The Supreme Court rejected a series of appeals from conservatives Monday on hot-button issues like DEI and gun control.
More than a year after the court ended affirmative action in colleges, the justices declined to take up a case on the use of race in admissions in Boston's high schools. The court also turned away a Second Amendment challenge to Hawaii's draconian gun laws and a controversy on transgender policy in schools, the Washington Examiner reported.
Two of the court's most reliable conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, disagreed with the court's decision to reject the appeal of Boston parents who challenged anti-white and anti-Asian admissions policies at three prestigious high schools.
The criteria indirectly factored in race by using ZIP codes, leading to a drop in white and Asian students accepted. Since the policies are no longer in effect, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued the court should not review the case, but he did not call it completely moot.
Dissenting, Alito and Thomas expressed concern about a lower court's analysis that relied on "disparate impact" theories that the Supreme Court previously rejected when striking down affirmative action in 2023.
“I would reject root and branch this dangerously distorted view of disparate impact. The Court, however, fails to do so today, so I must respectfully dissent,” Alito wrote.
Although the Supreme Court formally ended affirmative action, liberal schools and universities have sought workarounds. Chris Kieser, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, told the Washington Examiner that the Boston case shows the continued danger of racial discrimination in admissions.
"Boston Public Schools’ use of a ZIP Code quota as a naked proxy for race violates the Constitution’s promise of equal protection," he said.
“Regardless of today’s disappointment, the government’s use of skin color or ethnicity to choose who can attend public schools is a critical constitutional question that must be settled,” Kieser added.
In a separate matter, the court declined to take up a challenge from a man who was charged under Hawaii's strict gun control laws, which require "special need" to get a license.
The case led to a bizarre and extraordinary rebuke of the Supreme Court by Hawaii's top court, which invoked the "spirit of Aloha" while rejecting the Supreme Court's precedent in the landmark case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The ruling led to a nationwide rollback of strict gun laws and spurred liberals to find ways to circumvent the court's decision.
Thomas and Alito criticized the Hawaii court's ruling as contradictory to Bruen, but they rejected the case Hawaii v. Wilson on technical grounds. However, they said they are open to hearing an "appropriate case" to vindicate the right to bear arms in the future.
The Supreme Court also declined to get involved in a dispute in a Wisconsin school district that allows students to "transition" without parental consent. A lower court found the parents lacked standing to bring the case, but Thomas, Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh said they would have heard the case.
While progressives argue the Supreme Court is a rubber stamp for the right, that's clearly not true. That does not mean the court has not granted some significant victories for conservatives, however.
In one of the first major cases of the new term, the Supreme Court seemed open to allowing states to restrict transgender surgeries on minors.
Liz Peek believes President Joe Biden will absolve his corrupt cronies with "preemptive pardons" before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in the hopes of staving off investigations, the Fox News contributor said in her opinion piece. Meanwhile, Peek thinks Trump's "retribution will be his success" as Democrats face backlash.
Biden has been issuing "blanket pardons" for many in his administration and family members. He is working under the assumption that Trump will be looking to use the Justice Department against his political adversaries "because that’s what they have done," Peek noted.
Trump has already said that he's not out for his pound of flesh. "I’m really looking to make our country successful," Trump told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press.
"But here is the truth: Trump supporters – or at least this Trump supporter – don’t want vengeance. We want accountability," Peek wrote.
Peek believes that the strategy Biden is employing will be the Democrats' undoing. "Top Democrats have reportedly encouraged the president to grant preemptive blanket pardons to a slew of Trump’s adversaries, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and former NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, supposedly to protect them from his wrath," Peek wrote.
"They suggest that the nominations of Kash Patel to head the FBI and Pam Bondi for attorney general endanger the former president’s political foes, and that Trump World is bent on vengeance. Democrat leaders want Biden to protect them with a wave of his pardon wand," she continued.
"Issuing preemptive pardons is an offensive idea, but also so outlandish that it must be a smokescreen," Peek said. She believes that "Biden hopes to bury pardons of his family members among many others, hoping...they will not notice Jim or Hallie Biden on the list."
Besides his son Hunter Biden, whom the president already pardoned, other family members "cited by the House Oversight Committee as pocketing money from Hunter’s activities" may also receive the same treatment. "The more immunities granted, the fewer investigations and the safer Joe Biden himself will be," Peek continued.
However, Democrats are under the misguided belief that "Trump and his appointees will use the Department of Justice to punish some of the perpetrators of the years-long attacks on him, because that’s what they have done." Instead, it's voters who will be looking to hold these people accountable.
