Tag: scotus

Radical ‘Free Palestine’ Extremist Targets Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Sister with Bomb Threat

A deranged “Free Palestine” extremist attempted to terrorize the family of DEI U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett by threatening her sister with a mailbox bomb.

According to WYFF, citing the Charleston Police Department, authorities responded around 9:30 a.m. Monday after receiving an alarming bomb threat directed at Amanda Coney Williams.

The threat, sent via email to an employee of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office late Sunday night, detailed an alleged homemade explosive device that was supposedly placed in Williams’ mailbox.

The email read:

“Using a 1×8-inch threaded galvanized pipe, end caps, a kitchen timer, some wires, metal clips and homemade black powder, I’ve constructed a pipe bomb which I recently placed in Amy Coney Barrett’s sister’s mailbox at her home in Charleston, SC.

The device’s detonation will be triggered as soon as the mailbox is next opened. Free Palestine!”

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Mel Gibson Controversy Highlights a Bigger Scandal: Many Americans Lose Their Gun Rights for No Good Reason

Elizabeth Oyer, a former public defender who was appointed as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney in April 2022, says she was fired last Friday because she refused to sign off on a recommendation to restore Mel Gibson’s gun rights. The movie star and director, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election and was recently designated as one of the administration’s three “ambassadors” to Hollywood along with Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, lost the right to own firearms because of a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction.

Oyer presents the episode as a conflict between public safety and political favoritism, and The New York Times framed the story the same way. But the incident also illustrates how difficult it is for people who have lost their Second Amendment rights as a result of criminal convictions—a category that includes the president himself—to regain those rights, even when there are no grounds to think they pose a threat to public safety.

In March 2011, Gibson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge involving his girlfriend, and Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Sautner sentenced him to 36 months of probation. Although Gibson’s deal with prosecutors allowed him to avoid jail time, his plea triggered an ancillary penalty under 18 USC 922(g)(9), which makes it a felony for anyone who “has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” to receive or possess a firearm. Another provision of the same law, Section 922(g)(1), sweeps more broadly, imposing the same lifelong disability on anyone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration, no matter how long ago it was committed and whether or not it involved violence.

As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in an opinion she wrote as an appeals court judge, the constitutionality of the latter prohibition is doubtful. Barrett dissented from a 2019 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit upheld the application of Section 922(g)(1) to a manufacturer of therapeutic shoes and footwear inserts who had pleaded guilty to mail fraud. History “demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns,” she wrote. “But that power extends only to people who are dangerous.”

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen added heft to that argument by clarifying that gun control laws must be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” when they impinge on conduct covered by the “plain text” of the Second Amendment. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that Section 922(g)(1) failed that test as applied to Bryan Range, a Pennsylvania man who had pleaded guilty to food stamp fraud, a state misdemeanor that was notionally punishable by up to five years in prison. Based on similar reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last year overturned the Section 992(g)(1) conviction of Steven Duarte, a California man who had lost his gun rights because of a nonviolent criminal record.

Without such judicial intervention, “prohibited persons” like Range and Duarte have little recourse. Under 18 USC 925(c), they theoretically can ask the attorney general to restore their Second Amendment rights. The attorney general has the discretion to do that based on a determination that “the circumstances regarding the disability, and the applicant’s record and reputation, are such that the applicant will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest.” But that responsibility has been delegated to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which Congress has barred from considering such applications.

“Although federal law provides a means for the relief of firearms disabilities,” the agency explains, “ATF’s annual appropriation since October 1992 has prohibited the expending of any funds to investigate or act upon applications for relief from federal firearms disabilities submitted by individuals. As long as this provision is included in current ATF appropriations, ATF cannot act upon applications for relief from federal firearms disabilities submitted by individuals.”

If the ATF cannot act on such applications, can people with disqualifying criminal records seek relief in federal court? No, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the 2002 case United States v. Bean.

