Lorie Smith left the corporate world in 2012 to form her own website design firm, 303 Creative, which soon flourished. But in 2016 she was asked to create a design conveying a same-sex marriage message that flatly violated her deeply held Christian faith.

Smith declined to do so and when it became clear a Colorado public accommodation law would be used to force her to create messages that she and other Coloradans did not support, or face harsh penalties, she decided she had to challenge the statute.

So she turned to the federal court system to uphold her First Amendment freedoms and six years later the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in her case later this year.

Now Smith fears for her life as she awaits the slow-turning of the wheels of justice—thanks to continuous terrifying harassment, including death threats, from activists seeking to suppress her Christian beliefs.

“I have received phone calls, I’ve had mail show up at my home, I have had people wish me really vile things, things that should not be repeated, threats of bodily harm, some really vile things,” Smith said in response to a question from The Epoch Times.

Asked if she feared for her life Smith quickly responded saying, “Of course. When you hear the things that I’ve heard it is terrifying. It definitely makes your skin crawl and the hair on your back stand up.”

Smith added that “my clients have been harassed, and I love all of them dearly. They’ve received threats, as well as ultimatums, which has been difficult.”

She said the ultimatums came from “the same groups of people who have been so hateful toward me, but they took it a step further. They figured out my clients’ contact information and harassed them as well.”

Smith’s comments came on May 18 during a discussion with reporters at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) headquarters in the nation’s capital. Smith is being represented by ADF, an Arizona-based public interest law firm that specializes in First Amendment and religious freedom cases. Her case is 303 Creative vs. Elenis.

Kristen Waggoner, ADF’s general counsel, told reporters that Smith had to appeal her case to the Supreme Court despite the multiple facts both sides of the litigation agreed on in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The 10th Circuit ruled against Smith and in favor of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in a July 2021 decision in which the chief judge on the court dissented, calling the majority opinion “unprecedented” and “staggering” because the “Constitution protects Ms. Smith from the government telling her what to say …”

The chief judge also observed that, “Though I am loathe to reference [George] Orwell, the majority’s opinion endorses substantial government interference in matters of speech, religion, and conscience.

“Indeed, this case represents another chapter in the growing disconnect between the Constitution’s endorsement of pluralism of belief on the one hand and anti-discrimination laws’ restrictions of religious-based speech in the marketplace on the other.”

The judge was referring to Orwell’s famous quote that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” He added that quote to his dissent text.

The first of the essential facts in the case that both sides accepted, Waggoner explained, was “that Lorie’s religious beliefs are central to her identity and that she strives to glorify God in everything she does. The second is that Lorie works with people from all walks of life, including those who identify as LGBT.”

Waggoner said, “the 10th Circuit also agreed that Lorie, like every other artist, serves everyone. Lorie chooses whether to create websites based on their content, not based on the person that requests that content, and the 10th Circuit agreed with that fact as well. Lorie’s websites are protected speech under the First Amendment, and the 10th Circuit agreed with that.”

Even so, she said, “the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals held in a 2-1 decision that the government can actually compel Lorie’s speech, even though it admitted that her decisions hinge on what the message is in the speech and not the person who requests it.”

Waggoner described the decision as “absolutely unprecedented,” and said “our government’s duty is to protect freedom, not to take it away. So, if the government has the power to force Lorie to speak a message, then it can force any one of us to speak a message.”

The Supreme Court accepted Smith’s case in February. Waggoner said that law enforcement authorities will be contacted if Smith continues to receive harassment and threats.

Waggoner said she will be filing briefs to the High Court next week, and Colorado will then have several months to reply. Amicus briefs supporting Smith are due June 2. Oral arguments could come as early as October.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/colorado-graphic-designer-fears-for-her-life-as-religious-freedom-case-heads-to-supreme-court_4476981.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-22-2&utm_medium=email&est=n1ywt4OI26KFgpE0N8Tq9D0Z8XPYUAd1ZFaJn4si80qExcnh0hg6eKyAYrpREt5J4w%3D%3D

In a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a campaign finance rule regulating the repayment of loans by a candidate to his own campaign, handing a win on May 16 to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who challenged the Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulation.

“[The decision] is a resounding victory for the First Amendment,” a spokesperson for Cruz told The Post Millennial.

“Sen. Cruz is gratified that the Supreme Court ruled that the existing law imposed an unconstitutional restriction on free speech that unfairly benefited incumbent politicians and the super-wealthy. This landmark decision will help invigorate our democratic process by making it easier for challengers to take on and defeat career politicians.”

