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Tag: us federal court system

  • Rival rulings on medication abortion hypercharge the post-Roe legal war | CNN Politics

    Rival rulings on medication abortion hypercharge the post-Roe legal war | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A pair of conflicting federal court rulings on Friday created arguably the most contentious and chaotic legal flashpoint over abortion access since the Supreme Court’s ruling last summer that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the right to an abortion nationwide.

    Within less than an hour, two major rulings came down in separate, closely watched cases concerning medication abortion – in lawsuits that are completely at odds with each other.

    In one case, filed by anti-abortion activists in Texas, a judge said the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone – one of the drugs used to terminate a pregnancy – should be halted. But the court paused its ruling for a week so that it can be appealed, and that appeal is already under way.

    In the second case, where Democratic-led states had sued in Washington to expand access to abortion pills, a judge ordered the federal government to keep the drug available in the 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, that brought the lawsuit.

    On their face, both cases deal with the administrative law that controls how the US Food and Drug Administration goes about regulating mifepristone. The disputes did not rely directly on the question of whether there is a right to an abortion – the question that was at the center of the Supreme Court’s ruling last June. But tucked in the Texas ruling, by US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, was the idea that embryos could have individual rights that courts can consider in their rulings.

    Both cases emerge from a political environment that was unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal and a willingness to push the legal envelope that the Supreme Court ruling created. The abortion issue is now on a path back to the Supreme Court, as higher courts are asked to sort out the contradictory commands of Friday night’s decisions.

    Because the Texas judge has paused his ruling, it has no immediate impact on the availability of medication abortion drugs. But the next several days stand to be a dramatic and combustible legal fight over the order – a fight ratcheted up by the rival ruling in Washington.

    Besides pausing his ruling for one week, Kacsmaryk – an appointee of former President Donald Trump who sits in Amarillo, Texas – seemed to hold nothing back as he ripped apart the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and embraced wholeheartedly the challengers’ arguments the drug’s risks weren’t adequately considered.

    Kacsmaryk, whose anti-abortion advocacy before joining the federal bench was documented by a recent Washington Post profile, showed a striking hostility to medication abortion, which is the method used in a majority of the abortions in the United States.

    Leading medical organizations have already condemned his opinion and pushed back at the judge’s analysis of the safety of medication abortion.

    The judge said that the FDA failed to consider “the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion,” in what was a repeated invocation of “chemical abortion,” the term preferred by abortion opponents. Kacsmaryk suggested that the FDA’s data was downplaying the frequency with which the drug being mistakenly administered to someone who had an ectopic pregnancy, i.e. a pregnancy outside the cavity of the uterus. He repeated the challengers’ accusations that the FDA’s approval process had been the subject of improper political pressure.

    He said the FDA’s refusal to impose certain restrictions on the drug’s use “resulted in many deaths and many more severe or life-threatening adverse reactions.”

    “Whatever the numbers are, they likely would be considerably lower had FDA not acquiesced to the pressure to increase access to chemical abortion at the expense of women’s safety,” he said.

    Jack Resneck Jr., the president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement that Kacsmaryk’s ruling “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.”

    “The court’s disregard for well-established scientific facts in favor of speculative allegations and ideological assertions will cause harm to our patients and undermines the health of the nation,” the AMA president said.

    Kacsmaryk’s opinion paid no heed to the argument made by the FDA’s defenders that cutting off access to medication abortion would put the health of pregnant people at risk and that it would force abortion seekers to terminate their pregnancies through a surgical procedure instead.

    Instead, the judge wrote that a ruling in the challengers’ favor would ensure “that women and girls are protected from unnecessary harm and that Defendants do not disregard federal law.”

    As he explained why the preliminary injunction – which was being handed down before the case could proceed to a trial – was justified, he said that embryos had their own rights that could be part of the analysis. That assertion goes farther than what the Supreme Court said in its June ruling, known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

    “Parenthetically, said ‘individual justice’ and ‘irreparable injury’ analysis also arguably applies to the unborn humans extinguished by mifepristone — especially in the post-Dobbs era,” Kacsmaryk said Friday.

    Whereas Kacsmaryk had been asked by the challengers in Texas to block medication abortion, US District Judge Thomas Owen Rice, who sits in Spokane, Washington, was considering whether abortion pills should be easier to obtain.

    Rice, an Obama appointee, granted the Democratic attorneys general who brought the lawsuit a partial win.

    They had asked Rice to remove certain restrictions – known as REMS or Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy – the FDA has imposed on mifepristone, with the blue states arguing the drug was safe and effective enough to make those restrictions unnecessary.

    While Rice is rejecting that bid for now, he granted a request the states also made that the FDA be ordered to keep the drugs on the market. But Rice’s ruling only applies in the 17 plaintiff states and the District of Columbia.

    His decision maintains the status quo for the availability of abortion pills in those places and he specifically is blocking the agency from “altering the status quo and rights as it relates to the availability of Mifepristone under the current operative January 2023 Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy.”

    Rice’s opinion was a striking split screen to Kacmsaryk’s. While the Texas judge said the FDA did not adequately take into account the drug risks, Rice showed sympathy to the arguments that the rules for mifepristone’s use were too strict and that the agency should be taking a more lenient approach to how the abortion pill is regulated.

    Ultimately, he said he would not grant the Democratic states’ request that he remove some of the drug restrictions at this preliminary stage in the proceedings, because that would go well beyond maintaining the status quo while the case advances. He noted that if he had granted that request, it would also undo a new FDA rule that allows pharmacies to dispense abortion pills. That would reduce its availability and would run “directly counter to Plaintiffs’ request.”

    If Kacsmaryk’s ruling halting mifepristone’s approval is allowed to go into effect, it will run headlong into Rice’s order that mifepristone remain available in several states. Kacsmaryk’s ruling is a nationwide injunction.

    The Justice Department and Danco, a mifepristone manufacturer that intervened in the case to defend the approval, both filed notices of appeal. Both Attorney General Merrick Garland and Danco said in statements that in addition to the appeals, they will seek “stays” of the ruling, meaning emergency requests that the decision is frozen while the appeal moves forward.

    They’re appealing to the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is sometimes said to be the country’s most conservative appeals court. Yet some legal scholars were skeptical that the 5th Circuit, as conservative as it is, would let Kacmsaryk’s order take effect.

    Washington, where the blue states’ lawsuit was filed, is covered under the 9th Circuit, a liberal appellate court. But it’s unclear if the ruling from Rice will be appealed. Garland said the Justice Department was still reviewing the decision out of Washington. A so-called circuit split would increase the odds that the Supreme Court would intervene. But given how the practical impact of the two district court rulings contradict each other, the Supreme Court may have no choice but to get involved.

    The lawyer for the challengers in the Texas case, anti-abortion medication associations and doctors, said Friday evening that he had not reviewed the Washington decision, so he could not weigh in on how it impacted Kacsmaryk’s order that the drug’s approval be halted.

    “I’m not sure whether there’s a direct conflict yet and with the Washington state decision just because I haven’t read it yet, but there may not be a direct conflict,” Erik Baptist, who is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, said. “But if there is a direct conflict then there may be – it may be inevitably going to the Supreme Court, but I’m not convinced that it’s necessary at this point to make that conclusion.”

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  • Justice Clarence Thomas says trips with billionaire didn’t need to be disclosed at the time | CNN Politics

    Justice Clarence Thomas says trips with billionaire didn’t need to be disclosed at the time | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Justice Clarence Thomas said Friday that he did not disclose luxury travel paid for by a Republican donor because he was advised at the time that he did not have to report it.

    In a rare statement sent via the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas said that the trips he and his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, took with the donor Harlan Crow and his wife – whom Thomas describes as among his family’s “dearest friends” – were the “sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends” that he was advised did not require disclosure.

    Thomas’ travel with the Crows, which included trips on the donor’s yacht and private jet, was the subject of a bombshell ProPublica report published Thursday. Congressional Democrats have called for an investigation into the matter and for a stronger ethics code for the justices, and some federal judges are also speaking out.

    The justice notes that the guidelines for reporting personal hospitality have been recently changed.

    “And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” Thomas said.

    The ProPublica report describes Thomas accepting travel hospitality from Crow that included lavish trips to Indonesia, New Zealand, California, Texas and Georgia. Some of these trips reportedly included travel on Crow’s super yacht or stays at properties owned by Crow or his company.

    Thomas’ critics quickly pushed back on his defense Friday, with Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse zeroing in on Thomas’ assurance that the Crows did not have business before the high court.

    “Oh, please,” tweeted Whitehouse, who chairs a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that oversees the federal bench. “If you’re smoking cigars with Leonard Leo and other right-wing fixers, you should know they don’t just have business before the Court — their business IS the Court.”

    The ProPublica report described a portrait hanging at a New York property owned by Crow’s company that depicts Thomas, Crow and other influential figures in Republican politics, including Leo, the former Federalist Society head who played a crucial role in former President Donald Trump’s makeover of the federal bench. They are sitting together smoking cigars in the painting. The report says that some trips Thomas took with the Crows were also attended by executives of major corporations as well as a leader of a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Crow himself sits on the board of AEI, ProPublica said, and the think tank’s scholars have occasionally filed friend-of-court briefs in Supreme Court cases.

    The controversy has cast a bright light on the judiciary that is increasingly called upon to resolve raging disputes between the political branches of government.

    As confirmation hearings have turned into political spectacles and hot-button cases on abortion, gun rights and religious liberty have broken along familiar conservative-liberal ideological lines, critics say the court appears more and more political.

    Two dozen Democratic lawmakers from both chambers sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday, calling for a “swift, thorough, independent and transparent investigation” into whether ethics rules and laws were violated by Thomas’ trips.

    It also triggered reaction with another constituency that is rarely heard from: federal judges who serve on the lower courts. Current and retired federal judges don’t normally speak up about internal matters outside the confines of the courtroom, but they agreed to talk to CNN if their names were withheld.

    One retired judge – a Republican appointee – told CNN that the disclosure of the trips made them “livid.”

    “This is precisely why the public respect for the Supreme Court has plummeted,” the judge said. “This is far greater than mere ethics violations. It’s about the perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”

    The federal court system judiciary consists of the nine justices who sit on the highest court in the land, as well as 94 district level trial courts and 13 courts of appeal.

    But another judge, also a Republican appointee, sided with Thomas in the dispute, saying that the rules had not been clear and that a committee on the Administrative Office of the US Courts had been working for months to clarify them, only issuing revisions recently.

    “I always thought this area was kind of confusing,” the judge said, adding that regulations concerning what constitutes “personal hospitality” in the rules had never been made clear until a clarification went into effect on March 14.

    “Hospitality was never defined, and it seemed odd to think of a situation where you are spending social time with a close friend where at least occasionally some transportation doesn’t get involved,” the judge said. “If I go spending a weekend with my buddies – someone is going to be driving someone where we are going.”

    Another also sided with Thomas, saying that they had actually been told on two occasions that they had shared more information than was necessary. “The Administrative Office of the United States Courts are concerned with consistency – they want the reports to look the same” the judge said.

    “They don’t want a situation where one judge reports information that others aren’t reporting,” the judge added.

    “The new rules draw a line,” the judge said. “In the end, we are bound by whatever rules we have.”

    Another government source with close ties to the judiciary noted that the dispute around Thomas concerns regulations that apply to all federal judges, but, he says, it has also reignited a dispute about the fact that Supreme Court justices do not have a code of conduct that applies directly to them.

    As things stand, all lower court judges must abide by a code of conduct, but the justices have so far declined to either bind themselves to the current code or create one for themselves. The source said that the sentiment of the lower court judges they had spoken with was that they felt like the judiciary as a whole was being tainted by the fact that the nine justices won’t adopt a code of conduct.

    The source said that the sentiment among some lower court judges is that it “makes us all look bad.”

    In a 2011 report, Chief Justice John Roberts addressed critics who say that the Judicial Conference’s Code of Conduct for United States Judges should apply to the Supreme Court.

    He said that “Article III of the Constitution creates only one court, the Supreme Court of the United States.” It empowers Congress to establish additional lower courts. Roberts said that the two bodies are different, and so a code of conduct instituted by the Judicial Conference that Congress created could not apply to the highest court in the land.

    Roberts did concede that the members of the high court “consult” the code of conduct as well as other materials including advice from the court’s legal office. But, he concluded, the court has “no reason to adopt” a code of conduct.

    “I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted,” Roberts wrote at the time.

    In a statement to ProPublica and CNN, Crow said that he has been friends with Thomas and his wife Ginni for more than 30 years, and that the hospitality he has extended the justice over the years was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

    “Justice Thomas and Ginni never asked for any of this hospitality,” Crow said in the statement. He said that we “never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one.”

    “Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years. As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.

    “Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable. I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.

    “These guidelines are now being changed, as the committee of the Judicial Conference responsible for financial disclosure for the entire federal judiciary just this past month announced new guidance. And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Wisconsin voters are deciding control of state Supreme Court in most consequential election of 2023 | CNN Politics

    Wisconsin voters are deciding control of state Supreme Court in most consequential election of 2023 | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Wisconsin voters on Tuesday are deciding the outcome of a state Supreme Court race that could be the most consequential election of the year.

    The race between Democratic-backed Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz and Republican-backed former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly could both break a decadelong era of Republican dominance in one of the nation’s most important swing states and prove pivotal in the fight over the future of abortion access. It’s the most expensive state judicial race ever.

    Conservatives currently hold a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin high court. But the retirement of conservative Justice Patience Roggensack has given liberals an opening to retake control for at least the next two years, and with it fundamentally shift the political landscape in a state that has been ensnared in political conflict for more than a decade. The race could also effectively decide how the court will rule on legal challenges to Wisconsin’s 1849 law banning abortion – which took effect after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer.

