Tag: scotus

“You Don’t Have the Right to Say Climate Change is a Hoax!”- Purple-Haired Democrat LOSES IT as Lee Zeldin Schools Her on Two Landmark Supreme Court Cases

Congress’s purple-haired congresswoman had a near-complete meltdown after EPA administrator Lee Zeldin completely embarrassed her during an an exchange on ‘climate change’ and the law.

On Monday, Zeldin testified before the House Appropriations Committee regarding President Trump’s 2027 budget request. As The Washington Examiner notes, the proposed budget would cut the agency’s budget in half if approved by Congress.

During the hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) angrily attacked Zeldin for “appeasing polluters” and ignoring Americans under “the false flag of economic growth.”

Zeldin responded by explaining that he’s following the law, pointing out that it says nothing about fighting climate change.

Then, he asked DeLauro if she was familiar with the Loper Bright Supreme Court case.

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is a landmark Supreme Court case in 2024 which overturned the long-standing Chevron doctrine, fundamentally altering the balance of power between the judiciary and federal agencies.

The Chevron doctrine, established in the 1984 case Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, has long been a source of contention. It granted deference to federal agencies in interpreting ambiguous statutes, effectively allowing unelected bureaucrats to make laws through their regulatory actions.

However, by a 6-3 majority, SCOTUS declared that such power is unconstitutional and goes against the principles of democratic governance.

DeLauro had no clue what Zeldin was talking about and went berserk:

“You do not, excuse, you don’t have the right to say climate change does not exist, that it’s a hoax!” she yelled at the EPA Administrator.

The exchange got even worse for DeLauro when Zeldin exposed her for not knowing about another landmark Supreme Court decision: West Virginia Vs. EPA.

In this 2022 case, The Court determined by a 6-3 margin that Congress did not authorize the EPA to compel existing power plants to combat climate change using the Clean Air Act, thereby curbing the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from them.

All DeLauro could do was yell at Zeldin and finally snapped completely by saying, “I don’t have to listen to this BS!”

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The United States of America v. John Roberts

The Supreme Court is under attack. It has been under attack for years, almost exclusively from the left. And by “under attack,” I don’t mean the peaceful criticism. I mean everything from challenges to its legitimacy to outright ignoring its rulings to death threats against conservative justices.

This began years ago. Chief Justice John Roberts initially responded by trying to stay apolitical and by trying to ignore the criticism. When President Barack Obama called him out during his 2010 State of the Union address, Roberts called the stunt “very troubling.” In the last two decades, that has been the entire extent of his pushback against the left.

In the last couple years, leftist district judges and leftist federal judges issue decrees and stays that directly contradict recent rulings from the Supreme Court itself. Last August, Justices Brett Kavanaugh Neil Gorsuch also publicly rebuked lower courts for having to reverse orders from lower courts regarding issues that the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) had already addressed. But not by Roberts.

Last September, a group of anonymous federal judges criticized recent emergency stays that SCOTUS granted. In interviews with NBC News, these judges said such rulings imply that the lower courts are doing shoddy work (yes, that’s the point). One judge quipped, “It’s inexcusable. They don’t have our backs.” Far be it from me to explain to this judge that the job of SCOTUS is not to “have their backs.” It’s John Roberts’ job to explain this to them. And yet, nary a peep.

District Judge Brian Murphy has twice openly flouted SCOTUS decisions. For his obstinacy, Justice Elena Kagan, of all people, publicly rebuked him. But still nothing from Roberts.

Then there is the internal drama.

It burst into the open with the Dobbs decision, which the liberal justices deliberately slow-rolled in an attempt to stave off the inevitable. The problem arises because no SCOTUS decision is binding until the justices’ opinions are finalized and publicized. If a justice happens to die in the interim, then that justice’s vote is nullified.

This rule applies even if a justice dies from assassination. Like, you know, what almost happened to Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022. An armed suspect showed up outside his home, and his presence was made known to the authorities only because the suspect got cold feet and called the police and turned himself in.

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Trump Says His Supreme Court Picks Misrepresented Their Ideology

President Donald Trump on April 21 criticized recent Supreme Court decisions and said some of the justices he nominated “misrepresented” themselves during the confirmation process. 

“I put certain people on the United States Supreme Court who totally misrepresented who they were, and the true ideology for which they stand!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Trump’s comments came amid escalating tension between him and the court, which has seen a large number of cases challenging his second-term policies.

In February, two of the justices he appointed—Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch—joined a 6–3 majority that struck down his global tariffs.

Trump has since criticized those justices.

In a post on April 22, Trump said the court’s decision would “cost America massive amounts of money but, more importantly, it will cost America its DIGNITY!”

That majority decision was formed by Barrett, Gorsuch, Chief Justice John Roberts, and the three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of Trump’s nominees from his first term, penned a dissent, while Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito also opposed the decision.

On TruthSocial, Trump said that some of the “Democrat Justices” are known to “stick together like glue,” which the president said he respected.

“Certain Republican Appointees let the Democrats push them around, always wanting to be popular, politically correct, or even worse, wanting to show how ‘independent’ they are, with very little loyalty to the man who appointed them or, more importantly, the ideology from which they came to be Nominated and Confirmed,” he said.

