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      Most Americans have no idea how anti-worker the US supreme court has become | Steven Greenhouse

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      Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the supreme court has been supremely pro-corporate – one study even called the Roberts court “the most pro-business court in history”. Not only have many justices been groomed and vetted by the business-backed Federalist Society, but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have taken lavish favors from billionaire corporate titans. Thomas has even spoken at two Koch network fundraising “donor summits”, gatherings of rightwing, ultra-wealthy business barons.While the court is decidedly pro-corporate, most Americans probably don’t know just how anti-worker and anti-union it really is. The justices have often shown a stunning callousness toward workers, and that means a callousness toward average Americans. One of the most egregious examples was a 2014 ruling – with an opinion written by Thomas – that held that Amazon, which holds workers up to 25 minutes after the ends of their shifts waiting to be screened to ensure they didn’t steal anything, doesn’t have to pay them for that time.Or take this month’s decision in which the court ruled in favor of Starbucks by making it harder for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to win rapid reinstatement of workers who are illegally fired for supporting a union. In that case, Starbucks fired five of the six baristas who were heading an effort to unionize a Memphis Starbucks. After NLRB officials found that the workers had been fired unlawfully for backing a union, a federal judge agreed to the NLRB’s request to issue an injunction to quickly reinstate them. Many labor relations experts say it’s important for the NLRB to be able to win quick reinstatement after companies fire workers who lead unionization drives, as Starbucks has repeatedly done, because those firings often terrify co-workers and cause union drives to collapse.Writing the court’s majority opinion, Thomas ignored all that, oblivious to the injustices and suffering that many workers face when they exercise their right to form a union. Thomas said that federal judges, when issuing such injunctions, should follow a more exacting four-part test, rather than the worker-friendly two-part test the NLRB favored. Thomas’s opinion also ignored some glaring facts: the union has accused Starbucks of firing 150 pro-union baristas, and the NLRB has accused Starbucks of an astoundingly high number of violations of the law – 436 – in its efforts to block unionization.In contrast to Thomas, Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a partial concurrence and partial dissent, acknowledged the injustices and delays that pro-union workers often face. She wrote that “Congress, in enacting the National Labor Relations Act, recognized that delay in vindicating labor rights ‘during the “notoriously glacial” course of NLRB proceedings’ can lead to their defeat”. Jackson noted that the litigation over reinstating the Memphis baristas had dragged on for two years. (It was dismaying that Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor signed Thomas’s soulless, unsympathetic majority opinion rather than Jackson’s.)A 2022 study found that of the 57 justices who have sat on the court over the past century, the six justices with the most pro-business voting records are the six members of today’s 6-3, rightwing super-majority, all appointed by Republican presidents: Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The study found that Donald Trump’s three appointees – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett – were the three most pro-business justices of the 57 evaluated. (That study also found that the court’s Democratic appointees at the time – Kagan, Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer – were among the top 20 pro-business justices.)All this is a far cry from when some justices were true champions of workers. Arthur Goldberg had been the general counsel of the United Steelworkers and served as secretary of labor under John F Kennedy. Justice William J Brennan Jr, whose father was a union official, was famous for going to bat for workers. As a lawyer, Louis Brandeis filed famous, detailed supreme court briefs in cases that sought to uphold pro-worker laws.In sharp contrast, today’s conservative judges seem to almost reflexively rule against workers and unions. They seem to view workers and unions as unwelcome nuisances that are seeking to make life difficult for corporations as they pursue their noble mission of maximizing their profits and share prices.Take the court’s 5-4 Epic Systems ruling of 2018. Gorsuch’s majority opinion blessed corporations’ efforts to prohibit workers from filing class-action lawsuits. It instead let employers require employees to pursue their grievances through individual, closed-door arbitrations, which greatly favor employers, according to various studies. Because lawyers are far less willing to take individual worker cases than class actions, Epic Systems gutted workers’ ability to vindicate their rights against sexual harassment, racial discrimination and wage theft.In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the majority opinion “egregiously wrong”. She also said the ruling would result in “huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the wellbeing of vulnerable workers”. Ginsburg added that it’s difficult and potentially perilous to pursue small claims individually. “By joining hands in litigation,” she wrote, “workers can spread the costs of litigation and reduce the risk of employer retaliation.”Another case that showed shocking insensitivity toward workers’ concerns was the 2007 Lilly Ledbetter case. Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, where for years she earned substantially less than the 16 men at the same management level. That pay discrimination was hidden from her, and she learned of it only after more than 15 years on the job. Alito wrote the court’s inflexible, unsympathetic 5-4 majority opinion, ruling that her case should be thrown out because she had failed to file her complaint within 180 days after her pay was set, as the law called for.Ginsburg angrily dissented, writing that the ruling “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure”. Ginsburg added that Alito’s majority opinion “does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination”.There have been some recent anti-union cases. Last year, in Glacier Northwest, the court made it easier for corporations to sue unions for any financial damage they suffer when workers go on strike – a ruling that could discourage workers from using their most powerful form of leverage. In 2021, in the Cedar Point Nursery case, the court put property rights far above worker rights and union rights when it overturned part of a California law, inspired by Cesar Chavez, that granted union organizers a right to go on farm owners’ property to speak with farm workers.By far the most important anti-union decision in recent years was Janus v. AFSCME, a 5-4 ruling, written by Alito, in which the court held that requiring government employees to pay fees to their union violated their first amendment rights. That ruling allowed any federal, state or local government employees to opt out of paying union fees – and was immediately seen as a blow that would weaken unions and their treasuries. Ten minutes after the court issued that decision, then president Trump tweeted: “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”The Janus case was underwritten by rightwing foundations and billionaire corporate powerhouses, including Richard Uihlein and the Koch Brothers. (Remember, Clarence Thomas attended their “donor summits”.)The supreme court’s approval ratings have fallen to a record low. Many Americans think the court is corrupt and has lost its way – its justices take all-expenses-paid vacations with billionaires, fail to disclose gifts, ignore blatant conflicts of interest, and one justice’s home hung an upside-down flag apparently showing sympathy for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.One easy step the court can take to begin an effort to regain respect and popularity would be to be stop ruling so often in favor of multibillion corporations and instead side with workers, eg typical Americans – and with labor unions, institutions that fight to improve the lives of average Americans. It just might help, and would further the cause of justice, if the court were to show that it cares more about embattled workers than about billionaires and faceless corporations.
      Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      Biden and Trump arrive in Atlanta to face off in first 2024 election debate – live

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      A private plane carrying Donald Trump has touched down in Atlanta ahead of tonight’s debate.The former president’s plane was greeted by a group of his supporters on the tarmac.It could be the moment when a rematch that few seem to want finally comes to life: like two ageing prizefighters, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will enter the arena of political bloodsport on Thursday evening to resume a verbal sparring bout that will revive memories of the ugly exchanges when the two debated face to face four years ago.A CNN studio in Atlanta will host the first presidential debate of the campaign between the same two candidates who contested the last election, which Biden won.With more than four months to go until polling day in November, it is the earliest in any US presidential campaign that a debate between the two main candidates has ever been staged.While some see the timing as premature, it could provide a chance to open up a contest that has become overshadowed by, among other things, Trump’s recent felony conviction, as well as assorted other legal travails that see him facing 54 criminal charges for trying to overturn the last election and for retaining classified documents.Both candidates are deeply unpopular: Trump because his opponents see him as an aspiring dictator who threatens democracy, Biden because, at 81 (although just three years older than his Republican opponent), he is viewed – even among many Democrats – as too old for another term as president.Knife-edge polls indicate a race essentially tied, with a national polling average for May and June showing the candidates at 46% each.Polls in seven key battleground states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina – give Trump a narrow advantage, though usually within the margin of error.NBC News’ Sahil Kapur writes that the debate hall is right next to the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Georgia Tech, which is currently hosting a party under a sign that reads “Make America DRUNK Again”.A private plane carrying Donald Trump has touched down in Atlanta ahead of tonight’s debate.The former president’s plane was greeted by a group of his supporters on the tarmac.It is not clear if Melania Trump, the former first lady, will join her husband at tonight’s debate.Melania Trump’s office did not return a request for comment about whether she would be in Atlanta during the presidential debate, according the New York Times.The former first lady has largely been absent from the campaign trail this year, and she notably did not attend Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York.Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest child, will not attend the debate due to a family commitment involving his oldest daughter, according to NBC News, citing a source.Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, is not expected to be in Atlanta for the debate, but Eric’s wife, Lara Trump, will attend in her official capacity as Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, NBC reports.Jill Biden, the first lady, will be in Atlanta for tonight’s debate, according to the Biden campaign.Jill Biden is expected to be the only Biden family member in attendance, according to the New York Times.She is expected to watch the debate from a separate hold room on the debate campus.After the debate, Biden and his wife are scheduled to stop by a nearby Democratic watch party, before flying to Raleigh overnight.Candidates traditionally bring along their family members for support during a debate. Less common: bringing a member of your opponent’s family for support.On Thursday night, Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, will be in the post-debate spin room making the case for Joe Biden.Mary Trump, one of the former president’s harshest critics, has warned that her uncle is a threat to democracy and should not be re-elected.She did not hold back. In a statement, she said:
      I’m in Atlanta tonight to remind everyone who Donald is as a person and how he would rule as a president because the stakes are far too high for us to get this wrong: We cannot afford to allow Donald Trump anywhere near the levers of power again. Donald cannot be trusted and we must recognize that his last administration was simply a warm-up for much worse to come just as January 6th was a dress rehearsal for a man who will stop at nothing to ascend, once again, to this country’s highest office. He is desperate for power and has shown himself both unworthy of wielding it and obsessed with regaining it purely for his own benefit. He must be stopped.
