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    Wisconsin Supreme Court Says Governor’s 400-Year Edit Was Within Veto Authority

    Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, used his veto power to increase school funding limits for four centuries longer than Republican lawmakers in the state had intended.The sentence, dull but clear, was buried 158 pages into Wisconsin’s budget.“For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year,” the sentence read when it was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, “add $325” to the amount school districts could generate through property taxes for each student.But by the time Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his veto pen were finished, it said something else entirely: “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325.”It was clever. Creative. Perhaps even a bit subversive, extending the increase four centuries longer than lawmakers intended. But was it legal?On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said yes. In a 4-to-3 ruling in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Evers’s use of his partial veto authority, the court’s liberal majority said the governor had acted legally. The three conservative justices on the court dissented.“We uphold the 2023 partial vetoes, and in doing so we are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” Justice Jill J. Karofsky wrote in the majority opinion. “However, our Constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”The proposed state budget had outlined two years of revenue limit increases, for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. By editing out the text in red, Mr. Evers allowed increases until 2425.State of WisconsinWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Google Makes History With Rapid-Fire Antitrust Losses

    Within a year, two federal judges declared the tech giant a monopoly in search and ad technology. The tide may be turning for antitrust.Silicon Valley’s tech giants have long regarded antitrust scrutiny as an irritating cost of doing business. There will be investigations, filings, depositions and even lawsuits.Yet courts move slowly, while technology rushes ahead. Time works to the companies’ advantage, as the political winds shift and presidential administrations change. That dynamic often opens the door to light-touch settlements.But the stakes rose sharply for Google on Thursday, when a federal judge ruled that the company had acted to illegally to build a monopoly in some of its online advertising technology. In August, another federal judge found that Google had engaged in anticompetitive behavior to protect its monopoly in online search.Antitrust experts said two big antitrust wins for the government against a single company in such a short time appeared to have no precedent.“Two courts have reached similar conclusions in product markets that go to the heart of Google’s business,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “That has to be seen as a real threat.”The Google decisions are part of a wave of current antitrust cases challenging the power of the biggest tech companies. This week, the trial began in a suit by the F.T.C. claiming that Meta, formerly Facebook, cemented an illegal monopoly in social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Appeals Court Scales Back Freeze on Firing Consumer Bureau Employees

    A federal appeals panel on Friday halted parts of a district court judge’s injunction blocking the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allowing officials to move ahead with firing some agency employees.Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office director, was named the consumer bureau’s acting director in February and immediately began gutting the agency. He closed its headquarters and sought to terminate its lease, canceled contracts essential to the bureau’s operations, terminated hundreds of employees and sought to lay off nearly all of the rest.In a lawsuit brought by the bureau’s staff union and other parties, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington froze those actions last month with an injunction to stop what she described as the administration’s “hurried effort to dismantle and disable the agency entirely.” The Justice Department appealed her ruling.A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously rejected the government’s request to strike down Judge Jackson’s injunction, but it stayed parts of her ruling while the government’s appeal progresses. Specifically, the appeals court said the agency’s leaders can send a “reduction in force” notice — the process through which the government conducts layoffs — to employees they have determined are not necessary to carry out the agency’s “statutory duties.”When Congress created the consumer bureau in 2011, it assigned the watchdog agency dozens of tasks and ordered it to staff certain positions, including offices to aid student loan borrowers, military service members and older Americans. Those mandated obligations have been at the heart of the legal fight over the agency, because the bureau is required to fulfill those duties unless Congress acts.Mr. Vought’s team fired more than 200 probationary and fixed-term employees, only to reinstate most of them, with back pay, on Judge Jackson’s orders. The appeals court cleared the way for some to be fired again. Agency leaders may terminate employees after “an individualized assessment” of their necessity for carrying out the agency’s statutory tasks, the ruling said.But the court left much of Judge Jackson’s order intact, including her mandates that agency leaders shall not delete or destroy most of the bureau’s records and data, and that employees must be given access to either physical office space or the tools needed to work remotely. The consumer bureau’s Washington headquarters has remained shuttered and off limits to workers since Mr. Vought’s arrival.The appeals court expedited the government’s appeal and scheduled oral arguments for May 16. More

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    Judge Says One DOGE Member Can Access Sensitive Treasury Dept. Data

    Nineteen state attorneys general had sued to block Elon Musk’s government efficiency team from accessing Treasury systems that include Americans’ bank account and Social Security information.A Manhattan federal judge ruled on Friday that one member of Elon Musk’s government efficiency program could have access to sensitive payment and data systems at the Treasury Department, as long as that person goes through appropriate training and files disclosures.The order by the judge, Jeannette A. Vargas, came nearly two months after she had ruled that Mr. Musk’s team, members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would be banished from the agency’s systems until the conclusion of a lawsuit that claims the group’s access is unlawful.Friday night’s order partly dissolves the earlier preliminary injunction by granting Ryan Wunderly, who was hired as a special adviser for information technology and modernization, access to the Treasury systems in dispute, Judge Vargas wrote.To gain the access, however, Mr. Wunderly will have to complete hands-on training “typically required of other Treasury employees granted commensurate access” and submit a financial disclosure report, the judge wrote.The case stems from a lawsuit filed in February by 19 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, who sued to block the Trump administration’s policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” who work with Mr. Musk to access the systems. The systems contain some of the country’s most sensitive information, including Americans’ bank account and Social Security data.The attorneys general argued that only career civil servants who have received training and security clearances should have access. The untrained members of Mr. Musk’s team should not have “unfettered access,” they said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Freed From Prison by Trump and Now Facing the Prospect of Going Back

