The Berggruen Institute, a private foundation founded by billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen, awarded Ginsburg its annual $1 million Philosophy & Culture award during a swanky star-studded event in December 2019. At the time, ethics experts raised red flags over Ginsburg’s acceptance of the prize, noting that the bounty far exceeded the $2,000 limit placed on honoraria by Judicial Conference regulations. But Ginsburg temporarily assuaged those concerns when she pledged to donate the prize money to more than 60 charities that reflected her personal causes, including the American Bar Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the Metropolitan Opera.

"That list, per her wishes, is not for publication," Berggruen Institute spokeswoman Rachel Bauch told the Free Beacon.

Experts say the lack of transparency surrounding Ginsburg’s $1 million prize raises the possibility that some of the recipients could have had business before the court prior to Ginsburg’s death. One of the few known recipients, the American Bar Foundation, is affiliated with the American Bar Association, which filed several amicus briefs before the Supreme Court in 2020 before Ginsburg’s death. There is no evidence that Ginsburg recused herself from those cases.

The Berggruen Institute’s refusal to disclose which groups profited from Ginsburg’s $1 million prize comes as mainstream media outlets such as ProPublica have worked to instill a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court over alleged ethical transgressions from conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Democrats such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) have seized on the reports to push a Supreme Court ethics law that Republicans say would overstep congressional authority. The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on the bill Thursday.

But experts told the Free Beacon that the left’s lack of interest in potential ethical lapses from Ginsburg betrays the partisan motivation behind their attacks.

"Ginsburg required that her list of entities she showered with funds be confidential and we don’t know how many of them appeared before the Court when Justice Ginsburg was serving," said former Office of Management and Budget general counsel Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Justice Clarence Thomas. "With all of the Left’s wailing about transparency, this is the antithesis—but crickets from the Left. They don’t care about ethics. They just want to attack the Court because it is no longer acting like a super legislature to enact unpopular progressive policies like affirmative action."

Nonprofit groups are typically required to disclose the names of groups they provided grants to in their public Form 990 tax returns. The Berggruen Institute evaded this disclosure by reporting Ginsburg’s prize on its 2019 Form 990 financial disclosure as an expense.

Former IRS tax law specialist Patrick Sternal described the institute’s accounting maneuver as a "workaround to the disclosure of the ultimate recipients of the funds."

"There is some legal gray area here, but the foundation should probably have treated the prize as a grant, not a line-item other expense," Sternal told the Free Beacon. "It’s strange that [Ginsburg] didn’t want to make the recipients’ names public."

Paul Kamenar, an attorney with the National Legal and Policy Center watchdog group, also said the Berggruen Institute should have disclosed the identity of the charities designated by Ginsburg in its financial disclosure.

Nicolas Berggruen, the institute’s founder, told the New York Times in 2022 he had a "very left-wing" upbringing. But the billionaire investor claimed he wasn’t involved in awarding Ginsburg the philosophy prize in 2019. That decision was left to the Berggruen Prize Jury, which in 2019 included former University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann. The year prior, Gutmann helped Hunter Biden’s academically subpar daughter secure a ticket to the prestigious university at the behest of President Joe Biden, the Free Beacon reported. Gutmann became Biden’s ambassador to Germany in January 2022.

Ginsburg’s acceptance of the Berggruen Institute prize is hardly the only ethical lapse from the late justice, according to the liberal group Fix the Court. In 2018, Ginsburg embarked on a private tour of Israel paid for by billionaire Morris Khan just one year after the Supreme Court issued a ruling in favor of his company Amdocs. Ginsburg did not recuse herself from that case.

Ginsburg also attacked former President Donald Trump during a CNN interview in the lead up to his 2016 victory, saying she couldn’t "imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president." She later apologized for her remarks, but did not recuse herself from any case that the former president was a party to.

Other liberal justices have come under fire in recent weeks.

Supreme Court justice Sonya Sotomayor earned $3.7 million in book sales since joining the Court in 2009, thanks in no small part to using her taxpayer-funded staff to push colleges and other institutions to buy her books when she speaks at events, the Associated Press reported.

"The utter lack of curiosity from Senators Whitehouse and Durbin about liberal justices’ behavior only underscores their real motive," Judicial Crisis Network president Carrie Severino told the Free Beacon. "Their sham charges against conservative justices aren’t about ethics but are instituting a new McCarthyism attacking their political enemies."

The post Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Mysterious $1 Million Prize appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The law school's office of student services, which coordinates applications to all journals including the flagship Columbia Law Review, said Sunday that journal acceptances had been postponed until the school could verify that they comport with the new, race-blind standard articulated in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

"In light of the Supreme Court decision on Thursday, we are working with university leadership to better understand any implications for the journal ranking process," the office told students in an email. "Because of this, journal acceptances will be delayed until we receive further clarity."

"We have an obligation," the office added, "to … ensure that our decision processes are consistent with the law."

Law journals have long used affirmative action to select student editors as well as articles for publication. The delay suggests that this widespread practice could be on the chopping block as a result of the High Court's sweeping ruling, which experts say has laid the groundwork for invalidating a host of race-based policies across academia and corporate America.

"It's almost impossible to avoid the implication that all recipients of federal funds are now subject to the same rule announced in Students for Fair Admissions," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, which filed an amicus brief in support of the group that sued Harvard. As long as a law review is part of a federally funded university, it faces "the same constraints that the 14th Amendment applies to state entities."

