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Supreme Court Defies Biden Administration, Agrees To Take On Two Major Cases

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear two crucial cases that the Biden administration didn’t want before the court.

One case could scale back the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the other involves an attempt to revive a rule that screens out potentially government-dependent immigrants.

The court’s decisions come as migrants continue to illegally cross the U.S. southern border and the Biden administration develops a strategy for dealing with climate change.

The court also decided to hear West Virginia v. EPA, which involves energy-producing states and coal companies accusing the EPA of a power grab. States claim the EPA has exceeded its authority to limit carbon emissions, which environmentalists allege contribute to climate change.

Beyond that, the court has already delivered a slew of powerful rulings this month.

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Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has secured a major victory from the Supreme Court.

The nation’s highest court ruled 6-3 that a law limiting how much money raised after an election a campaign can use to repay loans from the candidate was unconstitutional.

In a separate case, the Court also ruled against an immigrant who was seeking to avoid deportation as one conservative Justice sided with liberals in dissent.

In a 5-4 vote, the court kept in place an appellate court decision against a man who has been in the United States illegally since the 1990s

“Federal courts have a very limited role to play in this pro­cess. With an exception for legal and constitutional ques­tions, Congress has barred judicial review of the Attorney General’s decisions denying discretionary relief from re­moval,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in the opinion of the majority.

A divided Supreme Court also delivered a ruling that federal judges cannot hear new evidence from death row inmates who argue that their state-appointed lawyers were constitutionally ineffective during state trials.

In a 6-3 ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas argued in the court’s opinion that two death row inmates in Arizona can’t raise evidence of ineffective counsel during their federal habeas appeal given they had not presented the argument in state court.

The Supreme Court is also dealing with a major leak.

A draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to Politico earlier this month and it set off a firestorm on social media.

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called the leak of a draft opinion “absolutely appalling” and announced an investigation to find the leaker.

“The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right,” Politico reported.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.”

Alito adds: “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

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“We, therefore, hold the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito writes in the document, labeled the “Opinion of the Court.”

Since the leak, a new report states that a majority of Supreme Court justices remain in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade and have not changed their votes.

The Court is expected to officially announce its decision on the case either this month or next week.

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