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Category Archives: US constitution and civil liberties
Senate Democrats dismissed the articles of impeachment as the charges failed to meet bar of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’
Senate Democrats on Wednesday dismissed the articles of impeachment brought by House Republicans against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, on grounds that the charges failed to meet the bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined in the constitution as a basis for removing an official from office.
In a pair of party-line votes, Democrats held that the articles alleging Mayorkas willfully refused to enforce border laws and breached the public trust with his statements to Congress about the high levels of migration at the US southern border with Mexico were unconstitutional. On the first article, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted “present”.
Suit is aimed at stopping a law allowing police to detain people suspected of crossing the US border without authorization
The US Department of Justice has sued Texas and its Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to block a new and controversial state immigration law from going into effect.
After threatening the state with legal action after last year’s passage of SB4, a new Texas law which allows state police to arrest any person they suspect has crossed the US-Mexico border without authorization, the justice department did so on Wednesday. Immigration and border control officially falls under the purview of the federal government – not individual states.
Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution, having endured an aborted lethal injection last November during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture.
Nine months later Smith has been singled out for another undesirable distinction. If the state of Alabama has its way, he will become the test dummy for an execution method that has never before been used in judicial killings and which veterinarians consider unacceptable as a form of euthanasia for animals – death by nitrogen gas.
At issue is whether a protection afforded by the constitution applies to ‘informal’ fact-finding by members of Congress
A federal appeals court appeared skeptical on Thursday of the justice department’s interpretation of US Congress members’ immunity from criminal investigations and whether it allowed federal prosecutors to access House Republican Scott Perry’s phone contents in the January 6 investigation.
The department seized Perry’s phone in the criminal investigation last year and was granted access to its contents by a lower court, until Perry appealed the decision on the grounds that the speech or debate clause protections barred prosecutors from seeing his messages.
The trend is expected to continue, after the supreme court ruling earlier this year overturning strict limits on public gun-carrying
An estimated 6 million American adults carried a loaded handgun with them daily in 2019, double the number who said they carried a gun every day in 2015, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
The new estimates highlight a decades-long shift in American gun ownership, with increasing percentages of gun owners saying they own firearms for self-defense, not hunting or recreation, and choosing to carry a gun with them when they go out in public, said Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, and the study’s lead author.
Secretary of state Brad Raffensperger accepts judge’s findings and says far-right congresswoman, a Trump ally, is eligible to run
The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has accepted a judge’s findings and said the far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is qualified to run for re-election.
A group of voters filed a challenge saying Greene should be barred under a seldom-invoked provision of the 14th amendment concerning insurrection, over her links to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.
Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin says Hawley’s attacks should be ignored in confirmation hearings this week
The Missouri Republican Josh Hawley is wrong to attack Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s supreme court nominee, and should be ignored in confirmation hearings this week, the Senate judiciary chair said.
Hawley, the Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin said, is “part of the fringe within the Republican party … a man who was fist-bumping the murderous mob that descended on the Capitol on 6 January of the last year.
The US supreme court could “at some point” become “compromised” by politics, said Clarence Thomas – one of six conservatives on the nine-member court after Republicans denied Barack Obama a nomination then rammed three new justices through during the hard-right presidency of Donald Trump.
“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court,” said Thomas, whose wife, Ginni Thomas, has come under extensive scrutiny for work for rightwing groups including supporting Trump’s attempts to overturn an election.
Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.
Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not the only great supreme court justice to have made her name with dissent in the name of progress
The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent collar is a small part of a larger history. Unlike some other high courts, the US supreme court accepts strong dissent. Ginsburg stood in the tradition of John Marshall Harlan – the only justice with the courage, foresight, humanity and constitutional vision to object to the odious 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision that approved racial segregation.
The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, slammed a federal judge’s decision to overturn his state’s three-decade-old ban on assault rifles as “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians”.
The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.
Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the storming of Capitol Hill on Wednesday continues to stoke fierce debate, supporters and critics split on partisan lines as they contest what the suspension means for a cherished American tradition: freedom of speech.
Donald Trump’s grip on the US presidency appeared increasingly tenuous on Saturday as Democrats advanced plans to impeach him for a second time, political allies continued to abandon him and Twitter banned his account, removing his most powerful way to spread lies and incite violence.
Confirmation of a sixth conservative on the nine-member court is due on Monday, the result of ruthless Republican politics
The almost certain confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court on Monday represents a “power grab” by Republicans facing possible wipeout at the ballot box, activists and analysts say.
Depending on your point of view, the woman seated before the Senate judiciary committee for her first day of questioning was either the female Scalia or the anti-RBG. Or maybe, of course, both.
Donald Trump’s pick for America’s highest court, Amy Coney Barrett, is an “ideological fanatic” who threatens abortion rights, healthcare and the environment, activists warned on Saturday, before Trump unveiled his third supreme court nominee in the White House Rose Garden.
A quick glance at the guest list for Amy Comey Barrett’s nomination ceremony today makes troubling reading. Among the guests were representatives from Judicial Watch, which has described climate science as a “fraud”; the Heritage Foundation (which has also pushed back against climate science); and the Family Research Council (which has opposed abortion, divorce and LGBT rights).
Attendees at Trump's SCOTUS nomination of Amy Coney Barrett: •Judicial Crisis Network's Carrie Severino Heritage Foundation's Kay Cole James •Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton •Family Research Council's Tony Perkins •Cleta Mitchell—a lawyer tied to many GOP 'dark money' nonprofits https://t.co/q5BzTkPBs9
Now that Amy Coney Barrett has been nominated for the supreme court, the senate hearings are likely to last from 12-15 October. And, as is more than likely, she will be confirmed by the Republican-held Senate by 29 October, well before the 3 November elections.
Donald Trump’s rival for the presidency, Joe Biden, has issued a statement saying the process should be delayed until after the election.
Election Day is just weeks away, and millions of Americans are already voting because the stakes in this election could not be higher. They feel the urgency of this choice – an urgency made all the more acute by what’s at stake at the U.S. Supreme Court.
They are voting because their health care hangs in the balance. They are voting because they worry about losing their right to vote or being expelled from the only country they have ever known. They are voting right now because they fear losing their collective bargaining rights. They are voting to demand that equal justice be guaranteed for all. They are voting because they don’t want Roe v. Wade, which has been the law of the land for nearly half a century, to be overturned.
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, made an urgent plea on Sunday to the conscience of Senate Republicans, asking them to defy Donald Trump and refuse to ram through his nominee to the supreme court before the November election.
On the question of supreme court nominees, the Republican senator Susan Collins has repeatedly threaded the same political needle. It is one with a shrinking eye.