Court packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.
The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.
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Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) on Thursday became the first state leader to sign legislation affirming abortion rights after a news leak revealed that the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision is likely to soon be overturned.
The bill provides legal protections to those performing or seeking abortions — including those coming in from other states to do so — and expands the list of practitioners who are permitted to perform abortion procedures.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, official guest host Grant Henry discussed the fear-mongering and the politicization of the Supreme Court.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a plan Thursday to force a vote on legislation that would codify Roe v. Wade – following the release earlier this week of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion indicating justices may soon overturn the high-court’s decades-old abortion-related ruling.
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The current uproar over the leaked draft from the U.S. Supreme Court deliberations over abortion – and the rage of the pro-abortion Left over the likelihood that the conservative justices (three of whom were nominated by President Donald Trump) will now repeal Roe v. Wade – is in some ways a lot of noise about the inevitable.
Roe v. Wade was a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion across the whole country and made America one of the most extreme abortion systems in the entire world. Importantly, it was a court decision by appointed judges – not legislation made by elected legislators. It was inevitably going to be overturned sooner or later.
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Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont reaffirmed his commitment to signing pro-abortion legislation, once it arrives on his desk.
The measure, House Bill 5414, would help protect “medical providers and patients seeking abortion care in Connecticut who may be traveling from other states that have outlawed abortion.”
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Mandela Barnes, a Democrat running to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, utilized a leaked document from the Supreme Court to reiterate his call for an end to the filibuster.
The document from the Court was an initial draft from Justice Samuel Alito that suggested the Court favors overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that federally legalized abortion across the country.
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Two moderate Republican senators criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in a leaked draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito on Tuesday.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that if the draft opinion was accurate, “it rocks my confidence in the court right now,” Politico’s Burgess Everett reported. Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the accuracy of the leak in a statement Tuesday.
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Congressman John Rose (R-TN-06) blasted a “radical and unethical” leak from the Supreme Court, disclosing an initial draft of a potential ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson.
The leaked document, obtained by Politico, signals that a majority of justices on the Court favor overturning Roe v. Wade, a landmark ruling that detailed a constitutional right for abortions in the country.
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A message from the Public Information Office of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) says a report in German-owned Politico containing a leaked draft of the Court’s opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade is authentic.
“Yesterday, a news organization published an opinion in a pending case,” said the statement from the Court. “Justices circulate draft opinions internally as a routine and essential part of the Court’s confidential deliberative work. Although the document described in yesterday’s reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position on the issues of the case.”
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A draft of the majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito leaked to Politico suggests the Supreme Court voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion rights decision.
The reported 98-page opinion of at least five justices offers a sharp rebuke of Roe and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, both of which protected abortion rights.
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The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that the city of Boston violated the U.S. Constitution when it refused to allow a local organization to fly a Christian flag in front of City Hall.
The nine justices said the city has established a public forum outside of City Hall, and invited all organizations to use the flagpole in front of the building to commemorate events. Not allowing the Christian flag to be flown denied the group the same rights as those afforded to all others and was a violation of free speech, said the court.
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The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a major immigration case, one of several key legal battles working their way through the federal judicial system as illegal immigration soars.
In Biden v. Texas, the attorneys general of Missouri and Texas sued after the Biden administration ended the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
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Nineteen attorneys general, led by Indiana, have filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit filed by Texas and Missouri against the Biden administration.
They’re asking the Supreme Court to uphold a lower court’s order instructing the Biden administration to follow the law to fully reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), otherwise known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
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Following four days of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late March, the full Senate voted 53-47 last week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as an associate justice of the Supreme Court—fulfilling Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to name a black woman to the high court. Three Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in voting to confirm Jackson—Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Utah’s Mitt Romney.
Imagine a slightly different scenario: a Republican president nominates someone to serve on the Supreme Court and asks a 50-50 Senate to confirm that person. You can be absolutely sure that Democrats would force the vice president to break the tie to get that nominee on the bench. Remember when, in 2016, President Trump nominated Betsy Devos to be secretary of education and Vice President Mike Pence had to break a tie, even without an evenly split Senate?
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Observers of the Supreme Court should ask themselves what’s the more preposterous mainstream media mindmeld: whether Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself or resign over his wife’s political activism, or the legal brilliance of the Supreme Court Justice-to-be, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Truth be told, what we have here is the myrmidon media’s mockery of the most brilliant Supreme Court justice ever, one they have derisively dismissed as a lawn jockey of the Right, a lackey of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, someone who will be tutored on race by future Justice Jackson, and now a pawn or puppet of his wife. The actual contrast between the two judges could hardly be greater. Of course, neither justice should be held completely responsible for the allies he attracts.
