Tag: scotus

Supreme Court Rules Police Conduct a Fourth Amendment “Search” When Grabbing Your Google Location History Data Through Geofence Warrants

The U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that law enforcement officers conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain cell phone users’ precise Location History data from Google using a geofence warrant.

In a 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court ruled that Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information, even when that data is stored by a third-party technology company such as Google. The ruling represents one of the Court’s most significant digital privacy decisions since its 2018 Carpenter decision involving historical cell-site location data.

Justice Elena Kagan authored the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Jackson separately concurring.

Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred only in the judgment, while Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Barrett also filed a separate dissent.

This builds directly on the landmark Carpenter v. United States (2018) decision, which already required warrants for cell-site location information (CSLI).

The Court made clear that Google’s even more precise and sweeping Location History data — which logs a user’s location every two minutes or so, within about 20 meters, and can even reveal elevation and which floor of a building someone is on — deserves at least the same protection.

The case, Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112), arose from a May 20, 2019, armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Police had surveillance footage and witness statements but no suspect. On June 14, they obtained a Virginia magistrate’s geofence warrant directed at Google.

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Supreme Court Says President Trump Cannot Fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook – Trump Responds

The US Supreme Court on Monday said President Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

The high court, in a 5-4 vote ruled that Trump cannot remove Cook.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion.

“To accept any of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Thomas dissented.

Lisa Cook filed a lawsuit against President Trump, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell after Trump fired her last summer.

The Trump Administration previously asked the US Supreme Court to intervene after a federal appeals court blocked Trump from firing Lisa Cook.

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SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Permit Counting of Mail-In Ballots that Arrive After Election Day

The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that state laws allowing for the counting of mail-in ballots after election day are not in violation of federal law, a blow to the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s administration.

On Monday, SCOTUS issued a 5-4 ruling that permits states to count mail-in ballots — sent on or before election day — that are received by state election officials after election day.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority’s opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Two principles are important here. First, post-election-day receipt, considered on its own, does not conflict with the election-day statutes,” the Court writes:

Second, state law is preempted by the federal election-day statutes only “‘so far as the conflict extends.’” So even if plaintiffs are right about Mississippi law, they would still lose the challenge they have pressed in this litigation: that post-election-day ballot receipt is itself unlawful. [Emphasis added]

The Framers recognized the difficulty of crafting election laws “applicable to every probable change in the situation of the country.” So instead of constitutionalizing election law, they decided that “a discretionary power over elections” needed to be lodged “somewhere.” Suffice it to say, that power was not lodged in this Court. The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose. [Emphasis added]

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined most of the dissenting opinion as well.

“The Court … concludes that the election-day statutes merely require that each individual cast a vote on or before election day,” Alito writes for the minority:

But if that is all that the election-day statutes require, there is no sense in which the electorate as a whole can be seen as making its choice on election day. Rather, the electorate’s choice would be made piecemeal over an extended period prior to election day, and that prospect is blatantly contrary to what the election-day statutes demand. [Emphasis added]

Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days. The election-day statutes require that federal elections occur on that date. Under the challenged Mississippi law, however, the collection of ballots continues for five more days, and therefore the “election” is not held until the end of that period. Because federal law requires that the election occur on election day, it preempts Mississippi’s statute. [Emphasis added]

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Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, Thomas: Public Opinion Can’t Block Constitutional Gun Rights

In a concurring opinion to the Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) Wolford decision, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas noted public opinion cannot block the exercise of a constitutional right.

Breitbart News reported that SCOTUS ruled 6-3 against a Hawaii gun control in Wolford, finding the limitations against licensed concealed carry on private property violated the 2nd and 14th Amendments.

Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, and Thomas used a concurring opinion to note that “The Second Amendment secures the pre-existing right of the people to have and carry weapons for their defense.”

They opined that “States may regulate the keeping and bearing of arms so long as they do not ‘infring[e]’ the right, as originally understood.”

The justices went on to explain that a state must be able to prove a given law’s constitutionality by passing Bruen’s (2022) two-step test.

Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, and Thomas then tested Hawaii’s law and found the major reason for its adoption and enforcement was that it served to reflect the majority of the Hawaiian people’s disdain for the public carrying of firearms. But such a basis is not sufficient, as the three concurring justices indicated: “While most Hawaiians might prefer that no one carry firearms in public places, a majority’s opposition to a constitutional right is not a permissible basis for restricting it. After all, ‘[t]he very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy” and “to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials.’”

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Justice Jackson Hit With a Major Constitutional Lesson Following Her Dissent in Hawaii Gun Rights Case – State Relied on an Old ‘Black Code’ Law to Disarm Residents

Gun rights experts are schooling Far-left Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson following her stupid dissent in a key gun rights case earlier this week.

As TGP’s Jordan Conradson reported, the Supreme Court sided with three Hawaii residents on Thursday, overturning a law that barred concealed-carry permit holders from exercising their rights in public.

