Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Pro-Abortion activists plan to blockade the Supreme Court on June 13th

2 Tim 3:1-5 (KJV) “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God…”

Important Takeaways:

  • A left-wing organization is planning to blockade the streets around the Supreme Court building in response to the court’s leaked draft opinion which revealed plans to overturn Roe v. Wade.
  • At least one justice, Samuel Alito, the author of the draft opinion, and his family were moved from their home to a secure location due to the threats of violence.
  • The Department of Homeland Security released a report warning that radical abortion activists are threatening to burn down or storm the Supreme Court building and murder justices and their law clerks if the court overturns Roe.
  • The report indicates these pro-abortion extremists also plan to target churches and other places of worship.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Justice Thomas says leak could herald the end of the Supreme Court

Deuteronomy 27:25 “‘Cursed be anyone who takes a bribe to shed innocent blood.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions’: Justice Thomas warns that leak of abortion draft judgment could herald the END of the Supreme Court as he suggests leak came from clerk and takes dig at recent appointees
  • Justice Clarence Thomas told conference for black conservatives that the leak of the Roe v Wade draft opinion was ‘tremendously bad’
  • The conservative judge said that despite being at odds politically with the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg: ‘She was actually an easy colleague to deal with’
  • Thomas also told the audience that conservatives wouldn’t show up to protest at justice’s homes
  • Thomas went on to say that he always felt that leaking of opinions was ‘verboten’
  • Protests are expected across the country on Saturday, including a rally in DC

Read the original article by clicking here.

Following ruling on flying a Christian flag now Satanic Temple requests to fly flag over city hall

Ephesians 6:13 “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Satanic Temple Asks Boston To Fly Its Flag After Supreme Court Ruling for Christian Flag
  • The Satanic Temple (TST) is requesting to fly a flag over Boston City Hall after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week that the city violated the free speech rights of a conservative activist seeking to fly a Christian flag on a pole outside the downtown building.
  • A request filed Tuesday with the city property management department to raise a flag marking “Satanic Appreciation Week” from July 23-29.
  • Lucien Greaves, the TST’s co-founder, said in an email to the Associated Press that the group wants to show that religious liberty must mean respect for “all forms” of religious practice and religious opinion.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Michael Snyder states not much would change if Roe v. Wade is overturned, rather it is only the beginning

Deuteronomy 27:25 “‘Cursed be anyone who takes a bribe to shed innocent blood.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’

Important Takeaways:

  • America Is About to Explode With Emotion, But Overturning Roe Wouldn’t Actually Change Much (Michael Snyder states not much would change if Roe v. Wade is overturned rather it is only the beginning)
  • NBC News…
    • Abortion rights would be up to the states if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Two-dozen states and territories would ban it immediately, and 13 have “trigger laws” waiting for the ruling.
  • What you just read is false.
  • The states of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin have abortion laws on their books that existed before Roe v. Wade was decided. Needless to say, not all of those states would enforce those old laws if Roe is overturned
  • There is another group of states that have passed “trigger laws” that will go into effect after Roe v. Wade is overturned. These are the states in that category: Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
  • But none of the state laws that have been passed since Roe v. Wade was decided are designed to totally ban abortion. Some would restrict legal abortion to the first six weeks, while other laws have deadlines of eight, fifteen or twenty weeks.  Here is how that breaks down by state…
  • According to the CDC, 66 percent of all abortions happen during the first eight weeks of pregnancy.
  • And approximately 90 percent of all abortions occur within the first 13 weeks.
  • Overall, women that get pregnant are still going to be able to run over to Planned Parenthood and terminate the lives of their children.
  • Don’t get me wrong. I am very excited that Roe v. Wade is being overturned, but that isn’t the end of the battle. In fact, it is just the beginning.

Read the original article by clicking here.

53-47 Senate Confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson to Supreme Court

1 Timothy 2:1-2 “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Senate Votes to Confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court
    • The Senate voted 53-47 on Thursday to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, marking President Joe Biden’s (D) first appointment to the country’s highest court. Breitbart reported
    • Three Republican senators – Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Lisa Murkowski – had already said they would join Democrats to vote for her, making her confirmation a forgone conclusion.
    • She is set to replace Justice Stephen Breyer who Democrats had asked to retire while they still control the Senate. He’ll officially step down this summer.

Read the original article by clicking here.

New Supreme Court seat opens as Justice Breyer set to retire

Exodus 18:21 “Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Justice Stephen Breyer to retire from Supreme Court, paving way for Biden appointment
  • Breyer is one of the three remaining liberal justices, and his decision to retire after more than 27 years on the court allows Biden to appoint a successor who could serve for decades and, in the short term, maintain the current 6-3 split between conservative and liberal justices.
  • Among likely contenders are U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a former Breyer law clerk; and Leondra Kruger, a justice on California’s Supreme Court

Read the original article by clicking here.

