Two of the most accomplished attorneys in the United States came together at The Heritage Foundation last month to discuss the 2023-2024 Supreme Court term which kicks off this week. The first speaker, Paul Clement, is a Partner at Clement and Murphy, PLLC, and was the 43rd Solicitor General of the United States. The second speaker, Lisa Blatt, is a Partner and Chair of the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice at Williams and Connolly LLP.

Senator Amy Klobuchar never seems to give up on her efforts to restrict political speech. Even after her failed efforts at enacting regulations for “Honest Ads” and last Congress’ S. 1 effort (nicknamed the “Corrupt Politicians Act”), the Senate Rules Chair is back with a new effort to restrict the speech of non-Democrats. This time, it is the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act (S. 2770). As Senator Bill Hagerty pointed out at a Senate Rules hearing earlier this week:

.@SenatorHagerty exposes that @amyklobuchar is trying to regulate AI, even though we don't even have anything close to an agreed on definition of AI.

— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) September 27, 2023

On Wednesday, the Committee on House Administration held the first formal oversight hearing of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in over a decade. Chairman Bryan Steil explained in his opening remarks:

Today marks the first time in twelve years the Federal Election Commission, or the FEC, has come before the Committee on House Administration.

As Chairman of this Committee, I’m focused on building Americans’ confidence in our elections by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat. . .

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held an oversight hearing of the Department of Justice. Attorney General Merrick Garland spent the marathon hearing denying the agency's weaponization against everyday Americans and deflecting questions about its ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden.

Today in @JudiciaryGOP, AG Merrick Garland followed the same pattern as the rest of the Biden DOJ.

Deny, deflect, defy.

— Congressman Ben Cline (@RepBenCline) September 20, 2023

Congress is back from its August recess, and Biden's judicial nominees up for confirmation by the Senate are as bad as ever. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee met to consider several nominees. Of particular concern to Committee Republicans were Richard Federico, nominated to the Tenth Circuit, and Eumi Lee, nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. 

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley grilled Federico on a case where he advocated for a sentence as defense counsel well below the recommended guidlines for a case involving child sexual abuse material. The Daily Wire reported:

Hawley began by laying out the details of the case he was referring to, noting that the sentencing guidelines recommended up to 240 months — or 20 years — in prison. The recommended range, he said, was from 210 months to 240 — but Federico had asked for just 105 months. . .

On Friday, RNLA will host Paul Carter, author of Richard Nixon: California's Native Son, for its first webinar of the fall. (Register here!) As the book summary explains, Carter's research takes a fresh look at the life of President Richard Nixon and traces his life journey wich began and ended in Southern California:

Modern biographies of Richard Nixon have been consumed with Watergate. All have missed arguably the most important perspective on Nixon as California’s native son, the only U.S. president born and raised in California. In addition, Nixon was also a son, brother, friend, husband, father, uncle, and grandfather. By shifting the focus from Watergate and Washington to Nixon’s deep, defining roots in California, Paul Carter boldly challenges common conceptions of the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

On Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' financial disclosure report for 2022 was released to the public. Attorney for Justice Thomas Elliot Berke summarized: "I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression, and any prior reporting errors were strictly inadvertent."

Over 100 of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' former law clerks have written a letter in his defense after months of baseless attacks by the radical Left on his credibility and character. Some excerpts from the letter read:

We’ve had a front-row seat to the Justice at work. Justice Thomas is a man of greatest intellect, of greatest faith, and of greatest patriotism. We know because we lived it. He is a man of unwavering principle. He welcomes the lone dissent. He is also a man of great humor and warmth and generosity. Walk the halls, and you’ll hear his laugh. Call, and he answers. His grandfather’s sayings become our sayings. His chambers become our chambers—a place fueled by unstoppable curiosity and unreturned library books, all to get every case just right. Those chambers become a way station for other Justices’ clerks too—a place where wisdom is freely shared by the man who made his way from Pin Point to the Supreme Court’s marbled halls. . .

For years, Republicans and fair-minded people have expressed concern about the unequal application of the law in the area of First Amendment protections. For example, churches during the COVID-19 pandemic were famously restricted from meeting, but protests for the “Black Lives Matter” movement were allowed to go forward. Last week marked the courts stepping in to push back and uphold the First Amendment:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in a unanimous 3-0 decision, found that two anti-abortion groups had plausibly alleged that the D.C. government “discriminated on the basis of viewpoint in the selective enforcement of its defacement ordinance.”

The groups, the Frederick Douglass Foundation and Students for Life of America, sued the D.C. government in 2021 after local police arrested two protesters who wrote “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a public sidewalk during an August 2020 demonstration.

The foundation claimed D.C. authorities abandoned enforcement of the anti-graffiti law during widespread protests in the city following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Yet that same summer, the group claimed, the restriction was “vigorously” enforced against them.

A bombshell report by Capital Research Center details how the "nonpartisan" Voter Registration Project worked to only benefit the Democrats—contrary to law—in their voter registration efforts. This is extremely problematic as an article from The Daily Caller explained:

“Encouraging qualified voters to exercise their right to vote is a noble purpose, served by legitimate nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations, and community leaders around the country,” Lawyers Democracy Fund Executive Director Lisa Dixon, who was not involved in CRC’s report, told the DCNF. “But when supposedly nonpartisan organizations conduct get-out-the-vote efforts in a manner that seems designed to benefit one political party, voters are rightly skeptical of how fair and nonpartisan such efforts are.”