That could spell trouble for Columbia's journals in the event of a legal challenge. Though the Columbia Law Review is technically an independent nonprofit, students apply to it through the university's online portal, and those with questions about the review are referred to the law school's associate director of academic advising, Jordan Carr. Other journals at the law school are published "in partnership" with the university, according to their websites.

Neither Columbia Law School nor the Columbia Law Review responded to requests for comment.

Legal academia is already feeling the heat from the Supreme Court's decision. Within 24 hours of the ruling, the conservative public interest firm America First Legal sent letters to 200 law schools demanding that they scrap racial preferences not just in student admissions but also in faculty hiring and law reviews.

"We will represent victims of these policies and sue any law school that allows these illegal and discriminatory practices to continue," the letters read.

The pause at Columbia indicates that the school's journals have similar programs, as do the demographic data solicited by the Columbia Law Review. Applicants are asked about their race, gender, and sexual orientation, according to segments of application form reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, and can also submit "other relevant information" about their "personal identity."

Even before the Supreme Court's ruling, law reviews were dealing with legal headaches over their use of racial preferences. In 2018, a Texas-based group sued the Harvard Law Review and the New York University Law Review for allegedly discriminating in the admissions process. While both lawsuits were eventually dismissed—largely on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing—law reviews may struggle to fend off similar complaints going forward, Morenoff said.

The Supreme Court's new standard could pose a particular problem for the Yale Law Journal, which in 2021 released admissions data following accusations of racism from minority students. It turned out the top-ranked law review accepted white and Asian applicants at much lower rates than their black counterparts, numbers that parallel the disparities cited by the Supreme Court in its judgment against Harvard.

"It certainly sounds like the whole set of elite law journals will need to change their MO or face consequences," Morenoff said.

The post The Supreme Court's Affirmative Action Ruling Is Already Having an Impact. You Might Be Surprised Where.  appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Here are the 10 must-read quotes from the justices on the case.

1. Chief Justice John Roberts: "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."

2. Justice Clarence Thomas: "Justice Jackson would replace the second Founders’ vision with an organizing principle based on race. In fact, on her view, almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race. ... This lore is not and has never been true. Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color."

3. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: "With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces 'colorblindness for all' by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems."

4. Justice Neil Gorsuch: "The words of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are not like mood rings; they do not change their message from one moment to the next."

5. Thomas: "Justice Sotomayor apparently believes that race-conscious admission programs can somehow increase the chances that members of certain races (blacks and Hispanics) are admitted without decreasing the chances of admission for members of other races (Asians). This simply defies mathematics."

6. Jackson: "For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die." FACT CHECK: FALSE

7. Roberts: "While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit."

8. Thomas: "After siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to 'march forward together' into some utopian vision."

9. Thomas: "Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. ... it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood."

10. Thomas: "While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law."

The post Top 10 Quotes from the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court skewered the Biden administration's claim that the Education Department had the authority to forgive loans under the HEROES Act, a 2003 law meant to provide debt relief to soldiers "in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency." The Biden administration argued that the coronavirus pandemic constituted such a "national emergency."

Roberts wrote that the HEROES Act gives the Education Department the power to "‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up."

"Under the Government’s reading of the HEROES Act, the Secretary would enjoy virtually unlimited power to rewrite the Education Act," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

The liberal trio of Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the case, which stemmed from a challenge led by a coalition of six Republican-led states to the Biden administration's proposal to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for eligible borrowers. In her dissent, Kagan argued the Court exceeded its authority "in every respect," both by taking up the case and striking down the loan forgiveness plan.

"The statute provides the Secretary with broad authority to give emergency relief to student-loan borrowers, including by altering usual discharge rules," Kagan wrote. "What the Secretary did fits comfortably within that delegation."

To defend her reasoning, Kagan deployed a hypothetical disaster in which "a terrorist organization sets off a dirty bomb in Chicago" and millions of residents "must find new housing, probably new jobs."

"Still their student-loan bills are coming due every month," Kagan wrote. "To prevent widespread loan delinquencies and defaults, the Secretary wants to discharge $10,000 for the class of affected borrowers. Is that legal? Of course it is; it is exactly what Congress provided for."

In a separate case challenging the loan forgiveness program, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a unanimous court that a separate group of petitioners did not have standing to challenge the Biden administration’s plan.

The decision brings an end to another landmark term for the Court. Minutes earlier, the Court ruled in favor of a Colorado web designer who refused to design websites for same-sex weddings. On Thursday, the Court overturned decades of affirmative action precedent in a pair of cases challenging race-based admissions policies. It is the latest in a series of decisions from the Court reining in broad executive rulemaking. The Court last month curbed the EPA's use of the Clean Water Act, and last year ruled that executive agencies must have "clear Congressional authority" to regulate on "major questions" of "economic and political significance.

Roberts echoed that standard in his opinion, saying "the ‘economic and political significance’ of the Secretary’s action is staggering by any measure."

The Biden administration’s plan would have forgiven debt for 40 million borrowers, according to Education Department estimates. Borrowers making less than 125,000 as an individual or less than 250,000 as a couple were eligible to have $10,000 in debt forgiven. Pell Grant recipients could have been given as much as $20,000 in loan forgiveness.

The Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this year the HEROES Act authors in an amicus brief rejected the Biden administration’s reading of the 2003 law. Former House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and former Reps. Howard McKeon (R., Calif.) and John Kline (R., Minn.) said the law was intended to provide relief for service members still paying off college debt, not for all borrowers.

A provision in the debt ceiling package passed last month requires the Biden administration to end its pandemic-era pause of student loan payments. Those payments must resume August 29, 2023, according to the law.

President Biden earlier this month vetoed legislation repealing his student loan forgiveness program. The House of Representatives failed to override the veto last week.

Democrats championed the plan in the 2022 midterms as a boon for the working class, while Republicans argued Americans were footing the bill for the pricey education of their wealthier peers. While the Biden administration claimed almost 90% of relief would go to individuals earning less than $76,000 per year, a JPMorgan study found more than half of the $549 billion in relief would go to earners making more than $76,000 per year.

This is a breaking story and will be updated with further developments.

The post Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden's Student Loan Program appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court ruled Colorado cannot compel website designer Lorie Smith to create a website celebrating same-sex marriage. The Court ruled websites are artistic expressions and that a law forcing her to design same-sex wedding announcements that clash with her religious beliefs infringed on her right to free expression.

"The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands," Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

In a dissent joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took issue with the majority's reasoning.

"As I will explain, the law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment," Sotomayor wrote. "Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group. I dissent."

The decision clarified questions surrounding religious liberty and free speech left by the Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a similar case involving baker Jack Phillips’s refusal to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding. In 2018, the Court ruled in Phillips’ favor but sidestepped the fundamental First Amendment issues in the case. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, focused on the Colorado anti-discrimination board’s animus toward Phillips, instead of his rights to free exercise and free expression.

Smith's case originated in the same state, challenged the same law, and was argued by the same legal representation, the Alliance Defending Freedom.

What changed was the ideological makeup of the Court. Although Masterpiece Cakeshop was a 7-2 decision, three of the conservative justices—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—argued in concurring opinions that the Court should have based its ruling on broader constitutional principles. With the replacement of Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Justice Kennedy later that year, and the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, the conservative justices gained the votes to form precedent on free speech grounds.

The decision is a victory for free speech advocates, Kristen Waggoner, who represented Smith in oral arguments at the High Court, said after the ruling.

"​​The government should no more censor Lorie for speaking consistent with her beliefs about marriage than it should punish an LGBT graphic designer for declining to criticize same-sex marriage," Waggoner tweeted Friday.

Sotomayor further argued that the Court disregards the value of public accommodation law.

"The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours," Sotomayor wrote. "The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes."

Gorsuch wrote that Sotomayor’s dissent "reimagines the facts of this case from top to bottom" and that it is "difficult to read the dissent and conclude we are looking at the same case."

"In some places, the dissent gets so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position," Gorsuch said.

Sotomayor cites the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting as an example of how "a social system of discrimination created an environment in which LGBT people were unsafe." But sources across the political spectrum eventually concluded the Pulse nightclub shooter was driven by a desire to seek revenge for America's involvement in the Middle East, not anti-gay hatred.

This is a breaking story and will be updated with further developments.

The post High Court Rules In Favor of Web Designer In Landmark Free Speech Case appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The timing of the decision is meaningful, coming days before the July 4th holiday: The Court’s 6-3 ruling vindicates the country’s founding principles and the idea of equal treatment enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The most important aspect of the ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is the affirmation that the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees to all citizens the equal protection of the law, means that the same law applies in the same way to every person—without regard to race. The Court rejected the so-called antisubordination view, which holds that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids only laws that hurt minorities, not those that help them—that is, that different treatment under the same law is permissible in light of historical inequities.

They made clear that the law guarantees equality of opportunity, not outcome. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, addressed this point powerfully. Advocates of the 14th Amendment, he wrote, "explicitly clarified that the equality sought by the law was not one in which all men shall be ‘six feet high’; rather, it strove to ensure that freedmen enjoy ‘equal rights before the law’ such that ‘each man shall have the right to pursue in his own way life, liberty, and happiness.’"

For decades, we have heard from college administrators that they only employed a little bit of racial discrimination—in cases of two equally qualified applicants, in borderline cases, and so on. If the data unearthed in the litigation wasn’t damning enough, the Ivy League’s collective meltdown over the ruling was itself an embarrassing refutation of those claims. Harvard immediately encouraged applicants to write about their race in their personal essays, while Princeton’s execrable Christopher Eisgruber said the Court had "significantly" narrowed the school’s discretion to admit applicants.

Those responses demonstrate how rampant and pervasive the discrimination in university admissions has been, and how salutary Thursday’s verdict might be. Three cheers.

But now comes the hard part. It is clear from the response of President Biden and the many universities that have already spoken out that they plan to use every means at their disposal to circumvent the law and impose a new regime of racial discrimination relying on proxies for race. A new battle begins today, but the forces of equality have won an important victory over the forces of equity—we can enjoy that for a moment, at least.

The post The Colorblind Constitution Prevails appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"It is basically saying that whatever caste system we have right now—that should stay intact," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten in a conversation with National Education Association president Becky Pringle. Weingarten said the decision is "as bad as Dobbs," the Supreme Court's ruling last year that there was no constitutional right to abortion.

