Oh, that’s rich. So he can execute someone by his authority for whatever reasons he likes, but he shouldn’t be killed because the government didn’t follow procedures. He’s a coward. If he wants to be a martyr to his monstrous cause, he should man up and welcome the chair.
Luigi Mangione asked a federal judge in New York on Friday to stop the government from seeking the death penalty if he’s convicted of federal charges related to the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing the Justice Department made a “political, arbitrary, capricious” breach of protocol.
“When the United States plans to kill one of its citizens, it must follow statutory and internal procedures,” defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo said. “Mangione seeks Court intervention now not merely because the Government has failed to follow these procedures but because it has abandoned them.”
An immigration judge ruled Friday that Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported on grounds that he threatens foreign policy, as alleged by the Trump administration.
[…]
While a student at Columbia University, Khalil was part of a leadership group protesting the war in Gaza. Khalil took part in negotiations with school administrators demanding the institution cut ties with Israel and divest from Israeli companies. Khalil finished his graduate studies at Columbia in December and is set to graduate in the spring.
Khalil — whose wife is about to give birth to their first child — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at his Columbia housing in March.
[…]
The government has argued, under an obscure 1952 federal law called the Immigration and Nationality Act, that it believes migrants are deportable “if the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that the alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
I love how any law with which the reporter disagrees is deemed “obscure.” Most of our laws were written a while ago and there are so dang many of them that most of them could be deemed “obscure.” But it’s still the law and it is very clear that the Secretary of State has this arbitrary authority.
Good. It’s unlikely that it will be able to get out of the Senate, but this is a rational bill. I would remind Democrats that this cuts both ways. If we allow pissant district judges to exercise a veto power over an entire branch of government, the chaos they inflict on our nation will swing against Democrats when they are back in power.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House passed legislation Wednesday mostly along party lines that limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration.
The pace of nationwide injunctions has certainly increased during Donald Trump’s presidency. Republicans are arguing that the increase is the result of “activist liberal judges.” Democrats counter that the courts are simply striking down illegal executive orders and actions from the Trump administration. They also note that some of the judges issuing the injunctions were nominated by Republican presidents.
The bill passed by a vote of 219-213. It limits the scope of injunctive relief ordered by a district judge to those parties before the court, rather than applying the relief nationally. But the bill is unlikely to advance through the Senate, where at least some Democratic support would be needed.
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the White House cannot bar Associated Press reporters and photographers from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other secure spaces where journalists from other media outlets are admitted.
District Court Judge Trevor McFadden in an order said that the White House’s current blocking access to AP journalists to those tightly controlled spaces with President Donald Trump is “contrary to the First Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution.
Of course the President has that right – just as the judge has the right to restrict who enters his courtroom. The notion that allowing one member of the media to be present obligates Trump to allow any and all members of the media is ridiculous and unworkable. These are confined spaces and choices have to be made.
For now… SCOTUS needs to police their branch and make it clear that some rando district court does not have the authority to stop the actions of an entire other branch of government.
The Supreme Court has granted a request by the Trump administration to temporarily block a lower court order requiring that a deported Salvadorian man be returned to the US.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to pause a ruling that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be brought back from El Salvador by midnight on Monday.
The government has said Mr Garcia was deported on 15 March due to an “administrative error”, although they also allege he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyer denies.
In its emergency appeal to America’s highest court, the Trump administration argued the Maryland judge lacked authority to issue the order and that US officials cannot compel El Salvador to return Mr Garcia.
[…]
Chief Justice Roberts’ administrative stay on Monday afternoon will allow the Supreme Court time to consider the case.
As we have been saying all along… Joe Biden WAS the family business. Selling access to Joe was how Hunter and others made money. With Joe out of office in disgrace, nobody is going to spend money on Hunter. Now he’s a 50-something year-old man with no marketable skills and no gainful way to make money. Pathetic waste of skin.
In a court filing on Wednesday, Mr Biden’s attorneys urged US District Judge Hernan D Vera to end the lawsuit, stating that he “has suffered a significant downturn in his income and has significant debt in the millions of dollars range”.