      Joining Mary Trump in the spin-room – a chaotic room where campaign staff and surrogates try to persuade reporters that their candidate won the debate – will be:
      Keisha Lance-Bottoms, former Atlanta mayor and a senior advisor on the Biden-Harris campaign
      Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett
      California governor Gavin Newsom
      California congressman Robert Garcia
      Former Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond
      Georgia senator Raphael Warnock
      Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate on Thursday for the first time this election cycle and it holds the potential for some history-making moments.Debates can inform voters on both the issues and temperaments of the candidates, potentially swaying an undecided voter toward one candidate’s direction. They can also make for good TV, creating soundbites that resonate for decades to come.From the candidates’ physical appearances to gaffes to planned attacks to off-the-cuff retorts, here are some memorable moments from US presidential debate history.The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has released a statement complaining that CNN rejected its request to include a pool reporter inside the studio during tonight’s presidential debate.The WHCA “is deeply concerned that CNN has rejected our repeated requests to include the White House travel pool inside the studio”, a statement by WHCA president and NBC correspondent Kelly O’Donnell reads.The debate, which is being held on a closed set, will not feature an audience. Print pool photographers will be present for the entirety of the debate, while one print pool reporter will be permitted to enter during commercial breaks, according to CNN.The letter says:
      That is not sufficient in our view and diminishes a core principle of presidential coverage. The White House pool has a duty to document, report and witness the president’s events and his movements on behalf of the American people.
      Donald Trump is on his way to Atlanta, where he is scheduled to land in about an hour.Trump aide Margo Martin, in a post to X, shared a video of the former president boarding his plane.Joe Biden has arrived in Atlanta ahead of tonight’s presidential debate, where he was greeted by a crowd of supporters who chanted “four more years” and “let’s go Joe”, according to a pool report.While on Air Force One en route to Georgia, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House’s press secretary was asked how the president feels about “standing toe to toe with his main adversary tonight”.According to the Washington Post, replied:
      He likes to fight. He likes to fight for the American people.
      US district judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case, has granted a request from the former president’s defense team to hold a hearing to challenge some of the evidence gathered against him.Cannon said she would schedule a hearing to consider whether prosecutors had improperly obtained the cooperation of Trump’s lawyers through an exception to attorney-client privilege.From my colleague Hugo Lowell:But Judge Cannon also denied a defense request for a hearing on a separate claim that FBI officials had submitted false or misleading information to obtain a warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents.The supreme court’s ruling earlier today to allow Idaho hospitals to provide emergency abortions – for now – has left key questions unanswered and could mean a final decision is delayed to beyond the November elections.A draft decision in the case was briefly posted on the court’s website yesterday and abruptly removed. The final version of the decision published today appeared to closely resemble the draft.Responding to the order, Joe Biden said the ruling ensures that Idaho women can get the care they need while the case continues to play out, adding:
      Doctors should be able to practice medicine. Patients should be able to get the care they need.
      The White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said:
      No woman should be denied care or wait until she’s near death or forced to flee her home state just to receive the healthcare she needs.
      Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said the justice department will continue pressing its case and using “every available tool to ensure that women in every state have access to that care”. His statement reads:
      Today’s order means that, while we continue to litigate our case, women in Idaho will once again have access to the emergency care guaranteed to them under federal law.
      Donald Trump has appeared to share his talking points for tonight’s debate on his Truth Social platform.The post shows what appears to be a set of recommendations from Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency chief.Wheeler, in the post, advises Trump to pledge to reduce carbon emissions and to point out that Joe Biden rejoined the Paris climate accord, and “all that does is send American dollars overseas”.Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesperson, shared Trump’s talking points on Twitter/X, writing:
      Donald Trump is just posting his debate talking points. Thanks I guess.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s angerand frustration at what he describes as his exclusion from the debate despite six qualifying polls and confirmed ballot access in five states – with Democratic legal challenges to his inclusion in five more, including one in New Jersey under the state’s “sore loser law” – comes as Democrats accuse him of being a political stooge for Republicans.Biden supporters worry Kennedy’s famous name and his history of environmental advocacy could sway voters from the left.His family members are largely against his candidacy, which they have made clear in public statements and by visiting the Biden White House en masse on St Patrick’s Day in March.But Republicans also have not welcomed his quixotic intervention in a tight race that could serve to siphon off vital votes from both candidates.Donald Trump has described him as “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat, including West and Stein”, referring to third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent US presidential candidate polling at about 8%, won’t be at tonight’s Biden-Trump TV smackdown in Atlanta.But he’s not taking the diss quietly, and has accused debate host CNN of colluding with the major party campaigns to exclude him.In an email statement on Wednesday, the Kennedy campaign claimed that 71% of Americans want to see him on the debate stage, and in an act of counter-programming he plans an alternative “real” debate on Elon’s Musk’s Twitter/X platform at the same time.“The American people want leaders who trust them to make up their own minds,” Kennedy said.
