Tag: scotus

Thomas and Alito Take a Regrettable Position in a Qualified Immunity Case

Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that routinely shields bad cops from facing civil lawsuits over their abusive and unconstitutional behavior. All too often, a federal judge will hear a case in which a clear constitutional violation occurred, only to then shield the offending officer anyway from facing civil liability over the blatant misconduct. It’s a legal doctrine that deserves to be abolished.

Occasionally, however, the officer will lose one of these cases, and qualified immunity will be denied. That’s what happened last year in Hart v. Grand Rapids, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit actually let a federal civil rights lawsuit proceed against a Michigan police officer whose use of deadly force against a protester was officially reprimanded by his own superiors because of how the officer’s actions violated the department’s training and procedures.

That officer subsequently appealed his loss to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally turned him down earlier this week, thereby leaving the 6th Circuit’s denial of qualified immunity undisturbed. The civil rights suit against the officer will now move forward in federal court, a welcome result. To be clear, the officer may still prevail in the end, but at least his alleged victim will now get the chance to seek redress for a credible constitutional rights violation.

What makes this case especially notable, in addition to the all-too-rare denial of qualified immunity, is the fact that two members of the Supreme Court went out of their way to let us know just how eager they were to rule in the offending officer’s favor.

In the view of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the officer in this case was fully entitled to receive qualified immunity and to be shielded from facing civil suit. If it were up to Thomas and Alito, the 6th Circuit’s judgment against the officer would have been summarily reversed.

I am sometimes asked which members of the Supreme Court are the most reliably libertarian on various legal matters, such as criminal justice. After clarifying that nobody on the current Supreme Court is a truly consistent legal libertarian on anything, I typically say something to the effect that Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch usually tend to give libertarians the most reasons to cheer on matters of criminal justice.

This case presents us with the flip side of that coin. When viewed from a libertarian legal perspective, Thomas and Alito tend to stand out as the worst on criminal justice issues. In far too many cases, Thomas and Alito have exhibited a kind of overriding deference to law enforcement that undermines the Bill of Rights and thwarts government accountability. Their actions this week continue that unfortunate trend.

Keep reading

SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Va. home targeted in ‘swatting’ hoax

The Fairfax County, Virginia, home of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is the latest target of a malicious “swatting” attempt, prompting a rapid law enforcement coordination that quickly exposed the emergency call as a hoax.

At approximately 9:02 pm on Wednesday evening, police received a call to their non-emergency line reporting active gunfire outside of the justice’s suburban residence.

Officers contacted security at the residence and quickly determined the report was a false call intended to swat the home. Swatting is the illegal act of making a false report of a violent or high-risk incident in order to trigger a heavily armed police response to an unsuspecting person’s address.

“Officers immediately coordinated with Supreme Court Police personnel assigned to the residence and quickly determined that the report was fictitious. No additional police resources were utilized,” the police department said. 

Barrett’s home has also previously been a focal point of chaotic demonstrations, drawing persistent crowds of abortion-rights activists following the High Court’s landmark 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) weighed in on the reports, characterizing the hoax as an attempt to get an innocent person killed, in this case, a sitting Supreme Court justice. He suggested the proper response will be putting the offender in prison for “many, many years.”

Keep reading

Supreme Court rejects Meta’s appeal in Vermont social media addiction case

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a push to avoid a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a decision that comes as social media companies increasingly face legal scrutiny.

Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. appealed after Vermont’s highest court allowed a suit filed by its attorney general in 2023 to move forward. The company is facing similar lawsuits from states across the country, accusing it of knowingly designing addictive features.

Meta had argued that it can’t be sued in Vermont court because neither the company nor the app design has specific ties to the state. Vermont countered that the sites’ large number of teen users gives its courts jurisdiction.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in a brief, unexplained order, as is typical. The procedural decision comes after court losses for Meta and YouTube in social media addiction lawsuits in California and New Mexico.

Vermont’s lawsuit was filed after an investigation by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in several states. Newspaper reports based on Meta’s own research also found that the company knew about the harms Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues. One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

Almost all teens ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. report using a social media platform, with about a third saying they use social media “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Meta, for its part, has said that it has already introduced dozens of tools to support teens and their families and suggested it would have worked with the states on standards for youth social media use.

