Justice

It can be a struggle in daily conversations to explain the real life impact this election has every day on the decisions being made to govern our society.  This election has put numerous individuals in positions of real, tangible power who are spending every hour of every day implementing policies in an efficient, destructive manner.  They are doing the exact things their prior words, actions, and lobbyist bosses should have made obvious.

What happened?

By a simple majority vote, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., set a new precedent in the Senate that will ease the confirmation for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch on Friday, after 30 more hours of debate on the floor. "This will be the first, and last, partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court justice," said McConnell in a closing floor speech.

Why?

Attorney General Sessions is withdrawing the Department of Justice's view that Texas' voter ID law is discriminatory just ahead of an important hearing in a federal case challenging the Texas law. The Justice Department has held the position for 6 years that Texas' voter ID law discriminates against both black and Hispanic voters.

Plaintiffs tell me DOJ plans to withdraw its position that Texas' ID law is intentionally discriminatory. /1

Since the current Administation nominated Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, the question has not been 'if' but 'when' he would take action to enforce Federal laws contradicted by legalized recreational marijuana use laws in seven states and Washington DC.  

Advocates of liberal marijuana laws have eyed the arrival of Attorney General Jeff Sessions with unease.  The former Republican senator from Alabama has a long track record of speaking out against marijuana use.  

In a reversal of an Obama-era order to phase out the use of private prisons, Attorney General Sessions issued a brief memo directing "the Bureau to reutrn to its previous approach."

The Justice Department will once again use private prisons to house federal inmates, reversing an Obama-era directive to stop using the facilities, which officials had then deemed less safe and less effective than those run by the government...

In a not particularly surprising move, President Trump weighed in on the government's role in protecting, or in this case not protecting, transgender rights.

The Trump administration on Wednesday revoked federal protections for transgender students who sought the right to use the public school restrooms that match their gender identity, taking a stand on a contentious issue that has become the central battle over LGBT rights.

As a candidate, Trump regularly railed against lobbyists and led crowds in chants of “Drain the swamp!” But as president, Trump last month signed an executive order that weakened significant aspects of the Obama ethics policy, including scrapping a ban on lobbyists joining agencies they had recently lobbied.

A San Francisco-based appeals court on Thursday delivered a stinging rebuke of President Trump's executive order on immigration and refugees, rejecting the administration’s request to resume the travel ban and setting up a potential showdown in the Supreme Court.

Jeff Sessions, one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate and an early supporter of Trump, was confirmed as Attorney General by a 52-47 vote on Wednesday.  Sessions shares Trump's anti-immigration views and will play a leading role in defending the immigration and travel ban in the courts.  Sessions has called the ACLU "un-American."

The FCC has declined to defend a 2015 FCC ruling that places caps on rates charged to inmates making phone calls from prison.

The Federal Communications Commission will not defend all its rules capping the rates prison telephone providers can charge inmates during oral argument Feb. 6, an FCC official told a federal appeals court Jan. 31.

Without this rule, the prison population and their loved ones can be gouged for simply communicating with family and friends.