Military Veterans and Patriots

Tag: SCOTUS

  • Frustrations!!!

    Frustrations!!!

    In my morning prayers I asked the Lord to help me write about some of the frustrations that we all feel.  To state that I am angry plus frustrated would be redundant.

    To begin with, I am frustrated with the US Supreme Court.  It is the duty of this court to ajudicate the law of the land.  Then why do we see so much election interference (AKA Voter Suppression) going un-challenged??  There are current issues with police in Pennsylvania telling voters that the polls are being closed early to allow vote counters to be able to catch up with the volume of votes.  In one instance, they were closing polls as early as 1:15 in the afternoon!!!   This is totally unacceptable!!

    My question is, where is the US Supreme Court when these kinds of issues are happening??  Is John Roberts asleep at the wheel??  If so, John, it is time for you to get your lazy ass in gear and address these voter suppresion issues!!!  And while we are on the subjuect of issues that you and the court should be addressing, let’s include illegal immigrant’s registering to vote, in what is supposed to be limited to legal residents of the country!!!

    So John, I have this to ask you.  Do you need an old time “Military  Airlift” (AKA a boot in the ass) to motivate you to do your damn job???  If so, I am sure I can find a voluteer to help you out.

    Another issue that gives many heartburn is the foot-dragging by local officials whose job it is to count the vote.  For instance, we are being told that it is often the State and Local issues that require extra time to count the vote thereby making the Federal issues wait on the count of state and local issues.   

    Like many, I do not live in Pennsylvania, Arizona or Georgia, so I do not feel that their problems should be shoved off on me and my fellow citizens who live in other jurisdictions.  So I ask, is it time to separate the election of Federal officials from the State and Local issues so that we are not forced to await the resolution of their problems before we know the results of Federal elections???

    The final part of my rant is the actions of congressional officials who stand in the way of issues the electorate want to have happen.  Too many times it has been Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi or any other stiff-necked committee chairman that has decided that this or that piece of legislation does not meet with their approval and it never comes to the floor for a vote.

    I know we are a democratically elected Republic, but has the time come to initiate National Referendums so these often occurring temper tantrums can no longer stall issues that the public wants to see enacted???  It may just be me speaking, but I believe it may be an issue whose time has come.  

    Term Limits can have the same effect, but we have seen little to no real movement to that issue either.  Just how long must we be chained to the ineffectual and  divisive actions of a few individuals who feel that they are entitled to rule over us??  

    If the duly elected do not want to see some of these things come to fruition, they might want to get their lazy asses in gear and begin to DO THE JOB they were elected to do!!!  They are not supposed to be our rulers, but our employees who are supposed to answer to “WE THE  PEOPLE”!!!

    I’m sure there are other frustrations the American People have, but this is just a few to get us to thinking.

    Walt 2024

  • The Supreme Court vs. the Administrative State

    The Supreme Court vs. the Administrative State

    The Supreme Court vs. the Administrative State

    Adam J. WhiteSeptember 2024 for commentary.org

    Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that judges should defer to regulators when they offer reasonable interpretations of ambiguously worded laws. As a matter of legal doctrine, the case in question—Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council—was important from the start. But for a long time, the importance of what came to be known as “Chevron deference” was limited to the world of regulatory litigators, agencies, judges, and administrative-law professors. In the larger scheme of things, it was a fairly mundane subset of a very mundane subject.

    Then, about a decade ago, everything changed. President Obama’s second term unleashed a wave of unprecedented regulatory fiats that depended on “Chevron deference” for their implementation. Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” would transform the nation’s energy industry. An “Open Internet Order” would dras-tically regulate Internet service providers to make them more “neutral.” A “Clean Water Rule” would dramatically extend federal regulatory power over farms and other privately owned lands by deeming even dry lands “wetlands.” And the programs called DACA and DAPA would unilaterally transform immigration policy. President Obama, facing a hostile Republican House majority, could not pass legislation for any of it. But, he told the American people in 2014, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.” That pen and that phone relied on Chevron deference to get things done.

    The Obama administration’s final years put the American political and judicial systems on notice that federal agencies had reached unprecedented levels of power, ambition, and gravity.

    An old term rose anew to describe them collectively. The term was the “administrative state.” Its governing doctrine and the source of its power was Chevron deference, which was deployed to give agencies the power to write and implement what amounted to legislation without the actual legislative branch having the slightest say in the matter.

    Conservative judges, foremost Justice Clarence Thomas, began to publish legal opinions rethinking administrative law from the ground up, endorsing the outright abandonment of Chevron deference. Conservative intellectuals like George Will embraced and amplified this new mood of judicial assertion. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, who since the 1980s had been Chevron’s most eloquent theorist and defender, began to signal second thoughts.

    The change was not simply partisan. It was an evolution in conservative legal thinking, and it began among judges and lawyers only in the early 2000s. The evolution was more a reflection of an increasingly confident conservative judicial worldview that sought to build on the ideas of textualism and originalism—ideas that urged judges to read laws for themselves to determine their meaning rather than deferring to unelected bureaucrats. Their passion for this effort was driven by increasingly implausible interpretations of old statutes by these agencies under the aggressively novel Obama administration, which sought to transform entire industries through new regulatory programs that their bureaucrats dreamed up.

    The entire intellectual exercise challenging the viability of Chevrondeference—the effort to answer the question of how much agencies can and should do when the laws they are bound to enforce do not provide adequate guidance—might have developed much more slowly, in law-review articles and scattered judicial opinions. The Obama administration’s final years, with their antinomian fervor, forced the question into full public view. Ideas have consequences, but not just the intended ones. Obama literally said that “we can’t wait” for legislators to act. That assertion of power not assigned by the Constitution to any executive branch official has now met a fiery end, in a Supreme Court decision handed down in June called Loper Bright v. Raimondo.

