A new video ad is calling on Democrats in the 2020 presidential race to open up about which judges they would nominate to fill America's federal courts.

"The radical Left smeared Judge Kavanaugh ... their coordinated attacks failed," the video ad from Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) begins, referring to the controversy that almost upended President Trump's most recent Supreme Court appointment. "Now the same radicals want to pack the court."

Referring to a recent story in The New York Times, the video goes on to say that now liberal groups and candidates "have built a secret list of judges that they won't show anyone, keeping Americans in the dark." It then goes on to ask "What are they hiding?" in reference to the "list of secret court picks."

The ad is part of a two-week, $1.1 million JNC campaign in response to the efforts of an initiative called Building the Bench, which is a joint effort between Alliance for Justice, other liberal advocacy groups and labor unions along with a group of over 30 attorneys and law professors and lawyers as its advisory board.

"The progressive organizations and individuals have traditionally weighed in on judicial nominations and the confirmation process when Democrats were in the White House, but this represents a much more concerted effort than in the past," the New York Times notes, but "the liberal groups do not intend to make their recommendations public."

JCN wants the groups instead to follow the lead of candidate Donald Trump who put out a list of potential judicial picks months before he was elected in 2016.

"President Trump was open and honest with the American people and has kept his promise. He released his list of judges, but Joe Biden and other Democrats running for president have yet to reveal theirs," said JCN policy director and chief counsel Carrie Severino. "Democratic front-runner Joe Biden and all Democratic presidential candidates should stop hiding and release their list of potential Supreme Court nominees so the American people can judge for themselves."

In May 2016, Trump put forward an initial list of 11 names of possible Supreme Court picks. Interestingly, neither of his two Supreme Court appointees so far were on the first list. Justice Neil Gorsuch was on a second list released that September.

In a 7-2 ruling issued Thursday morning, the Supreme Court ruled that a war memorial in the form of a 40-foot cross on public land does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

"The Religion Clauses of the Constitution aim to foster a society in which people of all beliefs can live together harmoniously," the court ruled, "and the presence of the Bladensburg Cross on the land where it has stood for so many years is fully consistent with that aim."

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for the court majority, which based the constitutionality of the Maryland cross on the fact that the monument itself has been around for a while. "The passage of time gives rise to a strong presumption of constitutionality," he wrote — and that the cross is not just a Christian symbol in this context.

"The cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol, but that fact should not blind us to everything else that the Bladensburg Cross has come to represent," the ruling says, citing a list of examples. "For all these reasons, the Cross does not offend the Constitution."

One of the major questions for religious liberty advocates in this case was whether or not the Supreme Court would overrule the infamous "Lemon test," which has been used as a standard in these cases for decades. Instead of eliminating the test, however, the opinion merely limited its use.

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, however, wrote a concurring opinion that said that the case shouldn't even have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place, writing that "it follows from the Court’s analysis that suits like this one should be dismissed for lack of standing."

The pair of Republican appointees contended that merely being offended by a public monument shouldn't give someone legal standing to sue over it.

"In a large and diverse country, offense can be easily found," the two conclude. "Really, most every governmental action probably offends somebody. ... But recourse for disagreement and offense does not lie in federal litigation."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonya Sotomayor dissented.

“This is a landmark victory for religious freedom," said First Liberty chief Kelly Shackelford, whose organization defended the cross in the case, in a statement emailed to CR. "The attempted perversion of our Constitution is now over, and every American now has more freedom than they have had in decades, with a government no longer hostile to people or expressions of faith.”

This ruling is the second major SCOTUS victory this week for religious liberty, following the remanding order which threw out a six-figure fine against a family of Christian bakers from Oregon on Monday.

The Supreme Court ought to be better able to correct its past legal mistakes without needing an extraordinary reason to do so.

That was the major point of a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday that confronted SCOTUS' stare decisis practice head-on.

As a 2018 Congressional Research Service report explains, stare decisis is Latin for “to stand by things decided" and means that a court "will follow its prior decisions absent exceptional circumstances (e.g., the Supreme Court following its decisions unless they have become too difficult for lower courts to apply)."

As Justice Robert Jackson explained the concept in his concurring opinion in the 1952 Brown v. Allen case, "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."

Thomas said that he wants the court to revisit how it handles past precedent.

"In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III [of the Constitution] because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law," Thomas wrote. "It is always 'tempting for judges to confuse our own preferences with the requirements of the law,' and the Court’s stare decisis doctrine exacerbates that temptation by giving the [veneer] of respectability to our continued application of demonstrably incorrect precedents."

Thomas also says that "by applying demonstrably erroneous precedent instead of the relevant law’s text ... the Court exercises 'force' and 'will,' two attributes the People did not give it."

And that makes a lot of sense. After all, if the reasoning of one imperfect human being can be wrong, then so can the reasoning of nine imperfect human beings on a judicial panel.