    Wisconsin is one of 14 states that directly elect their Supreme Court justices, and winners get 10-year terms. The races are nominally nonpartisan, but political parties leave little doubt as to which candidates they support. Spending in this year’s race – which reached $28.8 million as of March 29, according to the Brennan Center – has far surpassed the previous record for spending on a state judicial contest: $15.4 million in a 2004 Illinois race.

    Republican sway in Wisconsin began with Gov. Scott Walker’s election in 2010 – a victory that was followed by the passage of union-busting laws and state legislative districts drawn to effectively ensure GOP majorities, all green-lit by a state Supreme Court where conservatives have held the majority since 2008.

    Walker lost his bid for a third term to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2018. But Evers has been hamstrung by the Republican-led legislature, with the conservative Supreme Court breaking ties on matters such as a 2022 ruling during the once-a-decade redistricting process in favor of using Republican-drawn legislative maps rather than ones submitted by Evers. The decision cemented Republicans’ solid majority in the state legislature.

    Revisiting those maps, which Protasiewicz has criticized, could lead to new state legislative districts that are less favorable to Republicans if she is victorious.

    The court has also shaped Wisconsin elections in other ways. It barred the use of most ballot drop boxes last year and ruled that no one can return a ballot in person on behalf of another voter. The court played a pivotal role in the outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin: Justices voted 4-3, with conservative Brian Hagedorn joining the court’s three liberals, to reject former President Donald Trump’s efforts to throw out ballots in Democratic-leaning counties.

    Tuesday’s election will set the stage for the 2024 presidential race, with the court likely to be asked to weigh in again on election rules, including the state’s voter identification law, and potentially sort through another round of legal challenges afterward.

    But the most immediate battle likely to reach the justices as early as this fall is over Wisconsin’s 1849 law that bans abortion in nearly all circumstances.

    Groups on both sides of the abortion divide have poured vast sums into the race and have attempted to mobilize voters ahead of Tuesday’s election.

    Though the two candidates have refused to say how they’d rule on the issue, they’ve left little doubt about their leanings.

    In a debate last month, Protasiewicz said she was “making no promises” on how she would rule. But she also noted her personal support for abortion rights, as well as endorsements from pro-abortion rights groups. And she pointed to Kelly’s endorsement by Wisconsin Right to Life, which opposes abortion rights.

    “If my opponent is elected, I can tell you with 100% certainty, that 1849 abortion ban will stay on the books. I can tell you that,” Protasiewicz said.

    Kelly, who has done legal work for Wisconsin Right to Life, shot back, saying Protasiewicz’s comments were “absolutely not true.”

    “You don’t know what I’m thinking about that abortion ban,” he said. “You have no idea. These things you do not know.”

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  • Morning after pill brand speeds up retail access, doubles supply per pack | CNN Business

    Morning after pill brand speeds up retail access, doubles supply per pack | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    One maker said it is responding to high demand for the morning-after pill, after the US Supreme Court last year ended a constitutional right to abortion, by speeding up availability of the emergency contraceptive in retail stores and introducing a new two-count pack.

    Julie launched as a one-step tablet of emergency contraceptive containing Levonorgestrel, the key ingredient in the popular Plan B emergency contraceptive that was approved by FDA in late 1990s without a prescription, at 4,500 Walmart stores nationwide last September.

    The startup experienced a surge in demand for its $42 tablet at launch amid an overall spike in purchases of emergency contraceptive following the US Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade in on June 24, 2022.

    The FDA-approved morning-after pill can reduce the chance of pregnancy after unprotected sex or failure of another contraceptive method like a condom, and is ideally taken within 72 hours. The pill, which is legal in all 50 US states, works by delaying ovulation or preventing implantation and cannot terminate a pregnancy.

    While the plan from the beginning was always to make the product widely accessible as quickly possible, the Supreme Court’s ruling only compelled the startup to accelerate the timetable for Julie’s nationwide rollout.

    “The Dobbs decision and overturning Roe v. Wade last year rocked everyone’s world, our customers and our retail partners,” said Amanda E/J Morrison, cofounder of Julie. “It lit a fire under us to provide our product to more women and, more importantly, to educate women about emergency contraceptives.”

    In April, just seven months after hitting the market, Julie is now expanding into 5,600 CVS stores and 1,500 Target stores. The brand is also introducing a new 2-count pack of its emergency contraception (which has a three-year expiration period). The two-count pack rolled out at CVS locations over the weekend.

    “With the two-pack, we want to make it easier for women to keep extra emergency contraceptive at home, just like they would with other birth control options like condoms,” said Morrison.

    The price for two-count pack is $70. Morrison said the pill works most effectively the closer it is taken after unprotected sex, ideally within 72 hours.

    Dr. Colleen Denny, a clinical associate professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said she saw the upside to a two-count pack of emergency contraception, which she hasn’t seen before from other emergency contraception brands.

    “It generally makes sense for barriers to emergency contraception, prescription and over the counter, to be as low as possible,” said Denny,

    “Emergency contraception is incredibly safe and effective at preventing pregnancy when used in the right time frame,” she said. “Relationships are complicated. There can be situations where there isn’t access to emergency contraception or women might not ask the partner to use it. So being able to have access to one pill and a backup is a great idea.”

    Kelly Cleland, executive director of the American Society for Emergency Contraception, said emergency contraception brands, like Julie, still have to work harder at making the product not only more accessible, but also more affordable.

    “I am in favor of expanding access, but this is a missed opportunity when a generic brand comes into the market with a high price barrier,” Cleland said about Julie’s $70 price for the two-count pack.

    Cleland said a study done last year by the American Society for Emergency Contraception on access to emergency contraception in stores compared price at retail for branded and generic emergency contraception options. The report said some generic options were priced at $6 or less.

    Julie said it set the price for its single pill and two-count pack so it can fund its one-for-one donation program (in which the company donates one box for every box purchased) and to cover business costs tied to packaging and marketing.

    By overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court revoked the notion that the constitutional right to privacy included an abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court expanded states’ authority to regulate or restrict abortion.

    A total of 26 US states have since implemented new abortion restrictions or all-out bans.

    In the rulings’ immediate aftermath, doctors and prescribers saw a sharp jump in demand for different forms of contraception, including emergency contraception, and longer-lasting forms of birth control. The rush on emergency contraceptives forced some pharmacy chains to impose temporary purchase limits.

    “Every time there is a new development on restrictions to reproduction health care, there’s a run on emergency contraceptive. Our retail partners confirmed this,” said Morrison, adding that news events continue to influence buying patterns for emergency contraceptive.

    “The current political climate has emboldened Julie,” Morrison said. This, according to the company, includes expanding Julie’s available within communities through unexpected places like bars, restaurants and coffee shops.

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  • A threat to democracy or much-needed reform? Israel’s judicial overhaul explained | CNN

    A threat to democracy or much-needed reform? Israel’s judicial overhaul explained | CNN


    Jerusalem
    CNN
     — 

    For months hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been taking to the streets across the country to regularly protest far-reaching changes to the Israel’s legal system some say threaten the country’s democratic foundations.

    At its core, the judicial overhaul would give the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and therefore the parties in power, more control over Israel’s judiciary.

    From how judges are selected, to what laws the Supreme Court can rule on, to even giving parliament power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, the changes would be the most significant shakeups to Israel’s judiciary since its founding in 1948.

    The proposed reforms do not come out of nowhere.

    Figures from across the political spectrum have in the past called for changes to Israel’s judiciary.

    Israel has no written constitution, only a set of quasi-constitutional basic laws, making the Supreme Court even more powerful. But Israel also has no check on the power of the Knesset other than the Supreme Court.

    Here’s what you need to know.

    The judicial overhaul is a package of bills, all of which need to pass three votes in the Knesset before they become law.

    One of the most important elements for the Netanyahu government is the bill that changes the makeup of the nine-member committee that selects judges, in order to give the government a majority of the seats on the committee.

    Netanyahu and his supporters argue that the Supreme Court has become an insular, elitist group that does not represent the Israeli people. They argue the Supreme Court has overstepped its role, getting into issues it should not rule on.

    But the anger has also reached the business community, academia and even the military

    Defending his plans, the prime minister has pointed to countries like the United States, where politicians control which federal judges are appointed and approved.

    Another significant element of the changes is known as the override clause, which would give the Israeli parliament the power to pass laws previously ruled invalid by the court, essentially overriding Supreme Court decisions.

    Supporters say the Supreme Court should not interfere in the will of the people, who vote the politicians into power.

    “We go to the polls, vote, and time after time, people we did not elect decide for us,” Justice Minister Yariv Levin said while unveiling the reforms at the beginning of January.

    Another bill, now voted through, makes it more difficult for a sitting Prime Minister to be declared unfit for office, restricting the reasons to physical or mental incapacity and requiring either the prime minister themselves, or two-thirds of the cabinet, to vote for such a declaration.

    Although several bills could affect Netanyahu it is the one about declaring a prime minister “unfit for office” that has the biggest implication for the Israeli prime minister.

    Critics say Netanyahu is pushing the overhaul forward because of his own ongoing corruption trial, where he faces charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. He denies any wrongdoing.

    That bill is largely seen by opposition leaders as a way to protect Netanyahu from being declared unfit for office as a result of the trial.

    As part of a deal with the court to serve as a prime minister despite being on trial, Netanyahu accepted a conflict of interest declaration. The Attorney General determined that the declaration meant Netanyahu could not be involved in the policy-making of the judicial overhaul. A petition is currently in front of the Israeli Supreme Court to declare Netanyahu unfit for office on the grounds he has violated that conflict of interest declaration and the attorney general has written an open letter to Netanyahu saying he is in breach of the deal and the law.

    Critics also argue that if the government has a greater say in which judges are appointed, Netanyahu’s allies will appoint judges they know will rule in Netanyahu’s favor.

    Netanyahu is accused of self-interest in pursuing the legal shake-up

    Netanyahu, it should be said, has completely denied this and has claimed his trial is “unraveling” on its own.

    In the past, Netanyahu has publicly expressed strong support for an independent judiciary. Asked why he’s supporting such an overhaul despite those public proclamations, Netanyahu told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “I haven’t changed my view. I think we need a strong, independent judiciary. But an independent judiciary doesn’t mean an unbridled judiciary, which is what has happened here, I mean, over the last 25 years.”

    Weakening the judicial branch could limit both Israelis and Palestinians in seeking the court’s defense of their rights if they believe they are compromised by the government.

    Palestinians in the occupied West Bank could be affected, and of course Palestinian citizens of Israel or those who hold residency cards would be directly affected. Israel’s Supreme Court has no influence on what happens in Gaza, which is ruled by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

    Critics of the changes worry that if the politicians have more control, the rights of minorities in Israel, especially Palestinians living in Israel, would be impacted.

    Last year, for example, the court halted the evictions of Palestinian families in the flashpoint neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where Jewish groups have claimed ownership of land the families have lived on for decades.

    The protesters have vowed to fight on, but Netanyahu has given no indication he will back down

    At the same time, Palestinian activists have argued that the high court has further entrenched Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, having never considered the legality of Israeli settlements there, even though they’re considered illegal by most of the international community.

    The high court has also been the subject of complaints from Israel’s far right and settlers, who say it is biased against settlers; they have condemned the court’s involvement in approving the eviction of settlers from Gaza and the Northern West Bank in 2005.

    The overhaul has caused concern across Israel’s financial, business, security and academic sectors.

    Critics say the overhaul goes too far, and will completely destroy the only avenue available to provide checks and balances to the Israeli legislative branch.

    They warn it will harm the independence of the Israeli judiciary, and will hurt rights not enshrined in Israel’s quasi-constitutional basic laws, like minority rights and freedom of expression.

    According to polling released in February by the Israel Democracy Institute, only a minority of Israelis support the reforms. The vast majority – 72% – want a compromise to be reached and, even then, 66% think the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down lawa and 63% of Israelis think the current method of appointing judges should stay as it is.

    Members of the typically apolitical high-tech sector have also spoken out against the reforms. Assaf Rappaport, CEO of cybersecurity firm Wiz, has said the firm won’t be moving any of the $300 million capital it recently raised to Israel because of the unrest over the overhaul.

    Israel’s Central Bank Governor Amir Yaron told CNN’s Richard Quest that the reforms are too “hasty” and risk harming the economy.

    Several former Mossad chiefs have also spoken out against the reforms, warning division over the issue is harming Israeli security. Hundreds of reservists in Israel’s army have warned they will not answer the call to serve if the reforms pass, saying they believe Israel will no longer be a full democracy under the changes.

    Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the government’s legislation was “misguided, brutal and undermines our democratic foundations,” and warned Israel was potentially on the brink of a “civil war.” Although the Israeli presidency is largely a ceremonial role, Herzog has been actively speaking with all parties calling for negotiations.

    And on the international front, Israel’s allies, including the United States, have also expressed concern about the overhaul.

    According to the White House, US President Joe Biden told Netanyahu in a mid-March phone call “democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.”

    Protest organizers say they plan to intensify their demonstrations until the legislation is halted. But the government says it received a mandate from voters to pass the reform when it was elected last November.

    But in mid-March, the coalition government softened its plans for the first time, announcing that it had amended the bill that would reform the committee that selects judges. Instead of having the vast majority of the appointed seats on the committee, the government-appointed members would have a one-seat majority.

    On March 23, even after his own defense minister nearly gave a speech calling for the legislation to be halted out of concern for how it would affect Israeli national security, Netanyahu vowed to keep advancing the reforms.

    He called for opposition politicians to meet with him to negotiate, something they have said they will only do if the legislative process is halted.

    Complicating matters further, should the bills pass parliament the Supreme Court must then potentially decide on laws curbing its own power. This raises the possibility of a constitutional standoff. Would the Supreme Court strike down the laws, and if so, how would the government respond?

