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A Moment of Supreme Clarity: How the Court Delivered a Blow to the Lumberjack School of Constitutional Law


By: Jonathan Turley | March 6, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/03/06/a-moment-of-supreme-clarity-how-the-court-delivered-a-blow-of-the-lumberjack-school-of-constitutional-law/

Below is my column in USA Today on the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court to reject the disqualification of former president Donald Trump from the 2024 election. Some Democrats are now seeking to resume the effort through Congress to prevent voters from being able to vote for the leading candidate for the presidency.

Here is the column:

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election. The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.

During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.

After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.” Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.

Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”

Well, the court rejected that “unassailable” theory in a unanimous decision. While Tribe’s view was repeated with little contradiction on many networks and newspapers for months, it failed to garner a single vote from either the left or the right of the court.

Things are not going well for those seeking to remake the nation. In 2020, Harvard professor Michael Klarman warned that all of the plans to change the country were ultimately dependent on packing the court. With the 2020 election, he stated that Democrats could change the election system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.”

However, Klarman conceded that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described,” so the court itself had to be changed.

Now that the three progressive justices have joined their conservative colleagues in ruling for Trump, they apparently also will have to go. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that “the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”

The problem for many on the left is that the unanimous decision shattered the narrative repeated for months that Colorado would be reversed because the conservative justices would robotically protect Trump (despite the fact that they have repeatedly ruled against Trump and his policies). Now, by Rep. Raskin’s measure, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor are no longer acting as “real Supreme Court justices.”

Supreme Court transcended ideological divisions

The fact is that the Supreme Court justices have proved, again, that they are precisely the “real Supreme Court justices” that the Founding Fathers envisioned. The court was created to be able to transcend our divisions and politics. On Monday, a court sharply divided along ideological grounds showed the nation that it could speak with one voice. In doing so, it spoke to the things that bind us to each other, including an article of faith in our Constitution that defines us all.

In the news media and in universities, there is a persistent message that the court and the Constitution are the problem. In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically” altered to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks previously went on MSNBC to warn citizens not to become “slaves” to the Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.

Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin even called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.”

The lumberjack school of constitutional law is the rage on our campuses. Free from the obstructions of constitutional demands, activists (and a newly constituted court) could set about pursuing the devil as a nation of Ropers.

Supreme Court ruling provides moment of clarity

Despite the push of court packing and extreme interpretations of the law, most Americans continue to cling to America’s core institutions and constitutional values. For those reasons, this opinion could be one of the most significant in the court’s history, not because of what it did but what it would not allow to be done. It is a moment of clarity for a nation mired in rage politics. It was not just the opinion that brought that clarity but what followed the opinion.

A day after the unanimous ruling, millions of citizens will line up at polling places around the country to vote for their preferred candidates. It is their choice and privilege as citizens. They are also speaking with one voice. Not for a particular party or person, but as free people claiming their right to choose their own leaders.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @JonathanTurley

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Democrats, Not Trump or His Supporters, Are the Real Extremists


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | MARCH 05, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/05/democrats-not-trump-or-his-supporters-are-the-real-extremists/

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Hot on the heels of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling on Monday that states have “no power” to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, Democrats and their lackeys in the corporate press denounced the court for supposedly meddling or interfering in the election.

“Not since Bush v. Gore have we seen a court that’s had this many opportunities to interfere in the election,” said former Rep. Donna Edwards on MSNBC. NBC News’ Ken Dilanian mused that the 9-0 ruling would “be seen by many people as the court essentially interfering in some sense in the election.”

Got that? When Democrats interfere in a presidential election and launch what amounts to an insurrection against the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court steps in and unanimously puts a stop to it, it’s the court, not Democrat activists, who are interfering in the election.

The hypocrisy here is breathtaking but not unexpected. Democrats engage in this kind of projection constantly, taking an extreme position and then decrying any dissent or resistance to it as extremist.

In the Colorado case, two well-funded leftist groups with anodyne names — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Free Speech for People — waged a lawfare campaign with a far-fetched reading of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause,” managing to get Colorado’s Democrat-dominated Supreme Court to rule in December that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot. The plan was to do this in numerous states, foreclosing the possibility of Trump’s reelection.

From the outset, it should have been obvious that the legal argument was bogus, a cynical and clumsy ploy to prop up President Biden’s reelection bid by robbing voters of the chance to cast ballots for Trump. It’s hard to imagine anything getting a unanimous ruling on our deeply divided Supreme Court, but these bozos managed to do it — and in the process embarrassed the many corporate media commentators who twisted themselves into pretzels arguing that the Colorado case was strong.

But if we step back a bit and consider all this in the context of nearly every other scheme Democrats have hatched in recent years, it’s possible to see why they thought it was worth a shot. Time and again, Democrats take unprecedented steps and trample every conceivable norm to advance their agenda, and when anyone objects, they label them an extremist or insurrectionist or Christian nationalist (whatever that means). They project onto their opponents, and especially onto Trump, the very things they are actively engaged in doing.

An obvious example of this is when Democrats warn that if Trump is reelected, he’ll use the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his political rivals. Oh really? This is exactly what the Biden administration has been doing for the past three years to Trump, his lawyers, and his supporters. The criminal cases against Trump are nothing if not the weaponization of the DOJ to crush an unpopular sitting president’s chief political rival.  This weaponization began even before Trump won the White House in 2016. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Democrats used the FBI and the intelligence community to go after the Trump campaign — and continued going after Trump after he won the presidency, perpetuating the Russia-collusion hoax for years with the assistance of a complicit corporate press. If anyone is using the levers of government power to go after their enemies, it’s Democrats, not Trump.

Other examples of Democrat projection abound. After months of letting our cities burn in Black Lives Matter riots, excusing them as “mostly peaceful,” Democrats threw the book at anyone who wandered into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, arresting, jailing, and prosecuting more than a thousand Americans to date, often on flimsy charges that otherwise would hardly merit a fine. Just last week, the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker for his coverage of Jan. 6, marching him out of Blaze’s Dallas office in handcuffs. Democrats feign outrage at the arrest of The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia, but they gloat, as NBC News did, when the Biden administration does the same to right-of-center journalists here in America.

Pick almost any controversial issue, and you’ll find the same pattern at work. Democrats flood the internet with disinformation and propaganda about Covid, and then decry dissenting voices (and accompanying data) as agents of disinformation who must be censored and banned by Big Tech. Same thing for what they call “election disinformation,” which merely refers to opinions and data that run counter to their preferred narrative.

Democrats do this with everything.

  • On abortion, they take the extreme position that it should be allowed up until the moment of birth, then denounce Republican-led states that impose restrictions that are the norm across the Western world.
  • On transgenderism, they insist children can consent to genital mutilation and sterilization, then condemn modest efforts to ban or limit these practices as child abuse.
  • On immigration, they throw open the southern border and let 10 million illegal immigrants flood into the country, then attack anyone who suggests we have a crisis at the border and need to secure it.
  • On crime, they defund the police and decriminalize a host of antisocial, destructive behavior in our cities, precipitating a crime wave of robbery and assault, then denounce as racist any arguments for law and order.
  • On racism itself, they tar everyone on the right with the label but look the other way when the racists on their side call for the genocide of the Jews and defend (even celebrate) Hamas terrorist attacks on civilians.

On nearly every major issue today, Democrats are the extremists. Their denunciations of Trump and his supporters rise in direct proportion to their own extremist agenda. The projection is a tactic, a crude rhetorical ruse. Don’t fall for it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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‘The Supreme Court Has Betrayed Democracy’: Liberals Melt Down After Justices Rule Trump Can Remain on Ballot


By: Harold Hutchison / March 04, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/04/supreme-court-has-betrayed-democracy-liberals-melt-down-justices-rule-trump-can-remain-ballot/

Far left commentator Keith Olbermann vitriolically condemned the Supreme Court on Monday after the justices unanimously ruled individual states could not decide whether Donald Trump could be on their presidential ballots this fall. Pictured: Olbermann hosts a Trump impersonator on Comedy Central’s “The President Show” on April 27, 2017, in New York City. (Photo: Brad Barket/Getty Images)

Liberals on Monday bemoaned the Supreme Court overturning a state supreme court’s ruling tossing former President Donald Trump off the state’s ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court said that Congress alone had the power to enforce the “insurrection clause” of the 14th Amendment in a 9-0 ruling that was unsigned. The Colorado Supreme Court had decided that Trump was disqualified under the provisions of the 14th Amendment in a 4-3 ruling Dec. 19.

“The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy,” former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann posted on X. “Its members including [Ketanji Brown] Jackson, [Elena] Kagan, and [Sonia] Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”

“Supreme Court rules that an adjudicated insurrection can still be president, unless Congress acts,” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner posted. “Not unexpected, but more proof that our institutions of government are not up to the task of saving American democracy. Once again, it’s up to We The People. #VoteLikeHell”

MSNBC contributor Anand Giridharadas called the decision “another corrupt Supreme Court ruling” while linking to an article offering what he put forth as a course of action to counteract what he called “another round of despair bait.”

Other liberals said the ruling would not prevent Trump’s defeat at the ballot box.

“The Supreme Court will not prevent Donald Trump from becoming President again, but Gen Z will,” left-wing YouTube host Luke Beasley posted on X.

“The Supreme Court has decided to keep Donald Trump on the Presidential ballot. We knew this was coming,” Democratic congressional candidate Eugene Vindman posted. “Today’s Supreme Court decision won’t impact what will happen in November. We are going to defeat Donald Trump and take back the House from MAGA extremists.”

Also on MSNBC, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal tried to spin the ruling.

“What it doesn’t put aside is the 14th Amendment, Section 3, is not just about courts, it’s not just about—you know, about ballot—you election officials disqualifying someone. It’s also a rule of thumb for you and me,” Katyal told MSNBC host Ana Cabrera. “I mean, one of the most important moments in our history after the Civil War, our nation came together and said, ‘Look, insurrectionists should not be on the ballot.’ The court today is not saying that Donald Trump is free of the charges of being an insurrectionist.”

“It may be that Congress hasn’t implemented legislation to enforce it, but you and I enforce the 14th Amendment, too, by what we do at the ballot box,” Katyal added.

Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold of Colorado expressed disappointment in the ruling on X.

“I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates,” Griswold posted. “Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrectionists from our ballot.”

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

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Jonathan Turley Op-ed: Supreme Court immunity review and Trump. Three things to know


Jonathan Turley  By Jonathan Turley Fox News | Published March 1, 2024 3:20pm EST

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/supreme-court-immunity-review-trump-things-know

The decision of the Supreme Court to review the immunity question in the Trump prosecution has brought forth the usual (and a couple not so usual) attacks on the integrity of the Court.  While some are calling the justices now part of the “insurrection,” others are accusing them of “slow-walking” the appeal to push any trial past the election. MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin added that, due to the delay for a review of the matter, she was “beyond terrified for our country.”

In reality, the claim that the Court is moving slowly is factually and historically untrue. Indeed, in comparison to most cases, this is a NASCAR pace for an institution that is more focused on issuing right rather rapid decisions.

Some of the usual voices immediately came forward to declare that, once again, the justices are exposing themselves as raw partisans. MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow was declared the review of the matter as “BS” and exposes “the cravenness of the court.” She further declared, again, that the action undermined “legitimacy of the court.”

RACHEL MADDOW CALLED OUT FOR ‘DANGEROUS’ RHETORIC TOWARD SUPREME COURT: ‘FUELING THE RAGE’

Mary Trump, the niece of the former president, went further and declared that “the Supreme Court of the United States just reminded us with this corrupt decision that the insurrection did not fail–it never ended.”

Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, R., Wyo., said that the review effectively “suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear.”

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Regular MSNBC guest Elie Mystal (who previously called the Constitution “trash”) had a more novel take.  With MSNBC host Alex Wagner nodding in apparent agreement, Mystal explained to viewers that this was just an effort of Justice Clarence Thomas (and possibly Samuel Alito) to retire. The theory goes something like this: Thomas does not want to have a Democrat fill his seat, so he is going to postpone the appeal, which will delay a trial for Trump, which will allow Trump to be elected, which will permit Trump to appoint his successor, which will allow Thomas to drive off in his RV for an unending retiree roadtrip. See, it’s that simple.

There is, of course, another possible explanation. Some justices have serious concerns about the lower court decision. At the outset, there are a couple of glaring problems with the claim of “slow-walking” to push the trial past the election.

First, the Court did not create this collision with the election. Both state and federal prosecutors have waited until shortly before the election to bring charges for actions taken almost four years ago. They are now demanding expedited and in some cases abridged reviews due to an urgency that they created.

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Second, this matter has already been curtailed and expedited. Special Counsel Jack Smith has repeatedly pushed to deny Trump standard appellate options and time to present his case. After the Supreme Court refused to effectively cut off his right to an appellate review, the D.C. Circuit did so by pressuring Trump to file directly with the Supreme Court rather than seeking the review of the entire court in an en banc appeal. That standard en banc option was all but eliminated by an order that would have returned the mandate to the district court within days — forcing Trump to argue an appeal while being forced into the resumption of pre-trial proceedings.

SUPREME COURT AGREES TO REVIEW WHETHER TRUMP IMMUNE FROM PROSECUTION IN FEDERAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE CASE

Third, the Court has expedited the matter. The fact is that this is a much shorter schedule and the Court is fitting the case in the middle of a long scheduled and crowded calendar. It allowed the parties a few weeks to fully brief a question with major implications for our constitutional system.

It ordinarily takes months for the Court to even accept a case. The Court has set this matter for argument in April to allow the parties to fully brief the issue and will likely rule by June.

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Some have pointed out that there are cases where the Court moved more swiftly. However, those cases have important distinctions.

For example, Michael Waldman, president of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, noted that in 1974 the Court considered United States v. Nixon “in a matter of weeks.” That is a valid point, but there are a couple of missing relevant facts.

The district court issued the subpoena to Nixon to turn over the famous White House tapes in April 1974. He then ordered compliance in May 1974 when Nixon refused. In allowing a direct appeal, the Court then held oral argument on July 8, 1975. It issued its unanimous decision on July 24, 2975. That was roughly two months after the initial appeal.

That is certainly a faster track by a few weeks. However, the Court was unanimous and this was not an appeal by a criminal defendant. While there was always the chance of an indictment of Nixon (until his pardon by Gerald Ford after he left office), the case concerned the access to evidence in the Watergate investigation. Criminal defendants are afforded the highest level of protection and review in cases.

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Critics also cite the Bush v. Gore decision where the Supreme Court decided the matter in days.  Once again, that is true. I covered that decision for CBS News as a legal analyst and it was a rocket pace. However, the Court was not looking at an approaching election but an approaching inauguration of the next president. The case was decided on December 12, 2000 — roughly three weeks away from the certification of the election by Congress.

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This case is not going to decide whether an election can be held or whether a candidate can be certified. The original March trial date has already been discarded. It is not clear if a trial will occur before the election. It could still theoretically occur even with a June decision of the Court, though it is admittedly less likely with every delay.

That trial could cut both ways. Trump could be acquitted or convicted or it could result in a hung jury. The Court, however, rarely engages in such political calculations. Indeed, some justices may not agree with the exceptional treatment given this case by the appellate panel and may be resent the pressure to dispatch these claims to allow for a trial that may influence an election.

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Notably, the Court has previously rejected expedited appeal requests from Trump, including some issues related to the last presidential election. This appeal is not dependent on the election or tied to its certification. 

It is clear that, unlike the Nixon case, the court is not likely to be unanimous on this question. I have previously expressed doubt over the sweeping claim of immunity presented by the Trump team. However, justices may have good-faith concerns over the implications of the lower court decision as well.

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Some justices have long supported a robust view of executive privilege and power.  They may want to delineate the scope of this privilege with greater precision. In that sense, the Court could uphold the result of the D.C. Circuit while offering a different or more nuanced view of the immunity.

Of course, none of that is nearly as captivating as calling the justices “insurrectionists” or spinning tales of some retirement conspiracy with the RNC and the AARP.

Jonathan Turley teaches a course on the Supreme Court at George Washington University.

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Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.

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Illinois Judge Kicks Trump Off The Ballot, Says Any Votes For Him Must Be ‘Suppressed’


BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | FEBRUARY 29, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/29/illinois-judge-kicks-trump-off-the-ballot-says-any-votes-for-him-must-be-suppressed/

Then-President Donald Trump speaks in Seoul.

While outlets like The Washington Post have tried to convince Americans that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” it actually dies in Illinois courthouses where judges whose expertise revolves around parking tickets kick former presidents off ballots.

In the left’s latest attempt at election interference, Cook County Judge Tracie Porter kicked former President Donald Trump off the primary ballot on Wednesday — but put her own order on hold because she knows it won’t stand. Porter ruled Trump must be removed from the state’s March 19 primary ballot but stayed her own order until Friday pending a likely appeal.

Porter said the quiet part out loud, ruling that the board of elections, which unanimously voted against removing Trump from the ballot, “shall remove Donald J. Trump from the ballot for the General Primary Election on March 19, 2024, or cause any votes for him to be suppressed.”

The suit was brought by the left-wing group Free Speech For People, which argued Trump is ineligible based on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. Trump has not been charged with nor convicted of inciting or partaking in insurrection. Still, that hasn’t stopped left-wing activists from attempting to — as Porter would phrase it — suppress voters’ choice for president. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments challenging the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot. A similar case is underway in Maine.

Free Speech for People received donor support from the Tides Foundation, which funnels dark money to left-wing organizations intent on changing the way elections are run to boost Democrat chances. The Tides Foundation received more than $22 million from George Soros.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung lambasted Porter’s decision, saying the campaign will appeal.

“The Soros-funded Democrat front-groups continue to attempt to interfere in the election and deny President Trump his rightful place on the ballot. Today, an activist Democrat judge in Illinois summarily overruled the state’s board of elections and contradicted earlier decisions from dozens of other state and federal jurisdictions,” Cheung said. “This is an unconstitutional ruling that we will quickly appeal.”

Prior to kicking a former president and 2024 front-runner off the ballot, Porter focused on traffic tickets. The state’s Supreme Court appointed Porter in 2021 to be the “At-Large Cook County Circuit Court Judge.” According to the Cook County Democratic Party, Porter has spent time presiding “over minor traffic violations and Class A misdemeanor matters” in the downtown Chicago area.

Judging by Chicago’s ongoing crime crisis, Porter would better serve Illinois residents by continuing to focus on traffic violations — plus gang violence, illegal immigration, and theft — before telling them for whom they’re allowed to vote.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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How Illegal Aliens Flooding Our Border Skew Elections for Democrats Without Ever Casting A Vote


BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/28/how-illegal-aliens-flooding-our-border-skew-elections-for-democrats-without-ever-casting-a-vote/

President Joe Biden talks on the phone

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Why did President Joe Biden reverse former President Donald Trump’s order excluding noncitizens from being counted in the census, while simultaneously issuing a slew of executive orders decimating the integrity of our southern border? While illegal immigrants cannot vote in elections (despite Democrats’ best efforts), the left is using their illegal presence to rig elections by shifting the political landscape through apportionment.

Both congressional and electoral college apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area. Trump signed a memo in July of 2020 that barred illegal immigrants from being counted in the census, which is used to apportion representation in Washington. Biden, however, reversed the policy and ordered the census to include illegal immigrants and other noncitizens.

This means that American citizens aren’t receiving balanced representation in their government.

States can pick up — or lose — a congressional seat depending on the size of their population, despite the fact that some of that population may not even be allowed to vote. Millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom are in large, left-leaning cities, dilute the voting power of American citizens who may live in a mildly populated area composed of legal residents.

And Democrats know what they’re doing.

[READ: 2020 Census Asks For Your Racial Identity, But Not If You’re A Citizen]

Democrat New York Rep. Yvette Clark said during a 2021 hearing that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”

Clark’s resurfaced clip prompted Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and others to introduce the “Equal Representation Act” which would mandate only legal citizens are counted for congressional districts and the Electoral College map.

Sanctuary Cities

So-called “sanctuary cities,” which promise not to enforce immigration laws and often guarantee lodging to illegal residents, have long blurred the lines of law, bucking federal immigration policy and then begging taxpayers to foot the bill. But despite the drain on government resources — and sometimes violence — these policies invite, these cities and left-leaning states have reason to incentivize illegal immigrants because it helps them adjust for apportionment.

As residents flee blue states like California and New York for more family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly states like Florida and Texas, Democrats need to recoup their population losses. Illegal immigrants inflate the census data, which in turn could help Democrats retain their power.

Constitutionally Suspect

The framers likely would not support Biden’s position that illegal immigrants deserve to be counted in apportionment to determine representation.

The Constitution’s original census clause stated:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment stipulated that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”

But “whole number of persons” was likely not intended to encompass those illegally residing in the states.

Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.

The three-fifths compromise also lessened the incentive for slaveholding states to import more slaves in order to expand their population and increase their representation.

No ‘Colorable Constitutional Claim’

Lower courts had blocked Trump’s memorandum from taking effect after 23 states challenged the memo, saying it violated the Constitution and federal census statutes. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on the question nor answered whether the word “persons” encompasses illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment. But the high court has previously ruled in Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous court:

Neither the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.

If voting, which is a benefit exclusively for citizens, is off-limits to illegal immigrants, it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents. And yet, thanks to Democrats, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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Justice Jackson Shuts Down After Trump Lawyer Explains Why ‘Insurrection’ Mania Is A Stupid Talking Point


BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 08, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/08/justice-jackson-shuts-down-after-trump-lawyer-explains-why-insurrection-mania-is-a-stupid-talking-point/

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quickly abandoned her “insurrection” questioning on Thursday when former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Jonathan Mitchell pointed out that the term, although used widely by corporate media, Democrats, and Colorado’s lawyers, does not accurately describe the events of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

The exchange occurred during oral arguments for the presidential frontrunner’s challenge to the Colorado Supreme Court’s December 2023 ruling affirming Democrats’ decision to remove Trump from the Centennial State’s 2024 primary ballot.

After going back and forth with Mitchell several times about what constitutes eligibility for constitutional disqualification from holding office, Jackson pivoted to the definition of insurrection.

In a question about “the violent attempts of the petitioner’s supporters in this case to ‘halt the count’ on January 6 qualified as an insurrection as defined by Section 3,” Jackson asked Mitchell to clarify his position on whether or not Trump engaged in “insurrection” during the Capitol riot in 2021.

Jackson clearly sourced her framing from the corporate media and Democrats who, mere minutes into the 2021 Capitol riot, deemed the bedlam a criminal product of Trump.

They immediately lumped the patriotic, law-abiding citizens with concerns about the 2020 election’s legitimacy protesting in D.C. with the people who vandalized Capitol property. Big Tech weaponized this mischaracterization to justify its censorship of Trump’s social media calls for peace. President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice also adopted the sweeping insurrection accusations as its primary motivation to prosecute any and every one of its political enemies in or near the federal building that day.

“I read your opening brief to accept that those events counted as an insurrection but then your reply seemed to suggest that they were not,” Jackson said.

