Tag: scotus

Supreme Court Overturns Maine’s Censure of Rep. Laurel Libby in Free Speech Ruling Over Trans Athlete Post

The US Supreme Court has stepped in to overturn the Maine legislature’s censure of Republican Representative Laurel Libby, marking a clear win for those opposing legislative punishments aimed at curbing political expression. The 7-2 ruling, issued Tuesday, instructed Maine lawmakers to rescind the sanctions they imposed on Libby over a social media post that identified a transgender high school athlete who had placed first in a girls’ pole vault event.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

The Court found that Libby’s claim merited immediate relief, stating that her right to be free from censure for speech made in her official capacity was “indisputably clear.” Since February, the censure had effectively stripped Libby of her ability to participate in floor debates or vote on legislative matters unless she apologized, a condition she steadfastly rejected.

Following the ruling, Libby posted a celebratory message on X: “This is a victory not just for my constituents, but for the Constitution itself. The Supreme Court has affirmed what should NEVER have been in question — that no state legislature has the power to silence an elected official simply for speaking truthfully about issues that matter.”

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Supreme Court Rules Police No Longer Immune In Escalated Deadly Force Encounters

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a legal doctrine that helped shield police from accountability for recklessly escalating confrontations and then using deadly force.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Barnes v. Felix makes clear that when determining whether an officer’s use of deadly force was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, courts must examine the entire sequence of events—not just the split second in which an officer claims to perceive a threat before firing a weapon. The decision strikes down the so-called “moment-of-threat doctrine,” which allowed officers to escape scrutiny for their own prior misconduct and reckless provocation. Going forward, judges must weigh all relevant circumstances, including the severity of the alleged offense, the officer’s actions leading up to the use of force, and the actual threat posed by the individual. The Rutherford Institute filed an amicus brief urging the Court to overturn the moment-of-threat rule, arguing that it violated longstanding constitutional principles and fostered a culture of impunity among law enforcement.

“For too long, our justice system has enabled a kind of legalized lawlessness, where police are empowered to escalate encounters and then respond with deadly force, knowing the courts will look the other way,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This decision is a powerful counterbalance to the Trump Administration’s efforts to shield police from the consequences of unconstitutional behavior. While the executive branch attempts to entrench a culture of impunity, the Supreme Court has hopefully drawn a constitutional line in the sand—one that signals a long-overdue shift in how police can use deadly force.”

On April 28, 2016, a police officer in Harris County, Texas, stopped Ashtian Barnes based on a report of unpaid tolls linked to his license plate. When asked for proof of insurance, Barnes explained that the car had been rented a week earlier by his girlfriend and the paperwork might be in the trunk. Claiming to smell marijuana, the officer ordered Barnes to open the trunk and exit the vehicle. Barnes opened his door but also turned the ignition back on. At that point, the officer shouted at Barnes not to move, stepped onto the driver-side doorsill, and shoved his gun into Barnes’s head. The car started to move, and the officer fired two shots into the car, killing Barnes. The incident was captured on video. Although Barnes’s mother sued, lower courts dismissed the case—ruling that the moment of threat during the two seconds when the officer was standing on the moving vehicle justified deadly force, without considering the officer’s role in creating the danger.

The Supreme Court’s decision sends the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration under the proper constitutional standard. The Barnes decision comes as the nation reckons with the 30-year legacy of the 1994 Crime Bill, which dramatically expanded the power and protection of law enforcement at the expense of constitutional rights. As The Rutherford Institute has warned, the Crime Bill ushered in an era of “zero tolerance” policing and mass incarceration, laying the groundwork for the militarized and unaccountable police culture we see today. “The Court’s decision is an overdue course correction. But it is only a first step,” Whitehead said. “Law enforcement should not be allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution.”

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Obama Judge Says to Hell with the Supreme Court, Orders Trump DOJ to Turn Over Docs Related to Decision to Revoke ‘Protected Status’ for Hundreds of Thousands of Migrants

US District Court Judge Edward Chen, an Obama appointee, said to hell with the Supreme Court and still ordered the Trump DOJ to turn over documents related to its decision to revoke protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.

Judge Chen said the Supreme Court’s ruling today is not a factor and insisted on a deadline tonight for the Trump DOJ to turn over the documents.

The US Supreme Court on Monday lifted a lower court’s block on President Trump’s order to revoke ‘protected status’ for hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the US.

The high court allowed the Trump Administration to strip approximately 350,000 Venezuelans currently in the US of their ‘protected status.’

Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone Supreme Court justice to dissent.

In March, San Francisco-based Judge Edward Chen issued a stay on Trump’s order to revoke Temporary Restricted Status (TPS) for Venezuelans who arrived to the US on Biden’s parole program.