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  • Supreme Court humors itself as it considers whether Jack Daniel’s can stop a dog toy company from parodying its brand | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court humors itself as it considers whether Jack Daniel’s can stop a dog toy company from parodying its brand | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court on Wednesday delved into the complexities of federal trademark law in a case concerning a poop-themed dog toy that resembles a Jack Daniel’s bottle, at times erupting into laughter as the justices explored how much protection should be given to parodists that rip off trademarks they don’t own.

    At the center of the case is a “Bad Spaniels Silly Squeaker” toy created by VIP Products that is strikingly similar to Jack Daniel’s bottles. The distiller sued the company over the toy – which is replete with scatological humor – claiming it violated federal trademark law, which usually centers around how likely a consumer is to confuse an alleged infringement with something produced by the true owner of the mark.

    But at oral arguments, at least one justice admitted she didn’t understand the joke being sold by VIP Products.

    “What is there to it? What is the parody here?” Justice Elena Kagan asked an attorney for the toy company, leading the courtroom to burst into laughter. “Because maybe I just have no sense of humor. But what’s the parody?”

    Kagan went on to list a number of different marks the company pokes fun at, drawing laughter from Justice Clarence Thomas: “Doggie Walker, Dos Perros, Smella Arpaw, Canine Cola, Mountain Drool. Are all of these companies taking themselves too seriously?”

    And a misunderstanding by Lisa Blatt, an attorney representing Jack Daniel’s, over a hypothetical posed by Justice Samuel Alito led to another round of giggles.

    Alito was trying to ask how likely it was that a reasonable person would believe Jack Daniel’s approved the toy at hand or a similar theoretical toy that joked it contained “dog urine.”

    “So a reasonable person would not believe Jack Daniel’s had approved this?” he asked Blatt.

    “I think if you’re selling urine you’re probably going to win on a motion to (dismiss), but you’re probably also violating some state law,” she replied.

    “Oh no, you’re not selling urine. It’s exactly this toy, which purportedly contains some sort of dog excrement or urine,” Alito said, humoring the courtroom as he attempted to clarify his hypothetical.

    “Well, just showing how confused I was suggests that I would be your perfect consumer,” Blatt said.

    Jokes – intentional or not – aside, some of the justices were skeptical of the distillery, whose attorneys want the court to toss out a heightened standard of review an appeals court used when it ruled in favor of the toy maker.

    “I have some hesitation doing away with the Rogers Test,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in part, referring to a court-created test used to determine whether a potential trademark infringement in non-commercial instances enjoys constitutional protection.

    Alito seemed to agree.

    “Well, I’m concerned about the First Amendment implications of your position and you began by saying, by stressing that Rogers is atextual, it was made up.”

    “You know, there is a text that says that Congress shall make no law infringing the freedom of speech. That’s a text that takes precedence over the Lanham Act and you said there are no constitutional issues,” he added, referring to the trademark law at the center of the dispute.

    Joining the dog pile, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she was “concerned about impairing artists” if the court sided with Jack Daniel’s and issued a decision that effectively prevents the unauthorized use of marks in artistic works.

    The case pits the rights of a famous trademark holder against the First Amendment rights of a company that wants to use those marks to sell a humorous product.

    VIP’s “Bad Spaniels Silly Squeaker” toy has the same general shape of a Jack Daniel’s bottle. The plastic bottle, like its glass counterpart, has a similar font style and uses a black label.

    VIP borrows Jack Daniel’s “Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey” to sell “The Old No. 2 On Your Tennessee Carpet,” a reference to dog excrement. And it changes the liquor bottle’s “40% ALC. BY VOL. (80 PROOF)” with “43% POO BY VOL.” and “100% SMELLY.”

    A tag affixed to the toy notes that it’s “not affiliated with Jack Daniel Distillery.”

    That, however, was not enough to keep Jack Daniel’s from suing the company to take the toy off the market. The distiller argues VIP violates federal trademark law and that the toy, especially the references to dog excrement, damage its reputation because it could confuse consumers into thinking the product belongs to the “oldest registered distillery in the United States.”

    “To be sure, everyone likes a good joke,” lawyers for Jack Daniel’s wrote in court papers. “But VIP’s profit-motivated ‘joke’ confuses consumers by taking advantage of Jack Daniel’s hard-earned goodwill.”

    Depending on how they rule, the justices could strip away some trademark protections by giving entities cover to legally use registered marks not belonging to them so long as they do so in a way that expresses humor.

    A district court ruled in favor of Jack Daniel’s, finding that the toy infringed on the distiller’s trademark. But an appeals court later sided with VIP Products, invoking the so-called Rogers Test.

    The court said VIP’s use of Jack Daniel’s trademark was non-commercial and that because it was done humorously for an “expressive work,” it’s protected by the First Amendment.

    The case “deals with a very common thing of pitting somebody who has trademark rights … against another who is saying, ‘I’m entitled to (use those marks) under the First Amendment because it is parody. And I need to take enough of the mark in order to make it funny. People have to get the joke,’” said Mark Sommers, a trademark attorney based in Washington, DC.

    Sommers added that the justices’ decision in the matter has the potential to be a landmark ruling if they “help define that line that exists between the First Amendment right of expression – be that parody, be that art, whatever you want to express – versus the important trademark issues that are here where brand owners who have invested a tremendous amount of goodwill don’t want their trademarks used in a manner which could result in potential confusion among the consuming public.”

    Attorneys for Jack Daniel’s told the justices in court papers that the appeals court ruling “gives copycats free license to prey on unsuspecting consumers and mark holders,” and warned that if it wasn’t reversed, companies could use trademarks they don’t own to flood the markets with allegedly unserious products.

    Santa Claus, the KKK, and other bizarre hypotheticals raised by Supreme Court in LGBTQ rights case

    “No one disputes that VIP is trying to be funny. But alcohol and toys don’t mix well, and the same is true for beverages and excrement,” they wrote. “The next case could involve more troubling combinations – food and poison, cartoon characters and pornography, children’s toys and illegal drugs, and so on.”

    VIP argues consumers can easily distinguish between the two products, with lawyers for the Arizona-based company writing in court papers that it “has never sold whiskey or other comestibles, nor has it used ‘Jack Daniel’s’ in any way (humorously or not). It merely mimicked enough of the iconic bottle that people would get the joke.”

    “This is a case about speech, and a popular brand’s attempts to control that speech by weaponizing the Lanham Act,” they wrote, referring to the federal trademark law at the center of the dispute.

    “It is ironic that America’s leading distiller of whiskey both lacks a sense of humor and does not recognize when it – and everyone else – has had enough,” the toy company told the court.

    The Biden administration had urged the justices to take the case, with the Justice Department siding with Jack Daniel’s in the dispute.

    “The First Amendment does not confer any right to use another person’s trademark, or a confusingly similar mark, as a source identifier for goods sold in commerce,” the department wrote in court papers. “Indeed, the absence of any such right is a basic animating premise of trademark-infringement law. If such a right existed, states and the federal government might lack authority to prohibit trademark infringement.”

    Several major companies also filed briefs to the court in support of Jack Daniel’s, including Nike and Levi Strauss & Co.

    “Though defendants will often have an incentive to label it as such, not every humorous use of another’s trademark is a parody,” Nike wrote in its brief. “Courts therefore should take a disciplined approach to this important classification in cases where ‘parody’ is claimed.”

    The Supreme Court is expected to rule later this term in another high-profile intellectual property law case, with the justices having heard arguments last year in a copyright infringement case concerning the late Andy Warhol and the late musician Prince. During those arguments, the justices attempted to determine when a new work based on a prior piece is substantially transformative, and when it simply amounts to a copycat version of an existing work subject to copyright rules.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Supreme Court urged by DOJ and other parties to sidestep independent state legislature dispute | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court urged by DOJ and other parties to sidestep independent state legislature dispute | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    As the Supreme Court deliberates behind closed doors over a case that many believe could be one of the most consequential voting rights disputes ever to reach the high court, the Justice Department and some other parties involved are suggesting the case be dismissed due to major developments since oral arguments.

    If the justices were to ultimately remove the case from the docket it would sidestep a major dispute over the so-called the Independent State Legislature theory pushed by conservatives and supporters of former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election for now.

    The case has captured the nation’s attention, because Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are asking the justices to adopt a long dormant legal theory and rule that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules established by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections.

    Critics say the Independent State Legislature theory could revolutionize electoral politics going forward if fully adopted and could lead to state legislatures having absolute authority in the area without the necessary judicial oversight.

    The actual case before the justices presents a redistricting dispute out of North Carolina, involving a North Carolina Supreme Court decision from February 2002 that invalided the state’s congressional map. The state Supreme Court struck the map as an illegal partisan gerrymander and replaced it with a temporary court-drawn map more favorable to Democrats.

    The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the GOP’s appeal of that decision in December. At arguments, a lawyer for the lawmakers asked the justices to adopt the Independent State Legislature theory, and some of the justices appeared to express some support for a version of the doctrine.

    But after the case was argued, and before the justices have rendered an opinion, new developments occurred on the ground in North Carolina.

    That’s because after the last election, the North Carolina Supreme Court flipped its majority to Republican. In February, the newly composed state Supreme Court announced it had voted to take the unusual step and rehear a dispute concerning the maps.

    That development prompted the US Supreme Court to ask the parties on both sides to explain whether the justices still had the authority to hear the case or whether it should be dismissed. Central to the question is whether the state court has issued a “final judgment” in the case clearing the way for US Supreme Court review.

    Solicitor General Elizbeth Prelogar told the justices in a letter Monday that the NC decision grant of rehearing “makes it difficult to conclude that the state court has entered a final judgement.”

    At the same time, Prelogar acknowledged the maneuvering had created a “novel” predicament and the justices “could reasonably reach a different conclusion.”

    An attorney for the state of North Carolina, which is also opposed to the Republican lawmakers’ stance in the case, agreed the case should be dismissed. Sarah G. Boyce of the North Carolina Department of Justice stressed that the US Supreme Court cannot step in now because, “further proceedings remain”.

    But Common Cause, a group that opposes the GOP lawmakers, disagreed with the position taken by its own side and urged the justices to decide the case.

    Neal Katyal, a lawyer for the group, stressed that the court should use the North Carolina case to decide the Independent State Legislature doctrine issue rather than wait until it arises again on an emergency basis “during the 2024 election cycle.”

    And his opponent, David Thompson, a lawyer for the North Carolina Republican lawmakers, agreed on that point.

    He argued in his letter that the justices still have jurisdiction because the North Carolina Supreme Court decision was final, and the re-hearing order is directed at subsequent decisions made by the state high court.

    “This court is therefore fully possessed of jurisdiction to decide” the case, Thompson wrote.

    If the US Supreme Court ultimately decides to dismiss the case out of North Carolina, it will likely be asked in short order to take up the same kind of dispute brought by a different party. Ohio’s attorney general, for instance has a pending request with the court to take up a similar dispute.

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  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg is honored at a Supreme Court she wouldn’t recognize | CNN Politics

    Ruth Bader Ginsburg is honored at a Supreme Court she wouldn’t recognize | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was lauded by former clerks and colleagues at a memorial ceremony held at the Supreme Court on Friday – an institution she’d scarcely recognize if she were still on the bench.

    During the special session of the court, delayed because of Covid-19, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to Ginsburg’s dedication to equality and said she “changed our country profoundly for the better.”

    Attorney General Merrick Garland said her opinions were “concise and elegant.”

    Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, a former clerk, called the justice’s work the “stuff of legend.” (Prelogar also revealed Ginsburg’s passion for chocolate fondue.)

    But as the legal luminaries mingled in the Great Hall outside the marble-lined chamber, little was said about how much the court has changed in the 130 weeks since Ginsburg’s passing.

    Fresh on the minds of many is the unprecedented leak last May of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, a disclosure the court described as a “grave assault on the judicial process.”

    In addition, however, the current conservative majority, including Ginsburg’s replacement, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is working expeditiously to reverse much of what Ginsburg stood for in areas such as reproductive health, voting rights, affirmative action, administrative law and religious liberty.

    In the past few months, the court has seen its approval ratings plummet amid claims that it has become irreparably political. Even the relationships between the justices, while cordial, have frayed in public over debates concerning the court’s legitimacy.

    As conservatives praise the court’s new season, others mourn the dismantling of Ginsburg’s life work.

    “We are in the midst of a constitutional revolution, and the praise being lavished on Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, should not cause us to lose sight of that fact,” said Neil S. Siegel, a professor at Duke University and former Ginsburg clerk.

    Lara Bazelon, a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, put it more forcefully in an interview with CNN: “The current court is taking a wrecking ball to her legacy to smash it to smithereens.”

    Ginsburg died at 87 years old on September 18, 2020, having spent some 40 years as a federal judge – 27 on the high court. She worked until the end, even dialing into oral arguments from her hospital bed in Baltimore in May 2020 to chastise a lawyer for the Trump administration. The case at hand concerned a religion-based challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer-provided health insurance plans cover birth control as a preventive service.

    “You have tossed entirely to the wind what Congress thought was essential, that is that women be provided these services with no hassles, no cost to them,” Ginsburg said.

    After her death – less than seven weeks before Election Day – then-President Donald Trump praised her. “She was an amazing woman whether you agree or not she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life,” he said, while as expected, moving with dispatch to push through the nomination of a candidate believed to be Ginsburg’s ideological opposite in many areas: Justice Amy Coney Barrett .

    The shift from Ginsburg to Barrett is akin to 1991 when Justice Thurgood Marshall, a legend of the civil rights movement who often cast his votes with the liberals on the bench, was replaced with Justice Clarence Thomas, who has become a hero of the conservative right.

    The philosophical differences between the two jurists was almost immediately evident in disputes over the religious liberty implications of state Covid restrictions.