    “Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”

    The decision is transformative, and for more reasons than the merely ideological. In cases over the past decade, its coming was signaled primarily by Chief Justice John Roberts, who has struggled to balance conservative jurisprudence with what might be called real-world pragmatism, notably in his highly problematic rulings on Obamacare. But even after casting the deciding vote to accept the dubious constitutionality of Obamacare—which was, in Roberts’s defense, passed by Congress and signed into law—he quickly started signaling his discomfort with the broader administrative activism Obama was embracing.

    In a 2013 opinion dissenting from the Court’s decision to defer in a certain case to a Federal Communications Commission regulatory scheme, Roberts issued one of his most pointed jeremiads. “The administrative state ‘wields vast power and touches almost every aspect of daily life,’” he wrote. “The Framers could hardly have envisioned today’s ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ and the authority administrative agencies now hold over our economic, social, and political activities. … ‘[T]he administrative state with its reams of regulations would leave them rubbing their eyes.’”

    Roberts urged his colleagues not to defer to an agency’s view of the agency’s own jurisdiction. But he was unsuccessful in this case and had to settle for making the argument in a dissent. Two years later, he brought similar themes (in less colorful prose) to a majority opinion. That case, King v. Burwell, affirmed the Obama administration’s interpretation of Affordable Care Act and federal subsidies for insurance purchased on federal exchanges. It was a highly dubious reading of the law’s text, and the controversy over it overshadowed the chief justice’s crucial move at the outset of his majority opinion. In it, he held that Chevron deference could not apply in cases where the interpretation at issue involves “a question of deep ‘economic and political significance’ that is central to this statutory scheme.”

    In oral arguments on the case a few months earlier, the Obama administration’s solicitor general had urged the Court to give Chevrondeference to the agency’s interpretation. It was then that Roberts offered an unassailable objection. “If you’re right about Chevron,” he said, wouldn’t that indicate “that a subsequent administration could change that interpretation?” In other words, if everyone is to defer to an agency’s view, and individuals and businesses and governments all change their approaches to satisfy that view—what happens a year or two or three later when a new president is elected and his bureaucrats have the opposite view?

    This went at a crucial and intellectually self-negating feature of Chevron deference. If a statute is ambiguous and thus susceptible to multiple different interpretations, according to Chevron deference, a judge should defer to the agency’s reasonable interpretation…and then, two years later, defer again to the agency’s subsequent reinterpretations, as long as they too are reasonable.

    With the King v. Burwell case, the problem seemed especially acute to Roberts. If the Court were to use Chevron deference to affirm the Obama administration’s interpretation of Obamacare’s subsidy provision—and then use Chevron de-ference to affirm the next administration’s possibly opposite interpretation—the entire situation would be chaos. Millions of people would have been making financial and life decisions based on the original interpretation. Federal and state governments would have been making rules based on it. Insurance policies would have been written using it. And then what? They all go poof?

    The concern would appear subtly in other decisions written by the chief justice during the Trump administration when it came to about-faces at the agency level. Two cases from the Trump years stand out. First, the Court rejected the Trump Homeland Security Department’s attempt to repeal the DACA immigration policy Obama had put in place. Second, the Court turned back the Trump Commerce Department’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Neither decision involved Chevron deference, and neither explicitly barred the door to an agency later attempting the same policy change. But each of those decisions were designed to place speed bumps in the road path to slow the pace of change in modern administration.

    The issue, therefore, is not merely Chevron deference but the constant instability created by the rise in power and authority of the administrative state. Its capacity for wild regulatory swings from one administration to the next is an increasingly obvious and onerous problem for Americans.

    For decades, business leaders have complained about the overall burden of regulation. But more recently, business leaders have become increasingly vocal about the more specific problem of regulatory change. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan voiced this concern, just weeks after Loper Bright was decided, on Bloomberg TV’s Wall Street Week. “In the end of the day, we are for good, clear, fair regulation,” he told host David Westin. “Give us a set of rules, let us go after it. If you keep changing the rules back and forth based on political movements, based on swings, based on personalities…that just goes on.”

    Or take another recent statement from prominent business leaders. When venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their support for Donald Trump, they framed their argument in terms of the regulatory climate surrounding cryptocurrency. They did not criticize an overabundance of rules; they criticized the lack of clear laws and, relatedly, the ability of current regulators to leverage that regulatory uncertainty to chill new investments and technologies. “So we then went to Congress to say, well maybe we can pass a law that clarifies, you know, when something’s a security when it’s a commodity,” Horowitz said, “and the administration in the form of the SEC and the FDIC…have just fought us every step of the way and using very nefarious means.”

    His argument is plain. “First they refuse to issue any guidance,” he continued, and then “they’ve gone after the companies in lack of law—no law and no guidance.”1

    These criticisms demonstrate that the problem with the modern regulatory environment is not simply too many regulations, but also too much regulatory uncertainty. This goes to the very roots of our constitutional order. Both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison emphasized the need for steady administration of the laws; the Federalistis replete with references to it. “What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment,” Madison asked in Federalist 62, “when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government?”

    And from the start, these Founders knew that changes in presidential administrations would tend to exacerbate the problem. “To reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor, is very often considered by a successor as the best proof he can give of his own capacity and desert,” Hamilton warned in Federalist 72, and wild changes from one administration to the next would produce “a disgraceful and ruinous mutability in the administration of the government.”

    Hamilton and Madison prized “steady administration,” and in his opinion in Loper Bright, so does Chief Justice Roberts. At the very outset of his analysis, he quotes Hamilton’s Federalist 78: “To ensure the ‘steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws,’ the Framers structured the Constitution to allow judges to exercise that judgment independent of influence from the political branches.”

    That is the key import of Loper Bright. It does not aim to prevent agencies from announcing sweeping, unprecedented new regulatory programs on the basis of vague statutes; the Court’s “Major Questions Doctrine” already accomplishes that.