"It is 2023, and we are having Supreme Court decisions that are taking us further backwards in the progress that we've made," Pringle said.

The union leaders' reactions come after the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, on Thursday struck down the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote that "eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it." Weingarten and Pringle echoed dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Both unions filed amicus briefs urging the Court to allow colleges to continue using race as a factor in college admissions. With more than three million members, the National Education Association is the largest teachers' union in the country, followed by American Federation of Teachers with 1.7 million members, according to the organizations.

Angela Morabito, a spokeswoman for the Defense of Freedom Institute and former Education Department press secretary, told the Washington Free Beacon that union leaders should be supporting the Supreme Court's decision.

"If teachers' union bosses truly wanted what's best for students, they would be celebrating the end of race-based discrimination in college admissions," Morabito said. "The best thing Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle could do to help minority students is to stop trapping them in failing government-assigned schools and get out of the way of school choice programs that students need and parents deserve."

During a Thursday live-streamed conversation, Weingarten described what she would say in class if she were a civics teacher.

"If I was teaching this decision tomorrow in class, what I would be doing is I would be actually pulling together … the arc of the moral universe," said Weingarten, "what we have tried to do from the Civil War, the end of the Civil War, to the Civil Rights Movement and how this just throws a wrench into all that progress."

Weingarten questioned whether she would be allowed to teach about the decision if she were a teacher in Florida because of the state's "restrictions on the teaching of honest history."

"I might be really in trouble in teaching about this decision—in trouble in teaching about the dissents of this decision," Weingarten said.

Florida's "Stop WOKE Act," signed last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R.), explicitly requires the teaching of the "history of African Americans," including "the enslavement experience, abolition, and the contributions of African Americans to society."

The Court's opinion was part of the continuing backlash to former president Barack Obama's election, Pringle said.

"We knew when President Obama was elected there was going to be a backlash—we knew that," Pringle said. "I don't think we quite grasped the depth of it until we started to see that the highest court in the land is totally rejecting the notions, the ideals, on which this country was founded."

Weingarten cited Alexis de Tocqueville's description of America, saying Tocqueville recognized the country's "diversity and how that made us stronger."

"We're going back to 'Is America a salad bowl, a melting pot?'" Weingarten said. "Or is it what this decision is saying, which is we can all be in our separate fiefdoms and tribes and never any one of us meet?"

Weingarten said the Court's majority opinion advocated ignorance of racial inequities in today's America.

"What this decision does is basically ignore the original sin of slavery and the effects of that original sin and pretends that there is no longer an effect to it," Weingarten said. "It basically says that equal protection means that whatever the dominant power play is right now, that's what should be happening in America."

Roberts's opinion and other justices' concurrences presented a different view of American history and the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurrence that the "great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny" but presented an optimistic view of the nation's future.

"While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination," Thomas wrote, "I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law."

The post 'As Bad as Dobbs': Randi Weingarten Laments End of Affirmative Action appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

• The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that race-based affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

• Warren argued that the "extremist" Court's decision, supported by the vast majority of Americans, "rolled back the march toward racial justice, and narrowed educational opportunity for all."

Crucial context: Warren, a former Harvard professor sometimes referred to as "Pocahontas," repeatedly claimed to be of Native American ancestry throughout her career in academia. She is roughly 0.1 percent Native American, according to the results of a DNA test the senator released in 2018 ahead of her failed presidential run.

• From a Fordham Law Review article published in 1997: "Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995."

Bottom line: The Court's decision is bad news for white people who lie about their race to get ahead. People like Elizabeth Warren.

Go deeper: Elizabeth Warren Donor Arrested for Dog Sex

The post Harvard Law School's 'First Woman of Color' Cries (Like Wolf to Blue Corn Moon) After Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

• The 6-3 opinion argued that race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution because they "unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points."

Why it matters: Some have argued the Supreme Court faces a "crisis of legitimacy" because its opinions do not always reflect the views of the American public. By this standard, the Court's decision to strike down race-based affirmative action is laudably legitimate.

• The vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, oppose race-based affirmative action in university admissions, polls show.

By the numbers: More than two-thirds of Americans say colleges and universities should not use race as a factor in admission, according to the New York Times. Opposition to affirmative action is slightly higher when respondents are asked about public universities funded by taxpayers.

• Americans oppose affirmative action at public colleges and universities by an overwhelming margin of 74 percent to 26 percent.

• A solid majority of Democrats agree: Sixty percent said they oppose race-based admissions at public universities, while 58 percent said the same about private universities.

What they're saying: "The opinion today will serve only to highlight the Court's own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.

• Alas, the American public appears to have a different definition of "equality."

Bottom line: The Supreme Court's legitimate decision to end race-based affirmative action is an accurate reflection of the American public's views. Congratulations!

The post Legitimacy Restored: Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action, Outcome Backed by Vast Majority of Americans appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In a 6-3 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, a longtime opponent of racial preferences, the court ruled that the admissions programs at Harvard and University of North Carolina "cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause" because they "lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points."

In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that "the Constitution continues to embody a simple truth: Two discriminatory wrongs cannot make a right" and racial preferences "appear to be leading to a world in which everyone is defined by their skin color, demanding ever-increasing entitlements and preferences on that basis."

