Activist Judges

[verga]

They should tell the judge to pound sand.

Legally, if you are going to read my mind, I think you should use quote marks. Of course you left some of the more colorful adjectives i was thinking.

[Timber Rattler]

Idaho must allow abortions to preserve women's health, US judge rules

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/idaho-must-allow-abortions-preserve-175039795.html

A U.S. judge has ruled that Idaho's near-total abortion ban is unconstitutional because it provides exceptions when abortions are life-saving and not for broader risks to pregnant women's health.

U.S. District Judge ‌Lynn Winmill in Boise said in an 81-page ruling issued late on Thursday that the right to a health-preserving ‌abortion is protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process and equal protection under the law.

The ruling is the first by ​a federal judge to recognize a constitutional right to abortion in certain circumstances since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide, according to lawyers for the Idaho doctor who sued over the state laws.

EXCERPT

Another liberal federal judge ignoring SCOTUS and trying to make abortion a federal issue again.

[Hoodat]

U.S. District Judge ‌Lynn Winmill in Boise said in an 81-page ruling issued late on Thursday that the right to a health-preserving ‌abortion is protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process and equal protection under the law.

Another liberal federal judge ignoring SCOTUS and trying to make abortion a federal issue again.

The "due process" here is that the State of Idaho passed a law.  That's 'due process'.  There is no right to health preservation of any kind in Amendment XIV, or anywhere else in the Constitution.

[Hoodat]

Here is the ruling in the Idaho case:  https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/d6/67/69e0f1ec4f5ba9fe5e2e8a9000e9/seyb.pdf

The first thing that stands out is that the plaintiff does not have standing.  He is not a pregnant woman who seeks an abortion for health reasons.   He is simply a doctor who profits personally from killing babies in the womb.  This means that the judge here is not ruling based on the plaintiff's complaint, but instead is using this case as a political power play.

The judge's opening statement is "The Constitution does not protect the right to elective abortion".  If this is the case, then how can he possibly use the Constitution as a bases to protect the right to abortion?  Based on the opening premise, the following 80 pages are rendered mute.

[Sighlass]

Next week according the the Babylon Bee, women will get the right to kill their kids up to kindergarten age. In 20 years, just kill whenever/however they want.

[Free Vulcan]

If lower judges try to go around SCOTUS they are in contempt, simple as that. This should be pointed out by the Admin right before they are duly ignored, with an offer to arrest them if SCOTUS wishes.

[Bigun]

Judge blocks Trump administration's plan to relocate FBI headquarters to federal building in DC

U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang, an appointee of President Barack Obama, ruled that the Trump administration illegally tossed a plan that had been previously approved to build a new facility in Maryland.

A U.S. judge on Monday blocked plans to relocate the FBI headquarters to a federal office building in Washington.

A U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang, an appointee of President Barack Obama, ruled that the Trump administration illegally tossed a plan that had been previously approved to build a new facility in Maryland, the Associated Press reported.

The battle over a new location to house the FBI headquarters has been going on for years. The Biden administration picked a site in Greebelt, Maryland, but Trump appointees tried to reverse that decision last year in favor of repurposing the Ronald Reagan Building, which is a few blocks from the current location of the FBI headquarters. ...

Rest at headline link

[DefiantMassRINO]

Is there a Congressional House appropriation law explicitly for the Maryland location?

Was there a competitive bidding process?

What does the Government's landlord, the General Services Administration, have to say about all this?

There are supposed to be Congressionally mandated laws and procedures for this stuff.  Were they followed?

Or is this just another Executive Order vs Executive Order p!$$!ng contest?

[Bigun]

Is there a Congressional House appropriation law explicitly for the Maryland location?

Was there a competitive bidding process?

What does the Government's landlord, the General Services Administration, have to say about all this?

There are supposed to be Congressionally mandated laws and procedures for this stuff.  Were they followed?

Or is this just another Executive Order vs Executive Order p!$$!ng contest?

The federal government owns and maintains lots of buildings that or either grossly under utilized or not used at all but the good ole boy network demands we build new ones anyway. ALL of that paid for with OUR tax $$$.

[DCPatriot]

The federal government owns and maintains lots of buildings that or either grossly under utilized or not used at all but the good ole boy network demands we build new ones anyway. ALL of that paid for with OUR tax $$$.

I agree, but the FBI isn't "Weights & Measures" or Agriculture

With such dramatic advances in weaponry and surveillance (Havana Syndrome), I can certainly support a "new and improved" FBI headquarters.

