Joshua Browder is trying to cut red tape and upend the legal services industry with DoNotPay, a company that's running a "denial of service attack on the legal system."

A Senate star chamber full of grandstanding senators on both sides will not elucidate what happened four decades ago, when all people involved were minors, and the accuser is unclear on the details.

By Mollie Hemingway
TheFederalist.com

After the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh concluded last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., revealed that for six weeks she’d hidden a claim he’d sexually assaulted someone. Christine Blasey Ford then told the Washington Post that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers.

Although she said she doesn’t remember where or when the alleged event occurred, she said she believes it may have been in the summer of 1982 and that Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge was present for the assault. Notes from a couples therapy session in 2012 show that she spoke of an assault involving four boys, not two, from an elitist DC boys’ school. Kavanaugh isn’t mentioned in the notes, but Ford’s husband says she told him the name at that time and said she was worried he might be a Supreme Court nominee in the future.

Kavanaugh categorically denies the allegations. Judge says he doesn’t recall any such event and that Kavanaugh didn’t behave that way. Another alleged party attendee named by Ford says he doesn’t recall such a party and that Kavanaugh didn’t behave that way.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed the vote on whether to confirm Kavanaugh, reopened the hearings, and invited both Kavanaugh and Ford to speak to the matter. Kavanaugh has agreed but Ford says she won’t testify until and unless the FBI investigates her claim. Democrats, who previously asked for the hearing, now suggest that the vote to confirm Kavanaugh should be delayed for as long as it takes for an investigation to take place.

Senate Republicans are less enchanted by the demand that they indefinitely delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote so unverifiable claims might be investigated. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, “Immediately after learning of Dr. Ford’s identity from news reports Sunday, committee staff started working to gather facts related to her claims. We’ve offered Dr. Ford the opportunity to share her story with the committee, as her attorney said yesterday she was willing to do. We offered her a public or a private hearing as well as staff-led interviews, whichever makes her most comfortable. The invitation for Monday still stands.” The committee explained that the FBI “considers the matter closed” and doesn’t make credibility determinations.

Much of the media coverage has focused on how this is good for or Democrats and bad for Republicans. While that’s interesting, if debateable, it’s far more important to discuss whether this is good for the republic itself.

By Daniel Horowitz
ConservativeReview.com

Yes, one House committee is finally stepping onto the field in the one-sided battle against judicial tyranny. After years of endless legislative fiat from single district and circuit judges, the House Judiciary Committee is voting this week on a bill that clarifies once and for all that courts do not have the power to issue injunctions against abstract policies and statutes outside the parties before that particular court. Now the only question is whether the Republicans will unite behind a cogent message of keeping legislation within the legislature and place this provision in the budget bill or at least bring it to a vote before the full House and Senate.

The president’s first year and a half in office has been marred by the erroneous belief within the political system that the ACLU can shop for a judge who agrees with it on policy and use a straw-man plaintiff to veto abstract policies. That single judge, typically shopped around to a circuit where the plaintiff will automatically win the appeal, ensures that commonsense policies well within the purview of the political branches are shut down indefinitely at the flick of the wrist from one judge until the Supreme Court is willing to take the appeal, which could take months or years. Even if the other side secures a victory at the Supreme Court, the Left continues to shop around to the same district judges a new case with a slight nuance and starts the cycle all over again.

“We can and we should do better than this. It's predictable now that every confirmation hearing is going to be an overblown, politicized circus. And it's because we've accepted a bad new theory about how our three branches of government should work -- and in particular about how the Judiciary should work.”

By John Fund
NationalReview.com

While we fill a Supreme Court vacancy, let’s also have that debate.

Whenever there is a Supreme Court vacancy, I view it as a chance to teach voters about the courts and their legitimate role in our government. We could use that. Last year, the Annenberg Center found that only 26 percent of those it surveyed could name the three branches of government (executive, judicial, and legislative). A full 33 percent couldn’t name even one branch.

Confusion about the proper role of the courts extends to many of our sitting judges. Last month, while the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the so-called Trump travel ban, Justice Clarence Thomas raised an issue that the next Supreme Court justice may have to weigh in on. Why is it, he asked, that a single federal district judge can impose an injunction blocking a presidential executive order in all 50 states even if none of his colleagues (599 district judges) thinks it’s a good idea?

Justice Thomas wrote:

These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system — preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch.

I am skeptical that district courts have the authority to enter universal injunctions. These injunctions did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding. And they appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts. If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.

Since January 2017, the “resistance” to President Trump has succeeded in getting 22 injunctions against his actions on issues ranging from the “Dreamers” to sanctuary cities and transgender policy in the military.

The U.S. survived without judges’ imposing nationwide injunctions for the vast majority of its history. The first such injunction came in a 1963 minimum-wage case, in which the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that executive-branch officials should honor a court decision “in all cases of essentially the same character.” But such injunctions have been rare until, well, the Trump administration.

Even after the Supreme Court made its definitive ruling in the 16-month-old travel-ban case, the “Resistance” made clear that it hasn’t given up. On the very day the Court ruled, a total of 16 states and the District of Columbia sued to stop President Trump over his border-security measures. The suit was “forum-shopped” so it would be heard by a federal judge in the distinctly anti-Trump Seattle area.

In another ruling that came down the same day the Supreme Court acted on the travel ban, a federal district judge in California overturned an executive order Trump issued June 20: Parents crossing the border with their migrant children must have regular phone calls with their children and be reunited with them within 14 days, the judge ruled. Parents with children younger than 5 must be reunited by this coming Tuesday.

It is madness that a single federal district court judge can impose such an arbitrary deadline covering the entire country and not have his decision reviewed for weeks or months.

The Department of Health and Human Services has been tasked with reuniting the children. Alex Azar, the HHS secretary, has said that he will comply with those artificially imposed deadlines, but at a cost: Some of the “parents” being reunited with children are actually in league with smugglers, he noted. In a conference with reporters last Friday, Azar said:

Proper and careful vetting for child safety is essential. . . . Two purported parents were identified in ICE criminal background checks as having criminal history that were inconsistent with child safety. For example, these purported parents had a history of charges of child cruelty, rape, and kidnapping based on information revealed by ICE. . . . [But] we will comply even if those deadlines prevent us from conducting our standard or even a truncated vetting process.

It is madness that a single federal district court judge can impose such an arbitrary deadline covering the entire country and not have his decision reviewed for weeks or months. No one wants children separated from their parents, whether they are U.S. citizens or migrants, but many of these largely Central American parents bringing their kids across the border have made an unfortunate choice.

As Hans von Spakovsky, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, points out, such parents passed through Mexico and other nations that have their own generous asylum laws. By not seeking asylum in those countries, they are sending a strong signal that they are illegally entering the U.S. to better their economic condition rather than to escape persecution.

Of course, something must be done to clean up our archaic immigration laws that make it impossible to issue regulated work visas for legitimate job seekers (such as we had until the 1960s) while also making it almost impossible to send back people who are abusing the system. Congress has failed to act, but the solution is not to have a single, unelected federal district judge make determinations on what our nationwide immigration policy should be

If the confirmation hearings and debate about President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee can bring some of those issues forward, we might have the beginnings of a more rational debate on just what legitimate power judges have and how some are currently abusing it.