Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

President Trump is claiming the power to bar foreign women from entering the U.S. to have babies; he wants to make sure their children can’t become American citizens.  He seems convinced that a recent Supreme Court ruling against him on that constitutional point is not a problem. A new Executive Order signed by the President last week… Read More

President Trump has now won, from an extremely reluctant federal judge, a final victory over all of the criminal cases against his political allies who staged a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol more than five years ago. In a 15-page decision issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta in Washington, D.C., granted Trump’s… Read More

The ever-changing $1.8 billion fund deal that President Trump and his Cabinet put together to benefit his political allies got a new revision Sunday night – but maybe only as a political document.  Its legal status is still in doubt. Trump’s plan to transfer the huge sum of U.S. Treasury money to hundreds of his followers… Read More

Official Washington was absorbed on Friday in the politics surrounding President Trump’s highly controversial $1.8 billion fund for payoffs from the U.S. Treasury to his allies.  In a federal court in Florida – also on Friday — it became clear that the legal feud over the fund is becoming a major constitutional controversy, too. Since the… Read More

President Trump returned to the Supreme Court Tuesday night, seeking new clarity on how far the Court will go to protect him when he is found to have broken the law.  The appeal is an attempt to elevate to constitutional dignity the sordid scandal of a sexual assault accusation that led to jury verdicts against him,… Read More

A Florida federal judge, in one of the most blistering public criticisms yet of a sitting President, ruled Monday that Donald Trump gravely misused the court system to benefit himself, his family, his business and their friends and allies. The judge all but erased the legal basis for the $1.8 billion “slush fund” set up… Read More

Reaching back into 17th Century English history and relying anew on the burst of new civil rights after America’s Civil War, a deeply divided Supreme Court on Tuesday assured U.S. citizenship as a constitutional right of every child born in this country. The decision frustrates an effort by President Trump to take away citizenship for any… Read More

Pressing on with its controversial agenda to build up the power of the President, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the nation’s Chief Executive can fire almost any official in the Executive Branch without having to give any reason. By a vote of 6-to-3, the Court overruled a 91-year-old precedent that had limited the… Read More

Sometime this week, just days before America celebrates the 250th anniversary of ending its misery under the cruel domination of the British Crown, the Supreme Court is very likely to take a constitutional step toward giving U.S. Presidents a nearly imperial power. Acting on an ambition that former White House lawyer John G. Roberts, Jr., has… Read More

The Supreme Court, finding no reason to suspect racism in a Trump Administration policy that could lead to deportation of close to a million non-white immigrants, on Thursday told federal courts not to interfere with that policy. Dividing 6-to-3, the Court gave a narrow reading to a 1990 law that Congress passed to give temporary… Read More