Roberts was also joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Court’s ruling "rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress" and "cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter."

The decision is a major victory for opponents of affirmative action, including Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group that brought the cases against Harvard and University of North Carolina. The ruling will also force many universities that use race as an admissions criteria to find new recruitment strategies.

Students for Fair Admissions argued that Harvard, in its quest for racial diversity, violated the Civil Rights Act by holding Asian applicants to higher admissions standards than other racial and ethnic groups. Students for Fair Admissions also claimed that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s race-based admissions policies were at odds with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The decision overturns the 45-year-old Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which held that colleges could use race as one of multiple factors for admission.

Supporters of affirmative action—including the Biden administration, which had urged the Supreme Court not to take the case—argued that overturning that decision would be a massive setback for campus diversity.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law wrote in a pro-Harvard amicus brief that the university does not "treat race as the defining feature of an application" and said race-conscious admissions are necessary to ensure that students of all races are well-represented on campuses. The group also claimed that outlawing the practice would cause the share of black students admitted to plummet from 14 percent to 6 percent.

The ruling will likely force many schools across the country to revamp their recruitment and application processes. In California, where affirmative action was banned in 1995, the percentage of black and Latino students at the University of California at Los Angeles fell by around 50 percent immediately following the prohibition. Since then, the university has managed to recruit an even higher percentage of black and Latino students than before the ban, without using race as an admissions factor.

The last time the Court revisited the Bakke decision on affirmative action was in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the majority opinion upholding Bakke at that time, argued that affirmative action should be a temporary measure and "expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

The post High Court Strikes Down Racial Preferences In College Admissions appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In a January press release, the Justice Department said that "federal prosecutors [are] aggressively pursuing those who lie in connection with firearms transactions," arguing that its tough-on-offender policies were essential to  "reduc[ing] gun violence."

The Justice Department listed eight individuals who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of lying on a federal firearms application. The agency stated that "keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them is of paramount concern" and will "prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands by holding accountable those who lie to get them."

"There is no higher priority than protecting our citizens and their loved ones from firearms violence," said Jeffrey C. Boshek, the special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Dallas Field Division, in a statement at the time. "The lesson learned here is that if you buy a gun for someone that shouldn’t have one, you will go to prison. And trust me, prison is not somewhere you want to be."

None of the eight individuals received a "sweetheart deal," as Republican critics have described the plea agreement given to Biden. The first son, who was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm while addicted to a controlled substance, was offered a pretrial "diversionary program" that will clear him of all charges if completed.

The differing outcomes then and now would seem to bolster GOP allegations of a two-tiered justice system in which Biden is benefiting from his relationship to the White House. President Joe Biden has often called for more stringent gun control measures and signed several executive orders that created stricter background checks for firearms purchases.

The cases cited by the Justice Department in January include an individual who pleaded guilty to making false statements during the attempted purchases of firearms after omitting a conviction for carrying a gun under the influence of marijuana.

Another of the men spent 16 months in federal custody after he was arrested for making a false statement during the purchase of a firearm. That individual had been deemed incompetent by a court and was also the subject of a protective order that banned him from gun ownership. He is serving a two-year sentence of supervised release.

Prosecutors weighed charging Hunter Biden with lying on a federal gun form in purchasing the firearm in October 2018. Biden answered "no" to a question on the form that asks whether the buyer is "an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance." Lying on the questionnaire is a felony.

Text messages on Biden’s abandoned laptop strongly suggest he attempted to buy crack cocaine just one day prior to his gun purchase, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month. In his memoir, Biden wrote that he was smoking crack "every fifteen minutes" during that period of his life. Federal prosecutors, however, never charged Biden with lying on the gun form.

The revolver Biden bought, a .38 special, was stolen less than two weeks later by his then-girlfriend Hallie Biden, who was also the widow of his recently deceased brother, Beau Biden. Hallie Biden, who texted Hunter Biden that she was "scared when you walk out the door," disposed of the handgun in a garbage can across the street from a Wilmington, Delaware public school.

The missing gun prompted an investigation by both the FBI and the Secret Service and was eventually retrieved by an elderly man who was searching the trash for cans and bottles. No charges were brought against Hallie Biden over the incident.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Chris Clark, said Tuesday that his client is likely to remain free "without conditions."

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Months Before Hunter Biden Plea, DOJ Touted Crackdown on Gun-Related Crimes appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The 5-4 ruling affirmed a lower court's decision that the map diluted the voting power of black Alabamians, running afoul of a bedrock U.S. civil rights law, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the ruling, which was joined by the court's three liberals as well as conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

With the ruling in the dispute over the composition of Alabama's U.S. House of Representatives districts, the conservative-majority court elected not to further roll back protections contained in the Voting Rights Act as it had done in two major rulings in the past decade.

At issue in the case was the map approved in 2021 by the Republican-controlled state legislature setting the boundaries of Alabama's seven U.S. House districts. The map featured one majority-black district, with six majority-white districts.

The Voting Rights Act was passed at a time when Southern states including Alabama enforced policies blocking black people from casting ballots. Nearly six decades later, race remains a contentious issue in American politics and society more broadly.

