Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The US rebelled against Britain partially because the British would invade people’s homes based on warrants signed by the executive themselves, rather than by a judge approving the justification of the warrant. That’s why the Constitution has the fourth amendment. ICE tried to secretly start using monarchical British-style warrants to invade people’s homes without a real warrant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGr-yWEu0hc
“A federal judge handling a lawsuit over the deportation of pro-Palestinian activists excoriated top administration officials, including President Donald Trump, for trampling on the First Amendment and for what the judge described as a fearful approach to freedom.
“There was no policy here,” said U.S. District Judge William Young, an 85-year-old Reagan appointee who has been on the federal bench in Boston for 40 years. “What happened here is an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people.”
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“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States,” Young said. “These cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”
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Young used extraordinarily stark language during the hearing, describing Trump as an “authoritarian” while insisting that he was choosing the term carefully, rather than simply using a “pejorative.”
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The judge found the president and his aides targeted the members of the group for their First Amendment-protected views and speech, guided by an anonymously run private website targeting Palestinian students in the United States.
“I’ve asked myself why — how did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to infringe the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? And I’ve come to believe that there’s a concept of freedom here that I don’t understand,” the judge continued. “The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the president of the United States, have a fearful view of freedom.”
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“These professionals were taken off anti-terrorist investigations. They were taken off human trafficking investigations all to look up … what dirt they could find on this group that some private agency, at the very highest levels of the DHS decided — that’s the best use of those people,” Young said. “If ever you want chapter and verse about how the government can be weaponized against a disfavored group, that’s the record of it.””
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/15/unconstitutional-conspiracy-judge-slams-trump-administration-over-targeted-deportations-00733070
“First, the men at the center of the 60 Minutes segment were in fact shipped off to CECOT without any sort of judicial review. Second, even after the Supreme Court ruled that alleged “alien enemies” have a due process right to challenge their removal via habeas corpus petitions, the administration made that option nearly impossible to pursue in practice, as the Court subsequently recognized. Third, the government maintains that federal courts have, at most, a highly circumscribed role in these cases, saying they have no authority to question Trump’s historically unprecedented invocation of the AEA against alleged gang members.
Trump’s assertion of unreviewable power under the AEA is part of a broader pattern that became clear during his first year in office. He has made similar claims regarding his tariffs and National Guard deployments. In these and other cases, Trump’s position undermines civil liberties, the rule of law, and the separation of powers by attacking the crucial role that the judicial branch plays in making sure that presidents respect statutory and constitutional limits on their authority.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/01/3-areas-where-the-courts-pushed-back-against-trumps-attempts-to-avoid-judicial-review-in-2025/
“Exxon’s chief executive Darren Woods said: “We have had our assets seized there twice and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen and what is currently the state.”
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Trump signed an executive order that seeks to prohibit US courts from seizing revenue that the US collects from Venezuelan oil and holds in American Treasury accounts.
Any court attempt to access those funds would interfere with US foreign relations and international goodwill, the executive order states.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-venezuela-oil-meeting-starts-220946813.html
The reason so many Trump prosecutions are failing to get indictments is because he is charging people with weak evidence and for political reasons.
“Grand juries have emerged as a major stumbling block for Trump’s drive to use the criminal courts to exact retribution on his perceived political foes.
Federal grand juries operate in near-total secrecy and decide whether prosecutors can bring a criminal indictment in the first place. Unlike trial juries, they don’t need to be unanimous; rather, a majority of their 16 to 23 members must agree to return an indictment. And their only job is to determine if the Justice Department has brought a plausible case — a relatively low standard which led to the cliche that prosecutors could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
But in the Trump era, grand juries are no longer a rubber stamp. Instead, they’ve become a headache for prosecutors trying to advance controversial Trump policies like mass deportations and militarizing law enforcement. Dozens of recent cases in Washington, D.C., have been met with so-called “no bills” — the shorthand for a grand jury declining to return a bill of indictment. And grand juries in other jurisdictions have turned down high-profile cases that Trump has prioritized.
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The administration also seems to be losing because it’s pushing for indictments in cases with weak evidence, and due to the unpopularity in some parts of the country of tough tactics against protesters and of policies like Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. and
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan recently marveled at the “apparent prosecutorial machinations” at work, emphasizing the “unprecedented” actions prosecutors have taken to bring cases — even when grand juries have rebuffed them.
“Most troubling, prosecutors have rushed to charge cases before properly investigating them,” the Washington-based Biden appointee lamented.
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The Constitution’s requirement that a grand jury approve serious criminal cases was adopted as a safeguard against executive power and political prosecutions. The move stemmed from what many revolutionaries regarded as political trials instituted by British authorities.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-grand-juries-letitia-james-comey-indictments-00713579
The Legalization Of Corruption
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTWqadj_19k
The Supreme Court has always had elements of reverse engineering where justices reach their conclusions based on political ideology, then reverse engineer a legal argument. Their political ideology may even design their legal philosophy from the very beginning of their legal thinking! However, the justices on the right seem to even be dropping the reverse engineering, and getting more sloppy in their legal thinking, pushing forward their political ideology and partisanship even more. Bush V Gore may have been the moment that the conservative justices crossed the Rubicon and realized that they can get away with pushing partisan, ideological agendas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yrj66mQQOM
The Trump administration told Texas to gerrymander based on race. Texas did as asked. A judge said the gerrymander was illegal because it was based on race. The Supreme Court said that despite the detailed investigation by the lower court that showed a race-based gerrymander, they don’t think it was based on race. They based that opinion on very little, and overturning a lower court based on one’s opinions of the facts is illegal, unless the lower court decision was overwhelmingly erroneous, which it was not in this case. The Supreme court also said it is too close to an election to make a change even though the elections are a year out. This means state legislatures can illegally gerrymander half the years because House elections are every two years.
The Supreme Court is clearly ruling on freedom of religion cases in a way that is biased toward Christianity and that allows Christians to risk and hurt non-Christians as long as they consider it a part of their religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31vNflImmtM
“The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” …in Bridges v. Wilson (1945), the Supreme Court unambiguously stated that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/18/yes-the-first-amendment-applies-to-non-citizens-present-in-the-united-states/
The conservative court decided no matter how extreme a partisan gerrymander, it is legal. However, they said racial gerrymanders are illegal. A district judge dug into the Texas gerrymander and concluded that the actors involved explicitly gerrymandered based on race. Without disputing the facts, the conservatives on the Supreme Court rejected it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv_OsWd7cLo