Tag: scotus

Supreme Court Rules That US Government Must Cover Native American Health Care

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on June 6 that the federal government will have to cover Indian tribes’ costs incurred in operating tribal health care programs.

The majority opinion in Becerra v. San Carlos Apache Tribe and Becerra v. Northern Arapaho Tribe was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by all three liberal justices and one conservative.

U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra was the petitioner in both cases. He appealed unfavorable rulings by lower courts.

The respondent, the San Carlos Apache Indian Tribe, is based in Arizona. The other respondent, the Northern Arapaho Tribe, is based in Wyoming.

The ruling means the U.S. government will have to pay for overhead costs related to health care that the tribes provide under a federal law intended to give Native Americans greater control.

“Aside from being inconsistent with the statute’s text, [the government’s] failure to cover contract support costs for healthcare funded by program income inflicts a penalty on tribes for opting in favor of greater self-determination,” the majority opinion states.

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Elon Musk’s X Urges Supreme Court for Review After Jack Smith Obtained Trump Files

Elon Musk’s X Corp. has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider stepping in against a process that lets officials obtain information from social media companies and bars the companies from informing people whose information is handed over.

The process wrongly enables officials to “access and review potentially privileged materials without any opportunity for the user to assert privileges—including constitutional privileges,” lawyers for X said in a filing to the nation’s top court.

Unsealed documents in 2023 showed that X provided data and records from former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account to special counsel Jack Smith after Mr. Smith obtained a search warrant.

X was blocked from informing President Trump by a nondisclosure order that Mr. Smith also obtained.

The order said disclosing the warrant would result in “destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation,” and let President Trump “flee from prosecution.”

X challenged the order, arguing it violated its First Amendment rights and noting that President Trump might have reason to claim executive privilege, or presidential privilege. The company wanted to alert the former president so he could assert the privilege, but U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled against it, claiming during a hearing that the only reason X was issuing the challenge was “because the CEO wants to cozy up with the former president.”

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Samuel Alito’s ‘Appeal to Heaven’ Flag Got Retconned

Samuel Alito has refused to recuse himself from upcoming cases relating to the January 6 Capitol riot. The Supreme Court associate justice told Congress earlier this week that Democrats’ insistence that he does so was unreasonable, saying, “I am therefore duty bound to reject your recusal request.”

Why have so many Democratic politicians and media figures decided that Alito should sit out from January 6 cases? They believe that he has proven himself to be sympathetic to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—and they cite as evidence two flags that were flown on Alito’s properties.

One was an upside-down American flag, and the other was a Pine Tree flag bearing the message “an appeal to heaven.” Many in the media have abruptly decided that both flags telegraph agreement with the right’s pro-insurrection camp. CNN called the “Appeal to Heaven” flag a “symbol for supporters of former President Donald Trump.” The New York Times noted that both flags were carried by rioters during the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. MSNBC insisted that the Pine Tree flag was not just a pro-insurrection flag but also a Christian nationalist flag and implied that Alito should recuse himself from abortion-related cases as well.

Yet the idea that either the Pine Tree flag or flying the American flag upside-down always and everywhere endorsements of Trump’s election-related malfeasance is ludicrous. The American flag is commonly turned upside-down by activists representing all sorts of issues and usually represents dissatisfaction with the current state of the country. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag has equally broad usage; it originated during the Revolutionary War and quotes the philosopher John Locke in defense of rebellion against unjust authority. Protesters have borrowed it for their own purposes throughout American history. The Black Lives Matter movement was using it just a few weeks before January 6.

It is certainly true that some of the people who smashed the windows of the U.S. Capitol and feuded with police were carrying this flag, the Gadsden flag, and other icons of liberty—including the American flag itself. That does not mean these flags should be considered exclusive hallmarks of the far right. In fact, people ought to resist ceding pro-liberty iconography to the far right.

Alito says that he had nothing to do with the flags, which were put up by his wife during a dispute with one of their neighbors. It is certainly possible that Martha-Ann Alito is a supporter of the Stop the Steal movement. (Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was certainly sympathetic.) The flags are not compelling evidence of this, however; nor would it necessarily mean that Alito should recuse himself from such cases. Would a liberal justice be expected to recuse from a case related to gay marriage if they flew the pride flag? Or a criminal justice–related case if they had a Black Lives Matter sign on their front yard? No.

