Quote of the Day

 “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.” Calvin Coolidge on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence  

Carthage Must Be Destroyed!

By Rich Kozlovich  

 

Editor's Note:  I originally published this on January 8, 2014 and some of the links not longer work.  RK 

In 2013 the United States Congress was criticized for not getting things done. The Congress “only” passed 65 new laws. Of course we have to understand that one year they passed over three hundred new laws.

What is really important to understand is when new laws are passed the baton of power is passed to the permanent bureaucracies, whose function is to make even more laws called – “rules”! In 2013 there was an average of 56 new regulations resulting from each law passed totaling 3659 new laws called – “rules”! That multiplier has been as low as 12 per new law, but that was in 2006 when Congress passed 321 new laws. If you average out the multipliers over the last ten years the average multiplier is 25.36.

So what’s the rest of the story? Last year the states passed over 40,000 new laws. If we make a broad assumption that the average multiplier applies to the states we now have a potential of 1,014,400 new laws called – “rules!” Rules created by unaccountable bureaucrats, with their own agendas and views of reality, and who, generally speaking, went to college and then into government.

During the first five years of the Obama administration regulatory costs increased by $500 billion dollars, “with $112 billion in regulatory compliance costs in 2013 alone, and predicted that the burden would continue to increase this year to as much as $143 billion”.  The federal registry, where all the regulations are listed, contain 80,224 pages this year alone.  It’s estimated that in ten years at the current rate of regulatory growth there will generate approximately 900,000 new pages of regulations, which will be on top of the approximately 800,000 pages of regulations passed in the previous ten years.

All of these regulations do one thing for sure - create jobs – for non-productive bureaucrats.  It took government employees 10.38 billion hours to do “the paperwork for the federal government in 2013, and will take 78,000 full-time employees to complete the additional paperwork.”

We also have to look at who benefits from laws and the regulations they generate.  In this kind of hyper-regulatory, high tax economy many of these laws and regulations are promoted by businesses that want to make it harder for companies that will be, or are, competitors.  As a “all aspects of business, entrepreneurship degenerates into “bribery and diplomacy.” Instead of focusing on creating value for customers, entrepreneurs spend their time lobbying for favors or to avoid penalties, trying to discern the government’s next move, anticipating or adapting to the newest regulations.”  But this was to be expected from a party that loves big government and “more” laws and regulations - all the better to control our lives.  What about the administrations that have been considered conservative, anti-big government and opposed to all these regulations?  There were more regulations passed during George W. Bush’s administration than any president since Richard Nixon.  Furthermore this idea there is some invisible divide between the left and the so-called right regarding regulations and the promotion of the all powerful state is an illusion.   

“The modern regulatory state is a bipartisan enterprise: During the half-century before President Obama's election, the greatest growth in regulation came under Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.  And the Bush administration set the stage for many of the Obama initiatives that Republicans are now attacking. Dodd-Frank's policy of designating some financial firms as "too big to fail" is a codification of the Paulson-Bernanke bailout approach of 2008. It was the Bush Treasury Department that first proposed a financial consumer-protection agency, and the Bush Environmental Protection Agency that first proposed regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The Obama energy rules were authorized — and in some cases, such as the light-bulb ban, required — by a 2007 statute that President Bush vigorously championed.”

What about Richard M. Nixon?  Nixon as a strange man and still an enigma to many, and understandably so, because Nixon was the first to advocate what was called a New Federalism, which would ‘devolve’ power to state and local governments.  But he was the first one to jump on the environmental band wagon promoted by the first Earth Day in 1970.  He believed this was a precursor of public concern and he wanted to benefit from it politically.   

Eventually he passed the Clear Air Act, the Clear Water Act the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, requiring environmental impact statements for federal projects.   He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  All of which create virtual lava flows of scientifically dubious regulations, creating outrageous burdens on the American people, and the American economy.   Furthermore, all these laws and agencies give rise to lawsuits by activists that plague economic development with legal costs, studies and delays. 

What is the cost of all these federal regulations to the nation’s people?  One point eight trillion dollars a year!  And I have no idea what kind of costs of all these state laws impose on society.  So what is the solution - at least at the federal level?

No one can fix this piecemeal because it is a foundational issue and until that foundational problem is recognized it will never be solved. So what is that foundational issue? Passage of the 16^th and 17^th amendments in 1913, which laid the foundation for our doom. 

The 16^th amendment gave the federal government the right to tax income.  This gave them the right to confiscate an unending amount of society’s money, [called their fair share] and spend it like drunken sailors. That turned the federal government into an insatiable beast that can never be fed to satisfaction, creating debt that is threatening the stability of not only the nation, but the world.

The 17^th amendment changed how Senators are chosen. The Founding Fathers were determined to prevent the federal government from becoming an all too powerful entity that was centralized and out of control. In order to do this they created a government that wasn’t supposed to do very much creating a true balance of power between the central government and the state governments. In those days the word ‘state’ didn’t mean province, it meant an independent nation. So the Senators were chosen by the state governments to be ambassadors to the federal government in order to stop power grabbing by the central government.

After passage of the 17^th amendment they would be elected by popular vote, exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid, because that was already what the House of Representatives was for. That amendment destroyed the balance of power - the 10^th amendment notwithstanding. As long as the 17^th exists the 10^th is meaningless, and by misusing the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution the federal government can overturn any and all local authority, and individual rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

“The deterioration of the Constitution’s separation of, and balance of, powers means that regulators and bureaucrats now make most laws……The executive branch increasingly imposes its will: President Obama and his administration repeatedly say they are not going to wait for Congress…...”

