..Federal authorities detained more than 70 people during a raid on the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant near 68th and J streets, ICE said in a statement.
The large-scale raid also involved the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and Omaha police, according to the plant’s president. //
When I initially heard about this raid, I thought it was a repeat of that classic dance from the late 90s and early 2000s, but was kind of surprised that a factory owner would be so sanguine about employing illegals in numbers approaching that in this day and age. It didn't seem especially prudent.
I also gave a passing moment to wondering why the feds would be bothering with a plant in the middle of nowhere when surely there were plenty of the first-to-go criminals to be found by the gross in any city they were already working in.
And that was that, until I read a Judicial Watch newsletter this morning, which began to explain exactly HOW an obscure plant out of thousands in the country wound up raided.
It also answered my question about the plant owner's apparent lack of concern. It turns out, as far as he knew, all his employees were kosher by virtue of passing their E-Verify screenings. The plant was 100% compliant with federal regulations for hiring. The workers did so by using stolen identities and Social Security numbers. //
Years after Judicial Watch reported that the government’s system to verify if employees are authorized to work legally in the United States approved hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, federal authorities have uncovered widespread identity theft at a meat processing plant that used the defective tool to screen 100% of its staff. //
What led the feds to raid that plant in particular was a deep, detailed, multi-agency investigation into at least a hundred cases of individual identity theft across the country that - SURPRISE! - all led back to a massive identity theft ring originating in that very plant. //
“These so-called honest workers have caused an immeasurable amount of financial and emotional hardship for innocent Americans. If pretending to be someone you aren’t in order to steal their lives isn’t blatant, criminal dishonesty, I don’t know what is.” //
Agents took hours to meticulously go through and verify everyone's paperwork and authenticate documents. They even allowed workers to return home to retrieve paperwork for other family members or friends who didn't have what they needed with them. This wasn't any inhumane cattle round-up. //
Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year. //
Min Headroom
a day ago
The canard of the “law abiding undocumented worker” takes another big hit.
By the way, notice that identity theft victims hardest hit are the legal citizens with Hispanic surnames that “look like them?” I bet that’s a demographic already and increasingly disenchanted with the whole “undocumented migrant” thing - and the politicians supporting it. //
In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court granted the government's applications to partially stay the district court's nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship cases, noting that universal injunctions "likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts." The caveat here is that the applications are granted "only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue."
The key to the court's decision appears to be summed up thusly:
When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.
Additionally, the court has instructed the district courts to "move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity."
symbolset Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
12y
116
If you let any vendor be essential to your operation, they will blackmail you or they will go out of business and leave you inoperable. That is the nature of the essential dependency relationship. You can't shut them down, can you? No.
This very thing is both the reason for Unix and the thing that killed it. Mainframe lockin being what it is. People got tired of rebuilding everything and demanded portability. And then AT&T exploited their need for Unix.
Sure, their software is convenient. It's useful. But you have to be ready to unhook from any vendor instantly without disrupting your operation. That's inconvenient. It's expensive. It's necessary. If a vendor controls whether you could continue in business, they own your business. You work for them. You wouldn't allow that from any employee, a security contractor, a landlord, an Internet service, an accountant, an engineer, tech or manager. If your CEO goes rogue or dies in the chair you get another and move on. Why should a software vendor have this privilege above all others? There's always another way to do anything. For everything essential responsible people always have a hot spare, a workaround, a plan B. Always
This is also useful when going into negotiations. The one who cares the least controls the relationship.
RickyP784 Ars Tribunus Militum
13y
2,213
Subscriptor
I'm so looking forward to de-VMware-Ing and de-Cisco-ing my network over the next few years as much as possible.
We're starting soon with Arista fiber switches and will start replacing copper IDF switches in the coming years. I think we'll keep Cisco APs, phones, and firewalls, but it's gonna be real nice when our only SMARTnet costs are FirePowers and an ISR voice gateway.
