Tag: scotus

Supreme Court Set to Hear Landmark Case That Could End Birthright Citizenship Loophole and Cripple Anchor Baby Industry

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments next week in a constitutional showdown over President Donald Trump’s executive order that would end automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal aliens or parents on temporary visas.

The case, Trump v. Barbara, stems directly from Executive Order 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which Trump signed on his first day back in office.

The order directs all federal agencies, including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Social Security Administration, to stop issuing citizenship documents, such as passports and Social Security numbers, to any child born on American soil unless at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or a green card holder.

Children born to parents who are here illegally, on temporary visas (such as student, work, or tourist visas), or otherwise not subject to full U.S. jurisdiction would no longer qualify for automatic citizenship under the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

The order explicitly interprets the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to exclude those whose parents owe primary allegiance to a foreign country.

The Supreme Court granted review in December after multiple lower courts, including federal district judges and appeals courts, issued nationwide injunctions blocking the policy.

All lower courts that have ruled so far have declared the executive order unconstitutional, citing the 1898 Supreme Court precedent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a child born in the U.S. to Chinese immigrant parents who were legal residents at the time was a citizen.

Oral arguments are set for Tuesday, with a final decision expected by late June or early July.

If the Supreme Court upholds the order, it will represent a major shift in American immigration policy, effectively ending the “anchor baby” incentive that encourages illegal crossings and birth tourism.

Only a handful of countries, mostly in the Americas, grant automatic citizenship based solely on being born there. Most nations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia determine citizenship by bloodline or require at least one parent to be a citizen or permanent resident.

President Trump has repeatedly pointed out the national security and economic threats posed by the current system, pointing to “birth tourism” operations run out of China and other countries where pregnant women fly to the U.S. specifically to give birth and secure citizenship for their children.

Those children later return home but retain the ability to sponsor family members for U.S. visas or even claim benefits as adults.

Kayleigh McEnany, former White House press secretary and current Fox News contributor, broke down the stakes in a recent segment.

“Next week, the Supreme Court is slated to revisit President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order,” McEnany stated. “It directs all U.S. government agencies to refuse issuing citizenship documents to children born to illegal immigrants or children who do not have at least one parent who is an American or a lawful permanent resident. It’s a law President Trump says is in place all over the world, and he’s right. You’re looking at that map. And if he wins in court, he would effectively cripple the booming birth tourism industry.”

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The Senator Who Saved America From FDR’s Court-Packing Scheme

Americans can be thankful that the cynical effort to corrupt the Court in 1937 was defeated by principled legislators like Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, a member of FDR’s own party.

“When you don’t like the message,” the old saying goes, “shoot the messenger.”

In the wake of Supreme Court rulings they don’t like, leading Democrats in Washington renewed calls last year to “pack” the Court with more liberal justices. Were that to happen, it would surely set off “tit for tat” fights the next time a Republican sits in the White House.

Democrats control the Senate today and could conceivably muster the votes to fill a vacancy if one occurs in the next two years. But a plan spearheaded by Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) to change the Court’s composition from nine to 13 has no chance to pass both houses of Congress, at least for the moment. Boosting the number of justices for purely ideological advantage is the very definition of court-packing.

Reducing the size of a court can also be seen as a form of court packing (or “unpacking”), depending on the intent. Ten years ago, then-Congressman (now Senator) Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the ironically named Stop Court Packing Act. It would have reduced the number of judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from eleven to eight. Clearly meant to thwart President Obama’s nominees to the court, it went nowhere.

When Democrat Franklin Roosevelt attempted court-packing in 1937, a prominent member of his own party helped lead the successful fight to defeat it. That would be none other than Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who put country ahead of party when he declared,

Create now a political court to echo the ideas of the Executive and you have created a weapon. A weapon which, in the hands of another President in times of war or other hysteria, could well be an instrument of destruction. A weapon that can cut down those guarantees of liberty written into your great document by the blood of your forefathers and that can extinguish your right of liberty, of speech, of thought, of action, and of religion. A weapon whose use is only dictated by the conscience of the wielder.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Wheeler earned his law degree from the University of Michigan before heading for Seattle. He never made it. His train stopped in Butte, where he lost almost everything he had in a poker game. He decided to recoup by building a law practice in Montana.

