Tag: scotus

Supreme Court Backs Parental Rights Over School LGBTQ Books and Classes

In a landmark 6-3 decision on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have a constitutional right to opt their children out of public-school lessons involving LGBTQ-themed storybooks on religious grounds.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that Montgomery County, Maryland’s policy of requiring elementary students to participate in instruction featuring these books without allowing religious exemptions violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause.

Several of the titles at the center of Mahmoud v. Taylor have also appeared in similar lawsuits across the country, where parents, both Christian and Muslim, have sought to either remove the books entirely or at least retain the right to opt their children out.

The specific books that sparked the legal battle in Montgomery County included Uncle Bobby’s Wedding (kindergarten), about a girl adjusting to her uncle’s marriage to another man; Prince & Knight (first grade), a fairy tale romance between two men; and Born Ready (second grade), the story of a transgender child.

Other titles that have drawn objections include Love, Violet, about a girl nervous to give a valentine to another girl, and Pride Puppy, an alphabet book about a dog lost during a Pride parade.

Books challenged by parents elsewhere include Lawn Boy, Gender Queer: A Memoir, and All Boys Aren’t Blue, all of which feature explicit sexual content and gender identity themes.

Elementary and middle-grade books like King and King, Melissa (formerly George), and Julián Is a Mermaid have also faced legal and school board challenges.

Other contested titles include This Book Is Gay, ABC Pride, Heartstopper, Fun Home, It’s Perfectly Normal (a sex education book), Baby Be-Bop, The Drowning of Stephan Jones, and The Education of Harriet Hatfield.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: Conservative Majority’s Recent Rulings Pose ‘Existential Threat to Rule of Law’

Liberal-leaning Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply criticized recent rulings from her conservative-leaning colleagues during an interview with ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis at the Global Black Economic Forum on Saturday. 

In her first appearance since the High Court ruled that judges cannot abuse their powers by regularly issuing nationwide injunctions to halt an administration’s policies, Justice Jackson said she believes rulings from the court’s conservative majority pose an “existential threat to the rule of law.” 

“Sometimes we have cases that have those kinds of implications, and, you know, are there cases in which there are issues that have that kind of significance? Absolutely,” Jackson told Davis.

Jackson issued a similar criticism last month in a dissenting opinion for Trump v. Casa, in which the majority ruled in the controversial “birthright citizenship” case that lower courts cannot simply issue nationwide injunctions, and that doing so is an abuse of their judicial power. In her dissent, Jackson wrote that she has “no doubt that executive lawlessness will flourish because of the decision,” and that she predicts “executive power will become completely uncontainable.”

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Embarrassing: Even Liberal Justice Sotomayor Has to Remind Ketanji Jackson What the Case Is Actually About — Jackson Stands Alone in Dissent

In a stunning 8-1 decision Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court obliterated Clinton-appointed Judge Susan Illston’s May 22 injunction that had blocked President Trump’s sweeping plan to slash federal bloat and reorganize 20 agencies.

Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented—and even her fellow liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, had to coach her on the basics of the case.

Judge Illston’s order froze thousands of Reduction-in-Force (RIF) notices and slammed the brakes on Trump’s Executive Order 14210, which directs agency heads to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”

The order is the cornerstone of Trump’s pledge to de-weaponize the bureaucracy and return power to the people.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who appeared to be arguing a case entirely different from the one before the Court, was the only dissent.

In her fiery 15-page dissent, Jackson launched into a long-winded history lesson about executive overreach, Congress’s role in creating federal agencies, and past presidents’ requests for reorganization authority.

She insisted that Trump’s Executive Order 14210 amounted to an illegal “critical transformation” of the federal bureaucracy that could not move forward without congressional approval.

But her alarmist dissent was so far off base that even Justice Sotomayor had to step in and gently remind Jackson that the Court wasn’t even ruling on the merits of the reorganization plans themselves.