The appeal to the Supreme Court was brought by the FEC after a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled against the agency last year.

The legal provision in question is in Section 304 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, which imposed restrictions on post-election contributions by limiting the amount that a candidate may be repaid from such funds to $250,000.

Cruz lent his campaign committee money, and the committee deliberately failed to categorize the unrepaid part of the loan—$10,000—as a campaign contribution in order to launch a First Amendment-based challenge to the rule.

The case grew out of the 2018 election cycle that culminated in the Republican U.S. senator’s victory over Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, by 2.6 percentage points. O’Rourke raised more than twice as much money as Cruz in the high-profile, record-breaking $115 million Senate race.

Cruz wrote in a brief that Section 304 unconstitutionally deters candidates from lending money to their campaigns by restricting the campaign’s ability to repay.

The $250,000 repayment limit, “by substantially increasing the risk that any candidate loan will never be fully repaid—forces a candidate to think twice before making those loans in the first place.” As the district court found, this limit burdens a candidate’s right to speak freely in favor of his own election and “runs afoul of the First Amendment.”

The Biden administration had argued that disallowing the rule would open the door to bribery in elections, but the high court found that the restriction on candidates’ post-election use of political contributions to recover personal funds lent to the campaign ran afoul of First Amendment speech protections.

The decision (pdf) in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, written by Chief Justice Roberts, was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion that was backed by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

“The question is whether this restriction violates the First Amendment rights of candidates and their campaigns to engage in political speech,” Roberts wrote.

“There is no doubt that the law does burden First Amendment electoral speech, and any such law must at least be justified by a permissible interest.”

Roberts then directly quoted the 2014 plurality opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC, saying that “when the government restricts speech, the government bears the burden of proving the constitutionality of its actions.”

The government “is unable to identify a single case of quid pro quo corruption … even though most states do not impose a limit on the use of post-election contributions to repay candidate loans.”

The government failed to demonstrate that Section 304 of the BCRA “furthers a permissible anti-corruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics,” according to Roberts.

The rule “burdens core political speech without proper justification.”

Kagan wrote that the Supreme Court, which in recent years has been weakening campaign finance restrictions, was making a mistake.

“In striking down the law today the court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop. … In allowing those payments to go forward unrestrained, today’s decision can only bring this country’s political system into further disrepute,” she wrote.

Kagan embraced the bribery argument advanced by the Biden administration.

“Repaying a candidate’s loan after he has won election cannot serve the usual purposes of a contribution: The money comes too late to aid in any of his campaign activities,” she wrote. “All the money does is enrich the candidate personally at a time when he can return the favor—by a vote, a contract, an appointment.

“It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption—the danger of ‘I’ll make you richer and you’ll make me richer’ arrangements between donors and officeholders.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/victory-for-ted-cruz-as-supreme-court-rebuffs-biden-administration-strikes-down-campaign-spending-rule_4468762.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-05-17&utm_medium=email&est=2%2BzWYsq0U2DyZ5BVDGeiuVXVLd0HEbw3dPStJBuUTBOj39uSLBa2smHY9y8wKbF5IQ%3D%3D

A divided Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on May 16 against a longtime illegal alien who falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen on a driver’s license application, upholding a law that prevents federal courts from reviewing factual findings made by the Department of Justice in deportation proceedings.

The new ruling suggests that federal law isn’t sympathetic to individuals who falsely hold themselves out as U.S. citizens.

The majority opinion (pdf) in the case, Patel v. Garland, court file 20-979, was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Four conservative members of the court—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh—joined Barrett’s opinion.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a strongly worded dissenting opinion, which was joined by the court’s three liberal justices—Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

Pankajkumar Patel is a citizen of India who has lived in the United States since entering the country unlawfully in February 1992. He is married and has three children.

Patel checked a box on a driver’s license application in Georgia identifying himself as a U.S. citizen. He later claimed that he checked the box inadvertently, then tried to obtain lawful permanent resident status under a process authorized by Congress called “adjustment of status” that allows individuals who are physically present in the country to upgrade their immigration status to lawful permanent resident without having to leave the country.

In 2012, deportation proceedings began before an immigration judge. Patel said his application for adjustment of status was a defense to deportation and renewed his request to be processed for a green card. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security countered that the false claim of U.S. citizenship undermined his defense. The immigration judge agreed.

The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) then held that Patel was inadmissible under federal law because he “falsely represented” himself as a U.S. citizen for a benefit under state law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined jurisdiction to review whether Patel was inadmissible for representing himself as a U.S. citizen. The 11th Circuit separately held, contrary to a precedent-setting BIA decision, that the relevant federal law makes noncitizens inadmissible even if their misrepresentation of citizenship is immaterial to the government benefit sought.