Our Dell VxRail ends service life in 2 years, and that will be the last VMware equipment to go. Unless Proxmox comes a long way in a short time, we'll switch to straight Nutanix. Not ideal, but it's the best of a bad situation. //
Evil_Merlin Ars Legatus Legionis
25y
23,732
Subscriptor
We got ours. And we WERE a big VMware user. We migrated from Hyper-V to ESXi in 2019 for stability and extendibility reasons. The cost increase could be justified by the back end we had, so it wasn't a huge deal. Fast forward to now, we are on a deadline.
July 18th, no more ESX. Anywhere. No VMware products period.
All Windows systems going back to Hyper-V using Windows Server 2025.
All Linux/GNU and appliances going to KVM.
The company saves a BOAT load of money.
Broadcom made the decision REALLY easy for us. Best thing is that we will have it all gone before the audit, so when they get here (and we will LET them come) we can turn them away at the door with proof in hand. //
Are you willing to pay for your host? Windows Server does VM's quite fine for almost any loads. Good management tools and decent amount of guest coverage. //
Depending on guest oses
Proxmox, quemu with vmm or other gui, openstack , openshift with addon for vm's
or
if mostly windows hyperv. //
sjl Ars Tribunus Militum
19y
2,785
Spuwho said:
Heard a company is looking into a general Broadcom boycott. processors, controllers, network switches, storage equipment, other software products. Not just dumping VMWare, but anything related to or dependent on Broadcom. They really pissed off a lot of people.
I have an LSI (Avago, Broadcom - in order of the buyouts) SAS controller in my home-brew NAS.
If I ever need a replacement, I'll be looking at options from Microchip (the company that bought the company [Microsemi] that bought the company [PMC-Sierra] that bought Adaptec.) Possibly Marvell. Not Broadcom, specifically because of this. Sure, I'm a very small fish in that particular pond, but still.
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law.
Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, US District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.
Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic’s copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement. //
AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.
Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that US copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”
Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods. //
Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and Meta Platforms have been accused of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems. //
Anthropic had told Alsup in a court filing that the source of its books was irrelevant to fair use.
“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup said on Monday.
The broader lesson of this study is that the details will matter in these copyright cases. Too often, online discussions have treated “do generative models copy their training data or merely learn from it?” as a theoretical or even philosophical question. But it’s a question that can be tested empirically—and the answer might differ across models and across copyrighted works. //
For any language model, the probability of generating any given 50-token sequence “by accident” is vanishingly small. If a model generates 50 tokens from a copyrighted work, that is strong evidence that the tokens “came from” the training data. This is true even if it only generates those tokens 10 percent, 1 percent, or 0.01 percent of the time. //
There are actually three distinct theories of how training a model on copyrighted works could infringe copyright:
- Training on a copyrighted work is inherently infringing because the training process involves making a digital copy of the work.
- The training process copies information from the training data into the model, making the model a derivative work under copyright law.
- Infringement occurs when a model generates (portions of) a copyrighted work.
A lot of discussion so far has focused on the first theory because it is the most threatening to AI companies. If the courts uphold this theory, most current LLMs would be illegal, whether or not they have memorized any training data.
The AI industry has some pretty strong arguments that using copyrighted works during the training process is fair use under the 2015 Google Books ruling. But the fact that Llama 3.1 70B memorized large portions of Harry Potter could color how the courts consider these fair use questions. //
The Google Books precedent probably can’t protect Meta against this second legal theory because Google never made its books database available for users to download—Google almost certainly would have lost the case if it had done that. //
Moreover, if a company keeps model weights on its own servers, it can use filters to try to prevent infringing output from reaching the outside world. So even if the underlying OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models have memorized copyrighted works in the same way as Llama 3.1 70B, it might be difficult for anyone outside the company to prove it.
