Tag Archives: U. S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court Gets It Right

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The role the courts have assumed in our government is not in line with what the Founding Fathers envisioned. We were supposed to be governed by elected officials that we could hold accountable in elections–not by courts and unelected bureaucrats.

On Sunday, Watts Up With That posted an article about a recent 8-0 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The article reports:

In a rare but resounding act of judicial sanity, the Supreme Court of the United States has delivered an 8-0 ruling that reins in one of the most abused weapons in the bureaucratic arsenal: environmental obstructionism. The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, stemmed from a challenge to a planned railway in Utah, a project that environmentalists attempted to kneecap through endless litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In a time when green tape has been weaponized to stall or cancel everything from pipelines to housing, this decision marks a turning point—and it’s worth celebrating.

Let’s start with the heart of the ruling. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh emphasized that,

“NEPA does not allow courts, ‘under the guise of judicial review’ of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand”.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-975_m648.pdf

Translation: judges can’t play fortune teller and block infrastructure because of speculative “ripple effects” on theoretical future projects. In other words, environmental lawfare just hit a serious snag.

This case was triggered by the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of an 88-mile railway to carry crude oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to the national rail network. Eagle County, Colorado, and its usual cast of green litigators tried to stop the project, arguing that the environmental review should have considered other hypothetical projects or downstream effects that may—or may not—result from this railway’s existence.

But the Court decisively said no. Agencies aren’t expected to possess clairvoyant powers. As Kavanaugh clarified,

“The fact that the project might foreseeably lead to the construction or increased use of a separate project does not mean the agency must consider that separate project’s environmental effects”.

The article concludes:

For too long, infrastructure has been hostage to hypotheticals, paralyzed by process. This ruling loosens those chains. And that’s a victory not just for Utah’s railway, but for every American who still believes in building things.

Here’s to the rare sound of a gavel striking in favor of progress.

Here’s to getting back to legislation passed by Congress and not regulations passed by bureaucrats.

The End Of Nationwide Injunctions?

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On Monday, Hot Air posted an article about a case the U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing on Thursday.

The article notes how the political opponents of President Trump have repeatedly used the courts to try to prevent him from implementing his agenda:

Since President Trump took office, federal district courts have issued 37 nationwide injunctions against the Executive Branch.  That’s more than one a month.  By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued two nationwide injunctions against the Executive Branch, both of which were vacated by the Ninth Circuit.  And according to the Department’s best estimates, courts issued only 27 nationwide injunctions­ in all of the 20th century.

Some say this proves that the Trump Administration is lawless.  Not surprisingly, I disagree.  And I would point out that the only case litigated on the merits in the Supreme Court—the so-called “travel ban” challenge—ended with President’s policy being upheld…

The Constitution empowers Congress to create lower federal courts, and in designing a system of 93 judicial districts and 12 regional circuits, Congress set clear geographic limits on lower-court jurisdiction. In our system, district-court rulings do not bind other judges, even other judges in the same district…

Nationwide injunctions not only allow district courts to wield unprecedented power, they also allow district courts to wield it asymmetrically. When a court denies a nationwide injunction, the decision does not affect other cases. But when a court grants a nationwide injunction, it renders all other litigation on the issue largely irrelevant. Think about what that means for the Government. When Congress passes a statute or the President implements a policy that is challenged in multiple courts, the Government has to run the table—we must win every case. The challengers, however, must find only one district judge—out of an available 600—willing to enter a nationwide injunction. One judge can, in effect, cancel the policy with the stroke of the pen.

The article reports:

And the era of nationwide injunctions could come to an end later this week when the Supreme Court hears a case on birthright citizenship. The case probably won’t decide whether birthright citizenship is legal under the 14th Amendment. What the case is really about is the nationwide injunctions different courts have used to block Trump’s executive order on the topic.

I firmly believe that one of the things President Trump is trying to do is to bring America back to the country our Founding Fathers created. We have wandered so far from our Constitution that the road back is going to be bumpy and clogged by people who are making too much money the way things currently are. It would be wonderful if President Trump could bring us closer to the system of government our Constitution created.

What Do You Want Your Children Reading?

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What do you want your children reading, and should you have a say in the books introduced in their classrooms?

On Tuesday, Breitbart reported:

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments Tuesday over the religious rights of parents in Maryland to remove their children from elementary school classes using storybooks with LGBTQ characters.

The case is the latest dispute involving religion to come before the conservative-led court. The justices have repeatedly endorsed claims of religious discrimination in recent years.

The Montgomery County public schools, in suburban Washington, D.C., introduced the storybooks as part of an effort to better reflect the district’s diverse population.

Parents sued after the school system stopped allowing them to pull their kids from lessons that included the books. The parents argue that public schools cannot force kids to participate in instruction that violates their faith, and they pointed to the opt-out provisions in sex education classes.

