Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
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
“The judge found that many of those swept up in immigration raids were taken to the basement of a federal building in Los Angeles to a room known as “B-18” meant to temporarily house arrestees while they are being processed. Frimpong found that many detainees were held there for hours without access to counsel.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/11/federal-judge-blocks-roving-immigration-arrests-amid-los-angeles-crackdown-00449914
“”Due process is the most foundational legal principle protecting individual liberty in Western civilization. It dates back to the Magna Carta,” Bolick observed. Yet “we have seen the words due process appear in quotes repeatedly, as if this concept was created by rogue liberal judges to help illegal immigrants stay in the country.””
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“Bolick is a principled legal thinker and one of the genuine good guys in American law. If he is worried about the health of our constitutional order, we should all pay heed.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-republican-appointed-judge-decrying-trumps-deeply-disturbing-attacks-on-the-rule-of-law/
Judges are finding workarounds to Trump’s big Supreme Court win
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/03/supreme-court-nationwide-injunctions-rulings-00439335
SCOTUS: Judges Can’t block Trump Nationwide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA6jkis2s6I
https://reason.com/2025/07/03/a-broad-ruling-against-trumps-immigration-policies-illustrates-alternatives-to-universal-injunctions/
“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.”
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“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/
Federal Courts Shrug at Potentially Lethal Wrong-Door Raids
https://reason.com/2025/06/18/federal-courts-shrug-at-potentially-lethal-wrong-door-raids/
Conservative Supreme Court allows Trump to deport immigrants to third countries without due process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-UzsY0JC4
“Let’s start with the role of the courts. The idea that the judicial branch owes special deference to the elected branches of government was thoroughly rejected by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution. “As to the constitutionality of laws,” Luther Martin told the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on July 21, 1787, “that point will come before the judges in their proper official character. In this character they will have a negative on the laws.” Federal judges, Martin explained, “could declare an unconstitutional law void,” thereby overruling the actions of the elected branches. None of the delegates disagreed with that.
“This Constitution defines the extent of the powers of the general government,” Oliver Ellsworth told the Connecticut Ratification Convention on January 7, 1788. “If the general legislature should at any time overleap their limits, the judicial department is a constitutional check. If the United States go beyond their powers, if they make a law which the Constitution does not authorize, it is void; and the judicial power, the national judges, who, to secure their impartiality, are to be made independent, will declare it to be void.”
James Madison, often called the “father of the Constitution,” made the same point in his June 8, 1789, speech to Congress introducing the Bill of Rights. The proper role of the courts, Madison said, was to act as “an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.””
https://reason.com/2025/05/30/what-j-d-vance-gets-wrong-about-judicial-deference-to-executive-power/