Tag: scotus

Liberal SCOTUS Justice Took $3M From Book Publisher, Didn’t Recuse From Its Cases

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declined to recuse herself from multiple copyright infringement cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House despite having been paid millions by the firm for her books, making it by far her largest source of income, records show.

In 2010, she got a $1.2 million book advance from Knopf Doubleday Group, a part of the conglomerate. In 2012, she reported receiving two advance payments from the publisher totaling $1.9 million.

In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision for whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House, despite then-fellow Justice Stephen Breyer recusing after also receiving money from the publisher. Greenspan was a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s who wrote a book about the founding of Facebook and contended that Random House rejected his book proposal and then awarded a deal to another author who copied his book and eventually turned it into the movie The Social Network.

In 2017, Sotomayor began receiving payments each year from Penguin Random House itself, which continued annually through at least 2021, the most recent disclosure available, and totaled more than $500,000. In all, she received $3.6 million from Penguin Random House or its subsidiaries, according to a Daily Wire tally of financial disclosures.

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Despite SCOTUS Ruling Limiting Its Authority, EPA Tries To Unilaterally Regulate Carbon Emissions Again

After a bruising defeat at the Supreme Court, the Biden administration is back to crafting regulatory limits on power plant emissions. A forthcoming rule from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would require that carbon-producing coal and gas power plants slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, reports The New York Times.

These emissions limits would be so strict that coal plants likely have to adopt carbon capture technology to meet them while gas plants would have to switch to burning carbon-free hydrogen gas, say administration officials to the Times.

The yet-to-be-made-public rule is currently being finalized by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Since coming into office, President Joe Biden has been working on a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. This has been a liberal priority going back to the Obama administration, which tried and failed to get Congress to enact an emissions cap-and-trade scheme in 2009.

Undeterred, in 2015, Obama’s EPA implemented very similar regulations to those that were found in the 2009 legislation, claiming that the Clean Air Act had given it the power to regulate carbon emissions all along.

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The Supreme Court Will Decide Whether You Have a Right to a Prompt Hearing After Cops Seize Your Property

Do you have a right to a prompt hearing after the government seizes your property? The U.S. Supreme Court will consider the question in its upcoming term.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Culley v. Attorney General of Alabama, two consolidated cases concerning whether property owners have a due process right to a hearing to determine if police had probable cause to seize their property.

The issue may seem esoteric, but it’s hugely important to people who have their property seized by police under civil asset forfeiture laws. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can take property suspected of being connected to criminal activity even if the owner hasn’t been charged with a crime. Property owners then often have the burden of going to court and proving their innocence, a process that can take months and sometimes years.

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AOC says she may draft Clarence Thomas impeachment article if no one else does

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., renewed her calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be impeached after a report detailed the justice’s close relationship with a billionaire Republican donor — going so far as to say she will introduce articles of impeachment herself.

In comments made on the “Lever Time” podcast Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez said Thomas’ position on the court is an “emergency” and a “crisis,” and reiterated her full support for removing him. 

When asked if she would introduce the articles of impeachment herself, the New York lawmaker said she would step up if no one else does. 

“Congress is out of session for the next week. And so that does give Democrats some time to strategize, and the way I feel about it is that, I do think articles need to be introduced,” said Ocasio-Cortez. 

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Supreme Court refuses to hear challenge to NSA mass surveillance

The entity behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundations partnered with the ACLU and the Knight Institute to try to get the US Supreme Court to force Congress to curtail the current NSA internet surveillance.

The decision leaves the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit with a divided opinion, which threw out Wikimedia’s challenge accepting the government’s “state secrets privilege” argument.

The notorious agency’s legal basis for such surveillance are based on FISA (Foreign Surveillance Act) which grew into quite a “monster” since it was first passed in 1978, and in particular after 9/11 – and, specifically with Section 702, introduced in 2008.

Section 702 is up for renewal later this year and this is what the petition sought to prevent. The contested legislation proved to be the foundation of much of the mass surveillance wrongdoings revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Wikimedia and others unsuccessfully attempted to ensure that the NSA “upstream” surveillance program (the harmful nature of which is said to be backed up by a number of disclosures coming from government sources) would be “reviewed” rather than simply renewed this time. It allows the spy agency to search internet traffic to and from the US, and that means emails, messages and other communication belonging to Americans.

