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States that already ran voter rolls through the SAVE database can continue investigations of an estimated 24,000 voters.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed her conservative colleagues on Monday for making President Donald Trump more powerful than a king.The Supreme Court’s conservative majority scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—a high court precedent that allowed Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor warned that Trump had just become more powerful than the English monarch, whose Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” Sotomayor wrote. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision was constitutional because the country’s founding Framers had “‘never intended’ to give the President ‘the complete set of powers’ that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

By Victoria Law This article was originally published by Truthout Even state-level legal protections for trans people have not always extended to those behind bars. “I am the ONLY female being held in a male prison here in New Jersey all because I am transgender,” Gia Valentina told Truthout. In January 2026, after years of […]

The Supreme Court on Monday said it would not review the 2023 verdict, in which a jury found he sexually abused the writer in a department store in the 1990s.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict, in which he was found guilty of sexually abusing and then defaming Carroll.This means Trump will still be required to pay Carroll $5 million.Carroll, a former writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996. When she spoke out publicly against him, he posted on social media that the case was “a complete con job” and a “Hoax and a lie.” In 2022, she sued him for both sexual abuse and defamation, seeking damages, and the jury agreed with Carroll that Trump was liable.Trump’s lawyers appealed the case, arguing that the jury heard “highly inflammatory” evidence—including testimony from two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape.The Supreme Court justices did not provide any explanation for why they rejected Trump’s appeal. But they may consider another similar case. A separate jury found Trump liable for defaming Carroll in 2024, and he was ordered to pay the writer $83.3 million—Carroll’s lawyers argued that a significant settlement was the only way to get Trump to stop attacking her. Trump’s lawyers have said they plan on appealing that verdict to the Supreme Court, as well.However, that case is solely focused on defamation. Carroll’s claims that Trump sexually abused her in the ’90s have been affirmed by a jury, and Trump has now run out of ways to contest them. This story has been updated.

News Desk, The Cradle. The arrests come ahead of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi’s visit to Washington next month. And as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made a surprise visit to Baghdad on Sunday. Iraqi security forces deployed in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone at dawn on 28 June, using heavy vehicles and tanks to carry out a […]

The Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law on Thursday that forbade concealed-carry permit holders from bringing their guns onto private property without the owner’s express permission. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”The 6–3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez, which fell along the usual ideological lines, is the court’s latest effort to apply its relatively new history-and-tradition test to state gun-control laws. Along the way, the court raised new questions about what kinds of “historical analogues” can be used to defend gun restrictions—and whether the bigotries of past generations should be a factor.In 2022, the Supreme Court adopted a new Second Amendment test for lower courts in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. At issue in Bruen was New York’s restrictive law for granting concealed-carry licenses. In a 6–3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority held that the law violated the Second Amendment because it fell outside the historical bounds of gun rights in America. Bruen’s history-and-tradition test, as articulated by the court, has two steps. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his majority opinion. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.”At first, lower courts found themselves applying Bruen to a wide range of long-standing gun restrictions. Different courts also reached wildly different conclusions on when and how to use historical evidence to decide whether a law fit within “the nation’s historical tradition.” Two years years later, in United States v. Rahimi, the conservatives clarified the Bruen test: The government need only identify a “historical analogue” to survive judicial scrutiny, not a perfect match or a “dead ringer.”After Bruen, states that historically favored greater restrictions on guns rewrote their laws to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling. Among those states was Hawaii. One of its changes was to the state’s “default rule” for trespassing. Before Bruen, it was lawful to bring a concealed weapon onto private property that is generally open to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—unless the owner specifically prohibited it. (For brevity’s sake, I’ll just refer to this as “private property” from now on, even though I am not literally referring to all private property in the state.)Hawaii reversed that presumption: Now it would be illegal to bring a gun onto private property unless the owner had explicitly allowed it. With only a handful of exceptions, the law requires private property owners to provide “clear and conspicuous signage” that grants permission or “unambiguous written or verbal authorization.” As Alito noted in his opinion, Hawaii also bans concealed carry altogether in a variety of other locations, like public buildings, parks, banks, schools, hospitals, beaches, playgrounds, and so on.A group of Hawaii gun owners sued to challenge the law in federal court, arguing that it violated their Second Amendment rights by depriving them of the ability to feasibly carry their concealed weapons anywhere in public. The state defended the law by arguing that the individual right to bear arms does not supersede an owner’s right to exclude people from their property. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state last year.Since the Bruen decision was announced, lower courts and litigants have sharply disagreed on what counts as evidence of a “historical tradition” in Second Amendment cases. Hawaii, which had a unique path to entry into the Union, cited legal texts from the Kingdom of Hawaii in the early nineteenth century that strictly limited when and how weapons could be carried in public. This tradition, the state argued, supported Hawaii’s passage of a new default-rule law. Not so, said Alito.“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” the justice wrote in his majority opinion. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald [v. Chicago]). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8 percent of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59 percent).”In other words, the Second Amendment’s interpretation must flow from British common-law sources and those found in the colonial and early founding era, the court held. (There is an ongoing dispute over how Reconstruction-era sources apply, but I’ll come back to that later.) Hawaii cited those laws as well, pointing to eighteenth-century statutes in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that restricted gun owners from carrying their weapons in private fields at certain times of the year.Unsurprisingly, Alito dismissed their value as historical evidence, as well. The laws that Hawaii cited, he wrote, “consist almost entirely of laws that prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property,” and did not implicate stores, restaurants, and the like. “They had little if any impact on the Second Amendment’s central objective: protecting the fundamental right to self-defense,” Alito claimed. “And their obvious aim was to prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.”The three liberals justices disagreed in their dissents. Justice Elena Kagan, writing only for herself, noted that Bruen envisioned that historical analogues might be enacted for different purposes. Both the Hawaii law and the colonial-era laws cited by the state meant to address, in her view, the problems that would come with unauthorized gun possession on private property.“The ‘how’ is identical: The new law, just like the old ones, sets a default rule against gun carry that a private landowner may reverse,” Kagan explained. “The ‘why’ is sufficiently close. Both sets of laws respond to the dangers and harms that someone with a gun can cause on another person’s property. That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a separate dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, took the same view of Hawaii’s historical analogues. She additionally argued that the case should be primarily viewed as a property law case, where the state is owed more deference than a Second Amendment case. Alito countered that Bruen clearly applied, since it commanded judges to apply it in any case involving gun restrictions.Perhaps the most controversial citation made by Hawaii was to an 1865 law in Louisiana that made it illegal to bear arms “on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.” Alito dismissed the statute because it was an isolated example and not “widespread, well-known, or widely accepted.”The conservative justices have left open a debate over whether Reconstruction-era gun laws have any weight in the Bruen test. Under the court’s precedents, the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. Therefore, the “original public meaning” that the court claims to seek might naturally take it to the 1860s when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and not just the 1790s, when the Second Amendment was adopted, or earlier.But there’s a complicating factor here: Louisiana did not adopt the 1865 law in a vacuum. Instead, it enacted the restriction as part of what became known as the Black Codes—laws specifically designed to deprive formerly enslaved Black Americans of the fundamental rights that they would otherwise enjoy. In other cases, states have cited founding-era gun restrictions drafted to disarm Native Americans and enslaved people. To what extent does that reflect the “original public meaning” of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments?In Alito’s eyes, such laws hold no weight. He concluded that the Radical Republicans who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment intended to protect Black civil rights, including an individual right to bear arms, and that this intent supersedes that of Southern state legislatures. “Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously,” he wrote.Alito was not the only conservative member of the court to criticize Hawaii for its choice of historical analogue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurring opinion where she specifically castigated Hawaii for invoking the Black Codes, which she described as “vile laws,” in a twenty-first-century case.“The State seems to think Bruen is a matching game: Southern states enacted broad default rules, Hawaii reasons, so it can do the same today,” Barrett wrote. “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why.” She noted that the Black Codes were enacted to “subordinate newly freed slaves” and that since Hawaii did not have the same intent, the laws did not count as a historical analogue.It is always a welcome sight to see the Supreme Court condemn the bigotry and discrimination of the past. The majority’s words would also carry slightly more weight, however, if they were more consistent about it in the present. Their condemnation, for example, would have more moral weight if Barrett and her conservative colleagues had not gone out of their way to sanitize Trump’s racist bile toward Haitians as merely a strong, constitutionally permissible critique of immigration, in Mullen v. Doe—a case decided on the same day as Wolford.Alito’s appeal to the intent of the Reconstruction Amendment’s drafters is also laudable. At one point, he cites the Republican Party’s platforms in 1856 and 1860 to illustrate how the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters meant its protections to operate for certain rights. One can only hope that he and his colleagues show the same deference to the Reconstruction Amendments’ purpose when they decide the imminent case on birthright citizenship next month. It is lamentable that Reconstruction’s lessons have already been forgotten or disregarded by Alito and his allies in cases on voting rights, racial gerrymandering, and insurrectionist disqualifications.Jackson agreed with her colleagues in the majority that the Black Codes were “ugly” and “racist.” She also argued that the court “cannot have it both ways” by selectively drawing from relevant statutes. Though Jackson was not on the court when it decided Bruen, she criticized its approach to constitutional law in follow-up cases and described it on Thursday as “a grave mistake.”“Either history does matter, and if so, all potentially relevant historical experiences must be thoroughly examined to determine whether they reflect our Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation,” Jackson argued. “Or, it does not, and the Court should just admit that the test it has created is boundless, allowing it to accept or excise any historical analogue it chooses for any reason it prefers.”That is problematic, Jackson explained, because the court’s original rationale for the Bruen test was to rein in lower courts that were upholding too many gun restrictions. “Of course, the real irony is that the Court’s effort to rein in judicial discretion has resulted in an arbitrary rule that unleashes judges to thwart gun regulation at every turn,” she explained. It is hard to disagree with that assessment, just as it is hard to believe that future Second Amendment cases will not be similarly arbitrary.

Donald Trump has insisted six people have been arrested and many more have been given citations for vandalizing the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This allegedly includes carving a 350-foot gash in the pool’s sealant, and in a dark and angry tirade, Trump just described these people as akin to enemies of the state. But The New York Times just obtained a new statement from federal prosecutors. While they confirmed some citations, the Times also reports that administration officials and prosecutors are refusing to provide a single detail about what happened, refusing to divulge anything about who’s been targeted or what their offenses were, and refusing to confirm any arrests of any kind. As former prosecutor Ankush Khardori tells us in today’s episode, this is deeply strange. We discuss why it’s unusual for officials to clam up about such a high-profile claim, how this raises unnerving possibilities about the unhinged despot in the Oval Office, and why it all points to a deeper rot of Trumpian corruption. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Thousands of migrants are fleeing South Africa as the country braces for violence after an anti-immigrant group set a Tuesday deadline for all undocumented migrants to leave.