    When Ginsburg was still alive, the court ruled in favor of the states with Roberts serving as the swing vote. But after Barrett’s confirmation, the houses of worship won.

    Barrett – a former clerk to Ginsburg’s friend, the late Justice Antonin Scalia – has also embraced the constitutional theory of originalism, a judicial philosophy championed by Scalia. Under the doctrine, the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original public reading.

    Just last term the court divided along familiar ideological lines in several cases and Barrett sided with the majority, cementing the court’s conservative turn.

    Barrett’s presence also means that Roberts no longer controls the court, as there are five votes to his right on some of the most divisive issues of the day.

    “He is no longer empowered to moderate the very conservative direction in which the court’s other conservatives are pushing the institution,” Siegel said.

    The biggest blow for liberals last term came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito that reversed Roe – a decision that had been on the books during Ginsburg’s entire tenure.

    While she enjoyed a cordial relationship for the most part with her colleagues, Siegel and Bazelon said she would have been surprised by specific references Alito made to an article she wrote in 1992 as a lower court judge.

    On the 3rd page of his opinion Alito argued that when Roe was decided it was such a broad decision that it “effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single state.” He went on to say that it has “embittered our political culture for a half century.” After that sentiment he cited Ginsburg’s article in a footnote, where she wrote that the sweep of the decision had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believed, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.”

    Some believe Alito included the quotation to point out that Ginsburg, along with others, felt like the court may have moved too fast too soon in the opinion. But others question his use of the citation, especially because Ginsburg never questioned the result of the decision, only its reasoning in certain sections.

    “Alito’s citation is both cynical and misleading, implying that Justice Ginsburg disapproved of the Roe holding,” Bazelon said.

    That couldn’t be “farther from the truth,” she said, pointing out that Ginsburg’s disagreement was that the reasoning should have “honed in more precisely on the women’s equality dimension.” She noted that Ginsburg always agreed with the result of the opinion.

    In the last years of her life Ginsburg was asked what would happen if the court were to ever overturn Roe and she said that it would have a particularly harsh impact on women who did not have the means to travel across state lines to obtain the procedure.

    Those words were echoed in the joint dissent last term filed by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in Dobbs. “Above all others, women lacking financial resources will suffer from today’s decision,” they wrote.

    On Friday, Breyer, now retired, sat in the front row, next to retired Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy was replaced in 2018 by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who also voted to overturn Roe.

    During her final term, Ginsburg may have known Roe was in jeopardy. There were, after all, likely five members skeptical of the opinion. But she may have felt that Roberts could be persuaded to stop short of overturning precedent out of respect for the stability of the law.

    The very fact that she thought Roe could be in danger, was a signal that Ginsburg saw changes afoot before her passing. She often lamented the politicization of the court that she thought could be traced partly to the confirmation process. She noted that in 1993 when she was nominated by President Bill Clinton she was confirmed by a vote of 96-3 even though she had served as a lawyer for the liberal ACLU. In modern day confirmation hearings, that vote would have been much closer.

    Last term, in a rash of 6-3 decisions the fissures were evident.

    After dodging Second Amendment cases for years, for example, the court crafted a 6-3 opinion marking the widest expansion of gun rights in a decade.

    Kagan dissented when a 6-3 court curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to broadly regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants, a writing that seemed to trigger Kagan’s inner Ginsburg. She criticized the court for stripping the EPA of the “power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

    “The Court appoints itself – instead of Congress or the expert agency – the decision-maker on climate policy,” she said.

    “I cannot think of many things more frightening,” Kagan concluded.

    The conservative court is not finished.

    In 2013, Ginsburg wrote a scathing dissent when Roberts penned an opinion gutting a key section of the historic Voting Rights Act.

    Ginsburg wrote at the time that weakening the law when it “has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

    This term, the court is tackling another section of the same law.

    And the court is considering whether to bar colleges and universities from taking race into consideration as a factor in admissions plans.

    In 2002, Ginsburg memorably wrote about why such programs are necessary. “The stain of generations of racial oppression is still visible in our society, and the determination to hasten its removal remains vital,” she said.

    On Friday former clerk Amanda L. Tyler spoke lovingly about her late boss who, she said, had been described as a “prophet, an American hero, a rock of righteousness, and a national treasure.”

    She said Ginsburg had “the best qualities a judge can have: lawyerly precision, an abiding dedication to procedural integrity, a commitment to opening up access to the justice system to ensure that the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”

    The event in the great hushed hall, like many other memorials, served as a reunion of sorts for Ginsburg’s family and her acolytes and a respite from the court’s regular order. On Monday, the justices take the bench again for a new set of cases.

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  • DOJ seeks fast-track Supreme Court review of ruling against gun ban for people under domestic violence restraining orders | CNN Politics

    DOJ seeks fast-track Supreme Court review of ruling against gun ban for people under domestic violence restraining orders | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department on Friday asked the Supreme Court to fast-track its consideration of a recent appeals court ruling that deemed unconstitutional a federal law barring gun possession by those under domestic violence restraining orders.

    “The presence of a gun in a house with a domestic abuser increases the risk of homicide sixfold,” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in her petition Friday, urging the high court to decide before its summer recess whether to take up the case.

    The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said in February that the 1996 law was unconstitutional, and while the ruling applies only to Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, advocates worry it will have wide implications, including that it will discourage victims from coming forward.

    The circuit court cited the major Second Amendment ruling handed down by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority last year that laid out a new test for lower courts to use to analyze a gun regulation’s constitutionality.

    Prelogar told the Supreme Court on Friday that the 5th Circuit’s reasoning was wrong and the high court should take up the case so “that it can correct the Fifth Circuit’s misinterpretation of Bruen,” referring to last summer’s Supreme Court opinion.

    The high court’s majority opinion in June said that part of the test was whether a gun restriction had a parallel to the regulations in place at the time of the Constitution’s framing.

    The 5th Circuit said, with its opinion regarding the domestic violence gun restriction earlier this year, that the prohibition on alleged abusers lacked that kind of historical parallel and therefore was unconstitutional.

    If the 5th Circuit’s “approach were applied across the board,” Prelogar wrote, “few modern statutes would survive judicial review; most modern gun regulations, after all, differ from their historical forbears in at least some ways.”

    At the time of the circuit court ruling, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that Congress had determined the gun ban statute “nearly 30 years ago” and signaled the department’s plan to appeal the ruling.

    “Whether analyzed through the lens of Supreme Court precedent, or of the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, that statute is constitutional. Accordingly, the Department will seek further review of the Fifth Circuit’s contrary decision,” he said.

    Guns are used to commit nearly two-thirds of intimate partner homicides, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said. A 2021 study found that the majority of mass shootings are also linked to domestic violence.

    Though some of the states covered by the appeals court have similar state law restrictions, the new ruling undermines a crucial tool that survivors have to protect themselves from their abusers. If the 5th Circuit’s logic were adopted nationwide by the US Supreme Court, the consequences would be devastating, advocates say.

    “People are going to know that their abuser still has their gun. They’re going to continue to live in absolute, abject fear,” said Heather Bellino, the CEO of the Texas Advocacy Project, which works with victims of domestic violence. “They are going to be afraid to get a protective order, because now that gun’s not going away.”

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  • Supreme Court asks Congress for more security money due to threats | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court asks Congress for more security money due to threats | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    With a new annual budget request posted Thursday, the Supreme Court told Congress that it needs nearly $6 million in new security funding to expand the protection justices receive following threats to the court last summer.

    “Ongoing threat assessments show evolving risks that require continuous protection,” the court said in its budget request. “Additional funding would provide for contract positions, eventually transitioning to full-time employees, that will augment capabilities of the Supreme Court police force and allow it to accomplish its protective mission.”

    Thursday’s submission to Congress is the first annual budget request the Supreme Court is making to Congress since Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted with an alleged assassination attempt last summer.

    That attempt, along with how lower court judges and their families have been the target of violence, has raised the issue of judicial security – which tends to have broad, bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Also raising questions about the justices’ safety were the protestors that demonstrated outside the justices’ homes in the wake of a leaked draft opinion last spring that would go on to overturn national abortion rights protections.

    After the Kavanaugh incident, Congress passed supplemental funding last year to boost the justices’ security.

    The new budget documents referenced that additional funding and said with the next round of annual spending, $4 million of what it requested would go to the “annualization of police pay adjustments and protective activities that were funded” with the supplemental security bill.

    Overall, the Supreme Court is asking for $150,824,000 in the coming appropriations process for 2024.

    The court is also asking for a little more than $3 million to pay for restoration work of the building’s courtyard and a number of fountains on its grounds. The fountain work will include upgrades to the fountains’ mechanical equipment and the installation of pH monitoring controls equipment.

    And the court is asking for $6.5 million for “for physical security upgrades” to “reinforce” the iconic building, which they said will include meeting recommendations made following a “comprehensive review” by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

    Overall, the judicial branch is requesting $9.1 billion in the spending legislation Congress passes for 2024, which is an 8% percent increase over the $8.5 billion the judiciary received in the funding legislation for 2023.

    Of the 2024 request, $783.5 million would be used for the judiciary’s court security fund – a $33.3 million increase from 2023 levels. Some of that funding would go to additional positions in the US Marshals Service, which is tasked with protecting the courts and executing other court functions.

    As part of the court security fund request, the judiciary is also asking for an increase of $1.5 million for the Judiciary Vulnerability Management Program, which “will fund additional software licenses, automated tools, and support for identifying, redacting, and reducing personally identifiable information from the internet for judges and eligible family members.”

    Some of that money will help fund programs set up by a judicial privacy law enacted last year that allows federal judges – who have increasingly become targets of threats, violence and even assassination plots – to shield certain personal information about them from public view.

    The budget request specifically references legislation which, among other things, requires that judges be offered training on how to make removal requests, as well as training on home security and on using social media.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • ‘We are in limbo:’ Student loan borrowers still face months of uncertainty about Biden’s forgiveness program | CNN Politics

    ‘We are in limbo:’ Student loan borrowers still face months of uncertainty about Biden’s forgiveness program | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    More than 40 million federal student loan borrowers could be eligible for up to $20,000 in debt forgiveness, but they will likely have to wait several more months before the Supreme Court rules on whether President Joe Biden can implement his proposed relief program.

    The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in two cases challenging Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, but justices aren’t expected to issue their decision until late June or early July.

    When the ruling comes will also determine when federal student loan payments, which have been paused due to the pandemic since March 2020, will restart.

    Some borrowers have been anxiously waiting for years to see if Biden would fulfill his campaign pledge to cancel some federal student loan debt. The president finally announced a forgiveness plan last August.

    But after 26 million people applied, the program was blocked by lower courts in November – before any debt could be canceled.

    “In some ways, it feels like we are one step closer now that they’ve heard the oral arguments, but until a decision is made, it still feels like we are in limbo,” said Lindsay Clausen, who has about $68,000 in student loan debt and works as an instructional designer at a university.

    Clausen, 33, filed for relief from Biden’s forgiveness program last fall as soon as the application was open, hoping the forgiveness would help her and her husband save for a new home and expand their family.

    “I felt relief, and then it was like a rug was pulled from underneath me,” Clausen said.

    “Whichever way SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the US) decides to rule, it will at least be nice to have an answer,” she added.

    The Biden administration has estimated that more than 40 million federal student loan borrowers would qualify for some level of debt cancellation, with roughly 20 million who would have their balance forgiven entirely, if the forgiveness program is allowed to move forward.

    But not everyone with a federally held student loan would qualify.

    Individual borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 annually in those years could see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven. Those with higher incomes would be excluded.

    If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness. Pell grants are a key federal aid program that help students from the lowest-income families pay for college, but these borrowers are still more likely to struggle paying off their student loans.

    Student debt cancellation would deliver financial relief to millions of Americans, potentially helping them buy their first homes, start businesses or save for retirement.

    But those who have already paid off their student loans, or chose not to borrow money to go to college to begin with, would get nothing. And the estimated $400 billion cost of canceling some debt would shift to all taxpayers.

    At last week’s hearing, several of the conservative justices questioned whether that tradeoff is fair, while liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back, arguing how many borrowers “don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments.”

    The back-and-forth on fairness touches on one of the biggest complaints about the nation’s higher education system: many people feel they need to go to college, and as a result borrow money, to get ahead.

    Angel Enriquez, a 30-year-old meteorologist with about $61,000 in student loan debt, is one of those people.

    Angel Enriquez poses for a portrait at Bizzell Memorial Library at the University of Oklahoma on June 3, 2022.

    His parents, immigrants from Mexico, couldn’t afford to help him pay for college. Enriquez was wait-listed at a state school that had a meteorology program, so he instead enrolled at a more expensive school out of state. He is now pursuing a master’s degree, which he felt he needed to stand out in a competitive industry.

    “When you talk about fairness, it’s a complicated argument,” Enriquez said.

    “But if you talk to someone who comes from poverty, or someone who’s a person of color, they are going to benefit from the forgiveness program the most because they’re the ones that have to jump through extra financial hoops in order to get where everyone else in the educated country is,” he said.

    For some students, college degrees do not deliver the step up in the world they hoped for.

    Even though Blake Goddard worked part-time jobs while in college, he still had to borrow nearly $90,000 for his bachelor’s degree in network communications management from DeVry University. In an effort to land a higher-paying job in the information technology industry, he then earned his master’s degree, borrowing another $44,000.

    Despite those degrees, most of his jobs have been temporary contract positions, and many of his co-workers opted for getting lower-cost IT industry certifications rather than a four-year degree.

    Blake Goddard poses for a portrait in his home on June 10, 2022.

    Meanwhile, the Department of Education has found that DeVry University, a for-profit college, misled at least 1,800 borrowers with false advertising about job placement rates.