Judge Chen, temporarily paused Trump’s plans to end Biden’s TPS program.

The DOJ argued that the parole programs were discretionary and it is up to the government to decide when it can cut the program.

It was previously reported that President Trump was set to strip the status of 532,000 migrants living in the United States who were flown in on Joe Biden’s parole program.

Recall that Joe Biden brought in more than half a million migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on his CHNV program.

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SCOTUS: Trump Can Deport 350K Venezuelans Biden Allowed To Break The Law

The Supreme Court issued an order on Monday agreeing that the Trump administration had the constitutional authority to remove the Biden-era temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants who were allowed to remain in the country under the previous administration.

The court placed a hold on a lower court order that blocked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem from removing “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for Venezuelans. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. TPS permits migrants to work and live in the country if their native country is deemed unsafe.

The Supreme Court’s decision could mean some 350,000 Venezuelans can be deported.

As reported by The Federalist’s Breccan Thies, three days before President Trump took office, then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas extended the TPS designation for Venezuelans living in the country. The extension was for 18 months. Noem then “vacated the extension and subsequently terminated TPS for Venezuelans who had registered for it in 2023,” Thies reported.

In response “National TPS Alliance, an organization representing those with TPS, and a group of Venezuelans turned around and sued the Trump administration.” The suit alleged the termination of TPS was race-based — without considering that the United States has the right to decide which foreigners are admitted into the United States.

The Trump administration argued in a subsequent motion that Mayorkas “failed, among other things, to evaluate the key statutory question: whether permitting Venezuelan and Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is ‘contrary to the national interest.’”

An Obama-appointed judge issued a nationwide injunction, and the Ninth Circuit rejected an appeal by the Trump administration. While the protections were “set to expire on April 7,” the judge, as described by the Associated Press, found that “the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.”

The Trump administration contended that the ruling from the lower court amounted to judicial overreach, an issue that has plagued Trump’s first few months in office.

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SCOTUS Oral Argument In Nationwide Injunction Case Illustrates Courts’ Coup Against Trump

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Thursday in three cases concerning challenges to President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. The question before the high court was not, however, the constitutionality of the EO, but rather whether the lower courts had authority to issue injunctions on a nationwide basis to bar implementation of an EO. You would be hard pressed to know that, though, from the justices’ questions — the overwhelming number of which focused instead on how to stop Trump.

“So, as far as I see it, this order violates four Supreme Court precedents,” Justice Sotomayor declared early in the argument, referring to the Trump Administration’s EO on birthright citizenship. “And you are claiming that not just the Supreme Court — that both the Supreme Court and no lower court can stop an executive from — universally from violating that holding — those holdings by this Court,” Justice Sotomayor further charged. “[W]hy should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action,” the justice pushed, when a nationwide injunction could immediately remedy the executive branch’s unlawful action.

Justice Kagan likewise framed the question for the Court as how to promptly halt the implementation of a president’s EO which is “dead wrong” on the law. “[E]very court has ruled against you” on the birthright citizenship question, she intoned to Solicitor General D. John Sauer. 

“If one thinks — and, you know, look, there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions, but I think that the question that this case presents is that if one thinks that it’s quite clear that the EO is illegal, how does one get to that result in what time frame on your set of rules without the possibility of a nationwide injunction?” Justice Kagan further questioned the Trump Administration.

Those excerpts were but a few exchanges during the nearly three-hour hearing, with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan monopolizing much of last week’s oral argument with their questions focused solely on a solution: In effect, how do the courts expeditiously stop Trump, other than with a nationwide injunction? In positing this question, Justice Kagan even acknowledged “there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions . . . ”

From a legal perspective, the two liberal justices have it entirely backwards: The legal question for the justices was not how do courts accomplish their goal of stopping Trump without nationwide injunctions, but rather, do courts have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions?

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Trump Fumes After Supreme Court Rules Venezuelan Illegals Can’t Be Deported (For Now)

The Supreme Court ruled this afternoon to keep in place its block on President Trump’s deportations of (alleged) Venezuelan gang members under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime after their ACLU lawyers said the government was set to remove the men without judicial review in violation of a prior order by the justices.

The Supreme Court has previously issued two orders stemming from those cases.

Justices agreed that the president could rely on the centuries-old wartime law to remove immigrants from the country – provided they first have an opportunity to challenge those claims in court – and then temporarily blocked the government from deporting another group of Venezuelans in Texas while their lawyers scrambled to challenge the allegations against them.

In his proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump stated that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of [Tren de Aragua], are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

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Supreme Court Justice Proves She’s Totally Clueless Yet Again

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson talks a lot. That’s not just a qualitative observation. She consistently tallies up the most words spoken per justice. Take care not to confuse quantity with quality. When Jackson does open her mouth, it’s usually to expose her incompetency. 

