Archive for the 'Supreme Court' Category

NRO.

The conservative wing of the Supreme Court reportedly declined to take up a case dealing with Second Amendment rights after Chief Justice John Roberts indicated that he would vote with the court’s liberal justices.

In June, the justices rejected petitions from 10 challenges relating to state restrictions on firearms after Roberts signaled he would not vote with them, depriving the court’s conservatives of the fifth vote needed to overturn gun regulations, CNN reported Monday.

[ … ]

The four most reliably conservative justices were not confident that they would get a fifth vote from Roberts on the case or similar cases addressing the Second Amendment, according to unidentified sources cited by CNN.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned an unsigned opinion that was overseen by Roberts for that case in which six justices agreed that the case should be relegated to the lower court. In a separate statement that Kavanaugh signed, he said that the Supreme Court should address “soon” the issue of varying interpretations of the Second Amendment.

Somebody surely has something on Roberts.

So if this report is to be taken as true and accurate, the four justices stopped what could have been a defeat for the observation of gun rights in America by simply refusing to take cases.

Roberts is the stated reason.  If this report is accurate, it’s probably best that nothing was done.

David Codrea.

… here are questions gun owner rights advocates should expect the representatives they enable and support to ask that any qualified candidate shouldn’t have any trouble answering:

• What did the Founders mean by “A well regulated militia”?
• What did the Founder mean by “being necessary to the security of a free State”?
• What did the Founders mean by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”?
• What did the Founders mean by “shall not be infringed”?
• How can past Supreme Court opinion specifying protected arms as those being “in common use at the time” not apply to the types of firearms needed for militia service?

Hell, correctly answering these should be required to graduate high school. But it won’t happen even with Republicans nominally in control of things, let alone if there’s a blue wave in November. So what “legal” recourse is available?

You can’t hoist them on their own petard. Judicial immunity means you can’t take them to court for the subversion of Founding intent. And good luck getting the current crop of interested/compromised/beholden Deep State Swamp denizens to even suggest impeachment, although allow a Democrat supermajority and don’t be surprised to see Clarence Thomas targeted anew.

There is one other legal alternative. Per the Hoover Institute:

“Congress should exercise its power to limit the jurisdiction of the courts. The Constitution provides that Congress is authorized to establish those federal courts subordinate to the Supreme Court and set forth their jurisdiction. Congress also has the power to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and regulate its activities. Accordingly, Congress should exercise this authority to restrain an activist judiciary.”

I’ve known about this power for a long time.  So have the senators.  They will never use it, especially because they see the black robed tyrants as high priests.

Reason.

That inaction continued today. Once again, the Court refused to hear a major Second Amendment case. And once again, the Court’s failure to act prompted a sharp complaint from Justice Clarence Thomas, who upbraided his colleagues this morning for “prolonging our decade-long failure to protect the Second Amendment.”

Thomas’ complaint came in the form of a dissent from the denial of certiorari in Rogers v. Grewal. The case dealt with New Jersey’s requirement that any person seeking to get a handgun carry permit must first demonstrate to the satisfaction of the authorities “that he has a justifiable need to carry a handgun.” Among other things, the applicant must “specify in detail the urgent necessity for self-protection, as evidence by specific threats or previous attacks which demonstrate a special danger to the applicant’s life that cannot be avoided by means other than by issuance of a permit to carry a handgun.” Under the rules, “generalized fears for personal safety are inadequate.”

Thomas Rogers, who operates a business that services automated teller machines, wanted to carry a gun for self-defense while out on the job. But he failed to meet the state’s exacting standards. The Supreme Court today declined to take up his constitutional challenge to the gun control regulation.

“In several jurisdictions throughout the country,” Justice Thomas observed of Rogers’ case and others like it, “law-abiding citizens have been barred from exercising the fundamental right to bear arms because they cannot show that they have a ‘justifiable need’ or ‘good reason’ for doing so. One would think that such an onerous burden on a fundamental right would warrant this Court’s review.” Indeed, Thomas continued, “this Court would almost certainly review the constitutionality of a law requiring citizens to establish a justifiable need before exercising their free speech rights. And it seems highly unlikely that the Court would allow a State to enforce a law requiring a woman to provide a justifiable need before seeking an abortion. But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the Court simply looks the other way.”