    Rather, it is designed to prevent agencies from constantly changing from one interpretation to another, or leveraging regulatory uncertainty under vague statutes. The theory behind Loper Bright is that over time, as more and more statutes are definitively interpreted by the courts, agencies will lose the ability to whipsaw from one policy to another, or to threaten novel interpretations under old statutes.

    Loper Bright’s critics have argued that the decision will actually increaseregulatory uncertainty. Old regulatory policies that once survived judicial review thanks to Chevron deference will someday be struck down in new cases, they warn. Or new regulatory policies will spur disagreements among courts, creating a messy legal patchwork from one federal circuit to another.

    The concerns have a grain of truth. Chevron’s heavy thumb on the agencies’ side of the judicial scale reduced the odds that courts would strike down new regulations. But the critics miss the bigger point. They ignore the much greater stability that Loper Bright will facilitate. If an agency’s new regulation spurs disagreement among the lower courts over how to best interpret a statute, the Supreme Court will settle the question by interpreting the statute definitively. And once the courts have settled on an interpretation, it won’t be subject to agency reversal every four or eight years upon a new administration’s arrival.

    Other critics claim that Loper Bright’s reasoning conflicts with the Court’s other year-end blockbuster on presidential immunity, which found that the president can be held immune from legal sanction arising from some “official acts.” Loper Bright disempowers presidents in a bad way, critics claim, while Trump v. United States empowers them in a bad way.

    Once again, the critics miss the point. The two cases, both penned by Roberts, reflect the same constitutional insight: the need for energetic, steady administration, and the dangers that arise in a world when each new presidential administration turns its aim at the work of its predecessor.

    In Trump v. U.S., the Court affirmed a limited form of presidential immunity for the sake of energetic execution of the laws. Roberts warned that if the Court were to rule differently, “a President inclined to take one course of action based on the public interest may instead opt for another, apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall him upon his departure from office.” He continued: “The Framers’ design of the Presidency did not envision such counterproductive burdens on the ‘vigor’ and ‘energy’ of the Executive,” he added, quoting Federalist 70’s argument for “energy in the executive” for the sake of “steady administration of the laws.”

    To the extent that Loper Bright disempowers the president, it is a reduction of his power to make laws, not to execute them. That is fully within the Constitution’s separation of legislative and executive powers, and the former’s check on the latter. Loper Bright makes the president less of a unilateral legislator. Future presidents will enjoy less discretion to interpret laws, but this will leave them with more energy to execute the laws that legislatures have written and courts have interpreted.

    The Court’s other major regulatory case this year, SEC v. Jarkesy, can be understood in similar terms. Many agencies have long enjoyed discretion to choose the initial forum for litigating cases: They can either file a lawsuit in a federal trial court or undertake the initial “adjudication” before an in-house agency tribunal.

    Agency adjudications, and agency officials who decide them (who are often assigned the contestable title of “administrative law judges,” though they are not appointed by the president with Senate confirmation, and they do not have judicial life tenure), have raised constitutional concerns among many of the same judges and legal scholars who criticized Chevrondeference.

    In 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a stunning decision in the case of SEC v. Jarkesy, declaring the Securities and Exchange Commission’s in-house adjudication framework triply unconstitutional. It said first that the agency’s adjudicators were unconstitutionally appointed. Second, it found that Congress’s grant of discretion to the SEC to direct cases either to courts or to the SEC’s own tribunal was an unconstitutional “delegation” of legislative power. Finally, it said the agency’s failure to use juries in the in-house tribunal violated the Constitution’s right to trial by jury.2

    A day before deciding Loper Bright, the Court decided Jarkesy. In an opinion written once again by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court agreed with the Fifth Circuit on the trial-by-jury point. “When a matter ‘from its nature, is the subject of a suit at the common law,’ Congress may not ‘withdraw [it] from judicial cognizance,’” Roberts wrote. “A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator.” The agency cannot simply turn off the constitutional right to trial by jury, like a light switch. To allow otherwise, he emphasized, “would permit Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the Executive Branch. That is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands.”

    Thus Jarkesy, like Loper Bright, is an attempt to re-separate the Constitution’s powers. It is not a silver bullet to end the administrative state. The SEC and similar agencies can still bring enforcements case in—get the smelling salts ready—actual federal courts. To the extent that Jarkesy reduces an agency’s power, it is simply bringing the agency back to its proper constitutional role bringing cases, not judging them.

    Critics bent on denouncing the Roberts Court’s decisions in Jarkesy and Loper Bright tended to be less worried about cases that drew similar lines in the agencies’ favor. Those were heard and decided as well in this past term.

    In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the Court rejected litigation to second-guess the FDA’s past approvals of mifepristone, the abortion pill. The Court, in an opinion written this time by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, held that the plaintiffs lacked “standing” to challenge the FDA’s decisions in court. The Constitution’s Article III empowers courts to hear certain kinds of “cases” and “controversies,” and the Court has long construed those limits as requiring plaintiffs to have “standing”—that is, to have an actual injury that was caused by the defendants and redressable by the court.

    The plaintiffs here fell short of that, the justices concluded. If federal courts were allowed to adjudicate such cases against the agency, they would intrude on the executive and legislative branches’ own constitutional responsibilities. “Article III does not contemplate a system where 330 million citizens can come to federal court whenever they believe that the government is acting contrary to the Constitution or other federal law,” the Court wrote. “Vindicating ‘the public interest’ (including the public interest in Government observance of the Constitution and laws) is the function of Congress and the Chief Executive.’”

    The Court issued a similar decision in yet another case, Murthy v. Missouri. The plaintiffs sought to litigate allegations that the Biden administration had unconstitutionally used social-media companies to limit online speech. The justices did not reach the merits of the claims, because they found that the plaintiffs lacked standing. And “[i]f a dispute is not a proper case or controversy, the courts have no business deciding it[.]” Such disputes, absent a plaintiff with constitutional standing to file a case, are properly left to Congress, the administration, and the court of public opinion.

