Tag: Supreme Court

REPORT: Dems to Unveil ‘Transgender Bill of Rights’ in Response to Roe v Wade Reversal

by Breck Worsham, posted in law, news, politics

WASHINGTON (The Hill)– A group of House Democrats on Tuesday announced they would move to codify federal protections for transgender people.

The proposal, dubbed the “Transgender Bill of Rights,” would codify the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision that protects employees against discrimination for being gay or transgender.

The proposal would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to explicitly include protections for gender identity and sex characteristics, expand access to gender-affirming care and ban conversion therapy.

It would also require the attorney general to designate a liaison dedicated to overseeing enforcement of civil rights for transgender people and invest in community services to prevent anti-transgender violence.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and co-chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force, said in a statement that the resolution would ensure transgender people can lead “full, happy lives.”

“As we witness Republicans and an extremist Supreme Court attack and roll back the fundamental rights of trans people across our country, and as state legislatures across the country target our trans community with hateful, bigoted and transphobic attacks, we are standing up and saying enough is enough,” Jayapal said.

Jayapal introduced the proposal alongside Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Marie Newman (D-Ill.), Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.). The bill has 84 other co-sponsors.

The bill’s proponents cited Friday’s Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that the court should also consider overturning some of its other precedents decided under the same substantive due process protections at the heart of Friday’s decision, like rights to same-sex marriage and contraception.

The Bostock decision was not mentioned in Thomas’s concurring opinion and involved a different legal question.

But Thomas’s opinion has caught the eye of many Democrats who believe the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to roll back rights extended to LGBTQ people in past cases.

Democrats supporting the bill also pointed to research from the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, showing state legislatures have proposed more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills in the past year.

The bill is supported by more than 30 organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Education Association.

“While some politicians are targeting our community with discriminatory legislation, we are grateful that the members House of Representatives are sending this message to us — and especially to transgender youth — that they affirm our lives and value the contributions we make to our country,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the National Center for Transgender Equality’s executive director. “We deserve to live as who we are without sacrificing our safety, access to health care or enduring violence and discrimination.”

The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld contributed to the contents of this report.

Advertisement

REPORT: Conservative Supreme Court Justices Being Targeted at Their Homes By Pro-Abortion Protesters

by Breck Worsham, posted in law, media, news, politics

WASHINGTON (Breitbart)– Leftist activists are directing protestors to confront conservative Supreme Court Justices at their homes in Maryland and Virginia.

Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch are all targets by an organization called, “Ruth Sent Us.” The organization has published the justices’ supposed home addresses online for the radical protestors to locate.

Ruth seems to be a reference to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a ardent defender of the right to abortion. But this group’s use of her name is ironic, because Ginsburg was very collegial with her conservatives colleagues, including her best friend, Justice Antonin Scalia, and because Ginsburg criticized Roe as a bad decision, despite agreeing with its conclusion.

“Our 6-3 extremist Supreme Court routinely issues rulings that hurt women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights,” the group’s website states. “We must rise up to force accountability using a diversity of tactics.”

The website also asked protestors to “rise up May 8-15 and beyond… At the homes of the six extremist justices, three in Virginia and three in Maryland.” The site says the main protest is scheduled for May 11.

It is not the first time radical-left organizations have mobilized to intimidate political opponents at their homes. In September, protestors under the banner of ShutDownDC picketed outside Kavanaugh’s home to express angst against pro-life laws. In January, the same organization was also responsible for the protests outside Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) home in Virginia.

“Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel,” Hawley said at the time. “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Tuesday admitted the left’s radical protestors may turn violent against the justices in the coming days. “We hate to say this, but some abortion fanatic could decide to commit an act of violence to stop a 5-4 ruling. It’s an awful thought, but we live in fanatical times,” the board penned.

The potential violence follows a Monday Supreme Court leak that revealed Roe v. Wade may be overturned. “Our guess is that the leak is likely to backfire at the Court,” the Journal continued.

“A Justice who switched his or her vote now would be open to ridicule for wilting under pressure,” the Journal added. “It would also invite more leaks in the future by showing they get results. A pattern of pre-emptive leaks of draft opinions would destroy the Court.”

Breitbart’s Wendell Husebo contributed to the contents of this report.

BREAKING: Draft Ruling Shows Supreme Court Rules to Overturn Roe v. Wade

by Breck Worsham, posted in health, law, media, politics

WASHINGTON– In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

Source: Politico

Read the full 98-page initial draft majority opinion below.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/read-justice-alito-initial-abortion-opinion-overturn-roe-v-wade-pdf-00029504

THE FIGHT FOR LIFE: SCOTUS Hears Case That Could Destroy Roe v. Wade

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

WASHINGTON (The Hill) — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take up a dispute over a Mississippi law that bans virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, potentially setting the 6-3 conservative majority court on a collision course with the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

The move was announced in an unsigned order, with the justices indicating the dispute would be limited to the major issue of the constitutionality of pre-viability restrictions on elective abortions. 

The case was brought on appeal by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R) after a federal appeals court sided with challengers to the state’s restriction. 

The Supreme Court has undergone a dramatic conservative shift since last year when Mississippi first asked the justices to take up its appeal.

Last term, a bare 5-4 majority voted to block a Louisiana abortion limit, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the deciding vote alongside Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the court’s three other more liberal justices.

But the late Ginsburg, a liberal stalwart, has since been replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, cementing a 6-3 conservative court and throwing the future of longstanding abortion protections into question.

At least four justices must agree to hear a case for an appeal to be granted.

Abortion rights advocates expressed concern over Monday’s development.