Moreover, this kind of filtering makes it easier for companies with closed-weight models to invoke the Google Books precedent. In short, copyright law might create a strong disincentive for companies to release open-weight models.
“It's kind of perverse,” Mark Lemley told me. “I don't like that outcome.”
On the other hand, judges might conclude that it would be bad to effectively punish companies for publishing open-weight models.
“There's a degree to which being open and sharing weights is a kind of public service,” Grimmelmann told me. “I could honestly see judges being less skeptical of Meta and others who provide open-weight models.”
This Supreme Court term may well be remembered as a turning point. Not because the justices dismantled the administrative state in one dramatic move, but because they took important steps to rein in its excesses.
A string of rulings issued Friday—from McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson Corp. to Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA to FDA v. R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.—shows the Court is serious about restoring balance between unelected regulators and the courts tasked with holding them accountable.
What ties these decisions together is not a single ideological agenda. It is a shared recognition that when agencies act like legislative bodies or try to wall themselves off from judicial review, they go beyond their constitutional limits. The Court’s recent work reminds us that regulatory power must remain subject to oversight and correction when needed. //
District judges must independently interpret statutes, even when an agency has already spoken. As Justice Kavanaugh put it, “When a statute is clear, it is the law—not the agency’s interpretation—that governs.”. //
In FDA v. R.J. Reynolds, the Court pushed back on the FDA’s attempt to control who could challenge its decisions. The agency argued that only manufacturers could challenge its denial of premarket approvals. The Court disagreed and ruled that retailers, who are also harmed by these decisions, have every right to challenge them.
This ruling matters because it keeps agencies from deciding who gets to take them to court. When regulators pick their critics, there is no real oversight. //
None of these decisions dismantles the administrative state. Nor should they. What they do is draw clearer boundaries. Regulators should not act as lawmakers. They should not decide who can challenge them. They should not expect courts to accept their interpretations of the law automatically.
These rulings stand out because they are not driven by ideology. In fact, in some of these cases, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the Court’s more progressive voices, joined the conservative majority. That tells us something important. It suggests that Kagan recognizes, as the majority does, that unchecked regulatory power is dangerous no matter who holds it. If a progressive agency can go too far, so can a conservative one. The Constitution’s checks and balances are there to protect everyone.
Together, these rulings mark a shift toward restoring that balance. In our system, laws should come from legislators, be applied by judges, and not be dictated by unelected bureaucrats. That is a balance worth defending. //
Warren Pease
8 hours ago
“None of these decisions dismantles the administrative state. Nor should they.”
I must disagree with this premise. The administrative state is prima facie unconstitutional. Laws must be passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president. Having unelected bureaucrats make “regulations” with the force of law (these people can jail you and ruin you) is antithetical to a representative republic. SCOTUS should stop screwing around and remove the authority of anyone but congress to do things with the force of law.
“Our democracy cannot very well function if individual judges issue extraordinary relief to every plaintiff who clamors to object to executive action,” U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil said in her ruling on Monday. “It is not the role of a district court judge to direct the policies of the Executive Branch first and ask questions later.”
Those are the words many observers of the ongoing judicial coup have wanted to hear from a federal judge since the first wave of injunctions from tyrannical district court judges started coming down early in the Trump administration’s tenure, blocking the president elected by the American people to do what they elected him to do.
They finally came from Vyskocil, a Trump appointee serving in New York, when she dismissed a case from teachers unions attempting to get the court to “commandeer,” as she put it, $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Trump administration canceled the funding because of the school’s inability to handle pro-Palestine protests and violence on its campus.
“With no apparent sense of irony, lawyers for an organization called ‘Protect Democracy’ insist that a district court judge should order the Executive Branch immediately to restore the flow of taxpayer dollars to an elite university, which funding Defendants represent is inconsistent with the priorities of the duly elected President of the United States,” Vyskocil added. //
Vyskocil dismissed the case because the unions had no standing to sue, and Columbia University is “conspicuously absent” from the case as a plaintiff. //
She then went through the litany of bizarre counts against the Trump administration from the unions that did not describe any more than a tenuous relationship to the funding cuts at best. The unions even argued that the fact that they chose to spend money to oppose potential (yes, potential, not real) action from the Trump administration meant they had standing.