All three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Jackson, dissented in the 6-3 ruling.

To defend disarming its residents, Hawaii relied in part on a blatantly racist 1865 Louisiana statute enacted as part of the post-Civil War Black Codes. This made it illegal to carry firearms onto another person’s property without the owner’s consent.

Of course, this was due to the fact that Louisiana, which was ruled at the time by racist white Democrats, feared an armed black populace.

“It is disgraceful that any state would rely on a law specifically aimed at taking away the Second Amendment rights or any constitutional right of Black Americans as it was at that time,” attorney Kevin O’Grady, who represented the plaintiffs, told Fox News.

Jackson, however, had a different take. Jackson claimed in her dissent that the Court ignored what she considered an important constitutional question.

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DHS Lawyers Praise SCOTUS Rulings as ‘Victories for the Rule of Law, Common Sense’

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are praising decisions issued by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) on Thursday, all of which make it easier to enforce federal immigration law.

As Breitbart News reported, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, clarifying that a migrant who has not physically set foot into the U.S. is not entitled to apply for asylum and does not have to be inspected by an immigration officer.

Similarly, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe that President Donald Trump’s administration can end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the U.S. — making them deportable.

And, in a third case, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in Blanche v. Muk Choi Lau, which will make it easier for DHS officials to deport green card-holders who have been convicted of crimes in the U.S.

DHS General Counsel James Percival said the rulings reinforce that the nation’s borders are critical to its sovereignty.

“These three rulings are all victories for the rule of law and common sense,” Percival said:

This includes barring aliens from applying for asylum if they haven’t set foot in the United States, making it easier to remove lawful permanent residents who commit a crime, and reaffirming that TPS was always supposed to be temporary and can be cancelled at the appropriate time. Thanks to these decisions, we now have several more important tools to continue securing our borders. [Emphasis added]

Meanwhile, Democrats have panicked over the rulings. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, for instance, claimed SCOTUS is “enabling the Trump administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies, and in the process dealing our communities and our economy an undue blow.”

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Supreme Court ruling blocks thousands of lawsuits against maker of Roundup weedkiller

The Supreme Court sided with the maker of the Roundup weedkiller Thursday in a ruling expected to block thousands of lawsuits alleging it failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.

The case came before the justices after a tidal wave of litigation that included some multibillion-dollar verdicts against the global agrochemical manufacturer Bayer, which acquired Roundup when it bought its original manufacturer Monsanto in 2018.

The decision is a victory for the Trump administration, but one that could be tricky politically since allies in the Make America Healthy Again movement want to rein in pesticide use.

The high court, in a 7-2 ruling, found that the company can’t be sued in state courts because federal regulations have found a cancer link unlikely and do not require a warning label.

The decision “is good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation,” Bayer said in a statement. “It should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles.”

Though Bayer said the ruling should result in the dismissal of pending lawsuits containing failure-to-warn allegations, the company said it plans to proceed with a proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement intended to resolve many of the remaining claims.

Lawyers for some residents pursuing Roundup litigation criticized the court’s decision.

“This Supreme Court ruling wrongly slams the courthouse door on Americans sickened by pesticides,” said attorney Christopher Seeger, who is proposed as a claimants’ representative in the settlement. But he said a settlement still would allow some people to receive compensation.

The case before the Supreme Court was filed by Missouri resident John Durnell. He developed a cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after more than 20 years of serving as the neighborhood association’s “spray guy,” using Roundup on parks in his historic St. Louis community.

A jury agreed that the company failed to warn him about possible cancer dangers and awarded him $1.25 million. It’s one of thousands of similar cases, including some multibillion-dollar damage awards.

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Supreme Court calls out state for violating TWO constitutional amendments with one law

The Supreme Court has called out the state of Hawaii, after an earlier law that essentially made it impossible to get a license to carry a firearm was struck down, for replacing it with a similar demand that accomplished essentially the same thing.

That law, too, now has been banished.

The court ruled 6-3 that Hawaii’s newest gun ban was unconstitutional under the Second and 14th Amendments.

The majority opinion was a major win for gun rights activists as it threw out Hawaii’s insistence that it could require gun owners to get “permission” to carry firearms on any private property that is open to the public in the state.

The opinion pointed out that “For years, the State of Hawaii made it almost impossible to obtain a license to carry a firearm. Four years ago, however, this Court held in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. 1, that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right to carry hand guns outside the home for self-defense.

“Hawaii responded by replacing its old law on carry permits with new laws that achieved a similar result,” the court said.

The fight this time is over the state’s “law that prohibits firearms on private property open to the public without the express and affirmative consent of the property owner.”

The court found the law a burden.

“When these permit holders leave home, not only must they take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, restaurants, and stores.”