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark applauded the decision, saying it affirms “that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids.”

Keep reading

Justice Clarence Thomas Blasts Supreme Court For Refusing To Hear Florida’s Lawsuit Against Blue States Issuing Driver’s Licenses To Illegal Alien Truckers

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a scathing dissent Tuesday as the Supreme Court refused to let Florida sue California and Washington over their lawless practice of handing out commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who cannot read English road signs.

The Court denied Florida’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint in the original jurisdiction case, leaving the state with “nowhere else to bring” its claims, Thomas wrote. He was joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

This decision comes after the horrific August 12, 2025, crash on the Florida Turnpike. Illegal alien Harjinder Singh, an Indian national who entered the U.S. illegally through the Mexican border, obtained CDLs from both California and Washington despite failing English proficiency tests at least ten times in Washington and once in California.

Singh approached a clearly marked “no U-turn” sign for official use only, ignored it, and swung his massive tractor-trailer across both lanes of the highway. The trailer crushed a minivan traveling behind him. All three passengers in the minivan were killed.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration testing after the crash confirmed Singh could not correctly answer most verbal questions and identified only one out of four highway signs.

Keep reading

Panel of Leftist Federal Judges Defy Supreme Court, Order Alabama to Reinstate its Rigged and Racially Gerrymandered Congressional Map

A panel of leftist judges decided to snub the United States Supreme Court and throw out a perfectly constitutional redistricting map today.

As The Associated Press reported, a three-judge panel in Alabama’s redistricting case issued a preliminary injunction barring the state from switching maps.

It requires Alabama to continue using the 5-2 racially gerrymandered map the court ordered for congressional elections in 2024. The state had recently voted to reinstate its old map, which was 6-1 Republican.

This also means Democrats will regain an additional Black-majority seat for now.

This is after the Supreme Court SPECIFICALLY ruled that racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional.

The AP reported:

Federal judges on Tuesday temporarily blocked Alabama’s plan to use a new congressional map that could give Republicans an advantage in a key House race in the midterm elections.

A three-judge panel in the state’s long-running redistricting case issued the preliminary injunction that prevents the state, at least for now, from switching maps. It requires the state to continue using the same court-ordered districts that were used for congressional elections in 2024.

Lawyers representing Black voters in the state’s lengthy redistricting case had sought the preliminary injunction, arguing the same panel in 2023 found the state map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters. They also argued Alabama was creating chaos by trying to change lines in the middle of an election year.

Keep reading

Trump Scores SCOTUS Win In Battle Over Immigration Judges’ ‘Work-Related Speech’

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously sided with the Trump administration on Tuesday in a dispute involving its policy regulating immigration judges’ “work-related speech.”

In its per curiam opinion, the high court vacated and remanded a decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that centered around the government’s rules governing the executive’s immigration courts. The specific policy in question — which was enacted in October 2021 under the Biden administration — required immigration judges “to obtain supervisory approval for public speeches relating to their official duties” and was designed “to ensure that employee speech which may be seen as bearing the ‘imprimatur’ of the Office is consistent with its official positions,” according to SCOTUS.

The National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) challenged the rule in federal court, arguing that it violated its members’ First and Fifth Amendment rights. As noted by the Supreme Court, however, under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA), Congress “intended” for federal employees to bring “most work-related grievances” to the executive’s Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and the Special Counsel — “not to federal district court.”

According to SCOTUS, the district court overseeing the case dismissed the NAIJ’s argument that its members’ constitutional claims “were not the kind of work-related claims that Congress intended to steer out of district court.” It held that it lacked jurisdiction over the matter, and that the CSRA “covered” respondent’s claims.

While agreeing with the district court’s conclusions that the NAIJ’s claims were covered by the CSRA and that Congress precluded district courts from overseeing such matters, the 4th Circuit panel nevertheless vacated the lower court’s ruling based on “factual circumstances” that it said “called into question” whether the CSRA was “functioning as Congress intended.” The appellate court further remanded the case back to the district court “for factfinding into the current operation of the MSPB,” as summarized by SCOTUS.