At the end of the month, the court is expected to hear challenges to the Trump administration’s termination of temporary protected status for certain migrants.

It also recently heard a challenge to Trump’s order limiting birthright citizenship.

Trump attended the oral arguments, which were widely viewed as indicating that the court would rule against him.

On social media, the president asked how Democrats could “not like” how the Supreme Court votes, again citing concern about the outcome of the birthright citizenship case.

“It was meant for the babies of slaves, not for the babies of Chinese Billionaires. No, certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak,” Trump said. 

He also criticized the way the Supreme Court handled tariff refunds in its decision.

Its handling was “unexplainable” and an “unnecessary and expensive slap in the face to the U.S.A,” he said.

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Supreme Court Declines Appeal in Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Nursing Home Lawsuit

The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to hear a wrongful death lawsuit filed against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, effectively ending a legal challenge tied to the state’s COVID-era nursing home policies, as reported by Fox News.

The case was brought by Brooklyn resident Daniel Arbeeny, who alleged that Cuomo’s pandemic directives contributed to the 2020 death of his father, Norman Arbeeny, at age 89. The elder Arbeeny had been released from a Cobble Hill nursing home where COVID-positive patients had been housed.

According to court records, Arbeeny sued Cuomo and then-health commissioner Howard Zucker under federal civil rights law and a state wrongful death statute. The lawsuit argued that policies requiring nursing homes to accept patients returning from hospitals, regardless of COVID-19 status, played a role in fatalities among vulnerable residents.

A lower federal court dismissed the case on qualified immunity grounds, a legal doctrine that generally protects government officials from liability for actions taken in their official roles. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal, and the Supreme Court’s decision not to take the case leaves those rulings in place.

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Justice Jackson Takes Aim at Fellow Justices, and the Results Aren’t Pretty

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is distinguishing herself on the U.S. Supreme Court — and not in a positive way. It’s as though she’s positioned on an island defined by woke ideology, racial justice, and equity, while the other eight justices remain on the mainland of restraint.

For proper context, it’s important to know about a case that was in front of her and the other members of the court.

The case centered on an early morning police stop in Washington, D.C., where a Metropolitan Police officer responded to a call about what was described as a suspicious vehicle. At around 2 a.m., the officer approached the car, and immediately—without any further provocation—two individuals fled the vehicle. A third person remained inside with the door open. That individual, identified only as J.W., slowly backed the car out of the parking lot.

The officer ordered the driver to put his hands up while drawing his service weapon.

The lower court, in this case the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (DCCA), ruled that the officer stopped R.W. without reasonable suspicion and concluded that this violated the Fourth Amendment. That amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court heard the case and reversed the DCCA’s ruling in a 7-2 decision. Leftist Justice Elena Kagan joined the majority. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson were in the minority on this one, though Sotomayor said she would not have agreed to hear the case.

In the end, the majority on the court upheld law enforcement’s authority to make a stop based on “the totality of the circumstances” involved.

Now that you have the context, let’s turn to one of our foremost legal minds, none other than Jonathan Turley, to lay it out with clarity. On the X platform, Turley posted, “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has issued another sole stinging dissent…Jackson wrote that ‘I cannot fathom’ how the seven justices could second-guess the lower court in rejecting the police claims. She accused her colleagues of mere ‘wordsmithing.’”

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Supreme Court Rejects Massachusetts Case Over Hiding Student’s Gender Identity

Supreme Court justices on April 20 declined to take up a case involving a Massachusetts schoolgirl whose parents say officials wrongly hid their daughter’s purported identity as a male from them.

At least six of the nine justices declined to accept a petition to rehear a lower court verdict in the case, which was brought by the girl’s parents in 2022 against the Ludlow, Massachusetts, school district.

The vote count on the petition and how each justice voted were not disclosed, nor were any comments offered by the justices.

“Today’s denial by the Supreme Court is a missed opportunity to defend parental rights,” Jim Campbell, chief legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, who was helping represent the parents, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Social transition, including going by inaccurate or nonbinary pronouns and a different name, is a major intervention in a child’s life that puts the child on a difficult-to-escape pathway to medicalized transition, carrying the risk of life-altering damage. No school district should make important mental health decisions on behalf of parents and conceal those decisions from them, especially in opposition to the mental-health care that those parents have chosen for their children.”

An attorney representing the school officials did not return a request for comment by publication time.

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REPORT: The Latest ‘Shadow Docket’ Scandal Proves Between the Justices and Legacy Media, SCOTUS Is Toast

This week seems to be rife with journalistic malpractice from outlets either running with leaked and unsubstantiated material that tries and fails to put Trump administration officials in a bad light or works to erode and undermine our nation’s institutional bodies of governance. 

The latest installment from The New York Times involves leaked memos from the United States Supreme Court, verified by more anonymous sources. 

The Times spoke to 10 people, liberals and conservatives, who were familiar with the deliberations over the pivotal emergency order and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because confidentiality was a condition of their employment.

Amazing how one can fail so spectacularly on this basic tenet of integrity. God help us.

The papers expose what critics have called the weakness at the heart of the shadow docket: an absence of the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases.

