Tag: scotus

Pete Buttigieg Ramps Up His Renewed Effort to ‘Reform’ the U.S. Supreme Court

Former Biden Transportation Secretary and Democrat presidential candidate in 2020, Pete Buttigieg is ramping up his renewed effort on pushing “reform” of the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently while appearing in an interview on Fox News’ America Reports on Friday. But it wasn’t just Democrats’ favorite solution—court packing—that’s on his agenda.

Notice how he tries to push the idea that the current Supreme Court is corrupt, claiming “the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is, I believe, the lowest it’s ever been in the eyes of the American people.”

He adds, “It’s come to feel like a nakedly partisan institution.”

Pretty crafty, but biased. Then he starts with his first of three proposed changes: putting term limits in place. 

“At a minimum, term limits so that, for each presidential term, you know how many Supreme Court appointments are going to go with it,” he says.

His second idea: raising the number of Supreme Court justices (AKA court packing).

“I also think we would be better off with a court that has something like 13 justices that would match the number of districts that we have in the federal system,” he says.

Lastly, he expresses support for a balanced bench proposal being floated by progressives.

The balanced bench system would see the court expanded to 15 justices. Ten would be appointed through the traditional presidential nomination and Senate confirmation process, split evenly between Democratic- and Republican-appointed members over time.

Those 10 justices would then unanimously select an additional five consensus justices, who would be expected to have broader support across ideological lines.

Buttigieg warns that if the kinds of reforms he and other Dems are suggesting aren’t put in place, it would lead to “catastrophe.”

It comes just about two weeks after he told an Iowa Democrat Party audience he wants the Electoral College to be abolished and U.S. Supreme Court justices to be held accountable.

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Slate: 3rd Circuit Ruling Gives SCOTUS ‘Cover’ to Find Constitutional Protection for AR-15s

Slate lamented in a column on July 24 the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit striking down New Jersey’s “assault weapons” ban and claimed it gives SCOTUS “cover” to strike down such bans more broadly.

Breitbart News reported that the Third Circuit’s ruling was handed down on July 17, 2026. In that ruling, the majority made clear that the state’s ban failed to survive the Bruen (2022) test, which is a two-tiered test examining the historicity and tradition of firearms and firearms regulation in America.

The majority opinion for the 3rd Circuit decision was written by Judge Ariana Freeman, a Biden appointee. This fact was not lost on Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, as the astounded duo noted that Freeman is a “progressive appointee” who ruled that the millions of AR-15s in circulation prove they are in “common use for self-defense” and therefore protected by the Second Amendment.

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“Mutiny Against the Supreme Court” – DHS Blasts Biden Judge for Indefinitely Extending Block on Termination of Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians

US District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee on Friday indefinitely extended a block on the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

In 2022, the Biden Regime allowed more than 5,000 Ethiopians to enter the US and live here with special protections.

Their TPS status was extended again in April 2024 and expired on February 13, 2026.

Upon taking office again in January 2025, President Trump immediately revoked the Biden-era ‘Temporary Protected Status’ and ordered the DHS to ensure that the TPS designations were limited.

Judge Murphy previously said President Trump violated the process by revoking the protections.

Earlier this year, Judge Murphy issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and blocked the Trump Administration from ending the protection for the Ethiopians.

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Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an Alaska pilot’s challenge to the government seizure of his airplane for transporting an illicit six-pack of beer.

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture, a process which allows police and prosecutors to seize property connected to criminal activity.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Jouppi last year, leading to his Supreme Court petition. Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm.

“I’m thrilled that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, because this case isn’t just about me or my airplane anymore,” Jouppi said in an Institute for Justice press release. “I’m in my 80s now, and I’ve been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach.”

For the Institute for Justice, Jouppi’s case is also an opportunity to build on a landmark 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that the Eighth Amendment applied to states. Specifically, Jouppi’s case asks the Supreme Court to rule on whether states should consider the gravity of a defendant’s specific offense, rather than take an abstract view of the general crime.

“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, in the press release. “As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it’s vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach. We’re confident that it will do so here.”

