'I wasn't prepared to address the Chinese Communist Party House today'

'The US housing market is stuck'

Over the past few years, the federal government, universities and other institutions across the country have ended or rolled back programs and policies that prioritize certain races following a series of lawsuits. Fueled by the landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, in which the Supreme Court ruled race-based college admissions […]

'I don't know what you're talking about'

Saved By The Summer starts here! We’re exploring four Saved By The Bell related series, starting with Good Morning, Miss Bliss starring Haley Mills and the core cast of Bayside regulars who would go on CONTINUE READING... The post Remember That Show? Ep. 16: Good Morning, Miss Bliss appeared first on The Retro Network.

In an outcome that shocked court watchers everywhere, the Supreme Court today dismissed a pair of consolidated cases challenging the Biden administration over whether the government could require all federally funded hospital emergency rooms to perform abortions, regardless of any state law to the contrary. But by punting on the case with a “dismissed as improvidently granted” order, the court left that question—at least for now—unanswered.   In Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, the justices were asked if the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, requiring abortions in emergency rooms was legal. Congress passed EMTALA in 1986 to address the problem of hospitals refusing to treat indigent patients in emergency rooms. The law requires hospital emergency departments that accept Medicaid funds either to provide available treatment required to “stabilize” a patient’s emergency medical condition or to transfer that patient to another medical facility. Notably, it also requires hospitals to provide stabilizing care to pregnant patients with emergency medical conditions that could harm the health of the mother or her unborn child.  Idaho’s Defense of Life Act, which was passed in 2022, prohibits abortions except when a physician determines “in his good faith medical judgment … that the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” The justices were tasked with determining whether Idaho’s law conflicted with EMTALA. The Constitution’s supremacy clause requires that in the event of a clear conflict between federal law and a state law, the state law is preempted by the federal law. The Biden administration had argued EMTALA conflicted with the Idaho law because EMTALA allowed doctors to perform emergency abortions to address risks to a woman’s health (versus addressing something that could kill her), something the Idaho law doesn’t allow. Hence, the government argued that EMTALA preempted Idaho’s pro-life law. Idaho argued that its law and the federal law are in sync because EMTALA doesn’t mandate a particular treatment for particular medical conditions. The federal law leaves that to doctors, who must exercise their best medical judgment in the context of laws and regulations of the states in which they practice—something already accounted for in the Idaho law. But after extensive briefing and oral argument—and over the objections of four of the justices— the court issued a per curiam (that is, unsigned) one-sentence order dismissing the case. The order was “inadvertently and briefly uploaded … to the Court’s website” a day before its formal issuance, according to Patricia McCabe, the Supreme Court’s public information officer. The breach of protocol occurred on Wednesday, and the formal opinion was issued the next day. The Supreme Court occasionally issues a “dismissed as improvidently granted” order for a variety of reasons, whether procedural (such as when a litigant waives one or more of the key issues for which review was granted) or substantive (such as when the court identifies a policy better left to the political branches, rather than the courts, to decide). And while the order in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States was issued without explanation, the justices’ separate concurring and dissenting opinions provide some insight into their thinking in issuing it. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, stating that the “shape of these cases has substantially shifted” since the court first decided to hear them. She noted that in their briefings and during oral argument, the two sides appeared to have made significant concessions. The government, she stated, appeared to concede that an abortion would not be an appropriate stabilizing treatment for mental health conditions and that EMTALA would not override conscience protections for hospitals and health care providers who refuse to provide abortions based on their sincerely held religious beliefs. That concession, she wrote, indicated that Idaho’s Defense of Life Act “remains almost entirely intact” and EMTALA would rarely override the state’s law. And, she noted, the state seemed to concede that physicians could administer emergency abortions to stabilize expectant mothers experiencing certain serious medical conditions even if there was no imminent threat to the woman’s life.  