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The biggest Supreme Court decisions of 2024: From presidential immunity to overturning the Chevron doctrine

The biggest Supreme Court decisions of 2024: From presidential immunity to overturning the Chevron doctrine

The U.S. Supreme Court issued several major decisions over the course of 2024.  Its rulings include those that have pushed back on the Biden administration’s attempted change of Title IX protections for transgender students, reversed a 40-year precedent that had supported what conservatives have condemned as the administrative state in Washington, and considered the constitutionality of Republican-controlled state efforts to curtail what they define as liberal Silicon Valley biases online.  The high court also ruled on presidential immunity at a consequential time for current President-elect Trump during the 2024 election – and sided with a Jan. 6 defendant who fought a federal obstruction charge.  Here are the top cases considered by the justices over the past year.  The Supreme Court on Aug. 16, 2024, kept preliminary injunctions preventing the Biden-Harris administration from implementing a new rule that widened the definition of sex discrimination under Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity, while litigation over the rule continues. After the Fifth and Sixth Circuit Courts of Appeal denied the administration’s request to put a stay on the injunctions, the Department of Education turned to the Supreme Court, arguing that some parts of the rule should be able to take effect. The Supreme Court rejected their request. “Importantly, all Members of the Court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity,” the court’s unsigned opinion said, concluding that the Biden administration had not “adequately identified which particular provisions, if any, are sufficiently independent of the enjoined definitional provision and thus might be able to remain in effect.” In April, the Department of Education issued the new rule implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, arguing that expanding the definition of discrimination to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” would protect LGBTQ students. Louisiana led several states in suing the DOE, contending the new rule “violates students’ and employees’ rights to bodily privacy and safety.”  Title IX implemented the long-standing athletics regulation allowing sex-separate teams decades ago, and Republicans contended Biden’s new rule would have significant implications on women- and girls-only spaces and possibly legally back biological males playing in women’s sports. Separate court injunctions blocked the rule from taking effect in 26 states.  LIBERAL SUPREME COURT JUSTICE MAKES ‘CRINGE’ CAMEO PERFORMANCE ON BROADWAY “I’m grateful that the Supreme Court agreed not to block our injunction against this radical rewrite of Title IX,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement at the time. “Other than the 19th Amendment guaranteeing our right to vote, Title IX has been the most successful law in history at ensuring equal opportunity for women in education at all levels and in collegiate athletics. This fight isn’t over, but I’ll keep fighting to block this radical agenda that eviscerates Title IX.”  The Supreme Court on July 1, 2024, kept on hold efforts by Texas and Florida to limit how Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube and other social media platforms regulate content in a ruling that strongly defended the platforms’ free speech rights. Writing for the court, Justice Elena Kagan said the platforms, like newspapers, deserve protection from governments’ intrusion in determining what to include or exclude from their space. “The principle does not change because the curated compilation has gone from the physical to the virtual world,” Kagan wrote in an opinion signed by five justices. All nine justices agreed on the overall outcome. The justices returned the cases to lower courts for further review in broad challenges from trade associations for the companies. While the details vary, both laws aimed to address long-standing conservative complaints that the social media companies were liberal-leaning and censored users based on their viewpoints, especially on the political right.  The Florida and Texas laws were signed by Republican governors in the months following decisions by Facebook and Twitter (now X) to cut then-President Trump off over his posts related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trade associations representing the companies sued in federal court, claiming that the laws violated the platforms’ speech rights. One federal appeals court struck down Florida’s statute while another upheld the Texas law, but both were on hold pending the outcome at the Supreme Court. In a statement made when he signed the Florida measure into law, Gov. Ron DeSantis said it would be “protection against the Silicon Valley elites.” When Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas law, he said it was needed to protect free speech in what he termed the new public square. Social media platforms “are a place for healthy public debate where information should be able to flow freely – but there is a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas,” Abbott said. “That is wrong, and we will not allow it in Texas.” NetChoice LLC has sued Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.  “The judgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded, because neither the Eleventh Circuit nor the Fifth Circuit conducted a proper analysis of the facial First Amendment challenges to Florida and Texas laws regulating large internet platforms. NetChoice’s decision to litigate these cases as facial challenges comes at a cost,” the court wrote. “The Court has made facial challenges hard to win. In the First Amendment context, a plaintiff must show that ‘a substantial number of [the law’s] applications are unconstitutional, judged in relation to the statute’s plainly legitimate sweep.’ So far in these cases, no one has paid much attention to that issue.”  The court said its analysis and arguments “focused mainly on how the laws applied to the content-moderation practices that giant social-media platforms use on their best-known services to filter, alter or label their users’ posts, i.e., on how the laws applied to the likes of Facebook’s News Feed and YouTube’s homepage,” but the justices said they