“Alarm bells are ringing loudly about the threat to reproductive rights,” Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court just agreed to review an abortion ban that unquestionably violates nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and is a test case to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

The Mississippi law is among hundreds of abortion restrictions that have been introduced recently in state legislatures across the country. In 2021 alone, more than 500 abortion restrictions, including nearly 150 abortion bans, were introduced in 46 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Of those, just over 60 measures have been enacted.

The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) hailed the Supreme Court’s move on Monday as a chance to give states more latitude.

“This is a landmark opportunity for the Supreme Court to recognize the right of states to protect unborn children from the horrors of painful late-term abortions,” SBA List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement.

Mississippi’s appeal comes after losing two rounds in the lower courts. In 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that the state’s restriction placed an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy before viability. 

“In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed, and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability,” reads the opinion of a three-judge panel. “States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not impose an undue burden on the woman’s right, but they may not ban abortions.”

The Hill’s John Kruzel contributed to the contents of this report.

Justice Clarence Thomas Ruling Leads The Way To Ending Social Media Censorship

by Breck Worsham, posted in law

WASHINGTON (The Federalist) —

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas offered a roadmap to eliminating rampant social media censorship from online monopolies on Monday.

In a ruling for writ of certiorari on the case of President Joe Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Thomas concurred in an opinion to send the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit with instructions to dismiss as moot, now that Biden is in the White House. The case, launched in August, questions whether the First Amendment strips government officials of their ability to block third-party accounts on Twitter if the personal account is used to conduct official business. The lower court ruled Trump violated the First Amendment when blocking users on the platform, which served as a public forum.

“I write separately to note that this petition highlights the principal legal difficulty that surrounds digital platforms,” Thomas wrote, “namely, that applying old doctrines to new digital platforms is rarely straightforward.”

Thomas went on to outline a blueprint for breaking up protections that enable corporate tech monopolies to engage in widespread censorship frequently in one direction. The conservative justice’s argument rests primarily on the monopoly power Big Tech conglomerates possess in Silicon Valley, where unilateral control of the public forum means no real public forum at all.

“It seems rather odd to say that something is a government forum when a private company has unrestricted authority to do away with it,” Thomas wrote. “The disparity between Twitter’s control and Mr. Trump’s control is stark, to say the least.”

In January, Twitter kicked then-President Trump from the platform altogether.

“Today’s digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors,” Thomas emphasized. “Also unprecedented, however, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties. We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.”

Aside from Twitter, Thomas highlighted the dominant influence of Google and Amazon. Google, Thomas noted, serves as the “gatekeeper” between users and speech with power over 90 percent of internet searches.

“It can suppress content by deindexing or downlisting a search result or by steering users away from certain content by manually altering autocomplete results,” Thomas wrote. Amazon, meanwhile, as the distributor of a majority of e-books and half of all physical books, “can impose cataclysmic consequences on authors by, among other things, blocking a listing.”

Earlier this year, Amazon deplatformed conservative scholar Ryan T. Anderson and his book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” a book critical of the left’s efforts to mainstream transgenderism to a radical degree.

Now, when users search Anderson’s book title into Amazon, it’s not his book that shows up. Instead, it’s a work titled “Let Harry Become Sally: Responding to the Anti-Transgender Moment.”

Thomas himself has fallen victim to Amazon’s censorship. In February, during Black History Month, the company removed a documentary about the only black justice currently serving on the Supreme Court from its streaming service.

The PBS title, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” appeared ripped from the platform while Amazon still promoted other titles under the category of Black History Month, such as “All In: The Fight For Democracy,” with Stacey Abrams, and two movies on Anita Hill, Thomas’s accuser of sexual misconduct who attempted to derail his confirmation.

“It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information,” Thomas wrote. “But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

–The Federalist’s Tristan Thomas contributed to the contents of this report.

JENNA ELLIS: ‘No President-Elect Until Electoral College Votes’

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

WASHINGTON (Newsmax) — States’ certifications and projections “don’t mean anything” when it comes to who won the Nov. 3 presidential election, because the only thing that really matters is the Electoral College, Jenna Ellis, who is part of the Trump campaign’s legal team, said Monday while discussing the push for state legislatures to appoint electors to determine the race.

“Until the Electoral College actually votes on Dec. 14, we don’t have a president-elect,” Ellis told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, explaining that the team is working “two parallel tracks to keep up the fight for President Donald Trump’s reelection.”

“First is the litigation strategy, where we’re challenging the fraud and the widespread fraud in court,” she said. “That’s where we are currently in Pennsylvania. We also have a parallel track with state legislatures.”

State lawmakers, she said, can take back their power and appoint electors to determine the race’s winner. 

“In Pennsylvania, we have two pieces pending and primed for the Supreme Court,” said Ellis. “Now we have another case in the 3rd Circuit ready to go to the Supreme Court. We have 10 days from that ruling to appeal it.”

State legislatures, she added, are “vested under the Constitution with election integrity and the ability to select the manner of their electors to move forward. We are taking this very seriously.”

Allowing lawmakers to pick the electors was “built in as a safeguard” so the people’s vote is not disenfranchised when there is “corruption and fraud” in the election, she insisted. 

“The reason for that is to make sure that people’s voice is heard and the correct outcome ultimately happens through the Electoral College,” said Ellis. “President Trump is right. There was widespread fraud, in at least 6 states … the state legislatures must take back their selection of delegates and move forward to choosing the delegates that are preferred by the people we know President Trump won in a landslide.”

Newsmax’s Sandy Fitzgerald contributed to the contents of this report.