In a widely anticipated defeat for transgender rights, the Supreme Court upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ school sports team. The decision, issued Tuesday, does not impose a nationwide ban on trans athletes. But it does preserve laws passed in 27 states by GOP politicians and anti-trans activists who argued that transgender women threaten safety and fairness in women’s athletics.

All nine Supreme Court justices agreed that Title IX, the federal law forbidding sex discrimination in schools, allows states to ban trans girls from girls’ sports. They also ruled 6–3, along ideological lines, that such bans do not violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

The science is far from settled about whether trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment actually have a competitive advantage or pose a greater risk of injuring other players. But the majority opinion, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, glosses over those unknowns—reasoning that “biological sex” is a good enough proxy for athletic ability for states to categorically ban trans girls from girls’ sports.

“Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable,” Kavanaugh writes. “Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”

Yet the ruling has much broader implications. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out that the majority opinion is allowing states to make laws based on broad differences between boys and girls, without looking closer at the subcategories of people who may not fit into those generalizations. “In so concluding,” she writes, “the Court…lowers the State’s burden for justifying the use of sex classifications in potentially all cases.”

In other words, the decision makes it easier for states to justify treating men and women differently. In the past, Sotomayor argues, the court has overturned laws that used “overbroad generalizations” that suited most men and most women but failed to make exceptions for a minority who did not conform to sex stereotypes. But this case breaks that long-standing pattern: The court on Tuesday failed to account for the minority of students who have received gender-affirming treatment and thus may not conform to sex stereotypes about their athletic performance.

As a result, the ruling could threaten decades of progress on gender equality, Sotomayor warns. “The majority applies its diminished view of equal protection to the sports context today,” she writes. “One can only hope that the same misguided approach does not and will not extend to other contexts tomorrow.”

The legal cases, known as Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., began in 2020 and 2021, when trans students’ participation in sports had not yet become a culture-war flashpoint or presidential campaign–defining issue. Back then, conservative political strategists had just begun to invest in messaging on trans athletes, and Republican legislators began to introduce bills banning them—even though many couldn’t identify a single trans athlete playing school sports in their state.

The issue of trans athletes in sports proved persuasive. Soon, Republican legislators were introducing and passing an array of anti-trans laws, targeting LGBTQ-inclusive school curricula and medical gender transitions for minors and even successfully passing the kinds of bathroom bans that had failed in the past. “There was a concerted effort to use this issue as the wedge for establishing, both in law and in public opinion, that transgender women are not women and that they should be treated differently from cisgender women,” Joshua Block, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued one of the cases before the Supreme Court, said in an interview last year. “They go right from ‘transgender women don’t belong on our sports teams’ to ‘and they don’t belong in our restrooms or in our social clubs.’ It’s been a very potent political weapon for them.”

When Idaho and West Virginia passed their sports bans, trans students in each state sued, arguing that the laws were discriminatory and unjustified—not just because there are so few trans athletes, but also because the science remains unsettled about whether athletes who medically transition from male to female retain any physical advantage. The plaintiff in the West Virginia case, Becky Pepper-Jackson, has identified as a girl at school since the third grade, and, thanks to puberty blockers, never went through a male puberty; still, she was banned from trying out for her middle school’s girls’ cross-country team. Meanwhile, in Idaho, Boise State University student Lindsay Hecox was also barred from running women’s cross-country, even though she had medically transitioned and suppressed her testosterone for a year, as NCAA rules at the time required. In response to their challenges, federal appeals courts blocked the bans in both states. Then the Republican-led state governments asked the Supreme Court to take up the issue.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overruled those appeals courts’ decisions. “This is a heartbreaking ruling for our clients and transgender girls like them who’ve asked for nothing more than the same opportunities afforded to their peers,” Block said a statement following the ruling. “The reality is that the equality of transgender women and girls takes nothing away from, and in fact promotes, the equality of all women and girls.”

The court’s decision is limited in some important ways.

For one thing, it doesn’t require all states to ban trans girls and women from women’s sports. “This ruling does not require any state to follow West Virginia’s or Idaho’s cruel, overly broad approach, and it does not mandate categorical bans on transgender students participating in school sports,” Chris Erchull, senior staff attorney at the nonprofit GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, said in a statement following the ruling.

On top of that, the Title IX ruling is specific to sports—citing an amendment made to Title IX in 1974 that allowed schools to separate athletic teams by sex—and does not say whether Title IX allows or forbids discrimination against trans students in other contexts. That means trans students can continue to use Title IX to fight back when schools impose policies that harm them—such as rules that restrict their bathroom use, forbid teachers from using their preferred pronouns, or forcibly out them to unsupportive parents or guardians.

And while the justices decided that trans sports bans are allowed under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, they didn’t rule on a broader question: whether judges, when analyzing other anti-trans laws, should apply the same rigorous legal analysis they use for laws that treat men and women differently. That bigger, still-unresolved question has enormous consequences for transgender rights. If that answer is yes, courts must examine whether anti-trans laws are “substantially related” to an “important government” objective. That standard, known as “intermediate scrutiny,” is tough, and it makes it more likely that anti-trans laws of all kinds will be overturned.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Kavanaugh said trans sports bans must be analyzed under intermediate scrutiny because they treat people differently based on “biological sex.” But the court still hasn’t decided whether other laws that treat people differently based on transgender status qualify for the more rigorous legal analysis.

Still, Tuesday’s ruling could have much wider consequences for gender equality under the Constitution—affecting not just trans people, but cisgender men and women.

