#Institute for Justice

[gettothestabbing]

Under a new ordinance, the city has deemed it a criminal misdemeanor—punishable by fines and even imprisonment—to share prepared food in a public park “for charitable purposes.” As the city attorney clarified, people may freely share food in public parks at “social events, which would include a party.” But be sure your “party” doesn’t include any homeless people, or you might go to jail. https://ij.org/case/arizona-charitabl...

...For more than four years, Norma would regularly bring her food to the picnic tables there, sharing with anyone who asked. That all changed on March 8, 2022. Just as she was performing her usual cleanup of the area, Norma was arrested and criminally charged with violating the city’s ordinance. Norma refused to plead guilty as she felt she’d done nothing wrong; months later (after hearings in criminal court), the city dropped the charge—but only while clarifying that if Norma does it again, the city would throw her in jail. Now, Norma shares her food in a private alley—without shade in the scorching heat, without tables or a seating area, without a place for people to wash their hands, and out of sight of people who could use her help.

“I’m not on speakerphone right?” Policeman before he advises the guy on the scene to arrest, fingerprint, and drop off the old lady who dared to give food to homeless people in a public park.

#Institute for Justice #Bullhead City #Norma Thornton #arrests #homeless #charity #police #food #video #seniors #AZ #fingerprints #body cam #lawsuits #quote #pers com

[classicalliberalleague]

Shocker they don’t believe in free speech in Mississippi.

#Mississippi #free speech #IJ #Institute for Justice #Youtube

[007blonded]

Arizona's🌵 $127 to Learn Hair Braiding & $399 for LIFETIME Certification

Rare Essence Hair Braiding Training

This is a NON-payment endorsement of the Rare Essence Hair Braiding technique course. She is from Phoenix, Arizona, and is one of the women from the Institute for Justice economic liberation legislative advocacy for occupational licensing cases. It’s for the many women and some men who have asked if EcoHair Braiding Association provides hair braiding technique and trends courses. It will be a…

View On WordPress

#African Hair Braiding Shop #Black Women #Hair Braiding #Institute for Justice #Natural Hair Care #Occupational licensing #Rare Essence Hair Braiding Training #Youtube

[nosferdoc]

Great new book by Amul Thapar on Clarance Thomas summarizes the amazing, aggravating case and the key role the greatest originalist Justice played.

#books #clarence thomas #kelo case #new london #connecticon #scotus #amul thapar #institute for Justice

[antekythera]

Watch "Grandma Arrested for Feeding People in Need" on YouTube

78 year old woman arrested for feeding homeless in the park, threatened with jail if she continues feeding whoever needs it. Criminalizing charity is unconstitutional, and needs to be known.

#institute for justice #charity #homelessness #Youtube

[agentfascinateur]

From Gaza to the Student Protest Movement, with love:

Thank you 💜

#student protest #columbia university #palestine #palestinians #gaza #genocide #mass graves #mass murder #israeli apartheid #israeli occupation #idf terrorists #iof terrorism #war crimes #free palestine #free gaza #justice #university #yale #harvard #stanford #ucla #uc berkeley #tufts university #nyu #boston university #emerson college #students #usa #massachusetts institute of technology #rafah

[arcticdementor]

ARLINGTON, Va.—A little more than one week after the U.S. Supreme Court announced in Egbert v. Boule that federal police engaged in immigration-related work cannot be sued when they violate the Constitution—regardless of when, where or how egregiously they act—the Court has now signaled that all federal police are above the law. Since January 2022, the Court has held a pair of cases filed by the Institute for Justice (IJ), challenging the grant of absolute immunity to federal police engaged in domestic policing. This morning, the Court declined to hear both petitions, leaving victims of constitutional abuse without a remedy in American courts.

…

The first appeal sought to overturn an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that granted immunity to a federally deputized St. Paul, Minnesota, police officer whose well-documented lies and deception cost Hamdi Mohamud—who was a teenage Somali refugee—two years of her life unjustly spent behind bars.