    Yes, ideas have consequences. The Supreme Court’s latest term proved the point twice over. Vindicating the founding generation’s constitutional vision, and vindicating modern thinkers’ ideas of how to restore the Constitution today, will have profound effects on the administrative state. To be sure, even these great decisions will have further consequences we cannot necessarily envision, for as all conservatives know, the law of unintended consequences is one of the few immutable realities of our imperfect world. But the decision’s immediate consequences are clear, crucial, and excellent. Loper Bright exemplifies the Founders’ ideal of good, constitutional government.

    1 Perhaps no agency better exemplifies this problem today than the Federal Trade Commission under the leadership of Chairwoman Lina Khan, as I detailed in these pages in “The Power Broke Her,” March 2024.
    2 I described the Fifth Circuit’s decision in these pages. See “Reining in the Bureaucrats,” July/Aug. 2022.

    Photo: Shawn Thew/Pool via AP

  • SCOTUS Rules on Trump Immunity Claims

    SCOTUS Rules on Trump Immunity Claims

    The Opinion in Trump v US – the Presidential Immunity case – dropped this morning. Your editor has been reading thru it since it was released around 10:00. It is . . . interesting.

    The Roberts-crafted majority says a President is immune from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. He goes on to say that a President has presumptive immunity for official acts taken while President. From the Opinion (internal citations omitted):

    A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald J. Trump on four counts for conduct that occurred during his Presidency following the November 2020 election. The indictment alleged that after losing that
    election, Trump conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting, and certifying of the election results. Trump moved to dismiss the indictment
    based on Presidential immunity, arguing that a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, and that the indictment’s allegations fell within the core of his official duties. The District Court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss, holding that former Presidents do not possess federal criminal immunity for any acts. The D. C. Circuit affirmed. Both the District Court and the D. C. Circuit declined to decide whether the indicted conduct involved official acts.


    Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts. . .

    This case poses a question of lasting significance: When may a former President be prosecuted for official acts taken during his Presidency? In answering that question, unlike the political branches and
    the public at large, the Court cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies. Enduring separation of powers principles guide our decision in this case. The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law. But under our system of separated powers, the President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts. That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office.


    91 F. 4th 1173, vacated and remanded.


    ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, ALITO, GORSUCH, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined in full, and in which BARRETT, J., joined except as to Part III–C.

    THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in part.

    SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN and JACKSON, JJ., joined.
    JACKSON, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

    Your editor is not a lawyer (Thank God) but he does follow SCOTUS pretty closely. This seems to me to be a well-reasoned, balanced opinion. It makes sense that while official conduct is immunized, unofficial conduct isn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this case at SCOTUS again. While Roberts spelled out quite a few official acts in his opinion, the lower courts aren’t likely to roll over in this case.

    While I have read most of the Majority, I didn’t bother with the dissents. Frankly, Roberts dealt with them quite well in his opinion.

    I will point out that while dissenting opinions can and do get a little chippy from time to time, majority opinions typically do not. That does not seem to be the case for this term. There have been several instances of a majority opinion author chirping at the dissent authors. This one included.

  • Loper-Bright Opinion Handed Down

    Loper-Bright Opinion Handed Down

    I covered this case in a couple of articles when the oral arguments happened back in January. Well the case has been decided and the opinion released this morning, and it answers the question I asked back then, is this the end of the administrative state?

    Based on what I’ve read in the decision, the answer is a resounding yes. From the Roberts authored Majority Opinion (internal citations omitted, emphasis mine ):

    Joining Chief Justice Roberts in the Majority were Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. Thomas and Gorsuch filed separate concurrences while Justice Kagan filed a dissent with Justice Sotomayor joining for both and Justice Jackson joining for case No. 22–1219 (Relentless) she took no part in the consideration or decision of the case in No. 22–451 (Loper-Bright).

    Held: The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.

    Seeing as the Chevron deference is the basis for almost all of the administrative rule-making since the case was decided in 1984, you can be sure that the unfettered rule-making and the larger part of the administrative state will cease to exist.

    Your editor is not an attorney (Thank GOD), but he does follow the courts and has read a great deal of Law and Jurisprudence in his time. From my quick reading of the majority opinion in Loper-Bright it seems that this particular Court has had a difficult time squaring Chevron with the Administrative Procedures Act – a law that codifies federal agency administrative rules and procedures.

    We will see the total effect of this ruling in the coming years. From my perspective, it will be a reining in and deconstruction of the administrative state as we’ve come to know it over the last 40-ish years.

  • Some Thoughts on Rahimi

    Some Thoughts on Rahimi

    SCOTUS dropped its opinion on a case called US v Rahimi on 21 June (yesterday at the time writing).

    The Background

    Zachey Rahimi was involved in a domestic incident with his girlfriend/baby momma in December of 2019. A state court in Tarrant County, Texas, issued a restraining order against him. The order, entered with the consent of both parties, included a finding that Rahimi had committed “family violence.” It also found that this violence was “likely to occur again” and that Rahimi posed “a credible threat” to the “physical safety” of C. M. or A. R. (the minor child). Based on these findings, the order prohibited Rahimi from threatening C. M. or her family for two years or contacting C. M. during that period except to discuss A. R. It also suspended Rahimi’s gun license for two years.

    Rahimi was involved in a spate of other shootings – including one where he fired at a bystander who witnessed an altercation with the girlfriend – and threatened another woman while subject to this order. Police executed a search warrant of Rahimi’s residence in connection with the shootings and found a pistol, a rifle, ammunition— and a copy of the restraining order.

    Rahimi was then indicted under 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(8) — 922(g)(8) going forward –, a federal statute that prohibits individuals subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm. Rahimi’s attorney moved to have the 922(g)(8) indictment quashed on the basis it was a facial 2A violation. Court rules prevented an interlocutory appeal, so he pleaded guilty and appealed to the 5th Circuit raising the same issues.

