Important Takeaways:
- The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a clash between a federal emergency care law and Texas’ near-total ban on abortion, declining to provide clarity over whether physicians in states with the most restrictive laws must provide abortion care in certain emergency circumstances.
- The court’s rejection of the Biden administration’s appeal leaves in place a lower court decision that blocked the federal government from enforcing guidance it issued to hospitals notifying them that they must provide emergency abortions if the health of the mother is at risk.
- The Department of Health and Human Services told health care providers in a July 2022 letter that when a state abortion law does not include an exception for the life and health of the mother, that measure is preempted by the federal emergency care law.
- The case began after Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told hospitals more than two years ago that federal law requires them to provide pregnant patients experiencing emergency medical conditions with stabilizing treatment, including abortions, regardless of state restrictions.
- In Texas, abortion is banned except when the life of the mother is at risk.
- Texas sued the Biden administration to block its mandate requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortions, alleging that the secretary exceeded his authority when issuing the guidance.
- A federal district court sided with Texas and blocked the guidance, finding that hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions in certain medical emergencies when it would violate the state’s ban.
- They urged the Supreme Court to leave the lower court’s decision in place, writing in a filing that in Texas, a health care provider can comply with both EMTALA and state law by offering stabilizing treatment without violating its ban. In limited circumstances, they said, that can include providing an abortion when it is necessary to prevent the “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Prosecutors say Panos Anastasiou, 76, levied the threats over the course of about six months, but many were delivered in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision carving out broad criminal immunity for former President Trump.
- In one alleged message sent less than two hours after the July 1 decision, Anastasiou threatened to torture and execute six unnamed justices by “assassination,” according to the indictment. He allegedly sent a similar message that evening.
- Two days later, he made a threat to behead the six justices, prosecutors allege, which was purportedly followed the followed the next day with a threat of drowning, shooting, strangling and “lynching” the six jurists.
- Prosecutors say Anastasiou began sending messages through the Supreme Court’s website as early as March 2023 and started including threats this past January. More than 465 messages were sent in total, according to the indictment, and some allegedly targeted justices’ family members.
- The grand jury returned the indictment just days after authorities began investigating a man for apparently attempting to assassinate Trump at one of his Florida golf courses on Sunday.
- And it comes amid increased concerns about the protection of Supreme Court justices.
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Important Takeaways:
- The drop boxes had been used in the battleground state for decades, but came under harsh scrutiny after claims of voter fraud in 2020 tied to the boxes
- In the Friday 4-3 ruling, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley wrote for the majority: “Our decision today does not force or require that any municipal clerks use drop boxes. It merely acknowledges what (state law) has always meant: that clerks may lawfully utilize secure drop boxes in an exercise of their statutorily-conferred discretion.”
- Republican claims of voter fraud in absentee ballots led to questioning the legitimacy of drop boxes
- The ruling arrives more than four months ahead of the contested 2024 presidential election
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Important Takeaways:
- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of former President Donald Trump on Monday, holding in a 6-3 decision that presidents are covered by limited immunity from criminal prosecutions for actions taken while in office.
- The decision is here.
- The Court held, according to the summary of the decision:
- Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
- The Court also ruled that a president is entitled to a pretrial hearing on immunity that can be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court before a trial begins.
- This means that any trial of the former president will take place after the November 5, 2024, election.
- The case will now be remanded, and will likely result in the dismissal of some or all of the charges facing the former president in federal court in Washington, D.C., relating to the Capitol riot of January 6.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law that prohibits people subjected to domestic violence restraining orders from having firearms
- The ruling indicates that some longstanding gun laws are likely to survive despite the court’s 2022 decision that expanded gun rights by finding for the first time that there is a right to bear arms outside the home under the Constitution’s Second Amendment.
- Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that since the United States was founded “our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.”
- The provision at issue in the case “fits comfortably within this tradition,” he added.
- In reaching its conclusion, the court did not embrace some of the arguments made by the Biden administration in defense of the law, including that the government can disarm people who are not “responsible.”
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Important Takeaways:
- The court found that anti-abortion doctors who questioned the FDA’s easing of access to the pill did not have legal standing to sue
- In a blow for anti-abortion advocates, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available.