As I reported in depth earlier this year, feminist legal scholars have been sounding alarms about the conservative legal movement’s strategic use of anti-trans laws to chip away at the equal protection clause’s protections against sex discrimination. The term “biological sex” has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law,” legal historian Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis, explained:

“What they’re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,” Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, “they’re going to say, ‘American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.’” If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women’s lives—laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools—by arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Sotomayor points out a similar threat in her dissenting opinion. Under the court’s previous precedents, Sotomayor explains, states are not allowed to treat people of different sexes differently based on generalizations about “the way women are.” Instead, they have to account for the subset of women who might not fit into sex stereotypes. In a famous case, the court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute couldn’t categorically exclude women by reasoning that most women wouldn’t do well under its adversarial style, since at least a small subset of women would, in fact, succeed there. 

In the case of the trans girls who have received gender-affirming care, Sotomayor argues that it’s too soon to say whether they fit into generalizations about the athletic abilities of “biological” boys. “West Virginia might be right that transgender girls retain some inherent athletic advantage over cisgender girls due to their sex identified at birth even after receiving the hormonal therapy B. P. J. identifies,” she writes. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.”

In other words, trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment may not, in fact, threaten safety or competitive fairness in girls’ sports. The court simply doesn’t have enough evidence to tell, Sotomayor argues. Instead, she says, Idaho and West Virginia’s laws “[rest] on exactly the kind of overbroad generalizations based on sex the Equal Protection Clause is supposed to root out.”

“Even if most trans athletes would have strength advantages or potentially raise safety concerns, not all of them would, and that’s what intermediate scrutiny requires you to look at,” Ziegler explains. [Sotomayor] “thinks that the court is watering down that part of equal protection.”

That’s important, explains Albany Law School professor Ava Ayers, because Kavanaugh’s opinion on Tuesday could make it easier for courts to uphold other laws that generalize about all men and women based on sex. “What really concerns me about this decision is that he’s not only creating a bad precedent for trans people, he’s significantly lowering the protection all women get under equal protection,” Ayers says.

In the immediate term, the people who will have to live with the Supreme Court’s decision are mainly teenage girls. Disturbingly, Idaho’s law allows a “dispute” about a student’s sex to be resolved by a “physical examination” of their “reproductive anatomy.”

Many of the transgender girls seeking to play on a girls’ team simply want to play sports with their friends. “Where are they supposed to go?” says Ayers, who clerked for Sotomayor before she was appointed to the Supreme Court. “It’s not safe for a trans girl to play on a trans boy team, or at least she’s very justified in feeling that way.”

And there are the harder-to-quantify consequences for teenagers encountering rigid gender policies at school—whether or not they’re trans. “I didn’t realize I was trans until I was about 40, but I was deeply confused and perplexed by gender when I was a kid, and sports is a fraught experience,” Ayers says. “I think there are lots of kids who may not grow up to identify as trans but who benefit immensely from a space in which they can think about their gender with a measure of freedom that these laws deny to people.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down yet another campaign finance restriction in what has become its years-long aim to obliterate regulations governing money in politics. In a decision that broke down along party lines, the six Republican appointees lifted limits on how much parties and candidates could spend in coordination with each other. The decision will effectively allow wealthy donors to circumvent caps on direct giving to candidates by routing funds through the party, which can now spend the entire sum in coordination with the candidate.

The majority’s decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, hangs the ruling on the First Amendment. To restrict how a political party coordinates with one of its candidates—whether to consult on an ad or to pay the pizza bill—now infringes on the party’s free speech rights. To reach this conclusion, the majority overruled both Congress’ judgment about how to stop political corruption and its own precedent in a case just 25 years ago.

“The political party coordinated-expenditure limits impose a ‘stifling effect on the ability of the party to do what it exists to do,'” Kavanaugh wrote, arguing that the coordination limits imposed by Congress some 50 years ago are too burdensome.

In a dissent joined by the Democratic appointees, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the decision endangers our democratic system of government. As it has in other campaign finance cases, she wrote, the majority “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”

Indeed, with Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC v. FEC, the Roberts Court has, once again, nullified Congress’ judgment about how to stop corruption and given wealthy donors another vehicle to influence elections and extract favors from politicians. Thanks to the court’s past rulings, our elections are already defined by massive spending from the ultra-wealthy and our politics is already reoriented toward repaying those oligarchs for their donations. Though the Federal Election Commission announced after Trump’s inauguration it would not enforce the coordination limits struck down today, the ruling is a green light to both rich donors and candidates that their cozy relationship can become even closer.

Just by looking at the case docket, it’s clear that this case was a partisan brawl where the Republican-appointed justices threw in with the Republican Party. On one side were the GOP party committees, the sitting vice president, and the Trump administration, all urging the court to strike down the limits. In amicus briefs, conservative organizations funded by GOP-backing billionaires like Charles Koch joined their political allies. A win would allow these billionaires to have more influence over politicians, and for the politicians to get more money in return. The Roberts Court appears endlessly solicitous of both these groups. On the case’s other side were a handful of left-coded good government groups, Democratic politicians, and the Democratic National Committee. While some billionaires give to Democrats, Republicans receive a much larger slice of the billionaire pie. The New York Times recently found that in the 2024 election, Republicans took in five times as much as Democrats from billionaire donors.

Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act just ahead of the Watergate scandal, then amended it after President Richard Nixon’s quid pro quo with the dairy industry came to light as part of the Watergate investigation. Over many decades, the Supreme Court has eroded the anti-corruption limits that Congress enacted in this era. The Roberts court has knocked down limits on outside political spending, creating a free-for-all of super PAC and nonprofit election spending. Corruption and outsize influence from the wealthiest has predictably followed. In today’s opinion, the court turns to restrictions on donations that, effectively, go directly to candidates and starts to dismantle those.