    During the appeals process, SCOTUS issued its decision in Bruen. A new panel of the 5th Circuit ruled that 922(g)(8) as applied was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court granted Cert on 30 June 2023 and oral arguments were held on 7 November.

    The Decision

    The decision was 8-1 with Justice Thomas dissenting (I’ll get to Thomas’s dissent in a bit. I’m of the opinion he was the only one who got it correct). Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion, with all of the Justices filing concurrences. The meat of the decision is that the facial challenge of 922(g)(8) failed. From the filing (internal citations omitted):

    Held: When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.

    (a) Since the Founding, the Nation’s firearm laws have included regulations to stop individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms. As applied to the facts here, Section 922(g)(8) fits within this tradition. The right to keep and bear arms is among the “fundamental rights
    necessary to our system of ordered liberty.” McDonald v. Chicago. That right, however, “is not unlimited,” District of Columbia v. Heller

    The reach of the Second Amendment is not limited only to those arms that were in existence at the
    Founding. Heller. Rather, it “extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not [yet] in existence.” Ibid. By that same logic, the Second Amendment permits more than just regulations identical to those existing in 1791.

    Under our precedent, the appropriate analysis involves considering whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition. Bruen. When firearm regulation is challenged under the Second Amendment, the Government must show that the restriction “is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Bruen. A court must ascertain whether the new law is “relevantly similar” to laws that our tradition is understood to permit, “apply[ing] faithfully the balance struck by the founding generation to modern circumstances.” Why and how the
    regulation burdens the right are central to this inquiry. As Bruen explained, a challenged regulation that does not precisely match its historical precursors “still may be analogous enough to pass constitutional muster.”

    (b) Section 922(g)(8) survives Rahimi’s challenge.

    (1) Rahimi’s facial challenge to Section 922(g)(8) requires him to “establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” United States v. Salerno. Here, Section 922(g)(8) is constitutional as applied to the facts of Rahimi’s own case. Rahimi has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of others, see §922(g)(8)(C)(i), and the Government offers ample evidence that the Second Amendment permits such individuals to be disarmed. . .

    The Lone Dissent

    Despite what you may be reading in the news, Justice Thomas does not want those subject to domestic violence restraining orders to have access to firearms. His dissent hangs on two points; due process and the complete lack of a historical analogue to 922(g)(8). We’ll look at the lack of analogue first.

    In his majority opinion, C.J. Roberts takes great pains to equate the so-called peace bond or surety laws with 922(g). Thomas, correctly, notes that a peace bond does not disarm an individual charged with one. Instead it forces them to put up a sum of money as a guarantee of good behavior. From his dissent:

    Although surety laws shared a common justification with §922(g)(8), surety laws imposed a materially different burden. Critically, a surety demand did not alter an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. After providing sureties, a person kept possession of all his firearms; could purchase additional firearms; and could carry firearms in public and private. Even if he breached the peace, the only penalty was that he and his sureties had to pay a sum of money. To disarm him, the Government would have to take some other action, such as imprisoning him for a crime.

    By contrast, §922(g)(8) strips an individual of his Second Amendment right. The statute’s breadth cannot be overstated. For one, §922(g) criminalizes nearly all conduct related to covered firearms and ammunition. Most fundamentally, possession is prohibited, except in the rarest of circumstances.

    . . .

    These sweeping prohibitions are criminally enforced. To violate the statute is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years. That felony conviction, in turn, triggers a permanent, life-long prohibition on exercising the Second Amendment right. See §922(g)(1).

    The fact that many domestic violence restraining orders are not judicial findings of fact means 922(g)(6) violates individuals due process rights. As Thomas notes in his dissent (emphasis mine):

    Just as important as §922(g)(8)’s express terms is what it leaves unsaid. Section 922(g)(8) does not require a finding that a person has ever committed a crime of domestic violence. It is not triggered by a criminal conviction or a person’s criminal history, unlike other §922(g) subsections. And, §922(g)(8) does not distinguish contested orders from joint orders—for example, when parties voluntarily enter a no-contact agreement or when both parties seek a restraining order.


    In addition, §922(g)(8) strips an individual of his ability to possess firearms and ammunition without any due process. Rather, the ban is an automatic, uncontestable consequence of certain orders. See §922(g) (“It shall be unlawful for any [qualifying] person [to] possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition”). There is no hearing or opportunity to be heard on the statute’s applicability, and a court need not decide whether a person should be disarmed under §922(g)(8). The only process §922(g)(8) requires is that provided (or not) for the underlying restraining order.


    Despite §922(g)(8)’s broad scope and lack of process, it carries strong penalties. Any violation of §922(g)(8) is a felony punishable by up to 15 years’ imprisonment. And, a conviction for violating §922(g)(8) itself triggers a permanent, life-long prohibition on possessing firearms and ammunition.

    Thomas wraps up his dissent with this:

    This case is not about whether States can disarm people who threaten others. States have a ready mechanism for disarming anyone who uses a firearm to threaten physical violence: criminal prosecution. Most States, including Texas, classify aggravated assault as a felony, punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment. Assuming C. M.’s allegations could be proved, Texas could have convicted and imprisoned Rahimi for every one of his alleged acts.

    Thus, the question before us is not whether Rahimi and others like him can be disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment. Instead, the question is whether the Government can strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order—even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime. It cannot. The Court and Government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence. The Government has not borne its burden to prove that §922(g)(8) is consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding. The Framers and ratifying public understood “that the right to keep and bear arms was essential to the preservation of liberty.” Yet, in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more.

    I respectfully dissent.

    My Analysis

    This case was always going to be difficult. On one hand, you have a truly bad dude, Zachey Rahimi, who should not have access to firearms. On the other, you have – at least in my and Justice Thomas’s opinion – an unconstitutional law, 922(g)(8).

    In the specific case of Rahimi, the State had ample opportunity to indict, try and convict him of the offences underlying the RO. The convictions would have stripped him of his rights to own a gun. They did not.

