After more than 15 years of insisting that "competition is only a click away," Google's antitrust mantra is no longer keeping the regulators at bay. //

In the past eight months, however, Google has lost two major US competition lawsuits: One brought by Epic Games over Google's grip on the Android ecosystem, the other brought by the Department of Justice over the Big G's market-dominating search advertising business. //

"What the judge made clear was that they [Google] have an overwhelming monopoly in search," said Kint. "And they've abused it." //

There's a real risk that a poorly targeted remedy would just allow some other data predator to thrive, or would degrade the overall ecosystem – as happened when wolves were removed from Yellowstone. Imagine a Meta operating Google Play, and what the privacy disclosures would look like then.

Leitmotif
4 hours ago
Civil asset forfeiture is an egregious scam, a violation of basic human rights, and should be completely abolished at the federal, state, and local levels.

Period.

Full stop.

Adam Selene / Simon Jester Leitmotif
3 hours ago
We, as a society have somehow rationalized that 'civil' charges from government are not a big deal - just another lawsuit, so the constitutional protections afforded from 'criminal' charges don't apply. They just take your savings, your property and the labors of years of work. So in the end, you worked (retroactively and involuntary without the option to leave and against your will) without compensation. So basically ex post facto slavery.

After US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has a monopoly in two markets—general search services and general text advertising—everybody is wondering how Google might be forced to change its search business.

Specifically, the judge ruled that Google's exclusive deals with browser and device developers secured Google's monopoly. These so-called default agreements funneled the majority of online searches to Google search engine result pages (SERPs), where results could be found among text ads that have long generated the bulk of Google's revenue.

At trial, Mehta's ruling noted, it was estimated that if Google lost its most important default deal with Apple, Google "would lose around 65 percent of its revenue, even assuming that it could retain some users without the Safari default." //

But the remedies phase of litigation may have to wait until after Google's appeal, which experts said could take years to litigate before any remedies are ever proposed in court. Whether Google could be successful in appealing the ruling is currently being debated, with anti-monopoly advocates backing Mehta's ruling as "rock solid" and critics suggesting that the ruling's fresh takes on antitrust law are open to attack.

The lawsuit, which video streaming company Rumble also joined, comes on the heels of a House Judiciary Committee report alleging GARM likely violated federal antitrust laws by colluding with giant ad buyer GroupM to coordinate the demonization of news websites, platforms, and podcasts it deemed guilty of wrongthink. //

Correspondence obtained by the committee shows GARM Co-Founder Rob Rakowitz bragged about and even “took credit for Twitter’s revenue decline,” according to the committee report. //

According to Yaccarino, X’s legal action is “about more than damages.”

“[W]e have to fix a broken ecosystem that allows this illegal activity to occur,” she continued.

AMichigan Court of Claims judge ruled Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s guidance on absentee ballot signature verification violated the state’s constitution and ordered it removed in a final order signed on Tuesday. 

In the ruling, Judge Christopher P. Yates, an appointee of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, reiterated that Benson’s “’initial presumption’ of validity in signature verification of absentee-ballot applications and envelopes mandated by the December 2023 guidance manual issued by defendants is incompatible with the Constitution and laws of the State of Michigan.” 

On Tuesday, journalist Julie Kelly posted court documents on X showing Special Counsel Jack Smith “admitted the FBI added cover sheets to alleged classified documents found at MAL and took photos for evidence.”

“This confirms my report from last month that the FBI doctored evidence to produce stunt photos of classified documents at [Mar-a-Lago],” Kelly said. //

The FBI purchased glossy cover sheets to use in photos of authorities’ unprecedented raid of former President Donald Trump. //

Prosecutors admitted to mishandling the evidence triggering the delay demanded by the judge which now threatens the possibility for Smith’s team to go to trial before the November election.

According to Kelly on Tuesday, the FBI’s colored cover sheets were included in “classified discovery” implicating prosecutors’ desire to keep the details of the added documents concealed from the public.

“The FBI brought colored classified cover sheets to the raid under the guise of using them to substitute classified documents found within Trump’s boxes,” Kelly wrote on X. “Instead, FBI agents attached the scary looking sheets to various files and took photos.”