An organization “cannot spend its way into standing simply by expending money to gather information and advocate against the defendant’s action,” the judge wrote, quoting the Supreme Court.
Teachers unions, and universities for that matter, apparently believe they are entitled to federal funding and that any cut is a constitutional impossibility representing some kind of free speech violation. But as Vyskocil soberly pointed out in her second appeal to the fact that elections have consequences, the cuts are often made simply because the president — and the people who elected him — have priorities that differ from those of the unions and universities.
For experts in estate planning, the question may start to arise as more AI ghosts pop up. But for now, writing "no AI resurrections" into a will remains a complicated process, experts suggest, and such requests may not be honored by all unless laws are changed to reinforce a culture of respecting the wishes of people who feel uncomfortable with the idea of haunting their favorite people through AI simulations.
Deploying the National Guard is not an overreach but a measured response to a crisis that local leaders have failed to address. //
Labeling riotous behavior as “peaceful protest” is a deliberate misrepresentation that erodes trust in governance. Protesters who attack federal agents, destroy property, and endanger lives are not champions of justice; they are obstructing the rule of law. To paint Trump as the villain for responding to this chaos is to invert reality and excuse lawlessness under the guise of political posturing. //
The rule of law is not negotiable, and no state can opt out of federal authority when it comes to immigration enforcement. Other communities across the country must take heed: excusing violence as protest and obstructing federal law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent. As a nation, we must stand united in supporting the lawful execution of federal duties and reject the narrative that casts law enforcement as the enemy. The safety of our communities and the integrity of our laws depend on it.
A federal judge has stranded three ICE officers and their convicted-criminal deportees in Djibouti, Africa, after an order was handed down grounding their flight.
The eight illegal immigrants were on their way to South Sudan in late May when US District Judge Brian Murphy stepped in, claiming the Trump administration "unquestionably" violated a March decision on deportations. The flight then landed in Djibouti, a small nation on the Horn of Africa, with ICE agents being ill-equipped to deal with the "outrageous" conditions. //
The Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court to step in regarding this case, but so far, nothing has happened. As I've said before, regardless of what legal arguments exist, the longer this constant stream of lower-court decisions usurping executive power is allowed to continue without any new guardrails put in place, the less credibility the judiciary will enjoy. That's not a good thing for the country, and I sincerely hope this doesn't reach the point where court orders have to be ignored, because if that happens, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
In a unanimous decision that restores sanity and reaffirms the true meaning of civil rights, the Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a misguided judicial doctrine that had, for decades, warped Title VII protections into a one-sided tool of “equity.”
Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services is not just a technical correction of legal doctrine, it is a resounding declaration that equality under the law still matters more than identity-based scorekeeping.
For years, some federal courts imposed what was known as the “background circumstances” test, a requirement that majority-group plaintiffs (read: white, male, heterosexual, or Christian employees) provide extra proof that their employer was the rare kind that discriminated against the majority. //
Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said plainly what constitutional conservatives have argued all along: “Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.” The law, she explained, “makes it unlawful to discriminate against any individual… because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” //
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, filed a separate concurring opinion that went even further, calling out the root cause: judge-made doctrines that create unequal burdens under the guise of helping the marginalized. “Such a rule is undoubtedly contrary to Title VII, and likely violates the Constitution,” Thomas wrote. “[T]here can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race.” //
Equality > Equity
This case is more than just a victory for a woman who was passed over and demoted in favor of candidates who checked more fashionable demographic boxes. It’s a victory over the growing trend of replacing equality with equity.