    If the State decides that someone shouldn’t be trusted with a gun, they probably shouldn’t be on the streets. There are plenty of laws that meet constitutional muster that can and are used to restrict legal access to firearms. 922(g)(8) is not one of them. The fact that under 922(g)(8) anyone subject to a restraining order is deprived of their rights without due process is ridiculous.

  • SCOTUS Roundup

    SCOTUS Roundup

    It’s been a busy couple of days at the Supreme Court. Since Friday there have been 7 opinions issued and there have been oral arguments in 4 cases.

    Of the opinions issued, two are of general interest – Sheetz and DeVillers both property cases – and a third to Vets in particular, Rudisill V McDonough. James Rudisill served three separate periods of Active Duty and used his Montgomery GI bill benefits to obtain his undergrad degree.  Later, he applied for Post-9/11 benefits to attend Yale Divinity School. The VA granted him only the remaining Montgomery benefits, and he appealed that decision to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals. SCOTUS ruled he was eligible for the maximum number of months of GI bill benefits because of the clear breaks in service.

    On Monday the Court heard arguments in two cases, Snyder v US and Chiaverini V the City of Napoleon OH, Tuesday the Court heard Fischer V US and yesterday they heard Thornell v Jones. Snyder is a public corruption case, Chiaverini is a 4th amendment case and Thornell is a Death Penalty case. Frankly the only one I paid any attention to was Fischer. From Oyez:

    Facts of the case

    On January 6, 2021, while Congress was convening to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden, thousands of supporters of the losing candidate, Donald Trump, converged on the United States Capitol to disrupt the proceedings. The Trump supporters swarmed the building, overwhelming law enforcement officers who attempted to stop them. The chaos wrought by the mob forced members of Congress to stop the certification and flee for safety. Congress was not able to resume its work for six hours.

    Joseph Fischer, Edward Lang, and Garret Miller were indicted for various offenses related to their involvement in the Capitol riot on January 6. All three were charged with felony offenses of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers, and misdemeanor offenses of disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and in restricted grounds, involving the intent to disrupt congressional sessions and government functions. Additionally, each faced a count of obstruction of an official proceeding. The defendants challenged this obstruction charge, claiming that the statute does not prohibit their alleged conduct on that day. The district court agreed, holding that the statute does not apply to assaultive conduct, committed in furtherance of an attempt to stop Congress from performing a constitutionally required duty. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed, concluding that the natural, broad reading of that provision is that it applies to forms of obstructive conduct, not just those related to investigations and evidence.

    Question

    Does 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c), which prohibits obstruction of congressional inquiries and investigations, include acts unrelated to investigations and evidence?

    The Justices seemed split on this one, but not as split as I’ve seen during some other, recent oral arguments. The majority of the Justices expressed concerns about the decision to apply an obstruction provision in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law passed after the accounting fraud scandal at now-defunct energy company Enron to J6 cases. They grilled U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar about the law’s sweep, how it should be interpreted and whether the charge was necessary given the range of other criminal counts brought against J6 defendants.

    Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared wary that a broad reading of the law could encroach on non-violent protests, emphasizing the maximum penalty of 20 years in prison under the obstruction charge. “Would a sit-in that disrupts a trial, or access to a federal courthouse, qualify?” Gorsuch asked Prelogar. “Would a heckler in today’s audience qualify, or at the State of the Union address?”

    Gorsuch appeared to be drawing on actual events when he asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar whether people could be charged with obstructing an official proceeding if they rose in protest inside the courtroom, heckled the president at the State of the Union or pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol complex to delay a vote in Congress.

    “There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings,” Justice Clarence Thomas said. “Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past, and has this been the government’s position throughout the lifespan of this statute?”

    Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts seemed inclined to view the law narrowly, suggesting it might apply only to defendants who alter or destroy evidence – an interpretation that Fischer has asked the court to embrace.

    As of now, I’d expect this ruling to come down as 5-4 against the government. The question becomes who goes which way. It’s pretty clear from the arguments, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh think the prosecutors overreached with the 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) charges. It seems Roberts agrees, but not as strongly.

    We’ll find out sometime in June if I’m correct.

  • SCOTUS Rules on Colorado Ballot Case

    SCOTUS Rules on Colorado Ballot Case

    The Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the Trump v Anderson, the Colorado ballot access case. In an unsigned opinion, the Court reversed the Colorado supreme court’s ruling that Trump be barred from Colorado ballots on the grounds he was an insurrectionist and therefore ineligible.

    I’m not going to get into parsing the entire decision, I’ll leave that to others who are more well versed in the law. What I will say is this ruling was a resounding slap across the face of the CO supreme court. The opinion made it very clear that the States do not have the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal elections.

    I will note that you may see some differing analysis on the order, with some saying that the order does and does not do certain things. The single question before the Court was a relatively simple one:

    “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?

    Page 3, Per Curiam Order in the matter of Trump v Anderson

    The Court ruled on this question and this question alone. It did not rule on whether or not Trump was guilty of insurrection. That question was not before the Court.

    Keep in mind, concurrences and dissents do not count as a matter of law. You are likely to see lots of commentary about the concurrences written by Sotomayor and Barrett. While an interesting footnote to history, they are a waste of paper. The 13 page Per Curiam order is the only one that matters.

  • The End of the Administrative State?

    The End of the Administrative State?

    I mentioned the then-pending oral arguments in Loper Bright and Relentless in The View From Here on Tuesday. Well, those arguments happened yesterday, so now it’s time for some analysis.

    Before we get to that, a little background is in order.

    In 1972, Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, “to respond to the threat of overfishing and to promote conservation.” That law created eight regional fisheries councils. Each of those councils is charged with producing a fisheries management plan. Under the plan created for New England herring fisheries, half of all fishing trips had to carry a federal monitor. Originally, all the observers were employed by the federal government. In 2020, the management plan required the fishing boats to pay for monitors reporting to the federal government. The cost was over $700. Many vessel owners complained that this additional expense resulted in zero profit or even a loss for a day’s fishing. 