The images published by prosecutors became emblematic of the former president’s apparent irresponsibility illustrated from the raid.

Cannon ruled Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause and granted the motion to dismiss the indictment against Trump. //

Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday threw out the lawfare prosecution against former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents after finding the Biden administration unconstitutionally appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith. //

“None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment … gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith,” the ruling states.

Cannon ruled Congress is granted via the Constitution a “role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers.”

“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon ruled. “If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so.” //

“If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President,” Thomas opined.

Dem Rep. said FEC chair’s presentation of federal law might “sow misguided doubt and confusion about the state of the presidential election.” //

The Trump campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday challenging the transfer of funds and reportedly calling it “the largest campaign finance violation in American history.”

In the complaint, Trump campaign General Counsel David Warrington reportedly contended that the $91.5 million in campaign funds originally raised by Biden’s presidential campaign cannot be transferred to Harris, who has yet to be named the official Democrat nominee.

Biden and Harris are “flagrantly violating the [Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971, as amended] by making and receiving an excessive contribution of nearly one hundred million dollars, and for filing fraudulent forms with the Commission purporting to repurpose one candidate’s principal campaign committee for the use of another candidate,” Warrington reportedly wrote in the complaint.

RSB
7 hours ago
Well Cannon has things going for her here:

1) Justice Thomas concurrence, which she quoted from and based her ruling on. And Thomas doesn't write that if he doesn't have at least 5 votes behind it. It was basically what he did when he used opinion writing to beg for a Chevron case.

2) 11th Circuit is not a leftist sinkhole. And...it's SCOTUS supervisory justice is Thomas.

3) Jack Smith is unique in that he was a private citizen and not an already in place US Attorney. Without the Independent Counsel statute being in effect there was no authority to just appoint a private citizen to these powers without Senate approval.

4) In addition to the Immunity concurrence, the ruling that revoked Chevron plays here as it directly refutes deference to DOJ interpretation of its regs.

I think ultimately she gets upheld here. And that SCOTUS takes it even if a Trump election "moots" it so they can make a definitive ruling. //

DaveM Benito
7 hours ago edited
That's the issue. The Statute authorizing the DOJ to appoint Special Counsels expired many years ago and was never renewed.
The current trends of the court here indicates that their interpretation is that an agency can not by itself decide it has authority. Only Congress can grant it to them. The fact that the previous authorization expired without being renewed indicates Congress withdrew that authority.

From what I read yesterday- Smith is using Stare Decisis as his argument-i.e previous courts have upheld the appointment of SCs therefore it is decided law. It's dangerous to try to predict what the court will do in a particular case but in general that argument will not looked upon with favor by this court. This court has repeatedly ruled that unconstitutional behavior by an agency is unconstitutional behavior by an agency- whether it as been previously upheld in the courts or or not. //

The Viking RSB
6 hours ago
Prior to his appointment, every other SC had gone through the approval process in one form or another, as either head of the FBI (Mueller) or as a US Attorney, such as Durham and Hur.

"The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution," her order states. "Special Counsel Smith’s use of a permanent indefinite appropriation also violates the Appropriations Clause [...] but the Court need not address proper remedy for that funding violation given the dismissal on Appointments Clause grounds. The effect of this Order is confined to this proceeding." //

"The bottom line is this," she wrote. "The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives to Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers. The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers. If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigateand prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so. He can be appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys throughout American history, see 28 U.S.C. § 541, or Congress can authorize his appointment through enactment of positive statutory law consistent with the Appointments Clause."

Contrary to the New York Democrat’s claim, the naming of contingent Republican electors during the 2020 cycle was neither unprecedented nor unlawful. In fact, the process conducted in contested states such as Georgia parallels a similar endeavor that took place during the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. //

As my colleague Jordan Boyd previously highlighted, Democrats and their media allies had no problem “calling for electoral disobedience” after Trump won the 2016 election. In an effort to keep Trump out of office, so-called “news” outlets ran “[a]rticles demanding state electors ‘prevent an irresponsible demagogue from taking office’ and overrule Americans to install Hillary Clinton as president.”

‘If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people,’ Thomas wrote.

