Tag: scotus

SCOTUS Case Involving Cannabis Fraud Highlights the Illogic of Federal Drug Testing Mandates

The U.S. Supreme Court last week considered a case involving a trucker, Douglas Horn, who lost his job because he tested positive for THC after consuming a CBD tincture that was advertised as completely free of that psychoactive compound. Horn sued the companies that made and marketed the tincture under the Racketeer Influenced and Corruption Organizations (RICO) Act, arguing that he was “injured in his business or property by reason of” the defendants’ mail and wire fraud.

The issue in Medical Marijuana Inc. v. Horn is whether the economic losses that Horn suffered fit that statutory language, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit held last year. But the case also highlights the weak scientific basis for the federally mandated drug test that Horn failed, which reflects the ongoing conflict between state and federal marijuana laws.

In 2012, Horn bought Dixie X CBD Dew Drops 500 mg Tincture to treat the pain and inflammation caused by hip and shoulder injuries he had suffered in a truck accident. Since he was well aware that testing positive for marijuana would endanger his job, he investigated the product to make sure it did not contain any federally illegal substances. He says he was reassured by Dixie’s claim that its CBD extract was made from hemp containing less than 0.3 percent THC (the federal limit) and that, after processing, it contained “0.00 THC.”

According to a High Times article that Horn cited in his 2015 RICO lawsuit, the tincture was produced via “a proprietary extraction process” from “a strain of high-CBD hemp grown in a secret, foreign location.” The article said the resulting tincture “contains 0% THC and up to 500 mg of CBD.” Tripp Keber, Dixie’s managing director, averred that “we are importing industrial hemp” that is “below federal guidelines for THC, which is 0.3%,” and “extracting the CBD.” Keber said Dixie had “meticulously reviewed state and federal statutes,” and “we do not believe we are operating in conflict with any federal law as it’s related to the Dixie X (hemp-derived) products.”

Keber offered similar assurances in several YouTube videos, saying those products were “THC free” and contained “no THC.” Just to make sure, Horn says in a Supreme Court  brief, he contacted a customer service representative, who “confirmed that Dixie X contained ‘zero percent THC.'”

Based on those assurances, Horn’s brief says, he “purchased and consumed Dixie X in
September 2012.” A few weeks later, he was dismayed to learn that he had tested positive for marijuana in “a routine random drug screening.” As a result, “his employer immediately fired him.” He “lost his career and income,” which meant “financial ruin” for his family.

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SCOTUS Revives Lawsuit Against Missouri Cop Who Jailed a Man ‘for Being an Asshole’

On a Saturday night in May 2021, Mason Murphy was walking on the shoulder of a rural road in Sunrise Beach, a small Missouri town, when he was accosted by a local police officer, Michael Schmitt, who asked him to identify himself. Since Murphy was minding his own business and was not, as far as he knew, doing anything illegal, he did not think he should have to comply with that request. Murphy’s objection resulted in a nine-minute argument with Schmitt, who ultimately handcuffed Murphy and took him to jail, where he was detained for two hours.

Why? Schmitt had trouble answering that question. “I didn’t want him walking down my highway,” he told another officer at the jail. Schmitt also suggested that Murphy was being held “for being an asshole” and that he would stay in jail “until he decides to play nice.” Even after consulting with a senior officer and a local prosecutor, Schmitt could not come up with a valid reason to arrest Murphy, who was released without being charged.

Five months later, Murphy sued Schmitt for violating his First Amendment rights by arresting him in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech. A federal judge dismissed Murphy’s claim, and last year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit upheld that decision. But this week the U.S. Supreme Court revived Murphy’s lawsuit, remanding the case for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, a June 2024 decision that made it easier for victims of retaliatory arrests to make a case for compensation.

“This decision is a huge step forward, not just for Mason Murphy, but for all Americans who have been retaliated against by government officials for their speech,” said Marie Miller, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, which filed Murphy’s Supreme Court petition. “Our work is building lasting precedent, making it easier for people to hold officials accountable when their rights are violated. We will continue fighting until all Americans are protected against government retaliation.”