US agriculture primed to be next frontier in cybersecurity in new year, experts, lawmakers say

US agriculture primed to be next frontier in cybersecurity in new year, experts, lawmakers say

Cybersecurity has been a major subject of discussion in recent years, with purported Chinese spy balloons floating overhead, a major Appalachian oil pipeline hacked with ransomware and questions about mysterious drones over New Jersey skies.  But one overlooked area of focus in this regard is agriculture, several prominent figures have said — especially with America’s ag states primed to lend their top political leaders to Washington in the new year. Dakota State University President Jose-Marie Griffiths told Fox News Digital how important the heartland has become geopolitically, with several Dakotans gaining leadership or cabinet roles in the new year — including Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., chairing the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity. “I said quite a lot in the past and in [congressional] testimony about my concerns about agriculture and food production’s critical infrastructure, which came rather late to the cybersecurity critical infrastructure table,” Griffiths said. INFLATION, SUSTAINABILITY AND GLOBALISM ARE POTENTIAL DEATH SENTENCE TO US AG: FARMERS “People [will] start to realize the agricultural vehicles they’re using increasingly are autonomous and connecting to broadband [via] satellite — and other ways that these become vulnerable. And for people who wish to do us harm, they’re exploiting vulnerabilities as much as they can.” Residents across the heartland pay much more attention to the threats China and other rivals pose to the U.S. agriculture sector, she said.  With advancements in technology, hackers can now find their way into harvesters, granaries and the nation’s freight-train network, Griffiths and Rounds said separately. Whether the cash crop is Pennsylvania potatoes, Florida oranges or Dakotan wheat, all are crucial to the U.S. economy and supply chain, and all can be subject to cyberthreats, Griffiths suggested. Rounds told Fox News Digital he has studied for some time the potential vulnerabilities of the American agriculture sector when it comes to foreign actors and cybersecurity. “It’s more than just the vehicles and so forth,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that we rely on. A good example is your water systems; your electrical systems… All of those right now are connected and they all have cyber-points-of-entry.  “And so, we have been, for an extended period of time, looking at threats that could come from overseas by adversaries that would like to infiltrate not only the water supplies, but also the electrical systems… and in some cases, sewer systems.” Rounds said he and other lawmakers have been focused on where malign actors can proverbially “shoot the arrows at us,” and figure out who they are and how to stop them. GREEN GOVERNANCE IS THE NEW GUISE FOR MERCANTILISM, WILL LEAD TO GLOBAL INSTABILITY: KEVIN ROBERTS He said the Chinese firm Huawei had been selling cheap hardware to rural telecom entities and could be able to infiltrate communications systems. “Once we found out that that was in there… that they could be putting in latent materials that could be activated at a later date, we’ve gotten most of them pulled out. But that’s just one example of the ways in which rural areas can be a way into the rest of our communication systems,” he said. Rounds said drones are becoming increasingly used in agriculture, and they, too, have the danger of being hacked. Vehicles like harvesters and tractors have also greatly advanced technologically in the near term and face similar challenges. “A lot of that right now is done with GPS. You get into your tractor, you plug it in and basically it’ll drive it for you. We leave people in those tractors, but at some stage of the game, some of those might very well become autonomous as well — and they’re subject to cyber-intervention…” he said. Grain elevators also can be interfered with, which stymies marketing and transportation, and endangers the greater supply chain and the ability for a farmer to sell on the open market, Rounds said. Asked if he preferred today’s agriculture sector to the era before automation, Rounds said it’s not about what he thinks, but what is going to happen in the future. “We will have more and more autonomous vehicles being used in farming. And the reason is we don’t have the manpower — and we replace it with machinery. The machinery is going to get bigger. It’s going to become more sophisticated, and we’re going to be expected to do more things with fewer people actually operating them.,” he said. “The supply chain is so critical. We rely on autonomy in many cases for a lot of the delivery of our resources, both to the farmer, but also back out from the farmer in terms of a commodity that he wants to market.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP If that new technologically-advanced system malfunctions or is hacked, it will greatly disrupt the ability to provide the raw materials to the people and companies “actually making the bread” and such. Amit Yoran, CEO of exposure management firm Tenable, recently testified before the House Homeland Security Committee and spoke at length about cyber threats to critical U.S. infrastructure. Asked about cybersecurity in the agriculture realm, Yoran told Fox News Digital recently that there is “no singular defense paradigm that could effectively be applied across all sectors.” “Some critical infrastructure providers have a high degree of cybersecurity preparedness, strong risk understanding and risk management practices, and very strong security programs. Others are woefully ill-prepared,” said Yoran, whose company is based in Howard County, Maryland.