After Watergate, Congress realized that if it wanted to limit how much money an individual could give to a campaign, it also needed to restrict how much parties could spend in coordination with a candidate to prevent circumvention of that limit.

After today’s decision, one of the last remaining pieces of Congress’ anti-corruption campaign finance laws is a limit on how much individuals can give to parties. For now, that means that technically there remains a ceiling on the amount of money a donor can route to a candidate through the party apparatus. But that number is still high. In her dissent, Kagan lays out how the decision allows donors to get around the individual contribution limit, now $7,000 for both a primary and general election campaign. The majority enables “a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign,” she writes. “As a result, a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills.”

The remaining aggregate limits on how much people can give parties and directly to candidates will almost certainly become the next targets of Republicans and their wealthy allies. In fact, during oral arguments, the attorney for the GOP political committees, former solicitor general Noel Francisco, admitted as much.

For decades, this Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked Congress’ attempts to limit outside political spending which is ostensibly—though not in reality—independent from the candidate and therefore uncoordinated. But it has repeatedly upheld Congress’ ability to limit direct payments to candidates, including through parties, as part of Congress’ power to limit quid pro quo corruption schemes. Tuesday’s ruling argues that there are other avenues to combat corruption that are less burdensome on First Amendment rights: namely that records of donations to parties are available for people to find online. It’s hard to see how that sort of disclosure will stop an exchange of favors for donations, but the majority thinks it’s enough.

Not only does the majority use the First Amendment to attack the integrity of our democratic system, but it also based its opinion on its members’ own policy preferences. Suffice to say, that’s Congress’ and the president’s job—not the court’s. Nonetheless, the opinion is overly concerned with the weakened status of political parties in relation to the massive figures flowing through outside super PACs and other independent dark money groups. What the court doesn’t admit is that it created this current imbalance, most notably in Citizens United, when it lifted outside spending limits on corporations and unions. To enact one policy due to the ill effects of another is Congress’ role—but in Tuesday’s opinion, the Supreme Court acts as a super legislature, responding to its own folly by pursing a new policy.

Perhaps most galling, Kavanaugh lays the blame for the parties’ weakened state at the feet of the 2001 precedent he overturns, Colorado II, which 25 years ago upheld these coordination limits. “That one is rich,” Kagan rights in dissent. “If one is overruling—or just reversing—decisions on that ground, I can think of a couple of more obvious ones—that is, the ones that created the modern Super PAC system, and thus the complained-of imbalance,” she added, going on to reference Citizens United.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been preparing for the court’s decision. In the short term, it is likely to change how they pay for television ads. By allowing coordination, the party expects to purchase ad time at a lower rate that is generally reserved for candidates, allowing them to buy more ads. After the midterms, this rule could result in more advertising and longer campaigns, as the parties’ dollars stretch further.

So perhaps the most immediate consequence felt by voters will be an even greater barrage of ads. But in the long term, far more is at stake. The result, in Kagan’s words, is “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”

On Tuesday, US Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (D-NJ) returned to Congress after a four-month previously unexplained absence, during which he received his full salary despite missing over 100 votes.  He revealed on the House floor that he sought treatment for depression.

“I am grateful that I accepted help because today I stand before you healthier, stronger, and excited to return to the work that I love,” Kean said. 

But during his two decades in the New Jersey Senate, Kean consistently opposed paid sick leave for his constituents.

He voted against New Jersey’s historic Earned Sick Leave Act, which mandates 5 paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. He also voted against New Jersey’s No Surprise Medical Bills act and two of its paid family leave laws, in 2008 and 2018.

For Yarrow Willman-Cole of the nonprofit New Jersey Citizen Action, who organized for the Earned Sick Leave Act in 2018, Kean’s four-month absence is bitterly ironic. “He’s been able to rely on things he directly voted against,” Willman-Cole said. 

On the House floor on Tuesday, Kean said he has been a longtime “supporter of mental health care.” But, he hasn’t made it easier for others to take the leave they need. 

“You want your lawmakers to really be connected to their constituents and understand what their constituents need,”  Willman-Cole said, “and this disconnect with a lawmaker clearly not representing the needs of the average worker, the average family, is a problem. That’s not what government should be like.”

Matthew Camarda, the advocacy and public policy director of the nonpartisan NAMI New Jersey, said that all politicians should recognize the importance of the need for mental health care. 

“All individuals with mental health conditions deserve that opportunity to get care and to recover on their own terms,” Camarda said. 

Kean also notably voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which establishes work requirements for people on Medicaid. For low-income people on Medicaid, the need to fulfill work requirements to keep their health care could be a barrier to treatment as they go into effect.

“All of it makes it very challenging for millions of Americans in this country who do have mental health conditions like depression to get the care that they need without risking their employment and the rest of the stability of their lives,” Camarda said. 

Whether or not Kean’s voting record and absence are dealbreakers will be up to constituents in his district come November, when he is facing Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett to keep his seat. 

“Many of our lawmakers are out of touch with the reality of most working people,” Willman-Cole said, “but the good news is there [are] always elections.”

The Supreme Court affirmed on Tuesday that that birthright citizenship is the law of the land. The decision, by Chief Justice John Roberts, upholds the clear meaning of the Constitution and knocks down the Trump administration’s attempt to deny citizenship to thousands of newborns every year. It’s no exaggeration to say that the case was a test of whether this would remain a nation where everyone is born on equal legal footing, or whether the country would revert to a caste system in which one’s place in society is determined by the status of one’s parents. And the decision was scandalously close.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote in his 5–4 majority opinion. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

But Roberts’ sweeping ruling commanded only a bare 5–4 majority on the meaning of the Constitution’s citizenship clause. Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have struck down Trump’s executive order based on Congress’ previous codification of birthright citizenship, but does not believe it is required by the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented. That math is too close for comfort.