In U.S. Supreme Court case, the past could be the future on abortion

By Lawrence Hurley

OXFORD, Miss. (Reuters) – Just months before she was set to start law school in the summer of 1973, Barbara Phillips was shocked to learn she was pregnant.

Then 24, she wanted an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court had legalized abortion nationwide months earlier with its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling recognizing a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But abortions were not legally available at the time in Mississippi, where she lived in the small town of Port Gibson.

Phillips, a Black woman enmeshed in the civil rights movement, could feel her dream of becoming a lawyer slipping away.

“It was devastating. I was desperate,” Phillips said, sitting on the patio of her cozy one-story house in Oxford, a college town about 160 miles (260 km) north of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital.

At the time of the Roe ruling, 46 of the 50 U.S. states had some sort of criminal prohibitions on abortion. Access often was limited to wealthy and well-connected women, who tended to be white.

With a feminist group’s help, Phillips located a doctor in New York willing to provide an abortion. New York before Roe was the only state that let out-of-state women obtain abortions. She flew there for the procedure.

Now 72, Phillips does not regret her abortion. She went on to attend Northwestern law school in Chicago and realize her goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer, with a long career. Years later, she had a son when she felt the time was right.

“I was determined to decide for myself what I wanted to do with my life and my body,” Phillips said.

U.S. abortion rights are under attack unlike any time since the Roe ruling, with Republican-backed restrictions being passed in numerous states. The Supreme Court on Dec. 1 is set to hear arguments in a case in which Mississippi is seeking to revive its law, blocked by lower courts, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mississippi has raised the stakes by explicitly asking the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Such a ruling could turn back the clock in Mississippi, which currently has just one abortion clinic, and other states to the kind of environment on abortion access that Phillips experienced nearly a half century ago.

Large swathes of America could return to an era in which women who want to end a pregnancy face the choice of undergoing a potentially dangerous illegal abortion, traveling long distances to a state where the procedure remains legal and available or buying abortion pills online.

Mississippi’s abortion law is not the only one being tested at the Supreme Court. The justices on Nov. 1 heard arguments in challenges to a Texas law banning abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy, but have not yet ruled.

TRIGGER LAWS

Mississippi is one of a dozen states with so-called trigger laws that would immediately ban abortion in all or most cases if Roe is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Many are in the South, so a Mississippi woman would be unable to obtain an abortion in neighboring Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee or Alabama. The nearest states where abortion would remain legal, at least in the short term, would be Illinois and Florida.

The average distance a Mississippi woman would need to drive to reach a clinic would increase from 78 miles to 380 miles (125 to 610 km) each way, according to Guttmacher.

While some abortion rights advocates fear a return to grisly illegal back-alley abortions, there has been an important development since the pre-Roe era: abortion pills. Mississippi is among 19 states imposing restrictions on medication-induced abortions.

Mississippi officials are cagey on what a post-Roe world might look like. Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who asked the court to overturn Roe, declined an interview request, as did Republican Governor Tate Reeves.

Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce Andy Gipson, who as a Republican state legislator helped shepherd the 2018 passage of the 15-week ban, called Roe v. Wade “antiquated, old law based on antiquated and old science.”

Gipson in an interview declined to answer questions about what Mississippi – or the southeastern United States – would be like without abortion rights, focusing on the specifics of the 15-week ban.

“It’s a false narrative to paint this as a picture of an outright ban throughout the southeast,” Gipson said, noting that the Supreme Court does not have to formally overturn Roe to uphold Mississippi’s law.

In court papers, Fitch said scientific advances, including contested claims that a fetus can detect pain early in a pregnancy, emphasize how Roe and a subsequent 1992 decision that reaffirmed abortion rights are “decades out of date.”

Abortion rights advocates have said any ruling upholding Mississippi’s law would effectively gut Roe, giving states unfettered power to limit or ban the procedure.

Phillips worries about a revival of dangerous, unregulated abortions that imperil women’s lives.

“I’m afraid that many more women and girls will be in back alleys,” Phillips said. “I’m worried we are going to find them in country roads, dead.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

Mississippi set to carry out state’s first execution since 2012

(Reuters) – Mississippi is scheduled to carry out its first execution in nine years on Wednesday when it puts to death a man convicted of killing his estranged wife and sexually assaulting his stepdaughter during a standoff with police in 2010.

David Cox, 50, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. local time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman for the death of his wife Kim Cox.