The son of former President Joe Biden has also faced a series of financial setbacks, with January’s wildfire in the Pacific Palisades – where he was staying – making his rental home “unliveable” for an extended period.
Along with struggling to find stable housing and deal with fire damage, Mr Biden is having difficulties earning a steady income, according to the filing, and major sources of money have dried up.
Mr Biden is unable to borrow and sales of both his art and his memoir – his two major income streams – have fallen off over the last 18 months, according to the filing.
He had sold 27 pieces of art for an average price of $54,500 in the years leading up to the lawsuit. He has sold only one piece for $36,000 since.
Book sales for his memoir, Beautiful Things, dropped from more than 3,100 copies between April and September 2023 to roughly 1,100 in the following six months.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Four Wisconsin voters whose ballots were not counted in the November presidential election initiated a class-action lawsuit Thursday seeking $175,000 in damages each.
The voters were among 193 in Madison whose ballots were misplaced by the city clerk and not discovered until weeks after the election. Not counting the ballots didn’t affect the result of any races.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission investigated but did not determine whether Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl failed to comply with state law or abused her discretion.
She didn’t notify the elections commission of the problem until December, almost a month and a half after the election and after the results were certified on Nov. 29.
The goal is to reinforce and strengthen the right to vote in Wisconsin, said attorney Jeff Mandell, who is general counsel of Law Forward, which filed claims against the city of Madison and Dane County on Thursday.
Ames alleges her employer denied her a promotion and later demoted her, in both cases selecting gay candidates instead who were less qualified. Her supervisor at the time was also gay.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation.
The Supreme Court has said that plaintiffs bringing claims under Title VII must, as a first step, show a prima facie case — or initial set of facts that, if unexplained, plausibly amount to discrimination.
The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals concluded that Ames didn’t meet that bar because — as a straight woman — she failed to show the necessary “background circumstances” necessary to show a plausible case of discrimination against her as a member of a majority group.
Ames argued the “background circumstances” requirement was an unfair added burden on her simply because she’s straight. Nearly all of the justices seemed to agree — even the attorney for the state of Ohio.
A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.
U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.
Abelson, a Baltimore-based appointee of former President Joe Biden, said longstanding court precedent bars the federal government from “leveraging its funding to restrict federal contractors and grantees from otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Let’s engage in a simple logic exercise. If the federal government can put DEI requirements into contracts that requires private companies to comply by having DEI programs, then the opposite is equally true. The newly elected federal government can insist that companies that do business with the federal government do not have DEI programs. It does not violate the 1st Amendment because there is nothing that compels a private company to do business with the federal government. Most companies don’t.
He is absolutely correct. There may be some good ones in that group, but it’s impossible to tell which ones. Meanwhile, after the gross misallocation of resources and undeniable political bias of their prosecutorial priorities, they need to go.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed the Justice Department to terminate all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys, asserting that the department had been “politicized like never before.”
“We must ‘clean house’ IMMEDIATELY, and restore confidence. America’s Golden Age must have a fair Justice System – THAT BEGINS TODAY,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
A conservative US appeals court on Thursday ruled that a ban on handgun sales to people between the ages of 18 and 21 violates the second amendment.
The ruling, handed down by a panel of three judges on the fifth US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans, comes amid major shifts in the national firearm legal landscape following a landmark US supreme court decision that expanded gun rights in 2022.
The New Orleans court found that the federal law requiring young adults to be 21 is unconstitutional.
“Ultimately, the text of the Second Amendment includes eighteen-to-twenty-year-old individuals among ‘the people’ whose right to keep and bear arms is protected,” the court wrote in their ruling. The ruling sends the case back to a lower court judge.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A California woman was sentenced Monday to more than 3 years in prison in a long-running case over a business that helped pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States to deliver babies who automatically became American citizens.
U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner gave Phoebe Dong a 41-month sentence and ordered her immediately taken into custody from his federal court in Los Angeles. Dong and her husband were convicted in September of conspiracy and money laundering through their company, USA Happy Baby.