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On Thursday, a federal court upheld Joe Biden’s mandate that all federal government employees be forced to take a coronavirus vaccine.
The New York Post reports that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana issued a ruling that overturned a lower court’s decision to block the mandate, which was first issued in September of 2021. In January, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown had ruled the mandate unconstitutional, determining that the rule constituted an overstep in federal authority.
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Republican members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission say they did everything the state Supreme Court ordered them to do. Still, they say independent map makers ran out of time, leaving tweaks to a previously unconstitutional GOP plan as the only option for new state legislative districts.
The responses from Gov. Mike DeWine, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, State Auditor Keith Faber, Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, and House Speaker Robert Cupp, R-Lima, came at the 9 a.m. deadline on Monday the court gave to show cause why the group should not be held in contempt.
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Republican Sen. Susan Collins says she’ll will vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, guaranteeing President Biden’s judicial nominee at least a slim path toward confirmation.
Jackson will need 51 votes in final Senate vote – with the chamber evenly split among 50 Democrats and 50 Republican. With no GOP support, Vice President Kamala Harris would cast the decisive, tiebreaker vote.
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Using the pretext of the so-called insurrection on January 6, 2021, the long knives are out for Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Post-election text exchanges between Mrs. Thomas and Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief-of-staff, recently were leaked by the January 6 select committee to none other than the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who darkly described the communications as proof that “Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election result.”
The small cache of texts—29 total—shows Thomas expressing frustration at the election’s outcome. There is nothing sinister, and certainly nothing criminal, about the messages.
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The government’s sustained pressure on social media platforms to censor and report purported COVID-19 misinformation amounts to “state action” that violates the First Amendment, according to a lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of three Twitter users.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a frequent litigant against COVID-related administrative action, is representing theoretical cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, lawyer Michael Senger and stay-at-home father Daniel Kotzin.
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The Supreme Court on Friday blocked a lower court’s ruling that prevented the Navy from making deployment decisions for Navy SEALs based on their COVID-19 vaccination status.
The ruling clears the way for the Navy to keep SEALs from deployment if they aren’t vaccinated. The SEALs had sued challenging the Navy’s COVID-19 policies after being denied religious exemptions.
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been released from the hospital after suffering with an infection.
The Supreme Court announced Thomas’ hospitalization Sunday. So far, no other details of his condition are public.
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Sounding ever more a candidate seeking the White House again, former President Donald Trump on Saturday night attacked Democrats as a party of “socialists and communists” so extreme that they chose a Supreme Court nominee who “can’t even say what a woman is.”
“A party that’s unwilling to admit that men and women are biologically different in defiance of all scientific and human history is a party that should not be anywhere near the levers of power in the United States,” Trump told a raucous rally in rural Georgia.
In a 90-minute speech, Trump also rallied Republicans to get behind gubernatorial candidate David Perdue and football star-turned-Senate candidate Herschel Walker and to defeat incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.
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When Joe Biden announced his pick to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, he told us he’d found someone with “extraordinary character.” Biden said Ketanji Brown Jackson possessed “uncompromising integrity” and “a strong moral compass.”
Like every word that tumbles through Joe’s veneers, this, too, was a lie. Jackson has already proven that she is a woman of weak character, uncompromising dishonesty, and a broken moral compass.
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While conservatives noted the civility shown Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during the Senate confirmation hearings as compared to those of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, liberals complained that the Supreme Court nominee was asked difficult questions.
Jackson, President Joe Biden’s first nominee to the high court, has a history of progressive views and judicial philosophy, such as praising “the godfather of Critical Race Theory” and reducing prison time for a child pornography offender. In contrast, former President Donald Trump’s last two Supreme Court nominees, Kavanaugh and Barrett, are both conservative Catholics with pro-life views regarding abortion.
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On Thursday, the Arizona State Legislature passed a bill that would ban all abortions after 15 weeks.
ABC News reports that the Arizona House of Representatives voted along party lines to approve the bill, which is similar to a law already passed in Mississippi that has sparked perhaps the most influential Supreme Court case on abortion since 1973’s Roe v. Wade. Having already passed the State Senate, the bill now goes to the desk of Governor Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.), who is expected to sign it.