In vacating and remanding that decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the 4th Circuit’s actions were “based on an issue the parties had not raised” throughout litigation. By all accounts, the high court reasoned, the 4th Circuit’s decision “violated the party presentation principle when it decided ‘a case different from the one [respondent] advanced.’”

“Federal courts are not ‘roving commissions’ … licensed to ‘”sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right.”‘ … The Court of Appeals lost sight of those principles here,” the justices ruled.

While concurring with the court’s judgement, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas authored a separate opinion in the matter. Joined by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Bush 41 appointee explained why he believed the 4th Circuit’s ruling “was also wrong on the merits.”

“The Fourth Circuit’s analysis bears little resemblance to legal interpretation. Neither the President’s view that he can remove federal executive officials … nor his having done so, change the meaning of the statute or the binding nature of this Court’s interpretation of it,” Thomas wrote.

Keep reading

SCOTUS Case Makes Freight Brokers Responsible For Crashes Caused By Commercial Immigrant Drivers

hirty people died in 17 semi-truck crashes caused by noncitizen commercial truck drivers in 2025, according to the Department of Transportation. That number is almost certainly an undercount. Prior to 2025, the immigration status of a commercial truck driver was mostly not recorded in crash reports, court filings, or news coverage. The national conversation focuses on the truck driver at fault for the latest accident, but rarely goes deeper. Why was this truck driver on the highways? What trucking company hired him? How are operations like this still in business?

Somewhere between receiving a package from the distribution center to your doorstep, there is a strong possibility that a freight broker was involved. Freight brokers exist to manage freight and risk for shippers, and to hire motor carriers (trucking companies) to haul that freight. They collect the margin between what the shipper pays them and what they pay the trucking company.

Until a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, it was not considered the freight broker’s problem whether the trucking company it hired had a history of terrible safety violations, employed properly trained drivers, or safely maintained its trucks. Brokers had little reason not to hire cheaper, non-compliant trucking companies over compliant ones.

On May 14, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, and found that freight brokers can be held legally responsible for negligently hiring unsafe trucking companies.

Before the ruling, a freight broker’s liability depended on which state the crash occurred in. Negligent hiring claims against freight brokers have proceeded for years in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, but not in the Seventh (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) and Eleventh (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) Circuits, as freight brokers claimed preemption by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994. This left semi-truck crash victims in different parts of the country with fundamentally different legal options against the same class of defendant.

When a freight broker hired a trucking company, and that company’s truck driver caused a wreck that killed someone, the broker often walked away. The trucking company absorbed the liability, the family absorbed the loss, and when the verdict exceeded the carrier’s $750,000 minimum insurance coverage (a federal floor set in 1980 and never adjusted for inflation), the family absorbed that too. The middleman who chose the trucking company and profited from the load often faced no legal consequence.

Keep reading

A Century of Progressive Apartheid

This year marks the centennial of zoning in the United States, when the Supreme Court upheld comprehensive municipal land-use restrictions over the claims of property owners. The decision, Euclid v. Ambler Realty, was a milestone in the progressives’ campaign to overcome constitutional impediments to their plans for social engineering. In the ensuing century, zoning fundamentally altered the geography of American life, turning what had just become an urban-majority nation into a suburban one. Critics on both the libertarian right and woke left condemn zoning as a back-door version of apartheid, a stealthy way to keep immigrants and blacks out of “desirable” neighborhoods.

By 1900, Southern states had enacted segregation laws for “places of public accommodation” (hotels, restaurants, railroads, and the like), and the Court upheld these in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. The residential segregation campaign began later, a response to the “Great Migration” of blacks into border-state cities in the 1910s. This campaign faced more constitutional difficulties due to American doctrines of property rights.

Baltimore enacted the first residential segregation law in 1910. Louisville enacted a law that prohibited members of one race from moving into a block in which the other race was a majority. The NAACP cleverly arranged a case in which a white man, Buchanan, sued to overturn the law. Buchanan sold his house on a white-majority block (situated between the only two black-owned houses on the block) to a black man, Warley. When Warley refused to complete the purchase because of the Louisville ordinance, Buchanan sued him. Given his house’s situation between the only two black-owned houses on the block, Buchanan argued, no white man would buy it. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court struck down the Louisville law as a violation of individual property rights. Edward Bassett, the “father of zoning,” lamented that cases like this indicated that American law “gave real estate owners almost total control over the use of their property.”