During a Supreme Court hearing, Jackson made the case for rule by nationwide injunction. “I would think we’d want the system to move as quickly as possible to reach the merits of the issue, and maybe have this court decide whether or not the government is entitled to do this under the law,” the justice said. “Wouldn’t having universal injunctions actually facilitate that?” Jackson apparently isn’t much for Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president. It seems she’d prefer the president permanently subordinated to a clique of appointed judges. Herself included.

“It seems to me, that when the government is completely enjoined from doing the thing it wants to do, it moves quickly to appeal that, to get it to the Supreme Court, and that’s actually what we would want,” Jackson continued. The Supreme Court’s stated role is to interpret law. Jackson’s interpretation of the court’s role would see America guided by the whims of the judiciary – whims which, as has become obvious under the Trump administration, are ideological to the bone. It’s a vision straight out of the Progressive playbook: arbitrary rule by elected officials with the right credentials (and by extension, the right politics). The administrative state isn’t sending their best, folks.

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Supreme Court broadens standard for unreasonable force claims against police

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier to bring unreasonable force claims against police, ruling unanimously that courts should examine the circumstances beyond the split seconds when an officer fears for their safety in deciding whether they can be tried for unreasonable force.

The case stemmed from a 2016 traffic stop in Texas.

Ashtian Barnes, 24, was killed during the routine stop. He had been driving his girlfriend’s rental car, which had outstanding toll violations, when stopped by officer Roberto Felix Jr.   

After Barnes was asked to present his license and insurance, the car started moving forward. Felix jumped onto the vehicle’s doorsill and shot inside, striking Barnes twice and killing him.

The exchange turned deadly in seconds. The justices were asked to weigh whether courts should examine everything that happened during the traffic stop or just the moment when Felix feared for his safety when evaluating an excessive force claim.

In a 9-0 decision, they said the so-called “moment of the threat” doctrine should not be applied in such cases, instead directing courts to review the “totality of the circumstances.”

“To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force, a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.

Kagan noted the situation at the precise moment of the shooting may often be what matters most, given that the officer’s choice in those split seconds are what is under review. However, she said earlier facts and circumstances may inform how a “reasonable officer” would have responded to later ones.

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Biden Illegally Snatched Up Public Land, But SCOTUS Can Give It Back

There’s something undeniably American about searching the American Southwest for gold. As a young man, Mark Twain traveled to the Nevada Territory and, among other adventures, became a gold and silver prospector.

He wrote about the thrill of a strike: “You sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest — and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold.”

Like so many throughout history, Twain’s search for gold wasn’t about the riches—it was about adventure. One of Twain’s contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, put it this way: “The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.”

If you ask Dan Torongo, that’s it exactly. 

Most of the time, Torongo is an engineer with his own firm in Brighton, Michigan. He specializes in gas and diesel aftertreatment systems and components, in clean air. But his family caught the gold bug as far back as the 1970s and has long held claims in the Chuckwalla Mountains of California.

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John Roberts Is The Judicial Supremacist The Founders Warned Us About

It’s a sad day in America when the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court ignores the basic framework of the Constitution he’s supposed to interpret.

That’s what happened on Wednesday, when Chief Justice John Roberts took it upon himself to subtly thumb his nose at President Trump and conservatives during a rare sit-down interview in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. In addition to rebuking calls to impeach activist lower court judges for overstepping the confines of the Constitution, the chief justice had this to say about the subject of “judicial independence”:

In our Constitution … the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president. That innovation doesn’t work if … the judiciary’s not independent. Its job is to, obviously, decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive. And that does require a degree of independence.

To quote Vice President J.D. Vance, does John Roberts hear himself?

The chief justice begins by claiming that the judiciary is a “co-equal” branch of government. Then, in the very next breath, he asserts that the courts can “strike down … acts of Congress or acts of the president.”

If the courts can unilaterally “strike down” actions by the legislative and executive it believes to be unlawful or finds unfavorable, as Roberts maintains, then that isn’t “co-equal.” It’s judicial supremacism.

What Roberts is conveying is his apparent belief that the Supreme Court and judicial branch writ large are wholly supreme to the other branches of government. That is, regardless of the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives, it is judges who have the final say on matters of law and public policy.

While courts play an important role in American society, this is the exact opposite of the system the Founding Fathers established in the Constitution. If anything, the judiciary was viewed by framers like Alexander Hamilton to be the weakest branch, as it lacked “influence over either the sword or the purse” and “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

The founders were not shy about sharing their fears of what would occur should the views of judicial supremacists like Roberts become reality.

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