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in response to an Institute for Justice lawsuit that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines and fees applies to states under the incorporation doctrine. In the underlying case, Indiana police had seized a Land Rover from a man named Tyson Timbs for a minor drug crime.

But while the Supreme Court ruled that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment, the justices left it up to state courts to determine what constitutes an excessive fine.

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Federal Ban on Home Whiskey Distilleries Now Heading to Supreme Court

When I was a young man, roaming around the woods and hills of northeast Iowa, two old guys had a still tucked away somewhere in the woods near Highlandville. I know that moonshining is something generally associated with the South, but nobody seems to have told these two old fellows, and from them you could buy a Mason jar of what they called “corn squeezings” for $10. It wasn’t bad, although if you had any left after a night’s revelry, you could always use it to strip paint and blast stumps.

Now, selling homemade hooch is one thing, I admit. But honestly, this is a free country; one should be able to set up a small still and make your own booze for personal use. And now, a case with that as a possible result, is headed to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to legalize home whiskey distilleries in the United States by a conservative-leaning think tank in Ohio.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled recently that the federal ban against home whiskey distilleries is unconstitutional. However, the 6th Circuit upheld the federal ban.

The federal government said the law is constitutional because it was enacted to prevent tax evasion and that it would be easier for a distiller working out of their home to conceal the business and therefore avoid paying taxes.

That last bit seems a bit of a trite argument; it’s certainly possible now for a person to do this, just as it would be if home use were legalized, as it is now for wine and beer. And, if anyone can point out to us in the Constitution where the government is authorized to regulate booze, I’d love to see it. 

As evidence of the ambiguity of all this, we might note that two different courts of appeals issued conflicting rulings in this matter, which is why the case is going to the Supreme Court.

On Monday, the Buckeye Institute filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to decide between the two conflicting appeals-court rulings.

“Two courts of appeals considered the same provisions, against the same constitutional challenge, on materially identical facts, within 11 days of each other, and issued opposite judgments,” Buckeye’s Monday petition to the Supreme Court states.

That seems a pretty clear-cut argument for the escalation.

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The Supreme Court’s AI Collision Course

Imagine a tight House race in a swing state. In the final weeks of the campaign, a new super PAC begins spending heavily against the incumbent. It runs ads on local television and reaches individual voters with highly tailored texts. The messaging is hard-hitting and seems to be swaying the electorate. None of it traces back to the opposing campaign.

It also doesn’t trace back to any human operative. The super PAC is funded by a single LLC whose donor cannot be identified, and its spending decisions are being made by an AI agent that has been given a budget and a political objective and is now operating without any meaningful human direction. The “consultants” placing the ads are software. The text messages were crafted by the AI.

This is not a hypothetical we will face in some distant future. The technology already exists. A wealthy person, foreign government, or corporation that wants to influence an election without ever exposing themselves to scrutiny could set up such a campaign operation today. And under the Supreme Court’s current campaign finance doctrine, the states and Congress may have little power to stop it.

The AI industry has emerged as one of the largest forces in American politics. Super PACs funded by AI companies and their investors have raised well over $100 million to shape the 2026 midterms, backing candidates in both parties who share the industry’s preferred approach to regulation, and attacking those who don’t. So far, their ads rarely mention artificial intelligence at all. They talk about issues like immigration, corruption, and cost of living, and it isn’t obvious to the average viewer that these ads were funded by a multi-billion dollar industry with its own unspoken legislative wish list.

But there’s a deeper, less-obvious dynamic operating in the background. The constitutional doctrine that currently protects the right of these companies to spend millions in our elections is the same doctrine that will be asked to protect something even stranger: The “speech” of artificial intelligence itself.

Modern campaign finance doctrine has been established, affirmed, and extended by Supreme Court decisions over the last 50 years. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), it held that raising and spending money in political campaigns is tantamount to speech itself, and, therefore, that most legislative efforts to address the influence of money in elections would be subject to strict judicial oversight. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) extended this framework to corporations, and then, most famously, Citizens United v. FEC (2010) extended it further to independent spending.