“We never accepted or conceded in our opening brief that this was an insurrection,” Mitchell retorted. “What we said in our opening brief was President Trump did not engage in any act that can plausibly be characterized as insurrection.”

Jackson, unsatisfied with Mitchell’s prompt rejection of her assertion, doubled down.

“So why would it not be?” Jackson pressed. “What is your argument that it’s not? Your reply brief says that it wasn’t because, I think you say, it did not involve an organized attempt to overthrow the government.”

Mitchell conceded “an organized concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence” is one of the defining factors of an insurrection but said Trump’s actions never met that standard.

“My point is that a chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection?” Jackson asked.

“We didn’t concede that it’s an effort to overthrow the government either, Justice Jackson,” Mitchell replied. “None of these criteria were met.”

“This was a riot. It was not an insurrection,” Mitchell concluded. “The events were shameful criminal violence, all of those things, but did not qualify as insurrection as that term is used in Section Three.”

Mitchell continued but was interrupted by Jackson who hurriedly ended her questioning time.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Democrat Lawyer Admits At Supreme Court That Only One Party Can Be Allowed To Rig Elections


BY: EDDIE SCARRY | FEBRUARY 08, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/08/democrat-lawyer-admits-at-supreme-court-that-only-one-party-can-be-allowed-to-rig-elections/

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There was never a purer demonstration of how traitorous Democrats are about “defending democracy,” or whatever corny phrase they like to use, than what just happened at the Supreme Court.

At the very end of oral arguments in the Colorado case determining whether the state had the right to remove former President Donald Trump’s name from the 2024 ballot, Justice Samuel Alito asked the state’s solicitor general, Shannon Stevenson, what’s going to happen if other states “retaliate” by, say, removing Joe Biden from theirs. Elected officials in at least six states have suggested it as a course of action.

It’s an obvious question that Stevenson either wasn’t prepared for or knew it would expose her state’s case as a tragic joke. “Your honor, I think we have to have faith in our system that people will follow their election processes appropriately, that they will take realistic views of what insurrection is under the 14th Amendment,” she said. “Courts will review those decisions, this court may review some of them.”

What she said next should have resulted in her being laughed out of the room. “But,” she said, “I don’t think that this court should take those threats too seriously in its resolution of this case.”

Alito challenged Stevenson on whether she thought the suggestion of retaliation, coming from places like Florida, Arizona, and Georgia, all potentially swing states in the next election, was truly unfounded.

“Um, I think we have processes—” she said, before being interrupted.

“We should proceed on the assumption that it’s not a serious threat?” said Alito.

Stevenson said there are “institutions in place” that should “handle” such matters. Asked to specify which institutions, she said, “Our states, their own electoral rules, the administrators who enforce those rules.” She also said voters would have to rely on “courts.”

In essence, to believe this entire case by Democrats is an effort to safeguard democracy, rather than rig an election, is to trust that Republicans would never dare try doing the same. If they did, it would ruin Democrats’ plot. Alternatively, if such threats were made good, we should expect enough opposition to render them neutral.

In fairness, a lot of Republicans are naive morons who time and time again respond to Democrats politically kicking their teeth in by saying, “Well, if we do anything back, we’re no better than them.” So, Stevenson’s is not a terrible gamble.

But there’s a long way to go before the election. Attitudes change, and they will rapidly if Colorado is successful and other Democrat states decide to follow the example of unilaterally determining Trump is ineligible to run for a second term, all because he rejected the accuracy of election results (as Democrats do on a routine basis).

The media’s fixation on the Colorado case has focused solely on the legal merits of the case, when the more urgent matter has always been not what happens if it’s ruled legal to keep Trump off a ballot, but what it means for future democratic elections if he is.

There’s a reason until recently it was not only abnormal but unthinkable in America for one political party to use the justice system to exterminate its opponent. The reason is self-evident— mutually assured destruction. If they can do it to us, we can do it to them. It’s what they do in the Congo and every other war-torn state across the globe.

Alito intentionally invoked that perilous likelihood. Stevenson’s response — “I don’t think that this court should take those threats too seriously” — showed just how seriously Democrats take “defending democracy.”

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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Why Big Tech Needs First Amendment to Censor You


By: Joel Thayer / February 05, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/05/why-big-tech-needs-first-amendment-to-censor-you/

The social media platforms say, on the one hand, they have every right to act as publishers to curate their platforms any way they see fit. On the other hand, they say they are not publishers to gain legal immunity under Section 230. They can’t be allowed to have it both ways. (Photo: Jonathan Raa/Nur Photo/Getty Images)

Big Tech is back at the Supreme Court.

Appealing from a big loss they suffered at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, social media platforms are challenging Texas’ social media law that prohibits those companies from engaging in viewpoint discrimination when curating their platforms.

They claim Texas’ law violates their First Amendment rights for compelling them to host content. In other words, the platforms are saying that prohibiting a platform’s viewpoint censorship is effectively the same as forcing students in public schools to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

HUH??? What, WHAT?

It’s an odd argument for myriad reasons, but mainly because Big Tech has continually said that they serve as neutral platforms that merely transmit information from one point to another, like an internet service provider or a telephone.

They don’t claim to be publishers, like a newspaper or broadcaster. For example, Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times that Facebook “explicitly view[s] [itself] as not editors … .”  Nor “does [Facebook] want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed.”

Zuckerberg’s view is consistent with Big Tech’s court representations when seeking legal immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Act. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; X, the former Twitter; and Google have all stated that they are neither responsible for, nor materially contribute to, their users’ content to avoid liability for hosting it.

In other words, they are conduits of others’ speech, not speakers themselves.

It’s why their First Amendment argument is patently confusing: You have to be speaking to avail yourself of its protection.

It’s also why the First Amendment has long allowed the government to apply nondiscrimination laws, as Texas did, on communications platforms that merely transmit the speech of others. For instance, telephone companies are prohibited from discriminating against callers. 

The courts have upheld nondiscrimination provisions imposed on internet service providers.  And the Supreme Court has held that even a property owner must allow expressive activities on his property.

However, platforms say, on the one hand, they have every right to act as publishers to curate their platforms any way they see fit. On the other hand, they say they are not publishers to gain legal immunity under Section 230.

Not only are these two positions contradictory, but they are also inconsistent with the First Amendment’s history and its jurisprudence. The relevant part of the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … .” James Madison, when drafting the Free Speech Clause, intended it as a bulwark against government influence over what we can say or do. It doesn’t provide for tech exceptionalism.

Indeed, the opposite is true. Yes, the First Amendment does derive, in part, from Madison’s—and the nation’s—distrust over the concentrated power the government wields. But Madison also knew that private operators, too, could be a source of concentrated authority, and, if left unchecked, could amass more power than the government itself.

Today’s tech behemoths have proven Madison’s skepticism warranted. The power of social media platforms have over speech eclipses that of any sitting president or government. As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas succinctly put it, social media companies can “remove [an] account ‘at any time for any or no reason.’” In this case, Twitter, now X, “unapologetically argues that it could turn around and ban all pro-LGBT speech for no other reason than its employees want to pick on members of that community … .”

And recent history shows that the tech titans aren’t shy at doing just that with impunity.

YouTube blocks and demonetizes users who support certain political candidates or content creators that Google does not favor. What was then still Twitter censored The New York Post for accurate reporting ahead of a consequential election. Facebook even removed posts that shared a study published by the British Medical Journal—one of the oldest and most prestigious medical journals in the world—because the platform believed the study was disinformation for calling some of Pfizer’s data on its COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness into question.

It’s clear from their advocacy in this case that Big Tech companies don’t truly care about free speech. What they really care about is liability. If Texas is now going to hold them accountable for these decisions to censor users, then they are going to need another liability shield for that.

Big Tech thinks the First Amendment is the vessel to ensure they have complete immunity from any scrutiny. Candidly, it’s hard to imagine that Madison drafted the First Amendment as a corporate instrument to cut down an individual’s speech, but that’s what they argue. Not to mince words, their aim in this case is to contort the application of the First Amendment to create more protections to void every legislative proposal directed at them. It has almost nothing to do with free speech.

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Texas Isn’t ‘Ignoring’ The Supreme Court, It’s Upholding the Law


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JANUARY 25, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/25/texas-isnt-ignoring-the-supreme-court-its-upholding-the-law/

Border fence

A talking point cropping up on social media and press contends that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is “ignoring” or “defying” the Supreme Court by continuing to erect fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. This is wrong.

Abbott can’t ignore the Supreme Court because Texas wasn’t ordered to do anything. SCOTUS vacated an order against the Department of Homeland Security [sic] that stopped the Feds from cutting down razor fencing along the border. Nothing says that Texas can’t erect the fencing.

Though, you must marvel at the breathtaking audacity of Democrats suddenly treating the court’s (non-existent) words as if they were sacred text. This very week, President Joe Biden again ignored the court, rolling out yet another iteration of his unconstitutional student “loan forgiveness” program. Biden habitually circumvents, ignores, defies, attacks, and demeans SCOTUS — and Democrats cheer him on along the way. Senate leaders and “dark money” fake media organizations like ProPublica have poured millions into delegitimizing and smearing the court to undermine its authority.

Now, it is true that Biden has the power to ratchet up the fight, take federal control of the border, and implement any policy he desires — or, more specifically, any non-policy he desires. The Biden administration is standing in the way of Texas’ efforts to enforce state and federal law. Once that happens, we can have our constitutional crisis.

As a political matter, the case tells us that the border mayhem is not only a matter of historic incompetence but is also driven by ideology. Many Democrats believe limiting illegal immigration is immoral. They believe anyone who wants to walk over the border should be able to do so without any incumbrances.

This week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that razor wire at the southern border is ineffective and gets “in the way” of law enforcement. I’m no expert on border control, admittedly, but I am relatively certain that any fence is better than what is happening now.

A few years back, Nancy Pelosi distilled the left’s view on physical barriers when she called them an “immorality,” the “least effective way to protect the border,” and too expensive. “I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” the then House Speaker said. None of that is true, either. The idea that real fences and walls can’t mitigate the movement of people is undermined by looking at the entirety of history. The least effective way is probably what we’re doing now.

The “something else,” of course, is meant to call you a racist. The reality is that Mexico is the top origin country for legal immigrants. Most Americans still see immigration as a net positive. The lawlessness at the border, and now in major cities, is helping undermine that sentiment.

One of the vital jobs of the federal government is to protect the sovereignty, borders, and citizens of the nation — even more important than creating “book ban” czars or banning Zyn packets. But not only has Biden abdicated his responsibility on that front, he wants to stop others from doing their duty, as well. But sometimes, it seems like the lawlessness is the point.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Dictatorship Won’t Kill America, The Rot Of Partisan Abuse Will


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JANUARY 24, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/24/dictatorship-wont-kill-america-the-rot-of-partisan-abuse-will/

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The other day Rachel Maddow, one of the most unhinged conspiracy theorists in major media, described Donald Trump’s alleged pitch to Republicans:

If you pick me, that’ll be the end of politics, and you won’t have to deal with politics anymore. You won’t have to deal with contested elections, you won’t have to deal with contests or divisions when it comes to power, you’ll have a strongman leader and I’ll just do what I want. And won’t that be a lot simpler? That’s what he’s offering. That strongman model is what the Republican base is enthused about.

Funny, because this also happens to be what Maddow is enthused about. It’s what the officials taking leading presidential candidates off ballots are enthused about. So is Joe Biden, who gives angry speeches demonizing opposition voters and demanding one-party rule. Everyone wants his own dictator. Every president wants to be one. Politics can turn normally rational people into raging authoritarians.

The thing about wanna-be dictators, though, is that they have no real way of pulling it off. Don’t get me wrong: the consequences of an imperial presidency are bad enough. But there will be no military coups in America. There will be no Hitler. No political riot is going to overthrow “democracy.” That’s all paranoia. The reality is much more mundane. It’s what we have now — a slow-motion, tedious corrosion of basic standards.

And both sides aren’t equally at fault. The things progressives detest most about our system—a deliberative Senate, federalism, counter-majoritarian institutions, various inconvenient liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, for starters—compel Trump to deal with “politics.”  

Here, for instance, is something I think most Democrats probably know but would never say: If a President Trump blatantly exceeded his constitutional authority, it is highly likely that “conservative” justices would stop him. Yet every time the court renders a decision undercutting the political agenda of the GOP, which is often, the media acts like it’s some big surprise. It’s not. And Trump, for all his bluster last term, didn’t ignore the courts.

Now, if Biden blatantly exceeded his executive authority, as he already often does, what are the chances that a “liberal” majority court would bless his actions? When you have no limiting principles, it all comes down to justifying the morality of the underlying issue. Considering the modern left’s collective superiority complex, that is never a difficult task.

We don’t really need to theorize about how this works, either. Many left-wing politicians and intellectuals — self-styled defenders of “democracy” — not only implore Biden to ignore courts, they press him to declare national emergencies empowering the president to run virtually the entire economy through a massive administrative state. If Trump threatened to take similar power, the media would be convulsing with horror.

Indeed, the contemporary left isn’t working to delegitimize the court because it harbors ethical concerns (the people leading the charge are corrupt), it’s because they want to circumvent a court that still occasionally limits state power and preserves American “democracy.”

Won’t that be a lot simpler? Maybe if Trump wins in 2024, he’ll figure out that the Federalist Society’s principled jurists make no political sense for him and nominate lightweight partisans like Sonia Sotomayor to uphold whatever crackpot theory he wants. Why not?

When the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act, eliminating racist preferences in schools, Biden said, “We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize: We cannot let this decision be the last word.” That is something of a mantra for him.

A few years ago, Biden admitted he didn’t have the constitutional authority to extend (Trump’s) eviction moratorium. An extension would not “pass constitutional muster,” he said. The president, the administration noted, had “not only kicked the tires, he has double, triple, quadruple checked.”

It was illegal, and Biden did it anyway.  Congressional Democrats, tasked to protect the interests of their institution, cheered him on. The same goes for the obviously unconstitutional student loan bailout Biden keeps proposing. High-ranking Democrats, in fact, demand that Biden ignores the Constitution and separation of powers.

If Biden feels like he can dismiss SCOTUS on student loans, or anything else, why shouldn’t Texas ignore SCOTUS on protecting its borders? Maybe Texas should think about taking up the Biden method, which would entail erecting a new, slightly different fence every time the court shoots down the idea.  

All of it is reminiscent of Barack Obama telling Americans he couldn’t pass the DREAM Act because he was not a “king” or an “emperor,” and then doing it anyway. Indeed, the premise of the Obama presidency was the circumvention of “politics,” summed up neatly in the illiberal notion of political “unity.”

Once Obama lost control of Congress in 2010, he not only acted like a person who didn’t “have to deal with politics anymore,” he became the first president in memory to openly champion working around the law-making branch of government. “If Congress won’t act, I will,” he liked to say. People cheered.

Since then, every time Democrats can’t get their way, we are inundated with stories about how the system isn’t working correctly, rather than stories about how the contemporary left is destroying the system to fix the problem.

Now, I’m not naïve. Most voters couldn’t care less about these idealistic arguments. I don’t know “what time it is,” apparently. That said, protecting the system is not only a high-minded pursuit, but also the most practical way to preserve your own policy achievements and freedoms.

But you can’t expect the opposition to play by rules when you refuse to honor them. You can’t lecture everyone about accepting elections when you won’t. And you can’t keep acting like you’re saving “democracy” when you’re murdering it.

I mean, you can. It seems like the more norm-busting degradation of the system you promise, the more popular you become these days. But that does not bode well for our future.  

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Why SCOTUS Will Likely Smack Down Two Of Jack Smith’s Get-Trump Charges As Non-Crimes


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 02, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/02/why-scotus-will-likely-smack-down-two-of-jack-smiths-get-trump-charges-as-non-crimes/

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Last week, the Supreme Court rejected Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request that the high court fast-track an appeal by former President Donald Trump claiming immunity from the charges related to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While the immunity questions will likely return to the Supreme Court after the D.C. Circuit weighs in on the issues, before then the justices will consider the validity of two of the four charges levied against the former president — and it is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the “crimes” the special counsel charged are not crimes at all. Here’s your laws plainer.

Smith charged Trump in a four-count indictment in a federal court in D.C., seeking to hold the former president and 2024 GOP front-runner criminally responsible for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Specifically, the indictment charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

While all four theories of criminal liability are weak, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether the events of Jan. 6 qualify as criminal obstruction of an official proceeding under Section 1512 of the federal criminal code in United States v. Fischer. 

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Joseph Fischer’s appeal that presents the question of whether 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) criminalizes acts unrelated to investigations and evidence that obstructs an “official proceeding.” Fischer, like Trump, was charged with violating § 1512(c) by engaging in conduct on Jan. 6 that obstructed the certification of the electoral vote. 

The question for the Supreme Court in the Fischer case is one of statutory interpretation. Thus, to understand the issue requires a detailed study of the specific language of § 1512(c). That section, titled “Witness, Victim, or Informant Tampering,” provides:

(c) Whoever corruptly — 

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or 

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, 

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Fischer and Trump, as well as scores of other Jan. 6 defendants, were charged with violating subsection 2 of § 1512(c) by “otherwise” obstructing or impeding the certification of the electoral vote. In Fischer’s case, he asked the trial court to dismiss the § 1512(c) charge, arguing the statute only criminalized conduct that rendered evidence unavailable to an “official proceeding.” The district court agreed and dismissed the § 1512(c) count against Fischer. The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in a 2-1 decision reversed the lower court, with the two-judge majority holding that § 1512(c) criminalized any conduct that obstructed or impeded an official proceeding, whether that conduct impaired the availability of evidence or not, leading the Supreme Court to grant certiorari.

While forecasting the outcome of an appeal from the Supreme Court always leaves room for error, for several reasons the high court seems likely to hold that § 1512(c) does not reach the conduct of Fischer, Trump, or other Jan. 6 defendants. Most predictive is the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in the case Begay v. United States, which interpreted another statute that, like § 1512(c), used an “otherwise” catchall clause.

In Begay, the question before the court was the meaning of a section of the Armed Career Criminal Act that imposed a heightened punishment for individuals with three or more prior convictions for violent felonies or serious drug offenses. The act defined a “violent felony” as “any crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another,” or “is burglary, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives, or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another” (emphasis added).

The majority in Begay held the defendant’s prior felony DUI conviction did not constitute a “violent felony” under the “otherwise” language of the statute because “the provision’s listed examples — burglary, arson, extortion, or crimes involving the use of explosives — illustrate the kinds of crimes that fall within the statute’s scope,” and “their presence indicates that the statute covers only similar crimes, rather than every crime that ‘presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.’”

In reaching this conclusion, the Begay court stressed that in interpreting statutes, courts must seek “to give effect … to every clause and word” of the statute. The majority further reasoned that if the “otherwise” language meant to cover all crimes that present a “serious potential risk of physical injury,” there would have been no reason for Congress to have included the examples.

The holding and reasoning underlying the Begay decision should compel a similar conclusion in the Fischer case, namely that subsection 2 of § 1512(c) only criminalizes conduct that “otherwise” obstructs an “official proceeding” if the conduct charged is similar to the conduct covered by subsection 1. After all, if Congress sought to criminalize any conduct impairing an official proceeding, why then would subsection 1 be needed?

The conduct prohibited by subsection 1 of § 1512(c) all concerns the impairment of evidence for an official proceeding, by criminalizing the alteration, destruction, mutilation, or concealment of “a record, document, or other object…” Thus, under Begay’s reasoning, to constitute a crime under subsection 2 of § 1512(c), the indictment must charge that Fischer (or the other defendants) “otherwise” impaired evidence for use in an official proceeding. 

Nowhere in the indictment returned against Fischer is there an allegation that he somehow impaired evidence relevant to an official proceeding. So, if the Supreme Court follows the reasoning of Begay, as a matter of law, then Fischer did not violate § 1512(c), and that charge against him should be dismissed. Likewise, the § 1512(c) charge against Trump, which also did not allege an impairment of evidence, would fail, as would the second count alleging Trump conspired to violate that statute. 

With the Supreme Court deciding the Fischer appeal this term, the reasonable response would be for Smith to put the brakes on the criminal trial against Trump to await a ruling from the high court. The special counsel and the district court, however, have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than one year away.

But as the Fischer case may soon prove, the convictions Smith seeks may be for crimes that don’t exist. Sadly, half the country doesn’t seem to care.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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You’d Be Surprised Which States Persecute Religious Schools and Charities


BY: TIM ROSENBERGER | DECEMBER 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/26/youd-be-surprised-which-states-persecute-religious-schools-and-charities/

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Attempts to sideline religion from American public life are not new, but whereas conservatives typically think that this type of discrimination is endemic to blue states, the reality is much more complex. In fact, in a new Manhattan Institute report, Notre Dame Law Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett and I discover that states throughout the country are breaking the law by persecuting religious schools and charities.

The Supreme Court, in last year’s Carson v. Makin, clarified that states cannot exclude religious organizations because they are religious or force such organizations to secularize their offerings. Despite the clarity of the court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, many states, including some that one would expect to embrace religious freedom, continue to discriminate against religious organizations unfairly.

Here are nine of the most unexpected offenders.

1. Virginia

Disabled students suffer because of Virginia’s violation of the First Amendment. Virginia’s school districts and local governments can contract with any “public or private nonsectarian school, agency, institution,” or “nonsectarian child-day programs” to provide special education services. If the nearest option or best fit for your student happens to have a religious affiliation, your child will have to attend a further or worse option to receive funding.

Historically black colleges and universities and other nonprofit institutions of higher education are unconstitutionally prevented from using state funds for facilities or programs related to “sectarian instruction.” Virginia singles out religious institutions for worse treatment under industrial development powers and in eligibility for historic preservation consideration and grants, and excludes them from receiving funds to provide social services. Egregiously, this latter provision specifically singles out some religious organizations — the YMCA, YWCA, Habitat for Humanity, and the Salvation Army — for special treatment.

Virginia provides a tax rebate for fuel used in school buses but excludes buses used to take students to religious schools. 

2. Montana

Montana similarly provides funding for day education of students in private institutions so long as they are at “private, non-sectarian schools.” Like Virginia, Montana excludes religious schools from its school bus fuel tax rebate.

Montana’s work-study program allows students to work in construction and building maintenance but excludes from eligibility any building “used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place of worship.”

Religious health care providers face restrictions on how they can use funds under a Montana low-cost capital scheme for new buildings. And while Montana offers a permissive array of nonprofit-themed specialty license plates, including plates celebrating a soccer club, a shooting club, and a group that feeds animals, religious nonprofits are explicitly excluded from the plate program.

3. Georgia

Georgia does not allow pre-kindergarten providers to give any religious instruction. It specifies that this rule extends even to programs that have both approved secular and religious versions and notes that no funds may be spent on religious instruction.

Religious organizations are excluded from the state’s rural loan guarantee program. Suppose a church in Georgia wants to use taxpayer funds to feed the hungry, house the homeless, or provide health care. In that case, it must fastidiously maintain a separate budget for its welfare ministries. This paperwork nightmare means many churches offer fewer services than they otherwise might.

