tenth Circuit judge, a...

The shorthand description of Neil Gorsuch is that he's a younger version of the man he's likely to replace on the Supreme Court -- Justice Antonin Scalia. Therefore, his nomination is seen by many as merely restoring the balance that existed on the Court for most of the past decade -- 4 conservative justices, 4 liberal justices, and Justice Kennedy as a key swing vote. The idea that Gorsuch is a young Scalia is as accurate as such shorthand comments can be, but SCOTUS blog reports that there is one significant exception. Last year, "Gorsuch criticized a doctrine of...

Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch is a Colorado native and the son of a Republican politician, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, who was a state legislator and then director of the Environmental Protection Agency for President Reagan. Gorsuch attended Columbia University and Harvard Law School, after which he clerked for D.C. Circuit Court judge David Sentelle. Gorsuch then clerked for Supreme Court justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy in 1993–94. The next year he studied for a doctorate of philosophy at Oxford University under the legal philosopher John Finnis. After spending ten years at a law firm in Washington,...

"It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life For me And I'm feeling good." -- "Feeling Good" President Trump's critics are finding it difficult to stay focused following a flurry of actions taken by the new American CEO. In just the first two working days of the new administration, the president has signed an executive order withdrawing from the negotiating process of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), aligning him with socialist independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who broke with former President Obama over the agreement. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack...

Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign against Donald Trump largely amounted to a reprise of the left's attacks on Judges Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas in the 1980s. "Borking" -- nice slang for Hillary’s "politics of personal destruction" (which she decried when it was employed against her husband in 1998) -- succeeded against Judge Bork. It did not work against Justice Clarence Thomas. And it demonstrably didn't work against president-elect Trump. So what is the left going to try next, now that Borking Mr. Trump has failed? "Massive resistance." that's what. I laughed when Slate's Michelle Goldberg used the term on NPR...

The two sides in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the closely watched U.S. legal case in which a 4-4 U.S. Supreme Court barely upheld a 39-year-old precedent regarding the constitutionality of forced union fees as a job condition in the government sector on March 29, seemed bitterly divided. And they were, for the most part. But on one important matter in Friedrichs, by the time oral arguments were heard in January, there was no longer any dispute between the plaintiffs – 10 independent-minded Golden State educators – and the respondents – the officers of the National Education Association (NEA) union...

Sen. Ted Cruz on Saturday was quick laud Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the news of his death Saturday, saying he "changed the course of legal history." "Today our nation mourns the loss of one of the greatest Justices in history - Justice Antonin Scalia," Cruz said in a statement to The Hill. "A Champion of our liberties and a stalwart defender of the Constitution, he will go down as one of the few Justices who single-handedly changed the course of legal history." Cruz praised Scalia for his forceful opinions on the court, including the controversial 2008 District of...

The Supreme Court had an opportunity, with its ruling in King v. Burwell, to determine whether the United States is a nation of laws or of men. Today, in a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that we have devolved into the latter. Although the text of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) clearly states that the government may issue subsidies only through insurance exchanges established by the states, Obama administration bureaucrats unilaterally rewrote that part of the law so that the IRS could dispense such premium assistance through “marketplaces” created by the federal government. The plaintiffs in...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court asked Monday for the Obama administration’s views on whether Oklahoma and Nebraska should be able to sue Colorado over its marijuana laws. The court sometimes asks the solicitor general — the president’s advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court — for input on a case justices potentially will hear.

On Friday, the justices of the Supreme Court held a conference to review petitions for certiorari and other procedural matters. Among the most-watched petitions before the justices was that in King v. Burwell, a challenge to the legality of an IRS rule authorizing tax credits for the purchase of health insurance in federally established exchanges. This morning, the Court released the order list from the conference, and King was absent. Rampant speculation about what this could mean ensued. (See Chris Walker’s walk through the possibilities here.) Shortly thereafter, a notation on the King docket indicated that King has been relisted...

The Supreme Court was asked to consider petitions for certiorari in seven separate cases challenging state laws barring legal recognition of same-sex marriage. On Monday morning, SCOTUSBlog reported, the Supreme Court denied all seven petitions. Most commentators have assumed the Supreme Court would take one or more of these cases and (perhaps) conclusively determine whether the federal Constitution bars states from refusing to recognize same-sex marriages under state law. Yet all seven cases below had come out the same way. In all seven, lower courts struck down the challenged state laws, so there was no circuit split. Given the lack...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday returns to work to face a rich and varied docket, including cases on First Amendment rights in the digital age, religious freedom behind bars and the status of Jerusalem. Those cases are colorful and consequential, but there are much bigger ones on the horizon. “I’m more excited about the next 12 months at the Supreme Court than about any Supreme Court term in its modern history,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, who argues frequently before the court and is the publisher of Scotusblog. In the coming weeks, the justices will most likely agree to...

When in 1962 Edward Moore Kennedy ran for his brother's seat in the Senate, his opponent famously said that if Kennedy's name had been Edward Moore, his candidacy would have been a joke. If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her. We've had quite enough dynastic politics over the past decades. (Considering the trouble I have had with Benjamin and William Henry Harrison, I pity the schoolchildren of the future who will...

The transcript of my interview yesterday on the Hugh Hewitt show is now up at Radioblogger. By analogy to that great Congressional tradition, I want to use this post to revise and extend my remarks. In particular, I want to pick up on the baseball analogy. (In the course of doing so, I may also be able to at least indirectly answer some of the questions Beldar posed to me the other day.) The Supreme Court is the big league. Those nine old men and women have arrogated to themselves not only the powers historically exercised by jurists in the...