    While Goddard, 45, considers himself “one of the lucky ones” who would qualify for $20,000 of debt relief, the cancellation wouldn’t make too much of a dent in his more than $150,000 balance.

    His debt, Goddard said, is “so detrimental” to his American dream, which was to buy a house and have a family.

    “I was stupid enough to fall for it,” Goddard said about taking out student loans.

    “I wish we could make it so nobody else in this country falls into the same trap,” he added.

    Now, he’s committed to helping others avoid borrowing so much money for college and volunteers with an organization that helps students pursue careers in STEM fields.

    One criticism of Biden’s one-time forgiveness program is that it would do nothing to address the cost of college for future students.

    A more permanent solution to the college affordability problem would have to be created by Congress, but lawmakers have failed to pass any sweeping measure. A provision to make community college free was dropped from Biden’s Build Back Better agenda before it came to a vote in the House in 2021.

    The Biden administration is also working on changes to existing federal student loan repayment plans, which don’t need congressional approval, and that aim to make it easier for borrowers to pay for college.

    The Department of Education is currently finalizing a new income-driven repayment plan to lower monthly payments as well as the total amount borrowers pay back over time. In contrast to the one-time student loan cancellation program, the new repayment plan could help both current and future borrowers.

    Additionally, in July, changes will be made to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which allows certain government and nonprofit employees to seek federal student loan forgiveness after making 10 years of qualifying payments. The changes will make it easier for some borrowers to receive debt forgiveness.

    If the Supreme Court ultimately gives the student loan forgiveness program the green light, it’s possible the government will begin issuing some debt cancellations fairly quickly. The administration has said it already approved 16 million applications for relief.

    But several of the conservative justices expressed skepticism last week about whether Biden has the power to implement his student loan forgiveness program.

    Lawyers for the government have remained confident that their plan is legal. They point to a 2003 law passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that grants the secretary of education power to make sure people are not worse off in respect to their student loans in the event of a national emergency.

    “I’m confident we’re on the right side of the law,” Biden told CNN a day after the oral arguments when asked if he was confident the administration would prevail in the case. “I’m not confident of the outcome of the decision yet.”

    If the Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, it could be possible for the administration to make some modifications to the policy and try again – though that process could take months.

    The pandemic pause on payments will remain in effect until either 60 days after the Supreme Court’s decision, or late August – whichever comes first.

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  • Fact check: Republicans at CPAC make false claims about Biden, Zelensky, the FBI and children | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Republicans at CPAC make false claims about Biden, Zelensky, the FBI and children | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Maryland. And the members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics.

    Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat.

    Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl.

    And that’s not all. Here is a fact check of 13 false claims from the conference, which continues on Saturday.

    Marjorie Taylor Greene said the Republican Party has a duty to protect children. Listing supposed threats to children, she said, “Now whether it’s like Zelensky saying he wants our sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine…” Later in her speech, she said, “I will look at a camera and directly tell Zelensky: you’d better leave your hands off of our sons and daughters, because they’re not dying over there.”

    Facts First: Greene’s claim is false. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t say he wants American sons and daughters to fight or die for Ukraine. The false claim, which was debunked by CNN and others earlier in the week, is based on a viral video that clipped Zelensky’s comments out of context.

    19-second video of Zelensky goes viral. See what was edited out

    In reality, Zelensky predicted at a press conference in late February that if Ukraine loses the war against Russia because it does not receive sufficient support from elsewhere, Russia will proceed to enter North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries in the Baltics (a region made up of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) that the US will be obligated to send troops to defend. Under the treaty that governs NATO, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and Zelensky didn’t say Americans should fight there.

    Greene is one of the people who shared the out-of-context video on Twitter this week. You can read a full fact-check, with Zelensky’s complete quote, here.

    Right-wing commentator and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon criticized right-wing cable channel Fox at length for, he argued, being insufficiently supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Among other things, Bannon claimed that, on the night of the election in November 2020, “Fox News illegitimately called it for the opposition and not Donald J. Trump, of which our nation has never recovered.” Later, he said Trump is running again after “having it stolen, in broad daylight, of which they [Fox] participate in.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. On election night in 2020, Fox accurately projected that Biden had won the state of Arizona. This projection did not change the outcome of the election; all of the votes are counted regardless of what media outlets have projected, and the counting showed that Biden won Arizona, and the election, fair and square. The 2020 election was not “stolen” from Trump.

    NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND - MARCH 03: Former White House chief strategist for the Trump Administration Steve Bannon speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on March 03, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland. The annual conservative conference entered its second day of speakers including congressional members, media personalities and members of former President Donald Trump's administration. President Donald Trump will address the event on Saturday. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Bannon has a harsh message for Fox News at CPAC

    Fox, like other major media outlets, did not project that Biden had won the presidency until four days later. Fox personalities went on to repeatedly promote lies that the election was stolen from Trump – even as they privately dismissed and mocked these false claims, according to court filings from a voting technology company that is suing Fox for defamation.

    Rep. Jim Jordan claimed that Biden, “on day one,” made “three key changes” to immigration policy. Jordan said one of those changes was this: “We’re not going to deport anyone who come.” He proceeded to argue that people knowing “we’re not going to get deported” was a reason they decided to migrate to the US under Biden.

    Facts First: Jordan inaccurately described the 100-day deportation pause that Biden attempted to impose immediately after he took office on January 20, 2021. The policy did not say the US wouldn’t deport “anyone who comes.” It explicitly did not apply to anyone who arrived in the country after the end of October 2020, meaning people who arrived under the Biden administration or in the last months of the Trump administration could still be deported.

    Biden did say during the 2020 Democratic primary that “no one, no one will be deported at all” in his first 100 days as president. But Jordan claimed that this was the policy Biden actually implemented on his first day in office; Biden’s actual first-day policy was considerably narrower.

    Biden’s attempted 100-day pause also did not apply to people who engaged in or were suspected of terrorism or espionage, were seen to pose a national security risk, had waived their right to remain in the US, or whom the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the law required to be removed.

    The pause was supposed to be in effect while the Department of Homeland Security conducted a review of immigration enforcement practices, but it was blocked by a federal judge shortly after it was announced.

    Rep. Ralph Norman strongly suggested the FBI had tipped off the media to its August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort in Florida for government documents in the former president’s possession – while concealing its subsequent document searches of properties connected to Biden.

    Norman said: “When I saw the raid at Mar-a-Lago – you know, the cameras, the FBI – and compare that to when they found Biden’s, all of the documents he had, where was the media, where was the FBI? They kept it quiet early on, didn’t let it out. The job of the next president is going to be getting rid of the insiders that are undermining this government, and you’ve gotta clean house.”

    Facts First: Norman’s narrative is false. The FBI did not tip off the media to its search of Mar-a-Lago; CNN reported the next day that the search “happened so quietly, so secretly, that it wasn’t caught on camera at all.” Rather, media outlets belatedly sent cameras to Mar-a-Lago because Peter Schorsch, publisher of the website Florida Politics, learned of the search from non-FBI sources and tweeted about it either after it was over or as it was just concluding, and because Trump himself made a public statement less than 20 minutes later confirming that a search had occurred. Schorsch told CNN on Thursday: “I can, unequivocally, state that the FBI was not one of my two sources which alerted me to the raid.”

    Brian Stelter, then CNN’s chief media correspondent, wrote in his article the day after the search: “By the time local TV news cameras showed up outside the club, there was almost nothing to see. Websites used file photos of the Florida resort since there were no dramatic shots of the search.”

    It’s true that the public didn’t find out until late January about the FBI’s November search of Biden’s former think tank office in Washington, which was conducted with the consent of Biden’s legal team. But the belated presence of journalists at Mar-a-Lago on the day of the Trump search in August is not evidence of a double standard.

    And it’s worth noting that media cameras were on the scene when Biden’s beach home in Delaware was searched by the FBI in February. News outlets had set up a media “pool” to make sure any search there was recorded.

    Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college and high school football coach, said, “Going into thousands of kids’ homes and talking to parents every year recruiting, half the kids in this country – I’m not talking about race, I’m just talking about – half the kids in this country have one or no parent. And it’s because of the attack on faith. People are losing faith because, for some reason, because the attack [on] God.”

    Facts First: Tuberville’s claim that half of American children don’t have two parents is incorrect. Official figures from the Census Bureau show that, in 2021, about 70% of US children under the age of 18 lived with two parents and about 65% lived with two married parents.

    About 22% of children lived with only a mother, about 5% with only a father, and about 3% with no parent. But the Census Bureau has explained that even children who are listed as living with only one parent may have a second parent; children are listed as living with only one parent if, for example, one parent is deployed overseas with the military or if their divorced parents share custody of them.

    It is true that the percentage of US children living in households with two parents has been declining for decades. Still, Tuberville’s statistic significantly exaggerated the current situation. His spokesperson told CNN on Thursday that the senator was speaking “anecdotally” from his personal experience meeting with families as a football coach.

    Tuberville claimed that today’s children are being “indoctrinated” in schools by “woke” ideology and critical race theory. He then said, “We don’t teach reading, writing and arithmetic anymore. You know, half the kids in this country, when they graduate – think about this: half the kids in this country, when they graduate, can’t read their diploma.”

    Facts First: This is false. While many Americans do struggle with reading, there is no basis for the claim that “half” of high school graduates can’t read a basic document like a diploma. “Mr. Tuberville does not know what he’s talking about at all,” said Patricia Edwards, a Michigan State University professor of language and literacy who is a past president of the International Literacy Association and the Literacy Research Association. Edwards said there is “no evidence” to support Tuberville’s claim. She also said that people who can’t read at all are highly unlikely to finish high school and that “sometimes politicians embellish information.”

    Tuberville could have accurately said that a significant number of American teenagers and adults have reading trouble, though there is no apparent basis for connecting these struggles with supposed “woke” indoctrination. The organization ProLiteracy pointed CNN to 2017 data that found 23% of Americans age 16 to 65 have “low” literacy skills in English. That’s not “half,” as ProLiteracy pointed out, and it includes people who didn’t graduate from high school and people who are able to read basic text but struggle with more complex literacy tasks.

    The Tuberville spokesperson said the senator was speaking informally after having been briefed on other statistics about Americans’ struggles with reading, like a report that half of adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.

    Rep. Jim Jordan claimed of Biden: “The president of the United States stood in front of Independence Hall, called half the country fascists.”

    Facts First: This is not true. Biden did not denounce even close to “half the country” in this 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He made clear that he was speaking about a minority of Republicans.

    In the speech, in which he never used the word “fascists,” Biden warned that “MAGA Republicans” like Trump are “extreme,” “do not respect the Constitution” and “do not believe in the rule of law.” But he also emphasized that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.” In other words, he made clear that he was talking about far less than half of Americans.

    Trump earned fewer than 75 million votes in 2020 in a country of more than 258 million adults, so even a hypothetical criticism of every single Trump voter would not amount to criticism of “half the country.”

    Rep. Scott Perry claimed that “average citizens need to just at some point be willing to acknowledge and accept that every single facet of the federal government is weaponized against every single one of us.” Perry said moments later, “The government doesn’t have the right to tell you that you can’t buy a gas stove but that you must buy an electric vehicle.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. The federal government has not told people that they can’t buy a gas stove or must buy an electric vehicle.

    The Biden administration has tried to encourage and incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles, but it has not tried to forbid the manufacture or purchase of traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines. Biden has set a goal of electric vehicles making up half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030.

    There was a January controversy about a Biden appointee to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., saying that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and that “any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the commission as a whole has not shown support for a ban, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a January press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

    Rep. Ralph Norman claimed that Biden had just laughed at a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl.

    “I don’t know whether y’all saw, I just saw it this morning: Biden laughing at the mother who had two sons – to die, and he’s basically laughing and saying the fentanyl came from the previous administration. Who cares where it came from? The fact is it’s here,” Norman said.

    Facts First: Norman’s claim is false. Biden did not laugh at the mother who lost her sons to fentanyl, the anti-abortion activist Rebecca Kiessling; in a somber tone, he called her “a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl.” Rather, he proceeded to laugh about how Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had baselessly blamed the Biden administration for the young men’s deaths even though the tragedy happened in mid-2020, during the Trump administration. You can watch the video of Biden’s remarks here.

    Kiessling has demanded an apology from Biden. She is entitled to her criticism of Biden’s remarks and his chuckle – but the video clearly shows Norman was wrong when he claimed Biden was “laughing at the mother.”

    Rep. Kat Cammack told a story about the first hearing of the new Republican-led House select subcommittee on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government. Cammack claimed she had asked a Democratic witness at this February hearing about his “incredibly vitriolic” Twitter feed in which, she claimed, he not only repeatedly criticized Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh but even went “so far as to encourage people to harass this Supreme Court justice.”

    Facts First: This story is false. The witness Cammack questioned in this February exchange at the subcommittee, former Obama administration deputy assistant attorney general Elliot Williams, did not encourage people to harass Kavanaugh. In fact, it’s not even true that Cammack accused him at the February hearing of having encouraged people to harass Kavanaugh. Rather, at the hearing, she merely claimed that Williams had tweeted numerous critical tweets about Kavanaugh but had been “unusually quiet” on Twitter after an alleged assassination attempt against the justice. Clearly, not tweeting about the incident is not the same thing as encouraging harassment.

    Williams, now a CNN legal analyst (he appeared at the subcommittee hearing in his personal capacity), said in a Thursday email that he had “no idea” what Cammack was looking at on his innocuous Twitter feed. He said: “I used to prosecute violent crimes, and clerked for two federal judges. Any suggestion that I’ve ever encouraged harassment of anyone – and particularly any official of the United States – is insulting and not based in reality.”

