It’s about as simple as can be: The government has no business in your grandma’s kitchen. Now, media outlets nationwide are spreading the word about the Goldwater Institute’s efforts to protect the rights of a Missouri grandma who was threatened by “petty health bureaucrats” for cooking breakfast for her neighbors without the government’s permission.
Kathy Kite, who lives in the small town of Harrisburg, Mo., told Fox News this week that she was frightened when she received a letter from county health leaders threatening “legal action” if she didn’t stop inviting neighbors into her home and making them breakfast. Last week, Goldwater intervened, demanding answers from the health leaders about why they believe they have the legal authority to regulate Kathy’s hospitality. Those bureaucrats are demanding that she get a food-service permit and spend tens of thousands of dollars on a commercial kitchen. Kathy’s not backing down: “I’m not going to stop feeding my community cause they are my family,” she told Fox.
Speaking with the Daily Mail, attorney Dave Roland, Goldwater’s director of allied litigation, said the hospitality Kathy is showing her neighbors “is consistent with the best aspects of American culture and history.” Thankfully, the Goldwater Institute will always be there when bureaucrats overstep their bounds and trample on Americans’ constitutional rights.
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It’s a fundamental principle of American law: If a legal right exists, so does the right to enforce it. Next week, Goldwater Institute lawyers are headed back to the Arizona Supreme Court to stand up for that principle and defend the right of Arizona State University Professor Owen Anderson to hold his employer accountable for forcing him into a discriminatory and illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
Goldwater attorneys will argue on Tuesday that the Arizona Cout of Appeals got it wrong when it ruled that Professor Anderson had no right to sue ASU for forcing him to take an illegal DEI training as a job requirement. The so-called “Inclusive Communities” training included instruction about the alleged moral and social failures of “whiteness” and “heteronormativity”—a clear violation of Arizona’s law prohibiting trainings based on concepts of blame or judgement based on race, ethnicity, or sex.
If the appeals court’s error is allowed to stand, it will eliminate an essential civil rights safeguard for public employees and taxpayers. Goldwater will always defend the right of Americans whose rights have been violated by the government to have their day in court.
This will be the Goldwater Institute’s 16th appearance before the state’s highest court.
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Civil forfeiture is such a huge threat to liberty that Congress passed a law to protect Americans whose property is wrongly seized by the government. That’s why the Goldwater Institute has joined a brief calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to close a costly loophole that prevents people from collecting attorneys’ fees from government agencies if the government dismisses its forfeiture case before a judgement is finalized.
That’s exactly what happened to Richard Ross, an attorney who had money seized from a trust account for his clients. (Apparently one of those clients transferred money into the account from a company accused of wrongdoing.) After racking up more than $100,000 in legal fees, Ross informed the government that he intended to seek summary judgement—a ruling ending the case in his favor. Facing defeat, the government dropped the case and returned the money. The problem is that because the case was dismissed without a judgement in Ross’s favor, lower courts have said he can’t recover attorneys’ fees.
That’s wrong. Americans shouldn’t have to choose between surrendering their property and spending enormous amounts of money to get it back. That’s why the Goldwater Institute will continue its fight to rein in civil asset forfeiture so that innocent Americans don’t continue to fall victim to government theft.
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