Georgia even imposes restrictions on the generosity of its employees, empowering them to contribute to nonprofits but excluding any “religious organization.”

4. Alabama

Though in better shape than Georgia, Alabama still falls well short of Carson’s requirements. The state allows a moment of silence during the pre-K school day but forbids religious instruction. Any religious activities must take place “outside of … the school day.”

In much the same way, Alabama theoretically allows students to use its higher education grants at religious colleges but requires that schools accepting the grants use them only for “essentially secular education functions” and “carefully segregate funds to ensure that this rule is enforced.” The law would presumably exclude from funding those students who are pursuing careers as clergy, religious school teachers, and faith-based counselors.

Alabama places restrictions on funding structures used for religious purposes, restricts the content of services at family resource centers and municipal special health care facilities, and excludes faith-based organizations from the state’s employees’ combined charitable campaign.

Perhaps most amusingly, Alabama does not allow religious nonprofits to enjoy proceeds from greyhound racing days.

5. Arkansas

Arkansas similarly restricts pre-K content to be “secular and neutral with respect to religion.” It also requires that distance-learning providers be nonsectarian.

Arkansas subjects its citizens to a lifetime of unconstitutional forced secularism. A family of a child under 2 will find that Arkansas’ Life Choices Lifeline Program permits only nonsectarian content. Arkansawyers in programs receiving youth development grants cannot participate in religious instruction, services, or programming. Elders in the Arkansas Older Workers Community Service Employment Program cannot build or maintain any facilities used for religious instruction or worship.  

Despite the state’s proud history as the buckle of America’s Bible Belt, its Small Museum Grant Program excludes any religious projects. Local waterworks commissions can make donations to community chests but not to any sectarian nonprofits.

6. Oregon

While other states place unconstitutional restrictions on the activities of faith-based pre-K providers, Oregon goes an egregious step further, outright banning religious organizations from its universal pre-K program.

Oregon violates Carson in later education too. High school students can enroll in college classes through the state’s Expanded Options Program but may only select courses that are “nonsectarian.” Similarly, while the state can contract with private institutions, courses must be “nonsectarian educational services” or “nonsectarian subjects completed by undergraduate students.”

7. Florida

Florida has provided grants to faith-based, in-person education providers through its Family Empowerment Scholarship program. But its laws, while conforming to abandoned Supreme Court precedent, must comply with the demands of the First Amendment as clarified in Carson.

At present, Florida does not allow sectarian organizations to participate in its remote learning program. It operates two separate scholarship programs that exclude religious schools and refuse funding to students pursuing degrees in “theology or divinity.”

Perhaps most concerningly, Florida places restrictions on the content of programming provided to victims of domestic violence. Its Batterer Intervention program excludes any study of “faith-based ideology,” even when such content would be helpful to victims.

8. Missouri

Missouri has been at the center of recent caselaw clarifying the First Amendment since the Supreme Court found that Missouri violated the free exercise clause by excluding a faith-based preschool from a state program that provided recycled tires for playground surfacing. While Missouri has improved its laws, work remains to be done.

Juniors and seniors in private Missouri colleges can get state loans for tuition. But those loans cannot be used for any “sectarian” instruction. Missouri’s Health and Educational Facilities Authority Act provides loans for educational facilities except for “property used or to be used for sectarian instruction or study.”

More concerningly, Missouri does not allow support services for high-risk students to be offered at private, religious schools. This means a struggling student at a St. Louis Catholic high school or Lutheran middle school would have to leave campus to receive the services they need to be successful. This burden can make much-needed services inaccessible for the students most in need of the rigor and structure afforded by parochial schools.

9. Indiana

Under Indiana’s work-study program, students cannot be paid for “sectarian” work. The state’s Division of Family Resources must exclude any sectarian work from its contracts with nonprofits. If a county wants to support its local nonprofit hospital, it can only do so if the hospital’s board is “nonsectarian.” This provision excludes struggling faith-based community hospitals from support despite their essential services and, in many cases, decades as community anchors.

An Indiana historic preservation grant applicant must have “no affiliation with religion.” Most disturbingly, Indiana regulates the religious expression of the dead, with a law stating that a memorial corporation cannot “promote the interests or teachings of a specific church, sect, school, or creed.”

The Path Forward

American conservatives often think of themselves as the defenders of the First Amendment and religious liberty in particular. Many are probably shocked to see their states among the worst violators of the Carson principle.

Fortunately, red states should be able to act quickly to remedy these violations by amending laws or having their state attorneys general issue opinion letters committing to the state’s conformity to the First Amendment.

For states that refuse to meet their constitutional obligations, lawyers from the Becket Fund, law school religious liberty clinics, and think tanks stand ready to vindicate infringed religious liberties.

Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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Supreme Court declines to issue expedited ruling on Trump immunity case


By Bill Mears , Shannon Bream , Adam Sabes Fox News | Published December 22, 2023 2:45pm EST

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/supreme-court-declines-issue-expedited-ruling-trump-immunity-case

The Supreme Court has declined Friday to issue an expedited ruling on whether former President Trump has immunity from prosecution related to the 2020 election interference case. Appellate courts are hearing the immunity case, but the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that it would proceed as normal.

Trump’s criminal trial in Washington, D.C. was scheduled to begin on March 4, but it’s unclear if the Supreme Court ruling will force a delay. Special Counsel Jack Smith initially asked the Supreme Court to expedite arguments in the presidential immunity case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has already indicated it would expedite its consideration of the immunity case.

Trump Iowa speech
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Dec. 16 in Durham, N.H. (AP Photo/Reba Saldanha)

Trump’s legal team earlier this week filed a written response to Smith’s request, urging the Supreme Court not to rush things.

“This appeal presents momentous, historic questions,” the brief states. “An erroneous denial of a claim of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution unquestionably warrants this Court’s review. The Special Counsel contends that ‘[i]t is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court.'”

Jack Smith
Special Counsel Jack Smith arrives to give remarks on a recently unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former President Donald Trump on Aug. 1, in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images/File)

“That does not entail, however, that the Court should take the case before the lower courts complete their review. Every jurisdictional and prudential consideration calls for this Court to allow the appeal to proceed first in the D.C. Court.”

Trump at Manhattan courthouse
Former President Donald Trump speaks after exiting the courtroom for a break at New York Supreme Court, Dec. 7, in New York.  (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

Trump is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. 

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Special counsel in Trump case unconstitutional, former Reagan AG says


By Brianna Herlihy Fox News | Published December 21, 2023 12:41pm EST

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/special-counsel-trump-case-unconstitutional-former-reagan-ag-says

Former Attorney General Ed Meese has presented arguments to the Supreme Court that they should reject Special Counsel Jack Smith’s requests because he was unconstitutionally appointed in the first place. Meese, along with law professors Steven G. Calabresi and Gary S. Lawson, filed a friend-of-the-court brief Wednesday to present the case that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Smith — a private citizen — is in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. 

“Not clothed in the authority of the federal government, Smith is a modern example of the naked emperor,” the brief states. 

“Improperly appointed, he has no more authority to represent the United States in this Court than Bryce Harper, Taylor Swift, or Jeff Bezos,” they argued. 

RED STATE AGS BLAST SPECIAL COUNSEL PUSH FOR SCOTUS TO RUSH TRUMP CASE: ‘PARTISAN INTERESTS’

Jack Smith, special counsel
Special Counsel Jack Smith arrives to give remarks on a recently unsealed indictment, including four felony counts against former President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 1. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The brief was filed in response to Smith’s request to the court to expedite former President Donald Trump’s case arguing presidential immunity for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, which are connected to criminal charges brought by Smith. Meese argues that the “illegality” of Smith’s appointment is “sufficient to sink Smith’s petition, and the Court should deny review.” 

Messe and company noted in the brief that Smith was appointed “to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity [including former President Donald Trump] violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.”

While Garland cited as statutory authority for this appointment, Meese argues that “none of those statutes, nor any other statutory or constitutional provisions, remotely authorized the appointment by the Attorney General of a private citizen to receive extraordinary criminal law enforcement power under the title of Special Counsel.”

“Second, even if one overlooks the absence of statutory authority for the position, there is no statute specifically authorizing the Attorney General, rather than the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint such a Special Counsel,” the former AG wrote. 

SPECIAL COUNSEL JACK SMITH CALLS ON SUPREME COURT TO RULE ON TRUMP IMMUNITY CLAIM

Ed Meese at microphone
Former Attorney General Edwin Meese delivers remarks after being awarded the National Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump during a ceremony in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 8, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“Under the Appointments Clause, inferior officers can be appointed by department heads only if Congress so directs by statute… and so directs specifically enough to overcome a clear-statement presumption in favor of presidential appointment and senatorial confirmation. No such statute exists for the Special Counsel,” he added. 

Meese, who served as attorney general under former President Reagan, said “the Special Counsel, if a valid officer, is a superior (or principal) rather than inferior officer, and thus cannot be appointed by any means other than presidential appointment and senatorial confirmation regardless of what any statutes purport to say.”

Earlier this month, Smith petitioned the high court to decide Trump’s immunity claims in his case facing charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. 

FEDERAL JUDGE DENIES TRUMP’S CLAIM OF PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY IN SPECIAL COUNSEL JACK SMITH’S JAN. 6 CASE

US Supreme Court building
The Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Smith asked for expedited consideration of the case to essentially have the high court take over jurisdiction before the lower federal courts have fully decided the matter.

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Smith wants the court to expedite the claims in hopes to keep Trump’s Washington, D.C., trial — scheduled to begin March 4 — on track.

Brianna Herlihy is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.

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Colorado GOP Will Move to Caucus System If Trump Decision Stands


By Solange Reyner    |   Wednesday, 20 December 2023 12:39 PM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/us/colorado-gop-party/2023/12/20/id/1146648/

The Colorado Republican Party on Wednesday rallied around Donald Trump after the state supreme court ruled the former president was ineligible for reelection because he stoked an insurrection Jan. 6, 2021, saying it would withdraw from the primary election and move to a caucus system if the ruling stands.

“We think this is an absurd ruling and we’re going to do whatever we can to protect the rights of voters in Colorado and frankly, across the nation, if they choose Donald Trump,” Dave Williams, chair of the Colorado Republican Party, told CNN.

“But we’re going to appeal this to the United States Supreme Court. We’re a party to the case, and we’re not going to take this lying down and, if need be, we’re going to withdraw from the primary and go to a strict caucus process that would allow our voters to choose Donald Trump if they want,” he added.

A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democrat governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

Trump has vowed to appeal the state high court’s 4-3 decision.

GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday pledged to withdraw if the disqualification of Trump is sustained.

“I pledge to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary ballot until Trump is also allowed to be on the ballot,” Ramaswamy said in a video Tuesday.

“And I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley do the same immediately — or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver, which will have disastrous consequences for our country.”

Solange Reyner | editorial.reyner@newsmax.com

Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.

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Judge Napolitano to Newsmax: US Not Democracy if Colorado Trump Ruling Stands


By Brian Freeman    |   Wednesday, 20 December 2023 11:04 AM EST

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/andrew-napolitano-colorado-supreme-court/2023/12/20/id/1146633/

The U.S. Supreme Court must overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald Trump cannot appear on the ballot for the state’s Republican presidential primary in March. Otherwise, more states will do the same and the country will stop being a democracy, Judge Andrew Napolitano told Newsmax on Wednesday.

The former New Jersey Superior Court judge told “Wake Up America” that “it’s not the way the system is supposed to work … when judges are at the center of the democratic process, the voters should be at the center of the democratic process.

The 4-3 ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court, whose seven judges were all appointed by Democrats, makes Trump the first presidential candidate ever to be declared ineligible for the presidency under a rarely used provision of the U.S. Constitution that bans officials who have taken part in “insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.

But Napolitano pointed out that “the president has not only not been convicted of participating in or supporting or aiding an insurrection, he has not even been charged with it,” adding that the January 6 charges are not charges of aiding or abetting an insurrection.

If the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision “is not disturbed by the Supreme Court of the United States … then the ballgame will be over for Donald Trump, because other states will do the same thing,” Napolitano  said. “That’s why it is vital that the Supreme Court of the United States interfere with this decision, put it on hold and reverse it and let the voters decide … otherwise we don’t have a democracy.”

Napolitano said he was confident the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue in the next few days, because ballots will soon begin to be printed” for the primary in Colorado.

He noted there was a trial in Colorado in which a judge found that Trump did participate in and did incite the insurrection on January 6. The Colorado Supreme Court upheld that decision.

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Brian Freeman | editorial.freeman@newsmax.com

Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.

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Supreme Court Takes Up Case That Could Impact Trump’s Legal Battles


By: John G. Malcolm / @malcolm_john / December 18, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/18/supreme-court-hear-case-could-dramatically-impact-criminal-case-against-trump/

Former President Donald Trump in a suit on stage at campaign rally with fist in the air
The Supreme Court takes the case of Jan. 6 defendants to determine whether the charge of obstructing an official proceeding was applicable. Donald Trump was charged with the same crime, so the court’s decision could affect his legal battle. Pictured: Former President Trump gestures during a campaign rally at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center on Dec. 17 in Reno, Nevada. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

John G. Malcolm@malcolm_john

John G. Malcolm is the vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government and director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, overseeing The Heritage Foundation’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law.

The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to hear a case that does not involve Donald Trump as a defendant but which could, nonetheless, have a dramatic impact on one of the criminal cases that is pending against the former president.

Here’s the background.

On Jan. 6, 2021, over 2,000 Trump supporters entered the U.S. Capitol and disrupted Congress as it attempted to certify the results of the presidential election. Joseph Fischer, Edward Lang, and Garret Miller were among them. The three were subsequently charged in separate indictments with various offenses. While they do not contest the validity of many of the charges that are still pending against them, each filed a motion to dismiss a charge common to each of them: obstructing an official proceeding in violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1512(c)(2). That statute provides:

(c) Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

This statute, passed in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, was part of the government’s response to the Enron scandal in which executives at Arthur Andersen, Enron’s outside auditor, ordered the destruction of “tons” of documents over a two-week period—literally bringing in a mobile shredding truck and shredders from another company so that they could shred documents around-the-clock at a rate of 7,000 pounds per hour—after the failed energy trading company learned that its accounting practices were the subject of an investigation by federal regulators.

While this law was clearly aimed at corporate wrongdoing that involves an attempt to obstruct a government investigation or proceeding by destroying potential documentary evidence or tampering with witnesses, the government has, on occasion, attempted to broadly apply this law to other, less common circumstances. For example, in Yates v. United States, the government charged a fishing boat captain with violating a similar provision in Sarbanes-Oxley for “destroying” allegedly undersized fish (by tossing them overboard) in order to “impede” a federal investigation being conducted by an official acting on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2015, a closely divided Supreme Court held that “destroying” a fish did not fit within the type of evidence to which the statute applies.

The federal trial judge in Miller’s case granted his motion to dismiss the obstruction count, holding that, while the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 was an “official proceeding,” the conduct alleged in the indictment fell outside the scope of the statute. The court concluded that the language in the first subsection modified the scope of the second subsection and that the indictment was deficient because the government did not allege that Miller “took some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede, or influence Congress’s certification of the electoral vote.” For this reason, the judge also dismissed the obstruction counts against Fischer and Lang.

However, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court reversed the district court’s decision.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Florence Pan (a Biden appointee) and joined by Judge Justin Walker (a Trump appointee), adopted the government’s argument that the use of the word “otherwise” in subsection (c)(2) was meant as a “catchall” to encompass any and all forms of obstructive conduct designed to impact any federal investigation or other “official proceeding.”

Judge Greg Katsas (a Trump appointee) dissented, arguing that the word “otherwise” was meant to convey that the obstructive act must be of the same type, and in a similar manner, as those items listed immediately beforehand in subsection (c)(1)—all of which deal with tampering with or impairing the acquisition of relevant evidence, such as witness tampering or destroying, altering, or fabricating a document—and that, at the very least, any ambiguity in the statute ought to be resolved in favor of the accused (a well-established principle in criminal law known as the Rule of Lenity).

The eventual decision by the Supreme Court in Fischer v. United States could have a far-reaching impact not only on the more than 300 individuals who have been charged with violating that statute in connection with their actions on Jan. 6, but also on the criminal case that Special Counsel Jack Smith has brought against former President Trump that is pending in federal court in the District of Columbia before Judge Tanya Chutkan.

In that case, Trump has been charged with committing four crimes, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding (Count Two) and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding (Count Three), both of which would likely fall if the Supreme Court rules against the government in the Fischer case. That is because, setting aside the issue of whether Trump bears any responsibility for what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, it is clear that what happened did not involve document destruction or witness tampering.

The remaining charges also rest on a tenuous legal footing.

Count One alleges that Trump engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S. Code § 371 by using dishonesty to obstruct the procedures by which votes are collected, counted, and certified. In recent years, in cases like Kelly v. United States (2020), Ciminelli v. United States (2023), and Percoco v. United States (2023), the Supreme Court has taken a dim view of more amorphous theories of what constitutes fraud against the United States. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court in Ciminelli, “Federal fraud statutes criminalize only schemes to deprive people of traditional property rights,” i.e., money or property. As the court said, federal “fraud statutes do no not vest a general power in ‘the Federal government … to enforce (its view of) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking.’”

Here, there is no claim in the indictment that Trump was attempting to defraud anyone of money or property, which the Supreme Court has suggested is a necessary precondition of any claim under any federal fraud statute, including this one.

Count Four alleges that Trump engaged in a conspiracy against rights in violation of 18 U.S. Code § 241. This statute, which was part of the Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, was designed to stop the terrible violence, threats, and intimidation being committed against newly freed blacks and their white allies in the South. The act prohibits anyone from conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” any person from “the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

The theory behind this charge seems to be that it was unlawful to attempt to deprive people who voted for Joe Biden, who was ultimately declared the winner, of their votes. The indictment suggests that merely questioning the conduct of an election or the propriety of election procedures, including raising such issues in court, could constitute an attempt to “disenfranchise” all the people who voted for the person who was—rightly or wrongly—declared the winner, in this case, Joe Biden.

One could easily imagine how this would have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of anyone who dares to question the conduct of our elections or the results in a particular election.

I don’t recall anyone claiming that then-Vice President Al Gore or anyone connected with his campaign could or should be charged with conspiring to overturn an election in 2000 when he mounted numerous legal challenges against George W. Bush, which could, under this indictment’s theory, be characterized as an attempt to disenfranchise those who voted for Bush. Lest anyone forget, Al Gore lost the initial vote count in Florida and every single recount in every single county in Florida, including Palm Beach County. Yet Gore continued to contest the election until the Supreme Court put an end to the litigation in Bush v. Gore.

The same could be said for those who said rigged voting machines in Ohio cost John Kerry the election in 2004 as well as those who urged Trump electors to vote for Hillary Clinton following the 2016 election because Trump was an “illegitimate” president who had colluded with Russian intelligence agents to steal the election.

This is not the first time that Jack Smith has been overly aggressive in his attempts to unreasonably expand the text of a criminal statute in a case involving a public official. In 2016, a unanimous Supreme Court overturned the bribery conviction that Smith had obtained against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, concluding that many of the acts that McDonnell engaged in did not constitute “official acts” and that adopting Smith’s reading of the federal bribery statute would likely chill the interactions of public officials with their constituents out of fear of prosecution, making it difficult for them to do their jobs.

Proceedings in the D.C. case are currently on hold pending Trump’s appeal of Chutkan’s decision denying his motion to dismiss all the charges on the grounds of presidential immunity and double jeopardy. This threatens to delay the trial, currently scheduled to begin on March 4, which is why Smith has filed an “extraordinary request” urging the Supreme Court to hear that appeal on an expedited basis, bypassing review by the D.C. Circuit. The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Fischer case is yet another reason why the trial is likely to be delayed.

With the trial dates of other three criminal cases against Trump up in the air, it is far from clear that any of these trials will occur anytime soon, much to the dismay and disappointment of liberals and Never-Trumpers.

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Virginia Supreme Court Says Lawsuit by Teacher Fired for Christian Beliefs About Sex May Proceed


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | DECEMBER 15, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/15/virginia-supreme-court-says-lawsuit-by-teacher-fired-for-christian-beliefs-about-sex-may-proceed/

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The Virginia Supreme Court unanimously voted Thursday to revive a lawsuit filed by a teacher who was terminated for declining to use male pronouns to refer to a female student.

In 2018, Peter Vlaming was fired from his job of seven years as a French teacher at West Point High School because he would not address a student by biologically inaccurate pronouns. Vlaming “told his superiors his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns” for the student. The student complained, leading to a four-hour hearing with the school board, which ultimately voted 5-0 to fire Vlaming for “discrimination.”

“That discrimination then leads to creating a hostile learning environment,” claimed West Point Schools Superintendent Laura Abel. “And the student had expressed that. The parent had expressed that. They felt disrespected.”

Vlaming sued the school board in 2019. After a circuit court judge dismissed the suit in 2021, the seven justices on the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Vlaming’s case alleging that his rights to free religious exercise and free speech were violated deserves to move forward.

“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say,” said Chris Schandevel, a senior defense counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who represents Vlaming. “The Virginia Supreme Court rightly agreed that Peter’s case against the school board for violating his rights under the Virginia Constitution and state law should proceed.”

In December last year, another teacher represented by ADF filed a lawsuit challenging her termination for refusing to refer to a student by inaccurate pronouns. Ohio middle school teacher Vivian Geraghty was fired over her religious objections to addressing two students by names and pronouns contradictory to their biology.

“Schools can’t force teachers to set their religious beliefs aside just to keep a job and they also can’t force teachers to say things that are untrue and harmful to students,” ADF legal counsel Logan Spena told the Daily Caller.

In California, a Christian teacher was let go for her refusal to conceal students’ attempts to dress and act as the opposite sex from parents. Jessica Tapia was a physical education teacher who would not permit male students to use women’s locker rooms and objected to district policy mandating that teachers hide students’ gender confusion from parents.

“[The district] called me back to work but presented me with various directives, to which I responded I would not be able to comply with some of them based on my beliefs, such as having to call students by their preferred gender/pronoun and withhold that information from their parents,” Tapia told the Daily Caller. “I believe God is love and the most loving thing we can do is affirm one another in who God made us to be.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Supreme Court to Hear Case That Could Undo Jan. 6 Charges for Hundreds


Wednesday, 13 December 2023 01:07 PM EST

Supreme Court to Hear Case That Could Undo Jan. 6 Charges for Hundreds
Protesters rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/politics/supreme-court-jan-6-capitol-attack/2023/12/13/id/1145799/

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide whether a man involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol assault can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, a case with potential implications for the prosecution of Donald Trump.

The man is one of at least 325 people facing that charge for their alleged roles in the attack, which has also been brought against the Republican former president in the federal case charging him with trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat by Democrat President Joe Biden.

The justices said nothing about the Trump prosecution in agreeing to take up the case, but legal experts said Trump’s lawyers could argue that the court’s move should delay the start of his Washington trial on election subversion charges, currently due to begin in March.

Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination to challenge Biden, is facing four concurrent criminal prosecutions. But the Washington case brought by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith is scheduled to begin first and is seen as the likeliest to be resolved before the Nov. 5 election.