Equity, as practiced in far too many corporate HR departments and public institutions, demands unequal treatment to engineer equal outcomes. That’s not fairness, that’s retribution disguised as justice. In this case, it meant denying Marlean Ames the same legal protections everyone else enjoys, simply because of her orientation and perceived privilege.
The Ames decision, by contrast, restores the foundational principle that every American, regardless of background, deserves to be judged on the content of their character and qualifications, not on their demographic label.
On Monday, Alex Marquardt, CNN Senior Intelligence Correspondent and frequent fill-in anchor at the network, announced that he was leaving his position. Speculation was immediately emerging that this was in connection to the defamation lawsuit brought against CNN, where a jury found the news network liable for defamation and ruled they had to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages. Now, indications are that Marquardt was in fact let go as a result of the suit.
CNN was sued by Navy veteran Zachary Young over a report on Young’s work as an extraction expert who facilitated the safe release of people from Afghanistan. CNN chose to frame Young’s work as illegal black market activities where he was extorting people to have them safely escape the nation as it fell into Taliban rule. The jury ruled CNN acted errantly and with malice in its false presentation, awarding Young with significant compensatory damages, with the network then negotiating undisclosed punitive compensation.
Marquardt was the reporter on those disputed reports, which ran on programs hosted by Jake Tapper, as well as others at the network.
Retired Professor OrneryCoot
6 hours ago edited
Since you asked, here are the essential elements of any legal claim:
-
There must be an enforceable duty to do something, or not do something, established by law, contract, court decree, custom, or otherwise. For example, there's a legal duty to not commit adultery, although they forgot to tell my ex-wife that.
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There must be an identifiable breach of that duty by someone legally obligated to obey it. If I'm committing adultery with Kristi Noem, but only in my heart, I haven't breached any duty in the (secular) legal sense.
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The breach of that duty must be the cause of any injuries complained of. This has two aspects: "cause in fact" (the "but for" test), and "proximate" or "legal" cause (the relationship of the breach to the harm as a matter of public policy: The fact that Hitler's father met Hitler's mother might be a cause in fact of WWII, but it is not a proximate cause).
-
The breach of duty must result in (i.e., have been the legal cause of, see above) identifiable damages to an identifiable party. As you might have guessed, there's an entire area of law devoted to the subject of what constitutes legal damages. The fact that the Democrats make my blood boil is not a legal item of damage.
Ancillary considerations include:
-
Any valid defenses to the claim, which can involve anything from immunity (yes, I did it, but the law allows me to because of who I am) to statute of limitations (yes, I did it, but you waited too long to complain). There are a myriad of other legal defenses, everything from contributory negligence to condonation and recrimination. Don't you wish you'd taken my Remedies class?
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The jurisdiction of the court to resolve the matter. This includes such considerations as personal jurisdiction (i.e., whether this particular party is properly before the court) and subject matter jurisdiction (i.e., whether the court in question has authority over this kind of legal dispute, and the power to afford the kind of relief requested. You can't try a felony case before a traffic court judge). Another jurisdictional issue is the feasability of relief. A court shouldn't issue a ruling that would be impossible or even unreasonably difficult/expensive to enforce.
Applying all of these factors makes it pretty clear that most of what drives you and me crazy these days (everything from making excuses for murderers, racists, terrorists, etc. to providing them with material support) is not going to be actionable under the legal principles enumerated above, certainly not by us, and in many cases not even by the government. In support of the idea that this is a pretty good thing overall, I cite two words: Fani Willis.
I hope this answers at least part of your very excellent questions, above. I also wonder what our RedState Legal Eagle, @Susie Moore, would tell us about this?
On April 14, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to “regularly suggest updates” to the law and “accelerate the issuance of legislation by up to 70%.” AI would create a “comprehensive legislative plan” spanning local and federal law and would be connected to public administration, the courts, and global policy trends. //
AI, and technology generally, is often invoked by politicians to give their project a patina of objectivity and rationality, but it doesn’t really do any such thing. As proposed, AI would simply give the UAE’s hereditary rulers new tools to express, enact, and enforce their preferred policies.