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Confirmation hearings for D.C. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s first U.S. Supreme Court nominee, began Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. During an event in Washington, D.C. on Monday morning, activists gathered to rally on behalf of the nominee who could be the first black woman seated on the nation’s highest court.
“It’s also, for so many of us, a moment that is personal,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, told the crowd. “It is personal if you have ever been the only person sitting in a room. It is personal if you have ever wondered, ‘Is that for me?’” Over the past several weeks, Graves, a graduate of Yale Law school, has given dozens of interviews in support of Jackson’s nomination.
In a January column for CNN, Graves denounced “the current homogeneity of the legal profession and judicial system” and claimed “the perspective of White men has been treated as the default” in court proceedings.
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been in a Washington, D.C., hospital since Friday with flu-like symptoms, according to an announcement from the court.
“He underwent tests, was diagnosed with an infection, and is being treated with intravenous antibiotics. His symptoms are abating, he is resting comfortably, and he expects to be released from the hospital in a day or two,” the press release stated.
“Justice Thomas will participate in the consideration and discussion of any cases for which he is not present on the basis of the briefs, transcripts, and audio of the oral arguments,” according to the court.
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Ohio voters will not be able to decide on candidates for the state Legislature during the May 3 primary after the state Supreme Court struck down new district maps for the third time.
In a letter to House and Senate leadership and Gov. Mike DeWine, Secretary of State Frank LaRose said it was no longer logistically possible to include district-specific legislative races on the ballots.
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Corporations, including Citigroup, Apple and Match, are helping their employees undergo abortions in light of new, state-level restrictions.
Citigroup announced a policy of covering travel costs for U.S.-based employees seeking abortions “in response to changes in reproductive healthcare laws in certain states” in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. The policy will cover airfare and lodging, according to Bloomberg.
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A “trigger bill” was introduced this week in the Ohio General Assembly that would ban abortion in nearly all cases provided that certain conditions are met.
The text of HB 598 is clear: No person shall purposely cause or induce an abortion by either of the following: (1) Prescribing, administering, or personally furnishing a drug or substance; (2) Using an instrument or other means.
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No matter what political party you align with, we can all agree that 2022 is going to be a blockbuster term for the Supreme Court. Cases regarding abortion, gun control, and affirmative action are all poised to be decided this year.
In the past the Left has used the Court to impose its radical ideology on American society because it couldn’t use the electoral process to do it. Now they fear the Court is no longer hospitable to these efforts.
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A pundit who called the Constitution garbage is a leader of a dark money group funding a million dollar campaign to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, according to tax documents provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation by Americans for Public Trust.
Demand Justice seeks to nominate left-wing judges to American courts. Most recently, the group is pushing for the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
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Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) met with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday following her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin will last at least another month.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Tuesday extended former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Mike Gableman’s investigation until the end of April.
“The office of Special Counsel has done an outstanding job looking into the election concerns people all across Wisconsin had,” Vos said in a statement after signing a new contract with Gableman.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a Saturday fundraising touting the idea of expanding the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) while praising President Joe Biden’s recent SCOTUS nominee.
“Congress has expanded the Supreme Court seven times before,” the subject line of the email said. “It’s now time for the eighth.”
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The Supreme Court on Friday reimposed the death sentence for so-called Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reversing a federal appeals court ruling voiding the sentence.
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In the interest of a return to normalcy, we take this short break from COVID and Ukraine coverage to bring to your attention an actual conservative policy matter. The pesky trial lawyers and their junk science “experts” are at it again, providing certain justices of the Supreme Court an opportunity to show us they can still do the right thing.
I’m not pointing fingers at say, Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, but certain esteemed members of the court who had less than smooth sailing in their confirmation battles and for whom conservatives stormed the ramparts (figuratively speaking of course), have left us wondering if they were worth the battle scars. Here’s some low hanging fruit for them to pick off and make everyone breathe a little easier. All they have to do is vote to take a certain case.
The case involves a long-running dispute brought by the inventor of a special warming blanket called the Bair Hugger (now owned by 3M) which has proven to reduce post-operative infections and other complications and has been used in over 300 million surgeries worldwide to maintain patients’ body temperatures. The inventor, Dr. Scott Augustine made a fortune on this device but lost his rights to the product and its proceeds when he pled guilty to Medicare fraud in an unrelated matter. Dr. Augustine then invented a competing device and waged a campaign to discredit the Bair Hugger claiming that it caused infections. He then hired “experts” and funded studies to back up his claim. Except one of the actual authors of the studies called those studies “marketing rather than research.” As in not based on facts. The FDA admonished Dr. Augustine to stop the false campaign. And not a single physician who uses the Bair Hugger, or a single epidemiologist or any public health officials have supported Dr. Augustine’s contention.