    Cammack’s spokesperson responded helpfully on Thursday to CNN’s initial queries about the story Cammack told at CPAC, explaining that she was referring to her February exchange with Williams. But the spokesperson stopped responding after CNN asked if Cammack was accurately describing this exchange with Williams and if they had any evidence of Williams actually having encouraged the harassment of Kavanaugh.

    Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana boasted about the state of the country “when Republicans were in charge.” Among other claims about Trump’s tenure, he said that “in four years,” Republicans “delivered 3.5% unemployment” and “created 8 million new jobs.”

    Facts First: This is inaccurate in two ways. First, the economic numbers for the full “four years” of Trump’s tenure are much worse than these numbers Kennedy cited; Kennedy was actually referring to Trump’s first three years while ignoring the fourth, which was marred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second, there weren’t “8 million new jobs” created even in Trump’s first three years.

    Kennedy could have correctly said there was a 3.5% unemployment rate after three years of the Trump administration, but not after four. The unemployment rate skyrocketed early in Trump’s fourth year, on account of the pandemic, before coming down again, and it was 6.3% when Trump left office in early 2021. (It fell to 3.4% this January under Biden, better than in any month under Trump.)

    And while the economy added about 6.7 million jobs under Trump before the pandemic-related crash of March and April 2020, that’s not the “8 million jobs” Kennedy claimed – and the economy ended up shedding millions of jobs in Trump’s fourth year. Over the full four years of Trump’s tenure, the economy netted a loss of about 2.7 million jobs.

    Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and an adviser to his 2020 campaign, claimed that the last time a CPAC crowd was gathered at this venue in Maryland, in February 2020, “We had the lowest unemployment in American history.” After making other boasts about Donald Trump’s presidency, she said, “But how quickly it all changed.” She added, “Under Joe Biden, America is crumbling.”

    Facts First: Lara Trump’s claim about February 2020 having “the lowest unemployment in American history” is false. The unemployment rate was 3.5% at the time – tied for the lowest since 1969, but not the all-time lowest on record, which was 2.5% in 1953. And while Lara Trump didn’t make an explicit claim about unemployment under Biden, it’s not true that things are worse today on this measure; again, the most recent unemployment rate, 3.4% for January 2023, is better than the rate at the time of CPAC’s 2020 conference or at any other time during Donald Trump’s presidency.

    Multiple speakers at CPAC decried the high number of fentanyl overdose deaths. But some of the speakers inflated that number while attacking Biden’s immigration policy.

    Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, claimed that “in the last 12 months in America, deaths by fentanyl poisoning totaled 110,000 Americans.” He blamed “Biden’s open border” for these deaths.

    Rep. Scott Perry claimed: “Meanwhile over on this side of the border, where there isn’t anybody, they’re running this fentanyl in; it’s killing 100,000 Americans – over 100,000 Americans – a year.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that there are more than 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year. That is the total number of deaths from all drug overdoses in the US; there were 106,699 such deaths in 2021. But the number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, primarily fentanyl, is smaller – 70,601 in 2021.

    Fentanyl-related overdoses are clearly a major problem for the country and by far the biggest single contributor to the broader overdose problem. Nonetheless, claims of “110,000” and “over 100,000” fentanyl deaths per year are significant exaggerations. And while the number of overdose deaths and fentanyl-related deaths increased under Biden in 2021, it was also troubling under Trump in 2020 – 91,799 total overdose deaths and 56,516 for synthetic opioids other than methadone.

    It’s also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled in by US citizens through legal ports of entry rather than by migrants sneaking past other parts of the border. Contrary to frequent Republican claims, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized thousands of pounds of fentanyl under Biden.

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  • CFPB: What it does and why its future is in question | CNN Business

    CFPB: What it does and why its future is in question | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The US Supreme Court decided this week to hear a case that will consider the constitutionality of funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and, in doing so, test the constraints of US regulators’ power. The case would be heard in the fall, with a decision likely by summer 2024.

    But what is the CFPB? How does its work affect your wallet? And why is its future potentially at risk?

    The agency was created after the 2008 financial meltdown, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That law was passed in the wake of the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession that followed.

    The broad purpose of the CFPB is to protect consumers from financial abuses and to serve as the central agency for consumer financial protection authorities.

    Prior to its creation, as the agency notes on its site, “[c]onsumer financial protection had not been the primary focus of any federal agency, and no agency had effective tools to set the rules for and oversee the whole market.”

    The CFPB has regulatory authority over providers of many types of financial products and services, including credit cards, banking accounts, loan servicing, credit reporting and consumer debt collection.

    It is charged with implementing and enforcing consumer protection laws, making rules and issuing guidance for consumer financial institutions. And it is the place consumers can go to lodge complaints about financial products and services.

    Importantly, Dodd-Frank also gave the agency new authority to determine whether any given consumer financial product or service is unfair, deceptive or abusive and therefore unlawful.

    While there are critics of the agency’s current structure and funding, it has saved consumers money, made it easier for them to seek redress and to get better clarity and more tailored responses from companies when they have a problem with their accounts, loans or credit reports.

    “It has completely changed the consumer financial marketplace. Overall it has had a tremendous impact on making it more fair and transparent,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center.

    For instance, the CFPB has taken action against bank overdraft policies. “Arguably, the focus on overdraft practices has led some banks to eliminate or reduce their overdraft fees,” said Christine Hines, legislative director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

    And it has gone after institutions for saddling consumers with pointless products, excessive fees and punitive terms.

    Both Hines and Saunders made a special note of CFPB’s actions against Wells Fargo, after the agency found the bank had been engaging in multiple abusive and unlawful consumer practices across several financial products between 2011 and 2022 — from auto loans to mortgage loans to bank accounts.

    Last month, the agency required the bank to pay more than $2 billion to customers who were harmed by such practices, plus a $1.7 billion fine that will go into a relief fund for victims.

    “More than 16 million accounts at Wells Fargo were subject to their illegal practices, including misapplied payments, wrongful foreclosures, and incorrect fees and interest charges,” the agency said in a blog post.

    In the area of mortgages, “CFPB has written rules to implement new protections so that mortgage lenders don’t make loans with tricks and traps that lead people to lose their homes,” Saunders said.

    It also has created other safeguards, including rules on how service providers should communicate with borrowers who want to find alternatives to foreclosure, Hines noted.

    Currently, the agency is in the midst of an effort to curb excessive or “junk” fees on a range of consumer financial products, such as credit card late fees.

    Critics of the CFPB have been trying for years to limit its power and independence, attacking the way the agency is structured and funded. Like federal banking regulators, its funding is not determined by lawmakers in Congress as part of the annual appropriations process. Rather, it gets its money from the Federal Reserve System’s earnings.

    “This nontraditional funding source limits congressional oversight of the agency and is the subject of legal challenges,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

    The latest challenge — arising from a federal appeals court ruling that CFPB’s funding violates the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause and separation of powers — is what the Supreme Court will take up in its October term.

    While it’s impossible to predict how the justices will rule, should they decide to uphold the appeals court ruling, that will put in doubt how the agency will be funded going forward, and whether it can continue to function effectively.

    It’s also unclear whether the agency’s actions and rule-making over the past 11 years would be invalidated, nor what impact it would have on banks and other financial institutions that have set up systems to be in compliance with CFPB rules and safe harbors.

    “The agency would be unable to do anything if the funding is invalidated. And prior rules could be challenged as the agency did not have a legal funding source that it could use to write those rules,” Cowen Washington Research Group analyst Jaret Seiberg said in a note to clients.

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  • Biden administration tells student loan forgiveness applicants it is ‘confident’ in face of Supreme Court skepticism | CNN Politics

    Biden administration tells student loan forgiveness applicants it is ‘confident’ in face of Supreme Court skepticism | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The Biden administration is projecting confidence about the fate of President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation program in a message to applicants, even in the face of skepticism from conservative Supreme Court justices in Tuesday’s high-stakes oral arguments.

    Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in an email sent to millions of borrowers who applied for debt cancellation that the administration “mounted a powerful case” in support of Biden’s executive action.

    “Our Administration is confident in our legal authority to adopt this plan, and today made clear that opponents of the program lack standing to even bring their case to court,” Cardona wrote in the email update obtained by CNN.

    The email update to applicants reflects a position administration officials have maintained in the wake of the oral arguments. But it also implicitly lays out the administration’s view of the political dynamics of a move that has became an immediate partisan flashpoint. As applicants and administration officials alike settle in for what will likely be months of waiting for a final decision, the update sent to roughly 7 million people also provides a window into the reach the administration would have to frame the debate – and consequences – should the program be struck down.

    Cardona’s message comes as millions of borrowers remain in limbo as they await a Supreme Court decision on whether Biden’s action to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt will stand.

    White House officials, who closely monitored the oral arguments in two challenges, have maintained the position that they will ultimately prevail in the cases that challenge Biden’s authority to discharge millions of dollars in federally held loans. While they remain confident on the merits, sources continue to highlight the view inside the administration that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the challenges – which would render the arguments over the authority itself moot.

    One source familiar told CNN that the White House remains confident that things will go their way, simply saying: “We’ll win.”

    A particular flashpoint in the hearing was the states’ arguments that the loan forgiveness program’s potential harms to MOHELA – the Missouri-created entity that services loans in the state – gives Missouri standing.

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett stood out among the conservatives for asking particularly pointed questions of the GOP states about their standing arguments, setting her apart as a potential pickup vote for the court’s three liberal members.

    “If MOHELA is an arm of the state, why didn’t you just strong-arm MOHELA and say you’ve got to pursue this suit,” Barrett asked Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell.

    The question was one of several directed at Campbell, who represented the group of Republican-led states that argue the administration exceeded its authority, about the states’ standing claims.

    Another source familiar said that Barrett’s comments only raised optimism within the administration.

    But as several conservative justices leveled sharp questions related the government’s authority on the matter, Cardona’s update appeared intended to assuage overarching concerns.

    It also previewed a political contrast officials will likely elevate should Supreme Court strike down Biden’s actions – one White House officials have repeatedly pressed as the challenges have made their way through the courts.

    “While opponents of this program would deny relief to tens of millions of working- and middle-class Americans, we are fighting to deliver relief to borrowers who need support as they get back on their feet after the economic crisis caused by the pandemic,” Cardona wrote.

    Biden’s plan would cancel as much as $10,000 in federal student loan debt for people earning less than $125,000 a year, or less than $250,000 for married couples. Individuals on Pell Grants could see up to $20,000 forgiven. In all, more than 40 million federal borrowers would qualify for some level of debt cancelation, with roughly 20 million who would have their balance forgiven entirely.

    The Biden administration received 26 million applications for the program, which has been frozen as the court battles have played out, and more than 16 million applications had already been approved.

    Cardona reiterated that a pause on federal loan payments, which was implemented during the Trump administration in response to the pandemic and was set to restart at the same time cancellation was implemented, remain on hold as the Supreme Court deliberations play out.

    “While we await the Supreme Court’s decision, the pause on student loan payments remains in effect,” Cardona wrote. “Payments will resume 60 days after the Supreme Court announces its decision.”

    If the litigation is not resolved by June 30, payments are scheduled to resume 60 days after that date. If it has not made a decision or resolved the litigation by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that.

    The Supreme Court’s decision is expected to come this summer.

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  • Opinion: The one critical step Congress could take to protect kids online | CNN

    Opinion: The one critical step Congress could take to protect kids online | CNN

    Editor’s Note: Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advocacy group based in Washington, DC. He is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    This week the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that raised thorny questions over algorithms and free speech on the Internet. In Gonzalez v. Google, lawyers for the parents of a teenager killed in an Islamic State attack are arguing that YouTube should be held liable for promoting content from the group.

    The political debates over how much speech protections online cover Big Tech firms have inflamed the right for years. In the oral arguments, at least, the justices seemed uncertain about how best to proceed with the complex issues at play.

    But new research shows some issues surrounding tech don’t have a political divide. A new report I wrote for the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Institute for Family Studies shows widespread concern around kids online. And a set of policy proposals that aim to restore parents’ ability to shepherd their kids on the wild west that is the Web all recorded high levels of support across parents from both political sides.

    This issue is something that nearly every parent has to navigate. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that the average age of first exposure to pornography is now 12, and that three-quarters of teens had seen porn online by age 17.

    But parents have plenty to worry about kids online in addition to early exposure to pornography. All manner of online content can impact a child’s life. As this week’s Supreme Court case reminds us, youth can be lured into extremism or self-harm via online content. Parents might want to know if their child is becoming increasingly drawn toward figures who share racist or misogynistic views online.

    Documents released by a whistleblower indicated Facebook’s (now known as Meta, Instagram’s parent company) internal data showed the site made “body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls,” and also led to more severe and self-destructive thoughts. While the company disputed the claims, it also postponed an “Instagram for Kids” offering. Cyberbullying and non-consensual nude photo sharing have plagued high schools.

    These concerns are resonating with policymakers. Current law and decades of Supreme Court precedent establish much more leeway for Congress to protect kids online without having to hash out the complexities of more wide-ranging free speech concerns.

    A bipartisan effort to take modest steps to protect kids online might bear fruit. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Connecticut Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal have been pushing their colleagues to pass their Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would update the framework for how tech companies serve minors online.

    Among other things, it would require social media sites to default minors into the strongest possible privacy protections and give parents new tools to monitor harmful content. It would mandate social media platforms mitigate harms to minors, such as by restricting or eliminating content relating to self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. And it would set up require an annual audit of risks to minors, including providing broader data access to researchers to study the impact of social media on kids’ development.

    The bill was opposed by some civil rights and LGBTQ groups, who worried that putting greater content restrictions on what kids may come across online could prevent them from accessing information about sexual education without their parents’ knowledge. But that concern may ring hollow with parents who believe they should have better tools to know if their 13- or 14-year-old child is searching for information about birth control.

