Tag: scotus

Supreme Court rules American taxpayers MUST FUND sex changes for ‘trans’ prisoners

The Supreme Court on Wednesday kept in place a block on the Trump administration enforcing new restrictions that prevented the use of taxpayer funds on medical treatments and “social accommodations” for trans-identified prisoners. The Court stated that the federal government, funded by US taxpayers, must continue to pay for sex changes for allegedly trans-identified inmates in federal prisons.

In a brief, unsigned order, the court stated, “the application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied. Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the application for stay.” As of February 2025, there were 2,198 trans-identified inmates being held in federal prisons, the BOP said.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons adopted a policy in February that stated it will not provide sex change drugs to inmates or provide “social accommodations,” such as make-up, ladies lingerie, or other items. It said that inmates diagnosed with gender dysphoria who have never taken hormones before will not be able to start them while in prison, and those who came to prison taking them would be placed on a tapering plan.

The bureau said that inmates receiving social accommodations would no longer get them from the prison, and no new social accommodations would be provided. Social accommodations are items that are used to “alter the person’s appearance to align with the person’s ‘gender identity,’” the policy states. Such items include buttock padding, breast padding, binders, undergarments, makeup, and wigs.

The bureau said it would not be providing sex change surgeries to its inmates either, and for those who have already received such surgeries, the bureau said it would provide medical care for complications that arise, such as pelvic infections and urethral stricture.

The policy was adopted just over a year after Trump signed a day-one executive order directing the attorney general to “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” The BOP said that the 2026 policy was adopted “independently of” the executive order.

A class action lawsuit was filed in federal court by three trans-identified inmates over the order from the BOP. Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a ruling on August 26 blocking the BOP from implementing the policy, and the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the order.

The Trump administration asked the court on September 28 to pause the lower court’s order, with US Solicitor General D John Sauer telling the Supreme Court that the district court had “substitut[ed] its own policy judgment for that of the” BOP, “rel[ied] on evidence outside the administrative record, and fault[ed] the agency for following presidential directions,” per SCOTUSblog.

The inmates said the administration was asking the justices to “to overturn a three decades-long status quo,” and said that the BOP had not provided a “reasoned explanation” for its decision. The inmates said that they would be permanently harmed if the lower court’s order was paused. The Bureau of Prisons does not provide elective cosmetic surgery unless the inmate claims to be transgender.

The Supreme Court’s Wednesday ruling keeps the lower court’s pause on the order in place while legal proceedings continue.

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Supreme Court Says New Hampshire Can Ban Voters from Using Student IDs at Polls in Midterms – Ketanji Brown Jackson Dissents

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled 7-1 that New Hampshire can indeed stop voters from using student IDs at polls during the midterm elections.

The high court paused a lower court’s ruling that allowed student IDs to be using as a form of voter identification.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

“I respectfully dissent because—even, and perhaps especially, when an election is looming—I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes,” Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent.

The Hill reported:

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled New Hampshire’s top election official can fully stop voters from using their student IDs when showing up to the polls in the midterms — a request backed by the Republican National Committee (RNC).

A lower judge ruled officials had improperly gone further than a new state law placing restrictions on student IDs to get a ballot.

The judge said the state still needed to consider student IDs alongside other evidence when a voter lacks other ways to prove their identity.

The Supreme Court chastised the judge for intervening too close to November’s contests.

The high court has said such orders can cause voter confusion, known as the Purcell principle. The opinion points to the recent legal whiplash over Missouri’s redistricting as one recent example.

“Here, the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle,” the majority wrote in its unsigned, one-paragraph opinion.

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Radical Liberal Justice Elena Kagan Attacks Supreme Court’s Conservative Majority, Claims Their Rulings Are ‘Destructive to Democracy’ as Midterm Elections Loom

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, one of the Court’s three liberals, took a swipe at her conservative colleagues on Tuesday, accusing the 6-3 majority of undermining American democracy and fueling political polarization by declining to police partisan gerrymandering.

Speaking Tuesday at the Catholic University of America’s law school in Washington, D.C., Kagan blasted conservative-backed rulings on congressional redistricting, voting rights, and campaign finance laws, arguing that the decisions have allowed political parties to manipulate election maps for partisan advantage.

According to Reuters, Kagan claimed the conservative majority had enabled what she described as a race to the bottom in congressional redistricting.

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Supreme Court Denies Trump Emergency Appeal to Restrict Transgender Surgeries for Inmates – Thomas, Alito Dissent

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday, in an unsigned order, denied the Trump Administration’s emergency appeal to restrict transgender surgeries for prison inmates.

Conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

NBC News reported:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the Trump administration cannot enforce a new policy that restricts treatment for transgender inmates in federal prison.

The justices in a brief order rejected an emergency application filed by the administration that sought to block a lower court injunction against the proposal. There are about 1,000 transgender inmates in federal custody.