Peek believes the worst people in the Biden orbit have escaped consequences primarily due to media malpractice. "In the past, Americans counted on an ambitious press to hold government officials to account for such misdeeds; today, they cannot," Peek wrote.
"Few in the legacy media pursued credible reports of Biden family corruption, even though the infamous laptop (authenticated and held by the FBI for more than a year before the 2020 election) provided plenty of damaging information," she continued. The laptop also tracked how Joe Biden benefitted from his son's shady dealings.
"When the president pardoned his son, he was actually pardoning himself," Peek added. Even the Justice Department has skewed in favor of Democrats as "more than 1,100 Trump supporters who protested the 2020 election on January 6 have been rounded up, and over 600 sentenced to prison" while "there have been few prosecutions for the riots that took place after the murder of George Floyd," Peek noted.
The tide is turning, however. "It is infuriating that the Left has been winning so many rounds; on November 5 they began what we hope will be a long losing streak. Trump is right: his retribution will be his success. I cannot wait," Peek concluded.
Peek is correct that the entirety of Joe Biden's strategy centers on keeping him, his family, and his cronies out of the law enforcement spotlight. Unfortunately, that will do nothing to stop the political and electoral reckoning against the left that has already begun.
President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed he will begin pardoning January 6th prisoners on his first day in office - a move that is certain to trigger a meltdown from critics in the Democratic party.
During a sit-down interview with NBC, Trump said he would not hesitate to help supporters of his who have spent years languishing in "disgusting" conditions.
"First day, I'm looking first day. These people have been there — how long is it? Three, four years," Trump said. "They’ve been in there for years. And they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open."
Over the course of his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to pardon January 6th participants whom he said were treated harshly by the system.
Of the more than 1,5000 people charged over the riot, over 900 have registered guilty pleas, many of them for non-violent offenses. Trump said that many of those who pled guilty had the deck stacked against them.
"Look. I know the system. The system's a very corrupt system. They say to a guy, 'You're going to go to jail for two years or for 30 years.' And these guys are looking, their whole lives have been destroyed," Trump said.
Trump said he will make "exceptions" for defendants accused of more serious wrongdoing, but he plans to move "very quickly" to free those "living in hell."
"I’m going to look at everything. We’ll look at individual cases," Trump told Welker. "But I’m going to be acting very quickly."
As precedent for his action, Trump pointed to the sweeping dismissal of cases against left-wing rioters in the summer of 2020, including anarchists who attacked a federal court building after the death of George Floyd.
"They took over the police station in Minneapolis. They burned it down," Trump said.
"And yet these people have been in jail, and I hear that jail is a hellhole," he said of his own supporters imprisoned in Washington D.C.
Trump also told Welker that members of the January 6th committee, like Liz Cheney, deserve prison but he would not direct his Justice Department to target anyone over politics.
"I think that they'll have to look at that. But I'm not going to. I'm going to focus on 'Drill, baby, drill,'" he said.
When Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden of federal crimes, Trump reacted by calling it a "miscarriage of justice" while asking if January 6th defendants would also go free. Biden's critics argue he gave Trump an excuse to now pursue his own controversial pardons.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a ruling that subjugates parental rights to school politics.
The ruling that had come out of the 7th U.S. District Court of Appeals in a Wisconsin fight claimed that parental rights were not affected when schools secretly encouraged children to be transgender, so the parents had no standing to bring the case.
Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas would have granted the petition, according to the court announcement, as it's an issue that is coming up more and more.
Alito explained, "This case presents a question of great and growing national importance: whether a public school district violates parents' 'fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of' their children…when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process."
Thomas joined in the statement that added, "We are told that more than 1,000 districts have adopted such policies."
It is the transgender ideology, which puts its faith in the science-defying concept that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, that has been promoted literally around the globe by the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris regime in Washington. Actually, being male or female is embedded in the human body down to the DNA level and does not change.
The situations involving schools, activist employees, teachers and administrators repeatedly getting caught encouraging children to pursue the transgender ideology and keeping those actions secret from parents.
The case came out of the Eau Claire Area School District in Wisconsin, where parents sued over a district policy that helps facilitate gender identity transitions while concealing the child's new identity from his or her parents.
The 7th Circuit had claimed in its opinion, which placed school's ideology agendas above the rights and responsibilities of parents, that parents did not have standing to challenge the policy because they had not been directly impacted by it.
