All posts tagged "U.S. Constitution"

The Supreme Court is poised to overturn a 90-year-old decision protecting the heads of independent federal agencies from firing by the president — a move more significant in the court’s rightward march than the 2022 decision to overturn the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, alarmed legal experts tell Raw Story.

“This is the most important case of the decade,” said Seth Chandler, professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Following oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter last week, most observers predict the Court will side with President Donald Trump in his firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. ...

Twenty years ago this week, John Roberts was sworn in as chief justice of the Supreme Court, at 50 years old.

On that day, Lisa Graves “wept.” As chief counsel for nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 to 2005, she anticipated Roberts’ commitment to “advancing a right-wing political agenda through the judiciary,” she writes in her new book: "Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights."

With President George W. Bush having two Supreme Court vacancies to fill, Roberts was considered a “bankable vote for the Right’s political agenda” and was supported by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, the activist and fundraising impresario now widely considered the architect of the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, Graves said....

Rightwing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court fear “hell to pay” if they oppose Donald Trump on key cases, because the president may refuse to follow their rulings, a leading constitutional scholar said.

Asked about recent decisions by the court’s rightwing majority to let controversial Trump policies stand, notably including allowing racial profiling by federal immigration enforcement agents, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, said: “I think there are a couple ways to understand it."

“One is that a majority of the court thinks that the legal arguments the lower courts have made for stopping the initiatives in question are not strong, and either they're wrong or we need to have a holding action until we can decide whether they're right. ...

Donald Trump should accept a $400 million plane from Qatar but then sell it and use the money to train air traffic controllers at home, a senior congressional Democrat said.

“I think it's outlandish, it's against the Constitution, the emoluments clause,” Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) told Raw Story at the Capitol on Wednesday, referring to criticism of Trump's stated intent to accept the Qatari gift, from sources including the president's own supporters.

“But my feeling is, if it's worth $400 million or more, he ought to pawn it, get the money and use it to train controllers for this country, because look what's happening at Newark airport.”...

The Supreme Court is set to hear an Oklahoma case that will force the justices to choose between allowing more religious control of public schools or "respecting the wishes of the Founding Fathers," according to a new article in The Atlantic.

History professor Adam Laats laid out how, "In 2023, the Oklahoma government approved an application from the Catholic Church to create a virtual charter school. Like other charter schools, this one would be funded by taxpayers. But unlike other charter schools, this one would be explicitly religious, teaching students Catholic doctrine."

Laats wrote that Oklahoma’s state attorney general objected on the grounds that the approval violated the state constitution, as well as the U.S. Constitution....

One of the four men accused of sexual abuse by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives is suing the congresswoman for defamation in a case set to test the speech or debate clause of the U.S. Constitution, according to Politico.

The clause "provides a legal shield for members of Congress for acts taken as part of their roles as lawmakers, including 'any Speech or Debate in either House,'" the article stated.

In February, Mace said on the House floor that she was raped, sex trafficked, and nonconsensually filmed by her ex-fiancé, South Carolina businessman Patrick Bryant, and three other men. Bryant categorically denied Mace's accusations....