Court watchers generally expected an overwhelming rebuke for Trump in this case, with perhaps one or two dissenters. Instead, birthright citizenship—and with it the promise of a casteless society of equals—hangs by a thread. To be clear, if one Democratic appointee leaves the court while Trump or another Republican is president, the promise of equality for all under the law may fall.

On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to deny birthright citizenship to the children of temporary visitors and undocumented people, claiming that such a policy is the proper interpretation of the citizenship clause. But the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution after the Civil War, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The only exceptions, carved into the jurisdiction requirement, are the children of ambassadors, invading armies, and, at the time, American Indians under tribal authority. Today’s decision upholds this long-held understanding of the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time the court has ruled that the citizenship clause means what it says. In a landmark decision in 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the court found that birthright citizenship is the rule for virtually everyone born in the United States. Today’s court upheld all of Wong Kim Ark. “We see no reason to depart from that view today,” Roberts wrote. While the decision is a rebuke of Trump, the majority didn’t need to take this case in order to shut down Trump’s executive order—as the majority acknowledged today, it was already unconstitutional under the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment and Wong Kim Ark. Today’s ruling, Trump v. Barbara, didn’t change that. Some may nonetheless credit the court for striking down Trump’s order and point to it as evidence that the court is not overly obsequious to the president—though it has used recent terms to grant him vast new powers and reserved rebukes for rare occasions. But this case is too close to give the court any credit—instead, it portends a dark future, despite Roberts’ fulsome defense of birthright citizenship.

The very fact that the country came within one or two votes of undoing our system of birthright citizenship is a sign of how far the Trump administration has succeeded in throwing into contention the country’s most basic freedoms. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to Black people. But the amendment’s drafters went further in writing a broad rule for the ages, ensuring that no future politicians could discriminate against a disfavored minority by taking away their citizenship and consigning them to a permanent underclass. Roberts’ majority opinion affirms this: “The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to repudiate Dred Scott,” Roberts wrote. “However, the goal was even grander—to put the ‘great question of citizenship’ ‘beyond the legislative power’ altogether, to settle the issue once and for all.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration tried to undo that final decision. If Trump had succeeded, thousands of newborns each year would grow up deprived of the social welfare benefits and opportunities afforded to citizens—a permanent, stigmatized subclass unable to escape their lack of legal status. Restrictions could have also applied retroactively, ultimately ensnaring millions.

The Trump administration’s arguments were legally absurd. Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the term “jurisdiction” implied a compact of allegiance in exchange for the government’s protection, and that this can only be achieved if the parents have permission to stay indefinitely in the country. But the allegiance-for-protection rule is nonsensical because it would have excluded the emancipated people whom the amendment was explicitly intended to grant citizenship. Moreover, the requirement of permanent residence—what Sauer termed “domicile”—would hand politicians the right to deny citizenship to classes of people because the legal definition of domicile can be changed by Congress or, possibly, the president. It’s a theory that would have essentially nullified the citizenship clause.

Birthright citizenship, and with it the idea that anyone born here has a shot at succeeding in this country, is deeply ingrained not only in American laws and institutions, but also in our national identity. The very notion of the American Dream is that once here, you, and especially your children, can succeed. If legal status is inherited, the dream is shattered. That is the real import of the Trump administration’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship; not just to launch a cruel and chaotic experiment in sending federal officers into maternity wards, but to rewrite the fundamental character of the country, from a society of legal equals to one of inherited caste.

But the citizenship clause doesn’t mention parental status, it refers to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” By arguing that a child’s citizenship depends on the immigration status of their parents, the administration’s arguments departed from the text of the 14th Amendment and the history of its creation. “That’s part of the understanding of the birthright citizenship clause—that whatever the sins of the parents are, the clause breaks that connection,” Cristina Rodríguez, who is now dean of Yale Law School, told me last year. “What matters is where the individual was born.” Rodríguez has called the citizenship clause our “constitutional reset button,” ensuring that “each generation starts fresh, and we don’t worry about status because of what’s in our past.”

In a concurrence that spotlights the role Black people played in shaping the 14th Amendment, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammers this point. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation,” she wrote, “not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

To bolster his weak arguments about the past, Sauer also relied on the assertion that the government needs power to restrict birthright citizenship for national security concerns. “We’re in a new world now, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a US citizen,” he told the justices at oral arguments. Roberts responded with a zinger that signaled that the court wasn’t buying it: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Kavanaugh, however, bought Sauer’s contention that the 14th Amendment didn’t constrain the political branches from responding to modern-day immigration challenges by exempting the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors.

Three dissents presented fractured ideas about why some or all of Trump’s executive order is legal. Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito all believe that the 14th Amendment does not give citizenship to the children of temporary visitors, which would include people who have lived in the US for years as, for example, students, doctors, or professors. Alito thinks Trump can bar the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship. Kavanaugh thinks Congress could eliminate birthright citizenship for children of visitors and undocumented immigrants, or presumably repeal current law to allow Trump to do it. Thomas and Gorsuch reserved judgment on the status of an undefined group of undocumented immigrants who have been in the country of a long time—though they don’t specify how much time. Taken together, the dissenters would have given Trump all or nearly all of what he wanted.