What about the Supreme Court?  Don’t they understand how the Commerce Clause is being misused?  Until the Rehnquist court in 1995 SCOTUS never saw a law that exceeded Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause for sixty years.  In fact, they held the view that no matter how slight the impact might be on commerce it would now be subject to federal control.  If there ever was a system for abuse and tyranny this was it, and now the states were powerless to do anything about it. 

Roman Senator Cato the Elder was born in 234 BC and believed that Carthage was too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Therefore he gave speeches ending in the phrase [no matter the topic of the speech] “Carthago delenda est”, “Carthage Must be Destroyed". 

The 16th and 17th amendments are our modern Carthage – too dangerous to exist.   This is foundational. The only fix is the repeal of the 16th and 17th amendments.   After that - everything else will fall into place.   But first we must be willing to recognize the 16th and 17th amendments really are the enemy - our modern Carthage! 

Sedecim et septemdecim delenda est!

Turning Point: End of the Race Weapon

Final Word: The identity-based race weapon will be disarmed, and Freedom will be deployed. Hallelujah!

By Steve Eichler ——Bio and Archives--August 4, 2025

It’s happening in your lifetime: fair elections and true representation are about to be installed! Hallelujah! For decades, American politics has suffered a legally suspect and morally corrosive weaponization of race in the redistricting process, a strategic weapon wielded under the guise of civil rights but increasingly under scrutiny as a political device of division.

Now, with the Supreme Court poised to review the constitutionality of majority-minority congressional districts, a new chapter may be opening, one that promises a genuine reckoning with how race is used, and distorted, in our republic........To Read More.....

• Hochul: Republicans Attempting ‘Legal Insurrection’ with Redistricting - Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) said Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Weeknight” that Republicans were attempting a “legal insurrection” with redistricting.  Hochul said, “History will judge us how we respond in this moment, because if we allow the Republicans to get away with what they’re attempting to do, this legal insurrection of our U.S. Capitol, then we’ll have a generation of redistricted gerrymandered seats that are skewed against Democrats..... 

 

SCOTUS and Their Pompous Petulant Pontificator

By Rich Kozlovich

My go to news site first thing in the morning is American Thinker, which I think is the absolutely best new site out there, they've even published one of my articles in the past.  There are a lot of articles appearing at AT by a large number of volunteer contributors, but they only have a few paid staff members, who on every Saturday different members of the AT writing staff put out a "Members Weekly Newsletter".  There are times these pieces are so good I wished they'd publish them on line.

One such article is by Mike McDaniel entitled, It was always clear that Justice Jackson would be a disaster, but she's worse than anyone could have anticipated.

Biden committed himself to a DEI nominee, and a black woman fit the bill, who could easily have been called a "mediocre" left wing ideologue right from the beginning.  A left wing ideologue totally unconcerned with reality, or the law starting, out with her exchange with Republican Senators who asked her to define what a woman was.  She couldn't.  Why?  She's not a biologist was her answer.  But they all failed to drive a stake into the heart of her nomination when they all failed to ask her if she was a woman.  As Mike notes the answer to that question might have ended her nomination.  

It  was apparent her understanding of Constitutional law is abysmal after Senator Ted Cruz asked her to take a position on that which is foundational to the Constitution, Natural Rights.  

After doing what all these Biden nominees have done consistently, answering questions not asked, over and over again, finally Cruz asked if she held a position on Natural Rights, yes or no.

She answered saying she held no position on Natural Rights.  Well that's foundation to the very existence of Constitution, and for any law student to have no opinion is impossible, but for a federal jurist, and one being nominated to be a Supreme Court Justice, that's not just impossible, it's a deliberate lie.  A lie in an attempt to avoid exposing the fact she's not a jurist, she's a radical left wing ideologue and an activist.

• The judicial tyranny of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson 'Why bother with the Supreme Court? Let's just take a poll'

Recently Justice Amy Coney Barrett smacked her hard and heavy dealing with birthright citizenship, something rarely done on the court, if ever.   Then she had to be schooled by ... of all people... Sotomayor on the President's legitimate Constitutional Article II powers as the chief executive with the authority to hire, and fire.  She claimed allowing him to do that would open the door to an Imperial Presidency, saying:

Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.....

Well, that's the job for the Legislative branch to address, not the judiciary.  

But the interesting thing is not one of the jurists took exception to Justice Amy Coney Barrett smack down, and Mike explains why.  She's an enormous pain in the butt.   Instead of asking questions for clarification she babbles on "mindlessly" and according to Mike:

Canny court watchers have noted the annoyance of the wiser justices at Brown Jackson's loud-mouthed antics.

I have to imagine when the Justices meet privately as a group to discuss issues her penchant for mindless rambling is almost unbearable.  Over the years I've served on boards of my industry's trade associations, and had that kind of babbling go on to the point I would get up and walk out of the room until they were done, and then they would start all over again, it become unbearable.   But they didn't serve on those boards for life, a SCOTUS justice does, how unbearable that must be.

As a side bar.  Who has consistently been the justice who asks the fewest questions and comments the least?  Justice Clearance Thomas, who I consider the finest justice to sit on the court in my lifetime.

She thinks the federal judiciary should be able to impose universal injunctions against the Executive at the district level, requiring both the Executive and the Legislative branches to acquiesce their Constitutional authority to unelected minor judges.   She claims she fears an Imperial Presidency that will destroy "democracy" but has no concerns about an Imperial Judiciary that really is destroying democracy by destroying the rule of law.   An Imperial Judiciary where her feelings are far more important than the laws written by Congress and anything written in that dusty old document called the United States Constitution.  

Mike ends his article with this paragraph:  

Brown Jackson's petulance in these two most recent cases suggests Kagan and Sotomayor realize Brown Jackson is not up to the minimum level of competence required of the Court and are no longer going to try to keep her blazing incompetence and leftism under the radar. She's too overtly leftist even for them.