Justice Clarence Thomas.  The last remaining honorable man and scholar on the Supreme Court.  Kavanaugh signed on to the dissent, excepting section 2.  Go read section 2.  There is no good reason any liberty minded patriot should refuse to sign on to section 2.

The Supreme Court has become a college of swine, a gaggle of clowns; frauds, liars and shysters in robes of tyranny.  Roberts is the head clown, the high priest of swindle.

The best indication is to look at fellow crooks and collegial liars.

States can do literally anything they want without being held accountable by the highest court of clowns in the land.

Ten cases they denied.  Count them.  Ten.

But make sure to note that they expanded the Civil Rights Act to include transgenders.  So here are my predictions based on this ludicrous move today.

First, every military MOS must now be opened to transgenders, in every branch.

Second, there will be quotas just like there are for hiring, college admissions, and everything else.  Companies will be searching for transgenders to hire.  It will be a badge of honor to have transgenders on staff.

Third, this will affect churches.  Churches will now have to hire transgenders in order to maintain tax exempt status.

Fourth, it will affect other aspects of church life.  If a transgender wants to teach a Sunday School class on “Why I Became A Transgender,” s/he must be allowed to do that in order for the church to maintain tax exempt status.

Fifth, self mutilation will become a norm in the upside down world of anti-Christians.

The Supreme Court has now fully and completely thrown off the face of being anything other than an arm of revolution.  The French Revolutionaries in CHAZ want to hang people.  The Supreme Court still hides behind the vestiges and accouterments of robes, but they are no less thugs.

Decision in the dead of the night.

The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement. Our Constitution principally entrusts “[t]he safety and the health of the people” to the politically accountable officials of the States “to guard and protect.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 38 (1905). When those officials “undertake[ ] to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,” their latitude “must be especially broad.” Marshall v. United States, 414 U. S. 417, 427 (1974). Where those broad limits are not exceeded, they should not be subject to second-guessing by an “unelected federal judiciary,” which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people. See Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 545 (1985).

Meanwhile, the religion of “Home repair and lawn maintenance” remains unabated, with my local Lowe’s and Home Depot parking lots filled to capacity and wall-to-wall people in the aisles.

Welcome to the FUSA.  We have to be medical providers and professionals in order to interpret the first amendment to the constitution.  We’ll leave that to the bureaucracy.

Remarkable decision, with Roberts proving where his fealty lies.

Not so much.

This morning the Supreme Court issued orders from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices did not add any cases to their merits docket for next term, nor did they seek the views of the federal government in any new cases. And perhaps most notably, the justices did not act on any of the Second Amendment cases that they have now considered at three consecutive conferences; somewhat unusually, the electronic dockets for those cases (see, for example, here) all indicated late last week – that is, before today’s order list was even released – that the cases had been relisted for the upcoming conference on Thursday, May 28.

The court also granted a motion to substitute Donna Stephens, the wife of Aimee Stephens, as the respondent in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, in which the justices are considering whether federal employment-discrimination laws protect transgender employees. Aimee Stephens died earlier this month of complications from kidney disease.

But we need to make sure that the rights of transgenders are considered.

Politico.

The battle over the impact of coronavirus lockdown measures on Americans’ religious observances has reached the Supreme Court as a Southern California church and its pastor made an emergency appeal for relief from executive orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Lawyers for the South Bay United Pentecostal Church and Bishop Arthur Hodges asked the justices to step in Sunday after a federal appeals court panel rejected a similar emergency application Friday.

The decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came on the same day President Donald Trump publicly backed churches seeking to escape various stay-at-home orders in place across the country. Trump said he was ordering governors to exempt churches “right now” by declaring religious services to be essential, although he lacks any evident legal authority to impose his view on state officials.