Thomas, in a long dissent joined by Gorsuch, launches into an alternative history of citizenship since the founding. Whereas the majority recognizes that the framers of the 14th Amendment were incorporating the long-tradition of citizenship by place of birth, jus soli, imported from British common law, Thomas argued that the Americans never adopted what he derisively referred to as a “feudal” principle. Instead, he argued that the US only gave citizenship to the children of people “domiciled” in the country. To Thomas, the 14th Amendment applied only to the freed people after the Civil War because they were domiciled in the US and owed no allegiance to a foreign power—interpreting the rule as limited to one period and one population. “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support,” he wrote.

Thomas’ dissent is littered with references to bunk scholarship hastily put forward over the last year by a small band of radical scholars who tried to give academic cover to the executive order. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I have detailed, they spent the past year attempting to muddy the historical record. Despite their tortured arguments, they helped move the Overton window, as one Trumpian scholar boasted after oral arguments, and Thomas approvingly cited two of those professors’ work.

Perhaps Alito’s solo dissent is the most shocking, not only how far it would go in undoing our system of citizenship but also for the racial animus that jumps out of the language. Alito argues that “subject to the jurisdiction” excludes anyone subject to another power, and thus excludes children who would also be afforded citizenship in the home country of their parents. He names some of those countries, including Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Alito despairs at the “problem” of undocumented immigration, describes American citizenship as “precious,” states that the current rule “degrade the concept of United States citizenship,” and frets that today’s ruling invites more undocumented immigration. In upholding birthright citizenship, Alito warns that his colleagues have “made a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.” It does not take much parsing to see the racial anxiety animating Alito’s dissent.

The 14th Amendment is the cornerstone of our democracy. It was supposed to provide equality under the law, to ensure rights to all, and to preserve those rights through a casteless system of birthright citizenship. Not long after ratification, however, the Supreme Court began chipping away at the meaning and enforceability of the amendment. The Roberts Court has picked up where its predecessors in the 19th century began, from rolling back programs and laws aimed at racial equality to allowing insurrectionists to run for office. On Tuesday, the court held back from dismantling the fundamental right to birthright citizenship, but with a slim majority that makes the reprieve not just a relief, but a warning.

The Texas Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and James Talarico looks to be in a tie, according to several voter polls published in the past month.

A Tuesday survey by the New York Times and Siena University has the two candidates both locked at 47 percent of likely voters. A win for Talarico, a Democratic state legislator, would represent the first statewide election win for the party in Texas since 1994. 

The New York Times/Siena poll was conducted among 656 likely voters from June 19 to June 27, with a sampling error of 4.5 percentage points.

Polling suggests that Talarico’s numbers are largely down to a majority of likely voters seeing the Democrat as having good character—he is a former public school teacher and is currently training to become a minister—as opposed to Paxton, who was indicted for securities fraud and impeached as state attorney general by the Republican-dominated Texas state House (although the Republican-majority state Senate acquitted all 16 articles of impeachment against him). Paxton is also a Trump loyalist, and may be associated with President Trump’s mishandling of the economy amid a widespread struggle with affordability.

My colleague Tim Murphy, who has covered the Senate race extensively, noted that many Senate Republicans favored incumbent John Cornyn but Trump endorsed Paxton late in the primary race. And on Talarico, Tim wrote in March that Talarico is “unsullied by doings in Washington” and his “faith-based populism impressed Joe Rogan and Barack Obama and showed strength in the places the [Democratic] party has been hemorrhaging support.” 

Given that Democrats need to flip four Republican seats while defending all of their seats to win a Senate majority this November, Paxton vs. Talarico is definitely a race to watch.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s been nearly eight years since Congress reauthorized the farm bill, the massive legislative package that funds programs run by the US Department of Agriculture. What used to be passed roughly every five years, the farm bill touches nearly every aspect of agricultural production in the US. It puts billions toward conservation programs, nutrition assistance, rural development, crop insurance, and climate-smart practices. 

But persistent disagreements between lawmakers over these and other programs have stymied the process of passing a new farm bill. The federal government has instead resorted to stop-gap measures and one-year extensions of a small handful of programs.

If farmers were hoping to see a new farm bill this year, they may very well be disappointed—as a new schism between the two houses of Congress was made clear this week, when the Senate agricultural committee released a draft of its farm bill that excluded a law known as the Save Our Bacon Act. The measure was included in the House draft farm bill earlier this year with vocal support by Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Penn.), who chairs the House agricultural committee. 

Save Our Bacon (SOB), would override state and local laws like California’s Prop 12, which bans the sale of pork, chicken, and veal products that come from farms using the most extreme forms of animal confinement, such as gestation crates for hogs. Factory farming operations where animals have the least amount of space to move around result in a lot of manure, which is typically consolidated and stored in lagoons that can pollute the local air and waterways.

Advocacy groups argue laws like Prop 12 are common sense and popular among voters who want to know where their food comes from. There are currently 14 states with similar laws on the books, according to the American Meat Producers Association (AMPA), an industry group that opposes SOB.

“It’s just disappointing that we’re even talking about this because the farm bill should be about supporting sustainable farming and healthy food and food security. It should not be a way for large industry groups to overturn the will of voters,” said Molly Armus, who works on animal agricultural policy at Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit. 

Armus notes that transitioning away from extreme confinement of livestock can have positive environmental and climate impacts if producers move toward a pasture-raised system. (Prop 12 only establishes minimum space requirements for animals.) A recent analysis from the USDA found that 27 percent of hog farmers, or 1 in 4, are already Prop 12 compliant—suggesting that the transition away from extreme confinement is underway. 