Sotomayor apparently thinks Jackson is blazingly incompetent?  How shocking is that?  Jackson is arrogant, pompous, petulant, and grossly incompetent, and ya just can't fix stupid.  But when you put a person with those combined qualities in a position of power,  they're unbearable.  Ketanji Brown Jackson is another excellent example of why there needs to be a 28th Amendment to fix the Founders gravest error.  Lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary. 

I've written much about the federal judiciary, along with age and term limits, some of which are listed below. 

My 28th Amendment Commentaries: 

1. What if We Could Rewrite the Constitution To Fix the Republic
2. It's Time For a Twenty Eighth Amendment! 
3. The Founding Fathers Greatest Error? Lifetime Appointments to the Federal Judiciary!
4. The Need For a 28th Amendment Becomes More and More Apparent!
5. More Evidence of the Need for A 28th Amendment, II
6. The Federal Judiciary Needs Purged With Age and Term Limits
7. More Evidence of the Need For a 28th Amendment
8. Covid and the SCOTUS Swamp, Part One
9. The Supreme Court has taken up residence in the swamp

And SCOTUS isn't the only problem.  The nation's judiciary is out of control. Here's the link to

The Fate Of The U.S. If The Left Got Control Of The Supreme Court

July 09, 2025/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Currently at the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. While there are exceptions, most of the politically sensitive cases break along the 6-3 ideological lines. Recent prominent examples of cases breaking in that way include Trump v. CASA (limiting the ability of district judges to issue nationwide injunctions against executive actions); U.S. v. Skrmetti (upholding Tennessee statute banning transgender surgeries on minors); and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (ending the rule that courts should “defer” to administrative agencies as to interpretation of their regulations). In these and numerous other cases, the three liberal justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) would have reached the opposite result.

But the 6-3 conservative majority is very much a result of happenstance. Donald Trump won the 2016 election by a hair, and then got three Supreme Court appointments in his first term. Had Hillary Clinton won, she would have appointed three liberals. Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland got sunk by some deft maneuvering by Mitch McConnell. Liberal David Souter, appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1990, retired in 2009 (and has since died), while conservative Clarence Thomas, appointed by the same president in 1991, continues to serve.

With a few different breaks, the Court could easily have a 6-3, or even 7-2, liberal majority. Do you ever wonder what our law might look like if that had occurred?

You don’t have to look far to find out. In Europe and Israel, the political left has found ways to control the judiciary, and in particular the highest courts, no matter which political parties win the elections. And here in the U.S., the barrage of litigation against Trump administration initiatives has given a coterie of Obama- and Biden-appointed district court judges the opportunity to show their view of how the law ought to work.

In Israel and various European countries, left-wing judges have somehow arrogated to themselves powers to overrule most any decision of the political branches that they don’t like. At Gatestone Institute on July 8, Drieu Godefredi has a roundup. Godefredi calls what is going on alternately “judicial imperialism” and “judicial tyranny.” Excerpt:

From Israel to the United States, via Europe, the judicial coup d'état has become permanent. In the West, it is not the executive that threatens the separation of powers. It is faceless judges lacking democratic legitimacy who legislate on the pretext of judging.

Consider the case of Israel. Although Israel has had conservative governments for most of the last several decades (Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for almost 18 years out of the 30 years since 1996), the Israeli Supreme Court is firmly in the hands of the left. Rather than being named by the political branches as in the U.S., the Israeli Supreme Court’s members come from a Judicial Selection Committee, the majority of whose members are selected either by the Supreme Court itself or by the Israel Bar Association. Lacking a written Constitution like we have in the U.S., the Israel Supreme Court has decided that it can declare actions of the political branches invalid because they are “unreasonable.” Godefredi:

In the 1980s and 1990s, . . . the Court took on the power to assess the "reasonableness" of government decisions, thus giving itself a political veto over the elected government's choices. . . . There is no decision of the Israeli government and parliament that cannot be overturned by unelected judges.

The court has gone as far as to disallow appointment of cabinet officers on the grounds of “unreasonableness.”

Or consider the case of France. While the Biden administration got tied up in knots trying to prosecute its main political adversary (Trump) on some phony charge or other, the French judiciary has been more efficient. Godefredi:

Leading in all the presidential polls, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally party, has been sentenced to a five-year ban from holding public office with provisional execution. . . .

Le Pen’s alleged wrong was “assigning assistants paid by the European Parliament to French national tasks.”

Here’s another example cited by Godefredi:

In 2024, the Constitutional Council censured [struck down] several provisions of the Immigration Act, adopted under political pressure to tighten the conditions for entry and residence in France.

And in summary:

There is effectively no longer a single "right-wing" measure that can be adopted in any field by Parliament or the government without being struck down by the Constitutional Council or the courts.

Other examples cited by Godefredi include several from the European Court of Human Rights compelling European states to accept immigrants from Africa despite statutes to the contrary.

Well, the Europeans and the Israelis have nothing on some of their American counterparts. Consider the latest from one Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts. It seems that one of the many provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that became law upon signature of President Trump on July 4, would prohibit the federal government from providing further funding for Planned Parenthood. On July 7, Planned Parenthood was promptly in court seeking an injunction against the end of its funding. Note that this termination of funding was not a result of some unilateral Trump Executive Order, but rather part of a duly enacted statute. Under what possible theory could a court order that Congress could not do that?

Here is a write-up from National Review today. Excerpt:

The case went to Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee. Before even waiting to hear the Justice Department’s defense of a duly enacted federal law, she issued a “temporary restraining order” (TRO) ordering that the federal government, starting immediately and continuing the next two weeks, “shall take all steps necessary to ensure that Medicaid funding continues to be disbursed in the customary manner and timeframes to Planned Parenthood” and affiliates. Planned Parenthood is already asking the court to extend the order further before giving the federal government its day in court. . . . 