The policy is part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to roll back moves to expand transgender rights. It was announced in line with his January 2025 executive order telling federal agencies not to acknowledge the concept of gender identity outside of the “immutable biological classification” of male or female.

The court order included no explanation, saying only that two conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, would have granted it.

In several different announcements, the Bureau of Prisons over the last 18 months has said it will not provide gender transition surgery, hormone treatments or “social accommodations” such as wigs, padding or makeup.

In January 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order aimed at protecting women and banning taxpayer money from funding transgender surgeries.

“Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology. Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology,” the executive order said.

“The Attorney General shall ensure that the Bureau of Prisons revises its policies concerning medical care to be consistent with this order, and shall ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex,” the order said.

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Is Banning a Church From Building on Its Property’s Just “A Mere Inconvenience”? The Supreme Court Will Decide

The Supreme Court just agreed to take up a case that could reshape how every church in America is treated when it tries to build. Last week, the Court granted certiorari in Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist v. Frederic to define what counts as a “substantial burden” on religious exercise under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).

A Catholic religious organization in Park Hills, Kentucky, wanted to build a small chapel on land next to its church. The construction would be about the size of a backyard swimming pool. The city’s board approved the permit, but neighbors sued, and the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the church.

The court’s reasoning was alarming. It said that being barred from building a chapel was “a mere inconvenience” because the church could build a smaller one somewhere else. It also called the burden self-imposed because the church knew about the ordinance before it applied.

Under that logic, a complete ban on a religious use of your own property isn’t a substantial burden as long as a judge thinks you could worship some other way. Judges, not believers, would decide what matters to the faith.

The ACLJ filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take this case. We told the Justices that lower courts have been eroding RLUIPA’s protections by adding qualifiers Congress never wrote. Congress passed this law to stop local governments from treating churches as second-class property owners, and it told courts to read the statute in favor of broad protection of religious exercise.

The grant confirms that RLUIPA’s land-use protections have gone too long without guidance from the Supreme Court. Now that the Court has taken the case, the ACLJ will file an amicus brief on the merits, standing with houses of worship across the country as the Justices decide this question.

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Supreme Court agrees to review a Reconstruction-era ban on distilling spirits in private homes

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider whether Congress had the constitutional authority to impose a ban on distilling spirits in private homes more than 150 years ago.

Plaintiffs challenging the prohibition on home distilling claim the 1868 law is an antiquated relic of Reconstruction-era politics. They argue that Congress overstepped its taxation powers when it enacted the home distilling ban as part of a tax reform measure designed to curb fraud by commercial distillers.

Government attorneys counter that Congress properly restricted where spirits can be distilled to prevent producers from evading federal excise taxes. They warn that lifting the ban would violate Supreme Court precedent and erode congressional powers.

Federal law makes home distilling a crime punishable by a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Separate challenges to the law divided two federal circuit courts, which issued conflicting decisions in April, only 11 days apart.

A three-judge panel from the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the federal ban in a case brought by John Ream, a brewpub owner from Newark, Ohio, who wants to distill whisky at home for his personal consumption.

A Fifth Circuit panel ruled in favor of different plaintiffs — members of the Texas-based Hobby Distillers Association — and concluded that statutory prohibitions on in-home distilling are outside the scope of Congress’ taxing power under the Constitution.

The Supreme Court agreed to review the Fifth Circuit decision, which was the Justice Department’s preference.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Robert Alt said they are “thrilled” that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

“Our country’s founders would be rolling over in their graves to learn that a pastime in which even George Washington partook, which is as American as apple pie and certainly a lot older, has quite absurdly been turned into a federal crime,” Alt said in a statement.

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Colleges Are Still Discriminating by Race

In 2023, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard said that it was unconstitutional to discriminate in college admissions based on race. But since then we’ve seen pretty strong evidence that some schools are doing their best to cheat their way around this ruling.

In the past two years, the Trump administration has accused a bunch of specific schools of cheating.

In May, the Trump administration opened a new front in its crackdown on the higher education sector.

The U.S. Department of Justice said it had completed a yearlong investigation into the University of California, Los Angeles’ medical school and concluded that the public institution was discriminating based on race by giving Black and Hispanic applicants a leg up in the admissions process. UCLA pushed back against claims it was violating the law.

Since then, the DOJ has produced similar findings against four other medical schools and one law school, alleging that they are violating the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions.

In June of this year the DOJ announced it was opening 15 more probes into medical school admissions, though it didn’t name the schools under investigation.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced today that it opened fifteen new investigations into potential race discrimination in medical school admissions. The Division recently announced its findings that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and Yale University both illegally used race in medical school admissions.

But despite all of this effort, it seems many schools are more committed to equity practices than they are to following the law. In short, they are still cheating.