This means that both those on US soil and targeted individuals abroad are spied on.

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Kavanuagh Rape Accuser Confesses She Lied, Was Never Raped, Never Even Met The Man

ICYMI| Because the mainstream media was not very interested in this story (for obvious reasons) it is likely that you did not see this when it broke.  For this reason we are posting it again.

The sh*t show the Democrats staged at the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was a disgusting group denigration of the high office Democrats have been entrusted with.

This was borne out again yesterday when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley made a third criminal referral, this one against a second Kavanaugh accuser, Judy Munro-Leighton.

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When Does an Ugly Facebook Message Qualify as an Illegal ‘True Threat’ of Violence? SCOTUS Will Decide.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment,” the U.S. Supreme Court said in Texas v Johnson (1989), “it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” What that principle means in practice is that all sorts of vile and despicable speech—including hate speech—are constitutionally protected.

But the Court has also said that the First Amendment has its limits. One of them involves “true threats” of violence, which the Court in Virginia v. Black (2003) defined as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” The First Amendment, the Court held, “permits” the government “to ban a ‘true threat.'”

Deciding what actually counts as a “true threat” is not such an easy task, however, as the Supreme Court seems to recognize. Last week, the Court agreed to hear arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, which asks, in the question presented to the Court, “whether, to establish that a statement is a ‘true threat’ unprotected by the First Amendment, the government must show that the speaker subjectively knew or intended the threatening nature of the statement, or whether it is enough to show that an objective ‘reasonable person’ would regard the statement as a threat of violence.”

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The Supreme Court’s Complicity in Our Loss of Freedom

After the Constitution had been drafted, it was submitted to the states for ratification. It had quite a few opponents, called the Anti-Federalists. They argued that the proposed government would have too much power and would become a danger to the people’s rights. Most of their fire was aimed at Articles I and II, which created the legislative and executive branches, but some Anti-Federalists also expressed fears that the judiciary in Article III could become a menace. Seeking to allay all such fears, the Constitution’s proponents wrote 85 essays known as The Federalist Papers.

In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton defended the judiciary, calling it “the least dangerous branch” since it would have neither the legislature’s control over spending nor the executive’s power of enforcement. Hamilton argued that judicial review, the ability of a court (in this case the Supreme Court) to invalidate legislation passed by a legislature (in this case Congress) posed no threat to the rights of Americans, but was essential in protecting them against possible encroachments by the political branches.

So how has judicial review worked out?

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Ketanji Brown Jackson Suggests Christmas Classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” is Fodder For White Supremacists in Oral Arguments Over Free Speech Case

She’s the smartest person on the Supreme Court, according to Joe Biden.

The US Supreme Court on Monday listened to arguments in a case about a Colorado web designer who doesn’t want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples.

The conservative justices argued the web designer has freedom of speech to choose which websites she designs.

“Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that a businessperson’s objection would not be based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message the businessperson did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.”” CNN reported.

Enter Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson…

Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know what a woman is but she’s apparently a movie critic?

And a racist.

KBJ used the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” to argue the First Amendment case.

“I want to do video depictions of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and knowing that movie very well, I want to be authentic, and so only white children and families can be customers for that particular product. Everybody else can, I’ll give to everybody else I’ll sell them anything they want, just not the ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ depictions,” Ketanji Brown Jackson said. “I‘m expressing something, right? For the purposes of that speech. I can say anti-discrimination laws can’t make me sell ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ packages to non-white individuals.”

”This business wants to express its own view of nostalgia about Christmases past by reproducing classic 1940’s and 1950’s Santa scenes, they do it in sepia tone and they are customizing each one,” Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

Unbelievable!

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Kavanuagh Rape Accuser Confesses She Lied, Was Never Raped, Never Even Met The Man

ICYMI| Because the mainstream media was not very interested in this story (for obvious reasons) it is likely that you did not see this when it broke.  For this reason we are posting it again.

The sh*t show the Democrats staged at the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was a disgusting group denigration of the high office Democrats have been entrusted with.

This was borne out again yesterday when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley made a third criminal referral, this one against a second Kavanaugh accuser, Judy Munro-Leighton.

Keep reading