Barrett wrote in the decision that Congress “has comprehensively detailed the rules by which noncitizens may enter and live in the United States.”

“When noncitizens violate those rules, Congress has provided procedures for their removal. At the same time, there is room for mercy: Congress has given the Attorney General power to grant relief from removal in certain circumstances,” she wrote.

But federal courts “have a very limited role to play in this process. With an exception for legal and constitutional questions, Congress has barred judicial review of the Attorney General’s decisions denying discretionary relief from removal. We must decide how far this bar extends—specifically, whether it precludes judicial review of factual findings that underlie a denial of relief,” Barrett wrote.

“It does.”

In his dissent, Gorsuch claimed that a bureaucratic error doomed Patel.

“It is no secret that when processing applications, licenses, and permits the government sometimes makes mistakes,” the justice wrote. “Often, they are small ones—a misspelled name, a misplaced application. But sometimes a bureaucratic mistake can have life-changing consequences. Our case is such a case.”

Even though Patel may have made a mistake on the Georgia driver’s license application, this case, contrary to Gorsuch’s statement, isn’t about the government making a mistake.

The 11th Circuit specifically stated that “there was no dispute that Patel made a false representation of citizenship.” The immigration judge in the case “rejected Patel’s arguments” and “determined that Patel was not credible.”

Patel was “evasive when testifying and would not explain to the Court exactly what the mistake was,” the circuit decision reads. “The evidence contradicted Patel’s testimony, which the IJ [immigration judge] already suspected was not candid, so the IJ did not believe Patel’s claim that he made a mistake. The IJ found that Patel willfully and purposefully indicated that he was a U.S. citizen.”

Gorsuch blamed the false citizenship claim on the government and lamented the law’s inflexibility.

“Today, the Court holds that a federal bureaucracy can make an obvious factual error, one that will result in an individual’s removal from this country, and nothing can be done about it,” Gorsuch wrote. “No court may even hear the case. It is a bold claim promising dire consequences for countless lawful immigrants.

“And it is such an unlikely assertion of raw administrative power that not even the agency that allegedly erred, nor any other arm of the Executive Branch, endorses it. Today’s majority acts on its own to shield the government from the embarrassment of having to correct even its most obvious errors.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-rules-against-illegal-alien-who-falsely-claimed-citizenship_4469375.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-16-4&utm_medium=email&est=CyyoZFUifDD3KI%2BpT5F4yGo%2F7qfwykSfcUEmF9lEFmTx5Y%2Fmml21euHw0Ap2EnKInA%3D%3D

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have defended the outrage that some pro-abortion advocates have directed against sitting Supreme Court (SCOTUS) justices as “righteous” and “deserved” as violence against some pro-life groups has begun to escalate.

According to a draft opinion leaked by Politico on May 2, which Chief Justice John Roberts has since indicated is real, SCOTUS may be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion of the court. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The possible repeal of the seminal 1973 abortion case, which has defined federal law toward abortion for the past half-century, sent pro-abortion advocates into a flurry of activity online and on Capitol Hill.

Just minutes after the decision leaked, Pelosi and Schumer issued a statement roundly condemning the document.

“The Republican-appointed Justices’ reported votes to overturn Roe v. Wade would go down as an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history,” the two wrote in a joint statement on May 2. They said the decision would be the “greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), leader of the 96-strong Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a May 2 tweet, “As one of the 1 in 4 women in this country who have chosen to have an abortion, I am outraged & disgusted by the reported draft SCOTUS opinion.”

Since then, abortion advocates have leaked the home addresses of SCOTUS justices to the public and have staged protests outside their personal homes, prompting concern for the safety of the justices.

The protests, some have argued, are directly in contravention of U.S. law.

Under 18 U.S. Code § 1507, protesting outside the homes of those involved in the judicial process “with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty,” is liable to incur fines or prison time.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has not responded to a request by the Epoch Times for comment on the legal issue.

When asked about it during a May 9 press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied indirectly, saying, “We’re certainly not suggesting that anyone break any laws.”

Despite the protests being in apparent contravention of U.S. law, House and Senate Democrat leaders have praised the protests.

“While we have seen and heard extraordinary anguish in our communities, we have been moved by how so many have channeled their righteous anger into meaningful action: planning to march and mobilize to make their voices heard,” said Pelosi on the protests. “Thank you for your powerful commitment to carrying on the fight for the rights of all Americans.”

