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Latest Articles: U.S. Constitution
Supreme Court Fallout: Calif. Teachers Sue Unions to Recoup Unconstitutional 'Agency Fees'
Post Date: 2018-07-09 09:38:12 by Tooconservative
2 Comments
Justice is coming for unions that forced non-members to pay "non-political" agency fees that went to prop up Democratic candidates. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that forcing workers who disagree with a union to make these payments anyway violates the workers' First Amendment rights.Less than a week after that ruling, Janus v. Association of Federal, State, City, and Municipal Employees (FSCME), seven California teachers have filed a class-action lawsuit to recoup unjustly forced fees. "This lawsuit will enable teachers like me to recover the agency fees that we were wrongly forced to pay against our will," Scott Wilford, the plaintiff in the new lawsuit, ...
Inside Donald Trump's Supreme Court Deliberations
Post Date: 2018-07-08 10:09:40 by Tooconservative
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. . . At his private club in New Jersey this weekend, Trump has been consulting with aides and advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, who flew up to work through the pluses and minuses of each candidate. As Trump likes to do, he is also phoning friends and lawmakers to sound them out about potential contenders. As of Saturday evening, advisers say, the president had narrowed his list down to four candidates. Raymond Kethledge was the leading contender, although officials stress that Trump has not yet settled on a choice. Trump has been describing Kethledge to aides as “Gorsuch 2.0,” a reference to his 2017 successful nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Trump sees that nomination as ...
Judge Raymond Kethledge and the Second Amendment [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2018-07-07 09:49:34 by Tooconservative
53 Comments
Judge Raymond Kethledge vigorously defends — and exercises — individual rights under the Second Amendment. On the bench, he has faithfully applied the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, and ruled that Second Amendment rights deserve at least as much protection as any others. Off the bench, he is an avid hunter and a lecturer on originalism, textualism, and the Second Amendment. Perhaps the most important Second Amendment case to come before the Sixth Circuit in the last few years — so important that the court took it en banc — is Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department. The case dealt with a federal statute that barred anyone ...
Fox News: Kavanaugh and Kethledge new SCOTUS frontrunners? [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2018-07-05 14:08:39 by Tooconservative
54 Comments
Three days ago the alleged finalists were Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, but that was before Trump began interviewing shortlisters. And the interview with Raymond Kethledge reportedly went very, very well. .@FoxNews is told that @realDonaldTrump has completed the interview process for his @USSupremeCourt pick. Raymond Kethledge and Brett Kavanaugh are said to be the front-runners to replace Justice Kennedy. Announcement Monday night. — John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) July 5, 2018 Judge Raymond Kethledge If anyone’s well positioned to know that the winds have changed in the West Wing, it’s a Fox News reporter. And if anything’s likely to boost a shortlister ...
Fifth Circuit Says No, You Fucking May Not Strip Search A Classful Of Female Students To Find $50
Post Date: 2018-07-05 11:13:54 by Deckard
15 Comments
from the because-of-course-you-can't-the-hell-were-you-thinking dept The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court convened to write an opinion [PDF] the judges shouldn't have had to write. But then, of course, they had to because the lower court screwed everything up. The first paragraph sums up the issue -- and the appeals court's decision -- succinctly and devastatingly. (h/t Raffi Melkonian) During a sixth-grade choir class, an assistant principal allegedly ordered a mass, suspicionless strip search of the underwear of twenty-two preteen girls. All agree the search violated the girls’ constitutional rights under Texas and federal law. Even so, the district court dismissed the ...
The ACLU’s Longstanding Commitment to Defending Speech We Hate
Post Date: 2018-06-29 23:10:27 by Gatlin
7 Comments
The ACLU, the nation’s oldest and largest civil liberties organization, has always had its share of critics. Many condemned us for defending Nazis’ right to march in Skokie in the 1970s. Some, like former Attorney General Ed Meese, labeled us the “criminals’ lobby” for advocating for constitutional rights for those accused of crime. We earned few friends when we represented Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen suspected of terrorist ties and killed in a drone strike by the Obama administration. After we represented a white supremacist denied a permit by the city of Charlottesville, we were criticized for defending white supremacists. Such criticism comes with the ...