The court’s campaign finance jurisprudence was not built with artificial intelligence in mind, but its logic isn’t confined to the campaign finance context. If “speaker identity” does not matter for corporations and unions and super PACs, why should it matter when it comes to AI platforms?

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TERRIFYING: Far-Left Democratic Socialists Unveil Radical Plan to Abolish the Senate, Replace the President and Supreme Court, Grant Mass Amnesty, and Overthrow the U.S. Constitution

The radical left just showed its hand again, and it is even more extreme than most Americans could have imagined.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the far-left organization that has heavily influenced the Democrat Party, has rolled out its updated “Workers Deserve More!” platform.

This document is nothing less than a blueprint to dismantle the American constitutional republic and replace it with a socialist super-state run by an all-powerful Congress.

As The Gateway Pundit reported on June 20, 2026, the DSA’s official platform calls to:

  • Eliminate the U.S. Senate.
  • Replace the President with an executive chosen by Congress.
  • Replace the Supreme Court with a judiciary subordinate to Congress.
  • Grant universal amnesty to all illegal aliens.
  • Defund the Department of Defense (which the platform refers to as the “Department of War”).
  • Close overseas U.S. military bases.
  • End American economic sanctions against foreign adversaries.
  • Abolish what it calls the “carceral forces of the capitalist state,” including sweeping police and prison reforms.

If implemented, these proposals would fundamentally transform the American system of government by eliminating the constitutional separation of powers established by the Founding Fathers.

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Supreme Court rejects Michigan family’s claim that county committed ‘home equity theft’ over $2,200 tax debt

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously sided with Isabella County, Michigan, rejecting a family’s claim that local governments must pay homeowners the full fair market value of property seized and sold in tax foreclosures rather than the lower price obtained at public auction.

In the 9-0 decision, the court ruled that under the Fifth Amendment, “the proper baseline under the Takings Clause is the price obtained in a tax sale, at least when the sale is fairly conducted in light of our country’s history of tax sales.”

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito explained that “neither the Fifth nor the Eighth Amendment requires the government to compensate former owners based on the hypothetical fair market value of their property.”

The high court noted that creating a fair-market-value baseline would impose “unprecedented burdens” on local governments seeking to collect unpaid taxes, making these sales “impractical.”

“Under Pung’s rule, a tax sale to collect $20,000 in delinquent taxes would net the government a $20,000 loss—a loss paid out to the delinquent taxpayer himself,” Alito continued. “The possibility of such a perverse result would render tax sales infeasible as a debt-collection mechanism.”

The ruling comes amid a decade-long legal battle between Isabella County and the Pung family over what they called “home equity theft.” Isabella County foreclosed on the family’s 3,000-square-foot home over a disputed $2,241.93 tax bill stemming from a revoked Principal Residence Exemption, subsequently selling the $194,400 property at auction for just $76,008. Michael Pung, acting as the personal representative of the estate, disputed the bill and brought the legal challenge on behalf of the family.

While the county eventually returned the surplus auction proceeds, the family argued the Constitution required “just compensation” based on the home’s actual worth, rather than a low-ball auction price that destroyed more than $118,000 in equity.

However, the court said on Tuesday it would not “resolve any of Pung’s newfound contentions that the procedure the County followed in seizing and selling his property was unfair.”

The court ultimately vacated and remanded the case, sending it back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to reconsider those procedural claims.

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If Anyone Can Birth An ‘American,’ Citizenship Means Nothing

If you’ve been wondering why America’s 250th feels so hollow, the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling on birthright citizenship should provide ample clarity. If anyone, from anywhere in the world, can travel to America and give birth to an “American” citizen, then American citizenship is meaningless and based purely on the happenstance of birth.

As Justice Samuel Alito noted in his dissent, this system of “soil and servitude” was emphatically rejected by our Founders in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, the Court has once again saddled our nation with this ancient understanding, negating everything the Founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to reject, and resurrected a form of medieval English feudal rule.

At the center of this debate is the 14th Amendment, which was drafted to ensure that freed slaves were recognized as full citizens, given that, as Justice Clarence Thomas argues in his dissent, freed slaves “had no other homeland” and were “liable to be called upon to defend [America] in time of war.”