The schools said allowing children to opt out of the lessons had become disruptive. Lower courts backed the schools, prompting the parents’ appeal to the Supreme Court.

Five books are at issue in the high court case, touching on the same themes found in classic stories that include Snow White, Cinderella and Peter Pan, the school system’s lawyers wrote.

In “Prince and Knight,” two men fall in love after they rescue the kingdom, and each other. In “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” a niece worries that her uncle will not have as much time for her after he gets married. His partner is a man.

“Love, Violet” deals with a girl’s anxiety about giving a valentine to another girl. “Born Ready” is the story of a transgender boy’s decision to share his gender identity with his family and the world. “Intersection Allies” describes nine characters of varying backgrounds, including one who is gender-fluid.

I might be a whole lot more sympathetic to the school’s case if I thought they were actually teaching the children things like arithmetic and classical literature instead of this garbage. In elementary school there are much better things for children to read.

This case is part of the ongoing battle over whether parents or the state are in charge of children. The case is also one of many reasons attendance in public schools in declining in favor of homeschooling and private schools. If schools do not want to lose the majority of their students, they will stop this nonsense.

The Future Of The DOGE Cases

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On Monday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the court cases the Democrats have created to slow the project of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The article reports:

Attorney Alan Dershowitz said Monday that many of the injunctions blocking actions by President Donald Trump, ranging from his executive orders to his efforts to address wasteful and fraudulent spending, will be thrown out on appeal.

The Trump administration is appealing injunctions imposed by federal judges that targeted the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order ending birthright citizenship, among others. Dershowitz said during “The Dershow” that the cases will eventually be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Nobody ever said that our system of checks and balances would make it easy to govern or would make it efficient to govern. No, no, the design of our system of checks and balances was to create enough power to govern effectively while, at the same time, denying any one part of our government enough power to create a tyranny. So we have to counter our system of checks and balances, and it’s working, even today, as we speak,” Dershowitz said. “The president issues executive order after executive order after executive order, and what do the states do? They get their attorneys general to bring a lawsuit.”

The article concludes:

“People keep forgetting, the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy, the alphabet agencies. They are not an independent branch. They are part of the executive, and the executive is the president. Now, it’s complicated, because Congress created many of these agencies,” Dershowitz said. “For example, you know some of them, Federal Communications Commission, federal security, federal drug, those are created by Congress, but they’re part of the executive department. Some of the people are confirmed by Congress, and so your argument is you can’t fire them, only Congress can unconfirm them, but that’s never been the rule. For example, the head of the FBI is confirmed, and all cabinet members are confirmed by the Senate, yet the president can fire any of those heads of agencies at his whim. He doesn’t even have to have a reason to do it.”

I wish Congress and the judges would read the Constitution and decide to follow it.

Partial Relief For The Pending Border Disaster

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On Tuesday, The Daily Wire reported that the Supreme Court had reached a decision to all Title 42 to remain in place indefinitely.

The article reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday to keep the pandemic-era limit on immigration, referred to as Title 42, in place indefinitely, which allows officials to turn away migrants at the border to prevent the spread of COVID.

Customs and Border Protection officials warned lawmakers that approximately 50,000 foreigners were waiting to cross into the United States once Title 42 ended. However, according to The Associated Press, an order from Chief Justice John Roberts stayed a lower court’s ruling, which justices extended to give the court time to consider both sides’ arguments.

The article concludes:

Federal officials said ending the restrictions would likely lead to “disruption and a temporary increase in unlawful border crossings.” However, they still asked the nation’s highest court to reject the request from 19 Republican state attorneys general to maintain the policy.

Leaders in border cities had been bracing for an influx of immigrants. Oscar Leeser, the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency on Saturday in anticipation of the end of Title 42. “Our asylum seekers are not safe,” the official said at a press conference. “We have hundreds and hundreds on the street and that’s not the way we treat our people.”

More than 80,000 migrants have entered El Paso in the last four months; approximately 678,000 people currently reside in the city, where temperatures can drop below freezing during winter nights. Leeser did not rule out the option of using a nearby military base to temporarily house migrants, adding that officials were discussing options with state and federal authorities.

Arguing over Title 42 is missing the point. The point is that in order to maintain our sovereignty as a country, we need secure borders. We currently do not have them. It is unsettling that a large percentage of the people crossing the border illegally are adult males between the ages of eighteen and thirty. They do not represent family life, and when things don’t work out for them economically, they will be a force to be reckoned with. The Biden administration is setting the state for the destruction of America. I don’t know whether or not it is intentional, but it is what is happening.

The Respect For Marriage Act Doesn’t Respect Marriage

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On Tuesday, The Conservative Review posted an article about The Respect for Marriage Act that is now making its way through Congress. The Respect for Marriage Act is nothing more than the Biden administration (and Congress’) attempt to silence people who support and believe in traditional marriage.