Although Schmitt evidently did not realize it at the time, Murphy had broken the law: He had violated Section 300.405.2 of Missouri’s statutes, which says: “Where sidewalks are not provided any pedestrian walking along and upon a highway shall when practicable walk only on the left side of the roadway or its shoulder facing traffic which may approach from the opposite direction.” Murphy was walking on the right side of the road when Schmitt approached him—a fact to which the officer alluded during the initial encounter, most of which was recorded by Schmitt’s body camera.

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Dems Introduce Bill To Pack the Supreme Court

A new bill introduced by Democrat Senator Ron Wyden would add six more justices to the Supreme Court and introduce a raft of measures designed to make the Court work in the Democrats’ favour.

As well as increasing the Supreme Court’s size, the bill would make it harder for justices to overturn laws, require them to undergo audits and remove roadblocks to nominations.

The size of the court would be increased from nine to 15 over a period of 12 years.

The bill would also require a two-thirds ruling by the Supreme Court and the circuit court of appeals in order to overturn a law, and make it impossible for Senators to delay votes on new appointments. Mitch McConnell was able to delay Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland in 2016, allowing Trump to replace him with Neil Gorsuch.

As The Washington Post reports, the bill would introduce stringent auditing measures for justices:

“Supreme Court justices must report income, dividends, property sales and gifts, among other things, but the bill would bolster financial checks, disclosures and other transparency measures. It would require the IRS to initiate an audit of the justices’ tax returns each year, release the results and make the tax filings public. Nominees to the court would have to disclose three years of tax returns.”

Justices would be able to force other justices to recuse themselves from cases, with a two-thirds majority.

The bill’s author, Senator Ron Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said he doesn’t believe the bill will pass in full, but he hopes to get parts of the bill into law.

Reaction to news of the bill was fierce on the right.

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Alaska man arrested for threatening to torture and assassinate six Supreme Court justices

An Alaska man was arrested for threatening to torture and assassinate six Supreme Court justices and their family members. 

The Justice Department announced Thursday that the man, identified as 76-year-old Panos Anastasiou, sent over 464 messages through the court’s public website. 

The messages from between March and July 2023 contained ‘violent, racist, and homophobic rhetoric,’ according to the complaint. He also allegedly threatened to kill the justices through ‘torture, hanging and firearms.’

The man was arrested and charged with a total of 22 counts of making threats against a federal judge and through interstate commerce. He faces over 100 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

It is unclear whether the justices targeted are the six conservative justices, whose opinions Anastasiou ‘disagreed’ with. According to FEC records, he donated to ActBlue, a Democratic platform, as recently as July.

‘We allege that the defendant made repeated, heinous threats to murder and torture Supreme Court Justices and their families to retaliate against them for decisions he disagreed with,’ said Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

According to his Facebook page, he has no friends and hasn’t posted in years. 

His account simply contains a profile photo and a 2014 posting calling Supreme Court justices ‘jack booted thugs.’

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WSJ Calls for Keeping Judiciary in Shadows

A New York Times investigation (9/15/24) has given us great insight into Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who—unlike the president and the speaker of the House—enjoys a great deal of shielding from press scrutiny. The paper reported that when a flurry of cases about the January 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol reached the court, the “chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited [former President Donald] Trump.”

The paper’s investigation drew “on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders” from all partisan stripes. They spoke, reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak said, “on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.”

It was splashed on the cover of the Sunday print edition for good reason: The Supreme Court is a mysterious institution, and Roberts has long been thought of as a more temperate and prudent judicial conservative, a breed apart from the partisan hacks appointed by Trump. The investigation gives us some illustration of what happens behind closed doors, and drives home the point that Trump has benefited legally from the normal channels of American power, not just the followers of his MAGA cult.

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Judge Dismisses Machine Gun Charges Against Kansas Woman, Citing Supreme Court Decision

A U.S. judge has dismissed charges against a woman who possessed a machine gun, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that shifted the framework for how courts analyze cases dealing with constitutional rights.

Machine guns fall under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, U.S. District Judge John Broomes found.

That means prosecutors must show that the law barring possession of machine guns is rooted in historical firearm restrictions, under the 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, he added.

