Month in Review – May 2015

* On May 7, AFLC Senior Counsel Robert J. Muise appeared on Fox 2 Detroit’s “Let It Rip,” in defense of Pamela Geller, AFLC’s client who was exercising her First Amendment right to free speech by holding a Mohammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas.  Two Muslim terrorists with ties to ISIS were thwarted in their attempt to disrupt the event with violence.  The two jihadis were killed on the spot by an alert officer.

* On May 12, AFLC Senior Counsel Robert J. Muise argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Washington, D.C. in one of our many cases challenging Obamacare.  In this case, Jeffrey Cutler v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, we are representing Mr. Cutler, who liked his health insurance plan but was unable to keep it because of Obamacare and is now subject to penalty.

* On May 13, we filed a motion for attorneys’ fees, and on May 21, we filed a response to CAIR’s objections to the federal magistrate judge’s ruling that attorneys’ fees were a proper sanction for CAIR’s abusive discovery tactics (Note: on June 1, the district court judge ruled in our favor and rejected CAIR’s objections to the award of fees and costs).

* On May 15, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. dismissed our challenge to Obama’s unlawful executive order regarding the enforcement of Obamacare, claiming that we lacked “standing.”  This, unfortunately, is a way for the court to avoid addressing the difficult constitutional issues and effectively insulates Obama’s unlawful orders from legal challenge.  But no man is above the law.  We will be appealing this decision.

* On May 20th, a sharply divided D.C. Circuit denied Priests for Life’s petition to rehear en banc (full court) its legal challenge to the HHS mandate.  Three circuit judges dissented from this decision.  We will be filing a petition, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up this important case in defense of religious liberty.

*On May 22, we filed a motion to stay the mandate in the Priests for Life case so that the injunction previously issued while the case was on appeal in the D.C. Circuit will remain in effect while we seek review in the Supreme Court.

*On May 28th, we filed a response to the MTA’s motion to dissolve the injunction issued by a federal court in New York which ordered the MTA to display an anti-jihad ad.  Following the court’s order, the MTA modified its advertising regulations and are now claiming that the ad violates the new regulations, thereby mooting the earlier order.