Biden Loses Again

[GURPS]

"The court observes that plaintiffs have demonstrated substantial potential costs resulting from the challenged provisions," Judge Cain wrote. "While the government defendants largely focus on the acreage withdrawal and dynamics of the sale itself, many of plaintiffs’ alleged hardships arise from the vessel restrictions."

Plaintiffs, he wrote, have demonstrated a " likelihood that these will burden their operations on current and planned leases," adding, "the resulting costs would not be undone by the court’s entry of a permanent injunction and order of another sale."

In a criticism of the Biden administration's rulemaking, he said it appeared to be "a weaponization of the Endangered Species Act than the collaborative, reasoned approach prescribed by the applicable laws and regulations." The judge wrote that federal officials, meanwhile, have attempted to "provide scientific justification to a political reassessment of offshore drilling" by issuing restrictions on the lease sale.

Judge Hands Federal Government Major Legal Defeat in Gulf of Mexico

A federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would place restrictions on an offshore oil and gas lease sale.

www.theepochtimes.com

 

[GURPS]

The CISA, described as the “nerve center” of federal government censorship, is responsible for censoring the American public, facilitating collusion between the feds and social media companies, and interfering in our elections. Now, CISA, along with the Surgeon General, White House, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cannot communicate with social media companies for the purpose of policing speech, according to Federalist Contributor and Editor at Large of Real Clear Investigations Benjamin Weingarten. The court’s original opinion, which addressed the White House, FBI, CDC, and Surgeon General, did not include CISA.

The court stated that CISA “shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech,” according to an excerpt provided by Weingarten.

In their original filing, the Missouri v. Biden defendants revealed that CISA both directly and indirectly censored Americans. The agency directly forwarded social media posts to various platforms seeking for them to be censored and facilitated meetings between Big Tech companies and national security and law enforcement agencies to address “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” ahead of the 2020 election. The Hunter Biden laptop story, for instance, was mass-censored and labeled a foreign “hack-and-leak” operation thanks to warnings from CISA.

CISA also funded and collaborated with nongovernmental censorship organizations to outsource censorship and bypass the First Amendment. CISA helped conceive and create the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a private “anti-disinformation” organization that lobbied tech companies to establish oppressive content moderation policies. EIP also flagged offending content and flagged “entire narratives” for social media platforms to address.

Court Rules Censorship Agency CISA Can't Police Speech

A preliminary injunction issued today by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CISA is barred from censoring Americans.

thefederalist.com

 

[GURPS]

CISA’s Censorship Tactics​

So, beginning with the 2020 election and continuing thereafter, the likes of CISA began treating offending Tweets and Facebook posts about everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop to mass mail-in balloting, and oddities in election administration and outcomes as akin to mini-digital terrorist attacks on election infrastructure — if not “democracy” itself.

It used that national security pretext, built on a moral panic stoked by our ruling regime over Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the associated “Trump-Russia collusion” hoax that itself can be seen as one gigantic information operation to orchestrate social media censorship regarding protected political speech at mass scale.

As I detailed in testimony before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability this past May:

CISA has served as a censorship conductor, driving regular meetings between security agencies and social media companies aimed at encouraging the platforms to combat purported mis- and disinformation — that is, to censor speech disfavored by the government that regulates them. And they have.

CISA has served as a censorship “switchboard,” collecting purported misinformation from government and non-government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and even private Facebook messages, and relaying the flagged content to the platforms to squelch it.

Finally, CISA has served as an architect of the broader public-private censorship regime, helping originate, consult, network, and partner with often government-linked third parties to themselves serve as First Amendment-circumventing, mass-surveillance, and mass-censorship enterprises.

“These systematic speech-stifling efforts, often targeting core political speech, and intensifying during elections,” I concluded, “seem tantamount to a conspiracy to violate the First Amendment, and running domestic election interference.”

In short, that social media companies flagged posts, throttled narratives, and nuked accounts en masse — specifically around elections and interfering in those elections — as the Louisiana District Court had found, was attributable to fed-led efforts coordinated and driven in large part by CISA.

So, for the appeals court not to subject CISA to its injunction was untenable. It was akin to prosecuting a mob family but letting the boss skate and continue running his “waste management” business.

