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The confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s latest judicial nomination was refreshingly bipartisan for Trump's first ever out lesbian pick. Trump nominated Illinois judge Mary M. Rowland, through a June announcement, for a seat as a district judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Why is this significant for Instinct Readers? Because Rowland is an out lesbian and the first openly LGBTQ judge to be nominated by Trump since entering the White Rowland has had a long standing history in the world of law. She got her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and...

The administration warned a federal judge Monday to stay out of the debate over President Obama’s deportation amnesty, saying decisions about whom to deport fall squarely within the executive’s job description, “which this court lacks authority to review. In its first extended legal filing in one of the court challenges to the new amnesty, the Justice Department says courts have long held that an agency’s decision whether or not to prosecute someone or to enforce the law is entitled to “absolute discretion.”“Federal courts sit to decide cases and controversies, not to resolve disagreements about policy or politics,” said Joyce R....

I listen to whatever I can in the way of talk radio when I drive around, and Mark Levin is the least unpalatable choice on the drive home from work each day. He was on one of his bulging-neck-vein rants the other day, this one about the history of the Supreme Court’s overstepping their limited Constitutional role over the past several centuries, leading us to the “judicial tyranny” we see now, which was never the intent of the Founders. He implied that the ultimate remedy was the restoration of the original intent of the Founders, rather than merely electing conservative...

Democrats have hit back at veteran GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley for calling President Barack Obama “stupid” in a weekend Twitter message. “Ive know @ChuckGrassley a long time. I am saddened he would embarrass himself like today with his comments about the President,” Obama's campaign manager, Jim Messina, tweeted. Meanwhile White House senior adviser David Axelrod said, “Heads up, Sen. Grassley. I think a 6-year-old hijacked your account and is sending out foolish Tweets just to embarrass you!” ABC News reported. But the senior senator from Iowa was unrepentant. “In his Tweet on Saturday, Sen. Grassley said that it doesn’t speak...

... a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president's bluff -- ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law ...

We are told that it is up to the Supreme Court to determine what laws are constitutional, but that is hardly in line with the limiting principles offered by the U.S. Constitution. That power the courts claim to have is called Judicial Review, and it is addressed nowhere in the Constitution. In fact, the federal courts seized that power for themselves through an opinion written by Justice John Marshall in the Marbury v. Madison case of 1803. Yes, that’s right, the courts gave that power to themselves. By deciding if laws are constitutional, and since the Supreme Court is a...

Dear Mr. President, Supposedly, you are some sort of constitutional scholar. At the very least, you can read, you can write, and despite being merely some sort of guest lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, you once famously referred to yourself as a “Constitutional Law professor.”Ringing a bell so far, Mr. President? Great.While my Juris Doctor is from the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, and while Rutgers-Camden is hardly Harvard Law School, within the first three days of Constitutional Law class those who did not already know of and understand perhaps the single most important...

The Montana House has overwhelmingly endorsed a plan to disregard the federal law protecting endangered and threatened species. Republicans enthused by Gov. Brian Schweitzer's recent tough talk on wolves led a 61-39 vote Saturday to nullify the federal Endangered Species Act in Montana. Tea party politics in the Legislature have spawned increasing belief in an 18th-century doctrine that purported to give states the ultimate say in constitutional matters...

Final Soluton to U.S. "Abortion Problem" is Clearly Laid Out in Contstitution Says Writer FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, March 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Today's LifeSiteNews Special Report analyses the American Constitution and what is says about who has ultimate authority over U.S. laws concerning abortion. Rand Brown, a student at Christendom College in Front Royal Virginia states in his article that the final solution to the "Abortion Problem" lays "not where most pro-life Americans think it to be".Brown relates that Congress "can overthrow a Supreme Court ruling precisely because it, and not the Judiciary, is the voice of the American people....

Lost in all the hoopla over potential nominees and "strict constructionists" is the battle over Judicial Review. Judicial review was "created" in Marbury v. Madison. Nowhere in the constitution are the Federal Courts granted Judicial Review. They simply assumed that power in Marbury v. Madison. Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld a lower court decision that threw out a federal ban on partial birth abortions since it did not provide a "health" exception. The problem is, the US Court of Appeals doesn't have the constitutional power to override Congress, yet it did. A "strict constructionist"...

The framers of the U.S. Constitution feared a judiciary that might abuse its power. But even most of them did not envision the judicial oligarchy that confronts Americans in this 21st century. In case after case, judges and "last word" Supreme Court justices have substituted their personal opinions for the clear meaning of the Constitution or the law. The courts have overreached on abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, the death penalty, bilingual education, immigration, enemy combatants, law school admissions, flag-burning, ordering local governments to raise taxes, limits on political speech, prayer and the Ten Commandments in the public square, seizure...

In Marbury vs Madison Jefferson Saw the Beginning of Judicial Tyranny Early in his career Jefferson was concerned for the independence of the judiciary in order that it be strong and to prevent injustice. However, when the federalists focused their efforts on the transfer to Washington of the power reserved in the Constitution to the States, using the power that they had obtained in the judiciary, he began to view with alarm the subversion of the judiciary and its independence of the nation. To the prevention of their objective Jefferson devoted the rest of his life. The following quotations may...

Dear Rush, I’ve been listening to you since the first month you went on the air in New Orleans. You are an inspiration and my whole family loves you. In the last half of your first hour on Tuesday you were discussing how far out in left field the Federal Judiciary has gone in the last several decades. You discussed parts of the Scalia v Breyer debate and were hitting on all cylinders in the way that only Maha Rushie can. Then you proceeded to explain the history of the “source” of much of the judicial tyranny we suffer under...

CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY COLLOQUIUM SERIESNearly all of American constitutional law today rests on a myth. The myth, presented as standard history both in junior high civics texts and in advanced law school courses on constitutional law, runs something like this: A long, long time ago - 1803, if the storyteller is trying to be precise - in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison,1 the Supreme Court of the United States created the doctrine of "judicial review." Judicial review is the power of the Supreme Court to decide the meaning of the Constitution and to strike down laws that the Court finds unconstitutional.As befits the name of the court...

The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review , by Larry D. Kramer (Oxford University Press, 363 pages, $29.95) JUDICIAL SUPREMACY IS THE gospel of modern American constitutional law. It is the doctrine that the Supreme Court has the last word on most of the country's important issues from electing a president to campaign finance reform to treatment of the Guantanamo detainees. In recent years there have been few critics of judicial supremacy. When someone of influence has questioned the doctrine, they have been excoriated in the media and academic press. For example, when then-Attorney General Edwin Meese questioned the...

Do the Federal courts have a monopoly of the interpretation of the Constitution? Further, are the judges, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions . . ."?.1 There is little reason to doubt that the prevailing view in the country would give a resounding affirmative answer to the first question. There are dissenters, of course, but so far as they are numerous and widely influential, their dissents are to particular decisions or opinions of the courts, not to the propriety of the courts making some decision. The judges act as if they have a...

BOSTON Two hundred years ago today Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the judgment of the Supreme Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison. As a kindness to Justice Samuel Chase, who was ill, he announced the decision in the Capitol Hill rooming house where most of the justices lived. In that humble setting Marshall and his colleagues established the great principle that judges have the power to declare acts of Congress void because they conflict with the Constitution. After 200 years Americans are so accustomed to judges having the last word that alternatives seem unthinkable. We rely on the...