[Bigun]

I agree, but the FBI isn't "Weights & Measures" or Agriculture

With such dramatic advances in weaponry and surveillance (Havana Syndrome), I can certainly support a "new and improved" FBI headquarters.

There is not one building the fedgov owns that cannot be made secure for FAR less than the cost of building something new.

[verga]

The federal government owns and maintains lots of buildings that or either grossly under utilized or not used at all but the good ole boy network demands we build new ones anyway. ALL of that paid for with OUR tax $$$.

How about getting rid of these through auction or sealed bid. They go on the tax rolls and off the maintenance list.

[Bigun]

How about getting rid of these through auction or sealed bid. They go on the tax rolls and off the maintenance list.

Great idea! Let's do it!

The U.S. Government is Selling its Unused Properties—Here’s What You Should Know

The federal government is one of the largest property owners in the United States. It owns hundreds of thousands of properties—from residential homes to industrial sites. Combined, this real estate costs billions of dollars each year to maintain. But some properties have large vacancies or are empty, and others have outlived their original purpose.

The General Services Administration (GSA) has been trying to sell these properties. Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our new report on GSA’s efforts and future plans. ...

Rest at headline link

[Timber Rattler]

US judge strikes down policy suspending immigrant visa processing for 75 nations

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-judge-strikes-down-policy-suspending-immigrant-visa-processing-75-nations-2026-08-22/

A U.S. judge on Friday struck down, opens new tab a Trump administration policy suspending the issuance of immigrant visas to ​applicants from 75 countries, saying that the policy exceeded Secretary of ‌State Marco Rubio's statutory authority.

U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan said the policy that the State Department announced in January was "patently unlawful" and ran afoul of federal ​immigration law, which explicitly stripped the secretary of state of ​authority over consular officers' processing of immigrant visas.

"The Policy, which categorically ⁠prohibits the issuance of immigrant visas based upon the nationality of ​the applicant, represents a direct abrogation of this statutory scheme," she wrote.

The State ​Department's suspension that also took effect in January impacted applicants from Latin American countries including Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay; Balkan nations such as Bosnia and Albania; South Asian ​countries Pakistan and Bangladesh; and those from many nations in Africa, the ​Middle East, and the Caribbean.

The State Department said applicants from those countries were "at a ‌high ⁠risk for becoming a public charge and recourse to local, state and federal government resources in the United States." The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Vargas, an appointee of Democratic ​former President Joe ​Biden, issued the ⁠ruling in a lawsuit filed by immigrant rights groups Catholic Legal Immigration Network and African Communities Together along with ​applicants for immigrant visas and U.S. citizens who are ​sponsoring family ⁠members from the designated countries for immigrant visas.

EXCERPT

Another Biden judge clearly otuside her lane...now saying that the State Department can't regulate who gets visas and who doesn't.

[bigheadfred]

Dr Charlie Ward
@DrcharlieWardQ
·
7h
BREAKING 🚨: Justice Amy Coney Barrett ripped apart liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion after the Court ruled 6-3, limiting U.S. District Judges from issuing nationwide injunctions.

Barrett wrote in the majority opinion: “JUSTICE JACKSON, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a ‘mind-numbingly technical query,’ post, at 3 (dissenting opinion), she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush. In her telling, the fundamental role of courts is to ‘order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop.’”

“We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

“JUSTICE JACKSON skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring ‘legalese.’”

https://twitter.com/DrcharlieWardQ/status/2091586913916317902

[bigheadfred]

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
·
4h
🚨 BREAKING — JUDGE BETRAYS AMERICA: Activist Judge District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. has hereby BLOCKED Ohio’s proof-of-citizenship to register to vote law, effective immediately for the 2026 midterms

HE’S WAY OUT OF LINE!

Bring this to SCOTUS!

Every state needs proof of citizenship 🇺🇸

[Bigun]

How Tyranny Parades as Law

“Law is often but the tyrant’s will and always so when it violates the rights of an individual.”

Thomas Jefferson warned us.

The biggest crimes against liberty do not happen in the shadows. They happen right in front of us. Paraded as law, justice, and the public good. When law itself becomes a weapon, no one is safe.

THE MASK OF LEGALITY

If you want to understand how tyranny operates, you have to see through the disguise. No one openly admits they are out to crush your liberty. Every usurpation, every unconstitutional power grab, every violation of your rights is always dressed up with a stamp of law.

John Dickinson nailed it during the height of the American Revolution.

“All artful rulers who strive to extend their power beyond its just limits endeavor to give their attempts as much semblance of legality as possible.”