The second IJ appeal, filed on behalf of Kevin Byrd, sought to reverse a 5th Circuit decision that also granted immunity to an officer with a federal badge—a Department of Homeland Security agent who tried to kill Kevin to prevent him from asking questions about the involvement of the agent’s son in a drunken car crash the night before. After seeing a video of the incident, officers released Kevin and arrested the agent.

Considered alongside Egbert, which addressed immigration-related federal police, Hamdi’s and Kevin’s cases addressed federal police involved in domestic policing. Nearly all of the more-than-100,000 federal police who patrol across the country fall into one of these two categories. And the Supreme Court has now held in Egbert and signaled by denying IJ’s petitions that all federal police are now above the law. They cannot be sued, regardless of how egregiously they violate the Constitution and their oaths to uphold and defend it.

…

The Court’s refusal to hear Hamdi’s and Kevin’s cases leaves in place rulings that effectively prohibit all claims against federal police. As a result, the Constitution does not protect from abuse by federal police the millions of residents of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. By emboldening the courts that are refusing to provide constitutional remedies, the Court’s decision not to hear IJ’s petitions further endangers the rights of Americans in the other 40 states.

#john kramer #institute for justice #scotus #law enforcement

[alwaysbewoke]

On March 5th, 1959, 69 African American boys, ages 13 to 17, were padlocked in their dormitory for the night at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville. Around 4 a.m., a fire mysteriously ignited, forcing the boys to fight and claw their way out of the burning building. The old, run-down, & low-funded facility, just 15 minutes south of Little Rock, housed 69 teens from ages 13-17. Most were either homeless or incarcerated for petty crimes such as doing pranks. 48 boys managed to escape the fire. The doors were locked from the outside and fire mysteriously ignited on a cold, wet morning, following earlier thunderstorms in the same area of rural Pulaski County. The horrific event brought attention to the deplorable conditions in which the boys lived. The boys all slept in a space barely big enough for them to move around & theyre one foot apart from one another & their bathroom was a bucket at the corner where they had to defecate in. In an ironic twist, the land in which the school stood is now the Arkansas Department of Correction Facility Wrightsville Unit. In 2019 a plaque was finally placed after 60 years.

PURE EVIL!!! MY GOD!!

#white racial hatred #white people are evil #racism #civil rights #history #black history #historical injustice #institutional neglect #fire tragedy #juvenile justice #systemic racism #correctional facilities #commemoration #memorialization #social reform

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

The “enormously powerful Atlas Network, a global network of more than 500 member think tanks advocating for “free market” policies.”

Started by Antony Fisher and his Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK. It went worldwide with assistance from the Koch family and Rupert Murdoch, along with funding from big oil companies.

☝️👏🤯

#institute of economic affairs #IEA #Atlas Network #Koch family foundations #Rupert Murdoch #big oil #climate denial #Antony fisher #republican hypocrisy #republican assholes #republican family values #republican values #oligarchs #global conspiracy #right wing politics #climate change #climate Justice #climate and environment #climate change denial

[odinsblog]

🗣️This is an illegitimate and deeply corrupt Supreme Court. Vote every Republican & conservative politician out of office in 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to check her in. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn't offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.

The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.

“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care — this is inconceivable.”

It's happened despite federal mandates that the women be treated.

Federal law requires emergency rooms to treat or stabilize patients who are in active labor and provide a medical transfer to another hospital if they don’t have the staff or resources to treat them. Medical facilities must comply with the law if they accept Medicare funding.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday that could weaken those protections. The Biden administration has sued Idaho over its abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, arguing it conflicts with the federal law.

“No woman should be denied the care she needs,” Jennifer Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said in a statement. “All patients, including women who are experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies, should have access to emergency medical care required under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).”

PREGNANCY CARE AFTER ROE

Pregnant patients have “become radioactive to emergency departments” in states with extreme abortion restrictions, said Sara Rosenbaum, a George Washington University health law and policy professor

“They are so scared of a pregnant patient, that the emergency medicine staff won’t even look. They just want these people gone," Rosenbaum said.