The ACLU's Biggest Roadblock to Fighting Mass Surveillance
Post Date: 2018-06-29 15:14:15 by Gatlin
17 Comments
IN MARCH 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a type of National Security Agency bulk monitoring known as "upstream" surveillance. More than three years after the ACLU originally filed the suit, the case is still mired in procedural and bureaucratic limbo. But on Friday, a hearing over one such roadblock in Maryland district court could bring long-awaited progress. The Wikimedia Foundation, which the ACLU is representing along with cocounsel from the Knight First Amendment Institute and Cooley LLP, engages in more than a trillion communications per year with people around the world, and has hundreds of millions of visitors ...
When Privacy Prevails: ACLU Lawyer Dishes on SCOTUS' Carpenter Decision
Post Date: 2018-06-29 14:45:54 by Gatlin
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Nathan Wessler, who argued 'Carpenter' before the SCOTUS, said the decision made way for courts to address protections for "highly sensitive" data held by third-party companies. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Carpenter v. United States marks a significant gain for privacy advocates as well as a monumental shift in how both the Fourth Amendment and the “third-party” doctrine are interpreted. Among those who made the decision possible is Nathan Wessler, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued on behalf of Timothy Carpenter before the court. Legaltech News recently caught up with Wessler to get his thoughts on the case’s significance, ...
Contra Ben Shapiro on Judge Kavanaugh
Post Date: 2018-06-29 13:43:42 by nolu chan
12 Comments
Contra Ben Shapiro on Judge Kavanaugh By Ed Whelan June 28, 2018 4:53 PM I have no interest in favoring one outstanding Supreme Court candidate over another, so I don’t intend to say much about any of the candidates before a nominee is selected. But I also don’t like to see unfair or mistaken charges made, so I might occasionally weigh in. Such as now. The estimable Ben Shapiro offers what is super-ambitiously titled “The Run-Down: Here’s What You Need To Know About Trump’s Top 5 Possible Nominees.” To my great surprise, he concludes that Judge Brett Kavanaugh “has the most red flags.” As it turns out, though—perhaps because he has taken on ...
Republicans see ticket to midterm election success in Kennedy's retirement
Post Date: 2018-06-28 22:13:39 by Tooconservative
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Republicans searching for that elusive issue to erase the Democrats’ critical edge in voter enthusiasm heading into the midterm elections believe they’ve found their golden ticket in the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Senior Republicans are predicting that the opportunity to replace Kennedy, a swing vote on the narrowly divided high court, with a young conservative who could tilt the court to the right and serve for decades, will galvanize the conservative base and motivate rank-and-file GOP voters to put any uneasiness with President Trump aside and stick with the party in November. “This is every Democrat candidate’s worst nightmare, as it ...
Levin: Here’s what’s REALLY at stake with the next SCOTUS justice
Post Date: 2018-06-28 12:17:14 by Tooconservative
4 Comments
On his radio show Wednesday evening, LevinTV host Mark Levin cut through the legacy media bluster and broke down the actual terms of the real debate over America’s next Supreme Court justice. The segment followed news of the long-anticipated announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement earlier in the day. Levin went on to explain the importance of properly understanding the ideologies at play when discussing who will take Kennedy’s place on the bench. “This is a battle between constitutionalists and statists,” Levin said. What will happen, as always, Levin explained, is that Democratic politicians will demand that the prospective justice agree with ...
