Free Republic

Using claims of discrimination as a wedge in the door for government bureaucrats would end religious education and the religious rights of parents to educate their children according to the dictates of their faith. While the Supreme Court was hearing oral argument May 13 about whether Catholic schools should have the right to decide whom they employ as teachers, my daughter was on a Zoom call with her Catholic schoolteacher. Like the schools that appeared before the court, Our Lady of Guadalupe School and St. James School, her Catholic elementary school has one class per grade, and as a result,...

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan disregarded two controlling precedents from higher courts with his decision to appoint John Gleeson as amicus curiae in the U.S. v. Michael Flynn case this week. Judicial conduct similar to J. Sullivan’s in these prior, far less politically charged cases was roundly and unanimously condemned by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. ... One week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 9-0 decision, authored by Justice Ginsburg, that took judges to task for similar amicus antics. Her opinion for the Court in U.S. v. Sineneng-Smith upbraided the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court is set on Wednesday to consider a dispute involving whether “electors” in the complex Electoral College system that decides the winner of U.S. presidential elections are free to disregard laws directing them to back the candidate who prevails in their state’s popular vote. If enough electors do so, it could upend an election. The nine justices will hear two closely watched cases - one from Colorado and one from Washington state - less than six months before the Nov. 3 election in which presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden challenges Republican President Donald Trump. The...

The Supreme Court unanimously resurrected a federal law struck down by an appeals court that made it a felony to encourage people to come to or stay illegally in the United States.

Supreme Court divided over fight for Trump's financial records BY JOHN KRUZEL - 05/12/20 02:53 PM EDT The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared divided over President Trump’s assertion that the broad powers he enjoys as the nation’s chief executive override subpoenas for his financial records and tax returns. Trump’s standoff with a trio of Democratic-led House committees and Manhattan prosecutors over his financial paper trail saw the justices raise divergent concerns about presidential immunity, congressional oversight and the power of prosecutors to gather evidence linked to a sitting president. The first argument in Tuesday’s pair of overlapping cases concerned a...

In the Supreme Court Oral Argument on Congressional Subpoenas for President Trump's Financial Records broadcast live, Justice Sonya Sotomayor slipped up and said "WE" are asking for his personal tax returns", while questioning President Trump's lawyer Patrick Strawbridge. Her use of "WE" instead of referring properly to the Congressional subpoena showed her true colors. Audio and transcript at 16:25 in the embedded video on the C-SPAN link.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts paused a lower court order that would have forced the Justice Department to provide secret grand jury materials to Congress next week. On Friday, the high court granted a request from the Trump administration to pause an appeals court decision requiring the Justice Department to provide grand jury documents to the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee. The order, signed by Roberts, gave the congressional committee until May 18 to file its response. In the absence of the Supreme Court's order, the DOJ would have been required to give lawmakers on Monday secret grand jury materials...

President Donald Trump's lawyers will urge the Supreme Court on Tuesday to let him block access to his tax returns and other financial documents sought by three congressional committees and a New York prosecutor. In one of the most closely watched disputes of the court's term, the cases will test the justices' independence and could yield major rulings on the power of Congress to demand documents from a sitting president — or the authority of a president to refuse. The court will hear the two separate cases by telephone conference call with each justice taking a turn to ask questions,...

For the last several years, Cato has been leading the campaign to abolish qualified immunity — an atextual, ahistorical judicial doctrine that shields state officials from liability, even when they violate people’s constitutional rights. The most immediate practical goal of this campaign has been to convince the Supreme Court to hear one of the many cases calling for qualified immunity to be either narrowed or reconsidered outright. And over the last seven months, I’ve written several times about how the Court has indicated that it’s preparing to consider several qualified immunity cases, given the manner in which it has repeatedly...

A few weeks before the 2016 election, Brett Kavanaugh, then a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, drew a lot of attention with a ruling concluding that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, was unconstitutional. The agency, in the judge’s view, was simply too powerful, and Congress erred when making its director independent of, and unaccountable to, the president of the United States. That design, as conceived by lawmakers, served the purpose of insulating the CFPB from undue political influence — say, from...