Conservative states and groups have successfully prodded the Supreme Court to limit the Voting Rights Act's scope. Its 2013 ruling in another Alabama case struck down a key part that determined which states with histories of racial discrimination needed federal approval to change voting laws. In a 2021 ruling endorsing Republican-backed Arizona voting restrictions, the justices made it harder to prove violations under Section 2.

In the ruling on Thursday, two consolidated cases before the Supreme Court involved challenges brought by black voters and advocacy groups accusing the state of violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision aimed at countering measures that result in racial bias in voting even absent racist intent.

The challengers said Alabama's map reduced the influence of black voters by concentrating their voting power in one district while distributing the rest of the black population in other districts at levels too small to form a majority.

A three-judge federal court panel in January 2022 sided with the challengers, blocking the Republican-drawn map as a "substantially likely" violation of Section 2 and ordering an additional district where black voters make up "a voting-age majority or something quite close to it." Alabama then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Alabama officials argued that drawing a second district to give black voters a better chance at electing their preferred candidate would itself be racially discriminatory by favoring them at the expense of other voters. If the Voting Rights Act required the state to consider race in such a manner, according to Alabama, the statute would violate the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Democratic president Joe Biden's administration and a number of voting rights groups who backed the plaintiffs had said that a ruling favoring Alabama would threaten certain electoral districts in other states—for the U.S. House and state legislatures—potentially diminishing minority representation in American politics.

Electoral districts are redrawn each decade to reflect population changes as measured by a national census, last taken in 2020. In most states, such redistricting is done by the party in power, which can lead to map manipulation for partisan gain.

In a major 2019 ruling, the Supreme Court barred federal judges from curbing the practice, known as partisan gerrymandering. That ruling did not preclude court scrutiny of racially discriminatory gerrymandering.

Democrats have accused Republicans of pursuing policies at the state level that intended to suppress the vote of racial minorities. Republicans have said they were acting to prevent voting fraud. In addition, high-profile instances of black people killed by police have fueled America's ongoing debate about racial justice.

(Reporting by John Kruzel in Washington; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

The post Supreme Court Rules Alabama Voting Map Violates Civil Rights Act appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Alameda County Sheriff's Office on Friday urged Price to charge Sergio Morales-Jacquez, now 18, as an adult because of his "extensive and violent criminal history in multiple jurisdictions." Price—who was elected in November as an "unapologetic progressive" who promised to "upend" the county's prosecutorial conventions—declined the petition, sending Morales-Jacquez to the Juvenile Justice Center for seven years with the possibility of probation.

At age 17, Morales-Jacquez fatally shot 30-year-old newlywed Rienhart Asuncion after a road-rage altercation. Less than two weeks later, Morales-Jazquez and two other teens opened fire at a party in Oakland, linking him to the killing of two teenage brothers, Angel and Jazy Sotelo Garcia. He is also "a person of interest" in a homicide case authorities are still investigating, the Berkeley Scanner reported.

During her campaign, Price, who took hundreds of thousands of dollars from progressive billionaire George Soros, promised to "stop over-criminalizing our youth."

Former prosecutors and Price's own office question her more lenient approach.

"Seven years for three murder cases?" a former local prosecutor told the New York Post. "That is telling these kids that they are in control. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is a big deal anymore."

"Forget 16 and 17," the attorney continued. "We’re seeing kids getting into gang life at 10 now. Violent felony cases for kids under 15 are not a rare occurrence anymore. That’s why this approach is going to be a major, major problem."

Several of Price's prosecutors have resigned due to her radical reform policies, according to the Post.

"Victims deserve better," veteran Alameda County prosecutor Danielle Hilton said, adding that Price’s radical agenda is not providing justice to those "devastated by violent crime."

The post Soros-Funded DA Gives Teen Linked to 3 Murders Just 7 Years in Prison appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Revelations in media reports about the links between Thomas, the Court's longest-tenured member, and Crow including real estate purchases and luxury travel paid for by the businessman have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers for more rigorous ethics standards for the Supreme Court.

The Democratic-led Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the subject in May. Crow, a major Republican donor, last month, rejected the panel's request for a meeting.

In a six-page follow-up letter made public on Tuesday, Crow's lawyer Michael Bopp reiterated that he does not think the committee has the power to request information from Crow or to impose ethics standards on the nation's top judicial body, as it is considering pursuing, but that he "would welcome a discussion with your staff."

"The latest correspondence from Harlan Crow's lawyer is a clear, unwarranted refusal to cooperate with legitimate requests for information from this committee," Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin and Democratic panel member Sheldon Whitehouse said in a statement, adding that "all options are on the table moving forward."

Separately, Bopp declined to provide another Democratic-led Senate panel, the Finance Committee, any personal financial information about Crow, it said. In a statement, the panel accused Crow of "stonewalling" and "doubling down on bogus legal theories." Senator Ron Wyden, the panel's chairman, said the committee is considering issuing a subpoena.

Bopp told the Finance Committee in a letter dated June 2 that it "has no authority to target specific individuals' personal financial information when the asserted legislative goals could be served in less intrusive ways" but that he and Crow would still "work with the committee."

The news outlet ProPublica has detailed the ties between Thomas and Crow. Separately, the news outlet Politico has reported that conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch failed to disclose the buyer of a Colorado property in which he had a stake - the chief executive of a major law firm whose attorneys have been involved in numerous Supreme Court cases.