Why Janus cuts so deep: Workers must opt-in to pay union fees
Post Date: 2018-06-28 12:11:41 by Tooconservative
2 Comments
Amid the hubbub of Justice Anthony Kennedy's announcement Wednesday, you might have missed just how bitter and sad the cries of union leaders became over the Janus v. AFSCME decision. And one important aspect of the ruling may have been neglected. Janus, of course, barred public sector unions from collecting money from nonconsenting government workers who did not want to union members. But the real gut-punch comes in the last passage of the opinion, pertaining to its implementation. Justice Samuel Alito, in handing down this ruling, could have just quit after establishing that government violates workers' First Amendment rights when it forces them to contribute financially to a ...
The Run-Down: Here's What You Need To Know About Trump's Top 5 Possible Nominees
Post Date: 2018-06-28 08:35:40 by Tooconservative
14 Comments
According to Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the White House has narrowed down its list of potential Supreme Court nominees to a top five: Brett Kavanaugh, 53, of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; Amul Thapar, 49, of the 6th Circuit; Amy Barrett, 46, of the 7th Circuit; Thomas Hardiman, 52, of the 3rd Circuit; and Raymond Kethledge, 51, of the 6th Circuit. Here’s what we know about them. Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh is a former clerk for Justice Kennedy. He was elevated to the federal bench in 2006, after a three-year delay. His nomination was delayed thanks to Democratic upset over the fact that Kavanaugh worked for Kenneth Starr in the office of the Solicitor General, and had the ...
American Empire Demands a Caesar
Post Date: 2018-06-27 19:38:40 by Deckard
35 Comments
Trump is hardly our first emperor. The warfare state has been trampling the Constitution for a long time.The United States has adorned its president with extravagance that makes Roman emperors appear frugal by comparison. And such visible signs of the deification of our president are complemented by legal doctrines that echo Richard Nixon’s once discredited claim to David Frost: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” These extra-constitutional developments reflect the transformation of the United States from a republic, whose glory was liberty and whose rule of law was king, to an empire, whose glory is global dominion and whose president is law. The ...
Anthony Kennedy retiring [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2018-06-27 14:15:14 by Tooconservative
55 Comments
Per WaPo. Put the Dems on suicide watch right now.
SCOTUS ruling on Janus is about to change the American political landscape [involuntary union dues] [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2018-06-27 11:45:13 by Tooconservative
44 Comments
Justice Alito wrote the decision and it followed along with the expectations of those who watched the case play out before the court. Also as expected, this was a 5-4 decision, split along partisan lines. At the heart of Janus was the question of whether or not unions can forcibly extract dues from workers’ paychecks without the worker proactively volunteering to contribute. In parallel to that, the court had to determine whether or not those extracted fees, being put toward lobbying efforts, constituted involuntary political speech on the part of the worker. The ruling answers both questions definitively. You can read the full decision here but I’ve extracted a couple of the ...
Citizenship Checkpoints Start to Spread Across The Constitution-Free Zone
Post Date: 2018-06-24 10:43:49 by Deckard
1 Comments
As the immigration debate continues to rage in America, the application of the Constitution-Free Zone that extends 100 miles inland around the borders of the U.S. is spreading its application into what is blatantly being referred to as “citizenship checkpoints.” This type of “fishing expedition” flies directly in the face of the 4th Amendment which guarantees that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the ...
Lawsuit Argues Honking Your Car Horn Is Protected By The First Amendment
Post Date: 2018-06-24 10:21:38 by Deckard
11 Comments
from the #LEGALIZEIT dept The First Amendment covers a whole lot of area. Since it covers "expression," it doesn't necessarily have to be anything commonly thought of as "speech." It doesn't have to be printed. It doesn't have to be said. Lighting a flag on fire requires no statement of intent. The act itself is expressive enough. Passively gathering information (like recordings or public records) is protected by the First Amendment. Taking photos is a protected act, even if the photos are never used to express anything more than a memory of an event or place. It has been argued nudity or partially-exposed bodies are expressions deserving of protection by ...