Mohammed’s emphasis that a primary benefit of AI will be to make law faster is also misguided. The machine may write the text, but humans will still propose, debate, and vote on the legislation. Drafting is rarely the bottleneck in passing new law. What takes much longer is for humans to amend, horse-trade, and ultimately come to agreement on the content of that legislation—even when that politicking is happening among a small group of monarchic elites.
Rather than expeditiousness, the more important capability offered by AI is sophistication. AI has the potential to make law more complex, tailoring it to a multitude of different scenarios. The combination of AI’s research and drafting speed makes it possible for it to outline legislation governing dozens, even thousands, of special cases for each proposed rule.
But here again, this capability of AI opens the door for the powerful to have their way. AI’s capacity to write complex law would allow the humans directing it to dictate their exacting policy preference for every special case. It could even embed those preferences surreptitiously.
Since time immemorial, legislators have carved out legal loopholes to narrowly cater to special interests. AI will be a powerful tool for authoritarians, lobbyists, and other empowered interests to do this at a greater scale. AI can help automatically produce what political scientist Amy McKay has termed “microlegislation“: loopholes that may be imperceptible to human readers on the page—until their impact is realized in the real world.
But AI can be constrained and directed to distribute power rather than concentrate it. For Emirati residents, the most intriguing possibility of the AI plan is the promise to introduce AI “interactive platforms” where the public can provide input to legislation. In experiments across locales as diverse as Kentucky, Massachusetts, France, Scotland, Taiwan, and many others, civil society within democracies are innovating and experimenting with ways to leverage AI to help listen to constituents and construct public policy in a way that best serves diverse stakeholders.
If the UAE is going to build an AI-native government, it should do so for the purpose of empowering people and not machines. AI has real potential to improve deliberation and pluralism in policymaking, and Emirati residents should hold their government accountable to delivering on this promise.
SCOTUS Takes Up the Power of Nationwide Injunctions and the Threat to Executive Authority.
May 16, 2025
Mark Twain once used the word, Podunk to describe a small, unimportant town. Today, a Podunk pettifogger from just such a place thinks he is David taking on Goliath. But this time, Goliath is the duly elected President of the United States. //
The Presidential Executive Order (EO) has become the way to govern Washington at a time when Congress is entirely dysfunctional. However, the vast network of federal district judges, who are, by definition, supposed to be apolitical and neutral, often rule against the EO. They do so increasingly on a "nationwide" basis, far beyond the districts their courtrooms oversee.
It has become a pressing and multifaceted issue. The United States federal judiciary has 677 district court judges (across 94 districts, including territorial courts like those in Puerto Rico and Guam). These are lifetime appointments under Article III of the Constitution. When an activist federal judge deems the underlying challenge to an EO from a plaintiff noteworthy, the judge sets out to ensure "uniform relief" across the entire country through a nationwide injunction. Even the nine Appeals Courts do not have such a reach. Even the Supreme Court doesn't have the same power unless at least five justices agree! //
Expectedly, Justice Clarence Thomas expressed his displeasure again at nationwide injunctions, pointing out that the U.S. judicial system operated without them until the 1960s, so why were they necessary now? Justice Samuel Alito, who has previously been a skeptic, hinted that he would vote to scale them back.
Chief Justice John Roberts focused on the procedural aspects of nationwide injunctions, suggesting that the Supreme Court has become more efficient at handling emergency cases expeditiously. He undercut the concerns of Justices Barrett, Gorsuch, and Sotomayor.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh had the best legal solution by suggesting that class-action lawsuits could serve as an alternative to nationwide injunctions. His questioning was a rare demonstration of principled legal analysis, not tainted by politics.