Pelosi’s comment came under fire after the office of pro-life activist group Wisconsin Family Action was firebombed by pro-abortion activists. Julaine Appling, president of the group, attributed the attack to Pelosi’s rhetoric.

“It seems to me that Nancy Pelosi is partly responsible for inciting the kind of violence that we were the recipients of early on Mother’s Day morning,” Appling said. “That kind of rhetoric heats things up. It doesn’t cool it down. And our leaders need to be held responsible and held accountable for the kind of message they send.”

On the other side of Capitol Hill, Schumer also praised the protests.

“The outrage among women is palpable and real,” Schumer said, “and the outrage directed against this court is deserved.”

Some Republicans, concerned about the risk to the personal safety of the justices, have called on Chief Justice Roberts to release the decision as soon as possible to forestall the risk of further escalation.

On Monday, senators on both sides of the aisle banded together to pass legislation that would increase the security detail for justices and their families as protests continue unabated, with no indication from the White House or the DOJ that they will step in to enforce the law around judicial protests.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/amid-escalating-protests-dem-leaders-call-outrage-directed-against-scotus-deserved-righteous_4458220.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-11-2&utm_medium=email&est=C4zc33qUsGbFEkRfzdz%2FplzNVxrhb6LTEYipugsQlc04891dPpD9ApsBtz8xHiAvYA%3D%3D

Most conservatives seem to think someone leaked the Supreme Court decision to incite outrage among leftists. And many Democrats, eager to defend Roe v. Wade, have promised to “punish” those who want to protect unborn life.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, along with other members of the court, blasted the left.

From Axios:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Friday that government institutions can’t be “bullied” into giving people the outcome they want, multiple news outlets report.

Thomas scolded the left, saying they need to live with the outcomes they don’t agree with. But the radical left, fueled by Democrat cash and socialism, proved his point anyway.

From YouTube:

Proving the justice’s point, protesters assaulted the private homes of conservative Supreme Court justices. Their goal is to terrorize these justices, hoping they will break down to mob rule.

Even Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, called on more people to pressure the court.

This proves that Pelosi, and her party, are no longer on the side of law and order. The fact they are trying to exert outside pressure on the group that is supposed to rule on the law and law alone shows the Left wants power at all costs.

Don’t believe their lies that this is about “women’s rights.” Democrats get millions of dollars from abortion providers.

Democrats in Congress give hundreds of millions of tax dollars to Planned Parenthood and other groups. Then these groups donate millions to Democrat campaigns.

Meanwhile, millions suffer because of the left’s unchecked greed.

What’s so hilarious about their “protests” is that they ignore the fact that this doesn’t outlaw abortion. It only gives states (i.e. the democratic voting public) the right to decide their own abortion laws.

So, the left is ranting and rioting because some states won’t listen to their demands.

Uh… who are the crazy ones?

Key Takeaways:

• Clarence Thomas told the left the court won’t be bullied.
• Leftist activists protested outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.
• Pelosi urged activists to “pressure” the highest court in the land.

Source: Axios, YouTube

While the public focuses on the Biden administration’s vaccination mandate, many are overlooking yet another new federal mandate: Congress’s effort to ban state tax cuts.

Congress passed the so-called “American Rescue Plan Act” (ARPA) in March. The statute prohibits any state accepting ARPA funds from cutting state taxes if ARPA money reimburses the state “directly or indirectly” for funds “reduce[d]” from the tax cut. States must provide detailed records to federal regulators to justify their tax decisions.

As a matter of policy, Congress’s tax mandate makes no sense. If our goal is to recover from economic damage inflicted by COVID-19, then cutting taxes and unleashing private sector growth is the best way to do it.

But the mandate is more than bad policy; it’s also unconstitutional. Last July, Ohio federal Judge Douglas R. Cole so ruled (pdf).

Cole’s decision was based on modern Supreme Court 10th Amendment cases. Those cases say that if Congress wants to impose conditions on a state receiving federal dollars, Congress must lay out those conditions clearly. This enables state officials to understand the program’s costs before they agree to participate.

Cole found that ARPA’s tax mandate wasn’t sufficiently clear, and therefore not enforceable.

This is a good result. But truth to tell, if the Constitution was still fully respected, this sort of litigation would rarely be necessary. It became necessary because of a couple of shameful Supreme Court decisions.

The Two Cases That Rewrote the Constitution

The years from 1936 to about 1952 were perhaps the Supreme Court’s worst period. You can criticize the present justices, as I sometimes do. But compared to the court from 1936 to 1952, today’s bench is a paragon of judicial competence and virtue.