Justice Sotomayor made it abundantly clear in her concurrence: the executive order merely instructed agencies to plan reorganizations “consistent with applicable law.” The actual restructuring plans haven’t even been challenged in this phase. The case isn’t about their legality—yet.

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Supreme Court to hear cases on banning males in female student sports

The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear two cases on the banning of males in female student sports.

The cases are from West Virginia and Idaho where two transgender students, Becky Pepper-Jackson and Lindsay Hecox, are challenging the respective states’ bans, NBC News reported.

Both students won injunctions, allowing them to continue competing in female sports. Pepper-Jackson, a 15-year-old male high school student, takes puberty-blocking medication, while Hecox, a 24-year-old male college student, has received testosterone suppression and estrogen treatments.

The court will hear oral arguments later this year, after their next session begins in October, and they will be expected to rule by next June.

The decision to take up the cases follows the court’s ruling last month that upheld a Tennessee law that bans transgender surgery, puberty blockers, and hormone therapy for minors.

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The Curbing Of The Administrative State

The Supreme Court delivered an opinion last week that not even the best of the punditry class was prepared to understand. The decision was Trump vs. CASA, and the topic concerned the nationwide injunction against Trump’s management of U.S. immigration policy. As with more than 40 other cases, federal district judges have intervened to stop the president from exercising executive powers.

The opinion could not be plainer: “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” That principle applies not only to this case but to the whole panoply of cases that have tethered the ability of the president to manage executive branch operations. The courts have presumed authority over the president that the Constitution plainly does not grant.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the following of the unjoined dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “[It] is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an Imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

Court watchers called this an unprecedented rebuke of a colleague in a majority opinion.

The practical effect of the decision is to underscore the meaning of Article 2: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Why should this be controversial? Here we get into the overwhelming reality of the structure and operations of the U.S. government that stand in complete contradiction to the U.S. Constitution. It’s been going on for more than a century and has never been fundamentally challenged. Until Trump, most presidents were fine with it and offered no serious challenge. The legislature too has chosen to look the other way.

The issue is the fourth branch of government that is nearly the whole of the operational side of government as we know it. We elect leaders and representatives but our votes have carried ever less power over the course of a century. We know that but it has not always been obvious.

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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Children’s Health Defense Case Alleging Meta-Government Collusion to Censor Vaccine Speech

The Supreme Court has turned down a petition from Children’s Health Defense (CHD), leaving unexamined the group’s challenge to what it describes as collusion between Meta and federal agencies aimed at suppressing constitutionally protected speech.

The case, which dates back to 2020, centered on CHD’s allegations that Facebook, under government influence, targeted and silenced its views on vaccines and COVID-19.

CHD filed its initial complaint against Meta in August 2020 and later amended it, arguing that government officials worked alongside the tech giant to stifle dissenting opinions that the public had every right to hear.

The removal of CHD’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2022 only fueled concerns about the growing threat of coordinated censorship in digital spaces.

Those accounts, once a major source of alternative information for millions, remain banned.

In a decision last year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Meta, holding that the company’s actions reflected private policy choices rather than government compulsion.

CHD hoped the Supreme Court would take up the case and examine whether that distinction truly shields Big Tech from accountability when it suppresses speech at the behest of public officials. But the justices declined, offering no explanation, as is typical in most of the thousands of petitions they review annually.

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Leftist Supreme Court Justices Want To Parent Your Kids In The Worst Way

After a flurry of recent Supreme Court decisions, parents still have the right to teach values to their own children. For now.

If the three minority, leftist justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — had their way, public schools, rogue doctors, and the internet would be parenting instead.  

In dissenting opinions on three key cases, these three life-long appointees revealed how little they care for children.   

In Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, they argued it is unconstitutional to keep kids safe from porn if it means adults have to pause when entering an internet smut site long enough to prove they are over 18 to leer at  “hardcore pornographic content and videos,” many of which depict “sexual violence, incest, physical aggression, sexual assault, non-consent, and teens,” the majority opinion notes.

According to Kagan, who wrote the minority opinion, “Obscene-for-children speech is constitutionally protected speech for adults.” She repeats this concept many times.

