Archive for the 'Supreme Court' Category

Congratulations Trump.  Amy Coney Barrett votes with the communists.  Yet another failure.  You could have chosen Judge Don Willett instead.  This is on you.

David Codrea.

The complaint, embedded below is a treasure trove of examples from even before the Second Amendment was written, presenting photographic examples including:

• 1720 Flintlock Pistol with Stock
• 1750 Flintlock Pistols with Stocks
• 1760 Flintlock Grenade Launcher
• 1780 Flintlock Pistol w Stock
• 1760-1820 Flintlock Pistol Carbine with detachable stock
• 1790 Flintlock Blunderbuss Pistols – w detachable stocks (and bayonets)
• 1795 Flintlock Blunderbuss – 15” barrel

“Such weapons continued after the ratification era, through the incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the complaint continues, presenting further examples from 1820 through to the 1940s …

He uses the complaint brought by GOA attorney Stephen Stamboulieh, which we’ve linked before.

So if the Heller test is the law of the land, according to the Supreme Court, then “in common use” should completely disqualify SBRs from the NFA list, and the Bruen test for laws in place at the founding would certainly exclude SBRs (and pistol braces) from the NFA.

In another very interesting and insightful video, Mark makes a very good case for the reason and justification for the supreme court having accepted this case with one justice recusing herself in the case.

He predicts the end of the Chevron doctrine within a year.  I hope so.  The deep state needs to take a very large blow to their authority.  I don’t even believe the three-letter agencies have a constitutional right to exist.

Source.

BALTIMORE (WBFF) — With public safety a top priority for Maryland lawmakers, the first bill filed in the 2023 session would severely limit where people with conceal carry permits could bring their firearms.

“If people don’t feel safe nothing else matters,” said Maryland Senate President, Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City).

Senate Bill One, also know as the Gun Saftey Act, was introduced by Sen. Jeff Waldstreicher (D-Montgomery). Waldstreicher says the bill is meant to fire back at the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In which, the Supreme Court found New York’s gun law requiring concealed carry applicants give a reason for carrying unconstitutional. The decision meant Maryland’s “good and substantial reason” requirement fell too.

“Bruen said anyone can take any weapon anywhere at any time. I think that’s dangerous and Maryland needs to respond,” said Waldstreicher.

With more Marylanders being granted conceal carry permits, the Gun Safety Act would ban them from taking firearms within 100 feet of any public place. However, “public place” is a broad term in the legislation. In addition to restricting guns inside hospitals, churches, and government buildings — any retail establishments, restaurants, hotels, and movie theatres are also listed.

“Outside of the home what would be a space that someone could legally carry a gun?” questioned a FOX45 reporter.

“So, the bill does not define where you can, it simply says and clarifies where you cannot,” said Waldstreicher.

At least he admits that his intention is to defy the Supreme Court.  It’ll pass.  Now what will the SCOTUS do about it?

Surprising no one, if you haven’t been following the NY case of Ivan Antonyuk v. NY, the state of NY still hasn’t accepted Bruen, and won’t until the SCOTUS slaps them down again.  The federal district court ruled in favor of Antonyuk in a lengthy and well crafted decision that issued a stay on the recently enacted NY law, only to be blocked and held in abatement by the 2nd Circuit by a three-judge panel who said nothing about the merits of the decision.  The 2nd circuit overrode the district court decision with only a few cursory sentences.

The Antonyuk case was appealed directly to the supreme court, with Sotomayor demanding that NY reply.  They did with this brief.  In it, the state of NY insults the SCOTUS and tells them they aren’t needed.

NY to the Supreme Court

Friend of TCJ Stephen Stamboulieh, a terrific attorney, genuinely good man and defender of liberty, issued his reply, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

Stamboulieh to the Supreme Court in Response to NY

As Gandalf the Grey said (before he became Gandalf the White), “Until at last I smote my enemy and threw down his ruin upon the mountainside.”

This may not be over so the conclusory sentiment may be wrong, but may Stephen be victorious over his enemies and throw down their ruin upon the mountainside.

Reason.

Today I filed an amicus brief in support of a cert. petition challenging Maryland’s ban on various semiautomatic rifles. The case is Bianchi v. Frosh, and was brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, and individual plaintiffs. Petitioners are represented by the D.C. powerhouse litigation boutique Cooper & Kirk. (Docket page here, Petition here.)

[ … ]

1. Many lower courts have narrowed Heller from below.

2. Failure to grant review would tempt Congress to enact a national ban, over-riding the policy choices of 43 states.

3. The Fourth Circuit’s novel rule that governments can ban all firearms that are supposedly “like” military arms is based on an egregious misreading of one phrase from Heller. The Fourth Circuit rule would uphold a ban on many common firearms, such as the ubiquitous Colt 1911 .45 caliber pistol, and every semiautomatic pistol that is essentially similar to the Colt, which is to say all of them.

4. The Maryland ban harms public safety because the rifles that it singles out for prohibition are easier to fire accurately, easier to store safely, and often superior for lawful self-defense. To say that improved firearms can be banned because criminals might take advantage of the improvements would be to say that firearms can never be improved.

He gets into “common usage” as well, and we can all agree that any weapon can be and has been a military weapon and that the common usage doctrine was an abominable and inconsistent idea.  As one reader pointed out recently, if something isn’t in common usage, it cannot be introduced into circulation and therefore will never become commonly used.

But Kopel is one of the good guys, and he knows what he’s doing.  He has to play within the rules he’s been given.

Pathetic news.