The sentencing came as birthright citizenship has been thrust into the spotlight in the United States with the return of President Donald Trump to the White House. Since taking office, Trump issued an executive order to narrow the definition of birthright citizenship, a move quickly blocked by a federal judge who called it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Dong and her husband, Michael Liu, were among more than a dozen people charged in an Obama-era crackdown on so-called “birth tourism” schemes that helped Chinese women hide their pregnancies while traveling to the United States to give birth. Such businesses have long operated in various states catering to people from China, Russia, Nigeria and elsewhere.
[…]
Federal prosecutors sought a more than five year sentence for Dong and argued that she and Liu helped more than 100 pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States. They said the pair worked with others to coach women on how to trick customs officials by flying into airports believed to be more lax while wearing loose-fitting clothing to hide their pregnancies.
This is the correct ruling and shows how narrowly the Supreme Court ruled giving presidents immunity for official acts.
The New York judge in President-elect Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case ruled Monday that the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision does not apply to that case.
Trump had sought to dismiss his criminal indictment and vacate the jury verdict on the grounds that prosecutors, during the trial last May, introduced evidence relating to Trump’s official acts as president, after the Supreme Court later ruled in July that Trump is entitled to presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undertaken while in office.
However, Judge Juan Merchan said on Monday that the evidence in Trump’s hush money case related “entirely to unofficial conduct” and “poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch.”
MADISON, Wis. – A Dane County judge struck down on Monday, Dec. 2 parts of Act 10, a Wisconsin law that placed limits on government workers’ unions.
The judge already ruled in July that the law broke the Wisconsin Constitution. Now on Dec. 2, 2024, Judge Jacob Frost released his decision laying out what parts of Act 10 should be struck as unconstitutional.
“This gets to the heart of the Court’s July Decision –the unconstitutional creation of the “public safety employee” group and differential treatment of it without a rational basis – so I strike these sections,” Frost wrote in the new decision.
I can’t tell you how exhausting I find the prospect of litigating Act 10 again. We did this ten years ago. The law is clearly, unequivocally, irrevocably constitutional and the policy has had a tremendously positive impact on the state.
But none of that matters. The Leftist judges in Madison – especially the ones on the Supreme Court – are going to gut it anyway for brazen political purposes. It is the absolute worst manifestation of a corrupted judicial system that rules to ideological outcomes instead of allegiance to the rule of law.
There are new challenges to Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ 400-year school funding increase.
Both the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and the Institute for Reforming Government recently filed amicus briefs with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, challenging the governor’s veto power.
“The partial veto power is a tool in the governor’s toolbelt, but it has a specific purpose. When it comes to fiscal policy, the partial veto power is a one-way rachet. It empowers the governor to tighten public spending and taxation by eliminating or reducing budgetary items, but it does not permit the reverse. The governor cannot use the partial veto power to increase either appropriations or revenue. That function requires a different tool – legislative power – which is not in the governor’s toolbelt,” IRGs brief states.
Evers changed a line in the current state budget to change a two-year school funding increase into a 400-year increase.
Recognize that if/when the Republicans are able to reverse this some time in the future, the liberals will accuse Republicans of cutting school funding.
Chief Justice John Roberts strong-armed his fellow Supreme Court judges into allowing him the key role in cases involving Donald Trump, leaked memos reveal.
The leftist judges on the Wisconsin Supreme Court are actually doing the work of the DNC to keep the Green Party off the ballot. Where are the Greens?
(The Center Square) – Following the Wisconsin Election Commission’s dismissal of a complaint from a Democratic National Committee staffer, who seeks to remove Green Party candidate Jill Stein from the ballot, the plaintiff has doubled down and filed an expedited appeal with the state’s Supreme Court.
Court documents reveal it accepted the case Thursday and is requesting that the plaintiff provide additional information, actions that have caused two Supreme Court justices to dissent.
“The majority issues an unprecedented order directing the petitioner – within two hours – to give the court contact information for the respondents, which is currently absent from the record because no one has entered an appearance on behalf of any of those parties. How is the petitioner – an employee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – supposed to know the name or physical address of an ‘attorney or other representative of each respondent who is authorized to accept service of orders issued by this court’?” Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley wrote in dissent of the Supreme Court’s majority ruling. “To my knowledge, at no time in history has the court issued orders before parties had made their appearances. Petitioner filed this original action on Monday, served the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Tuesday, and served the Wisconsin Green Party just yesterday. The majority steps beyond its neutral role to lawyer the case on behalf of the DNC, seemingly facilitating an expedited review of this original action. Other parties presenting original action petitions have not received such preferential treatment by this court.”