This is the tyrant’s playbook. They always hide behind “legality.” They never admit what is really going on.

The Anti-Federalist Federal Farmer sounded the same alarm.

“Men who govern will in doubtful cases construe laws and constitutions most favorably for increasing their own powers.”

Give them any ambiguity, and they will twist it to justify more power for themselves.  ...

Rest at headline link

[Bigun]

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. "

Ariel Durant

[Bigun]

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.


Thomas Jefferson
letter to Judge Spencer Roane — 1821
Category: Judiciary

[bigheadfred]

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
·
2h
🚨 HOLY CRAP SHE’S GOING ROGUE.

Leftist Judge Indira Talwani spits in the face of the Supreme Court and just ruled that Trump’s U.S. Postal Service has hereby VIOLATED her block on the mail-in ballot security rules

She’s going off, aggressively accusing Trump’s team of “complete noncompliance”

This comes after SCOTUS UPHELD — for now — Trump’s EO and rules to secure mail-in ballots…

IT’S TIME.

IMPEACH JUDGE TALWANI. Or it won’t stop

[verga]

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
·
2h
🚨 HOLY CRAP SHE’S GOING ROGUE.

Leftist Judge Indira Talwani spits in the face of the Supreme Court and just ruled that Trump’s U.S. Postal Service has hereby VIOLATED her block on the mail-in ballot security rules

She’s going off, aggressively accusing Trump’s team of “complete noncompliance”

This comes after SCOTUS UPHELD — for now — Trump’s EO and rules to secure mail-in ballots…

IT’S TIME.

IMPEACH JUDGE TALWANI. Or it won’t stop

SCREW impeaching her. That will take to long. She is in contempt of a federal court Throw her @$$ into a federal prison (GITMO, come sto mind) until she changes her mind.

[Timber Rattler]

Strictly Ballroom: Justice Kavanaugh Defeats Chief Justice Roberts

https://reason.com/volokh/2026/08/31/strictly-ballroom-justice-kavanaugh-defeats-chief-justice-roberts/

I often write that my favorite writings by Chief Justice Roberts are when he's in dissent. These are the rare instances when I think he actually believes what he is writing. But the opposite seems true in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. The Court, by a 5-4 vote, stayed the injunction, thus allowing construction of the East Wing ballroom/military complex. The majority opinion was per curiam, though as I'll explain below, it is almost certainly a Kavanaugh production. Chief Justice Roberts was in dissent, joined by the Court's three liberals. Based on my quick search, this lineup appeared only one other time in NIH v. APHA.

At this point, John Roberts is utterly unrecognizable. This was the person that George W. Bush nominated to the Supreme Court because of his robust understanding of presidential power in the national security context, yet Roberts dismissed the government's national security concerns in a perfunctory footnote. This was the same justice who bitterly dissented in Massachusetts v. EPA, finding that the broad theory of standing would inject the judiciary into political disputes, but Roberts allowed a person walking past the White House to halt the construction of a military facility. This was a Justice who upheld the arrest of a D.C. tween who ate a single french fry on the metro, but extolled a D.C. busybody who walked past the metro as "deeply committed" to preserving the nation's capital.

This sentence from Justice Kavanaugh's opinion is the sort of thing that Chief Justice Roberts would mutter in his sleep:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger and against these harms, the only harm the Trust claims is the offense one of its members will suffer from having to view a structure of the "scale," "height," and "massing" the government intends. Id., at 75a. These harms and equities are not nearly in equipoise.

At this point, the Chief Justice is a shadow of his former self.

EXCERPT

I've watched Roberts for years, and taken in as many of his speeches and lectures as I can find on C-Span and various online law school and bar events.  He thinks he's Charles Evans Hughes, who buckled under FDR's threats to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, and is the ultimate institutionalist.  As Chief Justice now, he views his priority as protecting the Court as an institution, and in his mind, that requires engaging in all sorts of internal horse trading and office politics.  Something to take into consideration is the fact that the federal judiciary is a small-ish club, numbering only about 900 lifetime-appointed and confirmed Article III judges.  Most of them know each other and operate as a peer network, both professionally and socially, and they certainly all talk to each other, with Roberts sitting at the top like the CEO of a corporation.  That's how the current cabal of activist judges is operating, and Roberts is certainly aware of it.  But instead of crushing it, he's trying to manage it with strategic "shadow docket" rulings and dissents like this one (when he knows the outcome), in order to signal that he really is with them, but is trying to protect the judiciary as an institution, and the activist judges from themselves (because he also friends with them, like Boasberg).