- President Joe Biden said in a statement that while the ruling means the pill can remain easily accessible, “the fight for reproductive freedom continues” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling two years ago that overturned abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade.
- Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court, wrote that while plaintiffs have “sincere legal, moral, ideological, and policy objections to elective abortion and to FDA’s relaxed regulation of mifepristone,” that does not mean they have a federal case.
- Another regulatory decision left in place means women can still obtain the pill within 10 weeks of gestation instead of seven.
- Likewise, a decision to allow health care providers other than physicians to dispense the pill will remain in effect.
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Important Takeaways:
- As soon as Thursday, justices may vote behind closed doors on whether to grant an appeal that seeks to block a new Tennessee law prohibiting medical treatments that enable a “minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”
- At stake is the fate of a wave of a new state laws in the South and Midwest that bar transgender teens and their parents from obtaining puberty blockers and other hormones prescribed by a doctor.
- If the court turns down the Tennessee appeal and says nothing more, it could signal that treatment bans for transgender youth are likely to take effect in about half of the nation.
- Then the map of the states would largely match the red state-blue state divide on abortion.
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“When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.” ~Thomas Jefferson
Important Takeaways:
- Supreme Court rules states can’t remove Trump from presidential election ballot
- The Supreme Court on Monday tossed out a Colorado court ruling that barred Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot.
- The ruling means that no other state can bar Trump, or any other candidate, from a presidential ballot by invoking the insurrection clause in the Constitution.
- Colorado was the first of three states to block Trump from a primary ballot due to his alleged incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, which disrupted the confirmation of the Electoral College victory of President Joe Biden.
- The U.S. Constitution says “no person” can serve as an officer of the United States who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. after taking an oath of federal office.
- Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, in her own concurring opinion, agreed with the three liberals that the case did not require the Supreme Court to rule that only congressional legislation could enforce the insurrection clause.
- But Barrett added that, “In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency.”
- “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”
- Monday’s ruling reverses decisions by two other states, Maine and Illinois, which acted after the Colorado Supreme Court, to bar Trump from their primary ballots.
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Important Takeaways:
- Supreme Court Allows Federal Agents to Cut Razor Wire Texas Installed on US-Mexico Border
- The justices, by a 5-4 vote, granted an emergency appeal from the Biden administration, which has been in an escalating standoff at the border with Texas and had objected to an appellate ruling in favor of the state.
- The concertina wire along roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) of the Rio Grande near the border city of Eagle Pass is part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s broader fight with the administration over immigration enforcement.
- Abbott also has authorized installing floating barriers in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass and allowed troopers to arrest and jail thousands of migrants on trespassing charges. The administration also is challenging those actions in federal court.
- In court papers, the administration said the wire impedes Border Patrol agents from reaching migrants as they cross the river and that, in any case, federal immigration law trumps Texas’ own efforts to stem the flow of migrants into the country.
- Texas officials have argued that federal agents cut the wire to help groups crossing illegally through the river before taking them in for processing.
- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor sided with the administration. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas voted with Texas.
- No one provided any explanation for their vote.
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Important Takeaways:
- Whether you stand with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or a candidate who has to emerge from our time-tested democracy, the idea that a court in an individual state can arbitrarily rule a presidential candidate as ineligible to be on the ballot is a dagger thrust into the heart of our nation.
- To be clear, the threat is so grave that, if allowed to stand, it could topple the very foundation of a “united” United States, where individual states would then determine whether they will participate in national elections based on four unelected individuals in black robes to determine for whom we can vote. The U.S. is not Iran, where voters are presented with a “sanitized” slate that has anyone who might disagree with the regime purged from appearing on it.
- Even Trump’s most vicious opponent, fellow Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie, sees the move for what it is. Responding to the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to prevent Trump from being on the state’s ballot, Christie says it must be the voters, not the courts, who should decide if Trump should return to the White House.
- Unfortunately, the cancer on our democracy is growing. Now Maine’s Secretary of State says he has the authority to prevent Trump’s name from being on his state’s primary ballot.
- The encouraging news is that courts have ruled against similar efforts in the states of Arizona, Minnesota and Michigan, but at a time when our nation is facing both domestic and global challenges, the stakes are enormously high.
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