The article explains the consequences of passing this law:

What will happen is this: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else who dares maintain that marriage is a lifelong conjugal union between one man and one woman — the definition of marriage for thousands of years until the U.S. Supreme Court descended from Mount Sinai with Obergefell v. Hodges inscribed on stone tablets — will be branded a bigot and driven from the public square and marketplace.

Anyone who owns a small business related to the wedding industry — photographers, bakers, website designers, venue owners, caterers, florists — will be sued into oblivion if they refuse services to same-sex couples. Religious colleges and universities will lose their tax-exempt status. Religious institutions of every kind, if they hold to their teachings and traditions about marriage, will face an onslaught from the Department of Justice and the federal bureaucracy. 

To paraphrase George Orwell’s famous line, if you want a picture of the future under the Respect for Marriage Act, imagine a boot stamping on Jack Phillips’ face — forever. 

The untrammeled exercise of power and the vigorous crushing of dissent is the entire purpose of the proposed law. There can be no other possible justification for it. Michael New, an assistant professor at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, recently told The Daily Signal that Catholic colleges and universities in particular might face ruinous lawsuits and loss of federal funding if the bill is signed into law.

The article concludes:

The justification for the bill is just as outlandish and offensive as the argument that it presents no danger to religious Americans. In the wake of the Dobbs decision this summer, we were warned that some future Supreme Court opinion, following Justice Clarence Thomas’s logic, could overturn Obergefell and other substantive due process rulings such as Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws banning interracial marriage.

The purpose of this claim, in case it isn’t bone-crushingly obvious, is to lump opponents of gay marriage in with opponents of interracial marriage, to smear them as bigots who aren’t just on the wrong side of history, but who are about to be on the receiving end of a federal government empowered to go after them.

And if you think that can’t really be how proponents of the Respect for Marriage Act think about traditional-minded Americans, go ask Jack Phillips how he’s faring after winning his Supreme Court case in 2018.

This is a bad bill. Any Republican who supports this bill should be subject to a primary challenge during the next election.

The Abortion Ruling Has Been Released

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On Friday, John Hinderaker reported at Power Line Blog on Friday that the Supreme Court had released its decision on the Dobbs case.

Townhall posted a similar article on Friday.

John Hinderaker reported:

The Supreme Court released its opinions in the Dobbs case this morning. Consistent with the leaked draft by Justice Alito, it overrules the Roe and Casey decisions. You can read the opinions here. I haven’t had time yet to review Alito’s majority opinion to see how closely it conforms to what was leaked.

The vote was 6-3, with Chief Justice Roberts concurring in the result. He would have upheld the Mississippi statute without entirely overruling Roe. Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh wrote concurring opinions.

Townhall reports:

The Supreme Court issued an opinion Monday morning in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. Justices ruled 5-4 to uphold Dobbs, which limits abortion to 15-weeks in Mississippi, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade and returning abortion law to the states. The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito. 

“Now today, the Court rightly overrules Roe and Casey—two of this Court’s “most notoriously incorrect” sub- stantive due process decisions,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The ruling comes more than a month after a draft opinion of the case showed five justices planned to overturn Roe, with Justice Samuel Alito writing about the decision. The draft opinion is nearly identical to the final ruling. 

This ruling does not end legal abortion–it simply allows each state to make its own decision on the matter. The theory behind the federalism principles that our Founding Fathers embraced was that the people in the states, who were the closest to the voters, should be the people making the majority of the laws. Roe vs. Wade was unconstitutional as it ignored the Tenth Amendment.

The Tenth Amendment states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

We need to pay attention to the documents involved in the founding and establishment of America.

This Is Only The Beginning

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NewsMax is reporting today that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to block a Texas ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The decision was a 5-4 decision.

The article reports:

By a 5-4 vote, the justices denied an emergency request by abortion and women’s health providers for an injunction on enforcement of the ban, which took effect early on Wednesday, while litigation continues.

One of the court’s six conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined its three liberals in dissent.

“The court’s order is stunning,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

In an unsigned explanation, the court’s majority said the decision was “not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law” and allowed legal challenges to proceed.

The decision illustrates the impact of former Republican President Donald Trump’s three conservative appointees, who have tilted the court further right. All were in the majority.

The conservatives thought that they were supporting a conservative when Justice Roberts was appointed. Obviously we were wrong.

The article concludes:

Texas is among a dozen mostly Republican-led states to ban the procedure once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, often at six weeks and sometimes before a woman realizes she is pregnant.

Courts have blocked such bans, citing Roe v. Wade.

The court’s action over the Texas ban could foreshadow its approach in another case over a 15-week ban by Mississippi in which the state has asked the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The court will hear arguments in the term beginning in October, with a ruling due by the end of June 2022.