"Federal district judges are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and serve lifetime terms. There are currently 677 such judges in the U.S. Do you support or oppose individual district judges having the authority to block or halt a president’s policy nationwide?"
A solid majority of Americans say yes. Specifically, 56% said they either support such powers "strongly" (31%) or "somewhat" (26%), while just 28% said they oppose it either "somewhat" (13%) or "strongly" (15%). A sizeable 16% said they weren't sure. //
Democrats are most supportive, with 71% saying the support the judges, just 14% saying they oppose them. Among independents, that majority falls to 54% support, and rises to 30% opposition. The surprise comes among Republicans, where a plurality of 48% support judges over presidents, while 40% support it. //
But the numbers shifted somewhat with our second question: "Do you agree or disagree that federal judges should serve for a limited term rather than a lifetime appointment?"
The answer was even more overwhelming, this time not in favor of the judges. Overall, 71% said they either agree "strongly" (41%) or "somewhat" (30%), while the disagree category mustered only 16% for disagree "somewhat" (9%) or "strongly" (7%). //
Overall, 64% said they supported arresting judges who break laws either "strongly" (43%) or "somewhat" (21%). Just 22% opposed the idea, 10% "strongly" and 12% "somewhat." //
According to the Congressional Research Service, federal judges issued 17 separate injunctions against Trump from the time he re-entered office on Jan. 20 through March 27.
This is nothing new. In 2019, William Barr, Trump's second attorney general, complained about judicial injunctions directed at Trump.
"Since President Trump took office, federal district courts have issued 37 nationwide injunctions against the executive branch," Barr said. "That’s more than one a month."
"By comparison," the nation's former top lawyer added, "during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued two nationwide injunctions against the executive branch, both of which were vacated by the Ninth Circuit. And according to the Department’s best estimates, courts issued only 27 nationwide injunctions in all of the 20th century (emphasis ours)." //
Americans' appetite for enabling federal judges to halt presidential actions willy-nilly may soon be tempered by a Supreme Court decision that limits those powers. If so, it should not be politics. It should be because the Constitution does not allow it.
///
That's democracy. But what is consistent with Constitutional Law? Districts should not have jurisdiction beyond their district.
"If the ability [to brick a console] is there, someone will want to 'see how it goes.'"
One of the most frequent questions posed in response to articles regarding decisions by federal judges is: Who appointed him/her? In theory, that shouldn't matter — blindfolded Lady Justice and all that. In practice, all too often, it seems that it does.
But...maybe not quite as much as people assume. I decided it might be interesting to take a closer look at some of the statistics regarding the federal judiciary. Some of those stats will come as no surprise. Others, though, well, see what you think. //
While many assume the court typically rules in partisan fashion, the bulk of the decisions in each term are unanimous (accounting for roughly 47 percent of the decisions over the most recent three terms).
In contrast, the 6-3 decisions (what one would expect if the decisions were strictly party-line) account for only 22 percent of the decisions. //
Next, we'll take a look at the makeup of the federal judiciary, beginning with the District Courts.
Number of district courts - 94
Number of district judges - 677 (does not include those who have taken senior status). //
Alright, but what about the Circuit Courts of Appeal? Well, we have that breakdown as well.
Number of circuit-level judgeships - 179 (not including those who have taken senior status)
Because so much of the focus of late has been on the litigation challenging executive actions taken by President Donald Trump, and because so many of those suits have been filed in the D.C. District Court, I thought it might be useful to take a deeper dive into the makeup of that court. We'll also look at the distribution of these cases among the various active judges on the court. //
So, it appears that the judges who have more cases assigned to them tend to have multiple cases that have overlapping issues, and thus, the cases are related if not consolidated ... //
In other words, while I do think there are fair questions about how Judge Boasberg ended up with the J.G.G. case, overall, the only discernible patterns regarding case assignments are that the most senior and most junior have fewer, and the judges who have the most cases assigned to them tend to have cases that lend themselves to being grouped together.