Indeed, seeing as there's absolutely nothing about a Senate confirmation that grants anybody infallibility, even accomplished attorneys and judges who have reached the pinnacle of their profession make mistakes. And those mistakes can have awful consequences. Anyone who paid attention in high school history will remember the court's decisions in the Dred Scott, Plessy and Korematsu cases.

Dred Scott v. Sandford upheld the treatment of human beings as property and was never overturned by the court, but rather by the 14th Amendment. Plessy v. Ferguson created the “separate but equal” doctrine for segregation and was later overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. Korematsu v. United States — which upheld the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — remained on the books for decades because there was no applicable vehicle to overturn it until last summer, when the Supreme Court finally did.

But when it comes to current precedent, as Thomas explains "The true irony of our modern stare decisis doctrine lies in the fact that proponents of stare decisis tend to invoke it most fervently when the precedent at issue is least defensible."

And that brings us to the question of Roe v. Wade. Where pro-lifers see a poorly decided ruling that they want re-evaluated, abortion defenders can't seem to stop clamoring about the importance of precedent when it comes to the 1973 decision. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a leftist whose opinions on SCOTUS precedent are the same for Roe v. Wade as they are for the court's decision in Citizens United.

But one has to wonder what's actually scarier for the pro-abortion movement if pro-life laws could be considered without Roe v. Wade as a shield: Losing court-mandated access to procedures that kill unborn children, or ending up in the dustbin of legal history alongside past proponents of slavery and segregation?

The Supreme Court refused to take up a high-profile religious liberty case involving a family of Christian bakers on Monday and instead sent it back to the lower courts for further consideration in light of the high court's ruling in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

The case of Aaron and Melissa Klein, whose Oregon bakery became a major focal point of the national debate about religious liberty and the LGBT movement, has been remanded to the Oregon Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court also tossed out the Court of Appeals' previous decision to uphold a $135,000 fine against the couple because of their refusal to participate in a same-sex wedding ceremony in 2013 by making a cake for it.

Those standing behind the Kleins are chalking up Monday's Supreme Court order as a big win.

"This is a victory for Aaron and Melissa Klein and for religious liberty for all Americans," said First Liberty president, CEO and chief counsel Kelly Shackelford, whose organization is representing the Kleins along with Boyden Gray & Associates, in an emailed statement. "The Constitution protects speech, popular or not, from condemnation by the government. The message from the Court is clear, government hostility toward religious Americans will not be tolerated."

The case is to be re-evaluated in light of the Supreme Court's June 2018 narrow decision in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which reversed a decision by the Colorado Court of appeals in a similar religious liberty case.

However, since and despite the 2018 ruling, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips has been sued multiple times for alleged discrimination. Earlier this year, the state of Colorado dropped a lawsuit it brought against Phillips for refusing to bake a cake for a gender transition just weeks after last year's ruling. Last week, the same transgender individual behind the previous lawsuit sued Phillips for allegedly refusing to sell a birthday cake; an attorney representing Phillips dismissed the claim as "yet another desperate attempt to harass" the baker.

In orders issued Monday morning, the Surpreme Court denied the petitions for hearing of a pair of cases involving gun "silencers" — or suppressors — amid a national debate about whether the firearm accessory should be banned.

The cases of Cox v. United States and Kettler v. United States, had to do with the National Firearms Act (NFA), which was first passed in 1934. The NFA does not ban suppressors, but it does create substantial bureaucratic and financial barriers to transferring them, such as filing paperwork with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and paying $200 for a tax stamp.

Shane Cox manufactured suppressors and sold them unregistered out of his army surplus store. Jeremey Kettler — a disabled Army veteran — bought one of those suppressors and then posted a video of it on social media. After that social media post some drew suspicion from ATF, Kettler was questioned about the purchase and charged with three felonies, including possession of an unregistered firearm. Cox was also charged under the NFA.

Kettler's lawyers later argued that he thought the “purchase, possession, and use of such a suppressor was entirely lawful." Both were later convicted under the federal statute.

Later, in federal court, Cox and Kettler raised the question of whether or not the federal government has the authority to regulate commerce between two private parties within one state and also said that the transaction was protected by Kansas state law. The lower courts disagreed, and now the Supreme Court has allowed those rulings to stand.

The justices did not comment on the decision to decline the cases. The Supreme Court's Monday order list as well as Kettler's 46-page petition in the case are out.

"Silencers" — more accurately called suppressors — reduce the sound of gunshots by functioning in a similar manner to a car muffler. They redirect the gas created by the combustion reaction of the gunpowder and introducing it more gradually to the surrounding environment.

Contrary to the misconception created by Hollywood action and crime movies, however, they do not completely silence a gunshot, but merely bring the sound level down to around that of a jackhammer.

The devices have existed since the early 1900s but have faced renewed focus from anti-gun activists in recent weeks after one was used at a recent shooting in Virginia Beach, Va.

During a recent interview while in the United Kingdom, President Trump said that he would “seriously look” at banning gun suppressors. He explained that he doesn’t “like” suppressors, but also doesn’t “love the idea” of banning them.