“Most hog farmers do not support the Save Our Bacon Act,” said Holly Bice, president of AMPA, which was founded last year in response to an earlier attempt to skirt Prop 12 in a previous draft farm bill. For many hog farmers, Prop 12 has “been an important opportunity for them,” said Bice, because investing in crate-free operations allows producers to sell their products at a premium. “It’s helped them keep their heads above water at a time when consolidation has increasingly driven out farmers,” she said.

However, Brent Hershey, a hog farmer in Pennsylvania and member of AMPA, said the issue of extreme confinement has sparked a “civil war” among pork producers. “The industry is completely divided on this,” he added. Personally, Hershey said, he was reluctant to change the way his operation did things, but after years of receiving negative feedback, he began to see things differently. Today, Hershey’s farm has been crate-free for three years. Passing SOB, he said, would be “devastating” for producers like him who invested time and money into improving their operations.

Experts also argue that passing a farm bill that allows industrial animal agriculture operations to skirt state laws sets a bad precedent for broader environmental and public health goals. 

“When you’re doing something that, in a more macro sense, erodes states’ abilities to rollback some of the more harmful aspects of massive commercial agricultural operations, how does that impact any law that could impact agriculture?” said J.W. Glass, senior policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. For example, he added, “How does it impact state laws to restrict the use of pesticides?”

In the Senate, at least for now, it seems like a measure that allows animal agricultural producers to skirt Prop 12 is a nonstarter. “That is why [Boozman] did not put this in his bill. He knew it,” said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane World Action Fund (formerly the Humane Society). “And that’s why it’s critical to keep up the noise on it.”

Still, it’s unclear what happens next—whether the House will fold and exclude SOB from its draft farm bill, or whether, if the two chambers of Congress cannot reconcile their differences on extreme confinement, the gridlock lasts into next year.

Two years ago, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old sociology graduate student at the City University of New York, was sitting in a tent on Columbia University’s quad as part of the pro-Palestine encampment on its campus. This month, Chevalier, the daughter of a truck driver and a case worker from the Dominican Republic, soundly defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat to become the presumptive next member of Congress for New York’s 13th congressional district, where Columbia sits. 

“I kept thinking of all of the folks who have really been let down by a lot of establishment Democrats. I was thinking of my friend Mahmoud [Khalil],” Chevalier said in an interview: the Palestinian campus organizer and recent Columbia masters graduate who became the face of a new, more punitive phase of Donald Trump’s policy of political detainment and deportation when DHS agents kidnapped him from his apartment building last year.

When Khalil was taken, Espaillat sent out a two-sentence statement urging due process: too little, too late, Chevalier said. Khalil was released the same week Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. A year later, with Mamdani’s backing, Chevalier won her own race alongside a slate of New York candidates who championed the Palestinian cause throughout their campaigns—often in ways that, until very recently, constituted a political third rail.

Those relative outsiders—many backed or recruited by groups like Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America, new kingmakers like Mamdani, and influencers like Hasan Piker—are notching upset victories against incumbents with decades of experience.

It echoes the wave that brought challengers like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar to office—and eventually made them icons of the Democrats’ left flank. But those races, close to a decade ago, didn’t feature Israel-Palestine politics in anything like the same way, a door opened in part by Zohran Mamdani’s unusual willingness to engage frankly on the issue, and language, of genocide.

Chevalier’s congressional cohort includes former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide and beat AIPAC-supported Rep. Dan Goldman by a 30-point margin, as well as New York State Assembly member Claire Valdez, who defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a race for the House seat now held by retiring Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez, and who regularly joins protests calling for an arms embargo. Both candidates explicitly condemned US military aid to Israel, for decades a bipartisan pillar of US politics, in their campaigns.

“This electoral cycle has truly signified that we can no longer have a progressive-except-for-Palestine dynamic in electoral politics,” said Aber Kawas, a socialist candidate whose June win in a New York State Assembly primary will make her the first Palestinian-American in that body. Pro-Israel money is no longer a boon, Kawas said, but a liability. “The Israeli lobby, AIPAC, they’re still strong influencers in the Democratic Party, but this victory, and the victory of all of our races in this moment is chipping away at that in real substantial ways.”

In June, Army veteran and former combat surgeon Adam Hamawy, won his primary in New Jersey’s suburban, Democratic-leaning 12th congressional district—and he made opposition to AIPAC a cornerstone of his candidacy.

Hamawy, throughout his campaign, talked about his time as a volunteer physician in Gaza, and promised to fight for an arms embargo. “This is what prompted me to run,” Hamawy said to Al Jazeera of his time in Gaza. “I felt I had to go to Washington to fix this myself.”

In Philadelphia in May, self-described democratic socialist Chris Rabb beat two deep-pocketed and well-established candidates to win the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district. Two years earlier, when Temple University students faced trespassing charges for their participation in encampment protests, Rabb, then a state representative, was one of only a few local elected officials to back the students, calling their charges a “cruel and reckless abuse of power.”  

And in a primary taking place Tuesday in Denver, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist who calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, who has held her seat since 1997.

Two years ago, as a new lawyer in New York, Kiros wrote an open letter defending law students who organized for Palestine. “I myself am from the northern region of Ethiopia, where a genocide had also taken place a few years ago,” Kiros, whose parents immigrated to Colorado when she was a baby, said.

Her employer asked her to take the letter down. Kiros refused, was fired, and moved back to Colorado within a week. She took a gig as a barista (“the best job I’ve had”) to make ends meet, and is now running on a familiar progressive platform: Medicare for All, universal childcare, AI regulation, ICE abolition and an arms embargo on Israel. The newcomer is polling well against DeGette, who is in her 15th term: the only available public poll, conducted by the progressive polling firm Data For Progress in June, has Kiros leading by 5 points. 