Huge Win for Everyone With a Cellphone (and for the Fourth Amendment) at the Supreme Court
Post Date: 2018-06-23 09:11:00 by Deckard
18 Comments
SCOTUS rejects warrantless cellphone location tracking in Carpenter v. United States.In a blockbuster 5-4 decision issued today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that warrantless government tracking of cellphone users via their cellphone location records violates the Fourth Amendment. "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere," declared the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts. "We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier's database of physical location information." The case is Carpenter v. United States. It arose after the after FBI obtained, without a search warrant, the ...
Supreme Court Upholds Ohio's Ballot Integrity Law
Post Date: 2018-06-11 11:00:35 by Tooconservative
9 Comments
In 2015, a guy named Larry Harmon showed up to vote on a local initiative. Harmon’s problem was the last time he cast a vote was in 2008 and he was sort of sloppy about even reading his mail. He wasn’t on the voter roll, and, as far as I can make out, was not allowed to vote. (A brief side trip here. I’m chief judge in a voting precinct. I have been for six years. In my state I would have issued Harmon a provisional ballot. He would have cast it. The Board of Elections would have examined his ballot the week after the election. They would determine that he was eligible to vote and added his ballot to the total and put him back on the voter rolls for next election. A 100% ...
Oh my: DOJ will no longer defend parts of ObamaCare in court
Post Date: 2018-06-08 17:19:51 by Tooconservative
4 Comments
Man, what a day for bad Obama precedents. First the DOJ follows O’s lead by seizing records from a reporter to find a leaker, then it announces it’ll selectively refuse to defend disfavored federal statutes in court, just like the last administration did with DOMA. Imagine how furious the left would be at these Justice Department affronts to freedom of the press and the rule of the law if they hadn’t pioneered them. Thanks, Obama! It feels strange that the executive branch has to try to tank ObamaCare in court to get it undone when Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, but we’ve already been there, done that on legislative solutions. Time ...
Giuliani is throwing gas on fire: Napolitano
Post Date: 2018-06-04 21:59:18 by buckeroo
0 Comments
... uh oh.
The Masterpiece Cakeshop Decision Leaves Almost All the Big Questions Unresolved
Post Date: 2018-06-04 13:54:36 by tpaine
0 Comments
The Masterpiece Cakeshop Decision Leaves Almost All the Big Questions Unresolved Eugene Volokh June 4, 2018 10:49 am Do bakers have a First Amendment right to refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, even if there's a state law banning sexual orientation discrimination by such businesses? Do they have a First Amendment right to refuse to bake such cakes that contain text or symbolism (e.g., rainbow striping) that the bakers disapprove of? How about wedding photographers or videographers, who create products that (unlike most cakes) are traditionally seen as speech? How about calligraphers or graphic designers, who have an objection to personally writing or typing certain ...
Trump Says He Has the Absolute Right to Pardon Himself
Post Date: 2018-06-04 11:02:38 by Deckard
13 Comments
President Trump tweeted Monday morning that he has the right to pardon himself, but that he has no reason to do so, because he’s completely innocent. His bold, frightening assertion comes after a weekend in which the Trump administration’s legal argument — that the president can basically do whatever he wants with no repercussions — came into sharper focus. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Trump lawyers had sent Special Counsel Robert Mueller a letter in January arguing that their client should not be forced to sit for questioning because, as the president, he could not by definition have obstructed justice. Then, on Sunday, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani ...
Only one more state needs to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to finally get it ratified
Post Date: 2018-06-01 00:51:31 by nolu chan
14 Comments
Only one more state needs to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to finally get it ratified. By AJ Willingham, CNN Updated 9:41 PM ET, Thu May 31, 2018 (CNN)This week Illinois lawmakers approved the Equal Rights Amendment, a long-proposed addition to the United States Constitution that would ensure equal rights to all Americans regardless of sex. You would think that 230 years after ratifying its Constitution, the US would have some sort of federal protection like this enshrined in its supreme law. But the ERA, which states that "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex," has been languishing in ...
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