Consider what happened to a woman who was nine months pregnant and having contractions when she arrived at the Falls Community Hospital in Marlin, Texas, in July 2022, a week after the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion. The doctor on duty refused to see her.

(continue reading)

#politics #republicans #abortion #reproductive rights #healthcare #roe v wade #reproductive justice #femicide #misogyny #war on women #republicans are evil #the cruelty is the point #election 2024 #scotus #the supreme court is an illegitimate and deeply corrupt institution #religious reich #christian nationalism

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

On Thursday, Justice Neil Gorsuch released a 26-page opinion venting outrage about a legal dispute that does not exist, involving websites that do not exist. Yet this case, built on imaginary grounds, will have very real consequences for LGBTQ consumers, and for anti-discrimination laws more broadly. All of the Court’s Republican appointees joined Gorsuch’s opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis.

That said, the fake dispute that Gorsuch imagines in his 303 Creative opinion involves a reasonably narrow legal question.

In the past, Christian right advocates have sought sweeping exemptions from state and federal civil rights laws, rooted in their expansive notion of “religious liberty.” Often, these lawsuits claimed that the Constitution’s safeguards for people of faith allow anyone who objects to LGBTQ people on religious grounds to defy any law prohibiting anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

303 Creative involves a much narrower dispute. The case centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who wishes to expand her business into designing wedding websites — something she has never done before. She says she’s reluctant to do so, however, because she fears that if she designs such a website for an opposite-sex couple, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law will compel her to also design wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Smith objects to same-sex marriages.

As Gorsuch summarizes her claim, Smith “worries that, if she [starts designing wedding websites,] Colorado will force her to express views with which she disagrees.”

This is not a religious liberty claim, it is a free speech claim, rooted in well-established law, which says that the First Amendment forbids the government from compelling people to say something that they would rather not say. In ruling in Smith’s favor, the Court does not say that any religious conservative can defy any anti-discrimination law. It simply holds that someone like Smith, who publishes words for a living, may refuse to say something they don’t want to say.

The full implications of Gorsuch’s opinion are not entirely clear. In the past, religious conservatives have argued that artists and artisans of all kinds — including bakers, photographers, and floral arrangement designers — should also be allowed to discriminate under the First Amendment, because all artistic work necessarily entails some kind of expression. Gorsuch punts on this question, writing that “hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment,” are not present in the 303 Creative case.

And it is worth emphasizing that the particular kind of work that Smith does, writing words on a publicly available website, fits more snugly within the First Amendment than a similar claim brought by a wedding cake designer or a florist.

Before this case was argued, I wrote that if Lorie Smith had been approached by a same-sex couple and refused to design a wedding website for them, and if she had then been sued for refusing to do so, then she would have a very strong First Amendment defense against such a suit. As the Supreme Court said in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And that includes the right of a web designer to refuse to write words on a website that they do not wish to write.

But none of these events have actually happened. And, for that reason, the Supreme Court should have dismissed the case.

THIS CASE SHOULD HAVE NEVER MADE IT THIS FAR

The frustrating thing about this case is that it involves an entirely fabricated legal dispute. Again, Lorie Smith has never actually made a wedding website for a paying customer. Nor has Colorado ever attempted to enforce its civil rights law against Ms. Smith. Indeed, in its brief to the Supreme Court, Colorado expressed doubt that its anti-discrimination law would even apply to Smith.

Yet Gorsuch’s majority opinion repeatedly paints Smith as a hapless victim, oppressed by wicked state officials who insist that she must proclaim a dogma that she denies. As he writes in the very first paragraph of his opinion, “Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms. It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe.”

This claim is simply untrue. Colorado has not brought any enforcement action against Smith, or taken any other step to compel her to say anything at all — or to design any website that she does not want to design. Nor has anyone ever sued Smith for allegedly violating Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.

