Washington:

The US Supreme Court on Friday denied a request by the Biden administration to lift a block in several Republican states on expanding sex discrimination protection to transgender students.

President Joe Biden’s administration moved in April to extend rules forbidding sex-based discrimination in schools to cover gender identity.

Courts in 10 Republican-controlled states temporarily blocked the rules, and the administration petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene.

But in a 5-4 decision, the judges declined to take action while the legal process at the state level is still playing out.

Conservative justice Neil Gorsuch and the court’s three liberal justices issued a partial dissent.

The protections were part of a larger set of new rules on anti-discrimination, all of which will remain blocked in the Republican states while the legal challenges proceed.

The dissenting justices wanted the less controversial rules to take effect.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor highlighted that the court’s decision “leaves in place preliminary injunctions that bar the Government from enforcing the entire rule — including provisions that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries.”

“Those injunctions are overboard,” she added.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

President Joe Biden walks on stage to speak during the NAACP national convention Tuesday, July 16, 2024, in Las Vegas.
| Photo Credit: AP

U.S. President Joe Biden is preparing to propose a major Supreme Court overhaul in the coming week that would include term limits for justices and an enforceable ethics code, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday citing two sources familiar with the plans.

Mr. Biden is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad presidential immunity, the Post reported, adding that Mr. Biden discussed at the move in a video conference with the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Saturday.

ALSO READ | Gun control, the Second Amendment and the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court | Explained 

Mr. Biden has previously shunned calls to overhaul the top court with term limits or by expanding the number of seats on the bench. Some Democrats have made calls for the changes following former President Donald Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices.

In October, a bipartisan group of legal experts expressed their support for 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices as a way to deter partisanship and improve the judiciary’s reputation.

Washington:

Prosecutors overstepped in charging January 6 rioters with obstruction for trying to prevent certification of the 2020 presidential election, the US Supreme Court said Friday, throwing hundreds of cases into doubt.

The matter was brought to the court through an appeal by former police officer Joseph Fischer, a supporter of former president Donald Trump who entered the Capitol in Washington with hundreds of others on January 6, 2021.

Writing the opinion for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said prosecutors’ interpretation of the law would “criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyist(s) to decades in prison.”

The government “must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so,” he wrote.

The case was decided 6-3, with Ketanji Brown Jackson joining with the court’s conservatives. Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by Trump, penned the dissent, which was joined by liberal judges Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

It now heads back to a lower court, which will decide whether Fischer’s indictment can still stand in light of the narrower interpretation of “obstruction.”

In all, 52 rioters have been convicted and sentenced only on obstruction charges, with 27 currently incarcerated, the Department of Justice said in a statement. Some 249 people were charged with obstruction in addition to another felony or misdemeanor.

“The vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6 will not be affected by this decision,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.

– Meaning of ‘otherwise’ –

At the core of the case was how to interpret the word “otherwise” in the relevant statute, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was enacted after the destruction of documents in the 2001 Enron scandal.

This imposes up to 20 years in prison for whoever corruptly tampers with documents in an attempt to prevent them from being used in official proceedings, or “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

The word “otherwise” grants prosecutors excessive latitude, allowing them to pursue charges that far exceed the scope of Congress’s initial purpose, the majority said.

“The peaceful transfer of power is a fundamental democratic norm, and those who attempted to disrupt it in this way inflicted a deep wound on this Nation,” wrote Jackson, concurring with the court’s conservatives. “But today’s case is not about the immorality of those acts.”

In her dissent, Barrett said the fact that the joint session by Congress on January 6 was an official proceeding was not in dispute.

“Given these premises, the case that Fischer can be tried for ‘obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding’ seems open and shut,” she wrote, accusing the majority of performing “textual backflips to find some way — any way” to narrow the reach of the relevant subsection.

This case also has potentially significant implications for Trump, who faces four felony charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith over his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The Republican presidential candidate is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of an official proceeding — the session of Congress held to certify Biden’s victory.

He is also charged with conspiracy to deny Americans the right to vote and to have their votes counted.

But this case is on hold until the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s claims he is immune from criminal prosecution, which the judges are now expected to deliver on Monday.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

The US Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law prohibiting a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm.

“When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 8-1 opinion.

The case was the first involving gun rights to come before the court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority, since a major ruling it issued last year loosening gun restrictions.

In last year’s decision, the nation’s highest court said it would authorize only “reasonable” exceptions to the Second Amendment right to bear arms and would rely on historical precedents when it comes to regulating firearms.

The ruling left lower courts struggling to determine whether gun restrictions before them are consistent with “the history and traditions” of firearms regulation in the United States in the late 18th to the 19th century.

On the basis of that decision, an ultraconservative appeals court ruled in March that a federal law banning gun ownership by people with domestic violence restraining orders was unconstitutional, for lack of historical precedent.

Roberts wrote that “some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)