Free Republic

Leftist/Democrats currently are in an absolute panic over the death, and very probable replacement by a Republican president, of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. They are now promoting the unsubstantiated and wholly strange ideology that a justice - no, just THIS justice - should be replaced: - with a woman - with a person of similar judicial philosophy - by a Democratic President, purportedly the next president Where did ANY of these bizarre demands have their genesis? As far as the last demand, it has been emphasized in several rational recent public discussions how that the appointment of...

A Seattle teen shot and killed a man for his cellphone — then went to a friend’s house and complained the stolen gizmo wasn’t nice enough, police say. Byron White, 17, now faces charges as an adult for killing David Peterson last month in the Washington city’s Greenwood neighborhood. White was on the lam for a week after the shooting until cops caught up to him at the airport last weekend as the boy tried to board a flight to Atlanta, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. “David Peterson went out for a walk around the neighborhood after dinner and never returned,...

With all due respect, I dissent. I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers [410 U.S. 222] and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally dissentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible...

• BREAKING NEWS: Justice Byron White Diesno more written

In a surprise move... a closely divided House approved a floor amendment offered by Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho that would split the Ninth Circuit into three smaller circuits. The new Ninth would consist of California and Hawaii, plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. A new Twelfth Circuit would comprise Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and Montana, and a new Thirteenth Circuit would consist of Washington, Oregon and Alaska. All these states and territories make up the current Ninth Circuit.... Dividing the Ninth and setting up administrative structures for the two new circuits would be enormously disruptive and expensive -- initial...

Justice Byron R. White's former law clerks remember him not as one of his generation's greatest football players, but as one of its sharpest legal minds. He was, some say, the smartest person they ever met. Yet in 31 years on the Supreme Court, the most gifted scholar-athlete of his time made far less conspicuous a mark on the law than colleagues with far less potent intellects. One reason was the inelegant, cryptic, often-confusing writing style of the brusque, no-nonsense White. Another was a virtue now very much out of vogue: his modesty in the exercise of judicial power. White,...