The two cases that marked the beginning of this sad era were United States v. Butler (1936) (pdf) and Helvering v. Davis (1937) (pdf).

The Butler case adjudicated the constitutionality of a federal agricultural subsidy program. There was no serious doubt the program was unconstitutional. Nothing in the Constitution gives Congress power to regulate agriculture directly. For 140 years, agriculture had been accepted as within state, rather than federal, jurisdiction.

The court ultimately reached the right decision by ruling the federal program invalid. But along the way, it did some mischief: It inserted in its opinion completely unnecessary—and deeply erroneous—cogitations about the Constitution’s taxation clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1).

The taxation clause, as its name implies, grants power to Congress to tax. After granting power to tax, the clause restricts that authority by requiring that taxes must be levied only for purposes of debt payment or to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” But the court theorized that instead of restricting congressional power, this language granted the power to Congress to spend—and to spend anything it wanted on almost anything it pleased!

This assertion directly contradicts the Constitution’s text and what leading Founders had said about it. For example:

• In reading the text, the court ignored 18th-century word definitions. In 18th-century political discourse, “common” and “general” usually meant national rather than regional or special. “Provide” meant “lay up provisions for,” not “spend” (pdf). Thus, the phrase “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare” meant only that taxes were limited to storing up funds for national, rather than local or special-interest, purposes.
• Immediately after the taxation clause, the Constitution’s text contains a long list of additional congressional powers. Other portions of the document add even more. Of course, all that verbiage would be largely pointless if the taxation clause gave Congress the authority to spend on anything it wants. The court’s conclusion necessarily assumes that the Constitution’s framers, although highly accomplished legal draftsmen, gratuitously inserted enormous blocks of useless script.
• The text also includes curbs on some of those additional powers. But if the taxation clause had given Congress power to spend whatever it wants on the “common Defence and general Welfare,” then those curbs would be nugatory. Again, draftsmen as accomplished as the framers do not waste language that way.
• Other constitutional provisions empower Congress to pay debts, fund certain programs, and defend the nation. There’s no need to read the taxation clause as authorizing expenditures.
• In view of all this, it’s not surprising that during the constitutional debates of 1787–1790, the Constitution’s advocates uniformly affirmed that most spending programs would be administered by the states and would be outside congressional control (pdf).

The only Founding-era source the court marshaled to support its conclusion was a single claim in a single paper written by Alexander Hamilton. But this paper was written after the Constitution was ratified and was sharply at odds with statements that Hamilton—and many other advocates of the Constitution—issued before ratification (pdf). Hamilton’s claim apparently was part of a personal campaign to, in his words, “triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce them into an entire subordination” (pdf). It was not a good-faith interpretation of the Constitution.

Fortunately, the court’s ruminations in Butler weren’t binding authority. They were what lawyers call “dicta”—that is, extraneous material not necessary to the decision of the case.

The Conversion of Dicta Into ‘Law’

Yet, the following year, the bench pretended those dicta were binding authority. Writing for the court in Helvering v. Davis, “progressive” Justice Benjamin Cardozo asserted that

Congress may spend money in aid of the “general welfare.” … United States v. Butler …; Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, supra. There have been great statesmen in our history who have stood for other views. We will not resurrect the contest. It is now settled by decision. United States v. Butler, supra.

To put it bluntly, this statement was a lie. The Butler case hadn’t “settled” any such thing. The court’s ruminations on the spending power in the Butler opinion were extraneous to the case ruling, and the ruling effectively contradicted those ruminations.

Cardozo also cited Charles C. Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (pdf), presumably because the court’s opinion in Steward Machine mentioned the Butler dicta. But the issue in Steward Machine involved taxing, not spending. Moreover, Steward Machine was issued the very same day as Helvering and written by the very same justice.

Cardozo’s only “settled” authority was himself.

The truth is that in Butler and Helvering the justices effectively amended our Supreme Law without bothering to consult the people or the states, as the Constitution requires (Article V).

What happened next exemplifies how a single constitutional change can trigger massive long-term consequences. Before these cases were decided, the federal government rarely incurred a peacetime budget deficit. After they were decided, the federal government ran deficits almost every year.

These cases should have been reversed promptly by constitutional amendment, just as bad Supreme Court decisions had been overturned by the 11th and 14th Amendments. But because of the successive crises of the Depression and World War II, that didn’t happen.