His political career began in 1910 when, at age 28, he was elected to the Montana legislature. After running unsuccessfully for Governor in 1920, he won a US Senate seat two years later. Wheeler was a staunch ally of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, but he courageously broke with FDR over the court-packing plot.

Fresh from a landslide reelection to a second term in 1936, Roosevelt was determined to crush the independence of the Supreme Court by turning it into a rubber stamp for the White House. He was so rattled by rulings against his dubious New Deal policies that he publicly smeared the Court as “those nine old men.” Nobody had tampered with the size of the Court since 1869, when Congress established that the highest judicial body would consist of nine justices.

FDR asked lawmakers to approve a plan whereby the President could nominate a new justice every time a sitting one reached the age of 70 and failed to voluntarily retire. Roosevelt already controlled the executive branch and held sway over the legislative branch, with big Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. For Wheeler, a grab for the judicial branch was a bridge too far.

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SCOTUS Rejects Citizen Journalist’s Case Against Officials Who Arrested Her for Asking Police Questions

Priscilla Villarreal built a following in the way modern news often grows now. Not through printing presses or broadcast towers, but through a Facebook page that drew more than 200,000 people into its orbit.

In Laredo, Texas, under the name La Gordiloca, she reported quickly, conversationally, sometimes uncomfortably close to the raw edge of events.

In 2017, she texted a police officer to confirm the identities of two victims, one from a suicide, one from a car accident. She received answers. She published them.

Months later, she was arrested.

The law used against her had been sitting unused for 23 years. It makes it a felony to solicit nonpublic information from a government official “with intent to obtain a benefit.”

In Villarreal’s case, authorities argued that the benefit was popularity, more followers, more attention, more reach.

In other words, doing well at the job became the job’s alleged crime.

A state judge dismissed the charges, finding the statute too vague to stand. That might have sounded like a resolution, the system correcting itself in the end.

Instead, it became the beginning of a second act.

Villarreal filed a civil rights lawsuit against the officials involved in her arrest. The response was immediate and familiar within legal circles: “Qualified immunity.”

The doctrine protects government officials from liability unless there is already a court decision declaring nearly identical conduct unconstitutional.

No case had ever addressed the idea of arresting a journalist for asking a question over text.

A three-judge panel initially sided with Villarreal, stating, “If the First Amendment means anything, it surely means that a citizen journalist has the right to ask a public official a question, without fear of being imprisoned. Yet that is exactly what happened here: Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question. If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what would be.”

The clarity of that statement did not last.

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Supreme Court Limits ISPs’ Liability For Online Piracy

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sharply curtailed when internet service providers can be held liable for copyright infringement committed by their subscribers, handing a major victory to broadband companies and dealing a setback to Sony Music Entertainment and other major labels seeking to combat online piracy.

In a 7-2 decision (with Justices Sotomayor and Jackson concurring only in the judgment), the justices ruled that Cox Communications Inc. cannot be held liable for the actions of customers who illegally downloaded and shared songs using its network, even after the company received more than 163,000 infringement notices from copyright holders. The ruling reverses a $1 billion jury verdict against the Atlanta-based cable and internet giant and clarifies long-standing uncertainties about secondary liability under U.S. copyright law.

The case stemmed from a 2018 lawsuit in which the labels accused Cox of willful contributory and vicarious infringement for failing to terminate repeat offenders. A federal jury in Virginia sided with the labels on both theories and awarded $1 billion in statutory damages. The Fourth Circuit upheld the contributory-liability finding but tossed the vicarious-liability verdict, leading to the Supreme Court appeal on the contributory issue alone.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said a service provider is liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended its service to be used for that purpose. “The provider of a service is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement, which can be shown only if the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement,” he wrote.

Such intent exists only when the provider actively induces infringement – such as by marketing a product as a tool for piracy – or offers a service that is “not capable of ‘substantial’ or ‘commercially significant’ noninfringing uses,” the opinion stated, citing the court’s landmark 1984 decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios Inc. and the 2005 ruling in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. 

“Mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is insufficient to establish the required intent to infringe,” Thomas emphasized, rejecting the broader “material contribution” standard applied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The decision rejects the Fourth Circuit’s holding that Cox could be liable simply by continuing to provide internet service to subscribers whose accounts were linked to repeated violations. “The Fourth Circuit’s holding went beyond the two forms of liability recognized in Grokster and Sony,” the opinion states.

Cox, which serves about six million subscribers, had argued it took reasonable steps to address piracy, including sending warnings, suspending service and terminating accounts after multiple notices. The company contractually prohibits subscribers from using its network for infringing activity. Sony Music Entertainment and other major labels countered that Cox’s efforts were insufficient.

Tuesday’s ruling is expected to have ripple effects across the telecom and entertainment industries – with industry executives long warning that expansive secondary-liability rules could force providers to monitor and police all user activity, raising costs and privacy concerns. Copyright owners have argued that without stronger accountability for intermediaries, online piracy remains rampant.

For Cox, the ruling caps years of litigation. The company has said it will continue to cooperate with copyright holders through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice-and-takedown process, though the court noted that the statute creates defenses rather than new causes of action.

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Liberal Supreme Court Justice Got Smacked Down During Arguments Over Mail-in Ballots

The Supreme Court heard arguments about laws that allow mail-in ballots to be counted five days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Fourteen states permit these ballots to be counted within that period, but a legal challenge in Watson v. RNC, which had its oral argument on Monday, could shorten this window. The court appeared ready to restrict it, potentially undermining a favored Democratic election strategy for certain elections.

The case, Watson v. RNC, challenges a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be received up to five days after Election Day, as long as the ballot is postmarked by Election Day. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia also allow mail-in ballots to be received after Election Day. 

Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, said the case would give an opportunity for mail-in ballot laws to be uniform across the country. 

“Federal law clearly states that ballots must be received by Election Day,” Snead told The Center Square. “Despite this, states continue to allow absentee ballots to pour in days or even weeks late.” 

In Illinois, mail-in ballots can be received up to 14 days after Election Day. Lawyers for the RNC argued that the federal government sets a date for federal elections and that all ballots need to be available for counting by that date. 

Lisa Dixon, executive director at the Center for Election Confidence, said delayed mail-in ballot receipt deadlines became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said a ruling in favor of the RNC would still allow states to accept late mail-in ballots for nonfederal elections. 

Lawyers for Mississippi have argued that upholding a strict receipt deadline would jeopardize ballots for military and overseas voters. However, Congress’ passage of the Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Voting Act established requirements for states to send absentee ballots 45 days before a federal election. 

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The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Blow to the Dems’ Plan to Persecute ICE Agents If They Retake Power

The Democrats have made it painfully, frighteningly clear that they intend to weaponize the government against President Trump, his allies, and anyone who didn’t sufficiently “resist” the Trump administration if they regain power. Susan Rice said last month, “When it comes to the elites, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media…it is not going to end well for them, for those that decided…that they would act in their perceived very narrow self interest,” Rice said, “which I would underscore is a very short-term self-interest and take a knee to Trump.”

Rice added, “If they’ve done something wrong, they will be held accountable. And if they haven’t broken the law, good for them; if they’ve done the right things, good for them. That also will be noted and remembered. This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget. The damage that these people are doing is too severe to the American people and our national interests.”

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker promised to do the same, telling the media, “I don’t think you can speak of it in shorthand, but we’ve got to restore the rule of law, and that means holding people accountable who’ve broken the law. I’m talking about the people in this administration who’ve broken the law and federal agents who’ve broken the law.” He said Democrats would do whatever it took to prosecute them, “Criminally prosecuted, civilly prosecuted. Whatever it is that we can do.”

The biggest target thus far of the Democrats’ retribution plans is ICE agents. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner vowed to hunt them down like Nazis. Eric Swalwell said he’d make their lives a living hell if he’s elected Governor of California. And several states, including Maryland and Rhode Island, have introduced legislation that would bar ICE agents from obtaining law enforcement jobs in those states, while Colorado advanced a bill allowing lawsuits against ICE agents.

