Tag: scotus

Second Court Ignores Landmark SCOTUS Ruling, Issues Nationwide Injunction

In a 6-3 ruling late last month, Justice Amy Coney Barrett minced no words when it came to so-called “universal injunctions,” lower-court rulings that extended far beyond that court’s jurisdiction.

“It is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive,” Barrett wrote in the decision.

“That goes for judges, too,” Barrett added. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

That decision, by the way, did not decide the merits of the case in which the universal injunction was issued: President Donald Trump’s administration has argued that the 14th Amendment does not grant birthright citizenship because those born to citizens of other countries within U.S. borders are not among “persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The meaning of this language, and whether children of foreign nationals are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States will eventually be decided one way or another before the high court. But the ruling itself was clear: Before that, nationwide universal injunctions were the judiciary acting in a way that exceeded its power.

So, for the second time since the decision, the judiciary has exceeded its power, because what the heck?

In a 2-1 decision handed down late Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, judges ruled that the plaintiffs — attorneys general from four Democratic-led states, Arizona, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington — could receive a nationwide injunction because that was the only way to obtain requisite relief, according to The Hill.

“States’ residents may give birth in a non-party state, and individuals subject to the Executive Order from non-party states will inevitably move to the States,” U.S. Circuit Judge Ronald Gould wrote in the opinion of the court.

Both Gould and Judge Michael Hawkins, who voted to issue the universal injunctions, were Bill Clinton appointees.

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DOJ under Trump urges SCOTUS not to take up Ghislaine Maxwell’s case in filing: report

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday urged the U.S. Supreme Court not to take up Ghislaine Maxwell’s case in a Department of Justice filing. 

Maxwell’s lawyers stated that she should not have been put on trial due to the plea deal that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein got in 2008 from prosecutors in Florida.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ responded to Maxwell’s lawyers’ filing Monday and urged the Supreme Court not to take up her case, according to an exclusive report from the Daily Mail.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking and an array of other charges in connection with her procurement of minors for Epstein’s indulgence.

She said she was willing to testify before Congress about the Epstein files, sources told The Daily Mail. 

The Trump administration has received significant backlash from conservative influencers and journalists over his handling of the Epstein files. 

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Sotomayor Had To Explain The Law To KBJ Like She Was A 5th Grader

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was severely castigated and mocked by the 6-3 majority in the “birthright citizenship” (aka “universal injunction”) case for her Dissent which the normally staid Amy Coney Barrett (joined by five other Justices) termed “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.” No other Justice, not even Sotomayor or Kagan, joined in KJB’s dissent, which contained numerous KBJ-isms: I’ll meet your “(wait for it)” and raise you a “full stop”.

KJB is carving out as niche among liberals as the “Great Dissenter” – but her dissents are so shallow that in the recent case in which the majority (8-1) stayed a district court order halting the mere planning for layoffs, Sotomayor had to spell out for KBJ why her solo dissent was legally unsound (emphasis added):

I agree with JUSTICE JACKSON that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates. See post, at 13. Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force “consistent with applicable law,” App. to Application for Stay 2a, and the resulting joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management reiterates as much. The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law. I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance.

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Ketanji Jackson says the quiet part out loud: What matters are her feelings, not the law

Open any Supreme Court decision (here’s a good example), and you’ll see that, after a few pages of “Syllabus” (i.e., summary), you get to the meat, where the justices issue their ruling. And that ruling is invariably preceded by language identifying the justice who wrote the decision, followed by the words “delivered the opinion of the Court.”

The Supreme Court website helpfully explains at its “Opinions” page that the “most well-known opinions are those released or announced in cases in which the Court has heard oral argument.” In other words, those are the ones that analyze the Constitution, congressional statutes, pre-existing cases (precedent), and bureaucratic regulations. Other lesser-known “opinions” are a few types of quick orders. Judges may also issue concurrences or dissents in which they state their understanding of American law.

Stunningly, though, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has added a new type of opinion to this list: her own. That is, her personal, emotional reactions to the matters before the Court:

“I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues, and that’s what I try to do,” Jackson said.

Thus saith the wannabe theater kid, who brings her personal values and emotionalism to her performance as a judge. But honestly, Jackson has done nothing more than speak the quiet part out loud.

Before becoming a political writer and editor, I spent thirty years working in litigation in the San Francisco Bay Area. At a guesstimate, the judges on the cases with which I was involved were probably 80% leftist. These leftist judges felt exactly as Jackson did: The cases weren’t about the law; they were about a judge’s opinions and feelings concerning the matter before them.

Most of these judges weren’t as blunt as Jackson, but it was the little things they said. There was the judge who, when foiled in a first attempt to cancel a defaulting borrower’s legitimate debt to a bank, announced, “Just remember that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” During the trial, he attacked the bank’s attorneys so aggressively that it was a foregone conclusion that the jurors would find that the bank was evil, which they did.

And of course, sometimes, the judges were quite open about their disdain for the law. I swear that my journey from Democrat to conservative started when I had conclusively proven to the judge that California law completely foreclosed the plaintiff’s lawsuit against my client.

The judge, however, hemmed and hawed. He then ruled against my client, saying, “I know what the law is, but I still think there’s something there.” Feelings. Opinions. He was purely Jacksonian. In fact, there was nothing there, and, $1.2 million in fees and costs later, we had a huge victory at trial, which included an award for fees and costs. That same judge later ended up on the California Court of Appeals.

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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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