The problem is out of control. No one knows how many separate crimes there are, including the Department of Justice. Researchers have tried counting, with one 2019 effort identifying at least 5,199 statutory crimes. Regulatory crimes are orders of magnitude greater, with estimates of the number of regulatory crimes ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 separate offenses.

This is inconsistent with basic ideas of self-government and the intentions of those who framed the Constitution. Laws with criminal consequences should be carefully considered by the legislative branch, not pushed through by unelected bureaucrats who are not accountable to the people. //

Congress can seize the opportunity and pass some simple and commonsense reforms that would further reduce the power of the administrative state and its appetite for passing criminal laws.

Congress should begin by requiring the executive agencies to simply catalog their regulations that have criminal consequences. After all, if a federal agency does not know if something is a criminal offense, how can the people be expected to? If a “mens rea” requirement is not already in the law, Congress should make all criminal regulations have a “willful” requirement to prevent citizens from being prosecuted for actions they did not even know they took. For new laws, agencies should be required to state the applicable mental state.

This case has taken 13 years to conclude. Billions of dollars were lost to consumers in what will ultimately be seen as excess fees.

With Loper Bright opening the door to challenging agency regulations and Corner Post removing a six-years-from-rule-finalization statute of limitations, many regulations that should be tossed out will no longer have the shield of Supreme Court precedent and a lapsed statute of limitations to hide behind. This is the beginning of an Administrative State that is modest and chastened, and it remembers that it works for the people, not for the post-retirement careers of the bureaucrats writing rules to favor industries.

Monday, the Supreme Court handed down a mixed bag of a ruling on presidential immunity. In my view, they took what could've been a straightforward and elegant decision — the president is immune from prosecution for acts committed in office unless he has been impeached for those acts — and turned it into a dog's breakfast of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin litigation about what constitutes official and unofficial acts. //

What has passed with remarkably little notice is Justice Clarence Thomas's concurrence. Justice Thomas says the Court is putting the cart before the horse. The first question that needs to be answered is not whether acts were official or unofficial. The critical first question is whether this prosecution is legal at all. Thomas's comments begin on the 44th page of the linked document.

I write separately to highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure. In this case, the Attorney General purported to appoint a private citizen as Special Counsel to prosecute a former President on behalf of the United States. But, I am not sure that any office for the Special Counsel has been “established by Law,” as the Constitution requires. Art. II, §2, cl. 2. By requiring that Congress create federal offices “by Law,” the Constitution imposes an important check against the President—he cannot create offices at his pleasure. If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President.

No former President has faced criminal prosecution for his acts while in office in the more than 200 years since the founding of our country. And, that is so despite numerous past Presidents taking actions that many would argue constitute crimes. If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding.

...

Even if the Special Counsel has a valid office, questions remain as to whether the Attorney General filled that office in compliance with the Appointments Clause. For example, it must be determined whether the Special Counsel is a principal or inferior officer. If the former, his appointment is invalid because the Special Counsel was not nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, as principal officers must be. Art. II, §2, cl. 2. Even if he is an inferior officer, the Attorney General could appoint him without Presidential nomination and senatorial confirmation only if “Congress . . . by law vest[ed] the Appointment” in the Attorney General as a “Hea[d] of Department.” Ibid. So, the Special Counsel’s appointment is invalid unless a statute created the Special Counsel’s office and gave the Attorney General the power to fill it “by Law.”

Whether the Special Counsel’s office was “established by Law” is not a trifling technicality. If Congress has not reached a consensus that a particular office should exist, the Executive lacks the power to unilaterally create and then fill that office. Given that the Special Counsel purports to wield the Executive Branch’s power to prosecute, the consequences are weighty. Our Constitution’s separation of powers, including its separation of the powers to create and filled offices, is “the absolutely central guarantee of a just Government” and the liberty that it secures for us all. Morrison, 487 U. S., at 697 (Scalia, J., dissenting). There is no prosecution that can justify imperiling it.

Minister of War
2 hours ago
"the president is immune from prosecution for acts committed in office unless he has been impeached for those acts"

Bingo!

Period.

End of story.

Close the book.

John Roberts is an idiot once again & the conservative justices are required to roll their eyes & go along with his stupidity just because that was the only way to get even a partial victory.