“In this case, the government has not met its burden under Bruen and Rahimi to demonstrate through historical analogs that regulation of the weapons at issue in this case are consistent with the nation’s history of firearms regulation,” Broomes wrote in his 10-page ruling on Aug. 21. “Indeed, the government has barely tried to meet that burden. And the Supreme Court has indicated that the Bruen analysis is not merely a suggestion.”

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority in Bruen, said that when the Second Amendment is found to apply, government officials must show that the regulation in question “is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In the recent ruling in United States v. Rahimi, the justices found that a law prohibiting people under domestic violence-related restraining orders from possessing guns does not violate the Second Amendment, and they clarified how courts should analyze such regulations.

“A court must ascertain whether the new law is ’relevantly similar‘ to laws that our tradition is understood to permit, ’apply[ing] faithfully the balance struck by the founding generation to modern circumstances,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. He said that some courts had misunderstood Bruen.

Broomes’s decision came after prosecutors charged Tamori Morgan, a Kansas resident, with illegally possessing an Anderson Manufacturing AM-15 .300 caliber machine gun and a machine gun conversation device.

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The Chevron decision may also apply to federal land policies in the West

By now most who watch such things are familiar with the opinion issued by the Supreme Court in the case Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, et al. on June 28, 2024. Loper overturned an opinion issued by the court in 1984 titled Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.

The Chevron “precedent” required federal courts to defer to federal agency interpretations of law when the law at issue was ambiguous and, therefore, subject to interpretation. The effect of the Chevron “precedent” was to transfer certain authority for statutory interpretation away from the court and deposit it in the hands of unelected and, therefore, unaccountable bureaucrats. Stated otherwise, Chevron tended to reverse the role of the court in the process of “judicial review” which was established in 1803 in the case Marbury v. Madison.

Since Congress has a particular knack for writing vague or ambiguous law and letting the agencies “figure it out,” the Chevron “precedent” is said to have transferred substantial quasi-judicial power to agency staff at the expense of the judicial role. Chevron is, therefore, credited with accelerating growth of the “administrative” or “deep” state — a “shadow government” of sorts functioning, in effect, according to its own interpretation of its enabling statutes.

The point to be made here is that the Chevron ruling arguably represented a measurable breach of constitutional structure, as that structure was established by the court in Marbury v. Madison. The effect of this breach may be likened to the breach of a dam impounding a river. With this breach of constitutional structure, an unelected shadow government, arguably extraconstitutional and with expansive powers, unleashed a regulatory flood upon the land.

After 40 years, the Loper ruling has righted this historical wrong. The net effect of this remedy is that Congress will be compelled to exercise its legislative authority with greater particularity, agency staff will be disinclined to engage in regulatory adventurism, and the impartial interpretive role of the court is substantially restored. As more precise laws must now be made through the legislative process, thereby restricting regulatory latitude, democracy itself is substantially restored. However, in the nature of a wounded beast, these restorative consequences have given rise to shrill wailing and charges of “judicial power grabbing” coming from those whose power has been diminished.

Now bring this narrative around to the matter of federally owned public lands. An impartial review of the formative history of the federal territorial system will affirm two essential facts.

First, congressional authority for establishment of local governments within federal territories is derived from the Northwest Ordinance, not from the treaty power of the United States or from congressional Property Clause authority as originally maintained by the court in the case of Sere v. Pitot. Under authority of the Northwest Ordinance, Congress is authorized to establish and supervise temporary local territorial governments, but it is not authorized to be the local municipal government over them. From Benner v. Porter, “[Territorial governments] … are the creations, exclusively, of the legislative department, and subject to its supervision and control.”

Second, the Property Clause is a delegation of constitutional authority and duty to dispose of federal territorial and public lands. “The power being given, it is the interest of the nation to facilitate its execution,” according to McCulloch v. Maryland, speaking of constitutionally enumerated federal powers.

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Legal Experts Pan Joe Biden’s Proposals for Reforming U.S. Supreme Court: ‘It’s All Posturing for the Election’

Joe Biden called for major reforms to the United States Supreme Court in a speech today.