The parents had said, "As any parent knows, parental authority includes the right (and the solemn responsibility) to say no to children's often short-sighted desires when necessary to protect them from themselves."
The promotions of transgenderism have become common in many schools, even though multiple studies show that children with gender dysphoria issues resolve to live their lives as their sex according to birth in the vast majority of cases if they are not subjected to ideological pressure.
Alito also noted, "[T]he challenged policy and associated equity training specifically encourage school personnel to keep parents in the dark about the 'identities' of their children, especially if the school believes that the parents would not support what the school thinks is appropriate. Thus, the parents' fear that the school district might make decisions for their children without their knowledge and consent is not 'speculative.' … They are merely taking the school district at its word."
The parents in the case had charged that the Eau Claire schools were violating the Constitution's provisions and protections for parental rights and religious freedom. Their argument was supported by 16 states, led by Republicans, who urged the court to review the facts.
Imposing transgenderism on children involves giving them chemicals to alter their body's natural development as they age, and sometimes body-mutilating surgeries.
The case brought by a group called Parents Protecting.
President Joe Biden shocked the nation with the announcement of a generous and sweeping pardon for his son, convicted criminal Hunter Biden.
But the latest pardon rumors are even worse, as it was reported by several media outlets, including NBC News, that Biden is now considering "preemptive" pardons for a number of President-elect Donald Trump's critics.
The outlet reported that the president and his administration are considering preemptive pardons because they fear "retribution" by Trump for certain political figures.
Some of those pardons could be issued for "Senator-elect Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)" according to the outlet.
The outlet noted that there are some "Never Trump" Republicans and Democrats who fully support the idea of preemptively pardoning some of Trump's top critics from both sides.
Liberals should be ashamed. Biden is reportedly considering issuing preemptive pardons that could include Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and Adam Schiff. Trump has never said one thing about retribution. The pardon list is telling, all of them are criminals. pic.twitter.com/Y2VsNjW49L
— Scott Adams (@scottadamsshow) December 5, 2024
Many have argued that preemptive pardons is essentially an admission of guilt for the people who would receive such a rare privelege.
While super rare, they have been issued in the past from presidents from both sides of the aisle.
NBC News noted:
Previous presidents have issued such pardons, including George H.W. Bush for former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal; Gerald Ford for former President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal; Jimmy Carter for Vietnam War draft dodgers; and Abraham Lincoln for ex-Confederate soldiers.
The outlet then went on to talk about some of the things Trump has said about the aforementioned people and others, fearing Trump could retaliate once he's in office.
Many across social media were furious with the idea of issuing preemptive pardons for certain Trump critics. Some said it should be illegal to issue such a pardon before the person has even been charged with a crime.
"The only time to pardon someone is after they have been convicted," one X user wrote.
Another X user wrote, "Presidential pardons should be limited to individuals charged and convicted of crimes PRIOR to the pardon. Congress needs to change the law to prevent pardons for crimes not yet adjudicated."
Only time will tell if Biden actually goes through with it, and what the ramifications will be if he does.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
There's no question that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, with their extremist ideology on the issue of abortion, the wanton destruction of unborn children, ran an administration that actually put a bull's-eye on the backs of those who pursue pro-life goals.
They used the FBI and the Department of Justice to do that work, with charges against and prosecutions of groups and individuals who opposed the abortion industry mandates that they wanted to impose.
Now those bureaucracies have been warned by a member of Congress to keep all their records of those legal campaigns against pro-lifers.
The Daily Wire reports it is Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who has dispatched a letter to the FBI and DOJ instructing officials to preserve all records of their prosecutions of peaceful pro-lifers.
He told the FBI's Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland there are "serious questions" lawmakers must evaluate regarding how the Biden-Harris administration turned to the "weaponization" of the FACE Act.
That law makes it a crime to block the entrance to a health business, including abortion operations.
Roy heads the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government and said, "Congress has a sacred duty to preserve the rights of the American people, including the First Amendment, against any overreach by the Executive Branch. As we examine how to best protect Americans' fundamental freedoms, the Subcommittees must first understand how the DOJ and FBI enforce the FACE Act."
That law is supposed to also be used to protect both churches and crisis pregnancy centers, but the Biden-Harris team used it almost exclusively to jail grandmothers and others who were defending the unborn.
Roy wrote, "Since January 2021, the Civil Rights Division has brought a total of 24 FACE Act cases against 55 defendants, with only two of these cases – consisting of five defendants – concerning attacks on pregnancy resource centers.