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The Supreme Court heard arguments in West Virginia v. EPA on Monday, a blockbuster case that could have major ramifications in future separation of powers cases.
The case, which stems from an Obama administration climate rule, has wide-ranging implications for how the federal agencies may issue future regulations and rules, according to the parties that brought the case before the high court. States, environmental groups, large power utility companies, civil liberties organizations and pro-coal industry groups have inserted themselves in the case over the last several years, signaling the importance of the questions it has raised.
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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Superior, Wisconsin, on Wednesday to tout the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
According to the White House, the visit will focus on the effects of the legislation, including the advancement of “good-paying union jobs.”
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Medication-induced abortions accounted for 54% of all abortions in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Abortion pills have grown in popularity since they were first introduced in 2000, the Guttmacher Institute reported. And rules requiring women to receive their first two abortion pills at a clinic or doctor’s office were lifted during the pandemic, allowing women to speak with doctors via “telemedicine” and get the pills by mail, The New York Times reported.
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A federal judge Friday ruled that Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) officials discriminated against Asian students by lowering the bar for admission to Thomas Jefferson High School (TJHS) in a push for “diversity.”
“This is a monumental win for parents and students here in Fairfax County, but also for equal treatment in education across the country,” Erin Wilcox an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) said in a press release. “We hope this ruling sends the message that government cannot choose who receives the opportunity to attend public schools based on race or ethnicity.”
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President Biden announced Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jackson, who donated to and worked with former President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, has a record of rulings that seemingly favor Democrats.
In a 2015 ruling, for example, she declined to force former Hillary Clinton aide Philipe Reines to explain why he used a private account for work-related emails, according to Politico.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich led a lawsuit with 12 other attorneys general against the Biden administration for dropping the Public Charge rule implemented in 2018 underneath the Trump administration, which ended up at the Supreme Court on Wednesday for oral arguments. The Public Charge rule made noncitizens ineligible for green cards if they are receiving public assistance, which was U.S. policy for over 100 years.
“The United States is indeed the land of the free and of industrious immigrants, but it is not a welfare state,” said Brnovich in a statement about Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco. “The Biden Administration has once again caved to far-left groups attempting to erase a common-sense law that we’ve had in various forms for more than 100 years.”
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It doesn’t take a genius or even a veteran political watcher to conclude that Americans don’t have long attention spans.
Perhaps the lack of retention is due to the establishment news media’s fondness for sensationalizing every little tidbit of information whether the hysteria is warranted or not. How many times have we seen “Breaking News” flash across a screen to describe an occurrence that normally wouldn’t prompt much mention at all, such as a press secretary leaving vice president Kamala “no one gets out of my hemisphere happy” Harris or yet another House Democrat retiring rather than risking being humiliated and summarily booted out of office because of senile president Joe Biden’s abysmal job approval ratings or his or her district was reassembled in a manner that made a return trip to Washington too arduous.
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A petition asking President Joe Biden to appoint Dr. Carol Swain, an accomplished professor of law and Yale University graduate, to be the next Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court has reached over 1,000 signatures in just one week.
“We, the undersigned, respectfully suggest – and fully support – Carol M. Swain, PhD as your nominee to serve as the next Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court,” the petition says.
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President Joe Biden’s commitment to only nominate a a new Supreme Court justice who is a Black female does not have broad support, a newly released poll suggests.
The ABC/Ipsos poll found that 76% of surveyed Americans say Biden should consider “all possible nominees” to fill Breyer’s seat while 23% say Biden should “consider only nominees who are Black women, as he has pledged to do.”
Biden promised several times during the campaign to nominate a Black female justice, saying he is “looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court.”
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In response to President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a Monday petition was launched urging Biden to nominate legal expert and professor Dr. Carol Swain, PhD.
“We, the undersigned, respectfully suggest – and fully support – Carol M. Swain, PhD as your nominee to serve as the next Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court,” the petition says.
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A U.S. district judge serving the District of Minnesota is said to be on President Joe Biden’s “shortlist” to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
But Minnesotans might remember her for her leniency in the sentencing of a violent arsonist.
Judge Wilhelmina Wright is one of several top candidates for the soon-to-be vacant Supreme Court seat, as outlets like The Hill and Forbes have reported.
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