Judge Talwani did not issue a legal opinion explaining why she was overturning an act of Congress. Her order made none of the findings required under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for a TRO. Nor is this a proper TRO. As we have previously observed, “a TRO is supposed to restrain one side of a case temporarily, so that nothing changes until the court can issue a final order changing things, which then can be appealed. 

But [the district judge] tried to force the government to pay money it can’t get back.” By ordering that moneys be irrevocably withdrawn from the Treasury without an act of Congress — indeed, in direct contravention of an act prohibiting them — she is flatly contradicting the Constitution’s allocation of powers.

So we now have District Judges who think that they can order the President to spend taxpayer funds that Congress has specifically directed cannot be spent. I would expect this one to get overturned promptly on appeal. But that’s only because of our current Supreme Court. Is there any doubt that a Supreme Court with a majority of Ketanji Brown Jacksons would uphold Judge Talwani’s order?

Trump, the Federal Judiciary, and The Government of the United States

By Rich Kozlovich

Since there's all this foofaraw about the federal courts setting themselves up as mini Presidents, and the recent SCOTUS ruling telling them they're not, I think this chart is important.  

 

As Jeffrey Tucker notes in his article The Curbing of the Administrative State regarding the SCOTUS ruling: 

The opinion could not be plainer: “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” That principle applies not only to this case but to the whole panoply of cases that have tethered the ability of the president to manage executive branch operations. The courts have presumed authority over the president that the Constitution plainly does not grant.

He goes on to state the government as it's been configured is in effect contrary to the intent of the Constitution.  The elected officials are supposed to be in charge, not unelected bureaucrats saying: 

The answer has been hiding in plain sight all this time. It took a dramatic and domestic exercise of administrative power, one that hit us all our lives personally, to reveal the extent of the problem. It comes down to the approximately 425 agencies with millions of permanent employees that are the real government in the United States........In 2014, just two years before Trump’s first term, the scholar Philip Hamburger wrote “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” His argument was that this machinery does not exist in the Constitution. There is no such thing as an agency that is independent of presidential control................

All these court issues are predicated on the fact Trump is exposing to the America people how corrupt it all has become,  which is the lesson he learned after his first term after being stabbed in the back by people who were disloyal, and bureaucrats who undermined everything he was attempting to do.  So he issued executive orders and triggered a fight that was long overdue.  

The chart shows who in charge of the federal government, and it's not the legislature, and it's not the judiciary.  It's the Chief Executive, and that's the President of the United States. 

Harry Truman flew to Wake Island to confront Douglas MacArthur over their differences regarding the Korean War, and protocol demanded MacArthur stand at the stairs to greet the President of the United State.  He didn't, and that went on for 45 minutes.  Finally when they were alone he told MacArthur, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I don't care what you think about Harry Truman, but don't you ever disrespect the President of the United States that way again. "

Well, that's Trump's view of reality.  He doesn't much care what you think about Donald Trump, but they're not gong to get away with disrespecting and disregarding the President of the United States.  

Unfortunately, the battle is far from over, just as one district judge Brian Murphy openly defied the court refusing to follow the ruling of the Supreme Court, there are two other ways these radical leftist judges and attorneys can subvert the ruling an the obvious intent of the Constitution.  Class action lawsuits, which normally aren't so easy to bring into being, but if the jurists are corrupt, and we already know a bunch of them are, that will not be a deterrent, since like Ketanji Brown Jackson, they could care less about the rule of law.  However, the  Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 will clearly be problematic, as the wording is an open ended invitation for abuse by district courts, and is an issue either the Congress, SCOTUS, or both will be forced to address.  Make no mistake, this is far from over.  

•  Attorneys Push for Class Action in Birthright Citizenship Case After Supreme Court Ruling
• Two Harvard law grads issue ludicrous analyses about the Supreme Court’s limits on nationwide injunctions
• The battle of ‘Lawless Lawfare’
• Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Thunderclap Heard Around the Republic

A Radical Company is Paying Supreme Court Justices Millions

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

Last year, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, despite being in her early 50s and having an undistinguished career before her affirmative action appointment, published a memoir.

You might be forgiven for having missed it when “Lovely One” came out. As the media politely notes, it was “briefly” on the New York Times bestseller list and is now going for half price on Amazon. That is mostly to be expected of the ghostwritten memoir of an obscure judge.

Except that Jackson received a $893,750 advance for her memoir and is now reporting $2 million in profits last year. These would be record numbers for a Supreme Court Justice’s biography from a book that hardly anyone had noticed when it came out. And while books can become unexpected successes once released, there was little sign of that happening.

The actual sales figures have not been made public and perhaps ‘Lovely One’ sold millions of copies even while hardly anyone noticed before ending up in the remainder bin a year later. Certainly no one in the same media that pursued every living member of the Thomas family to find if anyone had ever done them a favor actually bothered obtaining the sales figure.

Even when the money was coming from an avaricious foreign publisher which has deluged Supreme Court justices with millions of dollars in generous publishing deals.

After Jackson’s memoir, Penguin Random House will be publishing Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book for which she received a $2 million advance. That’s money the publisher seems even less likely to recoup considering that Barrett is hated among leftists and has a mixed approval rating among conservatives. Past polls show that the majority of the country can’t even name a single Supreme Court justice, yet they are receiving celebrity level advances for books no one cares about.

Penguin’s payouts previously made headlines when five Supreme Court justices, including Jackson and Barrett, had to recuse themselves from a case involving allegations of plagiarism by racist Hamas supporter Ta-Nehisi Coates whose works, including a book describing 9/11 firefighters as “not human to me”, were widely backed and promoted by Penguin.