The ruling said Hawaii officials were flipping the default rule at common law, “under which anyone has an implied license to enter property held open to the public unless the property owner withdraws consent.”

The opinion cited both the earlier Heller and McDonald rulings, which struck down gun limits imposed by extremists.

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SUPREME COURT Sides with Trump Administration in Major 6-3 Immigration WIN — Makes It Far Easier to Deport Criminal Green Card Holders Accused of Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered another significant immigration victory for the Trump administration on Tuesday, ruling 6-3 that federal immigration officials do not need “clear and convincing evidence” at the border before treating a lawful permanent resident accused of certain crimes as an applicant for admission.

Justice Clarence Thomas delivers the hammer: Border officers making “quick judgments on the spot” do NOT need clear and convincing evidence of guilt at the moment of parole. Proof can come later at removal proceedings.

The Court sided with the Trump administration in Blanche v. Lau, rejecting activist attempts to tie the hands of border officers and making it significantly easier to remove lawful permanent residents who commit serious crimes.

The case involved Muk Choi Lau, a Chinese national who became a green card holder in 2007. In May 2012, while facing criminal charges in New Jersey for selling nearly $300,000 worth of counterfeit clothing (a clear crime involving moral turpitude), Lau took a trip to China.

When he tried to return through JFK Airport in June 2012, immigration officers did exactly what they were supposed to do: they paroled him into the country instead of formally admitting him as a returning resident because of the pending charges.

That parole decision was critical. It allowed the Department of Homeland Security to later treat Lau as an applicant for admission rather than automatically being allowed back into the country as a green card holder.

After he pleaded guilty in 2013 to trademark counterfeiting and received probation, DHS moved to remove him on inadmissibility grounds.

After Lau later pleaded guilty to the counterfeiting charge, the federal government initiated removal proceedings. However, the Second Circuit intervened and ruled that border officials needed “clear and convincing evidence” that Lau had committed the crime before treating him as an applicant for admission.

The Supreme Court rejected that argument outright.

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The Burden Of History: Justice Jackson’s Curious Call To Overturn Critical 2nd Amendment Precedent

Since her confirmation in 2022, Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson has established a legacy that is fast becoming one of the most radical in the Court’s history. Her sole dissents have drawn sharp criticism from both her conservative and liberal colleagues. However, for critics of some of these decisions, Justice Jackson continues to publish opinions that are not just, as she describes it, cathartic but chilling. Worse yet, the latest judicial jump scare was shared by her colleague, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, in her concurring opinion in United States v. Hemani..

At issue in the case was an effort to prosecute Ali Hemani for recreational use of marijuana, a prosecution that threatened up to 15 years and to strip him of his gun rights under  18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3)

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch ruled that the provision was not “consistent with the Second Amendment.” Gorsuch noted that Hemani was not alleged to be a drug addict or to have used his guns in a menacing manner.

Gorsuch wrote that the “historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways.”

However, Jackson used the concurrence to argue for overturning NYSRPA v. Bruen, a case critical to laying the foundation for interpreting the Second Amendment based on historical precedent. Jackson lashed out at the”‘history and tradition’ metric” and called for the Court to “revisit” the case.

Declaring Bruen “unworkable,” Jackson called for the restoration of the “means-end scrutiny – the approach courts applied before we adopted Bruen’s ‘history and tradition’ metric – offers a more rational way of assessing the constitutionality of firearm regulations.”

The reason for undoing Bruen? According to Jackson, “it imposes on judges the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of sifting through centuries-old evidence in order to answer ‘contested historical questions,’ and ‘applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems.'”

Justice Jackson added that “Given those challenges, it is unsurprising that Bruen’s test is vulnerable to inconsistent and arbitrary application, as judges draw different conclusions from the same historical evidence and reach divergent assessments of the same laws.”

The burden of actually seeking to understand the intended meaning of a constitutional provision is certainly greater than the more free-style approach of Jackson who focused on how to “resolve contemporary problems” under a living Constitution. However, to suggest that her outcome-determinative approach is less inconsistent and arbitrary is only true when you control the Court with justices who have like-minded “solutions” for contemporary problems.

That is precisely what many Democrats have in mind as they openly pledge to pack the Court with an insistent liberal majority if they can retake power. Moreover, Jackson is often cited as the model of the left, a justice who is unburdened by the language and history of constitutional provisions.

Just last week, liberal Wisconsin State Supreme Court justices heralded Jackson’s approach in arguing for the restoration of race-based gerrymandering. The state jurists lamented not being able to interpret the Constitution to address the “harms this country has caused to those who are marginalized, disempowered, or disenfranchised,” including the “preference for White Americans and to burden Black Americans and those of other disadvantaged races or backgrounds.”

These federal and state Supreme Court opinions are a glimpse into what awaits the country if Democratic leaders carry out their threat to take over the Supreme Court by adding four liberal justices in the image of Justice Jackson.

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