A big Supreme Court decision, and crazy things in blue cities

July 1, 2025

The United States Supreme Court has at long last ruled on an important issue. After months of federal district court judges issuing rulings opposing and halting actions by President Donald Trump, the Court ruled 6-3 that Trump's efforts to end "birthright" citizenship are legal and constitutional.

Not only was it found that the decision on birthright citizenship was valid, it also tells these judges to stop issuing these universal injunctions.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in the majority opinion, stated: "Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the Government's applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue."

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” she continued. “The Court today puts an end to the ‘increasingly common’ practice of federal courts issuing universal injunctions.”

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson commented in a dissenting opinion: “Make no mistake: Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,” she wrote. “This perverse burden shifting cannot coexist with the rule of law.”

However, Barrett promptly and properly corrected Jackson’s flawed reasoning. "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."

She further clarified that when these judges issue injunctions to block Trump’s actions, they cannot apply the injunction to more than those parties involved in the case, classifying these nationwide injunctions as judicial overreach.

There are 677 authorized judgeships for these federal courts, with each of those judges having authority over a tiny sliver of the United States of America’s judicial system.  

One has to wonder exactly what these judges, supposedly trained in the law and our Constitution, were thinking when issuing these injunctions. Did they forget their extensive training in the law? Or, did they stuff their judicial integrity under the courtroom bench, and replace legal elements with political preferences?

Does this un-judicial behavior warrant some disciplinary action for those guilty judges.

“GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court! Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the babies of slaves … not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process,” Trump commented. “Congratulations to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Solicitor General John Sauer, and the entire DOJ.”

Elsewhere, in San Francisco and New York City, we find the “progressives” hard at it.

Recently, the California Senate reportedly passed a law making it illegal for store employees to confront shoplifters.

Old Navy, which is headquartered in San Francisco, announced that it will close its flagship store there. When asked why, an Old Navy store manager said that his store is hit by shoplifters at least 12 or 14 times a day.

Other name brands have also left the city, including Walgreens, T-Mobile, Whole Foods, Amazon Go, and Nordstroms.

Other downtown stores are merely waiting for their leases to run out, and then they will also leave.

The City of San Francisco just released a $6 million tourism campaign, and the next day the two largest hotels in the city shut down, blaming street conditions, and apparently not believing the tourism campaign would make a difference.

State Farm Insurance has announced that it will no longer provide business and property insurance in California, following Allstate, which left six months ago, due to policies that encourage lawbreaking.

These foolish leftist policies are producing exactly the results that their critics predicted.

And in New York City, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani, is the Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the first Muslim nominee, and a supporter of radical policies.

Predictably, he has an extremely radical plan for New York, should he win the election. 

"This is a city where one in four of its people are living in poverty, a city where 500,000 kids go to sleep hungry every night," he said recently. "And ultimately, it's a city that is in danger of losing that which it makes it so special."

He has proposed the following radical ideas to cure New York’s problems: Free bus service citywide, rent freezes and stricter accountability for negligent landlords, a chain of city-owned grocery stores, and universal childcare for children aged six weeks to five years.

As with so much of the liberal/socialist/progressive mantra, these things sound pretty good. But they don’t work as imagined. Ideas like defunding police, not enforcing some laws, rental price freezes, having the City own and control the grocery stores, and some of his former “solutions” are a recipe for disaster.

Just ask the businesses and residents in San Francisco.

Has politics infected the actions of our judicial system?

May 27, 2025

Hardly anyone disagrees with the statement that America has some serious problems. One of the most serious of those problems is what is happening in our judicial system. Mis-interpretation of our Constitution and our laws is not new, but is a problem.

A prominent interpretation issue has to do with birthright citizenship. In January, shortly after being sworn into office, President Donald Trump signed several executive orders. One of them sought to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. 

The liberal left, which supports illegal immigration, immediately reacted. They think that according to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, if an illegal alien woman with child sneaks across the border on a Thursday and gives birth to that child on Friday, that child is automatically a citizen of the United States of America. 

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Upon first reading, and without thoughtful analysis, this would tend to suggest that anyone born in the U.S. is immediately a citizen, no questions asked. But with thoughtful analysis, and/or an understanding of why the 14th Amendment was ultimately passed by Congress, that interpretation falls on its face.

The liberal’s interpretation ignores both the actual language, and the actual purpose of the Amendment. Properly interpreting the Constitution’s language, and the language of laws passed by Congress, is not just relevant, but essential. And, applying the factors that were responsible for that piece of the Constitution, one of its Amendments, or a particular law — the original intent — is critical. 

Just because many years or decades have passed, and thinking may have changed since the enactment of the item in question does not mean that those factors should be or can be ignored.

A useful analysis of this comes from the Heritage Foundation, via Amy Swearer, Senior Legal Fellow, Meese Center, and Hans von Spakovsky, Election Law Reform Initiative Manager and Senior Legal Fellow.

“For the first century following the 14th Amendment’s ratification, few legal scholars would have batted an eye at a directive like Trump’s. If anything, they’d have been more confused as to why the federal government started issuing passports to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, tourists, and ‘temporary sojourners’ in the first place.  

“Contrary to popular belief, the 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all people born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of ‘universal’ birthright citizenship. 

“This was intended to constitutionalize the protections of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that ‘all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power’ would be considered citizens.   

“That’s because the sponsors of the 14th Amendment made it clear that ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the U.S. means owing your political allegiance to the U.S., and not to another country. Children born to aliens are citizens of their parents’ native land, and thus owe their allegiance to, and are subject to the jurisdiction of, that native land.”

Another example of problematic judicial action is provided by an article in The Western Journal. This challenges that the idea that a federal district judge in one of the hundreds of districts can routinely issue a ruling that affects the entire country, including the actions of its president and the co-equal administrative branch.

“Trump U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued when being questioned by [Supreme Court] Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday that the phenomenon of district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions is relatively new in the nation’s history, becoming prominent in the last four or five administrations.

“Further, they have been meted out in unprecedented numbers against Trump, with 40 in the last four months, he said.

“Sauer directed Kavanaugh to the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a reference point. ‘There were very, very passionate challenges to nationwide policies during the Roosevelt administration, and they were not addressed by issuing universal injunctions,’ the solicitor general highlighted.

“Sauer also addressed the Supreme Court’s past rulings on whether lower courts can issue nationwide injunctions.

“So, when the [Supreme Court] has considered and addressed this, it has consistently said, ‘You have to limit the remedy to the plaintiffs appearing in court,’’ Sauer argued.

“Then [Justice Clarence] Thomas made the most important observation of the day by asking, ‘So, we survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions?’”

“That’s exactly correct. And in fact, those were very limited, very rare, even in the 1960s,” Sauer responded. “It really exploded in 2007.”

So, we are now experiencing a pandemic of improper judicial rulings, it seems. Are these the result of persons appointed to positions of federal judgeships who really do not understand the law and the necessity of judicial neutrality and boundaries? Or, are they more concerned with political goals than with being judicially neutral referees in these cases?