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Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Arrested Christian Street Preacher

A Mississippi street preacher who sued a community over a law that banned him from preaching near an amphitheater has won his battle to challenge the law.

Gabriel Olivier claimed his arrest under a law passed by Brandon, Mississippi, violated his First Amendment rights, according to the Associated Press.

The city said he had shouted insults, and invoked the law to fine Olivier and slap him with a year of probation. Olivier paid the fine and completed his probation.

The decision allowed Olivier to move forward but does not ensure he will win the suit.

“This is not only a win for the right to share your faith in public, but also a win for every American’s right to have their day in court when their First Amendment rights are violated,” Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO, and chief counsel for First Liberty Institute, said in a news release on First Liberty’s website.

“We’re delighted that the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Gabe’s right to his day in court. It’s just common sense that a citizen who is arrested under an unconstitutional law should be able to challenge that law. As people of faith, we look to the judiciary to protect our constitutional right to spread the gospel,” Allyson Ho, co-chair of First Liberty’s nationwide Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Group, added.

“No American should be criminally charged for sharing their faith in public,” Nate Kellum, senior counsel at First Liberty, remarked. “This is a wonderful day for Gabe and for the First Amendment.”

Olivier himself said that “my goal from the beginning was to be granted my rights as an American citizen under our great Constitution.”

“Now all people with deeply held Christian religious beliefs who are called to share the good news can do so in the public arena.”

As noted by SCOTUSBlog, Olivier was battling an argument from the city that a 1994 ruling, Heck v. Humphrey, should be used to block his lawsuit. The ruling limits challenges convicted criminals can bring against a law under which they were convicted.

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What’s Next In The Fight To Stop Schools From Transing Kids After SCOTUS Victory

A few weeks before Christmas in 2022, Amber Lavigne was cleaning her 13-year-old’s bedroom when she stumbled upon her daughter’s secret: a chest binder. She learned that Autumn had been wearing the garment, which girls use to flatten their breasts to achieve a masculine appearance, for about two months at school in Maine, where she had adopted a boy’s name, Leo, and was using he/him pronouns. 

It was the first of two chest binders Lavigne found that had been provided to her eighth-grade daughter by a social worker at the Great Salt Bay Community School, according to a federal lawsuit Lavigne filed in 2023, which is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her lawsuit alleges that the public school not only aided and abetted Autumn’s gender transition but also hid the information from her parents. 

“I think it’s important for parents to know that this is occurring in our public schools because I don’t think many parents believe that it’s as bad as it really is,” Lavigne said on a recent podcast. “When I was a kid, one of the first things I heard about adults is if any adult asks you as a child to keep a secret, there’s something wrong with that adult, and you need to come tell me immediately.”

“And now, I mean, it’s like we’re in upside-down land.” 

The Maine lawsuit and others like it raise one of the most contentious issues in the broader conflict over transgender policies: whether a parent’s constitutional right to direct their children’s education and medical care extends to a circumstance that society has never grappled with until the past decade or so — a youth’s rejection of their biological sex, adoption of a new name and matching pronouns, and assertion of a new gender identity. And to what extent children who are transitioning or exploring gender options have the right to confidentiality if they worry about rejection and hostility at home.

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Bad Faith Noncompliance: Virginia Schools Flout Supreme Court And Trump With DEI ‘Rebrand’

Just over a year ago, President Trump issued two executive orders banning destructive diversity ideology (a.k.a. “DEI” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) from the federal government and its contractors, including colleges and universities. The EOs sought to restore merit as the basis of hiring, advancement, and college admissions.

Both EOs reinforced prior actions by the president as well as by the Supreme Court: In his first term, Trump signed EO 13950, Combatting Race and Sex Stereotypes, which banned divisive concepts based on race and ethnicity, a measure duplicated in many states; and in June of 2023, the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard (“SFFA”), which found that diversity rationales for racial preferences in admissions were themselves discriminatory and therefore unlawful.