"You should construe this preservation notice as an instruction to take all reasonable steps to prevent the destruction or alteration, whether intentionally or negligently, of all documents, communications, and other information, including electronic information and metadata, that are or may be responsive to this congressional inquiry."
The sweeping pardon issued by President Joe Biden for his son, convicted criminal Hunter Biden, for an 11-year period, stunned the political and legal world, and many are speculating that there's much more behind the scenes than meets the eye.
According to the Daily Caller, Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson believes that Hunter Biden's bombshell pardon was only issued because he might have "blackmailed" his father into making it happen.
Hanson claimed during a recent podcast that he believes Hunter could have leveraged his father into issuing the pardon by threatening to expose his involvement in past crimes.
The Biden family influence-peddling operation has been under intense investigation for years, so it's not impossible that Hanson, and others, are onto something.
It's also much more likely given the fact that President Biden and the White House, for months, vowed and swore the president wouldn't use the power of the pardon to spare his son from legal consequences.
Hanson held nothing back in sharing his theory during his recent podcast.
"There is a sickness in Hunter Biden vis-a-vis his father. I mentioned that if one reads carefully the laptop communications, there’s an anger. He is not Beau Biden. He’s the bad seed, the prodigal son,” Hanson said.
Hanson suggested that Hunter Biden had to do the "dirty work" of the family.
He added "He feels that he cooked up the entire shakedown operation. He is the dirty bag man. He is Hunter. Remember he says to his cousin, ‘They always have me do stuff. Nobody ever, I’m the one making this family. If I was like dad, I’d charge everybody.’ So he had to do the dirty work."
"When he was up with the IRS and they were squeezing him because of this phony sweetheart deal they cooked up and the judge was mad. His lawyer said, ‘We might have to call in Joe Biden, now president.’ Think of that,” Hanson added.
“They’re going to call the president of the United States to testify on behalf of Hunter Biden. He would say something that would probably be preposterously false."
Hanson isn't the only one who believes that's a possibility.
Others have suggested that President Biden issued the pardon to eventually help cover up his own involvement in certain past crimes.
Some legal experts believe Hunter Biden's pardon could mean that he no longer has the ability to use the Fifth Amendment in future testimonies against cases involving his family members.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
For years, as his son Hunter engaged in a series of wild escapades, bought a gun after lying on a government form, and refused to pay taxes on his income, Joe Biden pledged to allow the justice system, judges and juries, to decide what penalty Hunter would pay.
Then he flip-flopped, claiming against the evidence that Hunter was "singled out" for prosecution, and handed him a get-out-of-jail free card for any and all crimes for a decade.
Americans aren't pleased.
Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard wrote about the results of a poll by Napolitan News Service.
A large majority of respondents, 62%, said they objected to the pardon, including 41% who said they objected "strongly."
Only 30% agreed with the special handout.
And the survey, the report said, "may have sparked the beginning of Democratic anger at the failed presidency."
Bedard explained, "Biden had repeatedly promised not to pardon his son, who has faced gun and tax charges. But he flip-flopped this week and made the pardon good for an 11-year span."
The report noted Joe Biden "said that he believed Hunter was unfairly targeted by prosecutors, a claim that echoed what President-elect Donald Trump has said about the weak cases he faced."
Judges in the cases involving Hunter Biden immediately responded, objecting to Joe Biden's negative characterizations of them, and the judicial system. One submitted a court document that said Joe Biden was just wrong.
The poll said 54% disagreed with the president's excuse, in contrast to the responses when asked about Trump, when 46% did believe that the Justice Department unfairly targeted him.
"Pollster Scott Rasmussen told Secrets that his poll also suggested that Democrats are reevaluating Biden, who currently sits at his lowest approval rating ever. The New York Times on Thursday, for example, slammed the pardon, calling it 'a significant misstep that could leave lasting damage,'" Bedard explained.
Rasmussen's conclusion? "In this hyper-partisan world, it's stunning that only 52% of Democrats support the president's pardon. This is just the beginning of partisan re-evaluation. I suspect the anger at Biden among Democrats is ready to bubble over. Over time, the party will come to believe that the only reason they lost in 2024 is because Biden selfishly tried to run for re-election."
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Jimmy Carter's presidency featured sky high inflation for Americas, including mortgages at 15% and 16%, and the disastrous situation in which Iranian Islamists took Americans at the nation's embassy there and held them hostage for months.
Richard Nixon, of course, left the office following revelations about what he did, and didn't do, during his election campaign and that infamous invasion by "burglars" of a Democrat office at the Watergate office complex.