So when you assign fault for our unsustainable national debt, don’t limit the blame to spendthrift politicians. Blame also the Supreme Court justices who enabled them.

Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor and legal historian, is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at Colorado’s Independence Institute and author of “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant” (3rd ed., 2015).

The Supreme Court has dealt two devastating blows to the aspirations of Black Lives Matter and its ilk on the left who leverage the false narrative that the thin blue line is a tool of systemic white supremacy for political gain.

Two rulings issued on Monday took the side of police officers in cases involving qualified immunity, both of which involved incidents of excessive force.

Qualified immunity is the legal doctrine that shields government officials, such as police officers, from lawsuits except in cases when they have clearly broken established law.

Eliminating these legal protections has become a prime policy target of the vehemently anti-law enforcement progressive hard left and the rhetoric surrounding last summer’s violent, destructive and divisive George Floyd riots and subsequent “defund the police” insanity.

The high court issued unsigned orders with no dissents on Monday, stating that in neither case had the officer broken the law as established by previous rulings.

Dan Bongino Punishes Sponsor for Bowing to Antifa Mob

Interestingly, both cases involved suspects who were reportedly in the process of victimizing women when police showed up, according to NPR.

In the first case, officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas from Union City, California, responded to a call from a terrified 12-year-old girl who said she and her mother and sister had barricaded themselves in a room because one Ramon Cortesluna was in the process of destroying stuff in the house with a chainsaw (emphasis mine).

After another officer shot Cortesluna with bean bag rounds, Rivas-Villegas knelt on his back to retrieve him of the knife he was wielding.

Cortesluna sued — what is this world coming to, after all, when you can’t terrorize women and children without fear of getting roughed up when the cops show up to intervene?

Do you support qualified immunity?

In the second case, a woman in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, called police saying that her drunken ex-husband, Dominic Rollice, refused to leave her home. When police showed up, they confronted Rollice in the garage, where he picked up a hammer which he refused to drop when ordered by police, whom he approached with the tool raised over his head. He was shot and killed.

The Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling that had found the officers broke the law, stating that “not one” case “comes close to establishing that the officers’ conduct was unlawful.”

Democrats pounced on the opportunity to advocate for legislation that would end qualified immunity, as they are indeed wont to favor policies that will likely lead to the further victimization of women, children and minorities.

By shielding police officers from accountability, qualified immunity encourages more police violence against Black and Brown people. The Supreme Court remains unwilling to correct this injustice. Congress needs to pass my legislation to finally abolish qualified immunity. https://t.co/a0ePZrewjo

— Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) October 18, 2021

Biden DOJ’s New Attack on Free Speech Brings Major Obama-Era Lie to Light

The Democrats, under the influence of Black Lives Matter, love to canonize men like Jacob Blake, for example, who was shot by police officers sparking days of unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.

He has been lionized by the left to the point that he’s personally met with now-Vice President Kamala Harris — and he was armed and allegedly in the process of harassing a woman he had sexually assaulted in front of their child when police initiated contact with him.

Harris said she was “proud of” him.

The notorious “Squad” voiced their support for such legislation last year, writing in support of a sweeping justice reform bill that it was necessary to eliminate qualified immunity granted that “police violence, as a weapon of structural racism, continues to have devastating and deadly consequences for Black and brown lives across our country.”

What about the lives of those who are victimized by criminals? Do their lives not matter? What about the women victimized by these reportedly belligerent men?

When it comes to living in a civil, lawful society, you simply can’t have your cake and eat it too. You cannot expect to live on streets where law and order are enforced by officers who are exhaustively trained on how to physically restrain violent criminals and not expect them to use force when they show up.

As police officers, they should absolutely be held to a high standard when they violate the law that they certainly have more understanding of than the people they’re often showing up to confront.

Yet police officers use violence to fight violence — and to put them at risk of civil suit every time they ever lay hands on a criminal with anything other than kid gloves is not only ludicrous, it’s downright dangerous.

As a woman, I don’t want to live in a society where officers can’t defend themselves or members of the public over fear of an arbitrary or frivolous lawsuit.

It’s heartening to see this lawsuit in today’s political climate, especially when you consider that “defund the police” has already proven to be politically toxic for the left.

Just like the Black Lives Matter organization itself, the movement as a whole is panning out to be far more toxic and destructive for our society than their pie-in-the-sky vision of a world in which no more prisons or police somehow can produce a perfect justice system.

Justice can’t exist unless all lives matter — and society works together with the same common goal to protect the vulnerable against those who seek to threaten and destroy life, not empower them in the name of a twisted and perverted form of “justice” like the one that’s been peddled to us for too long.