The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden cried foul, petitioning the Fifth Circuit for a rehearing and a reinstatement of the injunction on CISA. Now the court has responded by fixing the latter fatal flaw.

In issuing its revised opinion, the Fifth Circuit noted that CISA had in fact likely violated the First Amendment in “coerc[ing] or significantly encourag[ing] social-media platforms to moderate content” beginning during the 2020 presidential election.

Therefore, the panel ruled that like the censorious Biden White House, CDC, and FBI, CISA too would be subject to a preliminary injunction prohibiting it from engaging in any action that would cause social media companies to suppress “protected free speech.”

5th Circuit Fixes Error In Prior Ruling To Nix Deep-State Censorship

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals expanded the size and scope of its injunction against the government's central censorship arm.

thefederalist.com

 

[GURPS]

Supreme Court Takes Up Landmark Government Censorship Case​

The Supreme Court on Friday took up Missouri v. Biden, the free speech case challenging the Biden administration’s efforts to censor content on social media, while issuing a pause on a preliminary injunction granted by a lower court.

Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration over its communications with social media companies related to the suppression of online speech, arguing it violated the First Amendment. District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty issued an injunction in July blocking certain parts of President Joe Biden’s administration from colluding with social media platforms to censor content online. The Supreme Court paused the injunction, but agreed to take up the case, according to the court order.

 

[GURPS]

Supreme Court lifts restrictions on Joe Biden's administration pushing for the removal of controversial Facebook and X posts about COVID and election security​

• The Supreme Court is blocking a lower court order that blocked the Biden administration's efforts to curb disinformation on social media
• The nine justices will eventually hear a case brought by Louisiana, Missouri and other parties accusing the White House of squelching conservative views
• The social media posts at issue often involved COVID conspiracy theories and the 'big lie' about the 2020 presidential election

 

[GURPS]

SCOTUS Takes Up Free Speech Case

With this much evidence, the Court should smash the Biden censorship regime.




Late Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case that may end the Biden administration’s circumvention of the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to Big Tech. The case was initially filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with various private plaintiffs who allege that social media platforms censored them at the behest of federal agencies. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the plaintiffs on July 4, enjoining the agencies from communicating with platforms about “content moderation.” The Biden administration sought relief from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and lost again, making a Supreme Court clash inevitable.

In September, the Biden administration filed Murtha v. Missouri asking the Court to stay Judge Doughty’s injunction pending the Court’s disposition of the administration’s forthcoming petition for a writ of certiorari. On Friday, the Court granted the application for stay. The order expedited further proceedings by treating that application as a petition for a writ of certiorari and granting it as well. Consequently, the original plaintiffs will be able to make their case before the Court. However, in the interim, the Biden administration will once again be free to collude with Big Tech to suppress disfavored views. This perverse state of affairs prompted Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, to write a scathing dissent:

This case concerns what two lower courts found to be a “coordinated campaign” by high-level federal officials to suppress the expression of disfavored views on important public issues … Today, however, a majority of the Court, without undertaking a full review of the record and without any explanation, suspends the effect of that injunction until the Court completes its review of this case, an event that may not occur until late in the spring of next year. Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing.

 

[stgislander]

So Barrett and Kavanaugh, supposedly extreme right-wing Justices, didn't side with Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

Judge Blocks Biden Administration’s Attempt to Expand Lending Rules​

Current rules, for instance, based on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), require banks and other lenders to provide services to low- and moderate-income people in the local community. The expanded rules stretch the definition of community to any individuals with whom the lenders do business.

Government officials alleged that the word “entire” before community in the law necessitated a fresh examination of the statute and prompted the new rules.

“True, ’the word ”entire“ ... should not be read out of [the statute],'” Judge Kacsmaryk wrote in his ruling. “But it does not have the effect defendants attribute to it. In modifying ‘community,’ the word ‘entire’ merely clarifies that the whole community must be served, it does not change what a ‘community’ is. If a statutory ‘community’ is created around every individual customer with whom a bank does business—regardless of whether that customer is within the geography of the bank’s physical presence—the term becomes meaningless and the statute ineffectual.”
The judge, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, also said that the section of the new rules that authorize federal banking agencies (FBAs) to assess deposits, instead of only credit activities, was based on an incorrect reading of the law.