Indeed, in one particularly amusing turn, Smith alleged during an early stage of this litigation that she was approached by a man about doing some design work for his wedding to another man. Yet, after the New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant contacted this man, she learned that he never reached out to Smith — and that he was married to a woman.

These facts matter because federal courts, including the Supreme Court, do not have jurisdiction to decide hypothetical cases. As a unanimous Supreme Court held in Texas v. United States (1998), “a claim is not ripe for adjudication if it rests upon ‘contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.’” So the Court should have told Smith to go away and come back when she had a real dispute with the state of Colorado.

303 Creative, moreover, is the second time Gorsuch has taken such liberties with the truth in order to rule in favor of a religious conservative. Almost exactly one year ago, Gorsuch handed down the Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), a case about a public school football coach who, after games, would walk to the center of the 50-yard line and ostentatiously kneel down and pray before students and spectators — often while surrounded by players, community members, and even members of the press.

Indeed, in her dissent in Bremerton, Justice Sonia Sotomayor included a photo of Coach Kennedy holding such a prayer session, as a throng of uniformed football players and other individuals kneel with him, and as people holding video cameras look on.

And yet, Gorsuch’s opinion in Bremerton claimed that Kennedy merely wanted to offer a “short, private, personal prayer,” and then Gorsuch ruled in favor of Kennedy based on this fabricated version of Kennedy’s actual conduct.

Needless to say, this is aberrant behavior by a Supreme Court Justice — and really by six Supreme Court justices, since all of the Court’s Republican appointees joined Gorsuch’s decisions in 303 Creative and Kennedy.

#us politics #news #vox #2023 #us supreme court #SCOTUS #303 Creative v. Elenis #republicans #conservatives #justice neil gorsuch #religious liberty #republican homophobia #anti lgbtq discrimination #lgbtqia+ rights #lgbtqia+ #Lorie Smith #Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights #Texas v. United States #Kennedy v. Bremerton School District #justice sonia sotomayor

[enby-axels]

this panel alone makes it clear that his goal of restoring his clan was never about repopulating it, like the fandom believes, but about restoring his family's honor. anyways it's missing five kage summit arc sasuke hours

#im still stuck on this moment #like he touches on such an underacknowledged aspect of justice. #there's no true justice without destruction of the institutions that lead to injustice. there's no true justice without liberation. #tbh i've always thought reconciliation is overrated anyways and too often weaponized by the oppressors/abusive party #.....sasuke was so real for this #undescribed #sskposting #uchiha sasuke #anti konoha

[classicalliberalleague]

#property rights #institute for justice #Youtube

[007blonded]

Arizona's🌵 $127 to Learn Hair Braiding & $399 for LIFETIME Certification

Rare Essence Hair Braiding Training

This is a NON-payment endorsement of the Rare Essence Hair Braiding technique course. She is from Phoenix, Arizona, and is one of the women from the Institute for Justice economic liberation legislative advocacy for occupational licensing cases. It’s for the many women and some men who have asked if EcoHair Braiding Association provides hair braiding technique and trends courses. It will be a…

View On WordPress

#African Hair Braiding Shop #Black Women #Hair Braiding #Institute for Justice #Natural Hair Care #Occupational licensing #Rare Essence Hair Braiding Training #Youtube

[garadinervi]

Rachel, (2009, documentary, 1h 40m), (stills), Directed by Simone Bitton, Cinematography by Jacques Bouquin, Edited by Jean-Michel Perez and Catherine Poitevin, Women Make Movies (WMM) (pt. 5) (pt. 1 here) (pt. 2 here) (pt. 3 here) (pt. 4 here) [Palestine Film Institute]

#art #documentary #still #drawing #illustration #poster #rachel corrie #simone bitton #jacques bouquin #jean michel perez #catherine poitevin #women make movies #the rachel corrie foundation for peace & justice #international solidarity movement #palestine film institute #2000s

[bighermie]

#george soros #vera institute of justice #clay higgins #trump administration