The ‘Penguin’ recusals successfully allowed Coates to triumph in that latest court case.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had been previously criticized for not recusing herself in cases involving Penguin which had paid her over $3 million. And the current Supreme Court is so badly conflicted over its Penguin cash that it can no longer decide cases involving it.

And that’s a problem because Penguin is actually Bertelsmann: a German ex-Nazi publishing giant that has waged war on American parents, promoted racism and is trying to monopolistically gobble up all of American publishing. Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”, and, during WWII, “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth” all came out of Bertelsmann.

While the ex-Nazi foreign corporation operates under familiar names like Penguin, Random House, Doubleday, Ballantine, Knopf,Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Del Rey, Golden Books and many others, it’s actually a foreign company pushing deeply destructive products. Even as parents tried to stop their children from being exposed to sexually inappropriate content, former CEO Markus Dohle went to war against them with a $500,000 legal fund.

Any corporation moving millions of dollars to Supreme Court justices in a way that has already successfully advantaged it in the Ta-Nehisi Coates plagiarism case would be suspect, but a foreign company that has tried to completely monopolize American publishing by seizing control of Simon and Schuster, and has intervened in American politics, is even more deeply troubling.

Yet the Bertelsmann millions have gone mostly unexamined even as ProPublica, a leftist advocacy group, launched a smear campaign against Justice Thomas. The Thomas smears were repeated by every media outlet in the country which pursued the 76-year-old justice’s 96-year-old mother to find out where exactly she lives and who paid the tuition for his grandnephew, yet shrug when the Supreme Court can’t even form a quorum over millions from a multinational giant that has business before the court being directed to justices.

No one in the media seems to have even bothered examining the sales figures for ‘Lovely One’ to determine how many copies were sold and which venues actually sold them. Sotomayor had become notorious for high-pressure sales tactics aimed at compelling venues to buy her books.

Supreme Court justices used to write on mainly legal matters (with notable exceptions such as Taft and Douglas) and reserved their memoirs toward the end of their lives. Newly minted justices like Jackson signing memoir deals is an obvious cash-in and Justice Sotomayor, after publishing a memoir no one was asking for ‘My Beloved World’, began writing children’s books.

Would Penguin really be publishing Sotomayor’s feeble efforts at writing children’s books, ‘Just Help!: How to Build a Better World’, ‘Just Ask!: Be Different, Be Brave, Be You’ and (coming soon) ‘Just Shine!: How to Be a Better You’ if she weren’t a Supreme Court justice?

And Justice Jackson making millions for a ghostwritten memoir after spending less time on the bench than most dustcloths is an equally obvious exercise in cashing in, not literary inspiration.

Judges putting their names on things to make money is not illegal, and maybe after this, Justice Jackson will have her own line of dish towels, sneakers or crypto coins, but Bertelsmann has not only monopolized the American publishing market, but has monopolized the market for justices. And considering its radical politics and vast ambitions, that is a major problem.

What happens when Bertelsmann triggers a court case with major legal implications and once again a quorum of justices can’t be found to sit on it?

Then the woke mega-publisher will have officially bought America’s legal system.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

This One Weird Trick Let D.C. Judges Stage a Coup

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish

The Supreme Court’s ruling in J.G.G. v. Donald J. Trump was not an unqualified triumph for the Trump administration’s deportations of foreign gang members, but it was a definite rebuke not just to Judge Boasberg, but to the entire D.C. Circuit Court shadow government.

The ACLU filed J.G.G. v. Trump in defense of five Venezuelan inmates in New York and Texas. All of the men claimed that they were not gang members and there was no indication that any of them were being deported, denying them any actual standing for coming before the court.

Especially before Judge James Boasberg who is thousands of miles away in Washington D.C.

Despite the lack of standing and the case being filed in the wrong venue, Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court, not only blocked the deportation of all gang members back to Venezuela, but ordered that planes currently over international airspace that were carrying gang members turn around and bring them back to the United States.

Boasberg fumed that the planes were not turned around on his mere word and threatened the Justice Department with repercussions for not recognizing his power over not only the entire country, but also the entire planet.

But why was a judge from the D.C. Circuit Court on a case involving inmates in Texas?

The answer is that leftist organizations and the judges of the D.C. Circuit Court were using one weird trick to seize power over the entire country (if not always the planet) and transform themselves into a shadow government able to block any Trump administration move.

The Supreme Court’s ruling vacating Boasberg’s order stated that, “the detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia” and directed that the appropriate “venue lies in the district of confinement”. So how did a D.C. judge ever get involved at all?

In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence he noted that the “only question is where that judicial review should occur. That venue question turns on whether these transfer claims belong in habeas corpus proceedings or instead may be brought under the Administrative Procedure Act.” The Supreme Court’s ruling even noted that “initially the detainees sought relief in habeas among other causes of action, but they dismissed their habeas claims” and stated that “their claims fall within the ‘core’ of the writ of habeas corpus and thus must be brought in habeas.”

Kavanaugh then laid out a brief history of detainees, including those terrorists at Gitmo, bringing claims under habeas corpus rather than, strangely, under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Administrative Procedure Act had been created in response to the rise of a vast unaccountable government bureaucracy under FDR. The APA was supposed to stop the administrative state from turning into exactly the kind of self-governing machine it grew into which FDR had described as threatening to “develop a fourth branch of government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.” It was not meant to block presidents from executing their policies or subject every one of those policies to the review of the D.C. Circuit Court.

The D.C. Circuit Court however has enabled every leftist ‘resistance’ group to go ‘judge shopping’ and file APA complaints to block anything and everything President Trump does.

