I think it’s time to seriously consider getting rid of these hearings for Supreme Court nominees. The Constitution doesn’t require a hearing. All it says is that the Senate must give advise and consent. You can do that with a simple up-or-down vote. And let’s be real: Do we really think one senator’s vote is…
The Trump administration filed an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief Wednesday urging the Supreme Court to protect a 93-year-old war memorial in Bladensburg, Maryland, that is shaped like a Latin cross. The court will soon decide whether the cross-shaped World War I memorial violates the First Amendment’s ban on religious favoritism. The justices agreed…
As postelection litigation rages in multiple battleground states, lawyers representing President Donald Trump include big and small names. Several lawyers withdrew after reporting pressure from anti-Trump activists that included posting the lawyers’ names and contact information on social media. Twitter removed such information posted on its platform. Of the lawyers who remain, some are litigating…
A tiny administrative agency in the District of Columbia announced a new policy Tuesday that will likely serve as a model for a whole-of-government push to assemble lists of Americans who object on religious grounds to a COVID-19 vaccine. The Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia—a federal independent entity that assists officers in…
Few times in American history has the Supreme Court received more attention than in the past two months. What will history say about this past Supreme Court term? Will we ever know who leaked the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs case? And how is new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson going to change the Supreme…
With the midterm congressional elections just two months away, House Republicans are preparing to roll out a plan that includes their top priorities for the country. The “Commitment to America” is a four-part plan that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will formally unveil in Pittsburgh on Sept. 19, Axios first reported. “The…
Peter Vlaming believes words have power, a conviction that cost him his job. Vlaming was fired from his position teaching French at West Point High School in Virginia in 2018 for refusing to call a female student by male pronouns. Vlaming said he was essentially given the option to either “deny” his own “Christian belief,…
Starting at Columbia University and spreading across elite universities, pro-Hamas protesters have taken over their campuses, erecting tent cities and blocking the normal operations of their schools. Worse, they have targeted Jewish students with threats of violence, organized human chains to push “Zionists” out of public spaces, and sent a Jewish student to the hospital after stabbing…
The FBI Richmond office's notorious anti-Catholic memo reached more staff at the bureau than previously suggested, and some FBI staff were aghast to see it, according to new documents released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Tuesday. The memo urged FBI agents to develop sources and surveil Catholic churches, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center's list…
Efforts to turn judges from impartial umpires into political operatives confirm the axiom that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. The Declaration of Independence lists actions by King George III that justified separating from Great Britain. The king, for example, had “made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the…
Americans are familiar with the idea of a dystopian future, dominated by an inescapable metaverse and ruled over by Big Tech overlords. Films such as “Blade Runner” and “Minority Report” depict a world conquered by technology and the terrifying consequences. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he wants to take that world…
Congress is weighing whether to lift sanctions on Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadist seeking to legitimize himself on the world stage. Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., is making clear he’s not eager to lift those sanctions on the newly minted leader, given the killings and clashes involving ethnic minorities that have occurred during his…
Renowned author George Gilder recently told an audience at The Heritage Foundation that conservatives have a fundamental problem in their economic ideology when it comes to money. They’re all for free markets in other areas of the economy, but when it comes to this one topic, they want not just rules but rules that don’t…
Last week, over the dissent of Justice Samuel Alito, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving a prison’s refusal to allow a Jewish man to study the Torah with others because of the prison official’s erroneous interpretation of Jewish doctrine. Israel Ben-Levi, an inmate in the Hoke Correctional Institution in North Carolina,…
Defense Secretary James Mattis sent a letter to Congress earlier this month calling for members to authorize a new round of base realignment and closures in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018. The bill is scheduled to be reconciled between the House and Senate next week. Mattis’ letter addressed two important criticisms that members…
Here is the problem for Trump critics. They began with the wrong premise. They believed that Hillary Clinton should have won the 2016 presidential election. Then they deluded themselves by embracing the notion that Donald Trump was illegitimate, unstable, stupid, and an offense to everything they consider normal. This led the Obama holdovers in the…
Strange days, indeed, when America’s free press opposes free speech. “Free speech is killing us,” headlined a New York Times op-ed. Its author, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, argued that “hate speech” leads to violence. Worse, he claims it can cause totalitarianism and even genocide. To avoid this fate, Marantz says we must rethink the First Amendment, which would include government…
In the United States, we don’t have kings or queens of any variety. Still, some judges apparently think they are philosopher-kings, and an order released last Tuesday by a federal district court judge in Texas shows he may be in that group. Judge Fred Biery’s order that state officials allow mail-in voting for all eligible…
You’ve heard of crowdsourced encyclopedias (Wikipedia), crowdsourced donations (GoFundMe), crowdsourced reviews (Yelp), crowdsourced navigation (Waze), and crowdsourced delivery (DoorDash). Now, get ready for … (drumroll please) crowdsourced political harassment! Infuriated by their failure to intimidate the Supreme Court, leftists have attributed the failure—just like communism’s—to insufficient extremism. To atone for their moderation, they are adopting…
How many voters know that the Democratic Party supports legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, on demand for virtually any reason? How many voters know this position aligns with only six other countries in the world—three of them, not incidentally, being North Korea, Vietnam, and China? How many voters know that Democrats want…