New York District Attorney Letitia James on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to block a lawsuit from Missouri that is attempting to stop former President Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case.
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When the Supreme Court reversed a preliminary injunction against several federal agencies and officials for “coerc[ing] or significantly encourag[ing] a platform’s content-moderation decisions,” the ideologically hybrid majority concluded that well-documented federal pressure to censor government-disfavored narratives was unlikely to recur.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, scolded his colleagues for their perceived credulity. The high court just provided “an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think,” he wrote.
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A liberal nonprofit will spend millions feeding information about the Supreme Court to swing state moms in an effort to turn them against former President Donald Trump, The Washington Post reported.
Demand Justice, an organization founded to oppose Trump’s judicial nominations, will spend $2 million on mobilization efforts and advertisements in Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin aimed at convincing mothers not to support the former president, the Post reported. The campaign will focus on how a Supreme Court made up of Trump appointees could impact issues related to abortion, firearms and healthcare in the coming years.
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While President Joe Biden’s halting performance in the first 2024 presidential debate generated the most significant commentary, it was some of former President Donald Trump’s remarks that raised concerns for pro-life voters. Those remarks ended up foreshadowing the recently proposed Republican platform’s surrender on the abortion issue.
Trump’s first misstep was his contention that “everybody” wanted abortion regulated at the state level. “Fifty-one years ago you had Roe v. Wade,” Trump argued, “and everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives. Everybody wanted it back… Ronald Reagan wanted it brought back” (emphasis added).
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Sentencing for Trump’s guilty verdict was originally scheduled for Thursday, but Merchan allowed a delay last week for Trump’s lawyers to argue on the Supreme Court ruling, according to NBC News.
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Oklahoma is the most recent state facing a legal battle with the Biden administration on the issue of illegal immigration, with a federal judge blocking legislation that would make entering the country illegally a state crime.
Oklahoma’s House Bill 4156 makes it a crime to be in Oklahoma without legal status. The legislation was signed into law on April 30, but was blocked by a federal judge in June after the Biden administration filed a lawsuit against the state.
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Reasonable constitutional scholars and jurists could quibble about the details and impact of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision in Trump v. United States, but the hysteria coming from the left, including President Joe Biden and dissenting Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, is beyond rational discourse. An inability to control emotions and anger has become commonplace for progressives who don’t get their way.
Writing for a 6-3 majority, split on ideological lines, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion laid out a three tiered approach to presidential immunity premised on the Constitution’s vesting of the complete executive power in one individual, giving him duties and power of “unrivaled gravity and breadth” and making that individual a full and equal branch of the United States government, alongside the Congress and courts. Roberts observed that the president’s constitutional powers are often “conclusive and preclusive” and those powers may not be subject to review by Congress or the courts.
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The far-left advocacy group Demand Justice announced its intentions to spend as much as $10 million on a messaging campaign smearing the Supreme Court after its ruling in favor of President Donald Trump on the question of presidential immunity.
According to Politico, Demand Justice’s goals for the $10 million spending spree include opposition research on potential future Supreme Court justices and suggestions for ethics reforms within the court. The group also plans to target such demographics as women and younger voters, falsely claiming that these groups have been “attacked” by the Supreme Court’s recent rulings. Demand Justice also intends to attack right-wing judicial groups that played a role in shaping the court’s conservative majority under the Trump Administration.
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The letter comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 opinion permitting emergency abortions to continue in Idaho.
The Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday informed hospital and doctor associations that they must perform emergency abortions to save a woman’s health.
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Last week, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.
(I must confess a personal interest in all of this: My civil rights organization, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represented individual plaintiffs in Murthy.)
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Prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office agreed on Tuesday to delay former President Donald Trump’s sentencing, The New York Times reported.
A Manhattan jury convicted Trump May 30 on 34 felony counts of falsification of business records. Bragg’s office agreed to a request to delay the sentencing in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that found presidents have immunity from prosecution for “official acts” taken in office, but called the motion by Trump’s attorneys meritless, according to the NYT.
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Democratic New York Rep. Joe Morelle announced Monday that he will file a constitutional amendment that will virtually invalidate the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.
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The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that former President Donald Trump is immune from federal prosecution for official acts he took while in office in split 6-3 ruling. However, the court ruled that there is no immunity for unofficial acts.
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In a devastating but well-deserved blow to the Department of Justice’s criminal prosecution of January 6 protesters, the U.S. Supreme Court today overturned the DOJ’s use of 18 USC 1512(c)(2), the most prevalent felony in J6 cases.
The statute, commonly referred to as “obstruction of an official proceeding,” has been applied in roughly 350 J6 cases; it also represents two of four counts in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s J6-related criminal indictment of Donald Trump in Washington.
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The Supreme Court on Friday ruled 6-3 that banning homeless camps in public spaces isn’t a violation of the constitution.
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Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, must report to prison by Monday after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal on Friday.
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A Supreme Court ruling on Friday limits the scope of obstruction charges against Jan. 6, 2021 rioters, which is the same charge former President Trump faces in his 2020 election interference case.