The Constitution’s Citizenship Clause demands that one not only be born in the United States but also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Legal scholars who reject universal birthright citizenship under consent theory argue that full jurisdiction requires mutual political consent.

Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a principal architect of Reconstruction-era legislation, explained that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else” and “subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.”

To this point, Justice Thomas explained in his dissent that this jurisdictional requirement was historically understood as demanding a legal domicile, meaning a permanent home, rather than a fleeting visit to our shores by tourists, temporary foreign workers, or illegal aliens.

This conclusion stands in direct contrast to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “universalist” vision of citizenship.

The author of the Citizenship Clause, Sen. Jacob Howard, stated during the Senate debates over the 14th Amendment that automatic birthright citizenship would not “include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”

The Supreme Court majority’s response to Howard’s assertion is to argue over commas, insisting “foreigners” and “aliens” merely describe diplomat families. But if diplomat families are foreigners by definition, why even list foreigners and aliens separately? Should birthright citizenship truly rest on grammatical semantics?

By ignoring the plain words of the amendment’s own authors, the court’s majority has enshrined a historical lie. For decades, open-borders advocates have repeatedly told the American public that this debate was permanently settled in 1898 by the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark because this understanding benefits the left demographically and electorally.

When the children of illegal aliens and birth tourists turn 18, they are eligible to vote in our elections. When they turn 21, they unlock the power of chain migration, allowing them to sponsor their foreign parents for legal permanent residency. One only needs to look at the wave of Democratic Socialist victories in recent municipal elections, driven by rapidly shifting urban demographics, to see where this leads.

But the current understanding of Wong Kim Ark is wrong, and the dissenting opinions take direct aim at this lie. As Justice Alito thoroughly explained, the holding in Wong Kim Ark was explicitly limited to children whose non-citizen parents had established a “permanent domicil and residence” in the United States.

Because the legal category “lawful permanent resident” did not exist in 1898, Wong’s parents were considered “lawfully domiciled” in the U.S. under common law because there was no statute making their presence unlawful. Additionally, being Chinese, they could not apply for naturalization.

They had done, as Justice Alito stated, “everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans.” As such, they were fully part of the national community to the extent that the law allowed at the time.

The promise of American citizenship remains a massive incentive for illegal immigration, while the subversive “birth tourism” industry will continue to profit openly from the Court’s refusal to defend the nation.

In 2023 alone, mothers who were unauthorized immigrants or held only temporary legal status accounted for an astounding 320,000 births in the United States, representing 9 percent of all U.S. births. If the restrictions of President Trump’s executive order had been properly upheld, roughly 260,000 of those children would not have qualified for automatic citizenship.

Even more alarming is the strategic weaponization of this loophole by adversarial nations such as China. As Peter Schweizer has documented in his book, The Invisible Coup, we are currently facing what he terms “civilizational warfare.”

Wealthy Chinese nationals, sometimes with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exploit visa loopholes in U.S. territories like Saipan, turning them into tropical maternity wards.

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President Trump Seeks Immediate REHEARING of Birthright Citizenship Case at Supreme Court After Scam Billboards Pop Up Along the Border Advertising “Deliveries Starting at $4000”

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday he is immediately demanding a rehearing of the birthright citizenship case at the United States Supreme Court after discovering that scam billboards and signs have exploded along the Southern Border, in Mexico, and across the country, openly advertising “BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP” with “Deliveries starting at $4000.”

The president blasted the growing scheme that exploits America’s birthright citizenship laws, arguing that the Court’s recent decision has created an incentive for criminal enterprises to profit by marketing U.S. citizenship to foreign nationals.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote:

“Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, with “Deliveries starting at $4000.”

Likewise, similar signs going up all over our Country. Billions of Dollars will be illegally made by this SCAM, with Citizenship going to anyone willing to pay.

It will be, by far, the number one way of becoming a citizen, and then the entire family will be allowed to follow. Not sustainable.

NOBODY SAW THIS COMING!!! AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP IS NOT FOR SALE! In fact, that is a crime, and therefore, the Supreme Court’s ruling is wrong.

I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY. This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”

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