Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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Applying impeachment clause to Supreme Court justices National conversations surrounding the remote possibility of impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas for accepting – and failing to report – lavish gifts from a GOP billionaire with interests before the Supreme Court, have prompted important questions from readers about the application of the impeachment clause to Supreme Court justices. In a nutshell, curious readers wonder whether justices, and federal judges, are subject to impeachment? If so, what are the criteria? Have we impeached a Sup...
Defendant Donald J. Trump and his supporters have assailed the 34-count felony indictment of the former president brought by the Manhattan District Attorney as resting on a flimsy, untested and novel legal theory that converts Trump’s alleged misdemeanors to felonies. While a jury of President Trump’s peers will decide his fate, assuming the case goes to trial, it turns out that the theory of the case underlying the 34 felony charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, may not be novel at all. New York legal experts hav...
A federal lawsuit reflective of the nationwide culture wars is challenging the right of a University of Wyoming sorority to induct a transgender woman, raising questions of central importance to the First Amendment Right of freedom of association and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The issues in the suit are likely to be replicated across the nation as the judicial system wrestles with legislative efforts to regulate, distinguish and deny opportunities and rights of the LGBTQ community. Seven past and present members have filed suit in...
Former President Donald Trump has said he expects to be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury any day now. Although widely anticipated, there is no certainty that he will be indicted by grand jurors in New York or, for that matter, by citizens serving on grand juries in Washington or Atlanta, led by prosecutors examining, respectively, his potential obstruction of justice of a federal investigation involving the “Mar-a-Lago Papers” or his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Trump’s supporters in Congress and those...
In 1965, in the landmark case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court, for the first time in our nation’s history, invoked the right to privacy for the purpose of upholding the right of married couples to access contraceptives. Griswold was hailed by women, who had been fighting for the right to use contraceptives for well over a century. It granted women control over their own reproductive organs and provided married couples with the liberty to decide whether to procreate, plan families and make decisions associated with p...
Racial discrimination in southern hotels and restaurants throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Congress determined in 1964 through hearings and studies, had created for Black Americans great challenges and difficulties in their desire to travel from state to state. The Supreme Court had held a century before that Americans enjoyed a constitutional right to travel, but how could Blacks realistically exercise that right without access to lodgings and places to eat? Congress sought in 1964, in the context of the historic civil rights movement, a...
The immense pressures inflicted on the United States by the Great Depression of the 1930s forced the Supreme Court on several occasions to confront the scope of a state’s police power to regulate economic activity in the name of the general welfare. In the landmark case of Nebbia v. New York (1934), the Court, in a sharply divided 5-4 decision, saved the American dairy industry when it upheld the state’s milk control law that created a board to establish minimum retail prices. The dairy industry, like the rest of the agricultural sector, was...
In 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling that, to this day, ranks as one of the most important victories ever rendered for farmers in American legal history. The decision rewarded Midwestern farmers for their broad and sustained political activism in a long campaign to protect their economic interests in a confrontation with the “all powerful railroads.” In a 7-2 opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, upheld an Illinois statute, one of several “Granger laws” enacted by Midwest...
Former Vice President Mike Pence plans to invoke the Speech or Debate Clause as justification for challenging a subpoena issued by Special Counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Pence’s claim to immunity from the subpoena shines a spotlight on an important but largely inconspicuous constitutional provision. Article I, Section 6 protects “Senators and Representatives” from arrest “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” and stipulates that “they shall not be questi...
President Joe Biden’s delivery of what has become the annual State of the Union address fulfilled one of the few constitutional obligations imposed upon the nation’s chief executive. What were the framers of the Constitution thinking when they wrote in Article II, section 3, that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and convenient”? In the Constitutional Convention, delegates spent virtually no time di...
The difficulties that college and university administrators from California to Massachusetts have faced over the past 30 years in protecting their students from harassment, within the context of America’s constitutional commitment to freedom of speech, were brought center stage once more in December of 2022 at the University of Wyoming where a church elder was banned from the student union for harassing an LGBTQ student by name. This most recent controversy was initiated on December 2, when Todd Schmidt, an elder with the Laramie Faith C...
Questions surrounding news that President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have disclosed possession of classified documents in their homes justify interruption of this column’s weekly focus on landmark Supreme Court rulings. Curious readers have asked about the constitutional, legal and historical foundations of government authority to classify documents. First things first. Let’s not confuse the voluntary and cooperative disclosure of possession of classified documents by the Biden and Pence camps with the deceit and obs...
Half a century later, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) remains the Supreme Court’s authoritative ruling on symbolic speech and the First Amendment rights of K-12 students to express their political views. Delivered in the context of the widespread social activism that defined the 1960s – anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-war protests – Justice Abe Fortas’s 7-2 landmark opinion upheld the right of students to wear black armbands in school as means of demonstrating their opposition to the Vietnam War. Justice...