Democrat Cory Booker sounds a lot different in the way he is treating allegations against Joe Biden vs how he sounded during the time Brett Kavanaugh went through something similar. Cory Booker was very vocal against Brett Kavanaugh, but not so much against Joe Biden. Is that because they are both Democrats?

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a surprise ruling, the Supreme Court has overturned the entire Star Wars sequel trilogy, rendering episodes VII through IX non-canon. “The entire trilogy has been a travesty,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 9-0 majority opinion. “It nullifies many of the accomplishments of the original trilogy while being a thematic mess that adds nothing itself.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg was just as harsh in her concurring opinion. “You basically had two directors fighting each other over three movies. This can’t stand as the last word about the Skywalker saga.” One might have predicted the ruling from the Justices'...

Aimee Stephens made national headlines when she said she was fired from her job at metro Detroit-based GR & RG Funeral Homes in 2013 after coming out as a transgender woman. Stephens then sued her employee for discrimination, and the case is now before the Supreme Court. But now, Stephens might not live to see the case's decision. According to a GoFundMe campaign set up on behalf of her family, Stephens' health has deteriorated due to kidney disease, and she's now in hospice care.

Feinstein questioned why Reade waited so long to bring forward her allegations. “And I don’t know this person at all who has made the allegations. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years? He was Vice President,” Feinstein said. To “attack him in this way to me is absolutely ridiculous.” “No, I do not,” she said when asked if she believes Reade, according to the Hill.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block a ruling that requires the Justice Department to give Congress certain secret grand jury material from the investigation conducted by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in March cleared the way for Congress to access secret evidence from MuellerÂ’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in one of a set of separation-of-powers lawsuits between House Democrats and the Trump administration. Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court on Thursday that if it does not put the...

Authoring a unanimous Supreme Court opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg tore into the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for "drastically" straying from judicial norms when hearing a case involving a California immigration consultant. After Evelyn Sineneng-Smith had been convicted of violating a federal law related to encouraging illegal immigration, the Ninth Circuit reversed the decision, not based on arguments presented by Sineneng-Smith, but by third parties the court brought in to submit arguments that the panel of judges themselves had suggested.

The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out the convictions of two government officials implicated in the 2013 Bridgegate scandal, in which then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's (R) allies schemed to create a traffic jam to retaliate against one of his rivals. The justices said in their unanimous decision that while the scheme involved deception and corruption, it did not violate federal law. "The question presented is whether the defendants committed property fraud," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the court's opinion. "The evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing — deception, corruption, abuse of power. But the federal fraud statutes...

Authoring a unanimous Supreme Court opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg tore into the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for "drastically" straying from judicial norms when hearing a case involving a California immigration consultant. After Evelyn Sineneng-Smith had been convicted of violating a federal law related to encouraging illegal immigration, the Ninth Circuit reversed the decision, not based on arguments presented by Sineneng-Smith, but by third parties the court brought in to submit arguments that the panel of judges themselves had suggested. "[T]he appeals panel departed so drastically from the principle of party presentation as to constitute an abuse of discretion,"...

Dean Weingarten in Front of Supreme Court of the United States When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the New York Rifle & Pistol case in 2019, it was big news. The lower courts in the circuits hostile to the Second Amendment have been busy rendering the Second Amendment a second tier Constitutional right. Some members of the Court, notably Justice Clarence Thomas, had written about it. A few days ago, the Court ruled the New York Rifle & Pistol case was moot. Four justices indicated they should grant a writ of certiorari (hear the case) of another Second...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seemed concerned Wednesday about the sweep of Trump administration rules that would allow more employers who cite a religious or moral objection to opt out of providing no-cost birth control to women as required by the Affordable Care Act. Chief Justice John Roberts, a key vote on a court split between conservatives and liberals, suggested that the Trump administration's reliance on a federal religious freedom law to expand the exemption was “too broad.” And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the conversation from a Maryland hospital where she was being treated for an infection...