So far, he's doing a terrible job at it...

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air (who I like) thinks that Roberts is covering for one of the other dissenting justices, and bigfooted 'her' (obviously) to save the Court from further embarrassment.  He doesn't believe the nonsense that he wrote but is taking the hit for the institution, knowing that Cavanaugh and the other four had it covered.

Ed: I still suspect that the dissent went to someone else first and Roberts flipped to make it less embarrassing. That's the only good explanation for Roberts' whiny and petulant attempt to grant Alison Hoagland standing.

I agree.

[Cyber Liberty]

Most of us had Roberts' number when he found Obamacare Constitutional by making arguments neither side made during Arguments:  Obamacare fines were in reality a tax. 

[rustynail]

john roberts is a blue eyed devil.

[Timber Rattler]

Most of us had Roberts' number when he found Obamacare Constitutional by making arguments neither side made during Arguments:  Obamacare fines were in reality a tax.

Yeah, he wrote both the dissenting opinion (which was his own real opinion) and then also the main controlling opinion (because of Obama's high pressure), in which he made up that bogus tax argument that neither side made.  Purely political opinion, and he did because (in his mind) he was protecting the Supreme Court, at the expense of everything else.

Roberts pretty much broke the entire country when he did that.

[Timber Rattler]

DC Circuit rules soldier's desertion court-martial was wrongfully revoked

A D.C. Circuit panel on Tuesday ruled a federal judge had overstepped their authority by voiding the court-martial of U.S. Army soldier Robert “Bowe” Bergdahl, who was dishonorably discharged for deserting his unit in Afghanistan in 2009.

Bergdahl, who left his post without permission to report poor conditions and leadership deficiencies within his unit to headquarters, was captured by the Taliban-allied Haqqani network and held hostage for five years. President Barack Obama approved a prisoner swap in 2014 for five Taliban members detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The three-judge panel determined that Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton could not grant Bergdahl his request to vacate the court-martial judgment because federal courts lack jurisdiction on collateral review under Article III of the Constitution.

U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins explained in the court’s opinion that the authority to review a court-martial judgment belongs exclusively to military tribunals who have been empowered with direct appellate review. The case is remanded back to Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, to dismiss Bergdahl’s case.

EXCERPT

[IsailedawayfromFR]

A known murderer nicknamed "The Witch", there is another Dem voter that the Dems want to ensure remains in this country.

Biden-Appointed Judge Frees MS-13 Terrorist Wanted for Murder in El Salvador
A United States District Judge in California appointed by former President Joe Biden ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release a known MS-13 gang member who is wanted in connection with a murder conviction in his home country of El Salvador. In 2025, President Donald Trump designated MS-13 as a foreign terrorist organization.

David Antonio Aviles-Perez, an illegal alien who has an extensive criminal history in the United States, was released back to the streets on Wednesday after Judge Jinsook Ohta’s order.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Aviles-Perez is an illegal alien who is the subject of an international warrant for aggravated murder in El Salvador. He has also been arrested in California for assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a controlled substance, and petty theft.

In March, ICE arrested Aviles-Perez after he was released from custody following his arrest for assault with a deadly weapon. At the time, the agency excoriated California sanctuary politicians for freeing the dangerous criminal alien. Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis commented on the arrest of Aviles-Perez at the time, saying, “ICE arrested this dangerous criminal illegal alien and MS-13 gang member wanted in El Salvador for murder. Gavin Newsom’s sanctuary policies allowed this gang member to be released from jail after his arrest for assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a controlled substance, and petty theft. Releasing this gang member back into California neighborhoods put American lives at risk.”

According to DHS, Aviles-Perez entered the United States illegally at an unknown date and location. Aviles-Perez had been in ICE custody awaiting removal and extradition to El Salvador to answer the pending international murder warrant in his home country.

The details of the murder Aviles-Perez was convicted of in El Salvador were outlined in a report by the New York Post. According to the Post, the international warrant for his arrest stems from a conviction for a 2014 murder Aviles-Perez committed in his home country.

In December, authorities in El Salvador sentenced the violent gang member to a term of 20 years in prison for the murder of an enemy with the help of an accomplice. According to the Post’s report, Aviles-Perez, also known as “la bruja” or “the witch,” and his associates shot and killed the victim during a dispute. https://www.breitbart.com/border/2026/09/06/biden-appointed-judge-frees-ms-13-terrorist-wanted-for-murder-in-el-salvador/