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You Can’t Make This Up: Supreme Court to Decide If Nigerian Terrorist Group’s Personal Chef Deserves U.S. Asylum and Taxpayer Benefits

Just when you think the radical open-border lobby and activist judges have pushed the legal system to its absolute limit, the United States Supreme Court is now being forced to step in to answer a question that should take precisely two seconds to answer:

Should a man who cooked thousands of meals to sustain members of an armed terrorist organization be granted legal asylum inside the United States?

The case, Blanche v. Ozurumba, involves Izuchukwu Ozurumba, who entered the United States illegally in July 2023 after spending roughly six months in 2022 as a cook for a group known as the “Unknown Gunmen.”

Court records show he prepared three meals a day for 15 to 17 of the group’s leaders at a remote camp outside Lagos, potentially thousands of meals over the period. U.S. officials determined the Unknown Gunmen qualify as a Tier III terrorist organization, The Center Square reported.

An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals found that this constituted “material support” for terrorism under the Immigration and Nationality Act, rendering him ineligible for asylum. He was later removed to Nigeria.

Ozurumba claims “he was lured” by a job tip, discovered the true nature of the camp, and was forced to continue working (including unpaid for part of the time) under threat before escaping during a grocery run and eventually fleeing to Venezuela and then the U.S. The Board of Immigration Appeals has held that the statute contains no duress exception for providing support to terrorist groups.

A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed in September 2025. Judge Andrew Wynn (an Obama appointee) ruled that Ozurumba’s cooking, using food and supplies provided by the group itself, was not “material” because it did not provide anything the organization could “use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities.” The majority described him as a “captive laborer.”

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High School Wrestler Asks Supreme Court To Allow Her To Avoid Competing With Boys

A Washington state high school wrestler, Kallie Keeler, asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 5 for an emergency order letting her wrestle on the girls’ team without facing male athletes, after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by one during a match. She argues the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association violated Title IX by allowing male athletes in girls’ sports, and wants her mother notified of any male opponent.

The Ninth Circuit denied her requests last month, saying the situation wasn’t emergent because the wrestling season doesn’t start until November, and that her request for notice of all transgender athletes was too broad. A Title IX investigator who reviewed two videos of the match wrote that the opponent likely touched her with force, and the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation in February 2026, but the district attorney declined to bring charges.

As the Epoch Times notes further, Keeler’s appeal came amid multiple Supreme Court decisions surrounding girls’ sports and parents’ rights.

Most notably, the Supreme Court allowed states in June to bar male participation in girls’ sports and rejected that doing so would violate Title IX.

It also rejected Keeler’s arguments that her mother should receive notice and an opportunity to opt her daughter out of the competition.

This argument was based in part on the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which said that a Maryland school district should provide notice to parents of storybooks with controversial content about gender and sexuality.

The Ninth Circuit said that case and another regarding parents’ rights didn’t apply to Keeler’s situation.

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s 2025-2026 handbook states that “Athletes will participate in programs consistent with their gender identity or the gender most consistently expressed.”

WIAA Director Sean Bessette stood by the policy in an email to The Epoch Times.

“The WIAA remains committed to following Washington State law, which permits student-athletes to participate in sports consistent with the gender with which they identify,” Bessette said.

“If state law changes in the future, the WIAA holds the authority to revise policies as necessary to remain in compliance with state law.”

Washington is currently considering Initiative 638, which would prohibit boys from participating in girls’ sports.

Sponsored by Let’s Go Washington, a political action committee, the measure will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot.

The group stated that Initiative 638 restores fairness to eligibility rules by prohibiting “biological men” from competing in female athletics.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington opposes the initiative.

ACLU-Washington said the measure would require annual sex verification procedures for all athletes participating in school girls’ sports.

The ACLU said existing state anti-discrimination laws and school athletic policies protect participation based on gender identity.

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Supreme Court Rejects Radical Far-Left PA Judge’s Appeal After He Was Suspended For Hyper-Partisan Pro-Biden Facebook Posts

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear former Philadelphia Judge Mark B. Cohen’s last-ditch bid to undo his suspension for turning a public Facebook page, one that identified him as a sitting judge and showed him in his robes, into a Democrat cheering section for Joe Biden, Josh Shapiro, and the party line.

The justices denied certiorari without comment. Cohen, a Democrat who spent more than four decades in the Pennsylvania House before winning a Court of Common Pleas seat in 2018, had asked the high court to rule that the First Amendment shielded dozens of partisan posts he made while on the bench. It did not.

As The Hill reported, Pennsylvania’s judicial discipline system suspended him in 2024 over posts praising Democrats, including Biden and Gov. Josh Shapiro, and pushing policies such as raising the minimum wage.

That suspension was not a close call, and it was not a surprise.

The Judicial Conduct Board charged Cohen over scores of posts on a page that advertised his status as a Family Division judge.

The record, laid out in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s January 21, 2026, opinion and in the board’s filings, shows a longtime Democratic operative who never really left the campaign.

He called Biden an excellent president. He boosted Shapiro. He backed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

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