(The Epoch Times)—In a rare move, all three liberal Supreme Court justices recused themselves on May 28 from a case involving a lawsuit filed against them for rejecting a previous lawsuit that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In the case, the Supreme Court turned away a longshot bid by Raland J. Brunson of Ogden, Utah, who has gained notoriety among Trump supporters for his legal activism.
The case at hand is known as Brunson v. Sotomayor. The petitioner sued Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in their official capacities for voting on Feb. 21, 2023, to deny the petition for certiorari, or review, in his previous lawsuit, Brunson v. Adams.
The three Democrat-appointed justices recused themselves, citing judicial disqualification mandates in the U.S. Code and the Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, which the nation’s highest court adopted in November 2023.
The previous lawsuit was Brunson v. Adams, in which Mr. Brunson sued hundreds of members of Congress in 2021, claiming that they violated their oath of office by not investigating election fraud in the 2020 election and by certifying the election victory of then-challenger Joe Biden, over then-incumbent President Donald Trump in a vote that concluded in the early morning of Jan. 7, 2021, following the security breach at the U.S. Capitol.
Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.) appears in the short title of the petition filed in the appeal because she was named first in the list of 388 respondents. Also included as respondents were President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Vice President Mike Pence. The lawsuit sought the removal from office of President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the members of Congress.
In the unorthodox lawsuit, Mr. Brunson argued that avoiding an investigation “of how Biden won the election, is an act of treason and an act of levying war against the U.S. Constitution which violated Brunson’s unfettered right to vote in an honest and fair election and as such it wrongfully invalidated his vote.”
In that appeal, the Supreme Court denied the petition for certiorari, or review, in an unsigned order on Jan. 9, 2023. No justices dissented. No reason was provided for the decision. At least four of the nine justices have to vote to approve a petition for certiorari for it to advance to the oral argument stage.
The court denied a petition for rehearing on Feb. 21, 2023, in an unsigned order without providing a reason. No justices dissented.
This week, the Supreme Court denied the petition for certiorari in Brunson v. Sotomayor in an unsigned order without providing a reason. No justices dissented, but Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson did not participate in the ruling.
The petition had been docketed with the high court on March 29, with Mr. Brunson serving as his own counsel.
Mr. Brunson argued in the second lawsuit that the justices violated their judicial oath in Brunson v. Adams.
The lawsuit began in state court but the justices as federal officers had the case removed to federal district court.
The district court found that the state court lacked jurisdiction in the suit, holding that the official capacity claims against the justices were tantamount to claims against the United States, which enjoys sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity is the legal doctrine that the government cannot be sued without its consent.
The district court determined that the state court lacked jurisdiction and that the district court therefore lacked derivative jurisdiction due to the official capacity claims triggering the justices’ sovereign immunity.
The district court dismissed the action, finding that the justices enjoyed immunity.
Mr. Brunson appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, arguing that even if derivative jurisdiction had been required, the state court still retained jurisdiction because the doctrine of sovereign immunity runs afoul of the First Amendment’s right to petition for redress of grievances.
On Feb. 9 of this year, the 10th Circuit dismissed the appeal.
In the Supreme Court proceeding, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, functioning as attorney for the justices being sued, waived the federal government’s right to respond to the petition in the Supreme Court in a document that was docketed on May 2.
Mr. Brunson argued that the three justices violated their oath of office “by giving aid and comfort to enemies of the Constitution, which is an act of treason, fraud and a breach of contract.”
He urged the Supreme Court to grant his petition, alleging the justices were guilty of “fraud, violations of the Oath of Office and … treason.”
“These serious offenses need to be addressed immediately with the least amount of technical nuances of the law and legal procedures because these offenses are flowing continually against Brunson’s liberties and life and consequently is [sic] a continual national security breach.
“Seeking a redress of grievances, as Brunson has done herein, is a great power one retains to protect himself from the encroachment of a tyrannical government. Brunson’s personal voice and the way he can protect his personal constitutional protected rights and the U.S. Constitution,” the petition stated.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