Keep in mind that if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, it simply means that the issue of abortion is left up to the individual states. It does not automatically make abortion illegal. Also consider the fact that a large percentage of the babies that are aborted every year are minorities. In America, there is a genocidal aspect to abortion. Those who support abortion need to consider that. Unfortunately, there is also a lucrative market in the sale of aborted baby body parts. That also should be considered by those who support the practice of abortion. Abortion may be necessary if the mother’s life is truly in danger (tubal pregnancy, etc.), but it should never been seen as a simple procedure to be used as birth control. There is nothing simple about it, and there are many women who have had abortions that suffer physical and mental consequences for years afterward.

Protecting The Fourth Amendment

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Sharyl Attkisson posted an article on her website today about a recent Supreme Court decision. Hopefully the decision will give pause to those politicians who want to take guns from law-abiding Americans.

The article reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court recently unanimously agreed that a warrantless search and seizure of a man’s firearms from within his home was unconstitutional.

The case involved a domestic argument between a husband and wife. The husband placed a handgun on the dining room table and asked his wife to “shoot [him] now and get it over with”. The wife left the home and returned the next morning with police.

The man reportedly agreed to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation on the condition that the officers not confiscate his firearms. But the police allegedly told the man’s wife that he’d agreed to give up the firearms. So the wife allowed them to enter the home and take them.

The lower courts upheld the police conduct under a “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment search and seizure protection.

I posted an article about the incident in March. The thing about the story that bothered me most was that the police lied to both the husband and the wife in order to take the guns from the house. I don’t think police should lie to law-abiding citizens.

Also, when was the last time the Supreme Court agreed 9-0 on anything?

The article concludes:

The community caretaking exception is commonly considered to apply to vehicles when a law enforcement officer is giving aid to a motorist.

A recognition of the existence of “community caretaking” tasks, like rendering aid to motorists in disabled vehicles, is not an open-ended license to perform [warrantless searches and seizures] anywhere.

U.S. Supreme Court

If the exception had been upheld, it would have been a significant limitation of Fourth Amendment rights.

I am truly glad to see that ruling. It protects all of us.

 

Keeping Election Integrity

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In the last state legislative session, North Carolina changed its voting laws to ensure the integrity of its elections. Photo ID will be required in 2016, there will be no more same day registration, and voters will be required to vote in their own precincts.

The reasoning behind these changes was simple. Voter ID prevents a voter from being disenfranchised by someone who casts an illegal vote. Same day registration does not provide a way to check to make sure someone actually lives at the address they state. As I recently reported, a friend of mine who lives in North Carolina checked the voter registration rolls a few weeks ago and found out that there were six people who claimed her house as a residence, but did not live there. That is potentially six illegal votes cancelling out the votes of legal voters. Requiring people to vote in their own precinct ensures that they receive the appropriate ballot. Precinct ballots vary according to local offices being filled, obviously, voters need to vote for their local officials–not someone else’s. The idea behind the new law was to secure the right of voters to an honest election.

Unfortunately, some of that law was recently struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. According to the U. S. Supreme Court blog, the Fourth Circuit judges felt that the new laws would limit the black vote. I guess I’m a little dense, but it seems to me that if it actually limited anyone’s ability to vote (which it doesn’t), it would limit everyone’s ability to vote. Registering to vote is easy–it can be done five days a week at the Board of Elections or when you get your license. Advance registration gives the Board of Elections time to confirm your address. Voting in your precinct should not be a problem as your precinct is determined by where you live–therefore the voting place should be relatively close to your home.

Well, now the U. S. Supreme Court is involved.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court, with two Justices noting dissents, on Wednesday afternoon allowed North Carolina to bar voters from registering and casting their ballots on the same day, and to refuse to count votes that were cast in the wrong polling places.  Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.  The majority did not explain its action.

The order gives the state time to file an appeal from lower-court rulings striking down those two provisions, which were part of a larger, sweeping change in voting rights in the state.  If the Court grants review of the state’s appeal, the postponement will remain in effect until there is a decision.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for herself and Justice Sotomayor, argued that the two restrictions at issue as well as others in the broader reach of the new law probably would have been found illegal, if the Voting Rights Act of 1965 remained in full effect and North Carolina had had to ask permission from the federal government to make those changes.  The Court last year limited the 1965 Act in a way that the dissenters said “effectively nullified” the law’s pre-clearance requirement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that the two provisions permitted by Wednesday’s Supreme Court order would risk a significant reduction in voting opportunities for black voters in North Carolina, in violation of a part of the Voting Rights Act still intact.

Ensuring the integrity of the vote does not disenfranchise anyone–in fact, it ensures that legal voters will not be disenfranchised by illegal voters.