Barrett also stated that issuing the order was appropriate here because of an argument the state had raised for the first time at the Supreme Court: that EMTALA, a statute enacted pursuant to Congress’ spending power that operates solely against private parties, could not preempt state law since the state had never consented to the government’s conditional payment scheme. So, could Congress, in reliance on its authority under the spending clause, obligate recipients of federal funds to violate state criminal law? That was a “difficult and consequential argument.” “The District Court did not address this issue below—nor did the Ninth Circuit, which we bypassed. We should not jump ahead of the lower courts, particularly on an issue of such importance,” Barrett wrote. It is unclear how the chief justice and Barrett and Kavanaugh would rule if the issue makes its way back to the high court.  Justice Elena Kagan wrote a separate concurring opinion that was joined in full by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and in part by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. In the portion of the opinion that Jackson did not join, Kagan argued that the dismissal was appropriate, that the court’s order “follows” from the “premise” that EMTALA preempts Idaho’s law when they conflict, and that Idaho’s arguments about EMTALA did not justify its request for emergency relief. Jackson did, however, join the portion of Kagan’s opinion in which she took direct aim at Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent, writing that regardless of EMTALA’s language concerning the protection of a woman’s “unborn child,” nothing “alters EMTALA’s command when a pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health.” Jackson wrote a separate opinion largely to disagree with dismissal of the case. She would have granted relief in favor of the United States because “Idaho law prohibits what federal law requires … under the Supremacy Clause, Idaho’s law is pre-empted.” It is quite clear that Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson would rule in favor of the Biden administration if the case returns to the Supreme Court. In a scorching dissent, Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, disagreed with the order and said he would rule in Idaho’s favor now. He argued that the preemption theory advanced by the United States was “plainly unsound,” and that “far from requiring hospitals to perform abortions, EMTALA’s text unambiguously demands that Medicare-funded hospitals protect the health of both a pregnant woman and her ‘unborn child.’” Even if EMTALA’s text was ambiguous, Alito wrote, Idaho would still prevail as “EMTALA was enacted under the [Constitution’s] Spending Clause, and … conditions attached to the receipt of federal funds must be unambiguous.” He called the court’s “about-face” in the case “baffling” and accused his colleagues of having “simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.” In reaching the Supreme Court, the state of Idaho had leapfrogged over the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to seek immediate relief. After the Supreme Court’s dismissal, the case now returns to that appellate court for continued litigation. In the end, the consolidated cases of Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States may live to see another day at the high court. After today, two things remain certain: States will always continue to protect the unborn, and the Biden administration will always work to protect its pet agenda items—like abortion—no matter how ridiculous its underlying arguments and application of the law appear to be. The post Supreme Court Dismisses Abortion Case Without Answering Key Question appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Constitution separates power, the administrative state fuses it. The Constitution gives Congress the power to make law, the president the power to enforce law, and the courts the power to apply law to specific cases. The administrative state takes all three for itself. Today, however, the Supreme Court delivered an important blow against that administrative fusion of powers by standing up for the right to have your case heard by a jury. It held that if the Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutes you for fraud, you’re entitled to have your case heard by a jury of your peers.  An administrative agency like the SEC can make a law, charge you for violating it, and prosecute you before its own in-house tribunals—where the judges whose salaries it pays rule in its favor 90% of the time. That’s what happened to George Jarkesy, who was prosecuted by the SEC in one of its in-house tribunals for allegedly committing securities fraud. Jarkesy filed suit in federal court to defend his Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial, and 10 years later, the Supreme Court heard his case. The Seventh Amendment guarantees a jury trial right in all “suits at common law.” One such suit is fraud, and Jarkesy argued that because securities fraud is a type of fraud, he should get a jury. The government responded that the Seventh Amendment does not apply when the government enforces a “public right,” that is, a right created by Congress through law and entrusted to the administrative state for protection. Jarkesy replied that the text of the Seventh Amendment makes no such distinctions, and what’s more, the results of the government’s argument would be absurd. Under the government’s theory, victims of reckless drivers could be forced into administrative law courts if Congress decided that the injured motorist’s recovery of damages mattered less than the public’s interest in highway safety. Same thing for medical malpractice suits—the government has an interest in safe medicine, so it can drag defendants to a Washington back office where a bureaucrat will inevitably side with the agency that pays his wages.   