The case taken up Wednesday by the justices involves defendant Joseph Fischer, who was indicted on seven charges following the Jan. 6 riot. Among his charges is one count under a provision of federal criminal law for anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences and impedes any official proceeding.”

The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the case in the coming months and issue a ruling by the end of June.

It was not immediately clear how the Supreme Court’s action on Wednesday might affect Trump’s case. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Typically, the Supreme Court agreeing to review an issue in one case would not be a basis for pausing a separate case that raises the same issue, said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former top federal prosecutor appointed by then-President Barack Obama. Still, McQuade said she expects Trump’s legal team to make the argument because delay “has been his strategy throughout all of these cases.”

LIMITED FOCUS FOR CHARGE?

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, granted Fischer’s pretrial motion to dismiss his obstruction charges, ruling that the statute applied only in cases in which a defendant had taken “some action with respect to a document, record or other object.”

Federal prosecutors appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A divided three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit in April reversed Nichols’ ruling, saying the statute was not limited to documents and records, but instead “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding.”

The charge carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison with a conviction.

Fischer is awaiting trial on his other criminal charges, including one count of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers and one count of civil disorder, among other charges.

After the election, Trump and his allies made claims that it had been stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. On Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to certify Biden’s victory, protesters  stormed the Capitol, broke through barricades, attacked police officers, and vandalized the building, prompting lawmakers and others to flee for safety.

In federal charges brought by Special Counsel Smith, Trump faces four counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; and conspiracy to deprive citizens of their voting rights.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to his election-related charges, as well as charges stemming from three other ongoing state or federal criminal prosecutions.

© 2023 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

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State Of Texas Joins the Federalist, Daily Wire in Suing the Federal Censorship-Industrial Complex


BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 06, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/06/state-of-texas-joins-the-federalist-daily-wire-in-suing-the-federal-censorship-industrial-complex/

Antony Blinken, Secretary of State

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The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.

The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” says the lawsuit. It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).

This lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike. Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.

Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”

This is just the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year to uncover multiple federal censorship efforts laundered through private cutouts. The “Twitter Files,” a series of investigative journalist reports, uncovered that dozens of federal agencies pressured virtually all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of posts and users.

Missouri v. Biden found this federal censorship complex has included government officials changing the content moderation and user policies of social media monopolies through threats to destroy their business models. House of Representatives investigations have uncovered U.S. national security and spy agencies creating “private” organizations to circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials abridging Americans’ speech. These false-front organizations deliberately avoid creating records subject to transparency laws and congressional oversight, public records show.

Congressional investigations in November revealed that federal officials have specifically targeted The Federalist’s reporting for internet censorship.

The U.S. Justice Department is even about to put a U.S. citizen in prison for sharing election jokes on Twitter.

‘Coordinating the Government’s Efforts to Silence Speech’

The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the “vast censorship enterprise” that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence.

Even though Congress and the Constitution have banned the federal government from silencing Americans, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has morphed into “the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as defendants the U.S. State Department, GEC, and multiple department officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. GEC originated as a counterterrorism agency created by an executive order from President Obama.

Through GEC, the State Department evaluated more than 365 different tools for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information, the lawsuit says. The department also pays millions to develop multiple internet disinformation “tools.” It also runs tests on censorship technologies and awards government prize money to those most effective at controlling what Americans say and hear online, the lawsuit says.

[LISTEN: Margot Cleveland Breaks Down Explosive New Federalist Lawsuit Against State Department]

State then shares these censorship technologies with companies, favored media outlets, academics, and government agencies. It markets these government-funded censorship technologies to Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. The tools included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says.

At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.

They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.” That deprives leftists’ media competitors of high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.

“Advertising companies that subscribe to GDI’s blacklist refuse to place ads with disfavored news sources, cutting off revenue streams and leaving the blacklisted outlets unable to compete with the approved ‘low risk’ media outlets — often legacy news,” the lawsuit says.

Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite

Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist at least in part on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.

All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.

This federal censorship-industrial complex’s numerous disinformation operations include the Hamilton 68 effort. In contrast, The Federalist not only reported all these stories accurately from the beginning but for most led the reporting pack that proved it. GDI rated The Daily Wire’s “risk level” as “high” and The Federalist’s “risk level” as “maximum.”

While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”

The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Flag Waver

A.F. BRANCO | on November 26, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-flag-waver/

Minnesota to Change their Flag

Flag redesign commission member blasts process as ‘absurd’ and a ‘colossal waste of time’

Others criticized any potential incorporation of the state motto “L’etoile du Nord” or the statehood date of “1858” into a new state seal or flag as “hurtful” to many with indigenous backgrounds.
A lengthy deliberation Tuesday among 13 Minnesotans tasked with selecting a new state flag and seal at times devolved into argument and confusion among some, with one member of the State Emblems Redesign Commission calling it “a colossal waste of time” for those who submitted the designs.

Others criticized any potential incorporation of the state motto “L’etoile du Nord” or the statehood date of “1858” into a new state seal or flag as “hurtful” to many with indigenous backgrounds.
Read More…

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Truth by Fire

A.F. BRANCO | on November 27, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-truth-by-fire/

Chauvin Trial

The film is based on Liz Collin’s Amazon bestseller, “They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd,” which exposes the holes in the prevailing narrative surrounding George Floyd’s death, the trial of Derek Chauvin, and the fallout the city of Minneapolis has suffered ever since.

The documentary features more than a dozen interviews with the people directly involved, including exclusive interviews with former officers Derek Chauvin and Alexander Kueng who spoke to Liz Collin from prison. The families of Chauvin and Kueng also speak out publicly for the first time.

The film also features current and former Minneapolis police officers who tell their harrowing stories from the riots, recount the planned surrender of the Third Precinct, and explain why so many of them left the job.
Read More…

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

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Supreme Court adopts modified ethics code after pressure from Hill Dems


By Brianna Herlihy , Bill Mears , Shannon Bream Fox News | Published November 13, 2023 2:22pm EST

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/supreme-court-adopts-modified-ethics-code-pressure-hill-dems

The Supreme Court on Monday issued a new “Code of Conduct” following months of heightened scrutiny from Senate Judiciary Democrats pushing for new ethics laws for the high court. 

“The undersigned Justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court,” the announcement Monday read. 

“For the most part these rules and principles are not new: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice,” the statement reads. 

“The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct,” it says. 

SENATE DEMOCRATS TURN UP THE HEAT, ANNOUNCE ‘NEXT STEP’ IN SUPREME COURT ETHICS INVESTIGATION

Supreme Court justices standing for photo
The Supreme Court on Monday issued a new “Code of Conduct” following months of heightened scrutiny from Senate Judiciary Democrats. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)

The Code is a set of five “canons,” including two new canons that appear to be in response to reports over travel arrangements for private trips taken by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas paid by others, and use of Court staff for book promotion — referring to a recent report on that staff of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff urged colleges and libraries to buy her latest book. 

“A Justice should not to any substantial degree use judicial chambers, resources, or staff to engage in activities that do not materially support official functions or other activities permitted under these Canons,” the code states. 

TOP DEMOCRAT TRIES TO SCHOOL JUSTICE ALITO IN GROWING TIFF OVER SUPREME COURT OVERSIGHT

The Supreme Court building
The Surpeme Court on Monday adopted a new Code of Ethics amid pressure from Senate Democrats (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

“A Justice may accept reasonable compensation and reimbursement of expenses for permitted activities if the source of the payments does not give the appearance of influencing the Justice’s official duties or otherwise appear improper,” the rules say.

‘DANGEROUS’ DEMOCRAT JUDICIAL ETHICS BILL WOULD ALLOW ANY ‘JACKALOON’ TO DEMAND A RECUSAL, SEN. KENNEDY SAYS

United States Supreme Court (front row L-R) Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan, (back row L-R) Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pose for their official portrait
To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct,” the statement from the justices’ said.   (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“Expense reimbursement should be limited to the actual or reasonably estimated costs of travel, food, and lodging reasonably incurred by the Justice and, where appropriate to the occasion, by the Justice’s spouse or relative,” the new code says.

The Code also states that, “For some time, all Justices have agreed to comply with the statute governing financial disclosure, and the undersigned Members of the Court each individually reaffirm that commitment.”

Fox News has learned that the Court has been meeting privately for months on how to structure a new ethics code, one that would address public concerns over ethics without abdicating what the Chief Justice in particular had said was the court’s independence on such matters from congressional oversight.

Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in recent weeks had all publicly voiced support for a new ethics code. Chief Justice Roberts in May issued a statement signed by all nine members of the court saying there was more work for the court to do to “adhere to the highest ethical standards.”

Justices Thomas, left, and Alito, right, with Chief Justice Roberts center in photo session
Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group photo following the recent addition of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill on Friday, Oct 07, 2022 in Washington, DC. Bottom row, from left, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had mounted relentless pressure on the high court after reports that Justices Thomas and Alito went on luxury vacations paid for by friends. Ranking Member Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. accused his Democratic counterparts of launching “a concentrated effort” to delegitimize the conservative majority Supreme Court.

“This is not about trying to update the ability of the court to be more transparent, it’s about an effort to destroy the legitimacy of this conservative court,” Graham said in May.

Republican Senator John Kennedy, R-La., called the Democrat-sponsored legislation – the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act –  a “court-killing machine” that was both “dangerous” and “unserious.” 

It’s unclear whether Committee Democrats will continue to push for their reforms in light of the Supreme Court’s announcement Monday. 

Brianna Herlihy is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.

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Book Review: Thomas Sowell’s New Book Wrecks Social Justice Warriors’ Favorite Fallacies with Facts


BY: DAVID WEINBERGER | NOVEMBER 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/07/thomas-sowells-new-book-wrecks-social-justice-warriors-favorite-fallacies-with-facts/

Thomas Sowell

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More than 100 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that popular catchwords can stunt critical thinking for 50 years or more. In his latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, revered economist and scholar Thomas Sowell confirms Holmes’ observation by examining the buzzwords that self-described “social justice” proponents commonly use today. He shows that, despite many years — and in some cases even centuries or more — of evidence revealing these words to be nonsense, our media and cultural elites continue touting them in utter defiance of facts.

Social Justice’s False Premise

Consider, for example, the very term “social justice.” It is predicated on the assumption that institutional discrimination is the primary reason for differences among groups of people, whether among races, economic classes, or even between the sexes. It assumes that were it not for such discrimination, all races, groups, and classes would be equally represented in all human endeavors. In other words, human beings are equal not only in their nature and capacities but in their ability to develop those capacities.

As Sowell documents, however, this assumption is rarely tested empirically. In fact, both the historical record and everyday experience regularly contradict it. For example, not only have homogenous societies had unequal representation among groups of people in various endeavors, but even twin siblings who are raised under the same roof and by the same set of parents show vast differences in aptitude, performance, and cognitive ability. This is because factors beyond both our knowledge and our control — including factors that begin long before birth — heavily influence the development of human capabilities, including intelligence.

Culture and Competence

Some cultural traditions, for example, go back centuries or even millennia and thus continue to orient the developmental capacities of the people living in these cultures today. For instance, Sowell notes that the Germans have been brewing beer for thousands of years, far longer than most other cultures. It is, therefore, no surprise that they tend to be superior at making beer nowadays. Likewise, for reasons that need not concern us here, Jewish people have historically been significantly involved in matters of finance, where they continue to excel to this day.

It is simply folly, however, to believe that government decree could circumvent these longstanding cultural traditions without major catastrophe. Moreover, these “reciprocal inequalities,” as Sowell calls them, rarely amount to one group dominating all fields of human achievement. “Even highly successful groups,” he writes, “have seldom been highly successful in all endeavors. Asian Americans and Jewish Americans are seldom found among the leading athletic stars or German Americans among charismatic politicians.”

Cultural Inequalities Aren’t Fair

Of course, Sowell quickly adds that this does not mean that life is fair for all groups of people, much less to all individuals, or that there is nothing that can be done about injustices in the world. It does mean, however, that we ought to be humble about the limits of both our knowledge and our power to improve things rather than make them worse. As he points out, “We might agree that ‘equal chances for all’ would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival.”

Sowell spends several chapters documenting the negative consequences that have followed from decades of government policymakers ignoring the limits of their knowledge. He describes the unintended consequences of minimum wage policies, tax legislation, rent control laws, and policies related to race and sex as well as to welfare, housing, and education.

Affirmative Action and Welfare Backfire

Take, for instance, the issue of affirmative action in education. Sowell exposes the harm these policies have done first and foremost to the recipients themselves. Minority students who gain acceptance to elite schools for which they are not academically prepared often struggle to keep up with the rigorous pace and demanding workload. As a result, they end up either failing or dropping out.

On the other hand, Sowell highlights the positive results that followed from the abolition of affirmative-action policies in California (as decided by voters). “The number of black and Hispanic students graduating from the University of California system as a whole rose by more than a thousand students over a four-year span,” he observes. “There was also an increase of 63 percent in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher.”

A similar trend followed the growth of the welfare state in the 1960s when both crime rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates exploded in minority communities. The two decades prior to the ’60s, however, saw declining crimes. Out-of-wedlock birth rates were lower among minority groups than among the majority white population. Nevertheless, laments Sowell, “intellectual elites, politicians, activists and ‘leaders’ — who took credit for the black progress that supposedly all began in the early 1960s — took no responsibility for the painful retrogressions that demonstrably did begin in the 1960s.”

Beware Man’s Ignorance

All this history and much more is packed into this short but critical book, whose single most important insight may be how little we know about the lives of others. We must, therefore, be careful when making policy decisions that have the potential to affect many people — and possibly even whole societies.

As Sowell warns, “Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times — and in enough different ways — for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.”

David Weinberger is a freelance writer and book reviewer on topics related to philosophy, culture, history and economics. Follow him on Twitter @DWeinberger03. Email him at davidweinberger916@gmail.com.

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Op-ed: Time for Scrutiny of DEI Policies of Administrative Office of US Courts, Judicial Conference


Zack Smith / @tzsmith / Matthew Turner / November 06, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/time-for-scrutiny-of-dei-policies-of-administrative-office-of-us-courts-judicial-conference/

Chief Justice John Roberts—seen here receiving the Henry J. Friendly Medal at the American Law Institute’s 2023 annual dinner in Washington on May 23—needs to rein in the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. (Photo: Sarah L. Voisin/ The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Federal courts have their own administrative state, and that’s a problem. Like many of its executive branch counterparts, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts came into existence during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal push to establish supposedly expert administrators. Established in 1939 after FDR’s failed court-packing plan, the “AO” (as it has come to be known) nominally has a narrow mandate—“to provide administrative support to federal courts.”

In fact, two federal appellate courts that have examined the relationship of the AO vis-a-vis the federal judiciary have said that the AO “was created to perform, and historically has performed, a limited ministerial function.”  It was not, they said, “intended to govern or make policy for the Judiciary.” 

It would raise serious constitutional concerns for it to do so, since the AO itself is a not an entity under Article III of the Constitution. That job instead has been assigned to the Judicial Conference of the United States, which serves as the “Judiciary’s principal policy-making body.”

The chief justice presides over the Judicial Conference, which is “comprised of the chief judge of each judicial circuit, the Chief Judge of the Court of International Trade, and a district judge from each regional judicial circuit, who is elected for a term of not less than three nor more than five successive years as established by majority vote of all circuit and district judges of the circuit represented.” Still, the chief justice appoints the AO’s director, who is under “the supervision and direction of” the Judicial Conference.

Today, the AO maintains a sprawling portfolio and has engaged in actions that have directly injected the courts into hot-button political controversies. Worse still, the AO’s actions seem to contradict the Supreme Court’s own recent precedent in the area of racial preferences. For instance, an article published earlier this year highlighted just a few of the AO’s problematic diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, where the AO has been touting its work to promote “diversity” in the profession, particularly along “racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and sexual-orientation dimensions.”

While the Judicial Conference should rein in these problematic policy decisions, it has unfortunately allowed some of these same pernicious themes to creep into its views, too.

As part of its 2020 Strategic Plan for the Federal Judiciary, it emphasizes that “Judges must be encouraged to give special attention to diversity in their law clerk hiring process.” Of course, that diversity lies largely along racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation dimensions.

And the reports of the Judicial Conference’s various committees are rife with references to programs under consideration to increase the diversity of staff and employees and among members of the bankruptcy and magistrate benches.

At its next meeting, the Judicial Conference should engage in a serious discussion about whether these various initiatives and programs undermine confidence in the judiciary. They give the impression that the courts themselves are not being colorblind in their actions and are instead relying on something other than merit when making hiring and firing decisions.

And the Judicial Conference (again, headed by the chief justice) must grapple with whether these programs can still pass muster in light of the Supreme Court’s decision this past June (written by the chief justice) striking down Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs.

There’s some precedent at the state level for reviewing such programs being implemented in our court systems around the country.

The Florida Supreme Court, for example, exercised its administrative oversight to prohibit programming that required certain diversity quotas from qualifying for continuing legal education credit. Other state high courts should similarly exercise their oversight authority, and the Judicial Conference must do the same here.

Our Constitution is colorblind, and our courts must be colorblind, too, in all of their actions. To do otherwise undermines the very foundations of our court system—and our country.

COMMENTARY BY

Zack Smith@tzsmith

Zack Smith is a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Matthew Turner

Matthew Turner is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

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Jay P. Greene Op-ed: Supreme Court Justice Jackson’s second error reveals another industry gone woke


 Jay P. Greene | Fox News | Published July 31, 2023 4:00am EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/supreme-court-justice-jacksons-second-error-reveals-another-industry-gone-woke

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s defense of racial discrimination is falling apart. It’s now well known that Jackson repeated an embarrassing falsehood while defending affirmative action in college admissions. In her Students for Fair Admissions dissent, she asserted that matching Black physicians with Black patients doubles survival rates for newborns, a claim that’s equally unbelievable and factually unsupported.  

But this is not the only mistake Jackson made. Her second error shows the diversity-industrial complex’s deep corruption of medicine – and its threat to Americans’ health.   

RESEARCHERS HORRIFIED, DECRY RISE OF ‘FASCISM’ AS STUDENTS SEND MOCKING RESPONSES TO WOKE SURVEY

Jackson wrote, “research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly,” for instance, “prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication.” A footnote refers to an amicus brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the same source that led to Jackson’s first mistake.   

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was unable to define the word “woman” when asked at her confirmation hearing last year, made a telling error during her affirmation action decision. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The AAMC brief refers to four studies in support of this claim.  Yet none of them examine whether Black doctors are better at treating the pain of Black patients. All four document Black patients’ problems with pain management, but crucially, not one examines the efficacy of doctors of different races. The AAMC either failed to read the research or deliberately created this claim out of whole cloth.   

It’s unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization.  The AAMC, which represents every accredited medical school in the U.S. and Canada, has elevated diversity to an absurd level. It holds, as an article of faith, that medical schools must recruit more Black students, even if that means discriminating against students of other races and lowering standards for admission.   

Video

Not only does the AAMC brook no arguments to the contrary, but it also misreads research and perhaps manufactures evidence to support its position.  These are the actions of a radicalized organization – one that puts political demands above its stated goal of improving medical education. The AAMC’s faulty justification of race-based admissions, seen in its amicus brief, is bad enough. Yet the association’s extremist turn doesn’t end there.   

The AAMC has quietly graded its member schools’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Through freedom of information reports, we have found reports from 34 medical schools, detailing their implementation of 89 AAMC-approved DEI initiatives.  The list includes hiring and promoting professors based on DEI metrics, creating a permanent DEI bureaucracy, lobbying for DEI policies at every level of government and making DEI a “key learning outcome.” The average medical school has complied with 85% of the AAMC’s wishes.   

It’s unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization.   

The corruption of curriculum is especially concerning. Last summer, the AAMC released new “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies,” which effectively dictate what medical schools teach. Future physicians must now master “intersectionality,” describing “how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.”   Other mandatory topics include “colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, [and] assimilation.” The AAMC sponsors medical schools’ accrediting body, so institutions that don’t teach these medical divisive concepts risk losing their ability to issue degrees.   

The AAMC’s actions are lowering, not raising, the quality of medical education, which in turn lowers the quality of future medical care. By repeating the organization’s false claims about racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Jackson has shined a light on the deeper danger that DEI poses to Americans’ health and well-being. 

Jay P. Greene is a Senior Fellow at Do No Harm.

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Republican Lawmakers Call on SCOTUS To ‘Rein In’ The Administrative State


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JULY 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/26/republican-lawmakers-call-on-scotus-to-rein-in-the-administrative-state/

SCOTUS

Dozens of congressional GOP lawmakers led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., are calling on the Supreme Court to curtail the administrative state’s power through a rollback of the 1984 Chevron decision.

On Monday, McCarthy filed an amicus brief by the House general counsel on behalf of the lower chamber supporting a legal challenge to the nearly 40-year precedent that gives federal agencies wide latitude to interpret congressional statutes.

“As part of our Commitment to America, House Republicans pledged to hold Washington accountable,” McCarthy said in a statement. “The Chevron framework makes it easier for unelected bureaucrats to weaponize federal regulations against the American people. The Court should rein in the power of unelected bureaucrats and restore the separation of powers.”

In May, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, setting the stage for a landmark decision that could narrow the scope of bureaucratic agencies to unilaterally impose burdensome rules and regulations. The conservative majority on the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts already signaled its willingness to “rein in” the administrative state last summer with its decision in EPA v. West Virginia. In that case, justices struck down the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, ruling the Constitution did not allow federal agencies to circumvent Congress by implementing broad regulations to wide effect.

In 1984, the Supreme Court established “Chevron deference” in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, broadly defined as allowing administrative agencies to substitute their own interpretation of congressional statutes when a particular issue is implicit. Justices on the current court have debated whether the 1984 case law has been properly interpreted. Regardless, Republicans say its application has been abused by a burgeoning administrative state run by unelected bureaucrats.

Three dozen lawmakers, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., filed another brief on Monday in support of a challenge to the Chevron ruling. The brief includes 18 total signatories from the upper chamber, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and 18 from the House.

“Decades of application of Chevron deference have facilitated the exercise of functions by the executive branch that more properly belong to the legislative and judicial branches,” the brief reads. “Agencies exploit general or broad terms in statutes to engage in policymaking functions of questionable legality with the assumption that courts will grant deference and not independently evaluate the lawfulness of those agency interpretations.”

The court will revisit the nearly four-decade-old doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, with New Jersey fishermen objecting to rules from the Commerce Department that would force commercial fishing vessels to pay federal observers. Such on-board monitoring could cost more than $700 a day and about a fifth of fishermen’s profits, according to the Cause of Action Institute, which is representing the plaintiffs.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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10 Abnormal Things Biden’s ‘Return To Normalcy’ Brought Americans


BY: SAMUEL BOEHLKE | JULY 13, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/13/10-abnormal-things-bidens-return-to-normalcy-brought-americans/

Biden speaks at an Iowa rally in 2019

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As they worked tirelessly to oust Donald Trump from the White House in 2020, a chorus of corporate media, Never Trumpers, establishment Democrats, and Joe Biden himself promised Americans a Biden presidency would usher in a “return to normalcy.”