Still, Trump’s pointed rhetoric added new fire to the simmering legal battles, including pledges by thousands of churches to defy local public-health restrictions by holding services on Pentecost, which falls next Sunday.

In the California-focused case that reached the high court Sunday night, a 9th Circuit panel split, 2-1, with the majority declining to disturb the state government’s action in light of the health dangers posed by the ongoing pandemic.

“We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure,’” Judges Barry Silverman and Jacqueline Nguyen wrote. “In the words of Justice Robert Jackson, if a ‘court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.’”

Silverman, a Clinton appointee, and Nguyen, an Obama appointee, were dismissive of the church’s arguments in the Friday order, devoting only two paragraphs to the substance of the dispute.

However, the third judge on the panel — Trump appointee Daniel Collins — weighed in with an 18-page dissent arguing that Newsom’s orders are impermissibly intruding on religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.

“I do not doubt the importance of the public health objectives that the State puts forth, but the State can accomplish those objectives without resorting to its current inflexible and over-broad ban on religious services,” Collins wrote.

Collins noted that the orders allow many workplaces to open, but ban religious gatherings even when they could meet the social distancing standards imposed on other activities that are now permitted.

“By explicitly and categorically assigning all in-person ‘religious services’ to a future Phase 3 — without any express regard to the number of attendees, the size of the space, or the safety protocols followed in such services8 — the State’s Reopening Plan undeniably ‘discriminate[s] on its face’ against ‘religious conduct,’” the judge said.

The legal dispute may turn on how much weight the justices choose to give to a 115-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a mandatory vaccination scheme for smallpox.

Who wants to lay bets with me?  I say the Supreme Court punts and refuses even to hear the case, leaving it to the cowards in the Ninth Circuit who didn’t even have the courage to hear the case En banc.

Josh Blackman writing at Reason.

Immediately after the case was decided, the Supreme Court distributed 6 Second Amendment cases for the May 1, 2020 conference (H/T to the Duke Center for Firearms Blog.)

1. Mance v. Barr (5th Circuit)—challenge to federal prohibition on out-of-state handgun purchases
2. Pena v. Horan (9th Circuit)—challenge to California’s prohibition on “unsafe” handguns (including “microstamping” requirement)
3. Gould v. Lipson (1st Circuit)—challenge to Massachusetts’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime
4. Rogers v. Grewal (3rd Circuit)—challenge to New Jersey’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime
5. Cheeseman v. Polillo (N.J. Supreme Court)— challenge to New Jersey’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime
6. Ciolek v. New Jersey (N.J. Supreme Court )—challenge to New Jersey’s “may issue” conceal carry licensing regime

This article was updated.

SCOTUSBlog located four more Second Amendment cases that were distributed for the 5/1/20 conference:

1. Worman v. Healey (1st Circuit)—challenge to Massachusetts ban on “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines
2. Malpasso v. Pallozzi (4th Circuit)—challenge to Maryland’s “may issue” conceal carry license regime
3. Culp v. Raoul (7th Circuit)—Challenge to Illinois’s ban on allowing non-residents to apply for conceal carry license
4. Wilson v. Cook County (7th Circuit)—Challenge to Cook County’s ban on “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines

So the game is up after this point and good men everywhere will have to conclude that the Supreme Court cares nothing for their second amendment rights.  That means no more claims that the courts will overturn infringements.  We’re on our own.

Here’s how we will know.  Four Justices clearly stated that the SCOTUS needs to take up a 2A case and stop the hemorrhaging.  Roberts said nothing of the sort.

If the four justices do not grant certiorari, that means they know that Roberts would not have gone along with the four on the given case, and the four will not risk an awful decision from the SCOTUS.  It’s better to leave the issue alone rather than risk diminution of rights.  It could be that Roberts was behind the curtain saying, “But wait, we have the perfect case coming up.  Let’s tackle more issues than the NY case brings up.”  But the throwdown between Alito and Roberts was so bitter it makes one think that this goes deeper than a chess match.

So we’ll all know very soon where ALL of the justices stand on gun rights.  This is a wonderful thing, yes?  Good times.