District of Columbia residents are not entitled to voting representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Supreme Court ruled, affirming a lower court decision.

The ruling came after the House approved legislation in April to make D.C. the 51st state, but the bill stalled in the Senate. Democrats support the measure, arguing that all U.S. citizens should be represented in Congress; Republicans oppose it because they believe the framers of the Constitution did not want D.C. to become a state, and because the new state’s two senators would almost certainly be Democrats in the Democratic Party stronghold.

The case is Castañon v. United States, court file 20-1279. The ruling, which summarily affirmed a lower court decision, came Oct. 4. There were no oral arguments.

In the brief unsigned order Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated they would dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. They did not elaborate.

In the order, the high court referenced Adams v. Clinton, a decision it handed down in 2000. In that previous decision, the court held the District of Columbia was not a state and was therefore not entitled to representation in Congress under Article I, section 8 of the Constitution.

Referring to the nation’s capital that at the time the Constitution was ratified in 1788 had yet to be created, that provision gave Congress the power “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of Particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.”

Although President Joe Biden supports D.C. statehood, his administration urged the Supreme Court “that the appeal be dismissed or, in the alternative, that the district court’s order be affirmed.”

The petitioners, a group of Washington residents led by Angelica Castañon, previously argued in their complaint before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that the continuing denial of the right to vote, which “is fundamental under our Constitution,” “violates the constitutional guarantees of equal protection, due process, and the constitutional right of association.”

In March last year, a three-judge panel of the District Court ruled against the residents.

“We recognize that District residents’ lack of the congressional franchise is viewed by many, even most, as deeply unjust, and we have given each aspect of Plaintiffs’ claims most serious consideration, but our ruling today is compelled by precedent and by the Constitution itself,” the opinion stated.

However, Washington residents are not completely shut out of self-governance. There is an elected District Council that takes care of day-to-day local government matters, subject to the possibility of a joint resolution of disapproval being passed by both houses of Congress, something that rarely happens. The 23rd Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1961, gave the District 3 votes in the electoral college in presidential elections.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), a nonvoting member of the House, said she was “disappointed” by the Supreme Court ruling.

But she said in a statement that “the ruling has no bearing on the constitutionality of D.C. statehood, which would give D.C. residents voting representation in the House and Senate and full control over their local affairs. In fact, the three-judge panel expressly referred to statehood as a remedy for D.C. residents.”

“In 2016, D.C. residents voted overwhelmingly for statehood, and the House has passed my D.C. statehood bill twice since June 2020. We have record support for D.C. statehood in the Senate, and we have never been closer to statehood.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-upholds-constitutional-ban-on-d-c-voting-rights_4032739.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

A Mississippi abortion clinic is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the state’s fetal pain abortion law based in part on a debunked medical study.

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sued Mississippi over a 15-week abortion ban, argued in a Supreme Court brief filed Monday that a 2010 review of research proved that pre-viability babies could not feel pain, but it failed to mention that one of the study’s architects repudiated the findings. “This medical consensus reflects the conclusions of a multi-disciplinary team of physicians and scientists from all relevant fields after a years-long examination of all peer-reviewed data relevant to the issue,” the brief states. 

Neuroscientist Dr. Stuart Derbyshire, who was a lead author in the literature cited by the clinic, updated his findings in a 2020 study after finding that fetuses feel pain at 12 weeks. John Bockmann, who co-authored the 2020 fetal pain study with Derbyshire, said the idea that there is a medical consensus on fetal pain is absurd. He said the brief is an example of abortion advocates disregarding updated science on fetal development. 

“If there were a rebuttal to our paper, which posits fetal pain beginning at 12 weeks, they would have put it front and center,” Bockmann told the Washington Free Beacon. Derbyshire, a professor at the National University of Singapore, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Supreme Court will take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in the fall term. Legal precedent since Roe v. Wade has declared abortion bans prior to fetal viability to be unconstitutional, but the Court did not intervene to stop a six-week abortion ban in Texas from being implemented in September. 

Mississippi state officials and pro-life activists encouraged the Court to consider updated science on fetal development that was not around during past abortion decisions. Derbyshire, who is pro-choice, previously told the Washington Free Beacon that his 2010 research paper is outdated. Chuck Donovan, president of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, said abortion advocates are fearful that previous abortion cases may not hold up thanks to updated scientific understanding of fetal development. 