In a tragic, landmark ruling of historic dimensions, the Supreme Court, in 1927, in an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, upheld the forced sterilization of a Virginia woman erroneously characterized by the state as “feeble-minded,” grounded on the chilling rationale that, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Court’s 8-1 decision in Buck v. Bell, with only Justice Pierce Butler dissenting, is widely regarded as one of its worst. Justice Holmes’s opinion, just five paragraphs in length, and fewer than 1,000 words...
Congressman-Elect, George Santos’s (R-NY) sweeping distortions of his personal and professional biography has triggered nationwide calls for the House of Representatives to prevent him from assuming his seat in the 118th Congress. Americans have recoiled from his many false claims, including that he is Jewish and that his grandparents fled Nazi persecution, that he is a graduate of Baruch College and that he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. The rising demands to block him from Congress raises anew a question of monumental importance f...
In this season of peace, remembrance and celebration, we are beckoned by the ghosts of 1776 and 1787 to recall the historic work of this nation’s founders in establishing a republic grounded in the aspirational principles of liberty, equality and self-governance, and our duty as citizens to defend to defend it. The serious challenges to American Democracy, at home and abroad, have generated searching concerns amidst exposure of its deep-seated vulnerabilities and led some to wonder if our nation is facing a “Machiavellian Moment,” the point whe...
For the generation that framed and adopted the Constitution, legislative despotism was not merely theoretical, but real. The Founders’ fears were drawn from their experience under Parliament, which saddled an aspiring Republic with laws that violated their rights and liberties and denied their goal of independence. Henry Adams, the preeminent historian of the founding period, observed, “a great majority of the American people shared the same fears of despotic government.” Suspicion of legislative power was exacerbated in the years follo...
Constitutionally speaking, a former President may be prosecuted It is unclear if the Department of Justice will charge former President Donald Trump with four crimes referred by the January 6 Committee, but there should be no doubt, constitutionally speaking, that an ex-president is subject to criminal prosecution. Chief Justice John Marshall, presiding at the Aaron Burr treason trial in 1807, observed that a former president is returned to the citizenry. The president, Marshall stated, “is elected from the mass of the people,” and “return...
Donald Trump’s call to terminate the constitution As the entire world knows by now, former President Donald Trump, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, has called for the “termination” of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election. Trump’s landmark demand, if implemented, would eviscerate the Constitution, American democracy and the rule of law. Setting aside calls during the Civil War from Confederate leaders for the overthrow of the Constitution and the Union, no high ranking American official, past or present, has ever so...
The public role of religion in American life, long a challenging issue for the Supreme Court in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, commanded nationwide attention in 1984 when a lawsuit was brought against Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for its erection of a nativity scene in the center of the city’s downtown shopping district. Prior to the arrival of Lynch v. Donnelly, the Supreme Court had rendered decisions that prohibited public schools from orchestrating prayer, posting the Ten Commandments and organizing a m...
At this juncture in American history, when the citizenry seems to require frequent reminders of the landmark decisions and actions that poured and preserved the foundation of our constitutional democracy, we would do well to recall the transformative importance of Near v. Minnesota (1931), in which the Supreme Court delivered a ruling that built a wall of protection for freedom of the press against governmental censorship. The virtues of Near v. Minnesota are exhausting to recount. The Court’s decision defined freedom of the press. It trumpeted...
The enormous pressures and hardships—financial, medical and psychological-- inflicted on the citizenry by the Great Depression required creative governmental responses that stressed the limits of the Constitution. In the face of the nation’s gravest economic crisis, states struggled to find ways and means to keep Americans in their homes and on their farms. The historic job losses meant that millions could not meet mortgage obligations. Foreclosures forced citizens from their homes and into the streets, without any hope of state assistance sin...
Two hundred years ago, in the landmark case of Cohens v. Virginia (1821), the future of our Constitution, the aspirations of national unity, and the status and role of the federal judiciary itself, were before the Supreme Court. We have seldom seen in one case the coalescence of so many issues fundamental to the integrity of our constitutional system. The stakes for America could not have been higher. If the Supreme Court could not exercise appellate authority over state court decisions, then each state would be free to interpret federal l...
The controversial use by college admission committees of an applicant’s race was the subject of a five-hour hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court this week in cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The lengthy oral argument brought to a fever pitch the long simmering question of the constitutionality of race conscious programs—affirmative action policies-- that were upheld in the Court’s landmark ruling in 1978 in Regents of University of California v. Bakke. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the use...
The 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr, lost in the mists of early American legal history stirs, at most, only feint recollections among members of the Bar, let alone the general public. But Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark ruling that the president is required to obey subpoenas represents a principle that is fundamental to American Constitutionalism and the rule of law. Marshall’s ruling is a grand reminder of the resonance--in the fanatical politics of our time --of the American ideal that all men are equal in the eyes of the law. The pri...
