Free Republic

Over the next few squibs I will show why Scotus has no Constitutional business fabricating rights. As opposed to its assumed authority to invent rights, it is instead duty-bound to defend the Constitution. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Ninth Amendment deserves equal protection from the Scotus. Despite this presumption, Scotus has generally interpreted the Ninth Amendment in a manner that denies the sovereign people’s prerogative to assert the rights that Scotus is Constitutionally bound to accept.1 Background. Thanks to the assurances of James Madison and other Federalists, the draft Constitution made its way unscathed through a...

Don’t say America wasn’t warned. During the oral arguments for same-sex marriage in 2015, a question came up about the fallout for Christian education. Asked if religious schools could be punished for holding a natural view of marriage, U.S. Solicitor Donald Verrilli was surprisingly honest. ” … [I]t’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is going to be an issue.” Four years later, that prophecy is coming to pass. Out in Maryland, a Christian charter school was told by state officials that it can’t participate in the voucher program anymore because of its...

Democrats on Saturday slammed what they described as a “Friday night document massacre” after the White House withheld more than 100,000 pages of Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s records, citing presidential privilege. Former President George W. Bush’s attorney Bill Burck told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter Friday that it has mostly completed its work ahead of next week’s planned confirmation hearing. Kavanaugh, who has been tapped by President Trump to replace Anthony Kennedy on the nation’s highest court, served in the White House Counsel’s office during the Bush administration. The letter said that Bush told them to...

{Full Title} Trump Jr. jokes of ‘flash flood warning’ due to ‘liberal tears’ following Trump’s Supreme Court nomination Donald Trump Jr. joked that there is a “flash flood warning” Monday night because "liberal tears will be flowing” when President Trump unveils his nominee to the the Supreme Court. “*Flash Flood Warning Tonight at 9PM EST*,” Trump Jr. tweeted Monday evening. “This is not a joke. Liberal tears will be flowing like Niagara Falls when #POTUS announces his second #SCOTUS pick,” he added. “Please take all necessary precautions & bring an inner tube or boogie board to ride this blue wave.”...

A new poll shows that voters in battleground states represented by vulnerable Senate Democrats decisively want President Donald Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, to replace Anthony Kennedy in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)... The poll conducted by the Tarrance Group between July 5 and 8 revealed that voters agree by a decisive margin of at least 12 percent that their senators should confirm the SCOTUS appointment Trump announced Monday night. After explaining that the U.S. Senate will vote on the president’s appointment to replace Justice Kennedy, it asked voters, “Do you think Senator [Nelson, Donnelly, McCaskill, Heitkamp, or...

Following President Donald Trump's nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Women's March released a statement condemning the pick.Unfortunately for the left-wing organization, the statement contained a clear sign that it was written before the actual name was announced by Trump.

Did Judge Brett Kavanaugh write the roadmap for saving ObamaCare? That question has dwelled at the center of passionate debate in the conservative legal community for days as Kavanaugh, a federal appeals judge in the District of Columbia, finds himself as one of President Trump’s four finalists for a place on the U.S. Supreme Court. The allegation from conservative critics is rooted in a 2011 ObamaCare case where Kavanaugh dissented against the ruling but acknowledged that the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate provision” could fit “comfortably within Congress’ Taxing Clause power.” Kavanaugh's detractors say that language helped provide the roadmap...

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.

The president is expected to nominate a conservative to replace the justice who authored most of the pro-LGBT decisions of the last 20 years. President Trump's coming announcement of his nominee to fill Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court has many members of America’s LGBT community understandably on edge. The stakes for LGBT people are enormous, given Kennedy's history of embracing LGBT people under the constitution’s protections and questions about whether a new Trump-appointed justice may turn the court in a very different direction. Though LGBT rights have come a long way since Kennedy began authoring pro-LGBT...

Judge Hardiman isn't the frontrunner, but he would also be an excellent SCOTUS pick -- and if he doesn't get it, he's okay with that. Here’s where we stand on the search for a Supreme Court nominee to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, according to John Roberts of Fox News (which is about as close as one can get to an official news outlet for the Trump Administration): "John Roberts ✔ @johnrobertsFox Sources tell @FoxNews that the White House is preparing 4 rollout packages for @realDonaldTrump nomination announcement. The 4 are Kavanaugh, Kethledge, Barrett.......and.......Thomas Hardiman 8:16 AM - Jul 6,...

