John Roberts

Donald Trump has now been indicted enough times for there to be a sense of routine around the news of a fresh batch of charges. The former president warns that an indictment is coming. Then it arrives, it’s unsealed, and he’s arraigned. Trump’s Republican primary rivals respond, their choice of words assessed for signs of obsequiousness and defiance (the former are usually easier to find than the latter). The jurisdiction and likely make-up of the jury is debated. As are the prejudices of the judge, when the name becomes known.  And so yesterday when Trump was indicted for the third time this year, in relation to January 6, there was a familiar, inevitable, almost unremarkable feel to what is, by any reasonable measure, a grave moment for the country.

There will be no hot limousine liberals' summer in 2023. The Supreme Court has in a series of rulings struck down everything that those high earning, Uber Black-ordering, sushi and box-seats-at-Taylor Swift liberals favor when it comes to government policy. If you are someone who knows all the indie films and foreign contenders for the Oscars every year, our hearts go out to you in your moment of pain. You have been dealt an excruciating blow by the 6-3 conservative majority on the court.

The Supreme Court has decided Tuesday that state legislatures do not have untrammeled power to draw congressional districts and must adhere to their own constitutions, which state supreme courts can adjudicate. As such, independent state legislature theory — which the North Carolina state legislature utilized to bring its case before the court — is not a viable legal theory. The decision in Moore v. Harper was 6-3, with Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch taking up the dissent.  The court wrote in its thirty-page decision that, contrary to independent state legislature theory, “The Elections Clause does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections.

The shockwaves of this past Supreme Court term continue to shake the political left. Roe v. Wade is gone. Gun rights were further secured. Religious liberty was vindicated. The reaction among progressives (beyond anger) has been to attack the Court as illegitimate. Of course, they do not mean the Court is inherently unconstitutional. Article III makes that plain to even the most evolving of living constitutionalists. Instead, they say that the Court has committed two sins this term: the justices have engaged in judicial activism and they've acted undemocratically. These accusations seem based in frustration more than perceptive analysis. First, let’s tackle the claim that the Court engaged in judicial activism. The essence of judicial activism is to “legislate from the bench.

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.

It's been almost a month since Politico scooped its bombshell leak, an unprecedented revelation of a draft majority opinion in a still-pending Supreme Court case. That leaked draft opinion, penned by the stalwart Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, would finally overturn 1973’s infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Alito’s draft opinion does not go far enough, at least as far as the proper pro-life end goal is concerned, but it is a praiseworthy development and an admirable start toward an abortion-free America.

Pro-abortion activists are proving themselves a greater threat to the country than a man smiling and carrying Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lectern through the Capitol building or a parent protesting at a local school board meeting. Yet the latter two have been treated far more harshly by the Biden administration because, well, they don't have the right politics. After a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to Politico last week, pro-abortion groups used intimidation and violence to try to retain the "right" to kill their unborn children. The prevailing theory is that the leak itself was done to mobilize opposition to the opinion and get the justices to change their minds.

I'm not ready to celebrate the death of Roe v. Wade just yet. The reason has more to do with baseball than it does with the Supreme Court. I'm a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, which means I know what it's like to think you're about to win only to be crushed yet again. I remember well game seven of the 2003 ALCS when the Sox battled the Yankees 11 innings deep only for Aaron Boone to finish it with a walk-off home run. The next year, when Boston won the World Series for the first time since 1918, I didn't breathe until Keith Foulke threw to first for the final out. So it is now with Dobbs v. Jackson, the most important Supreme Court case of my life.

“Everybody want to know what I would do if I didn’t win,” said Kanye West, the only 2020 presidential candidate to truly grapple with the horrors of abortion, as he accepted his award for Best Rap Album at the Grammys in 2005. He paused. The room was silent. Then Ye dropped the bomb: “I guess we’ll never know.” The crowd erupted in applause. That’s the energy I felt Monday night at the Supreme Court as the world learned a majority of justices was prepared to strike down Roe v. Wade. You’ll find no nuance here. The pro-choicers lost, and I’m going to inject 500ccs of their tears straight into my veins. Cope and seethe. At around 9:30 on Monday, I was already in my pajamas, settling in for a quiet night with my wife. Then she showed me her phone.

Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia (Ginni) made the cover of the New York Times Magazine on February 27 amid an eleven-page article titled “The Long Crusade of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.” The authors are Danny Hakim and Jo Becker. It is in essence a hit piece, and the latest of several in the left-wing media aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence. The first salvo came in late January from Thomas’s long-time antagonist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, but other eager journalists have stepped through Mayer’s muddy footprints. Three of their publications — the New Yorker, the Guardian, and CNN — contacted me because Ginni Thomas serves on the advisory board of my organization, The National Association of Scholars (NAS).

President Biden had no censorious words concerning the Taliban as the evacuation catastrophe in Kabul unfolded, but he sure let ’er rip Thursday when the Supreme Court let stand, for now, a new Texas law blocking early abortion procedures. Out came the dictionary of excoriative synonyms: ‘extreme’, ‘blatantly’, ‘outrageously’. Ripping up any reminders of freedom in Afghanistan is a smaller game, in Bidenesque terms, than ripping out, or extracting from the womb in some other manner, the smallest particle of human life. Such is the mode of modern politics, we might note, sadly. The Texas law, which went into effect at midnight August 31, is the latest attempt by a supposedly sovereign state to mitigate the effects of Roe v.

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

From 1969 to today, presidents have appointed eighteen men and women to the U.S. Supreme Court. Of those eighteen justices, Republican presidents have seated fourteen justices to just four justices making it to the highest court under Democratic presidents. All four of those justices are still serving, with Bill Clinton naming 87-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg and 81-year-old Stephen Breyer and Barack Obama appointing Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Theoretically, that means that conservatives should hold a 5-4 majority on the court. Theory, however, rarely applies in the swamp that is Washington, D.C. Despite appointing nearly 78 percent of justices over the last 51 years, conservatives have watched as the Supreme Court established or upheld liberal precedents such as Roe v.

Like a bona fide member of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has opted to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Pelosi, a stern purveyor of the truth and the criminal justice system, has indicated that she will withhold the Articles of Impeachment leveled against President Trump until '[Congressional Democrats] see what [Senate Republicans] are doing … so far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to [Democrats].'Fairness — the building blocks that American politics are built upon — requires an interesting examination into what exactly a fair political impeachment trial would look like on the Senate side.History tells us the Senate has been known to curate a world-class community theater show.