    Congress did not authorize billing private fishing companies for federal monitors. However the Department of Commerce interpreted the requirement that it may “require that one or more observers be carried on board a vessel of the United States engaged in fishing for species that are subject to the plan, for the purpose of collecting data necessary for the conservation and management of the fishery,” to mean that half the fishing boats had to pay for those observers.

    This brings us to the Chevron deference. That precedent comes from a case called Chevron V Natural Resource Defense Council inc. Decided in 1984, that case is the basis of the modern administrative state. In a nutshell, the opinion in that case requires courts to give the widest deference to administrative regulations. The decision reads, in part:

    When a challenge to an agency construction of a statutory provision, fairly conceptualized, really centers on the wisdom of the agency’s policy, rather than whether it is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress, the challenge must fail. In such a case, federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do. The responsibilities for assessing the wisdom of such policy choices and resolving the struggle between competing views of the public interest are not judicial ones ….

    — Chevron, 467 U.S. at 866

    The Chevron deference is a two-stage test. If the law explicitly permits an action, the agency can do whatever it wants. If the law is ambiguous, the courts can review the agency’s decision to determine if the resulting regulation was a possible way to go about enforcing the law. If so, the courts lose their ability to interfere. 

    Loper Bright and Relentless, both independently owned herring fishers, sued in federal court, saying that having to pay for the monitors exceeded the scope of the Magnuson-Stevens act. In both cases the district and appeals courts relied on the Chevron deference to find that making the fishermen pay for the observers was allowable under the law. SCOTUS granted certiorari in the Loper Bright last May, and in Relentless in October and the cases were scheduled to be argued at the same time.

    Now on to yesterday’s arguments. As a slightly more than casual observer of SCOTUS, I came away with the impression that the majority of the Justices were ready to throw Chevron on the dust heap.

    Relentless attorney, Roman Martinez opened his arguments this way:

    Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:
    For too long, Chevron has distorted the judicial process and undermined statutory interpretation. It should be overruled for three reasons.
    First, Chevron violates the Constitution. Article III empowers judges to say what the law is. It requires them to interpret federal statutes using their best and independent judgment.


    Chevron undermines that duty.

    It reallocates interpretive authority from courts to agencies, and it forces courts to adopt inferior agency constructions that are issued for political or policy reasons. In doing so, Chevron blocks judges from serving as faithful agents of Congress. It mandates judicial bias and encourages agency overreach. And by removing key checks on executive power, it threatens individual liberty. . .

    I think that the opening statement sums up the problems of the Chevron deference quite well.

    Loper Bright council, Paul Clement opened with this:

    . . .There is no justification for giving the tie to the government or conjuring agency authority from silence. Both the APA and constitutional avoidance principles call for de novo review, asking only what’s the best reading of the statute. Asking, instead, is the statute ambiguous is fundamentally misguided. The whole
    point of statutory construction is to bring clarity, not to identify ambiguity. The government defends this practice not as the best reading of the APA but by invoking stare decisis. That is doubly problematic. First, at issue here is only Chevron’s methodology, which is entitled to reduced stare decisis effect. We have no beef with Chevron’s Clean Air Act holding, and we could not take issue with its APA holding because it failed to mention that statute. But, second, all the traditional stare decisis factors point in favor of overruling Chevron’s methodology. The doctrine is unworkable as its critical threshold question of
    ambiguity is hopelessly ambiguous. It is also a — a reliance-destroying doctrine because it facilitates agency flip-flopping. So the reality here is the Chevron two-step has to go and should be replaced with
    only one question: What is the best reading of the statute?

    While reading the transcripts of the oral arguments of Loper Bright, it became clear that the conservative Justices were generally skeptical of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s claims that overturning Chevron would create chaos in the courts. Paul Clement argued that the chaos could be mitigated by the Court, and the majority of the Justices seemed to agree.

    As I said in the View, it’s past time for Chevron to go away. And based on the questions and issues raised by the Justices, that’s going to happen. We’ll know for sure in June when the Court releases its Opinion.

    Relentless Transcript

    Loper Bright Transcript

  • The View From Here

    The View From Here

    Featured Image: West Canada Creek near Nobleboro NY. West Canada creek is one of the premier trout streams in the southern Adirondack region.

    As the Russian war of aggression 3 day Special Military Operation in Ukraine enters its 99th week, the Russian Air Force suffered the loss of two aircraft yesterday. A Beriev A-50 “Mainstay” AEW&C plane -think AWACS- and an Illushin IL-22 “Coot” ISR/airborne command and control plane were hit over the sea of Azov. The Mainstay was shot down, while the heavily damaged Coot managed to make a landing at a nearby airfield.

    In addition a Russian Ilyushin Il-20M was also hit in this area and signaled mayday, including the attempt for an emergency landing in Anapa, Russia, as well as the request for ambulances. There is no information that the plane arrived at the destination but even if then it was certainly severely damaged. The cause for both incidents are still a matter of speculation, but the fact that two valuable Russian birds got hit at the same time and the same region, make enemy fire the most plausible explanation.

    This is a costly loss for the Russians, as there were only 8 of the A-50 and 11 of the IL-22m air-frames ever built. It is believed that Lt. General Oleg Pchela, commander of the long-range aviation of the Russian Air Force, was on board the A-50 aircraft destroyed by Ukraine.

    I’m seeing three theories being bandied about regarding the shoot-downs. First is it was a Russian ‘friendly fire’ incident. I personally find that hard to swallow as we are talking about two C&C birds that are both linked into the Russian ADA net.

    The second theory floating around is some sort of SAM trap executed by Ukraine. While this is possible, sources I trust say the interception by Ukraine has would have been at or near the max range of the Patriot PAC2 missile and outside the range of any of the other ADA missiles Ukraine has access to.