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Appeals Court Says Trump Can’t End Birthright Citizenship — Battle Likely Heading to Supreme Court

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that President Donald Trump cannot end birthright citizenship with his executive order, likely setting up a battle about the issue in the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department had filed an emergency request for the court to lift a Seattle judge’s freeze on the policy, but the appeals court denied it on Wednesday.

CNN reports:

The 9th Circuit panel – made up of a Trump appointee, a Jimmy Carter appointee and a George W. Bush appointee – said that a closer review of the case will move forward in its court, with arguments slated for June.

The case before the San Francisco-based appeals court is one of several major legal challenges to the policy and the first to get the weigh-in by an appellate panel.

In filings, the Justice Department said that the birthright citizenship executive order was “an integral part of President Trump’s broader effort to repair the United States’ immigration system and to address the ongoing crisis at the southern border.”

The court said the decision was made because the appeal was not likely to succeed on the dispute’s merits.

The lawsuit against the order was brought by four state’s Democratic attorneys general.

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Texan Allegedly Bullied By School Over His Skin Color, Trump Support Asks Supreme Court To Take His Case

Inside the Texas Capitol, on the back wall of the Senate chamber hangs a hard-to-miss oil canvas smattered with carefully painted soldiers wielding swords and cannons. The colorful battle scene depicts a pivotal moment in the Texas Revolution when approximately 900 Texas soldiers managed to defeat a much larger group of soldiers from the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto in just 18 minutes.

One of the most famous Henry McArdle illustrations in the frame shows General Sam Houston, whose horse was just shot out from beneath him, being beckoned by an “unnamed and unarmed aid” offering him a new mount. The mystery man is claimed by eighth-generation Texan Brooks Warden, who, nearly 200 years after seven of his ancestors fought in the battle of San Jacinto, faces a very different and very important battle of his own.

Twenty-one-year-old Warden is a plaintiff in a years-long lawsuit alleging students and school administrators in the Austin Independent School District in Texas violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through repeated racial harassment.

“Starting when I was 12 up until the end of high school, I was attacked physically and emotionally because of my race. Being a white Christian, conservative male, I was beaten. They threatened to kill me and verbally abused me daily,” Warden told The Federalist.

Until now, Warden was unnamed due to his status as a minor when the lawsuit was filed. Now that he’s surpassed his teenage years and there is a new development in his case — a petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court — Warden is ready to speak about the intense bullying siege he faced from faculty and peers alike.

“I know what I believe, and I won’t be swayed. I’ve taken punches to the face for defending the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “I was never scared to speak my mind. I was terrified to walk down the halls, though.”

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Contradict Elizabeth Warren About the Importance of Court Rulings Depending on What’s at Stake

There is an old saying that if it weren’t for double standards, liberals wouldn’t have any standards at all. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is the living embodiment of that statement.

In recent years, Warren and many other Democrats have waged an almost daily war on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court. Now that they want to stop everything that Trump is trying to do, they are relying on courts to do it and saying that anyone who would undermine the legitimacy of those courts is a threat to democracy.

Watch the side-by-side video of Elizabeth Warren below. The first half is from last year, the second half is from this month.

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Chuck Schumer Might Legally Reap the ‘Whirlwind’ for His Threats Against Supreme Court Justices

In March 2020, crusty Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, stood on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court Building at a pro-abortion rally and threatened the lives of two Supreme Court justices if they dared change abortion law in the U.S. 

“You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer thundered before the pro-abortion crowd, in what appeared in retrospect to be an insurrection-y comment against part of the government. But it got worse. 

Schumer name-checked two justices who had recently been appointed to the bench by Donald Trump. 

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch! I want to tell you, Kavanaugh!” Schumer screeched. Upping the ante of his rhetoric before the angry crowd—on the steps of the Supreme Court Building—he blustered, “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” 

States were challenging Roe v. Wade, the existing federal abortion law, and the cases were making their way to the Supreme Court. Schumer issued the threat as a way to extort his and his supporters’ preordained decision. And everyone got the message. Loudly. Clearly. Would Schumer get away with this obvious threat over the Supreme Court giving America the “wrong” answer on abortion? 