Two and a half years later, normalcy has yet to appear. Biden’s tenure has cemented a new “normal” of men pretending to be women, a march toward global conflict, and synthetic drugs in the White House. Decency and decorum? Not exactly. As the 2024 election season heats up, now is as good a time as ever to take stock of our cultural and political status quo and remind ourselves that the self-proclaimed unifier-in-chief and his administration’s lackeys have done everything in their power to upend our norms, not return to them. Here are 10 examples.

1. Obscene LGBT Activism

In exchange for Trump’s mean tweets, Biden’s normal includes men showing off their prosthetic breasts on the White House lawn. As LGBT extremists enforced pride month on the rest of the country, the Biden family saw fit to host a pride party at the symbolic residence. Three of their guests proudly stripped off their tops to flaunt their mutilated “true” selves.

After immediate backlash, the Biden administration noted the behavior was “inappropriate” and disinvited the three people involved — but there was nothing “normal” about nude White House party guests.

Speaking of indecent exposure, LGBT activism under the Biden administration has taken an obscene turn and not just during “pride month.” The White House’s gay and trans agenda has no limiting principle, with the president going out of his way to promote irreversible medical interventions for confused youths. This radicalism trickles down into defending pornographic books for children, explicit “education,” public nudity, and graphic sexual depictions in family-friendly public environments. 

2. Corruption

When Biden talked about normalcy, did he mean multimillion-dollar bribery schemes? Thanks to astute lawmakers like Sen. Chuck Grassley and brave whistleblowers within the Internal Revenue Service and FBI, Americans are finally seeing past the Biden-protection racket to the corrupt family business.

Biden and his DOJ will pretend the sins are littler misdemeanor tax crimes limited to his poor addict son Hunter, but whistleblower testimony about a damning FBI document suggests “the big guy’s” hands are dirty — and the Justice Department has been covering it up.

3. Cocaine at the White House

The same administration that tracked down grandmas who happened to be in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, claims it won’t be able to figure out who brought cocaine into the high-security White House, complete with Secret Service agents, cameras, and records of every guest’s name, date of birth, and social security number, among other things.

Whether the synthetic drug belongs to Hunter Biden, an obvious suspect who is believed to be living in the White House right now, or someone else, Colombian bam-bam turning up at the president’s house isn’t normal.

4. Federal Weaponization and Censorship

To suppress its ideological and political opponents, the Biden administration found convenient ways to silence social media users. As recent House reports have shown, Biden’s agencies regularly engaged in collusion with the largest Big Tech companies to suppress free speech. Not only did they push for the censorship of speech that was factually wrong — speech that is still protected by the First Amendment — but they labeled information critical of the Democrat regime as “disinformation” and “misinformation” to justify stripping it from the public square. Worse, the Biden administration devised a category of speech that’s true but inconvenient, called “malinformation” — and worked to silence that too.

5. Bidenomics

Despite recovering some of the jobs the government forced workers out of during Covid lockdowns, Biden’s economy overall has been disastrous for the American people. Inflation in particular has been a steady theme, with prices for essentials from groceries to gasoline soaring throughout the early years of Biden’s term. Prices are still high and many Americans are still suffering in 2023, but in January the president had the audacity to claim a high inflation rate was a good thing because it had “cooled” from the 40-year record Biden broke the previous year.

6. The Edge of World War

Aggressive support for Ukraine in its war with Russia has been a constant theme of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, this support edges us closer to a global war. With escalation as the apparent goal of this conflict, depleted stockpiles put the U.S. at increased risk of war with insufficient supplies to fight it. NATO’s recent shortening of Ukraine’s membership application process could threaten to drag NATO member countries, and America in particular, into a great power conflict once again.

Of course, this is in addition to rising threats from China and at America’s southern border, with foreign threats growing under the noses of a distracted national security apparatus.

7. Science-Denying HHS Assistant Secretary

How’s this for normal? Biden appointed a science-denying man as the first “female” four-star

admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The president selected Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender-identifying person and motivated LGBT ideologue, as the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Levine previously promoted the most extreme policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Covid and was responsible for thousands of excess deaths in Pennsylvania during his tenure as the head of the Pennsylvania Health Department. In his position as Assistant Secretary, Levine has consistently fought to deny biological realities and promote the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.

8. Pop Star as a Medical Expert

In keeping with Biden’s elevation of the unqualified, his administration turned to celebrities such as Olivia Rodrigo to persuade Americans to fawn over a flailing Anthony Fauci. In 2021, Rodrigo partnered with Fauci and Biden to produce videos encouraging youth vaccination. Her fans, along with the rest of the world, realized her expertise in healing hearts through music did not extend to medicine; her vaccination video remains one of her least-liked social media posts. 

9. Senility and Lying

Probably the easiest return to normal would have been the election of a younger, coherent president who maintained some semblance of accountability to Americans. Instead, Biden offers regular doses of verbal incoherence, sleepiness, gaffes, uncomfortable whispers and shouts, and tumbles. These are all bad looks, but not as bad as the lies that spill out of the president on the daily, which The Federalist has tracked since his first day in office. Lying may be normal for Biden, but it shouldn’t be normal for the presidency, and neither should perceived physical and cognitive weakness on the world stage. 

10. War on SCOTUS

It’s no surprise attacks on the Supreme Court have ramped up under the Biden administration. After all, this president evidently believes he’s above the law, and the court has disagreed, smacking down his administration on everything from student loans to Covid jab mandates. Not to mention other blows to the left during Biden’s tenure, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 303 Creative decision, and a university affirmative action takedown.

With the help of the media, the Biden administration has gotten bold about its plans to undercut and circumvent the court wherever it can. And the president is not alone; private universities will also be doing their best to dodge the law to keep supporting racial discrimination.

Samuel Boehlke is a rising senior in Mass Communication/Law and Policy at Concordia University Wisconsin and a current intern at The Federalist. He is Web Editor for CUW’s The Beacon and External Affairs Editor for Quaestus Journal. Reach him at sboehlkefdrlst@gmail.com or by DMs @vaguelymayo.

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The Left Is Losing Its Race War, That’s Why It’s Distorting The Definition Of ‘Racism’


BY: EDDIE SCARRY | JULY 11, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/11/the-left-is-losing-its-race-war-thats-why-its-distorting-the-definition-of-racism/

Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris look on while Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers remarks on her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court

An everlasting truism of the political left is that when they hold an indefensible position, they pretend everything is more complicated than it actually is, and, therefore, it’s your fault for failing to understand the complexities of the world. So shut up and just let them do what they need to do!

You think crime is addressed with more policing and criminal prosecutions? How naive! It’s not so simple! This is an issue that requires time and new solutions!

There is no truer example of that reality than the way they talk about “racism.” The Supreme Court just ruled that it’s unconstitutional for institutions in higher education to discriminate against an applicant based on his race. What has been congenially known as “affirmative action” is, by definition, racial unfairness.

Knowing full well that defending the kind of discrimination America erased 50 years ago is untenable, the left has once again attempted to take a very simple concept and distort it beyond recognition so that, hopefully, everyone will be too confused to even argue about it.

Washington Post contributor Theodore Johnson wrote Tuesday that the Court’s decision didn’t eliminate yet another form of toxic discrimination but exacerbated existing racial tensions by reinforcing the idea of a supposed “model minority” — ethnic minorities who assimilate to the broader (white) population. The Court’s “portrayal of Asian Americans as model assimilators is neither a compliment, nor is it proof that structural racism is an artifact of the past,” Johnson wrote. “It serves only to exploit one minority group, to condemn others and to argue against accounting for a people’s history.”

Wow, the ruling did all that? Here I am thinking it’s a good thing that schools can no longer deny access to an applicant because he’s not a specific race. Little did we all know that, actually, the ruling perpetuated a myth for the purpose of pitting Asians against blacks in some type of Cold War.

Thanks for the lesson, Theodore!

It’s garbage. Racism means one thing — the belief that a person’s value is contingent upon his skin color. What it doesn’t mean is, “Anything that I think denies me advantages because now I’m expected to follow the same guidelines as everyone else and, by the way, model minorities are a construct of white supremacy, and the very idea advances my argument.”

Overcomplicating and distorting the very basic, straightforward concept of racism is how we all ended up paraplegics from contorting ourselves trying to understand “equity,” “unconscious bias,” and every other convoluted new term cooked up by the left.

It’s now racist to even expect that it’s enough to say racism is bad. Now you have to dwell on it, consume it, and ultimately accept that the only way to truly absolve yourself of racism is to do whatever people like Johnson say.

But no matter what they say, the word for that isn’t “racism.” It’s submission.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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Ketanji Brown Jackson made ‘mathematically absurd claim’ on Black newborns: WSJ op-ed


Supreme Court Justice argued affirmative action ‘saves lives’

Hanna Panreck

By Hanna Panreck | Fox News | Published July 6, 2023 1:46pm EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/media/kentanji-brown-jackson-made-mathematically-absurd-claim-black-newborns-wsj-op-ed

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a “mathematically absurd claim” about Black newborns in her dissenting opinion in the affirmative action decision, attorney Ted Frank wrote in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed. 

Jackson argued in her dissent that diversity “saves lives” and that it was essential for “marginalized communities.”

“It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die,” she wrote.

Frank responded to the argument in his Journal opinion piece: “A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.” 

Ketanji Brown Jackson
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued in her dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling that promoting diversity “saves lives.” (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File )

Frank, a senior attorney at Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard, according to the WSJ.

“How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake?” he wrote. 

Frank wrote that Jackson’s claim came from a 2020 study, according to a footnote in the dissent, but added that the study didn’t match Jackson’s claim. 

“The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians),” he said. 

Supreme Court members
The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in a landmark 6-3 ruling on June 29. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images)

The Supreme Court rejected the use of race as a factor in college admissions at the end of June, citing a violation of the 14th amendment. In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that, “A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrim­ination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination.”

President Joe Biden Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson
President Biden nominated Jackson to the high court in 2022 and the first Black female Supreme Court Justice began her first term last October.  (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Frank said the study cited in Jackson’s dissent was “flawed.”

“So, we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges ‘all of us’ to ‘do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.’ Instead we should watch where we’re going,” Frank continued. 

Hanna Panreck is an associate editor at Fox News.

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Prof. Jonathan Turley Op-ed: Biden’s unhinged ideas of Supreme Court and our Constitution


President distorts history to attack Supreme Court as ‘not normal’

Jonathan Turley

 By Jonathan Turley | Fox News | Published July 3, 2023 4:00am EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/bidens-unhinged-ideas-supreme-court-constitution

The decision of the Supreme Court to end the use of race in college admissions was not unexpected. Yet, President Joe Biden expressed outrage and actually claimed that the court gutted the constitutional guarantee that “all men and women are created equal.”  

In declaring that this court was not “normal,” Biden further insisted that these admissions decisions and the Dobbs abortion decision reversed the gains that “we fought a war over in 1860” to secure. In an interview on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” President Biden accused the court of ignoring what “the Constitution says: We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women are created equal, endowed by their creator.” That is actually a reference to the Declaration of Independence, but it was the substance of the point that was so baffling. 

LIBERALS LAMENT STRING OF SUPREME COURT VERDICTS: ‘THIS TRULY SUCKS’

In barring the use of race in admissions, the court believed that it was protecting that very “self-evident” guarantee. It erased what the court viewed as a glaring anomaly in its cases in the treatment of racial discrimination in education as opposed to employment.  

Biden tugs at collar
President Biden accused the Supreme Court of ignoring what “the Constitution says.” (Getty Images)

It was the capstone opinion for Chief Justice John Roberts, who, in 2017, declared: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In 2006, Roberts also said: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” 

The court thought it was doing the work started (but not fulfilled) with the Declaration in treating that all men and women are created equal in both education and employment. 

The president is not alone in such hyperbole. Figures like ABC’s Whoopi Goldberg actually asked whether the decision will be “leading to no women in colleges soon? Who knows.” 

We actually do know. An opinion rejecting the use of racial classification to determine who goes to college could not be read by anyone as endorsing the exclusion of other groups. 

Video

The truly baffling statement was Biden’s claims over the Civil War. By leaving questions like abortion to the states, Biden claims that the court was reversing what was gained in that war. The criticism came in response to an opinion insisting that there is no place for racial discrimination in higher education. That would hardly seem an argument that would be embraced by the Confederacy. 

Biden has long taken liberties with our constitutional history. Many of us have repeatedly objected to claims that he has made in areas like the Second Amendment. One of his most repeated lines is that the Second Amendment was passed with the understanding that certain guns would be banned and adding, “You couldn’t buy a cannon when, in fact, the Second Amendment passed.” 

That happens to be utterly false. Yet, even after the Washington Post declared Biden’s understanding of the Second Amendment to be false, he has continued to make the same false assertion over and over again. 

Now Biden has moved on to the Civil War and his revisionism is about as subtle as Sherman’s scorched “March to the Sea.” 

photo of Whoopi Goldberg
ABC’s Whoopi Goldberg ridiculously asked whether the court’s decision will lead “to no women in colleges soon?” (ABC/”The View”/Screenshot)

The Civil War did not end federalism or states rights. It denied the right of the states to secede and ultimately fulfilled the pledge to equality first made in the Declaration of Independence. 

One can have good-faith disagreements on whether to use racial criteria in admissions. However, Biden is belittling our prior struggles for equality with these sweeping and erroneous claims. 

In his interview, the president also insisted that one has to “look at how it’s ruled on a number of issues that are — have been precedent for 50-60 years sometimes. And that’s what I meant by not normal.” 

In reality, the court’s decisions on affirmative action in education have been muddled and conflicted for decades. In 1977, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court barred affirmative action in higher education. However, it allowed some consideration of race as part of a holistic admissions process. 

Video

In the decades that followed, the court remained sharply divided. By 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor supplied the fifth vote to uphold the use of race by the University of Michigan.  

Yet, O’Connor wrote that the court “expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” That was roughly 20 years ago. 

It is also ironic to hear the president bewailing the reversal of precedent since the greatest advance in racial equality was the reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson and the doctrine of “separate but equal.” That was the governing precedent from 1894 to 1954, but few denounced the Supreme Court for reversing that precedent to eliminate separate or different treatment on the basis for race. 

The president also asserted that “the vast majority of the American people don’t agree with a lot of the decisions this court is making.” The majority clearly opposed the Dobbs ruling, but that is not the case on the affirmative action ruling. 

One can have good-faith disagreements on whether the use of racial criteria in admission. However, Biden is belittling our prior struggles for equality with these sweeping and erroneous claims. 

Polls have consistently shown (including this week) that the majority of the public does not support the use of race in college admissions. Indeed, even in the most liberal states like California, voters have repeatedly rejected affirmative action in admissions. 

We should have a robust and passionate debate over these issues. Yet, a president should be seeking to facilitate that dialogue rather than distorting and weaponizing our shared history. It is a continuation of his prior declarations that members of Congress opposing his election reforms to block state laws are voting with “Jefferson Davis” and the Confederacy.  

Despite the laws in states like Georgia being upheld as constitutional, Biden declared them a return to the “Jim Crow” South based on distorted accounts of those laws. The claim was again historically and legally ridiculous even if one opposed these state laws. 

We should not allow the president’s constitutional and historical distortions to become, to use his description of the court, “normal.” We have fought hard to address the scourge of slavery and racism in our country. That struggle is continuing, but we cannot address those problems in the future by distorting our past. 

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE JONATHAN TURLEY

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.

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Supreme Court Backs Christian Mail Carrier Who Wanted Sundays Off


NEWSMAX | Thursday, 29 June 2023 12:54 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/supreme-court-mail-carrier-post-office/2023/06/29/id/1125415/

Supreme Court Backs Christian Mail Carrier Who Wanted Sundays Off
(AP)

The Supreme Court on Thursday used the case of a Christian mailman who didn’t want to work Sundays to solidify protections for workers who ask for religious accommodations. In a unanimous decision the justices made clear that workers who ask for accommodations, such as taking the Sabbath off, should get them unless their employers show doing so would result in “substantial increased costs” to the business. The court made clear that businesses must cite more than minor costs — so-called “de minimis” costs — to reject requests for religious accommodations at work. Unlike most cases before the court, both sides in the case had agreed businesses needed to show more.

The case before the court involved a mail carrier in rural Pennsylvania. The man was told that as part of his job he’d need to start delivering Amazon packages on Sundays. He declined, saying his Sundays are for church and family. U.S. Postal Service officials initially tried to get substitutes for the man’s shifts, but they couldn’t always accommodate him. When he didn’t show, that meant more work for others. Ultimately, the man quit and sued for religious discrimination.

The case is the latest religious confrontation the high court has been asked to referee. In recent years, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority has been particularly sensitive to the concerns of religious plaintiffs. Last year, the court split along ideological lines in ruling for public high school football coach who wanted to pray on the field after games. Other recent religious cases have drawn wide agreement among the justices, such as upholding a cross-shaped monument on public grounds and ruling that Boston had violated the free speech rights of a conservative activist when it refused his request to fly a Christian flag on a City Hall flagpole.

In the latest case, a federal law — Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices unless doing so would be an “undue hardship” for the business. But a 1977 Supreme Court case, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, says in part that employers can deny religious accommodations to employees when they impose “more than a de minimis cost” on the business.

During arguments in the case in April the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was representing the Post Office, told the justices that the Hardison case as a whole actually requires an employer who wants to deny an accommodation to show more. But Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion for the court that while some lower courts have understood Hardison the way the Biden administration suggested, other courts incorrectly latched on to the “de minimis” language “as the governing standard.”

“In this case, both parties agree that the ‘de minimis’ test is not right, but they differ slightly in the alternative language they prefer. … We think it is enough to say that an employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business,” Alito wrote.

The Biden administration has said that requests for religious accommodation come up most often when employees seek schedule changes like the Sabbath off or midday prayer breaks or exemptions from a company’s dress code or grooming policies. They also come up when an employee wants to display a religious symbol in the workplace.

As for the particular dispute in front of them, the justices sent the case back to a lower court for another look in light of their decision. The case involves Gerald Groff, a former employee of the U.S. Postal Service in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. For years, Groff was a fill-in mail carrier who worked on days when other mail carriers were off. But when an Amazon.com contract with the Postal Service required carriers to start delivering packages on Sundays, Groff balked. Initially, to avoid the shifts, Groff transferred to a more rural post office not yet doing Sunday deliveries, but eventually that post office was required to do them, too.

Whenever Groff was scheduled on a Sunday, another carrier had to work, or his spot went unfilled. Officials said Groff’s absences created a tense environment and contributed to morale problems. It also meant other carriers had to deliver more Sunday mail than they otherwise would.

Groff resigned in 2019 rather than wait to be fired. He sued the Postal service for failing to accommodate his religious practice. Lower courts ruled against him previously. As a result of the court’s ruling, his case will get another look.

Groff said in a statement after the ruling that he was grateful the court heard his case. “I hope this decision allows others to be able to maintain their convictions without living in fear of losing their jobs because of what they believe,” he said.

The case is Groff v. DeJoy, 22-174.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Futures of Thomas, Alito Raise Stakes in 2024


By Solange Reyner    |   Wednesday, 28 June 2023 12:58 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/2024-supreme-court-election/2023/06/28/id/1125255/

Lawmakers say speculation that Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are considering retirement make the 2024 presidential election outcome more crucial, The Hill reported.

The Court is made up of nine justices, with a 6-3 conservative majority, after former President Donald Trump filled three vacancies: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They helped form the majority to overrule Roe v. Wade in June 2022, allowing states to outlaw abortion.

“It’s critical. President Biden, who I feel confident will be reelected, needs to be able to put more judges on the bench, federal judges, including Supreme Court. It is absolutely critical that the Senate remain in Democratic hands,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who will retire at the end of next year, told the Hill.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told the Hill that the next president will likely “have a chance to appoint another member of the court. … I expect that you’d see, over the course between now and the end of the next [presidential] term, probably another retirement or two.”  

Neither Alito or Thomas has said he is mulling retirement. Thomas, who has served on the Court for nearly 32 years, is the oldest justice on the Court at 75. Alito, who has served since 2006, is 73.

“I do think that the 2024 election is important,” said Brian Fallon, co-founder and executive director of left-wing judicial advocacy group Demand Justice. “I do think Alito and Thomas will be getting up there in age, and there’s quite a real possibility that replacements for them could be in order in the next four-year presidential window.‘

“It’s hugely important to win the upcoming election, and I think the court will be more salient of an issue than ever. It’s important to win the next election because if there is going be an opportunity to replace a Thomas or Alito, you don’t want to miss it by not winning a Senate race here or there and preventing us from filling a seat.‘

“But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that the court’s balance is going to be shifted anytime soon just by winning a few elections.”

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House strikes blow against federal regulations, votes to overturn controversial Supreme Court ruling


Peter Kasperowicz

By Peter Kasperowicz | Fox News | Published June 15, 2023 12:12pm EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-strikes-blow-federal-regulations-votes-overturn-controversial-supreme-court-ruling

The House voted Thursday to overturn a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that Republicans say gave the executive branch too much power to impose regulations that cost Americans trillions of dollars each year. Lawmakers approved the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, or SOPRA, in a mostly party-line 220-211 vote.

Republicans have argued for the last several years that the Supreme Court precedent set in the Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. case effectively told courts that they should defer to federal agencies when they interpret laws passed by Congress as they write regulations. Republicans say that since that ruling, courts have failed to do their due diligence in assessing whether those regulations can be fairly justified under the law.

The lawmaker who sponsored SOPRA, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.), argued on the House floor Thursday that the Supreme Court ruling has given the executive branch vast authority to regulate as it pleases, and often in ways that contradict the intent of Congress.

SUPREME COURT ACCEPTS CASE THAT HAS POTENTIAL TO ERODE POWER OF FEDERAL REGULATORS

Kevin McCarthy Supreme Court
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other House Republicans voted Thursday to overturn a Supreme Court precedent that the GOP says makes it too easy to impose costly regulations on Americans. (Getty)

“Since 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled that courts must defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute rather than what Congress intended, the executive branch has begun usurping the legislative branch to issue regulations with the force of law,” Fitzgerald said. “It is certainly not what our founders intended.”

He added that the cost of these regulations have piled up on Americans over the last several decades.

“The total annual cost of regulation is almost $2 trillion, or about 8% of the U.S. GDP,” he said. “If it were a country, for comparison, U.S. regulation would be the world’s eighth largest economy.”

NEW JERSEY FISHERMEN HOPE TO REEL SUPREME COURT INTO A FIGHT OVER FEDERAL REGULATORY OVERREACH

Rep. Scott Fitzgerald
A bill introduced by Rep. Scott Fitzgerald to overturn a Supreme Court precedent was passed in the House on Thursday. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Another Republican, Rep. Thomas McClintock of California, said the Supreme Court ruling goes against the intent of the Constitution, which sets out that Congress writes the laws while the executive branch carries them out.

“One brother makes law but cannot enforce it, the other brother enforces law but cannot make it,” he said.