Dark money groups are all in against Kiros, including a trio of super PACs that have spent at least $1.3 million to oppose her in the final weeks of the race, the Colorado Sun reported. Much of that money has gone to attack ads that claim Kiros is from out of town (“I came here in ‘98!” Kiros said) and critical of Democrats (“So are most Democrats.”) 

AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying organization which has invested heavily in establishment candidates in many such races, has shifted to a diversity of electoral tactics: promoting spoiler candidates, creating new political action committees with names unrelated to Israel, funneling money through pre-existing but unrelated PACs, running ads that don’t talk about Israel at all.

But those efforts have targeted even mainline progressives who, for example, back the Block the Bombs Act, which would suspend arms shipments to Israel. Efforts to paint such candidates as far-left radicals are hard to maintain when only 13 percent of Democrats expressed positive views of Israel as of March—and by brooking no legitimate political opposition to Israel, AIPAC increasingly compels even mainline progressives to treat its wrath as a given.

AIPAC’s open support “is becoming a kiss of death to candidates they support in deep-blue districts, and I think that’s abundantly clear through the means in which they have had to operate throughout this cycle, which is through a network of shell PACs and pop-up PACs that obscures their funding,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros, Valdez and Chevalier.

Those who still take the group’s money are being more circumspect about it, even as those that refuse AIPAC cash trumpet their refusal with pride—much as candidates in the wake of Citizens United and the first Bernie Sanders campaign began advertising their rejection of dark money and emphasizing small donations.

“Money in politics is the issue,” Kiros said. “Every single thing that you care about, from social justice to economic justice to environmental justice, all of these things are intertwined with who has the money and the influence to wield power over our government.”

Voters rarely make their decisions based solely or even primarily on foreign policy, but candidates like Chevalier and Kiros have drawn connections between violence in Palestine and affordability at home.

“Our tax dollars are going towards a war machine that is just insatiable,” Chevalier said shortly after her primary win. “And when I hear from folks directly, they want their tax dollars to be coming back home. This is money that we are working hard for, right? We deserve to reap the benefits of it, to be able to use those resources to live dignified lives.”

On Monday, officials in 25 states and Washington, DC, sued Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz over the interim final rule for Medicaid work requirements established by President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The new rule, their lawsuit contends, “will create unnecessary bureaucracy and lead people who are either already working or eligible for an exclusion to lose or be denied coverage.”

As I previously reported, the rule released near the beginning of June was even more onerous than many state officials feared. It was a surprise to states that individuals already on Medicaid with serious health conditions would have to jump through further hoops to prove that they were unable to work:

State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me. “We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”

The lawsuit specifically raises the point that CMS “provided no indication
that it intended to place specific limits on States’ ability to rely on self-attestation” rather than requiring health care workers’ certification in all circumstances.

In a press release, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who helped lead the suit, said that the “abrupt changes in [federal] implementation of the statute leave states insufficient time to adjust…or effectively communicate to members what is required.”

“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha, who is also joining the suit, in a press release.

The lawsuit asks that a federal judge stay the interim final rule and vacate parts of it. The rule would otherwise go into effect in states with Medicaid expansion by January 1.

The Supreme Court has issued a raft of recent decisions benefiting Donald Trump. But on Monday, the justices rejected his latest effort to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll millions of dollars a jury awarded her after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Carroll had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carroll successfully sued him in 2023, after he not only denied the allegation—calling it a “hoax” and a “conjob”—but mocked Carroll as “not my type.”

A federal jury found Trump liable for $5 million in damages in May of 2023, after which Trump immediately denied the assault and once again mocked Carroll, leading to a second similar lawsuit, in which a jury quickly found that Trump owed an additional $83.3 million.

Trump appealed both jury decisions, but a federal appellate court ruled against him in 2024. He took the initial case to the Supreme Court last summer. On Monday, the court declined to hear the case, leaving the initial judgment in place.

Theoretically, the much larger second judgment could still be taken up by the Supreme Court. But today’s decision suggests the president is running out of legal avenues to avoid paying Carroll the money the juries said he owes.

Trump posted an angry message on Truth Social following the Court’s decision. He insisted he would keep fighting the case—he didn’t explain how—and tried to reframe Carroll’s lawsuit against him as an attack on America.

“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump wrote.

Trump specifically cited the fact that Carroll had sued him under New York State’s Adult Survivors Act, a 2022 law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations on civil lawsuits in which victims allege they were sexually assaulted. Previously, the statute of limitations had been only three years.

In his post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the law had been written specifically to target him, which is not true. The law was modeled on a similar law that temporarily allowed lawsuits by victims of child sexual abuse, who otherwise would have been prevented from suing because of the statute of limitations. Nor was he the only defendant sued under the law—besides Carroll’s lawsuit, the law also enabled lawsuits against Bill Cosby and Sean Combs.

During the 2023 trial, Carroll testified, in sometimes graphic detail, about the incident, her confusion over how to handle it, and her eventual decision to write a book that included the allegation.

Asked on the stand if she regretted going public with her accusation, she said, “I regretted it about 100 times, but in the end”—she paused as she broke down into tears—“being able to get my day in court…I’m crying, but I got to tell my story in court.”

The Supreme Court on Monday gave the president the authority to remove the leadership of most agencies that Congress had set up to act independently of presidential control. The ruling in Trump v. Slaughter may seem technical, but it represents a radical change in how our American government has functioned since the 1930s and, in some cases, since the founding, by creating agencies that operate with independence from presidential control and the expediency of presidential politics. Rather than allow Congress to decide how much control the president can exercise over an agency that Congress creates, the Supreme Court has seized that power for itself. Starting today, nine justices will decide which agency heads can be fired by the president and which cannot.