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch may have offered a clue about who President Donald Trump will nominate to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, days ahead of the planned announcement on Monday. In a Friday op-ed article for Deseret News, a prominent newspaper in Hatch's home state of Utah, the longtime Republican lawmaker wrote a defense of the coming nominee amid a highly polarized and evenly split Senate. "Too much is at stake to allow politics to corrupt the Supreme Court confirmation process," Hatch wrote. "That's why in the coming weeks, I will lift...

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch may have offered a clue about who President Donald Trump will nominate to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, days ahead of the planned announcement on Monday. In a Friday op-ed article for Deseret News, a prominent newspaper in Hatch's home state of Utah, the longtime Republican lawmaker wrote a defense of the coming nominee amid a highly polarized and evenly split Senate. "Too much is at stake to allow politics to corrupt the Supreme Court confirmation process," Hatch wrote. "That's why in the coming weeks, I will lift...

One of the judge’s most famous dissents came in a 2008 challenge to the constitutionality of a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) panel called the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board (PCAOB). Members of the PCAOB had stronger protections against termination than comparable agency officials, prompting conservative critics to argue the panel was a roving, unaccountable fourth branch of government. Two judges on a three-judge panel hearing the case at the D.C. Circuit found for the PCAOB and defended its constitutionality. Kavanaugh dissented, arguing the structure of the panel unlawfully restricts the president’s power to appoint and remove executive branch...

Maybe it's your agenda that's broken. If you’re under the impression that the system exists merely to facilitate your partisan agenda, it’s not surprising that you also believe it’s “broken” every time things don’t go your way. This is why so many Democrats argue that we should “fix” the Electoral College when they lose a presidential election and “fix” the filibuster when they run the Senate and now “fix” the Supreme Court when they don’t run the Senate. During the Obama presidency, liberal pundits groused about the supposed crisis posed by a “dysfunctional” Congress. In political media parlance, “dysfunction” can...

And a favorite of conservatives gunning for an immigration fight with the Left... The coup de grace for this group is his dissent in Fogo de Chao v. Dept. of Homeland Security (D.C. Circuit 2014). The popular Brazilian steakhouse chain was, in effect, “granting waiters high skilled visas,” the memo argues. “While the D.C. Circuit absurdly reversed the Department of Homeland Security and granted them visas,” the memo highlights Kavanaugh’s dissent, which argued: “At bottom, that seems to be at least part of what is going on in this case—namely, Fogo’s desire to cut labor costs masquerading as specialized knowledge....

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, the front-runner to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, once argued that President Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying to his staff and misleading the public, a broad definition of obstruction of justice that would be damaging if applied to President Trump in the Russia investigation. Judge Kavanaugh’s arguments — expressed in the report of the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, which he co-wrote nearly 20 years ago — have been cited in recent days by Republicans with reservations about him and have raised concerns among some people close to Mr. Trump....

President Donald Trump is said to be down to his final three potential picks to replace pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Much of the pro-life focus has been on Judge Amy Barrett and leading pro-life advocates strongly support her as a potential nominee. But there is another potential nominee who is a reported finalist for the position who has very strong pro-life Bona fides and who one leading pro-life attorney says would be an excellent choice for the Supreme Court. That potential nominee is Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who sits on the DC Circuit Court. That is the main federal...

Just hours after Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, media legal analysts and commentators began forecasting what this will mean for women’s reproductive freedom. On CNN: “Roe v. Wade is doomed.” Huffington Post: “It’s time to prepare for life without nationwide legal abortion.” Reuters: “a death knell for Roe v. Wade.” Or, as one commenter remarked, invoking Dylan, “looks like it’s all over now, baby blue.” I share the despair, but have we forgotten something? Republicans have a one-vote majority in the Senate. Their number includes two female moderates, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom support...

When thoughtful conservatives and Republicans voted for Donald Trump in 2016, they did so in part because they knew that he would be among the nation's most consequential presidents, regardless of his occasional lapses in decorum or the steep learning curve he might face. This is because conservatives knew that the next president would be called on to fill the huge backlog of judicial vacancies that accumulated during the last years of Barack Obama's presidency. In addition, many other federal judges were approaching retirement age, so it stood to reason that the opportunity to remold the judiciary would be vast....

Fox News hosts told Dershowitz that many Democrats were against Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump met with on Monday and is one of the top names he is considering for nomination because of her religious beliefs that they feel could lead her to overturn Roe v. Wade. “Well, you know the Constitution says no religious test shall ever be required for any office under the United States. It would be unconstitutional and immoral to take into account negatively a person's religious views,” Dershowitz said.