And so the ACLU appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, wielding the Administrative Procedure Act, to challenge the question of whether President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (which predated the APA by 148 years) applied and what could be defined as wartime. The ACLU was asking Boasberg to block President Trump’s use of presidential powers based on an act meant to check bureaucratic overreach. And Judge Boasberg went ahead and tried to seize control of U.S. forces abroad from President Trump in the name of an act meant to regulate agencies.

The Supreme Court’s response to this unconstitutional abomination was milder than it deserved.

What gave the ACLU and Boasberg the idea that they could get away with it? The ACLU had previously sued the Trump administration for removing materials falsely describing the existence of a ‘transgender’ society as a violation of the “Administrative Procedure Act” by “removing articles without a reasoned basis” as if that were a matter subject to the APA.

In another case, ‘Judge’ Ana Reyes, a Uruguayan activist lawyer appointed by Biden as the first gay ‘Latinx’ judge in the D.C. Circuit Court, blocked the removal of mentally ill individuals who hallucinate the idea that they are members of some other sex than their biological one, by claiming that it’ss “soaked in animus and dripping with pretext, Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit” and argued, despite the mountain of evidence, that the Department of Defense had “not provided a legitimate reason for banning all transgender troops” and therefore violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Reyes had confused the Administrative Procedure Act with her own personal opinion and rather than ruling on the legality of a policy based on actual laws, abused the APA to seize power over the Pentagon to promote her own favored social and sexual worldviews in the APA’s name.

But the Supreme Court has begun shooting down some APA abuses.

In its response to a Biden judge in Massachusetts blocking the Trump administration from ending education grants that violate its ban on DEI, the court noted that Judge Myong Joun and the court “lacked jurisdiction to order the payment of money under the APA” and that monetary cases involving the government are supposed to go to the Court of Federal Claims.

The APA has become a favored weapon of choice whether the issue at hand is financial, foreign policy, deporting illegal aliens or even publishing materials about the existence of transgenderism on government websites. During the first term of the administration, leftist groups had taken to boasting of having entire “teams of APA litigators and experts”.

And with a 93% loss rate for the Trump administration in APA cases, the judicial coup was a sound strategy. All a leftist judge had to do was declare that the Trump administration’s actions were “poorly reasoned” or lacked “sufficient rationale” and would override the president’s orders.

The APA enabled a massive shift of power from the executive branch to district courts, and to the D.C. Circuit Court which had seized virtually unlimited power from both the president and local courts and judges in the process creating an unelected shadow government.

But the D.C. judicial shadow government overreached itself. And Boasberg’s attempt to seize presidential powers has created a constitutional moment of crisis that may unwind the coup. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

The Judiciary is Out of Control: SCOTUS

By Rich Kozlovich

I have a massive number of drafts in my files, and I try to organize them topically by way of gazettes, and that included the judiciary, which is out of control.  On April 13th I published My Judiciary Gazette, organized by - resistance to Trump, judicial corruption and lawfare, immigration, judicial overreach, DOGE, hiring and firing, control of funding, purging the deep state bureaucracies including the military, tariffs, and I keep adding updates.  This is like a daytime nightmare that lingers and grows.  So, I've decided to separate all of this, starting with SCOTUS.

You will find there are only two real justices on the Supreme Court, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.  Three are outright leftist political hacks and four are seriously confused legal hacks, including Chief Justice Roberts.

1. Update, 4/26/24:  Caught! Supreme Court fails to rein in radical judges, damages its own credibility, report charges
2. Update, 4/23/25  This Supreme Court Justice is 'either the dumbest or most evil member,' analysis warns
3. Update, 4/20/25: Supreme Court Pauses Trump Admin’s Deportations of Venezuelan Migrants
4. Update, 4/20/25: SCOTUS Could Sell Our Nation Out This Summer
5. Update, 4/19/25: Supreme Court Blocks Deportation of Alleged Venezuelan Gang Members for Now
6. Update, 4/19/25: Liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan denies appeal from Mexican family seeking asylum from cartel violence 
7. Update, 4/19/25: Some Familiar Supreme Court Justices Joined Libs in Blocking Further Deportation Flights
8. Soaring Eagle: Trump Gets 3rd Straight SCOTUS Win!
9. Supreme Court Rules Trump Admin Must Facilitate Release of Deported Man from El Salvador Prison
10. Major victory from SCOTUS in Trump deportation case
11. SCOTUS: You’re Fired 
12. BREAKING: Supreme Court Orders US to Facilitate Return of Alleged El Salvadoran
13. SCOTUS Order Requiring Deported Man to Be Returned to U.S. Has Interesting Details on Authority of Courts 
14. Sotomayor Sounds Call for Judicial Independence
15. Democrat-Appointed Federal Judges Are the Big Losers at Supreme Court This Week
16. Supreme Court Blocks Reinstatement of Fired Federal Workers for Now 
17. The Supreme Court affirms Justice Boasberg lacked jurisdiction over Trump’s deportation decision under the Alien Enemies Act
18. SCOTUS Blocks Lower Court Order for the Trump Admin to Rehire Thousands of Fired Federal Workers 
19. John Roberts is the Judas of the Judiciary
20.  Chief Justice Roberts Should've Kept His Mouth Shut  
21. Justice John Roberts Rebukes Trump for Suggesting Impeachment of Judge in Deportations Case 
22. Captain Ahab, meet Chief Justice Roberts
23. The Agony of John Roberts
24.  The Supreme Court Must Recognize That The Executive’s Great Powers Also Mean Smaller Powers 
25. Amy Coney Barrett's 'Trojan Horse'
26. A victory for the presidency 
27. AOC to File Articles of Impeachment Against SCOTUS
28. Trump Asks Judge Merchan to Toss Guilty Verdict After SCOTUS Immunity Ruling
29. Sotomayor's Dissent in Presidential Immunity Case Certainly Has People Talking 
30. The Supreme Court’s decision about presidential immunity is good and good for Trump
31. Bill Barr Rips Through Justice Sotomayor's Hysteria Over the SCOTUS Presidential Immunity Ruling
32. Justice Jackson Is Panicking About the End of the Administrative State
33. Jack Smith's Case Against Trump 'Gutted' After SCOTUS Rules on Immunity 
34. SCOTUS Rules on Trump's Immunity From Prosecution
35. How the Supreme Court Decision on Presidential Immunity Could Impact Trump Case
36. Legal Bureaucrats Infect the Supreme Court 
37. Chuck Schumer’s absurd attack on the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision 
38. Leftwing pundits are very confused about the SCOTUS’s immunity ruling; I suggest they read the Constitution
39. Yes, the Supreme Court got it right