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‘An Embarrassing Mistake’: Neil Gorsuch Rails Into Florida’s Use of 6-Person Juries

The right to a trial by jury was designed to be part of “the heart and lungs of liberty,” enshrined into the Constitution to protect people “against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hogs,” according to John Adams.

It is, in theory, still supposed to do that. But the Founders would likely be dismayed by the ways in which the government has watered down that right since their passing.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuked one such way today: the use of six-member juries, as opposed to the historical practice of 12-person panels.

His opinion was pegged to Cunningham v. Florida, a case concerning Florida woman Natoya Cunningham who was sentenced to eight years in prison after a six-person jury found her guilty of aggravated battery and retaliation against an informant to whom her nephew sold crack. Florida is one of six states—the others are Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Utah—that permits either six- or eight-person panels for such criminal trials.

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Supreme Court sides with NRA in free speech case against ex- New York official

The Supreme Court on Thursday backed the National Rifle Association in a First Amendment ruling that will make it harder for state officials to put pressure on advocacy groups.

The decision means the NRA may sue a former New York official, Maria Vullo, who pressed banks as well as insurance companies to stop associating with the NRA after a 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, according to CNN.

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Mrs. Alito and the Bad Flag

The New York Times apoplectic over basically nothing: “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display,” reads a New York Times headline from yesterday.

According to the Times, an upside-down American flag was flown at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021—between the January 6 Capitol riot and President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The nation’s esteemed paper of record suggests this action indicates that Alito thinks the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

There is very little evidence available to make this case. People fly upside-down flags for all kinds of reasons; it typically signals “SOS” or a sense that the country is horribly off course. People have historically flown flags in this manner out of protest for the Vietnam War, out of protest for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, to contest election results (believing the election was stolen or that voter fraud was rampant), or—and don’t get the two confused—to signal displeasure with the election results.

Alito reports that his wife was the one who flew the flag in this manner and that it concerned a dispute with a neighbor who posted an anti-Trump sign in their yard, following the election, that used expletives. Mrs. Alito was reportedly angered by this, and flew her flag upside-down in response. It is very hard to tell what intentions were behind one single gesture, reportedly not even done by the justice himself, and no account from neighbors or friends of the Alito family has bolstered the idea that Mrs. Alito is a “Stop the Steal” type.

This reminds me of when media outlets and the Anti-Defamation League claimed the “OK” symbol was actually a white supremacist gesture. If you look hard enough, you can find disturbing symbols anywhere you look, but you must sometimes suspend logic and reason in order to do so. This does not seem like a situation where a sitting Supreme Court justice is supporting overthrowing election results; it looks like a situation where The New York Times is straining to make that the narrative.

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Justice Kavanaugh Asks Jack Smith’s Prosecutor Why Barack Obama Was Never Charged For Drone Strikes Against Civilians

The Supreme Court on Thursday heard oral arguments on Trump’s presidential immunity claim in Jack Smith’s January 6 case in DC after a federal appeals court ruled Trump was not immune from prosecution.

Trump’s lawyers previously argued that Trump is immune from federal prosecution for alleged ‘crimes’ committed while he served as US President.

At issue before the Supreme Court is whether a US President is immune from criminal prosecution for official (not personal) acts.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked DOJ prosecutor Michael Dreeben (former Mueller goon) why Barack Obama was never charged for drone strikes against civilians.

“How about President Obama’s drone strikes?” Kavanaugh asked Michael Dreeben.

Dreeben defended Obama’s drone strikes that killed weddinggoers and innocent civilians.

“So the office of legal counsel looked at this very carefully and determined number one that the federal murder statute does apply to the Executive Branch, but the president wasn’t personally carrying out the strike, but the aiding and abetting laws are broad and determined that a public authority exception is built into statutes and that applied particularly to the murder statute that talks about unlawful killing did not apply to the drone strike,” Dreeben said.

Dreeben could have saved a lot of time and just said that Barack Obama has Democrat privilege.