Cox would be the first inmate executed in Mississippi since 2012 and the ninth executed in the United States in 2021. Mississippi is among the U.S. states that have had recent difficulties in buying lethal-injection drugs from pharmaceutical companies unwilling to supply them for executions.

Cox had petitioned the Mississippi Supreme Court for all attorneys to be removed from the case and all appeals on his behalf to be halted. In 2018, Cox wrote a letter to the court’s chief justice, saying that he was “a guilty man worthy of death.”

On May 14, 2010, Cox bought a gun and went to his sister-in-law’s Sherman, Mississippi, home where his estranged wife, their two children and his stepdaughter lived. Cox shot his way into the home and took his wife and two of the children hostage for more than eight hours, prosecutors said.

During the standoff with police, Cox shot his wife in the stomach and arm. As she lay dying for several hours, he sexually assaulted his stepdaughter three times in front of her. He also refused medical treatment for his wife, forcing her to beg for her life to hostage negotiators, court documents showed.

Police entered the home early the next morning and arrested Cox. A jury sentenced him to die in 2012 after he pleaded guilty to all eight charges he faced, including capital murder.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

New York City police union files lawsuit to block vaccine mandate

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) – New York City’s police union filed a lawsuit on Monday against a vaccine mandate for municipal workers ordered last week by Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The mayor on Wednesday ordered all city employees to show proof of inoculation against COVID-19 or be placed on unpaid leave, drawing the union’s ire.

The Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York said on Twitter that it had filed a suit in the state Supreme Court. It asked the court for a temporary restraining order to halt the mandate while the suit remains pending.

The union added on Twitter that there was “still no written, NYPD-specific policy guidance on how the mandate will be implemented.”

The mayor set a deadline of 5 p.m. this coming Friday for employees to show proof of inoculation to a supervisor. Over 70% of all 160,000 New York City workers, including a similar percentage in the police department, have already received at least one dose, the mayor said.

Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association representing the city’s 50,000 active and retired officers, said they should have the opportunity to choose whether to get the vaccine.

De Blasio cited overtime and redeployments as contingency plans should a large contingent of those officers and other unvaccinated city workers refuse to comply with the mandate.

Municipalities, school districts and other jurisdictions throughout the country are grappling with masking and vaccination requirements. The number of new COVID-19 cases has steadily declined in the United States since a surge caused by the Delta variant of the virus during the summer.

De Blasio had said employees will no longer have the option to be regularly tested instead of getting the vaccine, but added the city will still grant medical and religious exemptions.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Howard Goller)

Abortion providers ask U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in challenge to Texas law

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) -Abortion providers in Texas on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on an urgent basis in their challenge to a state law imposing a near-total ban on abortion.

The providers asked the justices to hear their case before lower courts have finished ruling on the dispute because of the “great harm the ban is causing.” The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, this month refused to block the law, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

The Texas law is unusual in that it gives private citizens the power to enforce it by enabling them to sue anyone who assists a woman in getting an abortion past the six-week cutoff. That feature has helped shield the law from being immediately blocked as it made it more difficult to directly sue the government.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the abortion providers including Whole Woman’s Health and other advocacy groups said that the justices should decide if the state can “insulate” its law from federal court review by delegating its enforcement to the general public.

The Supreme Court rarely agrees to hear a case before lower courts have had a chance to weigh in with their own rulings. But in the court’s 5-4 decision on Sept. 1 to let the law stand for now, the dissenting justices, including conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, expressed skepticism about how the law is enforced.

Roberts said he would have blocked the law’s enforcement at that point “so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”

The providers said that the ban has eliminated the vast majority of abortions in the state given the threat of “ruinous liability,” causing Texans to have to travel hundreds of miles (km) to other states, causing backlogs there.

“Texans are in crisis,” they said in a legal filing.

Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration on Sept 9 sued Texas, seeking to block enforcement of the Republican-backed law, as his fellow Democrats fear the right to abortion established in 1973 may be at risk.

The Texas law is the latest Republican-backed measure passed at the state level restricting abortion.

The measure prohibits abortion at a point when many women do not even realize they are pregnant. Under the law, individual citizens can be awarded a minimum of $10,000 for bringing successful lawsuits against those who perform or help others obtain an abortion that violates the ban.

The providers said that they have been forced to comply with the law because defending against these lawsuits, even if they prevail, would amount to “costly, and potentially bankrupting, harassment.”

The Supreme Court already is set to consider a major abortion case on Dec. 1 in a dispute centering on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban in which that state has asked the justices to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide and ended an era when some states had banned the procedure. A ruling is due by the end of June 2022.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editig by Will Dunham)