A Massachusetts Salon owner feels ‘violated’ after the United States Secret Service broke into her business during a nearby fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Footage from a Ring security camera shows an agent approaching the front door of the business in Berkshire, Massachusetts last week before coming back to tape over the video camera.
Alicia Powers, the salon owner, said after the camera was covered, agents broke into the building by picking the lock and then allowing multiple people to use the bathroom inside over a two-hour period.
We have a right to our private property and that right is strongly protected in several places in the U.S. Constitution. Without a warrant or probable cause, these agents broke into a private business to use for their own purposes. The purpose is immaterial. The Secret Service had no more right to enter that building without permission than any thug on the street. If a rando had broken in, they would be prosecuted and put in jail. The same thing should happen to the agents. They don’t get to say, “ope, our bad” and move on. I wouldn’t be able to do that. They should be held to the same or higher standard.
The whole thing speaks to a culture at the Secret Service that disregards the rights of citizens and does not hold itself accountable. It speaks to a culture of an agency that considers itself above the law. They are behaving as a modern Praetorian Guard instead of as a law enforcement and protection agency in a Constitutional Republic.
It seems that all of our federal agencies have become rotten to the core.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden called for major changes to the Supreme Court on Monday, including a constitutional amendment that would limit immunity for presidents, impose term limits for justices and stipulate an enforceable code of ethics.
Remember that Biden would not be proposing any of these things if the court were reliably issuing ruling that the liberals want. For 50 years, the court leaned Left and nobody proposed these kinds of things. Now that the court has tilted slightly right for less than a decade, liberals have decided that the court needs to be blown up.
Thankfully, none of this stands a chance of passing with a divided Congress and a lame duck President. It is curious that he would push it at all. Harris is the Leftist standard-bearer now. By tipping their hand that the Leftists want to radically usurp the power of the Supreme Court, does this help Harris? She will have to now offer her position on his reforms, right? Or is this a setup where Harris will come out against these “reforms” to make her look more moderate? Or is Biden just a bitter old man who wants to demonstrate that he still matters?
Good for them. We win back this country at the local level with work like this.
HARTFORD — The Hartford Union High School (HUHS) Board voted not to accept a revised definition of the term “sex” under Title IX on Monday night.
[…]
The current HUHS process regarding students wanting to use different pronouns or a different name would not change. The school would still contact the parents and set up a meeting or have conversations with the parents, and only the parents’ written permission would allow HUHS to address the student by that name or pronouns.
School Board President Tracy Hennes, also a Moms for Liberty member said the Title IX document itself is very long and complex and it feels like the Department of Education is trying to force districts to accept it in an election year, as well as that there are required trainings for staff that would have to be implemented before the school year.
[…]
HUHS Board member Nolan Jackett said he was hesitant to accept the revised policy, due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises V. Raimondo, which struck down Chevron Deference (an administrative law principle that compelled federal courts to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute).
“The Department of Education, without congressional authority, they shouldn’t be going and making drastic changes like this,” said Jackett.
[…]
According to HUHS Board member Heather Barrie, based on paraphrasing what both Hennes and Lacy said, if this is not a reasonable way for the government to act, the district shouldn’t go along with it and they should wait for the current challenges to the policy to go through the court system (which could take “years and years and years,” according to Lacy).
HUHS Board member Craig Westfall motioned to approve the revised policy, but no other members, which included Hennes, Jackett and Barrie, seconded the motion, thus it failed and the current policy will stay on the books. HUHS Board member Don Pridemore did not attend the meeting.
[…]
Lacy said it is likely that HUHS will be hit with an audit from the U.S. Department of Education, through the Wisconsin Department of Instruction, for not approving the revised Title IX policy.
That last sentence is why we need to get rid of the Department of Education. Not only has it failed to improve educational outcomes despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars, but it is also how they federal government bullies local communities into adopting their ideology.