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The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a landmark decision that gave federal agencies broad regulatory power.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) moved Monday to shut down a lawsuit that exposed the Biden administration’s collusion with a transgender medical organization to develop the very standards it is now using to defend child sex changes at the Supreme Court.
After the Supreme Court agreed to take up the Biden administration’s challenge to Tennessee’s ban on child sex changes, the DOJ asked a lower court to put another case challenging a similar Alabama ban on hold pending the high court’s decision. While the DOJ requested a halt on the Alabama case to “avoid the prospect of re-litigation of the claims” after the Supreme Court issues its ruling, the defendants argued the government likely has another motive: shielding information about the administration’s involvement in developing the standards it heavily relies on from the Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked opioid maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement which would have provided immunity to the Sackler family from facing lawsuits over their role in the opioid crisis.
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The Supreme Court inadvertently posted a copy of a ruling on its website Wednesday in the Biden administration’s challenge to Idaho’s abortion ban, a court spokesperson confirmed.
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The House subcommittee chairman investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot’s intelligence and security failures made an extraordinary intervention Wednesday at the Supreme Court, telling the justices he believes an earlier Democrat-led investigation into the tragedy was “factually and procedurally invalid” and therefore could not lawfully hold ex-Trump adviser Stephen Bannon in contempt.
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The Supreme Court issued a ruling Wednesday siding with the Biden administration in a landmark case that challenged the federal government’s ability to pressure social media companies to censor speech.
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After almost a month following former President Donald Trump’s conviction by a New York City jury on May 30, Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced on June 20 that his state is suing New York for its “direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump”.
That’s good — better late than never — as Bailey stands as the first Republican Attorney General to actually announce such a lawsuit, with not much time before Trump’s scheduled sentencing on July 11, which could imprison to presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
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The Supreme Court rejected Thursday a challenge to a 2017 tax law passed by Congress.
The case, Moore v. United States, considers whether the 16th Amendment permits taxing unrealized gains. Kathleen and Charles Moore sued for a refund in 2019 after they were hit with a $14,729 tax bill for their investment in an overseas company, though they never received any payment in earnings from the company.
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The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Starbucks on Thursday in the company’s challenge to a judicial order that would have required them to rehire seven Memphis employees that were fired while they participated in union efforts.
The “Memphis Seven” publicly released a letter addressed to the Starbucks CEO and agreed to sit down in a store with a TV news crew to discuss the union efforts.
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After several decades of conservative control of the Supreme Court and a string of rulings against their legislative and social priorities, Democrats and left-leaning media appear to be mounting an all-out assault against the judicial branch, casting doubt on its legitimacy and impartiality, while working to undercut the reputations and credibility of its more conservative justices.
Ostensibly conservative since the appointment of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1986, the court has generally not attracted comparable partisan scrutiny to the extent that it has under the Biden administration. The Roberts court, however, currently boasts three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, who have solidified the court’s conservative character and handed conservatives decades-sought wins on abortion, gun rights, and affirmative action.
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The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal rule put in place during former President Donald Trump’s administration that prohibited bump stocks for guns, handing a major victory to Second Amendment advocates.
In a 6-3, ruling, the court ruled the devices added to semiautomatic weapons to make them fire faster does not convert weapons into prohibited machine guns.
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The Supreme Court sided unanimously Thursday against several doctors and pro-life medical associations who brought a challenge to the abortion pill.
In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the Supreme Court held that the doctors do not have standing to challenge the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to roll back safety regulations for the abortion pill. While recognizing the plaintiffs have “sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority rulings that those kind of objections are not enough to show the doctors would be injured by the FDA’s actions, noting the federal courts are “the wrong forum” for addressing their concerns.
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Though Hunter Biden was found guilty Tuesday on federal gun charges – on crimes dating back to 2018 – the first son’s legal troubles are far from over, and House Republicans leading impeachment inquiry into his father, President Joe Biden, say this should be only the beginning of the accountability.
Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement following the conviction that his client’s legal team “will continue to vigorously pursue all the legal challenges available to Hunter.”
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The controversial business practice known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) could soon see its legal challenges take it all the way to the Supreme Court.
According to Axios, the case that could spark Supreme Court action was filed by the same group that successfully saw the practice of affirmative action overturned by the court last year. The current case saw an appeals court ultimately rule that a venture capital firm had to shut down its grant program that was exclusively for black women.
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This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech” ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.
The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News’ new “Censorship Files” series, and continuing installments of the “Twitter Files” series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the “military-industrial-academic-complex” – building on President Eisenhower’s formulation – in a 1967 speech.
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The Supreme Court unanimously held Thursday that the National Rifle Association (NRA) “plausibly alleged” that a New York official violated its First Amendment rights, finding that government officials cannot “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”
The justices allowed the NRA to pursue its First Amendment claim against former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) Maria Vullo, vacating a lower court ruling that found the NRA failed to show Vullo “crossed the line between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce.” They held that the gun rights group has a plausible case that Vullo “violated the First Amendment by coercing regulated entities to terminate their business relationships with the NRA in order to punish or suppress gun-promotion advocacy.”