Today’s decision overturns a 91-year-old precedent, called Humphrey’s Executor, in which a unanimous Supreme Court upheld Congress’ authority to give independent commissioners protection from presidential removal. In his majority decision, Chief Justice Roberts derides this critical precedent while downplaying the gravity of overturning it. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” Roberts stated in his 6-3 opinion joined by other GOP appointees. “Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale.”

The decision stems from President Donald Trump’s illegal firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a President Joe Biden appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. At the onset of his second term, Trump began firing Democratic appointees to independent agencies in violation of federal law, which protected their removal except for sufficient cause. He removed Biden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, among others. These agencies are designed to be insulated from immediate presidential control. They are run by a bipartisan board of commissioners who serve staggered terms. And unlike appointees to cabinet departments, the president cannot remove them over policy differences. The power to remove is the power to control. An impending firing can sway the decision-making of commissioners—and if it doesn’t, they can get the boot.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that chaos will ensue. “Today, the majority reshapes our Government,” she wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.” It does this, she wrote, in the service of the majority’s “half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions. The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The Roberts Court had already chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, and it was clear that in their quest to realize a so-called unitary executive with dangerous amounts of power and vanishing guardrails around him, it would use this case to knock down the precedent. Roberts does this with gusto. His opinion is a sweeping recitation of all the history he has mustered in his march toward a unitary executive, and relies on his own prior opinions inching toward this very moment—treating his decision as inevitable and right, rather than the result of his own political crusade. Legal historians have long complained that Roberts’ history is a house of cards. This opinion is “embarrassingly thin, full of historical errors and cherry-picked sources,” posted Boston University law professor Jed Schugerman, “reverse engineered from unitary ideology.”

The tricky task for the Republican-appointed majority, however, was how to exempt the Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency upon which rests the stability of the entire economy and which, under presidential control, could tank the markets and plunge the country into even more economic chaos. Indeed, the court in deciding this case while also deliberating whether the president can invent a bogus “cause” to remove a member of the Fed whom he doesn’t like in a blatant attempt to seize control of the agency. Roberts issued that opinion Monday as well, arguing that the Fed is different because of its allegedly unique history and therefore Trump cannot fire targeted governor Lisa Cook without following proper procedures. Roberts left to another day whether the charges against Cook are sufficient, but did reinforce his decision that the Fed’s independence should be maintained.

The solution to this problem—the desire to hand Trump almost unlimited firing power but not when it would cause brutal economic fallout—is to strip Congress of its power to decide when an agency it creates is independent and instead hand that policy determination to themselves. The decision sets up a new regime whereby the justices themselves decide when firing protections are constitutional based on whether an agency’s work falls “within the President’s ‘general administrative control'”—an amorphous standard that surely can be manipulated as the justices see fit. That allows the 6-3 majority today to allow Trump to fire commissioners at the FTC, but preserve Fed independence.

There are other agencies whose independent status and the removability of their commissioners are now uncertain. Congress could try to weigh in, but its decisions are now relegated to suggestions. Roberts’ decision oozes disdain for Congress and alleges that its attempt to insulate agencies from presidential control was an unconstitutional power grab. He cloaks the unitary executive theory as a democratic approach, making all government administration accountable to one man and, ultimately, the people who elect him, even though the Founders intended Congress to be the most democratic branch. The chief justice disagrees. “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection),'” Roberts writes, “often results only in an ‘increased subservience to congressional direction.'” He continued to accuse Congress of using Humphrey’s Executor to take “more power for itself.”

But in Monday’s opinion, it is the court that hijacks Congress’ power for itself. Now, the justices will decide the fate of each agency’s independent status on a case-by-case basis. This is undoubtedly a question for Congress to decide, but the six justices seize that policy-making authority for themselves. As Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”

Trump v. Slaughter follows the clear modus operandi of the Roberts Court: disempower Congress, give more power to the president to buck the laws, and leave the nine justices as the only people who can shut down the president’s actions. The most infamous example is the court’s grant of criminal immunity to the president. Just as presidential immunity breeds corruption and political weaponization, this one will likewise turbocharge Trump’s ability to reward allies and donors and punish political enemies at the expense of good governance.

From approving mergers and regulating Wall Street and Crypto to determining which toys are safe for babies, independent agencies play a critical role in regulating the economy, the environment, our jobs, and the objects we rely on every day. Handing these decisions to donors or weaponizing them for political gain will line some pockets but almost certainly harm the public.

The Roberts Court claims to be an originalist court, basing its constitutional rulings on the document’s original public meaning. But ever since the Roberts Court’s hard turn toward unitary executive theory—the idea that the president has unrestricted authority over the entire executive branch—and its movements against independent agencies, scholars have gone back to the archives to investigate the originalist bona fides of these related judicial trends. It turns out that there is little historical evidence for a unitary executive (and mountains of evidence against) and that there are many instances of independent agencies in the founding era and the 19th century. They are not an invention of the New Deal, even though that is the time in which they grew in number and significance—and is indeed the era this court seeks to erase from the law books.

In her dissent, Sotomayor recounts the history that the majority eschews, demonstrating how Roberts’ opinion relies more on discredited fictions than sound history. “From the start, the majority’s theory rested on shaky ground,” she wrote. “Over time, its arguments have grown weaker still, as historical evidence has undermined key pillars of its theory. Today, the Court faced a choice: plow ahead… Unfortunately, the Court repeats and expands upon several prior errors that require correction.”

The historical anomaly is not independent agencies or presidents with limited authority, as Roberts asserts. It’s this court and the Trump actions it blesses.