    At a hearing this week, witnesses described behavior by Jonathan Braun that could result in his being locked up again. In the early hours of Feb. 15, Jonathan Braun, a violent felon granted clemency by President Trump, was agitated.After getting into a heated argument with his wife and parents and kicking them out of his cavernous Long Island home, Mr. Braun knocked on the door of his live-in nanny under the pretext of retrieving his phone, which was charging in her room.What followed, according to the former nanny’s testimony on Friday, was a terrifying, degrading encounter. Mr. Braun, shirtless, entered the room, pulled her onto her bed and put her into a headlock, she said. Then he pushed her hand over his bare genitals as he groped her breasts, telling her he had always wanted to have intercourse with her.The nanny said she had wrested herself away from his grasp, escaped to her bathroom and locked herself in.Coming on the second day of a hearing that will determine whether Mr. Braun returns to federal prison, her testimony offered one of the most vivid depictions of the depraved behavior he is accused of engaging in. There were no defense witnesses.Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Braun’s 10-year sentence for drug trafficking at the end of his first term in office. The commutation came after Mr. Braun’s family used its close ties to the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser at the time, to secure Mr. Braun’s release.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Appeals Court Clears Path for Trump to Resume Firing Probationary Workers

    The Trump administration is once again free to fire probationary employees. For now.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a 2-to-1 decision, sided with the government on Wednesday to block a lower-court ruling in Maryland that had led to the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers who had been fired in February.The purge of the employees had marked one of the first stages of President Trump’s plan to rapidly downsize the civil service and overhaul or eliminate entire offices and programs. Since then, the status of the workers has been tied up in legal battles over whether the firings had been carried out lawfully.The Wednesday appeals court decision came a day after the Supreme Court blocked a similar ruling in California reining in the government in a separate case. There is now no court order in place to stop the government from firing probationary employees.Both courts ruled on narrow issues of standing: whether the probationary firings harmed the plaintiffs so much that they had the right to sue in district court. In California, nonprofit organizations sued the government over the firings at six agencies because they said they benefited from the services the federal workers provided. In Maryland, 19 states and the District of Columbia sued 20 federal agencies, arguing that the government was obligated to give them notice when personnel actions could abruptly and significantly increase demand for unemployment benefits.It was not immediately clear what the latest decision meant for the thousands of fired probationary employees, nearly all of whom had been recently reinstated as a result of district court orders. The back-and-forth has left the employees in a state of limbo, wondering if they will be fired again after having just been rehired.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Case in Texas Could Shed More Light on Invocation of Alien Enemies Act

    Immigration lawyers are reacting to the Supreme Court’s ruling, which declared that any legal challenges to the Trump administration’s plan to use a wartime statute to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants have to be filed where the men are being held.And as they scrambled to adjust on Tuesday, their efforts could be guided by a similar case that is underway in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas. It was filed last month by Daniel Zacarias Matos, a Venezuelan migrant who claimed that the administration tried to deport him — without a hearing or an order of removal — under President Trump’s recent proclamation invoking the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act.In mid-March, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who is handling the case, issued an order stopping Mr. Zacarias Matos from being deported until he could look deeper into the matter. His lawyers and lawyers for the Justice Department are expected to file dueling court papers this month laying out the details of what happened.While the facts in Mr. Zacarias Matos’s case do not line up exactly with those in the cases of the Venezuelan migrants directly affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling, they could shed light on some of those proceedings as they start to move forward, most likely one by one.According to court papers, Mr. Zacarias Matos came to the United States with his 8-year-old daughter in December 2023, seeking asylum from Venezuela. Federal immigration agents took him into custody in October at the El Paso County Jail after he was arrested on charges of violating the terms of his probation on two, now-dismissed misdemeanor charges, court papers show.Early last month, the papers say, Mr. Zacarias Matos was sent to the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, where the administration was holding scores of Venezuelan migrants they were planning to deport to a prison in El Salvador under the expansive powers of the Alien Enemies Act.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Read the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Venezuelan Migrants

    Cite as: 604 U. S.
    (2025)
    9
    SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting
    whether its March 15 deportations complied with the Dis-
    trict Court’s orders, it simultaneously sought permission to
    resume summary deportations under the Proclamation.
    The District Court, first, denied the Government’s motion
    to vacate its temporary restraining order, rejecting the as-
    sertion that “the President’s authority and discretion under
    the [Alien Enemies Act] is not a proper subject for judicial
    scrutiny.” App. to BIO 71a. At the very least, the District
    Court concluded, the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed” on
    their claim that, “before they may be deported, they are en-
    titled to individualized hearings to determine whether the
    Act applies to them at all.” 2025 WL 890401, *2. The D. C.
    Circuit, too, denied the Government a requested stay and
    kept in place the District Court’s pause on deportations un-
    der the Alien Enemies Act pending further proceedings.
    2025 WL 914682, *1 (per curiam) (Mar. 26, 2025).
    It is only this Court that sees reason to vacate, for the
    second time this week, a temporary restraining order
    standing “on its last legs.” Department of Education, 604
    U. S., at (JACKSON, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1). Not
    content to wait until tomorrow, when the District Court will
    have a chance to consider full preliminary injunction brief-
    ing at a scheduled hearing, this Court intervenes to relieve
    the Government of its obligation under the order.
    II
    Begin with that upon which all nine Members of this
    Court agree. The Court’s order today dictates, in no uncer-
    tain terms, that “individual[s] subject to detention and re-
    moval under the [Alien Enemies Act are] entitled to judicial
    review’ as to ‘questions of interpretation and constitution-
    ality’ of the Act as well as whether he or she ‘is in fact an
    alien enemy fourteen years of age or older.”” Ante, at 2
    (quoting Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U. S. 160, 163–164, 172,
    n. 17 (1948)). Therefore, under today’s order, courts below More