After obtaining the papers, The Times confirmed their authenticity with several people familiar with the deliberations and shared them with a spokeswoman for the court. The Times posed detailed questions to the justices who wrote the memos; they did not respond.

Nor should they. 

As RedState reported in February, Chief Justice Roberts took action to secure the integrity of the court’s processes after the 2022 leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Two months later, if this latest tranche of leaked memos is any indication, it hasn’t worked. Between justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly criticizing their constitutionalist colleagues, and the legacy media’s breathlessly publishing unsourced and leaked material, soon there will not be a Supreme Court left to preserve.

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Explosive Report: As Dobbs Majority Faced Death Threats, Liberal Justices Slow-Walked Release

When the draft of the Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked to the press, the conservative justices who signed on to the majority opinion suddenly wore bigger targets on their backs. The very real threat of assassination hung over them like a coming thunderstorm. 

And still their pro-abortion colleagues stalled the release of the official ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, as detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito and reported Saturday by Fox News.

Alito is the justice who wrote Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending nationalized abortion.

“Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief writes in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.” 

The dissenters — Justices Stephen Breyer (counting down the days until his retirement at the end of the 2021-22 term ), Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — “demurred,” Hemingway reports. Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the liberals when they expected to be wrapped up. They refused to provide a date. 

The tension and the threats escalated. 

‘Serious Security Risk’

On May 2, 2022, accomplice media outlet Politico published the 98-page draft of Dobbs. The unprecedented leak set off a wave of leftist protests and a literal firestorm of pro-abortion-led violence. Six days later — on Mother’s Day — a radical who was eventually arrested thanks to a half-eaten burrito firebombed the Madison headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action, a Christian pro-life, pro-family organization. 

“In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze,” Hemingway wrote. Protesters also lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes.

More than a month after the leak, Nicholas Roske, 26 at the time, arrived at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with murder on his mind. In his possession were a Glock pistol, ammunition, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, duct tape, and more accoutrements, according to the criminal complaint. Roske said he was going to stop Roe v. Wade from being overturned by getting rid of a judge — or three — that voted to stop the deeply flawed 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide. 

“Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically,” Hemingway writes. 

It took 53 days to finally release the Dobbs decision. Despite the growing threat to their colleagues, the liberals on the court refused to listen to urgent pleas to complete their work, Hemingway reports.

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Justice Clarence Thomas: Progressivism, Declaration of Independence Cannot ‘Coexist Forever’

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used a speech at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law on Thursday to contend that progressivism has increasingly conflicted with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, telling students that the movement cannot permanently coexist with the founding ideals of natural rights and limited government.

Thomas, 77, was speaking at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The justice, who was appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1991, is the longest-serving current member of the Supreme Court and the second-longest-serving justice in the Court’s history.

During the address, Thomas traced the rise of progressivism in the American mainstream to the beginning of the 20th century and identified President Woodrow Wilson as its most prominent advocate.

Thomas said progressivism had “made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life” since Wilson’s presidency and asserted that it stood in opposition to the Declaration.

“It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration because it is opposed to those principles,” Thomas stated. “It is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

Thomas maintained that Wilson and other progressive thinkers believed that “America needed to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power, nearly perfect, perfected.”

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas explained. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government.”

Quoting Coolidge, Thomas said: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with unalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.”

Thomas argued that Wilson’s distrust of popular government reflected his preference for European-style systems of centralized state power. According to Thomas, Wilson described Americans as “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn and foolish,” complained that they did “too much by vote and too little by expert rule,” and praised Germany because its people were “docile and acquiescent.”

Thomas contended that those ideas produced disastrous consequences in the 20th century. “The century of progressivism did not go well,” Thomas said. “The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen.” Thomas pointed to the regimes of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Mao Zedong, saying they were intertwined with the rise of progressivism and opposed to natural rights.

Thomas linked progressivism to Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Buck v. Bell. He argued that Wilson’s claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress helped justify segregation in Plessy. Thomas also observed that progressives embraced eugenics and believed Darwinian science had shown the superiority and inferiority of different races, leading Wilson to resegregate the federal workforce and later contributing to sterilization programs upheld by the Court in Buck v. Bell.

Near the end of the speech, Thomas remarked, “In my view, we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration have so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs.”

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Wait, Did This Former Trump Official Just Reveal the Voting Rights Act Decision?

Where is the decision on the Supreme Court case involving the Voting Rights Act? Where is Louisiana v. Callais, the case that could weaken the Voting Rights Act, and potentially cause Democrats to tremble? The national consequences of this decision are critical, as a ruling striking down the VRA could lead to total Republican control across the South. Perhaps that’s why the Court is slow-walking in releasing the opinion.

Sean Spicer said on The Huddle that the opinion is finished, but some justices are holding out as long as possible to prevent redistricting. Does that mean VRA is going to be struck down?

“I have been told by reliable sources that the decision is done and the minority is slow walking the dissent so that states do not have time to redistrict,” said Spicer.

So, does this mean we won?

The Callais case revolves around whether the creation of a majority-minority congressional district in Louisiana violates the 14th and 15th amendments. 

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