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DOJ Opens Investigation into Chuck Schumer For Threatening Supreme Court Justices

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Chuck Schumer for threatening Supreme Court justices.

According to The Washington Post, interim D.C. U.S. attorney Edward R. Martin, Jr. is looking to scrutinize Democratic leaders and former Justice Department officials.

Among them is the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in connection with comments regarding Trump’s Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

During a pro-abortion rally back in 2020, Schumer said that the two justices would “pay the price” for overturning Roe vs Wade, a decision that they eventually handed down two years later.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer said at the time.

”You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

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There Is No Such Thing as “Settled Law”

Much of the debate over so-called “birthright citizenship” is over interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution. Most of the people currently in power claim that the text means every baby born to every foreign national on American soil is an automatic US citizen. Others—like myself—believe that this interpretation is dubious and has always been a matter of debate.

In commentary on this topic, however, one often encounters assertions to the effect that rulings by the US Supreme Court provide the “definitive” or “final” interpretation. Or, put another way, there is an idea that once SCOTUS makes a ruling on something, then the ruling is “settled law.” Even worse, some people think that once the Supreme Court has ruled on something, there is no point discussing it or challenging the currently popular interpretation of the law.

In truth, there is no such thing as settled law and the US Supreme court’s interpretations are hardly definitive. In politics nothing is ever settled or permanent. No cause is ever won or lost permanently. Beyond the short term, everything is up for grabs.

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The FBI Wrongly Raided This Family’s Home. Now the Supreme Court Will Hear Their Case.

When asked about the evening the FBI mistakenly broke into her home, detonating a flash grenade in the house and ripping her door from its hinges, Curtrina Martin struggles to find a way to describe what that does to a person. “I don’t know if there is a proper word that I can use,” she told me last year.

The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will evaluate whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled correctly when it barred Martin from suing over that nightmare scenario—a case that has attracted bipartisan attention from Congress.

In October 2017, the FBI arrived at Martin’s house, which she shared with her then-fiancé, Hilliard Toi Cliatt, and her 7-year-old son, Gabe. The agents were searching for a man named Joseph Riley, who lived approximately one block over. After law enforcement found Martin and Cliatt hiding in the closet, police dragged Cliatt out and handcuffed him, while another officer screamed and pointed his gun at Martin, who says she fell on a rack in the chaos.

A panel for the 11th Circuit wrote that the two structures “share several conspicuous features.” For example, they are “beige in color” and have “a large tree in the front.” Since it was dark outside, the judges said, it would have been “difficult to ascertain the house numbers on the mailboxes.” Lawrence Guerra, who led the raid, thus received immunity.

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Supreme Court Allows Law Requiring Small Businesses To Report Ownership Information

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 8–1 on Jan. 23 to allow the federal government to enforce an anti-money laundering law that a lower court blocked late last year.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the new ruling.

The statute at issue, the federal Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), required millions of business entities to file information returns about their owners by Jan. 1, 2025.

An estimated 33 million small businesses face fines of as much as $591 per day should they fail to comply with the new rule, according to.a Treasury website.

Businesses with upwards of 20 employees, $5 million in annual sales, and a U.S. office qualify for exemptions from CTA reporting requirements.

The law provides that affected corporate entities must file reports with the federal government about their beneficial owners, which means individuals with substantial control over the entity or who own or control 25 percent of the entity.

Entities are required to provide the government with the names of their beneficial owners, along with their birthdates, addresses, and identifying information such as passport or driver’s license numbers.

The CTA’s reporting requirement was put on hold on Dec. 5, 2024, when the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas sided with challengers, granting a nationwide preliminary injunction—also known as a universal injunction—against the CTA.

The court found that the challengers would likely succeed with their claim that the act was unconstitutional.

On Dec. 13, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice, acting on behalf of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a federal agency, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to stay the injunction.

The agency argued the law was constitutional and that the challenge to it would probably fail in the end.

The circuit court’s motions panel granted the government’s request on Dec. 23, 2024, and suspended the injunction pending appeal. FinCEN then extended the filing deadline for corporate entities to Jan. 13, 2025.

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