Fortunately, the Supreme Court put the kibosh on those scenarios. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court agreed with Jarkesy. The jury is an indispensable bulwark of liberty. As is making sure that your prosecutor isn’t the one paying the judge. The question before the court was what, exactly, is included in “suits at common law.” We know some traditional common-law suits, like fraud, nuisance, and monopolization, for example. But we now live under millions of bureaucratic rules and regulations. Do they count, or does the government get to try you without a jury every time it invents a new one? The court held that whether the government’s case counts as a “suit at common law” depends on whether it resembles any of the traditional suits we know and, more importantly, whether the remedy the government wants is the sort of remedy that courts of law typically give. In Jarkesy’s case, for example, securities fraud is a subspecies of fraud, so the first factor is satisfied. And the government wanted money damages, which is a classic legal remedy, so the second factor is satisfied, too. That’s not quite the end of the analysis, however, because over the years, the court has invented an exception to the Seventh Amendment for “public rights.” Under that exception, if the government’s suit is trying to vindicate a right that the government invented, then no jury is required. The public rights exception has “no textual basis in the Constitution,” to quote the court, but it is long established in the court’s cases. The question is whether securities fraud involves a public right. The government, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson said in a dissenting opinion that a case involves a public right any time the “Government has acted in its sovereign capacity to enforce a new statutory obligation.” Roberts and the five remaining justices balked at that expansive rule. Not only is it unsupported by the court’s old public-rights cases, worse, it could “swallow” the Seventh Amendment whole. The majority concluded that public rights include only specific issues identified in those old cases, like collecting revenue, immigration law, and granting public benefits. But fraud, of any sort, is plainly far afield of those, and therefore, you get a jury in fraud cases. Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote a concurring opinion to recount the historical origins of American juries and how important they are to protecting liberty. They also reminded Americans that we should not undermine important safeguards any time someone unpopular—and Jarkesy may very well have committed securities fraud—finds himself under the government’s thumb. After all, “while incursions on old rights may begin in cases against the unpopular, they rarely end there,” they wrote. The dissenters took a broad interpretation of the court’s prior public-rights cases and then attacked the majority for disagreeing with their interpretation, saying that it “significantly undermines” the rule of law and “prescribes artificial constraints on what modern-day adaptable governance must look like.” But, as Gorsuch points out, that charge is hypocritical. First, the dissenters’ view almost erases the Seventh Amendment in federal cases, which is one of the most important rule-of-law safeguards we have. Second, the dissenters’ broad interpretation is, itself, out-of-step with the old cases. And third, the public-rights exception has no constitutional foundation. How bold to accuse someone of undermining the rule of law while ignoring the law yourself. Although the ruling forces the SEC to respect a core constitutional right, the decision hardly prevents the SEC from fulfilling its mission. Until the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act in 2010, the SEC always brought its cases in courts rather than in-house tribunals, and it can still do so now. All that has changed is that the people it targets once again benefit from the assurance that the judge isn’t being paid by the prosecutor. It’s only a basic bulwark of liberty, but it’s often good to go back to the basics. The post Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to the Administrative State appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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About that Hit Piece Letter Against Trump Signed by '16 Nobel Prize-Winning Economists'

It was an ordinary day for Indy, the cat, who was enjoying a serene nap on the living room floor. Little did Indy know, a surprising turn of events was about to make him an internet sensation. This unexpected incident not only startled the laid-back feline but also captivated the attention of nearly 400,000 viewers... The post Robot vacuum pushes startled cat underneath the couch appeared first on Animal Channel.