    Some say parents should be the ultimate gatekeeper of their kids online, which is true. But we have laws relating to the minimum age to consume alcohol or drive a car precisely because we know adolescents’ brains are still developing, and the potential to cause harm to oneself or others is high. After all, unless a critical mass of families agree to move social life offline, minors who don’t have access to Instagram, TikTok or Facebook may be missing out on crucial information or opportunities to socialize.

    Moreover, while some tools exist for helping keep kids safe online, they are often easily circumvented. Asking individual parent to be an expert on the plethora of user settings, filters and options for keeping age-inappropriate content away from their kids places an undue burden on families. Establishing age-based controls, and policing them effectively, would be an appropriate step for Congress to take.

    Indeed, some say the Blackburn-Blumenthal framework doesn’t go far enough. The policy solutions polled in our recent report are more aggressive than those included in KOSA, and still receive support from three in four parents.

    For example, nearly 9 in 10 Republican parents, and 77% of all parents, agreed with a proposal to require social media platforms to grant parents full access to what their children are seeing and who they are communicating with online, the most popular policy polled among that subgroup. 81% were in favor of a law that would require social media platforms to get parents’ permission before allowing minors to open an account. Another two-thirds of parents agreed or strongly agreed that internet service providers should be required to obtain age verification (like a drivers’ license or credit card) before allowing individuals to view pornography.

    Future action will likely take up these concerns. Just last week, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a bill that would bar users from under age 16 from opening a social media account. While the implementation mechanism would likely need to be improved on – relying on Big Tech companies to keep copies of every American’s drivers’ license safe may not work out – the direction of the legislation is laudable, recognizing that American parents are looking for bold action when it comes to keeping kids safe online.

    The battles over Big Tech and accusations of algorithmic bias may be what gets the Republican base riled up. But in a divided Congress, both parties should listen to the parents who make up their base – giving families more tools to protect their kids online is not only long overdue, it’s a political winner.

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  • 2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics

    2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Everett R. Berryman Jr. was 11 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in public schools illegal.

    But supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Berryman was attending public school, had no intention of complying. Five years later, in 1959, as Berryman was looking ahead to attending 7th grade, the county shuttered all public schools and opened a private school – for White children only. It would take five years, an intervention by the Department of Justice and another Supreme Court order, before integrated public schooling in Prince Edward County proceeded.

    Around the same time, in North Carolina, Dr. E.B. Palmer was working as the executive secretary of state for the North Carolina Teachers Association, advocating for Black teachers after Brown was decided.

    “When the school system said ‘separate but equal,’ that was fine,” Palmer recalled to CNN. “But when we moved a little further, they tried to say, ‘We don’t want Black teachers teaching White students.’”

    Nearly 40,000 teaching positions held by Black teachers in 17 southern and border states would be lost in the ensuring years, according to Samuel B. Ethridge, a National Education Association official who was a leader in the movement to integrate teacher organizations during the civil rights movement.

    Today, Brown v. Board of Education is remembered as a watershed moment in the history of America’s civil rights progress and the fight against systemic racism. But the ruling also had the unintended effect of leaving behind thousands of Black students and educators whose fates were not considered when America moved to reshape its education system.

    Berryman and Palmer shared their stories with CNN as part of the “History Refocused” series, which explores surprising and personal stories from America’s past that may bring new understanding of today’s conflicts.

    The Supreme Court officially struck down the legal basis for segregated classrooms in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a second, follow-up ruling a year later outlined the process for implementing school desegregation. In “Brown II,” the Supreme Court ordered district courts to enforce desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” reasoning that such language would provide local authorities with time to adjust to the new law of the land.

    Instead, those opposed to desegregation exploited the terms, including officials in Prince Edward County, who figured that by starving the local public school system of funding, they could do an end-run around the high court’s order by opening a private – and all-White – school.

    “Even in cases where White children or White families rather could not afford to attend the school, they even charged as little as a dollar to allow White students to attend school,” Dawn Williams, dean of Howard University’s School of Education, told CNN. “Now, for the Black community – something totally different for the Black community. There were no forms of public schooling.”

    To combat the lack of educational opportunities, members of the Black community in the area created a grassroots community center, which also served as a makeshift school, but it was not the real thing.

    Two years into the lockout, the Berryman family looked for other ways to keep their children in school. They tried to enroll their children in the neighboring county of Appomattox, Virginia, only to find out that they had to live in the county and present a valid address to do so. The next step was to move in with a family friend.

    At that point, Berryman was a 14-year-old who stood 6-foot-2 but was still in 7th grade, when he should have been in the 9th grade had he not missed out on years of public schooling.

    “I was the tallest guy in the whole school,” he recalled.

    Eventually, the Supreme Court had to become involved again. In 1964, it ruled that the time for desegregating schools “with all deliberate speed” had passed and that there was no justification for “denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia.”

    Berryman and his family returned to Prince Edward County when the public schools reopened, and he remembered feeling “happy to be back home.” But there were constant reminders of the toll taken on the Black community.

    “We ran across students – all students were with us that hadn’t been in school for going on five years. And some of the students here began school at 10 years old. … And on the upper end, we had guys and girls graduating high school at 21 and 22 years old,” Berryman said. “So we had – it was like a kaleidoscope of pupils every which way in this grand scheme of school opening again.”

    Brown was intended to protect education opportunities for students. It didn’t say anything about teachers whose jobs would be soon jeopardized by school integration, when Black students often moved to White facilities that had superior conditions.

    In the wake of Brown, various tactics were used across the nation to undercut Black teachers and educators, from outright dismissals or demotions to forcing teachers to teach unfamiliar subjects or grades – making it easier to fire them based on poor performance.

    In Alabama, tenure rules were rewritten in several counties and teachers believed they were dismissed because of their participation in the civil rights movement, the NEA found in a 1965 report. North Carolina and South Carolina repealed their teachers’ continuing contract laws.

    “I had to spend day and night traveling all over the state following behind complaints of Black teachers being dismissed where schools were being desegregated,” recalled Palmer, the former official with the North Carolina Teachers Association.

    Ethridge, writing in the Negro Educational Review in 1979, found that by the mid-1970s, 39,386 teaching positions had been lost by Black teachers as a result of desegregation in 17 states, mostly in the South. In the 1970-71 school year alone, the cumulative loss in income to the Black community in those states totaled $240,564,911, the NAACP found.

    “The cumulative amount is staggering to the imagination,” Ethridge wrote in his research, noting that even as the Black student population grew in those years, the number of Black teachers decreased in those states.

    The Black teaching force has never recovered from the tremendous losses. In the 2017-18 school year, even though Whites accounted for less than half of the students in public schools – the result of a steady increase in diversity over the last 30 years – White teachers made up 79% of the workforce, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 87% three decades earlier. The percentage of public school Black teachers – 7% in 2017-18 – decreased one percentage point over that same time period.

    “Sadly, the reasons for this disparity go far back, and a key impetus happened just as the nation attempted to fix our public education system,” Williams said.

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  • Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s hearing on Twitter’s liability for terrorist use of its platform | CNN Business

    Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s hearing on Twitter’s liability for terrorist use of its platform | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    After back-to-back oral arguments this week, the Supreme Court appears reluctant to hand down the kind of sweeping ruling about liability for terrorist content on social media that some feared would upend the internet.

    On Wednesday, the justices struggled with claims that Twitter contributed to a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul by hosting content unrelated to the specific incident. Arguments in that case, Twitter v. Taamneh, came a day after the court considered whether YouTube can be sued for recommending videos created by ISIS to its users.

    The closely watched cases carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.

    For nearly three hours of oral argument, the justices asked attorneys for Twitter, the US government and the family of Nawras Alassaf – a Jordanian citizen killed in the 2017 attack – how to weigh several factors that might determine Twitter’s level of legal responsibility, if any. But while the justices quickly identified what the relevant factors were, they seemed divided on how to analyze them.

    The court’s conservatives appeared more open to Twitter’s arguments that it is not liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett at one point theorizing point-by-point how such an opinion could be written and Justice Neil Gorsuch repeatedly offering Twitter what he believed to be a winning argument about how to read the statute.

    The panel’s liberals, by contrast, seemed uncomfortable with finding that Twitter should face no liability for hosting ISIS content. They pushed back on Twitter’s claims that the underlying law should only lead to liability if the help it gave to ISIS can be linked to the specific terrorist attack that ultimately harmed the plaintiffs.

    Here are the takeaways from Wednesday:

    The justices spent much of the time picking through the text of the Anti-Terrorism Act, the law that Twitter is accused of violating – especially the meaning of the words “knowingly” and “substantial.”

    The law says liability can be established for “any person who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance, or who conspires with the person who committed such an act of international terrorism.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed unpersuaded by Twitter attorney Seth Waxman’s arguments that Twitter could have been liable if the company were warned that specific accounts were planning a specific attack, but that those were not the facts of the case and Twitter was therefore not liable in the absence of such activity and such warnings.

    Chief Justice John Roberts grappled with the meaning of “substantial” assistance: Hypothetically, he asked, would donating $100 to ISIS suffice, or $10,000?

    “Substantial assistance” would hinge on the degree to which a terror group actually uses a platform such as Twitter to plan, coordinate and carry out a terrorist attack, Waxman said at one point. The existence of some tweets that generally benefited ISIS, he argued, should not be considered substantial assistance.

    The justices alluded to the gravity of the dilemma as they drew analogies to other industries that have grappled with related claims.

    “We’re used to thinking about banks as providing very important services to terrorists,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “Maybe we’re not so used to, but it seems to be true, that various kinds of social media services also provide very important services to terrorists,” the liberal justice said. “If you know you’re providing a very important service to terrorists, why aren’t you [said to be] providing substantial assistance and doing it knowingly?”

    Eric Schnapper, an attorney representing the Alassaf family – who had also argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in Tuesday’s Supreme Court arguments in Gonzalez v. Google – again struggled to answer justices’ questions as they sought to find some limiting principle to constrain the scope of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Schnapper to respond to concerns that a ruling finding Twitter liable for the ISIS attack — even when the tweets it hosted had nothing to do with it — would negatively affect charities and humanitarian organizations that might incidentally assist terrorist organizations through their work.

    Schnapper suggested those groups might be insulated from liability due to the law’s “knowledge” requirement, but did not offer the justices a way to draw a bright-line distinction.

    Justice Clarence Thomas hinted at the potential expansiveness of what Schnapper was proposing in calling for Twitter to be held liable for the ISIS tweets.

    “If we’re not pinpointing cause-and-effect or proximate cause for specific things, and you’re focused on infrastructure or just the availability of these platforms, then it would seem that every terrorist attack that uses this platform would also mean that Twitter is an aider and abettor in those instances,” Thomas said.

    “I think in the way that you phrased it, that would probably be, yes,” Schnapper replied, going on to suggest a test involving “remoteness and time, weighed together with volume of activity.”

    Several justices asked the parties to respond to hypotheticals about what liability a business would have for dealing with Osama bin Laden. Their reliance of the terrorist in their examples seemed to get at the “knowing” requirement of the law.

    However, the court is being asked to issue an opinion that will guide lower courts in cases that likely will not involve such high-profile figures.

    Kagan invoked bin Laden’s name when she put forward a hypothetical for US Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler about a bank that offered services to a known terrorist that were the same services it provided its non-terrorist clients. Kneedler, arguing that Twitter should not be found liable under the anti-terrorist law in this case, said that in that scenario, the bank could be sued under the law.

    Other exchanges during the hearing revolved around the liability for a business that sold bin Laden a cell phone, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asking if the business could be sued even if bin Laden did not use the cell phone for the terrorist attack that injured the plaintiff. Schnapper said that bin Laden would not need to use the cell phone in an attack for the seller to be found liable.

    Gorsuch put forward a theory for why Twitter should prevail in the case but neither Twitter nor the US Justice Department took him up on it.

    Gorsuch gave Waxman a chance to reframe his arguments for why Twitter shouldn’t be liable, based on language in the law suggesting a defendant is liable for assistance provided to a person who commits an act of international terrorism. Gorsuch noted the lawsuit against Twitter doesn’t link Twitter to the three people involved in the 2017 attack on the Istanbul nightclub.

    Waxman declined to fully adopt that view, arguing instead that the “aid and abet” language in the statute should be tied to the terrorist activity that gives rise to a suit.

    When Kneedler was up to podium, Gorsuch offered up the theory again, implying it would be a way for Twitter to avoid liability in this case.

    “It seems to me that that’s a pretty important limitation on aiding and abetting liability and conspiracy liability … that you have to aid an actual person,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not just a pedantic point. It has to do with the idea that you’re singling somebody out, and that is different than just doing your business normally, and that does help limit the scope of the act.”

    Jackson later hypothesized why Twitter and the US government were reluctant to endorse Gorsuch’s interpretation of the law, suggesting it was not the limitation Gorsuch thought it was.

    “I’m wondering whether the concern about that is, if you’re focusing on the person [who committed a terrorist act]… that it seems to take the focus away from the act itself,” she told Kneedler. “You could ‘aid and abet’ a person who committed the act, even if it’s not with respect to that act.”

    Justice Kagan voices concern on whether Supreme Court should step in. Listen why

    The Taamneh case is viewed as a turning point for the future of the internet, because a ruling against Twitter could expose the platform – and numerous other websites – to new lawsuits based on their hosting of terrorist content in spite of their efforts to remove such material.

    While it’s too early to tell how the justices may decide the case, the questioning on Wednesday suggested some members of the court believe Twitter should bear some responsibility for indirectly supporting ISIS in general, even if the company may not have been responsible for the specific attack in 2017 that led to the current case.

    But a key question facing the court is whether the Anti-Terrorism Act is the law that can reach that issue – or alternatively, whether the justices can craft a ruling in such a way that it does.

    Rulings in the cases heard this week are expected by late June.

    This story has been updated with Wednesday’s developments.