To get around this constitutional impediment, segregationists devised the “racially restrictive covenant,” in which a purchase contract forbade selling the property to members of certain races. The title search for a house that I purchased in 2007 turned up a restrictive covenant from the 1925 sale of the property. The purchaser agreed never to sell the parcel “to any one of the Ethiopian or African descent.” He also promised “that no dwelling house shall be erected on the property that costs less than $1500”—a zoning-use restriction avant la lettre. The Supreme Court upheld such covenants in 1926, the same year that it upheld more comprehensive zoning laws.

Zoning was a “quintessentially progressive concept,” historian Michael Allen Wolfe observes, exemplifying the movement’s faith in expertise and state power. It fit particularly into the progressives’ belief that the state could improve the genetic stock of the population, based on their belief in racial group hierarchy and eugenics. One can see the first zoning ordinances in the efforts of cities like San Francisco to control Chinese laundries, and in New York City’s tenement-manufacturing laws.

Keep reading

National Sovereignty Is At Stake In Imminent Supreme Court Ruling

With the Supreme Court nearing the end of this term, it will soon release its ruling in Trump v. Barbara, the landmark case on the constitutionality of President Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, executive order clarifying and protecting the meaning of American birthright citizenship. Expectation that the court will rule against the president has prompted a recent social media blast from Trump against the unreliable “conservative” justices on the court. Trump predicted that the court will be “ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER. I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our country … Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide.”

President Trump is predictably insightful in his analysis of the politics of the court. Despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ desire to preserve the alleged impartiality and supra-political character of the court, it is impossible to deny that the courts have always been political actors in American government. As the president exhorted, the Supreme Court should make its decisions by “Good, Strong Common Sense” and with an underlying loyalty to the United States, which means loyal prioritization of our people, our founding principles, and our national preservation. Fortunately, the original meaning of the 14th Amendment supports President Trump’s position.

Specifically, while U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which allegedly established the liberal interpretation of birthright citizenship, should ultimately be overturned, there remains a viable path where the court could uphold that ruling’s precedent and simultaneously recognize that the 14th Amendment does not grant citizenship to children of illegal aliens born within the territory of the U.S. This would be a major win and step toward securing and restoring our national sovereignty.

Ed Erler, one of the foremost scholars on the issue of birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment, has treated this topic in great detail in his compelling book The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation-State. As Erler demonstrates, the original intention of the 14th Amendment, as expressed by its framers, was to grant American citizenship to former slaves and their children. The clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes illegal aliens and foreign citizens, given that they are not fully subject to the jurisdiction of the American regime. They are subject to our laws while they sojourn here, but not subject as loyal citizens, since they owe allegiance to their foreign nations of origin.

Erler relies upon the political principles of the American founders to reject the British common law doctrine whereby anyone born within the territory of the British Empire was a perpetual subject of Britain. Erler further provides evidence from the ratification debates, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Expatriation Act of 1868, and Elk v. Wilkins (1884) to clarify the original meaning of birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment.

Keep reading

Supreme Court Directs Lower Courts To Reexamine Decisions In Voting Rights Act Cases

The U.S. Supreme Court on May 18 ordered lower courts to reconsider rulings in two redistricting cases that concern whether private individuals may sue to enforce a federal law that bans discriminatory voting practices.

The court directed the lower courts to take another look at the cases from Mississippi and North Dakota in light of its recent landmark ruling limiting the use of race in redistricting efforts.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from both new rulings.

In Louisiana v. Callais, a majority of the court had said April 29 that race may not be the predominant, overriding reason for how congressional district lines are drawn. The case focused on the Pelican State’s decision to add a majority-black district after a lower court said omitting the district would violate the Section 2 nondiscrimination provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act.

On Monday, the nation’s highest court summarily disposed of the two cases, State Board of Election Commissioners v. Mississippi State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe, in unsigned orders. The court did not explain its decisions.

Lawyers call this process, which disposes of cases without holding an oral argument, GVR, which stands for grant, vacate, and remand.

The Supreme Court follows this procedure when it wants lower courts to reconsider their rulings using a new legal framework from a recent decision without delving deeply into the specifics of the cases.

Keep reading