 

[GURPS]

Finally, the Wall Street Journal ran a see-sawing op-ed yesterday headlined, “Biden Loses Again on Student Loan Forgiveness.” Again! Maybe this time it will stick.



After the Supreme Court blocked his sweeping student loan cancellation last summer, Biden bragged “we can’t have a debate because cannibal rappers named Ice Tea ate Donald Trump.” No, wait, that was a different time. What happened was, not one to let the top court in the land tell him what to do, Biden ineloquently boasted, in a hissed stage whisper, “That didn’t stop me.”

In a 61-page order, penned by two Obama-era judges, a Missouri federal court stayed most of Joe’s new and improved loan forgiveness plan. Eighteen states, including Florida, sued, arguing Biden’s so-called SAVE Plan — actually a giant SPEND plan — wasn’t authorized by Congress, turned loans into grants, and was overall uglier than a slimy hairball the judge’s hairless Persian recently coughed up.

The order held that Biden’s SAVE Plan likely violates the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine, because it is “‘an enormous and transformative expansion in statutory authority without clear congressional authorization.’” And the court noted the $475 billion estimated price tag would “forgive nearly one-third of all student loan debt.”

Most voters are less enthusiastic about paying off other people’s student loans than Secret Service agents debating who’s going to take Biden’s bite-happy German shepherd Commander for its next walk.

“By attempting to saddle working Missourians with Ivy League debt, Joe Biden is undermining our constitutional structure,” Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey said. “Only Congress has the power of the purse, not the President. Today’s ruling was a huge win for the rule of law, and for every American who Joe Biden was about to force to pay off someone else’s debt.”

The student loan issue is such a dumb political football. If they wanted to solve it, it could be solved in about ten minutes by letting people with unaffordable student loans discharge them in bankruptcy. The Constitutional bankruptcy system already has all the safeguards to ensure people don’t take undue advantage, and only use it when necessary.

We could also charge colleges for unaffordable student loans, in whole or in part. There are lots of good ideas out there. Good ideas are like flowers, they bloom when nurtured in the right intellectual soil and are properly watered with encouragement.

But the Biden Administration is like an intellectual desert where they bury nuclear waste in discarded Round-Up barrels. Don’t expect any smart flowers to grow there.

Today we are thankful that common sense remains in much of the federal court system, this time in Missouri. That’s especially encouraging news since I just filed our PREP Act lawsuit. Here we go!

☕️ UNPREPARED ☙ Wednesday, June 26, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

It's filed—our PREP Act lawsuit; Trump campaign's possible peace plan; good signs in primaries; Bannon gets help from House; Supreme's order days multiply; federal judge blocks Biden giveaways; more.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[GURPS]

Two Federal Courts Halt Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness End-Run Around SCOTUS Ruling​

The Supreme Court ruled that Joe Biden could not rewrite the terms of student loans.

Joe don’t care. He bragged he would get around it. The way he planned to get around it was complicated at one level, but simple in its essence: reconfigure repayment and other calculations to effectuate what SCOTUS said he could not do.

This Reuters article has a pretty good summary of the multiple lawsuits and decisions, with links to the opinions:

Two federal judges in Kansas and Missouri on Monday sided with several Republican-led states and partially blocked Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration from moving forward with a key student debt relief initiative that would cost billions of dollars.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree in Wichita, Kansas, blocked the U.S. Department of Education from proceeding with parts of a plan set to take effect July 1 designed to lower monthly payments and speed up loan forgiveness for millions of Americans.

He ruled shortly before U.S. District Judge John Ross in St. Louis, Missouri, issued a preliminary injunction barring the department from granting further loan forgiveness under the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan.

The SAVE Plan provides more generous terms than past income-based repayment plans, lowering monthly payments for eligible borrowers and allowing those whose original principal balances were $12,000 or less to have their debt forgiven after 10 years.

Biden announced the SAVE Plan in 2022, alongside a separate, broader plan that would have fulfilled a campaign promise by cancelling up to $20,000 in debt for up to 43 million Americans.