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  • What is the future of the internet? Don’t ask the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    What is the future of the internet? Don’t ask the Supreme Court | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Nine justices set out Tuesday to determine what the future of the internet would look like if the Supreme Court were to narrow the scope of a law that some believe created the age of modern social media.

    After nearly three hours of arguments, it was clear that the justices had no earthly idea.

    That hesitancy, coupled with the fact that the justices were wading for the first time into new territory, suggests the court, in the case at hand, is not likely to issue a sweeping decision with unknown ramifications in one of the most closely watched disputes of the term.

    Tech companies big and small have been following the case, fearful that the justices could reshape how the sites recommend and moderate content going forward and render websites vulnerable to dozens of lawsuits, threatening their very existence.

    The case before the justices was initially brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a US student who was killed in a Paris bistro in 2015 after ISIS terrorists opened fire. Now, her family seeks to hold YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, liable for her death because of the site’s alleged promotion – through algorithms – of terrorist videos.

    The family sued under a federal law called the Antiterrorism Act of 1990 , which authorizes such lawsuits for injuries “by reason of an act of international terrorism.”

    Lower courts dismissed the challenge, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the law that has been used for years to provide immunity for websites from what one justice on Tuesday called a “world of lawsuits” that stem from third party content. The Gonzalez family argues that Section 230 does not protect Google from liability when it comes to targeted recommendations.

    Oral arguments drifted into a maze of issues, raising concerns about trending algorithms, thumbnail pop-ups, artificial intelligence, emojis, endorsements and even Yelp restaurant reviews. But at the end of the day, the justices seemed deeply frustrated with the scope of the arguments before them and unclear of the road ahead.

    Family of ISIS victim says YouTube algorithm is liable. What will the Supreme Court say?


    02:30

    – Source:
    CNN Business

    A lawyer representing the plaintiffs challenging the law repeatedly failed, for instance, to offer substantial limiting principles to his argument that could trigger a deluge of lawsuits against powerful sites such as Google or Twitter or threaten the very survival of smaller sites. And some justices retracted from the “sky is falling” attitude put forward by an advocate for Google.

    On several occasions, the justices said they were confused by the arguments before them – a sign that they may find a way to dodge weighing in on the merits or send the case back to the lower courts for more deliberations. At the very least they seemed spooked enough to tread carefully.

    “I’m afraid I’m completely confused by whatever argument you’re making at the present time,” Justice Samuel Alito said early on. “So I guess I’m thoroughly confused,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said at another point. “I’m still confused,” Justice Clarence Thomas said halfway through arguments.

    Justice Elena Kagan even suggested that Congress step in. “I mean, we’re a court. We really don’t know about these things. You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet,” she said to laughter.

    But in court, Eric Schnapper, a lawyer for the family, repeatedly pushed much broader arguments that could impact other areas of third party content.

    Yet even Thomas, who has expressed reservations about the scope of Section 230 before, seemed skeptical. He sought clarification from Schnapper of how one might be able to distinguish between algorithms that “present cooking videos to people who are interested in cooking and ISIS videos to people interested in ISIS.”

    Alito asked whether Google might have been simply organizing information, instead of recommending any kind of content.

    “I don’t know where you’re drawing the line,” Alito said.

    Chief Justice John Roberts tried to make an analogy with a book seller. He suggested that Google recommending certain information is no different than a book seller sending a reader to a table of books with related content.

    At one point Kagan suggested that Schnapper was trying to gut the entire statute: “Does your position send us down the road such that 230 can’t mean anything at all?” she asked.

    When Lisa Blatt, a lawyer for Google, stood up she warned the justices that Section 230 “created today’s internet” because “Congress made that choice to stop lawsuits from stifling the internet in its infancy.”

    “Exposing websites to liability for implicitly recommending third-party context defies the text [of 230] and threatens today’s internet,” she added.

    In the end, Schnapper seemed to speak for the court when he said that “it’s hard to do this in the abstract.”

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  • Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s hearing in blockbuster internet speech case | CNN Business

    Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s hearing in blockbuster internet speech case | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Supreme Court justices appeared broadly concerned Tuesday about the potential unintended consequences of allowing websites to be sued for their automatic recommendations of user content, highlighting the challenges facing attorneys who want to hold Google accountable for suggesting YouTube videos created by terrorist groups.

    For nearly three hours on Tuesday, the nine justices peppered attorneys representing Google, the US government and the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American student killed in a 2015 ISIS attack, with questions about how the court could design a ruling that exposes harmful content recommendations to liability while still protecting innocuous ones.

    How – or if – the court draws that line could have significant implications for the way websites choose to rank, display and promote content to their users as they seek to avoid a litigation minefield.

    The attorney for the Gonzalez family argued that narrowing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – the federal law protecting websites’ right to moderate their platforms as they see fit – would not lead to sweeping consequences for the internet. But both the Court’s liberals and conservatives worried about the impact of such a decision on everything from “pilaf [recipes] from Uzbekistan” to individual users of YouTube, Twitter and other social media platforms.

    A big concern of the justices seems to be the waves of lawsuits that could happen if the court rules against Google.

    “Lawsuits will be nonstop,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at one point.

    But Eric Schnapper, representing the plaintiffs, argued that a ruling for Gonzalez would not have far-reaching effects because even if websites could face new liability as a result of the ruling, most suits would likely be thrown out anyway.

    “The implications are limited,” Schnapper said, “because the kinds of circumstance in which a recommendation would be actionable are limited.”

    Later, Justice Elena Kagan warned that narrowing Section 230 could lead to a wave of lawsuits, even if many of them would eventually be thrown out, in a line of questioning with US Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart.

    “You are creating a world of lawsuits,” Kagan said. “Really, anytime you have content, you also have these presentational and prioritization choices that can be subject to suit.”

    Chief Justice John Roberts mused that under a narrowed version of Section 230, terrorism-related cases might only be a small share of a much wider range of future lawsuits against websites alleging antitrust violations, discrimination, defamation and infliction of emotional distress, just to name a few.

    “I wouldn’t necessarily agree with ‘there would be lots of lawsuits’ simply because there are a lot of things to sue about,” Stewart said, “but they would not be suits that have much likelihood of prevailing, especially if the court makes clear that even after there’s a recommendation, the website still can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of the underlying third party.”

    Multiple justices pushed Schnapper to clarify how the court should treat recommendation algorithms if the same algorithm that promotes an ISIS video to someone interested in terrorism might be just as likely to recommend a pilaf recipe to someone interested in cooking.

    “I’m trying to get you to explain to us how something that is standard on YouTube for virtually anything you have an interest in, suddenly amounts to aiding and abetting [terrorism] because you’re [viewing] in the ISIS category,” Justice Clarence Thomas said.

    Schnapper attempted several explanations, including at one point digressing into a hypothetical about the difference between YouTube videos and video thumbnail images, but many of the justices were lost about what he was calling for.

    “I admit I’m completely confused by whatever argument you’re making at the present time,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

    Roberts added: “It may be significant if the algorithm is the same across … the different subject matters, because then they don’t have a focused algorithm with respect to terrorist activities… Then it might be harder for you to say that there’s selection involved for which you can be held responsible.”

    One of the few justices focusing on how changes to Section 230 could affect individual internet users was Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who repeatedly asked whether narrowing the law in the ways Schnapper has proposed could put average social media users in legal jeopardy.

    The text of Section 230 explicitly immunizes “users,” and not just social media platforms, from liability for the content posted by third parties. So a change that exposes tech platforms to new lawsuits could also have implications for users, according to several amicus briefs.

    Under Schnapper’s interpretation, could liking, retweeting or saying “check this out” expose individuals to lawsuits that they could not deflect by invoking Section 230?

    Yes, Schnapper acknowledged, because “that’s content you’ve created.”

    Barrett raised the issue again in a question for Justice Department lawyer Stewart. She asked: “So the logic of your position, I think, is that retweets or likes or ‘check this out’ for users, the logic of your position would be that 230 would not protect in that situation either. Correct?”

    Stewart said there was distinction between an individual user making a conscious decision to amplify content and an algorithm that is making choices on a systemic basis. But Stewart did not provide a clear answer about how he believed changes to Section 230 could affect individual users.

    Tech law experts say an onslaught of defamation litigation is the real threat if Section 230’s protections are weakened and the justices seemed to agree, posing several questions and hypothetical that turned on defamation claims.

    “People have focused on the [Antiterrorism Act], because that’s the one point that’s at issue here. But I suspect there will be many, many times more defamation suits,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, while pointing to other types of claims that also may flood the legal system if tech companies no longer had broad Section 230 immunity.

    Justice Samuel Alito posed for Schnapper a scenario where a competitor of a restaurant created a video making false claims about the restaurant violating health code and YouTube refusing to take the video down despite knowing its defamatory.

    Kagan seized on Alito’s hypothetical later on in the hearing, asking what happens if a platform recommended the false restaurant competitor’s video and called it the greatest video of all time, but didn’t repeat anything about the content of the video.

    “Is the provider on the hook for that defamation?” Kagan asked.

    This story and headline have been updated with developments from Tuesday’s hearing.

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  • Two Supreme Court cases this week could upend the entire internet | CNN Business

    Two Supreme Court cases this week could upend the entire internet | CNN Business


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court is set to hear back-to-back oral arguments this week in two cases that could significantly reshape online speech and content moderation.

    The outcome of the oral arguments, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, could determine whether tech platforms and social media companies can be sued for recommending content to their users or for supporting acts of international terrorism by hosting terrorist content. It marks the Court’s first-ever review of a hot-button federal law that largely protects websites from lawsuits over user-generated content.

    The closely watched cases, known as Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, carry significant stakes for the wider internet. An expansion of apps and websites’ legal risk for hosting or promoting content could lead to major changes at sites, including Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, to name a few.

    The litigation has produced some of the most intense rhetoric in years from the tech sector about the potential impact on the internet’s future. US lawmakers, civil society groups and more than two dozen states have also jumped into the debate with filings at the Court.

    At the heart of the legal battle is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a nearly 30-year-old federal law that courts have repeatedly said provide broad protections to tech platforms but that has since come under scrutiny alongside growing criticism of Big Tech’s content moderation decisions.

    The law has critics on both sides of the aisle. Many Republican officials allege that Section 230 gives social media platforms a license to censor conservative viewpoints. Prominent Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have argued Section 230 prevents tech giants from being held accountable for spreading misinformation and hate speech.

    In recent years, some in Congress have pushed for changes to Section 230 that might expose tech platforms to more liability, along with proposals to amend US antitrust rules and other bills aimed at reining in dominant tech platforms. But those efforts have largely stalled, leaving the Supreme Court as the likeliest source of change in the coming months to how the United States regulates digital services.

    Rulings in the cases are expected by the end of June.

    The case involving Google zeroes in on whether it can be sued because of its subsidiary YouTube’s algorithmic promotion of terrorist videos on its platform.

    According to the plaintiffs in the case — the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris — YouTube’s targeted recommendations violated a US antiterrorism law by helping to radicalize viewers and promote ISIS’s worldview.

    The allegation seeks to carve out content recommendations so that they do not receive protections under Section 230, potentially exposing tech platforms to more liability for how they run their services.

    Google and other tech companies have said that that interpretation of Section 230 would increase the legal risks associated with ranking, sorting and curating online content, a basic feature of the modern internet. Google has claimed that in such a scenario, websites would seek to play it safe by either removing far more content than is necessary, or by giving up on content moderation altogether and allowing even more harmful material on their platforms.

    Friend-of-the-court filings by Craigslist, Microsoft, Yelp and others have suggested that the stakes are not limited to algorithms and could also end up affecting virtually anything on the web that might be construed as making a recommendation. That might mean even average internet users who volunteer as moderators on various sites could face legal risks, according to a filing by Reddit and several volunteer Reddit moderators. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and former California Republican Rep. Chris Cox, the original co-authors of Section 230, argued to the Court that Congress’ intent in passing the law was to give websites broad discretion to moderate content as they saw fit.

    The Biden administration has also weighed in on the case. In a brief filed in December, it argued that Section 230 does protect Google and YouTube from lawsuits “for failing to remove third-party content, including the content it has recommended.” But, the government’s brief argued, those protections do not extend to Google’s algorithms because they represent the company’s own speech, not that of others.

    The second case, Twitter v. Taamneh, will decide whether social media companies can be sued for aiding and abetting a specific act of international terrorism when the platforms have hosted user content that expresses general support for the group behind the violence without referring to the specific terrorist act in question.

    The plaintiffs in the case — the family of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in an ISIS attack in Istanbul in 2017 — have alleged that social media companies including Twitter had knowingly aided ISIS in violation of a US antiterrorism law by allowing some of the group’s content to persist on their platforms despite policies intended to limit that type of content.

    Twitter has said that just because ISIS happened to use the company’s platform to promote itself does not constitute Twitter’s “knowing” assistance to the terrorist group, and that in any case the company cannot be held liable under the antiterror law because the content at issue in the case was not specific to the attack that killed Alassaf. The Biden administration, in its brief, has agreed with that view.

    Twitter had also previously argued that it was immune from the suit thanks to Section 230.

    Other tech platforms such as Meta and Google have argued in the case that if the Court finds the tech companies cannot be sued under US antiterrorism law, at least under these circumstances, it would avoid a debate over Section 230 altogether in both cases, because the claims at issue would be tossed out.

    In recent years, however, several Supreme Court justices have shown an active interest in Section 230, and have appeared to invite opportunities to hear cases related to the law. Last year, Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch wrote that new state laws, such as Texas’s that would force social media platforms to host content they would rather remove, raise questions of “great importance” about “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

    A number of petitions are currently pending asking the Court to review the Texas law and a similar law passed by Florida. The Court last month delayed a decision on whether to hear those cases, asking instead for the Biden administration to submit its views.

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