Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump is destroying the Department of Education and making it so they cannot fulfill their law-mandated duties. The Constitution states that Congress makes the laws, and the executive faithfully executes them. This is not faithfully executing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=and1R4YBDfc
Supporters of textualism act like it is a simple way of reading the law, but judges who practice textualism often claim a clear text is ambiguous or an ambiguous text is clear based on what fits their political or ideological bias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTSPi9CYjAQ
Mamy prominent founders did not believe in the supernatural claims of Christianity. They did not believe they were founding a Christian nation. Some wrote harshly about major parts of Christianity. They believed in religious liberty. Despite not believing and having harsh words, they were not necessarily anti-religion. Some were culturally Christian despite not believing. There was much disagreement among the founders. The Constitution they created was based on secular rights and the freedom of religion, rather than based on a particular religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAh6ykxtkXU
“A divided Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Education Department to fire almost 40 percent of its workforce four months after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to begin closing down the department.
The justices, by an apparent 6-3 vote announced Monday, lifted an injunction a federal judge in Boston granted in May against the firings. That judge found that the staff cuts were so drastic they would prevent the department from carrying out duties mandated by Congress. He also said the mass firings appeared to be part of Trump’s plan to eliminate the Education Department entirely, despite a lack of congressional authorization to do so.
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The high court’s majority offered no explanation for its decision, but all three liberal justices joined a 19-page dissent that accused the court’s conservative majority of favoring the Trump administration when considering emergency appeals.
“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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The majority stressed in that decision that the high court was not giving its legal blessing to any specific plan to downsize any particular agency. But now it appears to have done just that with the Education Department.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/14/supreme-court-education-department-ruling-00452134
“CNN published a story on Monday covering software developer Joshua Aaron’s ICEBlock app, which lets “users alert people nearby to sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area.” CNN reports that the app, released in April, has amassed over 20,000 users. The app, which is only available on the App Store (Aaron is concerned about the mandatory data collection on Android devices), allows users to specify where they’ve spotted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity and alerts other users within a 5-mile radius via push notification. The function of the app is not dissimilar from Waze and Google Maps, which help drivers avoid encounters with police officers monitoring highways and roads for traffic violations.
The First Amendment protects ICEBlock, just as it does Waze and Google Maps. Even if it didn’t, it still would protect CNN’s coverage of it. Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), tells Reason that prosecuting CNN for reporting on ICEBlock “would be like prosecuting a news outlet for reporting on Virginia drivers illegally using radar detectors to avoid speeding tickets.” Moreover, the First Amendment protects the development and use of the ICEBlock app itself because “putting out general information that someone, somewhere might use to evade law enforcement” is not aiding and abetting but “just providing others true information,” says Terr.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/02/the-first-amendment-protects-cnns-reporting-on-iceblock-and-iran/
“In 2024, Congress passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which prohibited operating or hosting “a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)” within the United States. The law required TikTok to find a buyer by January 19, 2025, or else shut down operations within the United States.
Ultimately, neither happened…Trump issued the executive order on his first day, “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.” He has since issued two additional orders further extending the deadline
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“But no president has the authority to simply postpone the enforcement of a law passed by Congress. The fact that Congress seems content to let Trump decline to enforce it does not obviate the law itself. And for that reason, if Congress will not repeal the law, then it should insist Trump enforce it.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/07/either-repeal-or-enforce-but-ideally-repeal-the-tiktok-ban/
“the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a teenage girl and her parents who are attempting to sue the girl’s school district for alleged disability discrimination. The decision, which did not rule on the merits of the case, is similar to another recent unanimous ruling finding that courts cannot require different discrimination cases to meet different standards of proof to receive a favorable judgment.”
…
“two lower courts ruled against the family. The 8th Circuit ruled that simply failing to provide A. J. T. a reasonable accommodation wasn’t enough to prove illegal discrimination. Rather, because the family was suing a school, they would be subject to a higher standard than plaintiffs suing other institutions. The family was told they had to prove that the school’s behavior rose to the level of “bad faith” or “gross misjudgment.”
The Supreme Court disagreed. In the Court’s opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that disability discrimination “claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” adding that “Nothing in the text of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reiterated how nonsensical the 8th Circuit’s higher standard for educational disability discrimination claims was, noting that some of the most obvious forms of disability discrimination do not involve bad faith or misjudgment against the disabled.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/13/supreme-court-rules-again-that-different-standards-for-discrimination-plaintiffs-are-unconstitutional/
The Constitution clearly puts the power of deciding to go to war in the hands of the Congress. The attack on Iran was a clear act of war. It was not authorized by Congress. The attack on Iran was unconstitutional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06f9bioCYRY
“Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the law that governs presidential authority to order military strikes, there are three lawful ways for a commander-in-chief to order the bombing of another country. None of them appears to cover the strikes carried out on Saturday.
Here is the relevant section of the law (emphasis added): “The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
The first two options provided by the law are clearly not involved here, as Congress did not declare war against Iran and did not pass an authorization for the use of military force (as was done to allow the invasion of Iraq in 2002).
The third circumstance also does not apply to Trump’s attack on Iran, which was not carried out in response to an attack on American troops and did not respond to a crisis threatening American soil.”
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“The War Powers Act should not be treated as a series of suggestions that can be discarded when they seem inconvenient. Indeed, limits on executive power are most essential at the moments when they are inconvenient—otherwise, they are meaningless. Trump’s attack on Iran was not just an assault on a suspected nuclear weapons program; it was yet another blow against the separation of powers and the fundamental structure of the American constitutional system.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/22/the-attack-on-iran-is-unlawful/
“Given that Congress wasn’t consulted about Trump’s weekend strikes on Iran either (more on that in a bit), the administration’s “we’re not at war” insistences allow it to pretend it’s not completely ignoring the Constitution.”
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“Nevertheless, Republican Congressional leaders have cheered on Trump’s unconstitutional attack on Iran. Most rank-and-file Republicans have offered support as well, with a few notable exceptions like Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who got roasted by Trump on Truth Social for his trouble.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/23/just-dont-call-it-a-war/