SCOTUS issued a spate of major rulings at the end of its term. Some rulings favor Americans, while some preserve key aspects of progressive power. In two key rulings, the Supreme Court upheld two key progressive policies, one allows mass-mailer ballot counting after election day and the other preserves “Birthright citizenship.”
SCOTUS also ruled the President can fire executive employees without cause and police must get a warrant to conduct “geofence” searches, or wide searches of cell phone user data within a crime scene area.
Alito Rips Supreme Court Majority in Ruling on Data Privacy– www.dailysignal.com
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The Supreme Court narrowed the conditions for law enforcement to obtain a warrant to access someone’s Google Location History data, ruling that it constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
In a case involving Big Tech and a bank robbery, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling Monday that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy with their cellphones. The case involved law enforcement’s access to geolocation data used to convict an alleged bank robber—who made a conditional guilty plea. The justices didn’t divide along traditional ideological lines.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority, joined by the high court’s two other Democrat appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as Republican appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.
SCOTUS Ruling Allows Mail-In Ballots to Be Counted after Election Day– www.westernjournal.com
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A closely-divided U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a critical decision on election integrity, jeopardizing the security of American elections and the sovereignty of the nation. In an opinion released Monday morning in Watson v. Republican National Committee (RNC), the court’s narrow majority ruled that mail-in ballots postmarked by election day may still be counted even if received after election day.
“Three federal statutes set the day for the election of Representatives, Senators, and the President,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. At issue is a Mississippi state law allowing ballots received by mail and postmarked by election day to be counted for up to five days after election day. The RNC argued that federal statutes preempt Mississippi’s law and require ballots to be received by election day in order to be counted. Barrett and the majority concluded that the federal statutes “do not” preempt Mississippi’s law.
Roberts’ Argument For Birthplace Citizenship Is Self-Defeating– thefederalist.com
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During oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the birthplace citizenship case handed down from the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Solicitor General John Sauer observed that “we’re in a new world now … where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”
Four justices would go on to agree with this originalist argument, that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not understand their words to confer citizenship on the offspring of illegal aliens and birth tourists. But Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed Sauer’s point, retorting that while it may be “a new world, it’s the same Constitution.” He clearly thought it was a clever turn of phrase, an impression no doubt bolstered by the fawning media coverage of his remark. Released on Tuesday, his majority opinion takes the same approach to a foundational constitutional question as his cheap potshot at Sauer: he shows little interest in compelling originalist arguments, instead issuing shallow and misapplied but noble-sounding platitudes.
Joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Roberts declared that, if a pregnant foreigner travels to the United States — legally or illegally, for 20 years or 20 minutes — to give birth, the 14th Amendment demands that act be rewarded by granting the child the full privileges of American citizenship. At the center of his argument is an aspirational concept of “allegiance” he grounds in the practices of feudal Europe. Because British subjects “born within the dominions and under the protection of a particular sovereign” owed a “tie or duty” to that sovereign, Roberts reasons, the children of foreigners born on American soil must be bound by the same allegiance and thus demanded citizenship.
Ironically, Roberts’ decision to reward illegal immigration and birth tourism is the surest way to destroy the bonds of allegiance he claims inform his opinion. He uses the term “allegiance” 51 times, emphasizing the mutual duties that British sovereigns and subjects owed each other. But such an argument is irreconcilable with the practice he defends: allowing people with no practice or intention of “allegiance” to the United States to secure citizenship for their children.