That plan would have canceled about $430 billion in debt but was blocked by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in June 2023 after several Republican-led states challenged it. But the Supreme Court’s ruling did not address the SAVE Plan

 

[GURPS]

Beyond this week’s historic Supreme Court session, we have even more wonderful news to celebrate on the legal front. First up, the Topeka Capital-Journal ran a story this morning headlined, “Federal judge sides with Kris Kobach, blocking Title IX protections for trans students.” Yesterday, joining two other courts who entered similar orders last week, a federal judge in Kansas entered a broad injunction stopping Biden’s grotesque Title IX rules that would have forced schools to treat biological boys as girls, and declaring the entire month of July “girls who are really boys month.”



The judge’s rationale was similar to the other two injunctions, which was that the Biden Administration is totally deranged, almost as if it were being run by someone with dementia or something. But unlike the previous two injunctions, this newest injunction extended not only to the four states who joined the lawsuit but also to co-plaintiff Moms for Liberty, which now has chapters in all fifty states.

I will add, for context, that Moms for Liberty did not exist before the pandemic. They were peacefully minding their own beeswax, making sandwiches and driving kids to and fro, to this lesson and that game and so on. But after masks and jab mandates, they are now impatiently nesting all up in Grandma Garland’s wavy hair and causing him to always look sort of pained and surprised, like he just tasted something strange and sour that wasn’t supposed to be in his mouth.

☕️ DIVIDED HOUSE ☙ Wednesday, July 3, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Split forming in Democrat party evokes 1860's election; Biden gains new celebrity advisor; tons of great legal news from jab cases; Florida judge discloses Epstein grand jury transcript; more.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[TPD]

 

[GURPS]

US judge blocks Biden rule adding gender identity protections to healthcare​

A U.S. judge on Wednesday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a new rule against discrimination on the basis of gender identity in healthcare while he hears a lawsuit challenging it by 15 Republican-led states.
The rule was finalized in May, opens new tab by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and was set to take effect on Friday. It states that a federal prohibition on sex discrimination, part of the Affordable Care Act health insurance law, extends to discrimination against transgender people.

States opposing the new rule had said in their lawsuit that it would require their Medicaid programs covering low-income residents to pay for treatments like hormones and surgeries for transgender people, including for minors. Many Republican states have passed laws banning such treatments, often called gender-affirming care, for minors.
The rule applies to recipients of federal funds, including Medicaid programs. It followed executive orders President Joe Biden issued in 2021 and 2022 instructing agencies like HHS to take measures protecting transgender people from discrimination.

 

[GURPS]

More good legal news emerged yesterday from the Eighth Circuit. Politico ran the story headlined, “Appeals court blocks Biden's student loan repayment plan, in latest legal blow to administration.”



Yesterday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals completely stayed Biden’s moronically named “SAVE Act,” which buys votes by requiring plumbers and contractors to pay off degrees earned by unemployed baristas, like Bachelors of Arts in “Black Lesbian Dance Theory” and “Critical Studies in Indigenous Gender Mustard.”

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) applauded the court’s decision, sensibly explaining that Biden "isn't 'forgiving' debt. He is taking the debt from those who willingly took it out to go to college and transferring it onto taxpayers who decided not to go to college or already paid off their loans.”

More progress! The RNC is over, but Joe Biden’s fully vaccinated covid quarantine continues. This weekend will feature the Biden resignation watch, as the drumbeat for him to step down will reach a feverish pitch. Can the old man hold out? We’ll see.

☕️ UNITED ☙ Friday, July 19, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

It's time for Act III; Pres. Trump's acceptance speech; Windows crashes world; long knives out for President Lettuce as old man resists; Secret Service appalled by criticism; great legal news; more.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[GURPS]

Texas Scores 'Major Victory' Over Biden Administration​

The Biden Department of Justice brought a legal challenge against the Lone Star State last year for installing the buoys without federal authorization.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta claimed the floating barrier was a threat to navigation and presented a public safety concern. It also risked “damaging U.S. foreign policy” with Mexico over the country’s objection to the barrier.