    The third theory, and the one I think most plausible, involves an air-to-air kill with UA SU-27s or MiG 29s armed with AIM 120 AMRAAM missiles. The damage to the tail section of the COOT looks like the damage I’d expect from that particular warhead vice the PAC2 warhead. Anyway, FAFO

    The IRGC took direct credit for a complex missile and drone attack on targets in Iraqi Kurdistan and Northern Syria. The IRGC said it was targeting the “headquarters of spies” and “anti-Iranian terrorist gatherings in parts of the region” with ballistic missiles. The sites struck were close to US locations in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. No US facilities were struck and there weren’t any US casualties, but the strikes were called ‘imprecise and reckless’ by one US official.

    I really wish someone other than POTATUS or the Prostate kid was in charge. This kind of escalation really needs to be answered, as in Operation Praying Mantis answered. Appeasement never, ever works.

    As Admiral Painter said in Red October “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

    **** As I was getting ready to publish this piece, some new information crossed the transom. The IRGC struck Baluch separatist bases in Pakistan. As I’m sure you know, the Pakistanis have fucking nukes, several dozen of them. What Iran is thinking, I don’t know.

    SCOTUS is set to hear oral arguments in Loper Bright v Raimundo and Relentless v Department of Commerce. At issue is a regulatory ruling forcing commercial fishermen to pay the salaries of compliance observers on their boats. The payment requirement is based on an interpretation of federal law by the National Marine Fisheries Service. These two cases are the biggest of the January term.

    These cases stem from a 1984 case called Chevron v National Resources Defense Council, Inc. The ruling in that case created what is known as the Chevron deference. Chevron deference consists of a two-part test that is deferential to government agencies: first, whether Congress has spoken directly to the precise issue at question, and second, “whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

    While I am not a lawyer, it’s my opinion that Chevron was badly decided. The Chevron deference is what created the modern regulatory state. It’s way past time to overturn Chevron and rein in the regulatory state in all its forms. This may be the Court that does just that. Here’s hoping. . .

    Got a story to share? A comment on anything above? Let us know in the comments below.

  • Random News and Notes

    Random News and Notes

    SCOTUS granted a writ of certiorari in Fischer v. United States on Friday. That case concerns the J6 charge of corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding or investigation. That law, 18 USC 1512 (c)(2), is part of the Sarbanes Oxley accounting and corporate governance laws that were passed in response to the Enron/Arthur Anderson investigation. J6 prosecutors have been using that law as part of a charge stacking scheme. It seems however, that they may have overreached. SCOTUS has historically been leery of ambiguously worded laws such as this one. Oral arguments are scheduled for the spring session.

    I feel I need to point out the fact that this case could have a huge bearing on Trumps legal issues in DC. The SCO has built the majority of his case on this law.

    By now I’m sure most of you have heard of the incident with POTATUS motorcade in Delaware yesterday. If you haven’t, well, some dope drove into a Secret Service vehicle blocking an intersection. The Protective detail agents responded by pointing their guns as said dope and arresting him. It seems he was drunk at the time. That, however, is not the focus of this section. The Dotard in Chief was asked a question about losing to Trump in the polls mere moments before the crash.

    There are a couple of things that stand out to me about this incident. First, the protective detail took their sweet assed time getting Biden into the Beast and out of the area. That’s Not Good. I am not and never have been a Secret Service agent, but I do have a LOT of protective detail experience, and in a fluid situation like that, you get your protectee off the X as fast as you can and let the rest of the chips fall where they may.

    Second, according to RCP, there is only one poll, an NPR/Marist poll, that doesn’t have Trump, or any other R, beating Biden. The NPR/Marist poll has Biden up by one point, well within the margin of error.

    The inbred goat f*ckers in Yemen have been acting up of late. The Houthis, an Iran backed and supported rebel group, have been attacking international shipping in the southern Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb strait. The attacks have, so far anyway, consisted of attempted boardings, ballistic missiles and drones. They managed to sink one vessel and have damaged several more. Several shipping lines, including the world’s largest, MSC, have rerouted their ships.

    About 10 percent of the world’s sea traffic goes through the Red Sea. Rerouting ships around the Cape of Good Hope lengthens the trip by about twelve days, adding considerable cost to freight and disrupting supply chains. Maritime insurance rates started to increase after the first few attacks. They are now triple the rate from the beginning of October.

    SecDef Lloyd is expected to announce a coalition naval task force to protect the shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Bab el Mandeb. From my perspective, unless and until the Houthis get to the Find Out part of the equation, nothing is going to change.

    Despite the headlines you may have read, the Pope did not give the OK to blessing same-sex marriages. Look, I’m nominally a Catholic, and I dislike what Bergoglio is doing to the Church as much as anyone else, but even for him it would be a step too far.

    The reality is a bit more prosaic. The ok was given to spontaneous blessings. They are limited to “the invocation of a blessing that descends from God upon those who recognizing themselves to be destitute and in need of his help do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit. of those in same-sex relationships.” The Dicastery, a Vatican organization dealing with matters of faith, issued a supplemental clarifying the issue.

    It seems to me, a layman, that the Dicastery is attempting to clean up yet another mess created by Bergoglio.

    A 67 year old woman in Silver Cliff CO was attacked by a mule deer (read more about muleys in Walt’s Icons of the West article here.)this past weekend. The small buck, reported to be a spike buck, punctured the woman’s lung and caused severe bruising on her legs. Colorado wildlife officials are searching for the buck and plan on euthanizing it when they do find it. They believe this particular deer had been fed by humans and habituated to them.

    There are a couple of lessons in this story. First, all wildlife can be dangerous. Treat them with the respect they deserve. Second, it isn’t good to feed most wild animals. As one NYSDEC biologist once told me, a fed bear is a dead bear. the same can be said of many other species.

    Got a news item to share? Thoughts about any of the stories above? Drop them in the comments below.