Notwithstanding these major legal developments against DEI, colleges and universities, especially in Virginia, are continuing business as usual to promote it, albeit under different names, a move known as rebranding. “To avoid scrutiny,” said one official at the University of Virginia, diversity offices are now called offices for “community and belonging,” while “queer brunch” is now marketed as “cozy brunch.” At George Mason University, the DEI office is now called the Office for Access, Compliance, and Community—same staff, same stuff. They do this even though Trump’s EO explicitly banned rebranding, stating such programs are illegal “under whatever name they appear.”

Obviously, bad actor schools are engaged in bad faith noncompliance.

In this 250th anniversary year of America’s founding, we should remember that the word “diversity“ is absent from our foundational documents: it does not appear in either the Declaration of Independence or in our Constitution.

How, then, did “diversity” become so ubiquitous—in education, government, and corporate America—and what does it really mean?

“Diversity” is in fact a top-down, divide-and-conquer strategy pitting Americans against each other based on race, ethnicity, and sex (and now including “gender” and gender ideology). It distracts from—and detracts from—talent and excellence, actually encouraging racial discord as everyone must have skin color or race in mind, rather than achievement or moral character. Accordingly, it destroys nations. Only corrupt politicians, owned and controlled by anti-American handlers, could parrot the lie that “Diversity is our strength.”

Many date the debut of diversity ideology from the 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, where the medical school of the University of California at Davis had a special admissions program reserving 16 of its 100 open spots for minorities, often with lesser qualifications than white applicants, such as complainant Allan Bakke. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell announced in this opinion that “diversity” was a legitimate governmental interest. But he and the other justices rejected the medical school’s rigid quotas to get there—insisting, instead, that race should be one of many different criteria for admission even while stating that “racial and ethnic considerations are inherently suspect” under the Constitution.

These ambiguities guaranteed more fights about the role of race in college admissions and elsewhere.

In 2003, the Court made matters worse in Grutter v. Bollinger, where Justice Sandra Day O’Connor elevated “diversity” from a permissible state interest to a compelling one, finding that the University of Michigan law school’s racial preferences in admissions were lawful, provided they were tailored and individualized.

Historically, “compelling state interests” concerned public safety, national security, or the protection of minor children. With no history, tradition, or textual basis to do so, the Grutter Court not only shoved diversity onto this list but also put it above a citizen’s right to equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. For this reason, many called the decision illegitimate. In practice, this case was the official government stamp of approval for discrimination against Christian, heterosexual men of European descent, as they are the only demographic said not to contribute to diversity.

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Clinton Judge Orders Trump Admin to Refund $130 Billion in Tariffs

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump Administration to refund $130 billion in tariffs.

The US Supreme Court recently struck down President Trump’s tariffs in a 6-3 decision.

The Supreme Court said President Trump does not have the authority to impose the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

The high court’s decision only invalidates Trump’s tariffs under the IEEPA.

Chief Justices Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch sided with the three liberal justices.

Conservative Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with President Trump.

In his dissent, Kavanaugh warned that refunding the tariffs would be a ‘mess.’

The Trump Administration asked for a 90-day delay in refunding the tariffs, but the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals denied the request on Monday.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday rejected the Trump Administration’s request to delay the Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs.

On Wednesday, Judge Richard Eaton, a Clinton appointee, said the Trump Administration to begin refunding $130 billion in tariffs.

Fox News reported:

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to begin the drawn-out task of refunding billions of dollars to companies that paid tariffs the Supreme Court recently invalidated.

Judge Richard Eaton, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, laid out the estimated $130 billion refund process in a three-page order, saying it would begin with U.S. Customs and Border Protection calculating what importers would have paid without the now-invalid tariffs. Eaton also made clear he had sole jurisdiction over the refunds, which more than 1,000 companies have sued over in the U.S. Court of International Trade.

“The Chief Judge has indicated that I am the only judge who will hear cases pertaining to the refund of [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] duties,” Eaton wrote. “So there is no danger that another Judge, even one in this Court, will reach any contrary conclusions.”

The case in question was brought by Atmus Filtration, Inc., a company that paid President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which Trump imposed on nearly every country on an emergency basis under IEEPA last year.

Last week FedEx filed a lawsuit seeking a refund.

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