Democrats said overturning the Supreme Court decision would force the courts to take on considerable work as they try to interpret federal law. Rep. Jerry Nadler, of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said the bill would “completely upend the administrative process by eliminating judicial deference to agencies and require federal courts to review all agency rulemakings and interpretations of statute on a de novo basis.”

Nadler also said Congress defers to agencies to do the work of deciding specific regulatory policies because it does not have the expertise to do that job.

GOP PLANNING BILL TO CURB ‘SILENT KILLER’ OF THE AMERICAN DREAM, FEDERAL REGULATIONS

Jerry Nadler
Rep. Jerry Nadler argued against the bill and voted against it with most other Democrats. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

“While Congress sets broad policies, we delegate authorities to executive agencies because we do not have the expertise to craft the technical regulations ourselves, and we rely on these agencies to carry out the policies we enact,” he said.

The bill is unlikely to move in the Democrat-controlled Senate and the White House has said President Biden would veto it. But the issue could be decided by the Supreme Court itself. In the fall, the Supreme Court is expected to hear a dispute between fishermen in New Jersey and the federal government over whether federal rules on fishermen are vastly exceeding what was allowed by Congress.

In that case, lower courts have leaned on the 1984 Chevron precedent to say they are giving deference to federal regulators. But the case is now at the Supreme Court, which could decide to overturn the precedent.

Pete Kasperowicz is a politics editor at Fox News Digital.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: How To Bribe The Supreme Court


 May 3, 2023 by Ann Coulter

Read more at https://anncoulter.com/2023/05/03/how-to-bribe-the-supreme-court/

How To Bribe The Supreme Court

  Having failed to destroy Clarence Thomas 32 years ago with preposterous sexual harassment charges (disbelieved at the time by 60% of Americans), now the left is resorting to attacking the ethics of a man vastly more honorable than the collection of degenerates reviling him.

     The sole purpose of the media’s sudden fixation on the Supreme Court’s “ethics” is to morally intimidate conservative justices by reminding them that the left controls the culture. Since they lost abortion, liberals have been in a panic that the court will junk other liberal sacraments, like gay marriage and affirmative action, too. That’s the reason for the stream of calumnies directed at the justices.

As usual, the main target of the left’s rage is Thomas. We’re supposed to be appalled that Thomas’ billionaire friend Harlan Crow took the justice and his wife on a vacation that (the media claim) would have cost Thomas more than $500,000!!!

Well, yeah, but Thomas and his wife, Ginny, weren’t going alone. They hadn’t just won a cruise sweepstakes. They were joining Crow on a vacation he was taking anyway. Cost to donor: a few extra chicken cutlets and string beans.

Crow sounds like a great guy, but when you’re going on vacation with a benefactor, it isn’t like he’s handing you an expensive bauble. You are the expensive bauble.

We went on a cruise on my private yacht in Indonesia and served Jeroboam of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945.[Meh.]

We went on a cruise on my private yacht in Indonesia and Justice Clarence Thomas was our guest. WINNER!!!!

Cui bono? Everybody!

The media want us to believe that generosity from personal friends is an ethical issue, but that’s because that’s not how liberals bribe government officials. They bombard their targets with the sort of public adoration that money can’t buy — or the sort of public hate that money can’t block. Your choice: Be beloved from every corner of society or be subjected to nonstop ridicule.

Adored: Anthony Fauci, BLM, Michelle Obama, Trevor Noah, transgenders, Ukraine, black people, pot, Elon Musk (pre-Twitter), Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Hated: Ron DeSantis, the Proud Boys, Melania Trump, Dave Chappelle, Christians, Russia, white people, cigarettes, Elon Musk (post-Twitter), Clarence Thomas.

Thus, during her quarter-century on the court, Ginsburg was showered with alms from the media, Hollywood, universities, television, publishing, the music industry, museums, clothing manufacturers, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Post Office and an array of nonprofits.

It’s a miracle she ever had time to write opinions with the constant procession of awards, retrospectives, portraits and honors — the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture; the LBJ Foundation’s Liberty & Justice for All Award; the World Peace & Liberty Award; a lifetime achievement award from Diane von Furstenberg’s foundation; the 2020 Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center; and the World Peace & Liberty Award from the World Jurist Association and the World Law Foundation.

I would wager that most people would prefer ceaseless public praise to a cruise, no matter how nice the yacht.

The U.S. Postal Service produced an RBG “Forever” stamp; the U.S. Navy named an oiler the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg”; Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center put on a large-scale exhibition on her life; the Cleveland Museum of Natural History named a species of praying mantis after her; she was slobberingly interviewed by Stephen Colbert; a Sam Adams beer was named in her honor; and she received honorary degrees from literally dozens upon dozens of universities.

Say, did any of these outfits have an interest in cases that might come before the court? Perhaps MSNBC could look into that.

It’s curious that the very cultural institutions bestowing all these goodies on liberals don’t see them as “gifts” at all. There are no somber invocations of “ethics” when the Sundance Film Festival features a North Korean-style documentary about Ginsburg. Nor when The New York Times gushes that Ginsburg was “a trailblazing feminist … [continuing] to point the way toward greater equality … she never wavered in her commitment to the court as a vehicle for a more just and more equal America. She was a dogged, tireless fighter … [gag, gag, gag].”

Try to imagine that string of accolades being given to Thomas, much less the Tiger Beat worship — the coloring books, documentaries, bobbleheads, and so on.

It’s inconceivable. In fact, the “honors and recognition” section on Thomas’ Wikipedia page contains a single item: “In 2012, Thomas received an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross, his alma mater.”

The only reward a conservative titan like Thomas will receive in this lifetime will be his friends spending their own money to enjoy his company. So the media have decided that’s a conflict of interest. Fawning media coverage worth millions of dollars: not a conflict of interest.

Let’s compare!

Value of private supporters’ gifts to Justice Thomas over the years: Maybe a few million dollars — and that’s according to liberals, although the donor was going on these vacations with or without Thomas, so the cost to him was minimal.

Value of liberal institutions’ gifts to Justice Ginsburg over the years: approximately $3 trillion.

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have a Supreme Court that isn’t dying to impose faddish liberal ideas on the country by claiming to discover never-before-seen constitutional rights. If anything, the Dobbs opinion should have calmed lefties. Abortion is no longer a “constitutional right,” so now it’s up to the states. And guess what, liberals? Americans are voting to allow abortion!

But Democrats are mostly neurotic women, so “calm” is not their middle name.

Contrary to the left’s self-advertisements as huge fans of democracy — Democracy Dies in Darkness! — the last thing they want is people voting on their crazy ideas. That’s why they’ve got to discredit the current court.

If all goes according to plan, Trump will lose another election for the GOP next year, handing Democrats super-majorities in Congress, whereupon they will pack the court. Finally, liberals will have their magical Supreme Court back! How much is that penumbra worth to you, New York Times?

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

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Op-ed: The Post Office fired me for honoring the Lord’s Day. Supreme Court must make this right


 By Gerald Groff | Fox News | Published April 13, 2023 2:00am EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/post-office-fired-me-honoring-lord-day-supreme-court-must-make-this-right

My roots in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania run deep.  Growing up here it was rare to see businesses open on Sundays.  It was the Lord’s Day.  We spent the morning in church, the afternoon with family, and honored God by resting from our regular labor—something God commanded we do in the fourth of the Ten Commandments.

I never thought I would lose my job for honoring the Lord’s Day. 

As I matured, I looked for jobs that would respect the Lord’s Day.  The United States Postal Service seemed a perfect fit.  Not only could I drive the rural routes of my boyhood, it famously did not deliver on Sundays.  I could have a good career and respect the Lord’s Day.

It was an ideal job until the Postal Service contracted with Amazon to provide Sunday delivery.  At first, we managed to find a workable solution: I would work every holiday that did not fall on the Lord’s Day and take extra route work on weekdays and Saturdays to make up for not working Sundays. 

SUPREME COURT TAKES UP RELIGIOUS FREEDOM CASE INVOLVING POSTAL WORKER WHO REFUSED TO WORK ON SUNDAY

As much as I was able to accommodate the Post Office, stepping in to help other employees when they needed it most, the Postal Service would not accommodate me.  If I were a full-time rural carrier, it would be no problem.  Full-time carriers have enough seniority to be contractually exempt from work on Sundays.  If I had been willing to compromise what I believed and worked just a few Sundays, I would have reached seniority to get a full-time route and gone on to have a long career with the U.S. Postal Service.

Authorities say a mail dropbox outside of a Pennsylvania post office has been struck dozens of times by thieves searching for money and checks. 
Authorities say a mail dropbox outside of a Pennsylvania post office has been struck dozens of times by thieves searching for money and checks.  (FOX 29 Philadelphia)

It was either I violate God’s command to me and honor the Lord’s Day by keeping it holy or honor Him and trust Him with the outcome.  On the verge of my ideal career, I surrendered all my seniority, unwilling to sacrifice my hope of becoming a full-time carrier at the prospect of refusing God’s decree—even if it meant working just one Lord’s Day.

The response by the Postal Service was brutal.  I felt targeted for almost two years.  Rather than respect my religious beliefs, the Postal Service chose to make an example out of me.  Postal management sent me for eight different “pre-disciplinary interviews” at the main post office.  Each one took about two hours out of my work day, and I still had to finish all of my routes—and without overtime pay.

My employer purposefully assigned me more work than the same carriers I had been supporting every Saturday and holiday by working so they could have time off with family.  Without explanation or justification, USPS docked my pay.  If I had just compromised what I believed about the Lord’s Day—even just a handful of times—all of it would have gone away.  Compromising what we believe is never the right choice.

Surely an employer the size of the Postal Service could have found a way to accommodate a single employee’s religious beliefs.  Instead, it disciplined me so severely, it was quit or be fired.

Gerald Groff lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and is a former postal employee.  The U.S. Supreme Court will hear his case on April 18, 2023. 
Gerald Groff lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and is a former postal employee.  The U.S. Supreme Court will hear his case on April 18, 2023.  (First Liberty Institute)

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether religious employees like me who work extra shifts, holidays, and cover for his colleagues deserve a religious accommodation in the workplace.  Only God knows the final outcome; I still trust Him even if my decision to honor the Lord’s Day cost me my career. 

Our nation has a long history of protecting employees from being treated differently just because of their faith.  That is something woven into the fabric of our nation, including Lancaster County.  The heritage of respect and tolerance our nation has shown to the Old Order Amish and Mennonites who are my neighbors in Lancaster County is a lovely thing.  Yet the U.S. Postal Service refused to extend that religious tolerance to me.

I hope the Supreme Court reaffirms our nation’s commitment to providing equal opportunity and fair treatment in the workplace.  No employee should be forced to make the same decision the Postal Service forced upon me: faith or job.

Gerald Groff lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and is a former postal employee.

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As Moral Relativism Replaces Christian Values, Americans Will Suffer More Mass Shootings


BY: KATHLEEN BUSTAMANTE | APRIL 03, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/03/as-moral-relativism-replaces-christian-values-americans-will-suffer-more-mass-shootings/

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The devolution of American society began when moral relativism supplanted biblical truth in education, government, and eventually the family.

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The devolution of American society began when moral relativism supplanted biblical truth in education, government, and the family. Beginning in the late 1940s with the Supreme Court’s Everson v. Board of Education ruling and onward, our government and educational system have turned their backs on absolute truth to embrace Marxism, which aims to remove Christianity from all spheres of society.

The moral erosion proves obvious in a recent Barna poll that found, “Millennials are significantly less likely to believe in the existence of absolute moral truth or that God is the basis of all truth.”

The study also noted that “Millennials have less respect for life, in general,” and that “they are less than half as likely as other adults to say that life is sacred. They are twice as likely to diminish the value of human life by describing human beings as either ‘material substance only’ or their very existence as ‘an illusion.’”

Millennials’ disregard for life or morality should not come as a surprise. The decreasing number of young Americans who attend church regularly hear from pastors who may not preach biblical truth. A study by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that only 51 percent of America’s evangelical church pastors hold a biblical worldview. 

Armed with this data, I am thankful that recent shootings like those at The Covenant School in Nashville and the school shooting in Uvalde do not occur more frequently.

Gun-control advocates, the media, politicians, and my friends on social media urge increased gun restrictions as the solution to the problem, pointing to Europe and Australia as the golden standard for gun control. Yet, a 2018 New Zealand Herald article showed that despite tighter gun restrictions in these countries, shootings have occurred more frequently than Americans realize.

In 2022, for example, a gunman killed two and wounded seven people in Denmark, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in Europe, before authorities apprehended him and held him for psychological testing. The article, along with anti-firearm advocates, suggests increased psychological testing as the next solution now that radical gun-control policies have failed.

Not many in Western society honestly address the origin behind increased psychological problems. Western countries increasingly lean on modern mental health mantras rather than dealing with the heart of the matter.

For centuries, firearms have been a standard tool for hunting and home defense in America and Europe. So why the escalation of gun-related massacres throughout the United States and the West over recent decades? Again, I pose the heart of the issue: Moral relativism has replaced the truth of God’s Word.

As a college writing professor, I read and hear the anti-American and anti-Christian propaganda to which my students have been exposed their entire lives. Basic biblical truths such as “treat others how you wish to be treated” and “love your neighbor” have been replaced with mantras like “treat others with kindness unless they offend you” and “love yourself.”

How can a society that raises children devoid of the Christ-centered teachings of Christianity expect anything besides massacres at the hands of miserable, self-centered, and horribly confused individuals like the Uvalde and Highland Park shooters?

Gun Control to Mask Moral Decline

Seven years ago, I attended an active-shooter training hosted by the campus safety department at the community college where I taught in Portland, Oregon. I will never forget the cautionary advice shared by one of the presenters.

“In the event of an active shooter situation, don’t bother calling campus police. Instead, call 911,” he advised. “Campus police at this college are unarmed, so we won’t be able to ensure your safety. Although it will take the local police department much longer to respond to a campus shooting, they will eventually be able to take down a shooter if the need arises.”

Baffled, I asked why campus police are expected to perform their duties unarmed. He explained that several years prior, a college board member felt distressed about campus police carrying firearms. After a swift vote by the board, my safety as well as the safety of my students and colleagues would be jeopardized henceforth.

After the training, I stayed behind to ask the officer his opinion regarding faculty arming themselves on campus. He encouraged me — off the record, of course — to carry concealed for my own safety and for the safety of my students. That college, like most academic institutions across the country, proclaims itself to be a gun-free zone.

A 2019 CNN article documented 10 years of school shootings, and the majority occurred in gun-free zones. A 2019 study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that in schools across the U.S. that reportedly allow teachers to carry guns on campus, no deaths occurred as a result of shootings between 2000 and 2018.

Neither the problem nor the solution to school shootings has any correlation with guns or mental health problems that can be treated with medication and therapy, as many scholars and pundits contend. Rather, the problem stems from our nation’s replacement of biblical truth with moral relativism.

A Symptom, Not the Cause

As a writing instructor for 16 years, I examined thousands of essays, gaining an unusual window into the lives and experiences of my Millennial and Gen Z students. Like an airline passenger who shares intimate details with a stranger, knowing he will never see that passenger again, many of my students confide personal musings and revelations in their writing.

A surprising number of essays I read unwrap students’ deep suffering related to childhood sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. Some of my students suffer the scars of drug- or alcohol-addicted, neglectful parents. Some students are only a few months clean and sober themselves. Several are homeless. And over the past decade, they write increasingly about gender confusion.

I have detected a common theme throughout their stories. Each of these unique souls is in search of something specific, a need inherent in every human. The agonizing part is that an ancient moral and religious tradition understands their needs, but they do not.

Instead of the moral relativism they have been fed from kindergarten through college, they need to hear truth. Not the “find your own truth” nonsense propagated by educators, Hollywood, and hosts on “The View,” but rather the age-old truth found solely in the Word of God.

The solution is clear: Churches must put away social justice-centered and seeker-friendly sermons and return to expository teaching. Parents must roll up their sleeves and remove the responsibility of parenting from educators and the media by doing the hard work themselves. And voters must stop expecting the government to fix a problem created by sinful humanity.

Instead, we must repent and ask God to point our nation to truth.

Kathleen Bustamante is a freelance writer and former college writing instructor. Her writing has appeared in the American Spectator, the American Conservative, the American Thinker, Real Clear Religion, and James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

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Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Race Is the Left’s Opening to Reverse Years of Conservative Victories


BY: DAVE CRAIG AND JAKE CURTIS | APRIL 03, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/03/wisconsins-supreme-court-race-is-the-lefts-chance-to-reverse-years-of-conservative-victories/

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Wisconsin’s growing leftist base sees an opportunity to overturn all of the hard-fought reforms by flipping the state’s high court.

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On Tuesday, Wisconsinites will once again head to the polls in a race that has garnered national attention and set national spending records for a judicial race. According to the most recent Wispolitics.com tally, the two Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates and outside groups have combined for over $45 million in spending. What’s at stake? All of the reforms of the Gov. Scott Walker era, and more.

Home to Walker, former Speaker Paul Ryan, former RNC Chairman and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and conservative star Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin has enjoyed an outsized role in national politics since 2010. Instead of cautiously governing like so many administrations in purple states, Walker and his allies advanced some of the boldest reforms in the nation. Starting with the historic Act 10 that resulted in a siege of the Capitol (and over $15 billion in taxpayer savings), conservatives advanced bold reforms like Right to Work, voter ID, concealed carry, castle doctrine, and a dramatic expansion of school choice.

Now, Wisconsin’s growing leftist base sees an opportunity to overturn all of the hard-fought reforms by flipping the state’s high court. Politico recently proclaimed the race “could be the beginning of the end for GOP dominance.” This would obviously be bad news for conservatives nationally since Wisconsin will undoubtedly play a huge role in who is president in 2025.

The two candidates running to replace the former conservative Chief Justice on the current 4-3 conservative court could not be any more different, and whoever wins will determine the ideological control of the court for years. Running as the progressive is Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz. Instead of articulating a coherent judicial philosophy, she has consistently emphasized her “values” and how they will influence her decisions. She has also troublingly declared that Wisconsin’s legislative maps are rigged –  announcing her thoughts on an issue that is likely to come before the court if liberals gain the majority. She has stated that she disagrees with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that returned abortion law to the states. She is also the candidate that the left apparently sees as showing they “are done pretending that judges are merely legal umpires.”

Contrast Protasiewicz’s activism with the originalist approach of former Justice Dan Kelly, appointed to the court by Gov. Scott Walker, who authored historic decisions during his four years on the court and consistently quotes from the Federalist Papers on the campaign trail. His lead opinion in Tetra Tech upended decades of deference to administrative agencies.

While Kelly has been supported by the Republicans and Protasiewicz by the Democrats, it is clear that Protasiewicz views the job of a judge as a super partisan legislator, supplanting the legislature’s authority with that of her own. Forecasting what a liberal majority would do Wisconsin’s duly-enacted reform regime, liberal Justice Jill Karofsky herself has declared specifically that “everything that Wisconsinites care about is on the line in this election, from abortion rights to fair maps to the 2024 election to democracy itself, all of those things are going to be on the ballot on April 4th…” These are all issues that have been settled by the democratically elected legislature but are apparently all on the table for a liberal majority of the court.

While abortion, crime, and redistricting have been the main focus of the media and outside groups during the campaign, several other cases could be brought which would fundamentally transform the landscape in Wisconsin. Even cases that have already been addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court are at risk of novel interpretations under the Wisconsin constitution by a new progressive majority.

An issue impacting tens of thousands of Wisconsin families that could be dramatically affected by the balance of the state Supreme Court is school choice. In 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the choice program for religious schools in Jackson v. Benson. There, the court reversed the lower court, holding that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was valid under both the Establishment Clause and Article I, Section 18 of the Wisconsin Constitution, which prohibits the use of money from the public treasury to be used for the benefit of religious societies, religious schools, or seminaries. The holding was based in large part on the fact that students in the program were not compelled to attend sectarian schools nor forced to participate in religious activities. The Court further held that public funds may be given to third parties as long as the program on its face is neutral between sectarian and nonsectarian alternatives and that the transmission of funds is guided by the decisions of independent third parties.

While the decision in Jackson has been in place for a generation, a court viewing itself as a super-legislature could undo the decision in part, or in whole, based on a narrowed view of the constitutional provisions reviewed in that case, particularly relative to monies “drawn from the treasury” that are used in the choice program. A court decision holding a strict view of the provision could decimate a program that provides alternatives to families desperately looking for an alternative to failing public schools.

Another issue likely to surface in the event the ideological makeup of the court shifts, as it has recently in other states, is the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s voter ID law. In League of Women Voters v. Walker and Milwaukee Branch of NAACP v. Walker, leftist groups challenged Wisconsin’s 2011 voter ID law, claiming the legislature lacked authority to enact a voting qualification under the Wisconsin constitution and that the law was an undue burden on the right to vote. Upholding the law, the Court noted that requiring an ID was within the legislature’s authority to provide for laws relating to elector registration under Article III, Section 2, that the law was a reasonable regulation that “could improve and modernize election procedures, safeguard voter confidence in the outcome of elections and deter voter fraud,” and that the burdens of gathering the required documents, traveling, and obtaining a photograph ID were not a substantial burden.

In a challenge to the voter ID law under the state constitution’s right to vote, an activist court could hold that a record demonstrating that numerous individuals claiming to have been deterred from voting because of the burden of obtaining an ID is evidence of a “substantial burden” that outweighs the threat of voter fraud and could strike down the law. The left will undoubtedly come after this important law ahead of the 2024 election as it has recently in other states. In a state with razor-thin margins of victory for conservative super-stars like Sen. Ron Johnson, opening the gate to fraudulent votes in the absence of a voter ID law could have major consequences in 2024 and beyond.

Finally, and least covered by the media, are the ramifications the court race might have on the shift of power back to the deep state. In the 2018 case Tetra Tech EC, Inc. v. Wis. Dep’t of Revenue, the court departed from its practice of “deferring to administrative agencies’ conclusions of law.” In a case where a citizen may be challenging an agency’s interpretation of law or administrative rule, the court would no longer review the agency’s action with a “bias” toward the agency’s own interpretation. Agency interpretation is an issue that arises in courts every day across the country, measuring the amount of authority an agency wields on virtually any issue, ranging from taxation to education to election administration – many times involving an agency seizing authority the legislature never gave it. A restoration of agency deference by an activist court could result in an immediate shift of authority from the legislative branch to the unelected officials in the executive branch.

During the final days of the race, former Justice Dan Kelly is sprinting across to the state with a final closing message: saving the court. But the race is about more than just the court. It could impact policies duly enacted by the legislature that conservatives have worked for a generation to obtain. It will make a difference in securing elections and electing strong conservatives like Ron Johnson, who has demanded Covid transparency and has taken on the deep state, or electing central planners like Tammy Baldwin who want to strip us of our freedoms. The election on Tuesday presents a fundamental choice to voters.

Do they want Wisconsin to lurch backward with a progressive court that will undo so many of the reforms the legislature and Gov. Walker worked to implement over the last decade, or are they going to vote to save the court by elevating a former justice that will ensure a conservative majority that respects the law as written by the legislature? The choice is obvious. Save the court and save the state.