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The Biden administration is currently waging a legal campaign against Republican-led states, arguing their laws that effectively restrict illegal immigration are unconstitutional.
The Department of Justice has so far filed lawsuits against three different states for enacting laws that largely empower police to enforce immigration rules. However, these state leaders, in the backdrop of an unprecedented border crisis, say they have no choice but to take up the issue themselves because the Biden administration won’t — and other Republican states may soon follow suit.
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The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday that a lower court “clearly erred” when it held that South Carolina racially gerrymandered its congressional district map.
The majority held that the “circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race, not partisan preferences, drove the districting process” behind the creation of the map.
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A coalition of medical professionals revealed the methods by which medical schools across the country are circumventing the Supreme Court’s ruling outlawing the practice of affirmative action, and employing such race-based policies anyway.
According to Fox News, the group Do No Harm released new research this week revealing that “many in the healthcare establishment nevertheless remain ideologically committed to the principle of racial favoritism and reject the virtue of race blindness.” This comes despite the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last year in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which determined that affirmative action, the practice of admitting students or hiring staff based solely on their race, was unconstitutional.
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The Supreme Court rejected a challenge on Thursday that could have paved the way for a consumer protection regulator to be dismantled.
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At one time, unfavorable outcomes in the four court cases against former President Donald Trump seemed likely to be politically damaging for the three-time campaigner, but as the cases have faced scrutiny and delays, public opinion has recently shifted.
Yesterday, the Georgia Appeals Court agreed to hear an appeal in the state election case brought by controversial Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Earlier this week, a Florida judge indefinitely suspended the federal trial in the classified documents case.
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Democratic strategist James Carville on Sunday mocked young voters who are struggling with whether they will vote for the Democratic Party.
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To convince the Supreme Court that the Biden administration could use federal Medicare funding to force hospitals to perform abortions in violation of Idaho law, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar conceived and gave birth to some unusual arguments Wednesday.
She reached for a 129-year-old precedent that crippled the labor movement for decades, neutered legal obligations to the “unborn child” in the federal law that allegedly requires abortions in certain situations, and didn’t deny a Republican administration could use her rationale to functionally ban abortion and even transgender care nationwide.
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The Supreme Court will hear history-making arguments on Thursday in the case of Donald J. Trump v United States. For the first time, the highest court in the land will publicly debate the untested and unsettled question as to whether a former president is immune from criminal prosecution for his conduct in office. And despite claims by Democrats, the news media, and self-proclaimed “legal experts” to the contrary, the matter is far from clear-cut.
The case arises from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment against Trump related to the events of January 6 and alleged attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election. Smith’s flimsy indictment—two of four counts are currently under review by SCOTUS and the other two fall under similarly vague “conspiracy” laws—-and an unprecedented ruling issued last year by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan will be put to the test by the justices.
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In July 2023, Joshua Youngerman was arrested in California on five misdemeanors for his participation in the events of January 6. According to charging documents, Youngerman entered the Capitol at 2:37 p.m. — 20 minutes after the House went into recess amid the escalating chaos — through an open door as Capitol…
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The Supreme Court declined Monday to stop a police officer’s lawsuit against a Black Lives Matter activist who led the 2016 protest where he was injured by another individual.
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Recently appointed 4th Circuit Judge Nicole Berner is legally married to the pro-abortion lawyer who represented Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her.
The Washington Post describes Berner as “the first openly gay judge and the first labor lawyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit,” which covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Berner, who is also pro-abortion, formerly served as a staff attorney for Planned Parenthood, where she focused on “protecting and expanding access” to chemical abortion drugs.
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Judges are ordering Jan. 6 defendants who fought against their sentences to be released early pending an appeal as the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments next week about the legitimacy of a key charge that many of them were indicted.
The attorneys of three Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants are set to argue before the Supreme Court that the crime of obstructing or impeding an official proceeding is only limited to destroying evidence in governmental probes, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
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A circuit appeals court halted Texas’ border enforcement laws on Tuesday the same day they were allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court.
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A preliminary Supreme Court ruling that allowed Texas to begin enforcing a state law empowering local police to arrest and deport illegal aliens if the federal government doesn’t should inspire other states to follow suit, prominent conservatives tell Just the News.
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Federal officials privately scold reporters and attempt to shape or even stop their coverage on a regular basis, without getting sued for First Amendment violations.
How close is that to White House aides privately and repeatedly badgering their counterparts at social media companies and President Biden publicly accusing Facebook of “killing people,” for insufficient censorship of disfavored narratives on COVID-19?
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The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an emergency request from former Trump advisor Peter Navarro to remain out of prison while he appeals his conviction for contempt of Congress.
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The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that there are circumstances when government officials can permissibly block a constituent from their social media pages, provided they are not claiming to speak on the state’s behalf.
The case, Lindke v. Freed, stemmed from Port Huron, Michigan, resident Kevin Lindke’s First Amendment lawsuit against city manager James Freed, who blocked Lindke from his Facebook page over comments criticizing the city’s response to COVID-19. While officials may look like they are “always on the clock,” not every encounter is “part of the job,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the opinion of the court.
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