School choice is crucial to the American Dream—we need a new birth of freedom.
The first round of July Social Security payments for retirees, now capped at $5,181, will be issued in seven days. When will payments arrive? Retirees born on or before the 10th of a month will receive this payment on Wednesday, July 8. The second round will go out on July 15 to those born between […]
House GOP leadership is sending members home early for the weeklong July 4 recess, after a GOP blockade shut down the floor for the second week in a row. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) canceled scheduled votes over his inability to pass procedural rule votes to allow legislation to come to the floor, as a coalition […]
Texas Democrats tore into Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton after a video emerged showing him flying with his alleged mistress to Iceland ahead of Independence Day. The 2026 Texas Senate race between Paxton and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico has emerged as one of the most personally contentious of the midterm elections. Democrats were given […]
The justice argues that the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test and the third-party doctrine are indefensible in theory and unworkable in practice.
The state excise tax will increase by 2.2 cents per gallon, bringing the total gas tax to 63.4 cents per gallon
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that law enforcement’s use of a geofence warrant to obtain cellphone location data constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, marking a significant privacy ruling while stopping short of declaring the investigative tactic unconstitutional. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the justices vacated a lower court ruling involving Virginia […]
At issue in Trump v Cook is not whether Lisa Cook can appeal her removal, but rather where her position rests while the appeal is underway. Does she work for the govt? Or is she technically removed from govt, pending appeal? The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Lisa Cook remaining in her position as […] The post Supreme Court 5-4 Ruling Creates Fourth Branch of Government – Trump v Cook appeared first on The Last Refuge.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s right to privacy when it comes to their phone location data.The justices ruled 6–3 to send a Virginia bank robbery case back to the lower courts for review in light of its decision. In 2019, Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union after police saw him using his phone in the security camera footage of the bank. They then used a “geofence warrant,” which compels tech companies to provide law enforcement with data from all devices at a specific place and time, to identify Chatrie.Geofence warrants are regularly used, and let the government demand location data and records from anyone near a crime scene without needing to identify an individual target.Government lawyers argued that Chatrie did not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, since he had willingly shared his location with Google.But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the majority, with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s liberals.“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred, writing, “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”The ruling is a win for data privacy, and will make it harder for the federal government to access personal information stored in the cloud without getting a specific warrant.