Dave Craig is a Waukesha attorney and served in the Wisconsin Legislature from 2011 to 2021. Prior to his election, he worked as an aide to Congressman Paul Ryan. Jake Curtis is an Ozaukee attorney who previously served as an agency Chief Legal Counsel in the Walker Administration.

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No One Should Be Forced to Choose Between His Faith and His Paycheck


BY: RACHEL N. MORRISON | MARCH 06, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/06/no-one-should-be-forced-to-choose-between-his-faith-and-his-paycheck/

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Without action by the Supreme Court, employers will continue to feel safe denying religious accommodation requests.

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Should American employees be forced to choose between making a living and freely exercising their religious beliefs? That is the question the Supreme Court is considering in Groff v. DeJoy.

On Tuesday, a diverse group submitted amicus briefs urging the court to answer that question with a resounding “no.” More than 30 briefs were filed on behalf of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Mormons, Muslims, Seventh-day Adventists, Sikhs, Zionists, religious liberty and employment law scholars, medical professionals, nonprofit organizations, states, and members of Congress, among others.

Groff involves United States Postal Service (USPS) mail carrier Gerald Groff, a Christian, who holds uncontested sincere religious beliefs about resting, worshiping, and not working on his Sunday Sabbath. After he joined USPS in 2012, USPS contracted with Amazon in 2013 to provide mail deliveries on Sundays. Initially, USPS accommodated Groff’s Sunday Sabbath observance but later required him to work Sundays.

In accordance with his religious beliefs, Groff refused to work when he was scheduled on his Sunday Sabbath, resulting in progressive disciplinary actions by USPS. Realizing his termination was imminent, Groff resigned in 2019, leading to this religious discrimination lawsuit.

This case places the future of workplace religious accommodation rights in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Religious Accommodations in the Workplace

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Recognizing that we live in a pluralistic and religiously diverse society and that it is important for employees not to have to hide or give up their religious identities in the workplace, Congress amended Title VII in 1972 to affirmatively require employers to “reasonably accommodate” an employee’s religious observances and practices unless doing so would pose an “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.”

The necessity for a religious accommodation in the workplace arises when a job duty, rule, or policy violates an employee’s sincerely held religious belief — such as working on one’s Sabbath. In practice, Title VII’s religious accommodation right has the biggest benefit for employees of minority religions and those who have less common religious practices — from a Muslim’s hijab and daily prayers, to a Jew’s yarmulke or Friday Sabbath observance, to a Seventh-day Adventist’s Saturday Sabbath observance, and a Sikh’s kirpan (small sword), metal bracelet, unshorn hair, and beard.

In 2015, the Supreme Court held that under Title VII the clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch could not refuse to hire a female Muslim applicant because she wore a hijab in violation of the store’s “no cap” policy. As the Supreme Court explained: “Title VII does not demand mere neutrality with regard to religious practices — that they be treated no worse than other practices. Rather, it gives them favored treatment,” creating an affirmative obligation on employers.

What Does ‘Undue Hardship’ Mean?

The central issue in Groff is what the phrase “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business” entails. In a 1977 case called Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison, the Supreme Court, interpreting similar language from an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guideline in effect during the events at issue, summarily stated that “undue hardship” meant merely “more than a de minimis cost.” This formulation has been adopted as the standard for Title VII by lower court judges across the country, effectively gutting the workplace religious accommodation right Congress provided employees.

Justices, judges, legal scholars, and religious leaders, among others, have criticized the Hardison court’s undue hardship formulation. As Justice Thurgood Marshall explained in his dissent in Hardison, the decision “effectively nullifie[s]” employees’ religious accommodation rights and “makes a mockery” of Title VII.

To put it simply: Hardison’s more than de minimis standard is absurd. De minimis means “very small or trifling,” and more than de minimis means merely a smidge more than “very small or trifling.” “Undue,” in contrast, means “exceeding what is appropriate or normal” or “excessive,” which is significantly more than “very small or trifling.”

Since Hardison, and to avoid application of Hardison’s non-textual standard, Congress has explicitly defined “undue hardship” in multiple statutes as “an action requiring significant difficulty or expense.” This is true for laws requiring other types of workplace accommodations, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), which provides employees accommodations for disability, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (2022), which provides employees accommodations for the known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.

A secondary issue in Hardison is whether undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business can be met by merely showing a burden on the employee’s coworkers rather than on the business itself. In Groff, the court of appeals held that USPS satisfied its burden to demonstrate undue hardship because accommodating Groff would burden the employee’s coworkers. This standard would minimize Title VII’s religious accommodation protections, subjecting them to a “heckler’s veto by disgruntled employees,” as Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote in his dissent.

Poised to Protect Religious Accommodations

The Supreme Court has had several chances in recent years to revisit Hardison, but the court finally decided it should do so in Groff. This has led many to speculate that the court will reject Hardison’s more than de minimis formulation and clarify that undue means, well, just that — undue.

Indeed, this case should be a no-brainer. It is a simple exercise in statutory interpretation and textual definitions.

An interesting wrinkle in this case, however, is that since the USPS is an arm of the federal government, it is represented in court by the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In December 2019, the DOJ, joined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the federal agency tasked with enforcing Title VII), told the court that Hardison’s formulation is “incorrect.” Indeed, in USPS’s brief urging the court not to hear Groff, DOJ merely argued the case was a “poor vehicle” to revisit Hardison and that the issue of a religious accommodation’s burden on coworkers “does not merit review.” The court clearly disagreed.

It would go against DOJ custom for the United States to change its position on Hardison. But it is unclear if the Biden administration will willingly support religious liberty, especially when it involves a Christian employee. We’ll find out when USPS files its response brief.

As evidenced by the number of amicus briefs filed by different faith traditions in support of Groff, religious accommodation rights in the workplace is an issue that all Americans, regardless of religion, can and should support. No one should be forced to choose between his religion and earning a paycheck.

Without action by the Supreme Court, employers will continue to feel safe denying religious accommodation requests because they can easily demonstrate a cost that is slightly more than de minimis. It is high time the Supreme Court remedies Hardison’s error.

Oral argument in Groff is scheduled for April 18, and a decision is expected by the end of June.

Rachel N. Morrison is an attorney and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project.

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Leftists Regurgitate ‘Uncle Tom’ Smear to Dim Clarence Thomas’ Legacy, But It Won’t Work


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/16/leftists-regurgitate-uncle-tom-smear-to-dim-clarence-thomas-legacy-but-it-wont-work/

Justice Clarence Thomas doing an interview at the Library of Congress
No matter what the left throws at him, Clarence Thomas will be remembered as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices in U.S. history.

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is routinely the target of deranged smears from American leftists, and sadly, this week has been no exception with the return of the “Uncle Tom” attack.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Senate successfully passed SB 69, which, if approved by the state House and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, would allow for the placement of a monument of Thomas on the grounds of the state capitol. In remarks to his colleagues, bill sponsor and GOP Sen. Ben Watson spoke to Thomas’ character and praised the justice for living a life “marked by tremendous achievement,” saying:

This native son of Georgia deserves a place of honor and recognition on our Capitol grounds, a place where future generations of Georgians can learn valuable lessons from his legacy and gain inspiration and belief that their lofty dreams are obtainable too in America, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born.

Meanwhile, the upper chamber’s Democrat members couldn’t have been less enthused. Not only did every single Democrat senator vote against the bill, but several of them used the opportunity to slander the Supreme Court’s most senior justice.

While some Democrats such as Sen. Nan Orrock went after Thomas’ judicial career by calling his service on the nation’s highest court “problematic,” the comments from leftist hacks like Sen. Emanuel Jones were much more vitriolic. During his unhinged diatribe, Jones referred to Thomas, the second black American to serve on the Supreme Court, as an “Uncle Tom,” and said he betrayed “his own community.”

“I’m just trying to tell you what we have in the African American community when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery and that person betraying his own community — we have a term in the black community,” Jones said. “That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’ An Uncle Tom … talks about a person who back during the days of slavery sold his soul to the slave masters.”

A Pattern of Racist Attacks

Unfortunately, Jones’ Tuesday rant is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the years, so-called “progressive” Democrats have hurled a barrage of racist and degrading attacks at Thomas for the crime of daring to think for himself.

During a 2014 interview, for instance, Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi didn’t just call Thomas an “Uncle Tom”; he also claimed the justice “doesn’t like black people” and “doesn’t like being black.”

But it’s not just Democrat politicians lobbing racist insults at Thomas. Prominent legacy media members such as MSNBC host Joy Reid have also joined in on the smear campaign in recent years. After then-President Donald Trump forecasted plans to take his 2020 election challenges to the Supreme Court shortly after the Nov. 3 contest, Reid openly questioned the legitimacy of the court and invoked the “Uncle Tom” slur by referring to Thomas as “Uncle Clarence.”

“So, I think what scares people is that if [Trump] decides to do something that legally makes no sense … but if they somehow manage to stumble into the Supreme Court, do any of you guys trust Uncle Clarence and Amy Coney Barrett and those guys to actually follow the letter of the law?” Reid asked her colleagues. “No! I mean, it’s a completely politicized Supreme Court that you can’t just trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”

In addition to Reid, actor Samuel L. Jackson is among those who has levied the “Uncle Clarence” slur against Thomas.

[READ: Why The Racist Left Smears Clarence Thomas As An ‘Angry Black Man’]

Thomas Is a National Hero

Unlike many of today’s social justice warriors who love to feign “oppression,” Thomas grew up in an era of real oppression. Born into abject poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, Thomas was raised by his grandparents in Savannah during the height of segregation. With his biological father missing from his life, Thomas’ grandfather assumed the role, providing his grandson with a foundation for hard work and discipline.

Despite the harsh circumstances of his beginnings, Thomas would go on to excel in academics, attending the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. After spending years working in the legal profession, Thomas was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989. Not long after in 1991, he was nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court (no thanks to Democrat partisans like then-Sen. Joe Biden), where he has faithfully served for the past 31 years.

If we lived in a world where Democrats earnestly stood by their professed belief in championing the success of non-white people, Thomas wouldn’t be getting one statue, but a hundred. His journey to success is something that shouldn’t just be celebrated but shared to inspire others to overcome adversity and chase their dreams with hard work and strong principles. Then again, leftists’ racial pandering isn’t about helping people.

For Democrats, Thomas’ devotion to the Constitution and willingness to do right by the American people stands in the way of their conquest to centralize government power in the hands of a few elites. His originalist jurisprudence is a roadblock to that goal, therefore making it perfectly acceptable in their eyes to use any tactic, no matter how grotesque, to undermine him.

Despite their best efforts, the left’s bid to slander the legacy of this great man will fail. No matter what kind of rhetorical garbage they throw at him, Clarence Thomas will be remembered as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices and public servants in U.S. history. His understanding of what it means to be a judge and adherence to the Constitution have rightly garnered him adoration from millions of Americans. And that is something the left will never be able to change.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Supreme Court grants request from Republican states to delay end of Title 42 ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy


By: CARLOS GARCIA | December 19, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/breaking-supreme-court-grants-request-from-republican-states-to-delay-end-of-title-42-remain-in-mexico-policy-2658986270.html

Photo (left): ERIN SCHAFF/POOL/AFP via Getty Images; Photo (right): Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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The U.S. Supreme Court granted a request from several Republican states asking for the end of the controversial Title 42 “Remain in Mexico” policy to be delayed. Title 42 was implemented during the Trump administration in order to allow immigration officials to expel migrants who were seeking asylum from the country while their applications were processed. The Biden administration has sought to end the policy despite objections from those who say it will result in a further surge of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.

While the policy was scheduled to end on Wednesday, the order from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Monday temporarily extended it until a response can be filed Tuesday. More than a dozen Republican states filed the lawsuit to keep Title 42 in place, including Texas, whose governor responded to the ruling on social media.

“U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts has HALTED the lifting of Title 42 for now. Texas and other states are insisting that the Court leave Title 42 in place,” tweeted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

“Today’s order is a step in that direction. This helps prevent illegal immigration,” he added.

The policy was struck down in November in a ruling from District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., who called it an “arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.”

Illegal immigrant advocates excoriated Title 42 and accused former President Donald Trump of being motivated by racism against immigrants. Supporters of the policy have argued that it was needed in order to stem the tide of illegal aliens streaming across the border and seeking asylum.

A poll in May found that 65% of Hispanics supported a temporary closure of the U.S.-Mexico border so that illegal crossings could be prevented. That was 9% greater than the number among all voters who supported the same.

Here’s more about the controversial policy:

US braces for surge in migrants with Title 42 set to expire | ABCNL www.youtube.com

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Supreme Court Clears Way For Congress To Access Trump’s Tax Returns


By: TREVOR SCHAKOHL, LEGAL REPORTER | November 22, 2022

Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/22/supreme-court-trump-tax-returns/

Former U.S. President Donald Trump Makes An Announcement At His Florida Home
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The Supreme Court has denied former President Donald Trump’s request to block the House Ways and Means Committee from reviewing his tax returns.

The committee has long been attempting to review six years of tax returns and files in connection with Trump and eight of his businesses. Trump had appealed to the Supreme Court to stop the committee from reviewing his tax returns, but the court turned down Trump’s request Tuesday.

On Oct. 27, a three-judge panel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Trump’s request to block the tax returns, pushing him to file the emergency appeal in the Supreme Court, CNN reported. Trump asked the court Oct. 31 to temporarily block the committee from viewing his tax returns as the court considered his case, and Chief Justice John Roberts granted that request. (RELATED: Supreme Court Okays Masks On Planes During Public Health Emergencies)

The Tuesday court ruling also vacated Roberts’ order.

Trump’s Oct. 31 application claimed the committee’s tax return review request would, if allowed to stand, “undermine the separation of powers and render the office of the Presidency vulnerable to invasive information demands from political opponents in the legislative branch.”

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Here Is Everything Democrats Claim Is ‘A Threat to Democracy’


BY: THE FEDERALIST STAFF | OCTOBER 27, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/27/here-is-everything-democrats-claim-is-a-threat-to-democracy/

President Joe Biden at White House
Meanwhile, it’s the blue party that’s working overtime to erode and replace actual democratic processes.

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Updated on Oct. 27.

It seems like every day Democrats and their cronies in the corrupt corporate media concoct a new, bogus “threat to democracy” that they use to intimidate Americans out of voting for their political opponents.

These “threats” aren’t just overused, they are overexaggerated in an effort to cover up Democrats’ hypocrisy, mask their incompetence, and justify the targeting of their ideological enemies. Meanwhile, it’s the blue party that’s working overtime to erode and replace the actual democratic processes responsible for keeping our nation running.

Here is a list of everything Democrats claim is “a threat to democracy.”

Donald Trump

Americans think corporate media are a bigger “threat to democracy” than former President Donald Trump yet not one day goes by without a Democrat, talking head, or corporate media outlet asserting the Republican is responsible for the downfall of the nation.

The “threat to democracy” accusations began before Trump won the 2016 election, have continued throughout his presidency, and repeatedly make headlines more than a year after the end of his first term.

Republicans

What could possibly be a bigger “threat to democracy” than Democrats’ top Trumpian foe? According to President Joe Biden, it is “MAGA Republicans.”

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said during a doom-and-gloom speech in Philadelphia earlier this year.

Whether it’s Republican voters, Republican governors, Republican members of Congress, Republican-controlled legislatures, or even Republican grandmas, Democrats and the media say anyone associated with the GOP could destroy our nation and deserves punishment.

Ted Cruz

Brookings, a left-leaning think tank, described Republican Sen. Ted Cruz as one of many “copycat candidates who parrot Trump’s moves and endorse his anti-democratic tactics” in a piece titled, “Trump is not the only threat to democracy.”

Josh Hawley

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley earned the same judgment from Brookings as Cruz. Additionally, when he objected to certifying the 2020 presidential election results, he (along with Cruz and other GOP senators) was smeared by The Washington Post as one of “the Constitution’s most dangerous domestic enemies.”

Ron DeSantis

According to Democrats, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a raging, extreme “threat to democracy” for simply governing as a Republican.

“Ron DeSantis Would Kill Democracy Slowly and Methodically,” one article in New York Magazine warned.

Dr. Oz

“An impaired Fetterman who does not pose a threat to our democracy is better than a polished Oz who does. Remember what’s at stake here,” a senior adviser at The Lincoln Project tweeted shortly after the political opponents’ debate.

Tudor Dixon

Tudor Dixon, the Republican woman brave enough to challenge Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was classified as “a huge threat to our democracy” by her incumbent opponent for raising questions about election irregularities.

Ron Johnson

For the crime of being an effective Republican lawmaker, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has also been deemed a “threat to democracy.”

Legitimately Conducted Elections

Speaking of Republicans, did you know that Americans choosing to elect GOP candidates is a threat to Democracy? That’s what several of the nation’s top propaganda publications want you to believe.

“American Democracy Can’t Survive Unless the Far Right Is Marginalized. Here’s How to Do It,” Time Magazine warned in 2021.

The push to classify GOP wins as threats especially expanded ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“Should [Republicans] win, they will certainly attempt to end democracy as we know it in their states,” MSNBC Opinion Columnist Ryan Cooper wrote three weeks before Election Day 2022. “The effort will probably look like an updated version of Jim Crow.”

Questioning Elections

Nevermind that Democrats are known for rejecting election results and objecting to every presidential Republican victory this century — anyone who dares mention that U.S. elections are not perfect is smeared with the ill-fitting term “election denier,” and considered a “threat to democracy.”

This “threat,” according to media, Democrats, and the ever-vague “experts,” is so big that it needs to be taught in schools. Less than two weeks before the 2022 midterms, The New York Times published a “Lesson Plan” titled “Explore How the Election Denial Movement Threatens Democracy.”

“What can happen in a representative democracy when politicians and a significant portion of the electorate question the legitimacy of elections?” the subtitle asks.

The Events of Jan. 6, 2021

Democrats say Americans’ actions on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, proved to be as big a “threat to democracy” as Pearl Harbor or 9/11, both of which resulted in thousands more deaths than the Capitol riot.

Not only was the Capitol riot an existential threat, leftists claim, but New York Magazine says “Americans’ Indifference About January 6 Is the Real Threat to Democracy.”

Election Security Legislation

The New York Times is also one of the many corporate media outlets and others that have expressed concern with Republicans’ voter integrity measures following the chaotic 2020 election.

“Many top Republican Party officials and lawmakers have spent the last two years striking back, and drawn the most attention for their efforts to pass ‘voter integrity’ laws that aim to make voting more onerous under the guise of preventing fraud. … These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans’ hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not,” The New York Times editorial board wrote last month.

“The real threat to America’s electoral system is not posed by ineligible voters trying to cast ballots. It is coming from inside the system,” the board concluded. “All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers.”

Poll Watchers

It’s ironic that The New York Times wants voters to be poll watchers — especially since corporate media recently deemed those who sign up to monitor ballot boxes as “threats to democracy.”

As documented by The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood, the propaganda press is repeatedly “hitting the panic button over Republican poll watchers legitimately overseeing the conduction of elections, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.”

Elon Musk

When Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced plans to acquire Twitter and welcome free speech back to the Big Tech platform, Twitter’s pampered employees, the corporate media, and pro-censorship politicians threw a fit.

“He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less,” The Washington Post’s Max Boot tweeted.

Not only is Musk’s purchase considered by the left a “threat to democracy,” Salon writer Matthew Rozsa said Musk’s “attempted takeover of Twitter is a threat to the free world.”

Freedom of Speech

Some of the same media personalities whose livelihoods revolve around rights granted by the First Amendment say that free speech, especially online, is “a threat to democracy.”

‘Misinformation’

The pro-censorship party and its allies say “misinformation” and “disinformation,” which means any information about hot topics like Covid, elections, and biology that they deem inconvenient or contra the narrative they are trying to sell, is a threat to democracy.

Parents at School Board Meetings

If it wasn’t already clear that the National School Boards Association and Attorney General Merrick Garland think concerned parents are “domestic terrorists” who threaten our nation and deserve to be prosecuted, it was certainly made clear by members of the media.

“Attacks on school boards are a threat to democracy,” an opinion editorial in the Mercury News said.

Pro-Lifers

Garland also considers peaceful pro-life protesters to be a threat to the nation. That’s why his Department of Justice has publicly indicted 22 people who oppose killing babies in the womb instead of prosecuting the people responsible for the destruction, vandalism, and arson of dozens of pregnancy centers.

The U.S. Supreme Court

Democrats have long insisted that the Supreme Court’s decisions are the “law of the land” but when the court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year, that philosophy was quickly replaced with the left’s favorite excuse for hypocrisy.

“The US supreme court poses a real threat to Americans’ democracy,” one headline in The Guardian blared.

Even before that, media, upset with the prospect of Trump exercising his presidential power to nominate yet another justice to the court, felt the need to explain “Why the Supreme Court is one of the biggest threats to American democracy.”

At one point, New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz threatened that “If the Court’s right-wing majority finds that it can continually push the boundaries of conservative judicial activism without undermining its own popular legitimacy, then the consequences for progressivism and popular democracy could be dire.”

Clarence and Ginni Thomas

The left believes that not only is the Supreme Court a “threat to democracy,” but so are Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife.

“Ginni and Clarence Thomas are the duo we wish we didn’t have to constantly talk about, but here we are. Their actions surrounding the insurrection are a threat to our democracy and the public’s trust in our courts,” Citizens for Ethics, a leftist watchdog group, tweeted.

The Electoral College

Our nation’s Electoral College was designed to best represent Americans no matter where they lived but the left says that constitutional design is a “threat to democracy.”

The left-leaning Aspen Institute blared that “The Electoral College Is a Threat to 21st Century Democracy,” adding that while “our founders felt we needed a brake against ‘mob rule,’ it is incompatible with our current national credo that every vote counts.”

Our Bicameral Legislature

According to Vox, though, the Electoral College “poses a smaller long-term threat to American democracy than the Senate,” because “the Senate undermines principles of equal democratic representation.”

“The Senate will continue to give small states, which tend to be rural and conservative, far more clout than their size deserves. That’s not just a problem for democracy in the abstract,” the Brennan Center’s Zachary Roth agrees.

Democracy Itself

As documented by The Federalist’s Elle Purnell, Democrats and the media also consider an elected majority in the U.S. Senate a threat to democracy.

This became very apparent when West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, “determined not to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Bankrupt plan.”

“Manchin is killing the Biden legislative agenda, and perhaps the future of American democracy too,” tweeted MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan.

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Liberal Supreme Court Justice Blocks Jan. 6 Committee


 By Jack Davis  October 27, 2022

Read more at https://www.westernjournal.com/liberal-supreme-court-justice-blocks-jan-6-committee/

Efforts by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion to examine phone records of the Arizona Republican Party chairwoman have been stymied by a member of the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal wing.

Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday temporarily blocked the panel from accessing the phone records of Dr. Kelli Ward and her husband, Mark Ward, according to The Hill.

Kagan’s order was terse, saying, “Upon consideration of the application of counsel for the applicants, it is ordered that the October 22, 2022 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, case No. 22-16473, is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.