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SCOTUS shocked by Biden administration’s view of federal power over states in ER abortion challenge

To convince the Supreme Court that the Biden administration could use federal Medicare funding to force hospitals to perform abortions in violation of Idaho law, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar conceived and gave birth to some unusual arguments Wednesday.

She reached for a 129-year-old precedent that crippled the labor movement for decades, neutered legal obligations to the “unborn child” in the federal law that allegedly requires abortions in certain situations, and didn’t deny a Republican administration could use her rationale to functionally ban abortion and even transgender care nationwide.

Such is the federal government’s interest in ensuring that abortion-minded women can use emergency rooms to terminate pregnancies as conservative states approve new abortion restrictions, or reinstate old ones, under the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Backed by 22 conservative states and sued by the feds, Idaho challenged the Biden administration’s use of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act as a “super-statute” that overrides its Defense of Life Act, which includes criminal penalties and loss of license, and “turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply.”

While Prelogar faced skepticism from GOP-appointed justices about the massive expansion of federal power her argument implied, a recurring point of confusion for the whole bench was how much “daylight” stood between EMTALA, designed to stop “patient-dumping,” and Idaho’s law.

The former requires “immediate medical attention” when the health of the individual or “unborn child” would otherwise face “serious jeopardy, serious impairment to bodily functions, or serious dysfunction of bodily organs.” The latter has one health-related abortion exception: “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

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Censorship on Trial at the Supreme Court

Billed as one of the most consequential lawsuits of the last century, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v Biden) is a legal battle that stands at the intersection of free speech protections and social media companies. 

The plaintiffs, which include psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty, and epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, cosignatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, allege the US government coerced social media companies to censor disfavoured viewpoints that were constitutionally protected by the First Amendment.

The US government denies coercing social media companies, arguing it was “friendly encouragement” in an effort to protect Americans from “misinformation” in a public health emergency.

The Constitution is clear – it forbids the US government from abridging free speech. But a private company such as a social media platform bears no such burden and is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment.

This case asks whether certain government officials impermissibly coerced social media companies to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users. The case now sits before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

The Case So Far

The case has seen several twists and turns since it was originally filed in 2022.

Discovery allowed plaintiffs to document nearly 20,000 pages showing platforms like Twitter (now X), Facebook, YouTube, and Google stifled free speech by removing or downgrading stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the 2020 presidential election, and various Covid-19 policies.

The plaintiffs described it as an “unprecedented, sprawling federal censorship enterprise.”

On July 4, 2023, US District Court Terry Doughty granted a motion to restrict federal government officials from communicating with social media companies over content it believed to be misinformation.

Specifically, they were prohibited from meeting or contacting by phone, email, or text message or “engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

Doughty indicated there was “substantial evidence” that the US government violated the First Amendment by engaging in a widespread censorship campaign and that “if the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

The Biden Administration appealed the decision in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the officials exercised a form of permissible government speech because they only pointed out content that violated the platforms’ policies to reduce the harms of online misinformation.

On September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit largely affirmed Judge Doughty’s order stating that US government officials were engaging “in a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government.”

It was determined that the harms of such censorship radiated far beyond the plaintiffs in the case, essentially impacting every social-media user.

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Porn industry asks Supreme Court to block Texas law requiring age verification before accessing sites

The adult entertainment industry will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block a Texas law that requires porn websites to verify the age of users. The case presents the justices with a chance to opine on the legal protections afforded to pornography, particularly in the context of the internet.

The nation’s most conservative appeals court — the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — ruled on March 7 to overturn a district court injunction that blocked Texas H.B. 1181. The law requires internet companies whose content consists of more than one-third “sexual material harmful to minors” to “use reasonable age verification methods” to limit their distribution to adults, and to display a health warning before showing any such materials. Embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton began enforcing the law in February, and shortly thereafter began a $1.6 million civil action against PornHub for noncompliance. The Free Speech Coalition, an association of the adult film industry, sued to block the Texas law, claiming that it both violated the First Amendment and conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is the federal statute that protects internet platforms from liability based on third-party content that violates the law.

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