Unlike other federal judges, Supreme Court justices are not bound by the code of conduct adopted by the policymaking body for the broader U.S. judiciary that requires federal judges to avoid even the "appearance of impropriety."

(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Kanishka Singh; Editing by Will Dunham)

The post Democrats Threaten To Subpoena Clarence Thomas’s Friend appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The 8-1 decision overturned a lower court's ruling that said the lawsuit filed by Glacier Northwest Inc, which sells and delivers ready-mix concrete, against a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was preempted by a U.S. law called the National Labor Relations Act. Glacier Northwest is a unit of Japan-based Taiheiyo Cement Corp.

Glacier Northwest filed a lawsuit in Washington state court accusing the union of intentional property destruction during a 2017 strike.

A group of drivers went on strike while their mixing trucks were filled with concrete. Although the drivers kept their mixing drums rotating to delay the concrete from hardening and damaging the vehicles, the company was forced to discard the unused product at a financial loss.

The Washington state Supreme Court in 2021 ruled that the company's claims were preempted by a statute called the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), saying the company's loss of concrete was incidental to a strike that could be considered arguably protected under federal labor law.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the ruling, said the union's actions had not only destroyed the concrete but had also "posed a risk of foreseeable, aggravated and imminent harm to Glacier's trucks."

"Because the union took affirmative steps to endanger Glacier's property rather than reasonable precautions to mitigate that risk, the NLRA does not arguably protect its conduct," Barrett wrote.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a 27-page dissent, wrote that the ruling "is likely to cause considerable confusion among the lower courts" about how preemption under the National Labor Relations Act should apply in future cases and "risks erosion of the right to strike."

The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has leaned toward curbing the power of labor unions in rulings in recent years.

The justices in 2021 struck down a California agricultural regulation aimed at helping unions organize workers. The court in 2018 ruled that non-members cannot be forced, as they are in certain states, to pay fees to unions representing public employees such as police and teachers that negotiate collective bargaining agreements with employers.

Noel Francisco, the lawyer who represented Glacier Northwest in the case decided on Thursday, said the ruling "vindicates the longstanding principle that federal law does not shield labor unions from tort liability when they intentionally destroy an employer's property."

Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien said the Supreme Court had "again voted in favor of corporations over working people."

"The ability to strike has been on the books for nearly 100 years," O'Brien said, "and it's no coincidence that this ruling is coming at a time when workers across the country are fed up and exercising their rights more and more."

The union, Teamsters Local Union No. 174, had claimed the strike not only was arguably protected under federal labor law but the resulting loss of concrete did not satisfy the high bar to override federal preemption. While the Supreme Court has found that labor unions can be sued in state court for violent or threatening conduct, the union had argued, this narrow exception should not be expanded to permit property damage claims brought under state law.

President Joe Biden's administration had urged the justices to reverse the lower court's decision, allowing Glacier Northwest's lawsuit to proceed.

(Reporting by John Kruzel in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

The post Supreme Court Ruling Deals Blow to Labor Unions appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Supreme Court justices were unconvinced by arguments last month from lawyer Neal Katyal, who once defended Al Qaeda terrorists. Katyal defended Hennepin County, which contains Minneapolis, after it confiscated an elderly woman's condo and took all the profits from its sale over a small unpaid tax. The county received $40,000 from the sale of Geraldine Tyler's condo after the county seized the property in 2015 over $2,300 in unpaid taxes. Tyler, now 94, owed $15,000 in total with penalties and interest on the unpaid taxes.

The High Court ruled that states that seize and sell private property to make up for unpaid taxes cannot keep more from the sales than what a taxpayer owed.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the Court's opinion. "The county had the power to sell Tyler’s home to recover the unpaid property taxes," Roberts wrote, but added that the county "could not use the toehold of the tax debt to confiscate more property than was due."

The post Al Qaeda Lawyer Neal Katyal Blown Out in Supreme Court Ruling appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The justices in a 9-0 decision overturned a lower court's ruling against the couple, Chantell and Mike Sackett, that had upheld the EPA's determination that their property near a lake contained wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. Though the justices unanimously agreed to reverse the lower court's decision, they differed in their reasoning for doing so.

The ruling marked the latest instance of the court backing a challenge to the scope of the EPA's ability to regulate in the environmental arena under existing law. In a 6-3 ruling last June powered by its conservative justices, the court imposed limits on the EPA's authority to issue sweeping regulations involving greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal- and gas-fired power plants under a different environmental law, the Clean Air Act.

The case decided on Thursday stemmed from the Sacketts' purchase in 2004 of an undeveloped plot of land about 300 feet (90 meters) from Priest Lake, one of the largest lakes in Idaho, near the U.S.-Canada border. In 2007, the couple began preparing construction of a home on it.

But after placing sand and gravel fill on the lot, the EPA issued an administrative compliance order stating the property contained wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act and that they needed a permit to build, which they had failed to obtain.

That law bars discharging pollutants, including rocks and sand, into the "waters of the United States," which regulators for decades have said covers not just navigable waters but adjacent wetlands like swamps, marshes and berms.

Courts and regulators have been grappling for decades over how much of a connection with a waterway a property must have in order to require a permit, with the Supreme Court issuing a ruling in 2006 that led to further uncertainty.

Four justices at that time said the law governed land with a "continuous surface connection" to a waterway while Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 case and has since retired, said the law extended further to areas that had a "significant nexus" to a waterway.