“Likewise, respondent T-Mobile USA, Inc. is temporarily enjoined from releasing the records requested by the House Select Committee pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.

“It is further ordered that a response to the application be filed on or before Friday, October 28, 2022, by 5 p.m. (EDT).”

Kagan was involved because she is the justice assigned to handle emergency requests from Arizona.

The Wards had sued to block access to their phone records. After losing their case at the district court level, they appealed, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit voted 2-1 to deny their bid to protect their records, according to CNN.

That prompted the emergency appeal to Kagan. “This is an unprecedented case with profound precedential implications for future congressional investigations and political associational rights under the First Amendment,” the Wards said in the appeal.

“In a first-of-its-kind situation, a select committee of the United States Congress, dominated by one political party, has subpoenaed the personal telephone and text message records of a state chair of the rival political party relating to one of the most contentious political events in American history—the 2020 election and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.”

The appeal painted the case as potentially setting a dire precedent.

“If Dr. Ward’s telephone and text message records are disclosed, congressional investigators are going to contact every person who communicated with her during and immediately after the tumult of the 2020 election. That is not speculation, it is a certainty. There is no other reason for the Committee to seek this information,” the Wards’ filing said.

“There can be no greater chill on public participation in partisan politics than a call, visit, or subpoena, from federal investigators,” they wrote.

The appellate panel ruled against the Wards, saying the federal subpoena “is substantially related to the important government interest in investigating the causes of the January 6 attack and protecting future elections from similar threats.”

“The investigation, after all, is not about Ward’s politics; it is about her involvement in the events leading up to the January 6 attack, and it seeks to uncover those with whom she communicated in connection with those events,” Judges Barry Silverman and Eric Miller wrote in the majority opinion. “That some of the people with whom Ward communicated may be members of a political party does not establish that the subpoena is likely to reveal ‘sensitive information about [the party’s] members and supporters.’”

The two judges who formed the majority castigated the activities of the Wards, who were electors pledged to former President Donald Trump.

“Ward participated in a scheme to send spurious electoral votes to Congress, a scheme that the committee describes as ‘a key part’ of the ‘effort to overturn the election’ that culminated on Jan. 6,” the opinion said.

In her dissent, Judge Sandra Ikuta said the Wards have valid constitutional rights that were insufficiently considered.

“The communications at issue here between members of a political party about an election implicate a core associational right protected by the First Amendment,” Ikuta wrote.

“Regardless of Ward’s position regarding the 2020 election, her right to engage in discussions with her political associates remains entitled to First Amendment protection against the government’s compelled disclosure of her political affiliations,” the judge said. “We must be vigilant to protect First Amendment rights — even when raised by an individual alleged to have engaged in a nefarious ‘scheme.’”

Jack Davis

Contributor

Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.

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Clarence Thomas’s Duty is to the Constitution, Not a Constituency of Black Men


BY: MARK PAOLETTA | OCTOBER 27, 2022

Rerad more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/27/clarence-thomass-duty-is-to-the-constitution-not-a-constituency-of-black-men/

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
If you listen to corporate media, you’d think Clarence Thomas is a dark-skinned white supremacist. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

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MSNBC host Tiffany Cross recently went on a rant about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in which she referred to him as “Tom” (short for the derogatory term “Uncle Tom”) and invoked a series of other ugly and disrespectful names. But while Cross and her fellow leftwing TV hosts have been spewing hatred, Thomas has been laying out a jurisprudence of faithfulness to the text of the Constitution that now represents a view held by the majority of justices on the Supreme Court. This view does away with the nonexistent constitutional “right” to abortion while reigning in out-of-control federal agencies and giving the Bill of Rights the respect it deserves.

Cross criticized Thomas for not representing black men in his jurisprudence, but where did she get the idea that a supreme court justice is supposed to represent a constituency? In our system of government, a judge’s job is to decide cases according to the Constitution and the law, without regard to any person. Take, for instance, Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s views on affirmative action. It is certainly not her job to represent the median views of Hispanics, 68 percent of whom oppose race being a factor in college admissions, yet she continues to support racially preferential admissions systems that categorize people by their heritage and not their merits. 

Contrary to Cross’s claim, working-class black Americans historically have been in agreement with Thomas’ views on virtually every contentious issue. Thomas has long been opposed to affirmative action and racial preference programs, and so are most black Americans. According to a 2022 poll from Pew Research Center, 59 percent of black Americans are against race factoring into college admissions. It is unlikely Cross is a part of this 59 percent. 

Justice Thomas has opined for thirty years that there is no constitutional right to abortion. According to a 2020 Gallup article, from 2001-2007, only 24 percent of black Americans believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances. From 2017-2020, only 32 percent did. In a May 2022 YouGov poll, 81 percent percent of black respondents said that abortion should be banned after the 25th week. Cross likely is unwilling to tolerate any limit on abortions up to the moment of birth, which would put her far outside the mainstream of black Americans.  

Thomas has ruled that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage. While that is wholly different than whether one supports or supports same-sex marriage, it is notable that a large percentage of black Americans have, until very recently, been opposed to the practice. According to Pew Research, only 21 percent of black Americans supported same-sex marriage in 2004, only 30 percent in 2010, and 51 percent in 2019, and now it is 59 percent.

On topics where Thomas has not ruled from the bench, it is noteworthy that 81 percent of black parents support school choice, but the NAACP opposes school choice. Sixty-nine percent of black Americans support Voter ID laws. Only 28 percent of black Americans support leftist calls to defund the nation’s police. 

Why do Cross and black leadership groups, like the NAACP, continue to be so out of touch with the black Americans they claim to represent? Why do they prioritize the goals set by rich white socialists? Perhaps it is because the NAACP receives significant funding from a majority of white leftwing organizations and labor unions and, therefore, may feel obligated to parrot the views of their funders. Certainly, that’s what happened in 1991 when the NAACP opposed Justice Thomas’ nomination at the insistence of the white labor unions, despite his support in the black community. Cross works for, in her own words, “a white-run media” company, and she pushes far-left views, whereas Thomas has a lifetime appointment and answers only to the Constitution and his conscience.   

Elites have worked to destroy Thomas for years because, among other things, he exposes how out of step they are with the concerns of everyday black Americans. Thomas has argued for affirmative action programs that help students of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds, but the major beneficiaries of racial set-aside programs are wealthy blacks and Hispanics. A recent analysis showed that 71 percent of blacks and Hispanics at Harvard were from wealthy families. These wealthy individuals prevent the truly disadvantaged members of their communities from getting ahead. 

During her tirade, Cross also attempted to smear Thomas by mentioning the ridiculous “pubic hair on a Coke can” comment that Anita Hill bizarrely claimed Thomas made to her many years ago. But the majority of the American people – men and women – did not believe Anita Hill’s testimony at Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed people believed Thomas by 58-24 percent. Only 26 percent percent of women believed Anita Hill.   

In 1998, Anita Hill was interviewed by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” where she trashed two women who claimed to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by then-President Bill Clinton, one of whom Clinton later settled with out of court for $850,000. After Hill had zealously defended Clinton, Russert asked if there were a double standard on harassment allegations for liberals and conservatives. Hill said there is a double standard, saying, “We live in a political world, and the reality is that … there are … larger issues other than just individual behavior.” Hill meant that if you are pro-abortion, women’s groups will give you a pass if you sexually assault or harass women. Despite Hill being a blatant fraud, Cross still used her antics to smear Thomas. 

The left and the out-of-touch black leadership have attacked Thomas since he joined the Reagan administration forty years ago. Nevertheless, he does not care what they think or say. Cross’s attacks may play well to her leftist audience, but that’s not a lot of people, given she is the second lowest-rated show on the lowest-rated cable news network. 

Nevertheless, it’s important to respond to these attacks to demonstrate how out of touch she and her colleagues are. On the other hand, Thomas will continue building a long-lasting legacy by writing well-reasoned opinions and persuading a majority of his colleagues to join him in ruling in a manner that is faithful to the Constitution.

Mark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel’s office and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas. He is a senior fellow at Center for Renewing America, and partner at Schaerr Jaffe.

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Kamala Harris On NBC: We’re Only A Legitimate Democracy If Democrats Are In Power


BY: EDDIE SCARRY | SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/13/kamala-harris-on-nbc-were-only-a-legitimate-democracy-if-democrats-are-in-power/

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Democrats and their fangirls in the national media pretend they have this thoughtful, nuanced view about where the country is right now, but it really boils down to: None of America’s institutions or political processes are lawful nor legitimate unless we’re the ones controlling them.

Elections, Supreme Court decisions, legislation signed into law, “norms,” etc. All of it holds meaning so dear to their hearts.*

*Except when Republicans are in power, in which case it’s all fraudulent.

That dynamic was reinforced in virtually everything Vice President Kamala Harris said during an interview that aired Sunday with NBC’s Chuck Todd. She said the Senate filibuster rule should be discarded for Democrat priorities, but believed it should be maintained for everything else. Roll the tape…

Todd: “Are you comfortable that this could end the legislative filibuster for good, probably, even if you only try to do it for two issues?”

Harris: “No, I’m not. No I’m not.”

She said the country needs a president who will “speak up and raise the alarm” about those “who right now are vividly not defending our democracy.” Then she excused Democrats who actively supported and elevated Republican primary congressional candidates who voiced skepticism about the 2020 election.

Back to the tape…

Todd: “When you see the Democratic Party and some parts of the party funding ads to promote some of these election deniers in primaries… Is this something you’d be comfortable with?”

Harris: “I’m not going to tell people how to run their campaigns, Chuck.”

She professed to be deeply dedicated to ensuring the world witnesses America’s dedication to “the importance of democratic principles, rule of law, human rights.” Then she undermined our highest court, accusing the justices of being politically motivated.

To the tape…

Todd: “How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?”

Harris: “I think this is an activist court.”

There is no logical end to Harris and every other Democrat leader’s thought process other than: When we run things, it’s right, just, and everyone must accept. When it’s not us, everything is improper, invalid, and unlawful.

To be a Democrat is not to be pro-democracy. It’s to pursue a one-party state.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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A Biden Climate Emergency Would Unleash Unconstitutional Actions


BY: CHUCK DEVORE | JULY 21, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/21/a-biden-climate-emergency-would-unleash-unconstitutional-actions/

Earth

Biden is considering invoking considerable powers, but executive actions taken for a ‘climate emergency’ would be unconstitutional.

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The left is pressuring President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and his consideration of this declaration is a sign of desperation and weakness. Executive actions taken as a result of a “climate emergency” would die in the U.S. Supreme Court (more on that later).  

The reason Biden may declare a climate emergency is simple: His green agenda has stalled. Persistent inflation, led by rising energy costs, and a nation likely in recession, has reduced the likelihood that a narrowly divided Congress will approve the application of additional environmental leaches to an anemic economy.

It appears green dreams are the ultimate First World luxury good — it’s all fun and games until the average family shells out $5,000 a year more for gas, food, electricity, and rent. Yet the left demands more. Elected representatives are a roadblock. The people don’t know what’s best for them. The Vanguard of the Proletariat have met and decided that if Congress won’t act, then an array of administrative acronyms led by the dogmatic theoreticians of the White House — none of whom who have run a business — will.

The powers Biden is considering invoking are considerable, though none of them were intended by Congress to do what administration is preparing to do. Even a short summary is terrifyingly breathtaking in ambition and disingenuous creativity.

Burdensome Regulations

In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a rule to require “climate-related disclosures for investors.” This rule, if finalized, would deal further hammer blows to the domestic oil and gas industry — just after Biden was forced to go hat in hand to Saudi Arabia to beg Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for more oil. It would do that by requiring publicly traded companies to detail their greenhouse gas emissions, including those of their suppliers, whether they are publicly traded or not. In other words, privately held firms, family-owned companies, and individual proprietorships would be burdened with costly reporting requirements, causing more money to be put into paperwork and less money to be put into productive activity.

Next, just because the Supreme Court rolled back regulatory power in June’s West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision doesn’t mean that the EPA won’t still be used to achieve climate goals in ways Congress never authorized. For instance, it’s expected that the EPA will issue new particulate thresholds that would have the practical effect of regulating all combustion for energy and transportation purposes. Particulates are small particles that, in today’s era of clean air, are mostly generated by farming, wildfires, and construction activities — modern combustion is remarkably clean. However, because ambient levels of particulates are very hard to push below a certain level, there will always be an excuse to squeeze for more until every vehicle powered by hydrocarbons is removed from the road or curbed by fees. Put another way, it’s a war on using hydrocarbons to make energy or power vehicles.

Misuse of the Law

The declaration of a climate emergency would also embolden the Biden administration to invoke Section 202 of the Federal Power Act. This law, clearly intended by Congress to be used only in time of war or an emergency due to an increased demand for electricity or a shortage of electricity, will be used to shift electrical power from regions that have responsibly planned for their power needs to states that have gone green and, as a result, have made their grids vulnerable to the vicissitudes of weather. This means that the federal government could literally divert power contracted for by Arizona and shift it to California — a version of this happened a year ago. Essentially, a maximalist use of Section 202 will allow leftwing Biden appointees to turn the power off wherever they choose — all for environmental justice and the planet, of course.

Finally, Biden’s environmental zealots are looking to the Defense Production Act (DPA) to commandeer any part of the economy they feel should be drafted into the fight against climate change. Former President Donald Trump used the DPA to order 3M to produce N95 masks and General Motors to produce ventilators for the federal government. Biden invoked it for Covid-19 purposes as well and then improbably expanded its use to (try to) address the baby formula shortage. With the DPA now unleashed for decidedly non-war applications, the ability to muck with all aspects of the economy for the “climate emergency” are endless.

Administrative State in Retreat

Fortunately, due to the unlikely success of the duo of Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the federal bench was well-provisioned with constitutionally minded jurists. As a result, the unbridled powers of the administrative state have been in retreat.

Former six-term Indiana Republican Congressman John Hostettler, vice president of federal affairs with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, observes that, “Justice Alito’s concurrence in Gundy v. United States was a clear signal that he is willing to put an end to the administrative state if the right case comes before the Supreme Court. And the left knows it.”

Hostettler was referring to Justice Samuel Alito’s 2019 opinion, which was characterized by his colleague, Justice Neil Gorsuch, as “not join[ing] either the [court] plurality’s constitutional or statutory analysis,” In it, Alito stated:

The Constitution confers on Congress certain “legislative [p]owers,” Art. I, §1, and does not permit Congress to delegate them to another branch of the Government…. Nevertheless, since 1935, the Court has uniformly rejected nondelegation arguments and has upheld provisions that authorized agencies to adopt important rules pursuant to extraordinarily capacious standards….


If a majority of this Court were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years, I would support that effort. But because a majority is not willing to do that, it would be freakish to single out the provision at issue here for special treatment.

Moreover, Hostettler maintains, “Given the addition of the likely votes of Justices [Brett] Kavanaugh and [Amy Coney] Barrett, there’s even more cause for optimism that the High Court is likely to do what Congress seems unable to accomplish. That optimism was bolstered with the outcome in West Virginia v. EPA. Although West Virginia wasn’t the nondelegation case that Alito’s previous pronouncement called for, it’s close enough to stiffen the resolve of Constitutionalists to come up with the right case so that the Court’s majority can further cement its direction on the ‘major question’ doctrine — the concept that if an agency seeks to regulate on a ‘major question’ the statute must clearly grant that express authority.”

For this reason, Hostettler is confident that the Biden administration’s climate emergency overreach would “do to the expansive power of the administrative state what Dobbs did to Roe v. Wade.”

In war there are casualties — and Biden’s climate war threatens to claim the once-mighty power of unelected bureaucrats and left-wing appointees to rule our lives without our votes.  

Chuck DeVore is vice president of national initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He’s the author of two books, “The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America,” and “China Attacks,” a novel.

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Richard D. Land Op-ed: The imperial judiciary, 1962-2022: Rest in peace


Commentary By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor | July 8, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/the-imperial-judiciary-1962-2022-rest-in-peace.html/

Anti-abortion campaigners celebrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 24, 2022. – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ended the legalization of abortion nationwide in one of the most divisive and bitterly fought issues in American political life. The court overturned the 1973 “Roe v Wade” decision and said individual states can permit or restrict the procedure themselves. | OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

From at least 1962 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled official prayer in schools unconstitutional (Engel v. Vitale), followed the next year by banning official scripture reading (Abingdon School Districtv Schempp), the United States of America has been more often ruled by at least five lawyers in black robes than by the government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” which our forefathers intended. 

As a Baptist, I actually agreed with these decisions, but polling was running 80% against the court and these decisions would never have been made law through legislation.

As our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln so wisely said, we have a government that is dedicated to the proposition that “All men are created equal,” and have the inalienable right to “life, liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness.”

Our first president, George Washington, noted that we did not have a king, but a Constitution.

Starting with the Earl Warren Supreme Court in the 1950s, the nation’s highest court began gathering greater and greater power unto itself as Congress and the Executive Branch acquiesced and surrendered more and more authority to the Supreme Court. That dangerous imbalance allowed the progressives to win most of the victories they have won over the last half-century by judicial fiat and edict, not by the people’s elected representatives (the Congress and the President).

Why? Because most of what they wanted to do they could not get passed by Congress.

The classic example of this was the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. In 2015, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a blistering dissent to the Obergefell decision sanctioning same-sex marriage. In doing so, for the very first time in his tenure as a justice, which began in 2005, he read his opinion out loud from the bench, which is a justice’s way of putting an exclamation point on his dissent.

Chief Justice Roberts argued that the issue of same-sex marriage should be decided by the people in a public policy political process, not by imperial edict from unelected justices.

“Just who do we think we are?” Roberts asked his fellow justices. He explained that such a momentous decision changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples should be adjudicated by “the people, acting through their elected representatives,” not by “five lawyers who happen to hold commissions authorizing them to resolve legal disputes under the law.” Thus, he excoriated his fellow justices for “stealing this issue from the people.”

Now, the Supreme Court has done an about-face and returned the power of governing to the people. Contrary to what the mass mainstream media are saying, the Supreme Court did not “end democracy” by overturning the Roe v. Wade decision. In fact, they struck down an imperial dictate from a Supreme Court that ignored the Constitution and sought to impose its view of abortions on the nation — and 63 million American babies died.

Finally, after half a century, the issue of abortion has been returned to the people of each of the fifty states, and they will decide, by democratic processes when and under what circumstances a baby’s life can be taken in their state.

In 2022, the Supreme Court reclaimed its proper role through several dramatic decisions in the 2021-2022 Supreme Court session. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court said a high school coach did not have his First Amendment rights to free exercise as an American citizen when he steps on public school property. In Carson v. Makin the court ruled that a state does not have to furnish tuition aid to public school students, but if they do so, they cannot discriminate by disallowing students attending religious schools from receiving such aid.

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the justices said that Congress can no longer surrender its powers to unelected bureaucrats in the federal administrative state. In essence, the court told Congress “to get off its lazy backside and resume the people’s work.” 

Congress can still regulate emissions from coal plants, but they must pass specific laws rather than pass them off to faceless bureaucrats.

And of course, supremely in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court said Roe v. Wade was an attempt by the Court to seize the issue of abortion from the American people. Even the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg felt that Roe was a badly decided decision and made the abortion issue more divisive than it would otherwise have been.

The mass media and the Democrat chattering classes are hysterically proclaiming from the rooftops and everywhere else that the Supreme Court has “killed democracy.” What utter nonsense. The Supreme Court restored the government “of the people, by the people, for the people” to its rightful place. Now, the people of the United States will decide in each state when, and under what circumstances, a baby can be legally killed in their state.

It was the Supreme Court’s action in 1973 in Roe that violated previous practice, not the Supreme Court in 2022.

What the Supreme Court surfaced was a fundamental difference in philosophy concerning what the Supreme Court’s role should be in the American government. 

The first view, the original intent view, believes that there are three federal constitutional branches with each having its assigned duties with the judicial branch to protect the constitutional system as a neutral arbiter. 

The second view is that the constitution is an ancient and obsolete document written by dead white men over 200 years ago. The Supreme Court’s role should be to perform legal acrobatics and verbal double talk to ram through the progressive left’s agenda (Cf. Francis Menton, “there are two fundamentally irreconcilable constitutional visions,” Manhattan Contrarian).

The 2022 court has largely returned to the first vision and the progressive left is hysterical at the apparent failure of the second vision. 

The American people have been profoundly misled by the American press as to what Roe v. Wade actually did. The Harvard-Harris poll, conducted after Dobbs was released, reveals the extent of that deception.

The polling shared that 55% of Americans opposed overturning Roe while 45% supported it. The poll further revealed that 72% of those polled said they supported abortion up to 15 weeks gestation (the precise limit in Dobbs) and 49% wanted to limit abortions to be abolished at six weeks gestation.

So, it turns out a significant majority didn’t support everything in the radical Roe regime and didn’t know that under Roe, America was one of the 10 most abortive nations in the world. 

Americans, thanks to the Supreme Court, our decisions about our nation’s future have been placed back in our own hands. A passage in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians comes to mind, “so be careful how you live.  Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise.  Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don’t act thoughtlessly but understand what the Lord wants you to do” (Eph. 5:14-17), New Living Translation.

Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.

Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Liberty Wins Again!

A.F. BRANCO | on July 1, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-liberty-wins-again/

The Supreme Court rules against the tyrannical EPA administration inflicting its unconstitutional policies against America.

SCOTUS EPA Ruling
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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Life wins as Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade


Reported by CHRIS PANDOLFO | June 24, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/hold-breaking-life-wins-as-supreme-court-overturns-roe-v-wade/

In a historic decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned its controversial Roe v. Wade opinion, which established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case concerning a Mississippi law that, with few exceptions, bans abortions after 15 weeks.

The court upheld the Mississippi law, which was challenged as unconstitutional under the Supreme Court precedents established in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

Emphasizing that abortion “presents a profound moral question,” Alito’s opinion finds that the Constitution “does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating and prohibiting abortion.”

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division,” Alito wrote.

“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” he added.

His words were unchanged from a draft of this opinion that was leaked to Politico in May. That unprecedented leak sent shock waves through the nation and prompted an investigation ordered by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh filed concurring opinions. Roberts filed an opinion concurring in the judgement. The three liberal justices dissented.

Abortion rights activists rallied against the draft opinion throughout May and June, even protesting outside the homes of Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices in an effort to get them to back down and change their votes.

Acts of violence were also committed against pro-life ministries and organizations in the name of protecting abortion rights. An anarchist group called Jane’s Revenge firebombed at least two pro-life pregnancy centers, claimed responsibility for the vandalism of several more, and made terrorist threats of more violence to come. The FBI has opened an investigation into these threats and others.

It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of the court’s landmark decision in Dobbs.

Where previously, state regulations on abortion had been ruled unconstitutional under Roe‘s and Casey‘s precedents, now state legislatures are free to enact limits or even outright bans on abortion according to the will of the people.

Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws that will now go into effect and criminalize abortion procedures.

The Louder with Crowder team is live on the ground with updates from the Supreme Court. The livestream of their coverage may be found here.

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