Is it any wonder the public's trust in the Judiciary is plummeting? 

 

 

The American Judiciary is facing a crisis of confidence as public outrage swells over federal judges’ repeated interventions in President Donald Trump’s agenda.  In just the past few days, rulings blocking foreign aid freezes, personnel shakeups, and terrorist deportations have sparked a firestorm, with social media erupting in accusations of bias, corruption, and judicial overreach.  At the center of the storm: Chief Justice John Roberts, whose rare public statement today defending the courts has only deepened the divide.............

If Congress doesn't step and and put this to a stop, we're fast reaching the Jacksonian solution, they make their judgement, now let them enforce it.

The Battle of Birthright: Trump’s Quest to End ‘Birth Tourism’

But open borders advocates fiercely fight back.

By James Fite | Jan 24, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags:  Articles, Opinion, Politics

Jus Soli – “right of the soil” – is the birthright of US citizens … but what qualifies one for inheritance? In one of many Inauguration Day executive orders, President Donald Trump answered the question: If both your parents are here illegally, then the automatic conference of citizenship defined by the 14th Amendment isn’t for you.

Simple, right? Not exactly. Just three days later, on January 23, a federal judge issued a temporary stay against the order. As it turns out, this issue won’t be resolved so easily. Trump should have expected this immediate challenge – in fact, perhaps he did, and queuing up the legal battle was all part of the plan.

An Issue of Birthright

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The idea of automatic birthright citizenship applying even to the children of illegal aliens stems from the wording of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Section 1 reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Those who believe in birthright citizenship for the offspring of illegal aliens born in the US – often derisively called “anchor babies” – argue that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” means literally everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” they argue, means subject to the laws of the land because they happen to be here.

Those who oppose, on the other hand, argue that the part about jurisdiction means those who owe allegiance to and are beholden to only the United States, excluding the children of foreign nationals who are citizens of other countries. The president falls into the latter camp.

“The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift,” Trump declared in the executive order. “The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” he continued. Such persons are later defined as those born in the US when neither parent is a US citizen and the mother is in the country illegally at the time of birth or under a legal but temporary status, like a visa for work, school, or travel.

Trump’s order declared that no US department or agency would issue or recognize citizenship for these people, to take effect February 19. The order didn’t make it anywhere close to that effective date. In just three days, US District Judge John C. Coughenour issued a temporary stay and told a Justice Department lawyer: “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Defining Inheritance

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Judge Coughenour said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one.”

Clear, however, is perhaps not the best word to describe the issue.

A “plain reading” of the 14th Amendment could be used to support either argument, depending on how one defines “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” There are, however, deeper questions – including regarding the validity of the 14th Amendment itself.

After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts established Union military rule over the defeated Confederacy, dividing all the rebellious states but Tennessee into five military districts tightly controlled by Union generals. The end of the war meant the Confederate states must remain in the Union, but in order to rejoin and once again govern themselves (more or less), they had to – among other things – ratify the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The Reconstruction Amendments were effectively ratified at gunpoint, and the 14th, at least, has remained controversial to this day.

Barring another amendment or some extreme (and unlikely) action by the Supreme Court, however, the 14th Amendment will remain in force regardless of the validity of its origin. A much better argument against birthright citizenship for the children of illegals was made by the man who introduced it into the Senate in 1866.

“This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States,” Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan said on the Senate floor. “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”

Based on the punctuation and word usage, many argue that this only applies to the children of ambassadors or foreign ministers. The best refutation of that interpretation, however, quickly followed in the general discussion at the time. “I presume the honorable Senator from Michigan does not intend by this amendment to include the Indians,” said Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin.

“Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” Mr. Howard clarified. “They are regarded, and always have been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being quasi foreign nationals.”

All Native Americans were granted citizenship in 1924 through the Indian Citizenship Act, but the very necessity of its passage almost 60 years later simply demonstrates that Mr. Howard’s interpretation was, in fact, the standard understanding. And it was Mr. Howard’s version of the amendment that the Senate and the House adopted and that went into the Federal Register as the 14th Amendment.

Senator Howard’s argument was that, as a foreign national subject to the rule of another authority before the US government, Indians were excluded from this automatic birthright citizenship. Applying that logic to modern birth tourism would suggest that babies born on American soil to illegal aliens – or, for that matter, even foreign nationals here legally but without being naturalized citizens – are not, in fact, US citizens.

The Battle Continues

Judge Coughenour’s two-week stay, which he says is necessary to give time for both sides to make their arguments, expires before the order was supposed to take effect on February 19. That, perhaps, is the oddest part of the ruling. Otherwise, an immediate challenge and fairly quick ruling in a lower court was far from unexpected. An appeal has already been filed, and this case seems likely to work its way all the way up to the US Supreme Court. One might even be forgiven for assuming the president expected and even planned for it in order to get a ruling from a High Court he believes will decide in his favor.