Lots of people are wondering why Biden is even trying to do this. He is the lamest of lame duck presidents in decades and has no political capital left to trade on. It’s likely that this is an effort by Democrats to squeeze one last major policy initiative out of Biden’s now failed presidency.

Legal experts are already weighing in and saying that Biden’s proposals are going nowhere.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Biden Supreme Court reforms already on life support, legal experts say

President Joe Biden’s ambitious three-pronged proposal to reform the Supreme Court is not likely to survive past its 15 minutes of fame, legal experts from across the partisan spectrum say.

“It’s all posturing for the election season to try to garner votes amongst the far Left but also to bully the United States Supreme Court into not pursuing its current path of enforcing the Constitution,” California RNC National Committeewoman and lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillon told the Washington Examiner…

Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, questioned in a July 18 Substack blog why Biden was merely highlighting the recent Trump v. United States decision when there are multitudes of other high court decisions Democrats disfavor.

“What about an amendment to overrule Rucho and reaffirm that the federal courts can adjudicate severe partisan gerrymandering? Or an amendment to overrule Citizens United and allow Congress to meaningfully limit the money in our elections? Or an amendment to overrule Dobbs? All of these have the exact same chance of getting two-thirds of the House and Senate to approve them (0.0%),” Vladeck wrote…

Additionally, Vladeck voiced caution over an enforceable ethics code on the nine justices, saying that if anyone other than the justices is given power to enforce a code on the members for violating roles, “we’d no longer have ‘one Supreme Court,’ as Article III, Section 1 says we must; we’d have two.”

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‘No One Is Above The Law’: Harris Backs Biden Proposals To Reform Supreme Court

In what marks a major shift for President Biden – the former head of the Senate Judiciary Committee who had long resisted calls to reform the high court – is calling for Congress to back his proposals for two significant changes to the U.S. Supreme Court and a change to the U.S. Constitution.

His plan includes establishing term limits and an enforceable ethics code for the court’s nine justices. He’s also pressing lawmakers to ratify a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity.

The announcement marks a remarkable evolution for Biden, who as a candidate had been wary of calls to reform the high court.

Last week, he announced during an Oval Office speech that he would pursue Supreme Court reform during his final months in office, calling it “critical to our democracy.”

As Melanie Sun reports at The Epoch Times, the president (well, his team of millennial minions) outlined his reasoning for pursuing changes that have been long-sought by progressive camps in U.S. politics in an op-ed published this morning.

“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one,” the president wrote.

According to a White House official, President Biden will call for Congress to back term limits for Supreme Court justices and a code of ethics enforceable by the legislative branch.

He also will propose an amendment to limit the extent of presidential immunity afforded by the Constitution, proposing that former presidents be granted no immunity for crimes committed in office.

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Report: Biden Will Announce His Radical Plan to Make Sweeping Changes to SCOTUS Next Week

Joe Biden is expected to announce a proposal outlining several radical changes to the Supreme Court during a trip to Texas on Monday.

According to Politico, Biden’s plan is likely to include term limits for justices and an enforceable code of ethics, as well as a constitutional amendment to limit presidential immunity.

This proposed amendment comes in response to the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling that protected presidents from prosecution for “official acts” during their term, a decision involving the witch-hunt of former President Donald Trump.

Such drastic measures to overhaul the Supreme Court are viewed by critics as a dangerous move towards consolidating power and diminishing our system of checks and balances.

The prospect of a constitutional amendment and new legislation faces significant obstacles and reflects the inability for the Democratic Party to cope over the court’s recent decisions, which they see as a challenge to their narrative.

From Politico:

“Biden is likely to endorse establishing term limits for justices and an enforceable code of ethics, in an announcement that represents a remarkable shift for a president who had long resisted calls to overhaul the high court.

He is also expected to push for a constitutional amendment limiting immunity for presidents and certain other officeholders, in a response to the court’s July 1 ruling that presidents are shielded from prosecution for “official acts” during their time in office, in a case brought by former President Donald Trump.

The specifics of the proposal remain unclear and could still change, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal planning.”

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