“The Mississippi abortion center brief only reinforces that Roe and Casey are based on outdated science,” Donovan told the Free Beacon. “Sadly, the abortion industry wants to keep it that way. Citing outdated science, ignoring medical advancements, and putting aside the consensus judgment of the American people, the abortion industry is asking the Court to close their eyes, their minds, and their hearts to the modern miracles of science and the dynamic lives of the unborn.”

Abortion Clinic’s Supreme Court Defense Rests on Debunked Study (freebeacon.com)

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer issued a warning on Democrats wanting to remake the Supreme Court, including expanding the institution with justices, suggesting that Republicans will exploit Democrats’ agenda.

Breyer, in a wide-ranging interview with NPR, said he will not kowtow to calls from progressive lawmakers to retire due to his age.

“I’m only going to say that I’m not going to go beyond what I previously said on the subject, and that is that I do not believe I should stay on the Supreme Court, or want to stay on the Supreme Court, until I die,” the 83-year-old justice told the partially publicly funded broadcaster. “And when exactly I should retire, or will retire, has many complex parts to it. I think I’m aware of most of them, and I am, and will consider them.”

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last year and Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the top court, left-wing Democrat lawmakers called for the expansion, or “packing,” of the Supreme Court with several more justices. In April, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that established an investigatory body to determine whether more seats should be added to the Supreme Court or whether term limits should be established for justices.

“There is no question that Justice Breyer, for whom I have great respect, should retire at the end of this term,” Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) told news website Cheddar in April, referring to Ginsburg’s death. “My goodness, have we not learned our lesson?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has issued similar statements.

But Breyer, who dismissed such calls earlier this year, again said that such notions haven’t had an impact on the justices.

“What goes around comes around. And if the Democrats can do it, the Republicans can do it,” Breyer told NPR while promoting his upcoming book, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics.”

During the interview, Breyer also said that he welcomes in-person oral arguments after the court went virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think it’s better to be there where you can actually see the lawyer and see your colleagues, and you get more of a human interaction,” he said to NPR.

“We’re not automatons. We’re human beings,” Breyer also said. “And I believe when human beings discuss things face to face … there’s a better chance of working things out. That’s true with the lawyers in oral arguments, and it’s true with the nine of us when we’re talking.”

Justice Breyer Issues Warning to Democrats Who Want to Remake Supreme Court (theepochtimes.com)

Tanner Cross refused to call students by pronouns divergent from their biological sex

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled in favor of an elementary school teacher who was suspended for criticizing the district’s proposed transgender policies.

The commonwealth’s highest court on Monday rejected Loudoun County Public Schools’ appeal to suspend Tanner Cross, a physical education teacher who was placed on administrative leave in May for criticizing the district’s proposed policies for transgender students. Cross won a temporary injunction in the state’s 12th circuit court in June and subsequently was allowed to return to the classroom.

The district did not make an adequate case for reversing the lower court’s June decision, reaffirming Cross’s win, the Virginia Supreme Court said Monday.

In its appeal, Loudoun County Public Schools claimed that Cross’s religious and speech protections are secondary to students’ rights to comfort.

“While LCPS respects the rights of public-school employees to free speech and free exercise of religion, those rights do not outweigh the rights of students to be educated in a supportive and nurturing environment,” the district claimed.

Virginia governor Ralph Northam (D.) last year approved a measure requiring public schools to create and implement protections for transgender students by the 2021-2022 school year. Pursuant to that law, Loudoun school officials proposed updated guidelines that would allow transgender students to access traditionally sex-discriminated spaces like restrooms and sports teams.

The updated policies, which the school board approved on Aug. 11, also require teachers to call students by selected names and pronouns that align with their “gender identity.” Cross spoke out against that provision in a May 25 school board meeting, days before he was suspended.

“I love all of my students, but I would never lie to them regardless of the consequences,” Cross said. “I’m a teacher, but I serve God first and I will not affirm a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it’s against my religion, it’s lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it’s sinning against our God.”

District officials claimed Cross’s statement had a “disruptive impact” on the school community.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal nonprofit that defended Cross, says teachers should not be forced to comply with such policies.

“Teachers shouldn’t be forced to promote ideologies that are harmful to their students and that their beliefs are false, nor should they be silenced for commentating at a public meeting,” senior counsel Tyson Langhofer said in a statement on Monday.

Langhofer said Alliance Defending Freedom amended its lawsuit after the district updated its policies for transgender students.

Students in Loudoun County Public Schools, one of the wealthiest districts in the country, returned to the classroom on Aug. 26.

Virginia Supreme Court Backs Teacher Ousted for Rejecting Trans Policies (freebeacon.com)