In 2023, Texas deployed the buoys to address the historic levels of aliens attempting illegal, dangerous—and in some cases, deadly—river crossings. The Biden Administration then sued and demanded Texas remove the buoys and reopen the border. A federal district court granted the Biden Administration a preliminary injunction and ordered the buoys to be removed and a Fifth Circuit panel issued a split decision upholding the order. However, in January 2024, Attorney General Paxton secured an en banc rehearing before the Fifth Circuit.
The full court has now ruled that the district court’s flawed preliminary injunction misapplied the law and was an abuse of the lower court’s authority. The buoy barrier can remain in the river while proceedings continue at the district court level. (Texas Attorney General's Office)

“We hold that the district court clearly erred in finding that the United States will likely prove that the barrier is in a navigable stretch of the Rio Grande,” Judge Don R. Willett wrote. “We cannot square the district court’s findings and conclusions with over a century’s worth of precedent.”

 

[GURPS]

Sanity In the Court​

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency application by the Biden Administration for partial stays on orders entered by district courts and affirmed by the Fifth and Sixth Circuits. As usual in such cases, the Court’s order was Per Curiam. The order lays out the procedural history succinctly:

The Department of Education recently issued a new rule implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The rule newly defined sex discrimination to “includ[e ] discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.” 89 Fed. Reg. 33886 (2024).
Several States and other parties sought preliminary injunctions against the new rule, arguing among other things that the rule exceeded the bounds of the statutory text enacted by Congress. District Courts in Louisiana and Kentucky agreed with the plaintiffs and preliminarily enjoined enforcement of the rule in the plaintiff States. The Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Sixth Circuits then declined to stay the injunctions in the interim period while those courts consider the Government’s appeals of the preliminary injunctions.

[clip]

The Biden administration’s rule didn’t “clarify” anything, it illegally sought to implement a policy change that it desired, but that was at odds with the statute the rule supposedly implemented.

Courts apply several factors in evaluating any motion for a temporary injunction. The most important of those factors is the plaintiff’s likelihood of ultimately succeeding on the merits. Here, a series of courts have found that the plaintiff states and others are likely to succeed on their claim that the Biden administration’s new rule is illegal.

What is actually noteworthy about the Supreme Court’s order, but which few seem to have pointed out, is that all nine justices agreed that the principal elements of the Biden rule, those relating to sexual orientation and gender identity, are likely to be found illegal, so that the injunctions entered below were proper. The dissent’s complaint was that the injunctions covered all elements of the new rule, not just the sexual orientation and gender identity elements that, frankly, are obviously illegal under Title IX. The majority described the disagreement:

Importantly, all Members of the Court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. But the Government argues (and the dissent agrees) that those provisions should be severed and that the other provisions of the new rule should still be permitted to take effect in the interim period while the Government’s appeals of the preliminary injunctions are pending in the Courts of Appeals. The lower courts concluded otherwise because the new definition of sex discrimination is intertwined with and affects many other provisions of the new rule. Those courts therefore concluded, at least at this preliminary stage, that the allegedly unlawful provisions are not readily severable from the remaining provisions.

In short, the federal courts have roundly and unanimously rejected the Biden Administration’s effort to use extralegal means to implement the LGBTQ+ agenda. This is a good reminder that, while the Democrats constantly charge that Donald Trump is an authoritarian and potential dictator, it is actually the Biden Administration that repeatedly uses illegal executive orders to try to circumvent our Constitution and laws.

 

[GURPS]

Supreme Court Refuses to Reinstate $475 Billion Student Loan Relief Program​

The Supreme Court on Aug. 28 turned down President Joe Biden’s request to reinstate a $475 billion student loan relief plan weeks after an appeals court blocked the program.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred the application to the full court which denied it. No dissents were recorded.

The Supreme Court said it “expects that the Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch.” The case remains pending in the lower courts.

The SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) plan that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona first proposed in August 2022 would reduce monthly payments for millions of eligible borrowers and accelerate loan forgiveness for others. A reported 8 million borrowers have signed up for the program.

The SAVE plan wasn’t yet finalized in June 2023, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal government’s previous $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan in Biden v. Nebraska.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found on Aug. 9 that Missouri and six other states challenging the plan would probably be able to prove that the plan violates the major questions doctrine. The doctrine requires courts to presume that Congress doesn’t delegate important policy questions to government agencies.