For Discerning News Hounds

The Supreme Court did historically rule in favor of Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship – until it didn’t. In the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, both the majority and the dissent agreed that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excluded the children of citizens or subjects of foreign states, even if born in the US. This was reinforced in the Elk v. Wilkins decision of 1884, which stated that an Indian born on a reservation was not a citizen of the United States.

In 1898, however, the Supreme Court reversed that position in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, establishing birthright citizenship for anyone born in America, regardless of the parents’ citizenship status. Which way today’s High Court will rule, however, is anyone’s guess – and President Trump seems to be betting on himself.

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From James Fite Editor-at-Large

Exclusive: Are Vaccines and Parental Consent Headed to the Supreme Court?

Can parents opt out?

By Liberty Nation Authors  Mark Angelides and National Correspondent John Klar, Esq. Nov 18, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Law, Opinion

In 2021, six-year-old Leo Politella was given a COVID-19 vaccine while attending school against the direct instruction of his father. Three years later, this case could be headed to the United States Supreme Court. However, it is the path to the highest Court that may end up being the most significant facet of this story.

Liberty Nation News’ correspondent, John Klar, is an attorney on the case* who spoke exclusively with us to explore the ramifications of the upcoming filing, Politella v. Vermont.

Parental Consent

Mark Angelides: John, can you give us a brief background on how Leo came to be vaccinated against his parents’ wishes?

John Klar: Tony and Shujen Politella were not anti-vax, but because they knew the vaccine was early in development and children were at low risk from COVID-19, they did not want their son, Leo, vaccinated. Tony visited the school the week before the clinic and was assured Leo would not receive the vaccine. On the day of the clinic, Leo was given another student’s arm tag, and when he protested that he was not supposed to be vaccinated, he was distracted by the workers and jabbed against his will. It should be noted that Vermont schools received cash awards from the state if they achieved high vaccination rates.

 

MA: What happened when this was first brought to state court? And what do you think are the further ramifications of Vermont’s ruling?

JK: The family did not sue for vaccine injury against a manufacturer but for breach of duty by government representatives. The trial court surprisingly ruled that the federal PREP Act, which governs emergency vaccines such as the one used on Leo, provided immunity to the school officials. The Vermont Supreme Court agreed, so this becomes a binding precedent for future instances in Vermont and possibly for children in other states. School personnel could force jab any child with a PREP Act vaccine with complete immunity unless they cause “death or serious bodily injury.”

MA: What is it that you are asking the Supreme Court to rule on, specifically? What is the “question presented” you propose the Court answer?

JK: The question is whether the Vermont Supreme Court erroneously interpreted the PREP Act to pre-empt traditional constitutional rights and medical ethics for parents and children, including the core right of informed consent. We are asking SCOTUS to issue an opinion that the PREP Act was intended to protect Americans’ health, not eliminate their children’s liberties, and that Vermont and other state courts are wrong to imply pre-emption of basic rights.

MA: Have there been other cases – or are there other cases ongoing – that deal with this question?

JK: Supreme Courts in Wyoming and Nevada have agreed with Vermont, as well as the Kansas Court of Appeals and federal courts in Kentucky and Oklahoma. There is a similar case pending in North Carolina about a football player who was administered a shot against his family’s wishes that we expect will go the other way: We await that decision.

More Common Than You Might Think

MA: I wonder, John, if this were another type of vaccine, for example, measles or DPT, would there have been a different outcome from the Vermont courts?

JK: Yes. The PREP Act only applies to emergency measures during a declared pandemic. Without the PREP Act’s protection, this would be actionable under various legal paths, including “the common-law rule that forced medication was a battery, and the long legal tradition protecting the decision to refuse unwanted medical treatment.”

MA: It’s terribly common for people to say they will fight a case to the Supreme Court, but the Court only takes a small fraction of appeals presented to it. What makes Leo’s case different and worthy of such an extraordinary appeal?

JK: The Court takes perhaps 150 out of some 8,000 filings annually. This case has improved odds because it is an issue of national importance and because there is a division between various courts and geographical districts. We believe this is the first petition on this specific issue, and we do not know what will happen in cases “behind” us – for instance, the North Carolina football player case may never be appealed beyond state court. It also concerns compelling facts – this was a very young child, and the school’s error was rather egregious. The case begs for justice. So, Leo’s case is particularly timely.

The SCOTUS Approach

MA: What is the timeline for this writ? And do you think the Supreme Court will grant it?

JK: It will likely be two months before the Court decides, though that may take longer. I am hopeful the Justices will grant our Petition because it is important for all children. The odds remain long, but ours are better than most!

MA: If that happens, what does the process look like?

JK: Both sides would file additional briefs followed by oral arguments in Washington, DC. If that happens, I am very confident we will win the case on the law. The Politellas would then resume seeking their “day in court” in Vermont.

Give Cable TV the Boot – Check This Out!

MA: It seems to me – and I am not a lawyer – that should the Court take up the case, it has implications beyond that of vaccinations. What are your thoughts on this?

JK: Not really so much, in my view. The case is a narrow one of proper statutory construction and application of established doctrines of federal pre-emption. We are simply asking the Court to rule that Vermont and other states are wrong to expand PREP Act immunities in ways never intended by Congress, which shocks the conscience in cases like Leo’s. If the Court agrees, it need not make any ruling on constitutional issues with broader implications. The case is really quite narrow: “Does the immunity granted to vaccine manufacturers extend to healthcare workers who jab people without consent?”

MA: Will you be conducting oral arguments should the case be scheduled for a hearing?

JK: I expect so. You know how I like to talk!

*As a lawyer on the case, Mr. Klar may benefit from any award won.

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.