The online magazine The Federalist rightly called the decision an “immigration rebuke,” but the author was mistaken when he wrote that Asencio-Cordero “was denied a visa by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2015”—visa decisions overseas are made by consular officers, who are commissioned Foreign Service officers in the State Department.

The Muñoz case was the latest round in a battle by immigration activists against the doctrine of “consular non-reviewability,” which holds that decisions made by consular officers overseas in visa cases can’t be challenged in U.S. courts. If they were, the system would crumble—much like the asylum system has under President Joe Biden’s flood of released and paroled inadmissible aliens.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Donald Trump’s favor in the presidential immunity case, complicating at least two prosecutions against the 45th president.

“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,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the high court’s majority opinion. “And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.” //

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent.

“Today’s decision to grant former presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the presidency,” Sotomayor argued. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.” //

Among the most well-known post-2020 election controversies involved Trump attempting to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to stall or reverse a joint session of Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. The high court remanded the question of Trump’s immunity on this back to the district court to further clarify.

“Whenever the president and vice president discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct,” the majority says. “Presiding over the January 6 certification proceeding at which members of Congress count the electoral votes is a constitutional and statutory duty of the vice president.”

Courts no longer owe deference to an administrative agency's interpretation of its ambiguous statutory mandate. //

The Court held that the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs the operations of administrative agencies,

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.

Thomas agreed with the Court’s decision but wrote separately “to underscore a more fundamental problem: Chevron deference violates our Constitution’s separation of powers, as I have previously explained at length.”

The violation, Thomas elaborated, stemmed from Chevron‘s mandate that judges surrender their judicial responsibility “to exercise . . . independent judgment in interpreting and expounding upon the laws.” //

The challengers also argued that Chevron is an abdication of judicial responsibility because courts have the duty to interpret the law, but Chevron deference substitutes the agency’s interpretation. The challengers criticized Chevron for “upend[ing] basic principles of constitutional due process of law” because it required deference to an agency’s interpretation when that agency is a litigant before the court. //

ThePrimordialOrderedPair | June 28, 2024 at 1:04 pm

Chevron is overruled.

Most important decision in decades … 4 decades, precisely.

And courts in the future need to keep in mind, in addition to this, that Congress is disallowed from delegating any of its Constitutional authority to any other entity unless specifically allowed to do so in the Constitution. To do so is to, de facto, amend the Constitution.

The past week has been the legal equivalent of the firebombing of Dresden for the administrative state.

In short order, many of the reasons we gradually, like a frog in a pot of boiling water, transformed from citizens into subjects have been demolished.

In the 6-3 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Chevron "defies the command of" the Administrative Procedure Act (the law governing federal administrative agencies) "that the reviewing court--not the agency whose action it reviews--is to decide all relevant questions of law and interpret ... statutory provisions. It requires a court to ignore, not follow, the reading the court would have reached had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA."

Roberts noted: "Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption" (that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations of authority by Congress to federal agencies) "is misguided, because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do."

Roberts added that this decision does "not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful--including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself--are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology." //

Jman98 Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
Congress always had the power, they simply refused to use it. Congress could have always been specific in the language used in any given piece of legislation they wrote and passed. They purposely weren’t because specificity leads to responsibility and they’re not about that. By leaving things to someone else, bureaucrats in the Executive branch, they could then complain about how their purposely ambiguous legislation was badly implemented and dodge responsibility for what they’d done. How many times have they written in legislation “the Secretary shall” so as to punt all responsibility for what happens next? Hundreds, sometimes in the same piece of legislation. This is telling Congress to do their job right the first time. //

Minister of War Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
I agree that the power should be returned to the people & their elected representatives. But Iam hesitant when I hear that the Court thinks that courts know better than anyone else. The SCOTUS may have just granted itself & the rest of the judiciary more power that they shouldn't have to do what amounts to writing laws.

Laocoön of Troy Minister of War
an hour ago
No...they've just thrown down the gauntlet and have warned the Executive to not play so fast and loose with regulation or the courts will take away even more power from them. This entire decision is an unmitigated, magnificent result.

I suspect that the lazy and cowardly Congress will end up forced by their donors and political supporters to stop at least some regulation overreach.