The Supreme Court on Monday permitted a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in New York that doesn’t include a religious exemption, the latest instance in which the nation’s highest court has declined to wade into the issue of vaccination requirements imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

New York state imposed the vaccine mandate for health care workers in August. The policy allows for medical exemptions but not those based on religious objections. An earlier religious exemption to the requirement expired last month.

The Supreme Court was considering two emergency challenges to that mandate and decided to allow the law to stand in both of them. In each case, three conservatives – Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – said they would have supported temporarily halting enforcement of the mandate.

“Sometimes dissenting religious beliefs can seem strange and bewildering. In times of crisis, this puzzlement can evolve into fear and anger,” Gorsuch wrote in dissenting from the decision to not block the mandate’s enforcement.

“One can only hope today’s ruling will not be the final chapter in this grim story,” he continued. “Cases like this one may serve as cautionary tales for those who follow. But how many more reminders do we need that ‘the Constitution is not to be obeyed or disobeyed as the circumstances of a particular crisis . . . may suggest’?”

Nurses, doctors and other health care workers asserted in a lawsuit that the lack of a religious exemption violated their First Amendment right to practice religion. The objections centered on the use fetal cells from abortions in the vaccines’ development.

That means Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh were opposed to stepping in front of the mandate and stopping it.

Pathetic.

Eternity calls them.  We will all answer for our sins.

Even more and more with each passing day, he shows his true colors.  What terrible judgment by GWB to nominate him.

WASHINGTON — The chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, warned Friday that the Supreme Court risks losing its own authority if it allows the existence of a law like Texas’ near-total abortion ban, which attempts to circumvent the courts.

In a strongly worded opinion joined by the high court’s three liberal justices, Roberts wrote that the “clear purpose and actual effect” of the Texas law was “to nullify this Court’s rulings.” That, he said, undermines the Constitution and the fundamental role of the Supreme Court and the court system as a whole.

The opinion was a remarkable plea by the chief justice to his colleagues on the court to resist the efforts by right-wing lawmakers to get around court decisions they dislike, in this case Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal in the United States, within limits. But in this case, his urgent request was largely ignored by the other justices on the court who were appointed by Republicans.

His point to them was that the court system should decide what the law is, and it should resist efforts like that of the Texas Legislature to get around the courts by limiting the ability of abortion providers to sue.

It is a basic principle, he wrote, “that the Constitution is the ‘fundamental and paramount law of the nation,’ and ‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.'” He cited as proof the landmark 1803 Marbury v. Madison case, which established the principle of judicial review, allowing the court to nullify laws that violate the Constitution.

“If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery,” he said, quoting the 1809 U.S. v. Peters case, which found that state legislatures can’t overrule federal courts.

He can’t get another vote to side with him and the rest of the communists on the court.

Funny, that statement I bolded.  I learned in Civics class in elementary school that the Congress made laws rather than the judiciary.  I guess he went to a different civics class than I did.

I can assure him, however, that the constitution is no solemn mockery.  I would say though, with the majority of U.S. citizens, that the SCOTUS had become an unsolemn mockery, a gaggle of court jesters rather than court officers.

Imagine.  All of this over the right to murder the unborn.  Worship of Molech indeed.  God judges the nation.

News.

A federal judge in Louisiana issued a nationwide preliminary injunction Tuesday against President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers.

Judge Terry A. Doughty in the U.S. District Court Western District of Louisiana ruled in favor of a request from Republican Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry to block an emergency regulation issued Nov. 4 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that required the COVID shot for nearly every full-time employee, part-time employee, volunteer, and contractor working at a wide range of healthcare facilities receiving Medicaid or Medicaid funding.

Louisiana was joined in the lawsuit by attorneys general in 13 other states.

Doughty argued in his ruling that the Biden administration does not have the constitutional authority to go around Congress by issuing such a mandate.

“If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands,” he wrote. “If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.

“During a pandemic such as this one, it is even more important to safeguard the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution to avoid erosion of our liberties,” he added.

[ … ]

Doughty’s ruling echoes one from U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp, who issued a 32-page order on Monday blocking the Biden administration from enforcing their vaccine mandate on health care workers in 10 states.

Ah, I see that the lower courts are doing the heavy lifting for the Supreme Tyrants, work they’re too cowardly to do themselves.

I had been cataloging the number of times this had been rejected with no explanation from the Supreme Tyrants, but have lost count now.  This is their latest cowardly act when they denied yet another appeal.

Perhaps when they’re no longer afraid and have stuck their fingers up in the air for long enough, they’ll do the right thing and bash this mandate.

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps they’ll show yet again what tyrants and cowards they really are.

News from D.C.

A sharply divided Supreme Court early Thursday said it will not block a new Texas law that deputizes any Texan to enforce a six-week ban on abortions. Five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — explained in a brief, unsigned majority opinion that the abortion advocates asking for an emergency stay “raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue,” but they were unable to untangle the “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” raised by the law.

The four dissenters — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — argued in separate rebuttals that their five colleagues, without any real debate, were rewarding Texas lawmakers for inventing a novel scheme to stomp on decades of Supreme Court precedent.

“The statutory scheme before the Court is not only unusual, but unprecedented,” Roberts wrote, and he would have granted “preliminary relief” at least until “the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.” Instead, the court allowed the law to take effect before lower courts weighed in, “without ordinary merits briefing, and without oral argument.”

Okay so let’s break this down.  Two squishes sided with the constitutionalists along with a very confused woman, and the communist sided with the communists.

Never forget that George W. Bush gave us Roberts.  And also two wars.  And also the Patriot Act.  And did nothing for the recognition of gun rights.  Never forget he supported a renewed when the sunset provision took over.

He was always an enemy, never a friend.