The Sacketts had asked the Supreme Court to revisit the issue after the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals relied on Kennedy's test in upholding a judge's determination that the Sacketts' property contained wetlands.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a five-member majority, embraced the "continuous surface connection" test for determining if adjacent wetlands are covered by the law.

"In sum, we hold that the (Clean Water Act) extends to only those wetlands that are 'as a practical matter indistinguishable from waters of the United States,'" Alito wrote, adding: "The wetlands on the Sacketts' property are distinguishable from any possibly covered waters."

Three justices - conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, and liberal Justice Elena Kagan - wrote separate concurring opinions.

The court's Thursday ruling came after President Joe Biden's administration in December finalized a rule expanding the definition of waterways that are protected under the Clean Water Act, in a reversal from former President Donald Trump's era. Biden in April vetoed legislation that sought to overturn the rule.

A federal judge in North Dakota on April 12 temporarily blocked implementation of the rule in 24 states in response to a lawsuit by mostly Republican-led states. In a separate ruling, a federal judge in Texas on March 19 blocked the rule from being enforced in Texas and Idaho at the request of Republican attorneys general amid legal challenges to the new regulation.

The rule was also halted in Kentucky on May 10 by the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals while the state appeals a lower court's ruling.

(Reporting by John Kruzel in Washington and Nate Raymond in Boston; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

The post Supreme Court Deals Blow to EPA’s Power To Regulate Waters appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The court denied a request by the National Association for Gun Rights and a firearms retailer for an injunction blocking enforcement of the state law and a similar ban enacted by another Chicago suburb, Naperville, while a legal challenge to the measures proceeds. No justice publicly dissented from the decision.

Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker in January signed into law the Protect Illinois Communities Act that banned the sale and distribution of many kinds of high-powered semiautomatic "assault weapons," including AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, as well as magazines that take more than 10 rounds for long guns and 15 rounds for handguns.

Pritzker welcomed the Supreme Court's action.

"The gun lobby has insisted on every legal maneuver to block this law, refusing to acknowledge that lives will be saved by this important piece of legislation. Despite these challenges, I remain confident that the assault weapons ban will be upheld and will create a safer Illinois for our residents," Pritzker said.

The law exempts existing owners, giving them a deadline of Jan. 1, 2024, to register their assault weapons with state police.

The gun rights association, as well as a Naperville-based firearms store, Law Weapons & Supply, and its owner Robert Bevis, challenged the city's ordinance restricting the sale of certain assault rifles and the state's broader ban as a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, which protects the right to "keep and bear" arms.

The case is one of several contesting the state's ban in both federal and state courts.

Illinois passed the ban in response to a massacre at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park in 2022 that left seven people dead and dozens of others wounded.

In signing the law, Pritzker also cited other recent mass shootings - frequent occurrences in the United States - including a 2022 attack that killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a 2012 killing of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

A gunman wearing tactical gear and carrying an AR-15-style rifle killed eight people on May 6 at a Texas mall before he was shot by police, prompting President Joe Biden to renew calls for the U.S. Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as to enact universal background checks and end immunity for gun manufacturers.

A federal assault weapon ban enacted in 1994 lapsed a decade later and has not been renewed by Congress despite Democratic efforts. In the absence of broad action by Congress on gun control, some states have enacted various measures, often drawing legal challenges on Second Amendment grounds.

The Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, has expanded gun rights in key rulings since 2008.

In a landmark decision last June striking down New York state gun limits, the Supreme Court recognized the right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. That ruling also announced a legal standard that could make it harder for lower courts to sustain new or existing gun regulations, requiring them to be comparable with restrictions traditionally adopted throughout U.S. history.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall in February and the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in April rejected the challengers' bid for an injunction.

In asking the Supreme Court to halt the ban, the challengers said AR-15s and similar rifles are in common use in the United States and there is no historical analogue to such a ban.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Additional reporting by John Kruzel in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

The post Supreme Court Allows Illinois Assault Weapons Ban To Stand appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The post Judge Strikes Down Federal Ban on Handgun Sales Under Age 21 appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"Recent investigative reporting has identified multiple instances in which you or entities you own or control have made payments, purchased real estate, or provided gifts, travel, or other items of value to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and members of his family," read the letter from committee Democrats including its chairman, Senator Dick Durbin.

"Many of these gifts, transactions, and items of value had not been previously disclosed by Justice Thomas," it said.

Similar letters, dated Monday, were sent to the holding companies that own Crow's private jet and private yacht.

Representatives for Crow did not return requests for comment.

The Democratic-led Senate panel last week explored the possibility of pursuing legislation to impose ethics standards on the Supreme Court amid revelations about luxury trips and real estate transactions by conservative justices, but the panel's Republican members voiced stern opposition.

The news outlet ProPublica has detailed ties between Thomas, a conservative who is the court's longest-tenured member, and wealthy Republican donor Crow, including real estate purchases and luxury travel paid for by the Dallas businessman.

The letter said Crow has acknowledged items of value given to Thomas and his family in public statements.

It asked him to provide the information to the committee by May 22 as the panel works to craft legislation strengthening ethics rules and standards for Supreme Court justices.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Mark Porter)

The post Dem Senators Escalate Scrutiny of Clarence Thomas appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.