But both of them are more highly esteemed by the American public than Joe Biden, who will leave office in just a few weeks after one term of flamboyant advocacy for abortion and transgenderism, the spending of trillions of dollars on "climate change" ideology, and a publicly noticeable decline in mental abilities.
The results are from an exclusive poll at the Daily Mail.
The report explains voters have branded Biden "the worst president in almost 50 years."
Carter, the report noted, was "voted out after a single term after presiding over double-digit inflation and a botched effort to rescue American hostages in Iran." And Biden is worse than Nixon, "who (was) forced to resign rather than face impeachment over the devastating Watergate scandal."
The poll had 1,006 registered voters rank the last nine presidents in order.
Biden was the bottom.
"Some 44 percent placed him as one of the worst two, while only 14 percent placed him in the top two, giving him a net score of 30 points underwater," the report said.
Nixon was negative 25, Donald Trump a negative 15, George H.W. Bush a negative one, Carter at zero, George W. Bush plus one, Bill Clinton plus 17, Barack Obama plus 21 and Ronald Reagan plus 30.
James Johnson, cofounder of J.L. Partners which conducted the poll, told the publication was it was "diabolical" result for Biden.
And he said Biden's numbers were worse than he expected.
"Voters have obviously looked at his age, general conduct in office, his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the situation at the southern border, and decided that, in their view, it qualifies him to be the worst president in modern history.
"And that's the position in which he leaves office. From the man who beat Trump to the man who let him back in, and who voters feel has been fundamentally a bad president," he said.
Biden, who will leave office at age 82, abandoned his bid for another term shortly after a disastrous presidential race debate with Trump last summer. He was trailing badly at the time.
Trump then defeated Democrats stand-in Kamala Harris in the election.
Biden's most recent approval rating was 37%.
These are some of the reasons for the rating:
Manslaughter charges have been dropped against Marine vet Daniel Penny, 25, after a Manhattan jury could not agree despite days of deliberation, Breitbart reported. Penny could still face charges for criminally negligent homicide.
In May 2023, Penny was riding a subway when 30-year-old homeless man Jordan Neely came into the car and began threatening passengers. In an effort to subdue Neely, Penny restrained him in a chokehold.
Neely was still alive when police arrived but later died, which triggered the charges. Some believe the prosecution is racially motivated because Penny is white and Neely is black.
The jury in the trial deliberated for days but could not come to agreement about the manslaughter charges even after the judge sent them back with instructions to come up with a unanimous guilty or not guilty verdict. Deliberations will continue next week on the lesser charges.
Judge Maxwell Wiley was within his rights to ask the jurors to devise an "Allen charge." With the jury unable to agree on manslaughter, Penny's defense team believes the judge should have declared a mistrial.
Instead, prosecutors asked Wiley to have the jury consider criminally negligent homicide. The difference lies in the sentencing requirements and the nature of the conduct in question.
For a manslaughter charge, a defendant would face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. The court would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the "defendant recklessly caused another person’s death," the news outlet noted.
By contrast, criminally negligent homicide carries a lesser sentence with a minimum of probation and a maximum of four years in behind bars. The criteria for such a charge would be to prove that the defendant exhibited "blameworthy conduct" without considering a risk.
Juries are permitted by law to find a defendant guilty of a lesser charge, but Wiley's decision to throw out manslaughter may complicate the case. The defense argues that only a "not guilty" charge on a higher crime would allow for lesser crimes to be considered.
Although it's a partial victory for the manslaughter charge to be thrown out, many believe the fact that Penny is being prosecuted at all is a blight on the justice system. Former NYPD inspector Paul Mauro told Fox News that bringing this case in the first place was the problem.
"A deadlocked jury on the top charge is not a victory for the defendant in a case that should never have been brought to begin with. Daniel Penny is a young man spending thousands on attorneys, he faces a civil case, and a district attorney’s office that has chosen ideology over law enforcement may well retry him if we get a mistrial," Mauro pointed out.
"His liberty remains at risk. This is not justice," he added. The facts of the case point to Penny's actions as heroic. Neely, who has a criminal record and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, told riders on the subway that somebody would "die today" and that he didn't fear prison.
The passengers believed they were in danger, and Penny stepped forward to protect them that day. It was later revealed that Neely had synthetic marijuana in his system, which could account for his erratic behavior.
Penny should never have seen the inside of a courtroom over this, let alone face murder charges. If there is anything less than a full acquittal for Penny, it means the justice system in New York is not doing its job.