Kagan and her gals really believe it is more important to preserve adult access to videos depicting sexual crimes than it is to keep it where it belongs: far away from children. In truth, there should be no market for this marriage-damaging, mind-altering, addictive content at any age.

Some porn is made with real trafficking victims, sometimes minors.

For example, Michael Pratt, leader of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking ring, pleaded guilty in federal court this month to many sex trafficking counts, according to the Department of Justice, for using “force, fraud, and coercion to recruit hundreds of young women – most in their late teens – to appear in GirlsDoPorn videos.”

Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson want to assure adults don’t have to prove their age before viewing these crime victims, no matter the consequence it may have on children.   

In Skrmetti v. United States, the Supreme Court majority found the “Tennessee law prohibiting the surgical and chemical castration of minors does not violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause,” The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported last week.  

Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion that Kagan and Jackson joined in part and in full, respectively.

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This Excerpt From Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent Explains Why She Got Nuked by Amy Coney Barrett

If you were following the Supreme Court news yesterday, you likely saw that Justice Amy Coney Barrett smacked down her fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over her childish dissent, saying:

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” she began. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary,” she added.

Now another excerpt from Jackson’s dissent is circulating and it contains a phrase that makes Jackson sound more like a YouTuber than a Supreme Court justice.

She actually used the expression ‘wait for it’ in the middle of a sentence.

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Justice Kagan’s Own Words Come Back to Haunt Her on Nationwide Injunctions

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., released Friday, finally put the brakes on the reckless abuse of nationwide injunctions by lower courts—and has Democrats in full meltdown mode. The left’s favorite judicial weapon just got neutered, and the hypocrisy is impossible to ignore.

The liberal wing of the court didn’t do itself any favors, either. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent was so horrible that Justice Amy Coney Barrett felt compelled to call it out in the majority opinion.

But Justice Elena Kagan’s credibility also took a direct hit. In a stunning display of judicial flip-flopping, Kagan’s own words from 2022 have come back to haunt her, exposing the left’s all-too-familiar habit of changing the rules when it suits their political objectives. 

Nationwide injunctions have been the left’s go-to tactic for derailing conservative policy at the stroke of a single judge’s pen. Under Trump, district judges from deep-blue enclaves repeatedly issued sweeping orders to block administration policies nationwide at an unprecedented pace, no matter how tenuous the legal grounds. 

Despite all the apocalyptic rhetoric, there’s no doubt that the left’s current position on nationwide injunctions is purely political—and Justice Elena Kagan accidentally proved it.

How? Well, Justice Kagan, who dissented in this case, was singing a very different tune just a couple of years ago. Back in 2022, when President Biden was in the White House and conservatives were the ones seeking relief from his executive orders, Kagan was openly skeptical of nationwide injunctions. 

“This can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stuck for the years that it takes to go through a normal process,” she said. 

That’s not some out-of-context paraphrase—it’s her own words, on the record.

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Supreme Court Greenlights Online Digital ID Checks

With a landmark ruling that could shape online content regulation for years to come, the US Supreme Court has upheld Texas’s digital ID age-verification law for adult websites and platforms, asserting that the measure lawfully balances the state’s interest in protecting minors with the free speech rights of adults.

The 6-3 decision, issued on June 27, 2025, affirms the constitutionality of House Bill 1181, a statute that requires adult websites to verify the age of users before granting access to sexually explicit material.

Laws like House Bill 1181, framed as necessary safeguards for children, are quietly eroding the rights of adults to access lawful content or speak freely online without fear of surveillance or exposure.

Under such laws, anyone seeking to view legal adult material online (and eventually even those who want to access social media platforms because may contain content “harmful” to minors) is forced to provide official identification, often a government-issued digital ID or even biometric data, to prove their age.

Supporters claim this is a small price to pay to shield minors from harmful content. Yet these measures create permanent records linking individuals to their browsing choices, exposing them to unprecedented risks.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

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