      Instead, our last two presidents are restricting voters from choosing anyone other than themselves. Presidents Biden and Trump have sucked trillions of dollars from the pockets of working people and Americans deserve to hear from the one candidate who can hold them to account. More

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      The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery | Moira Donegan

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      Did you know you could give your local government officials tips when they do things you like? Brett Kavanaugh thinks you can. In fact, if you’re rich enough, says the US supreme court, you can now pay off state and local officials for government acts that fit your policy preferences or advance your interests. You can give them lavish gifts, send them on vacations, or simply cut them checks. You can do all of this so long as the cash, gifts or other “gratuities” are provided after the service, and not before it – and so long as a plausible deniability of the meaning and intent of these “gratuities” is maintained.That was the ruling authored by Kavanaugh in Snyder v United States, a 6-3 opinion issued on Wednesday, in which the supreme court dealt the latest blow to federal anti-corruption law. In the case, which was divided along ideological lines, the court held that “gratuities” – that is, post-facto gifts and payments – are not technically “bribes”, and therefore not illegal. Bribes are only issued before the desired official act, you see, and their meaning is explicit; a more vague, less vulgarly transactional culture of “gratitude” for official acts, expressed in gifts and payments of great value, is supposed to be something very different. The court has thereby continued its long effort to legalize official corruption, using the flimsiest of pretexts to rob federal anti-corruption statutes of all meaning.The case concerns James Snyder, who in 2013 was serving as the mayor of small-town Portage, Indiana. Late that year, the city of Portage awarded a contract to Great Lakes Peterbilt, a trucking company, and bought five tow trucks from them; a few weeks later, Snyder asked for and accepted a check for $13,000 from the company. Snyder was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He argued that the kickback was not illegal because it came after he awarded a contract to the company that ultimately paid him off, not before.Absurdly the US supreme court agreed, classifying such payments as mere tokens of appreciation and claiming they are not illegal when they are not the product of an explicit agreement meant to influence official acts in exchange for money.In so doing, the court has narrowed the scope of anti-corruption law for state and local officials to apply to only those exchanges of money, goods and official favor in which an explicit quid pro quo arrangement can be proved. As in Cargill – the court’s recent decision legalizing bump stocks, wherein the court declared that the gun accessories do not render semiautomatic rifles into machine guns based on a lengthy technical explanation of the meaning of a “trigger function” – the court in Snyder has made an extended, belabored foray into a definitional distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities”.But the glaring reality remains that this is largely a distinction without a difference. As Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent, this is an interpretation which no reasonable reading of the statute can support. In a dissent whose tone seemed exasperated, almost sarcastic, she called the majority opinion “absurd and atextual”, saying it “elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain texts of this statute and is a quintessential case of the tail wagging the dog”. The “bribery” versus “gratuity” distinction, she said, allows officials to accept rewards for official acts in ways that are “functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe”.The court’s narrow vision of corruption – one in which only explicit, whispered deals in shadowy, smoke-filled back rooms count as “corruption”, and all other forms of influence and exchange are something other than the genuine article – also fundamentally misunderstands how influence-peddling works. In his controlling opinion, Kavanaugh emphasizes that in order to be an illegal bribe, a gift or payment must be accompanied by “a corrupt state of mind” on behalf of the official or benefactor. But corruption, influence-peddling, and unfair and undue methods of persuasion are more subtle and complicated than this in practice.For an example, we need look no further than the conservative justices of the supreme court itself, who have become notorious, in recent years, for accepting lavish gifts and chummy intimacy from rightwing billionaires. According to investigative reporting by ProPublica, Clarence Thomas has accepted vacations, real estate purchases, tuition for his young relatives, and seemingly innumerable private jet trips from the billionaire Harlan Crow, as well as financing for an RV from another wealthy patron, Anthony Welters. Thomas has argued that these gifts and favors are merely the “personal hospitality” of “close personal friends”.ProPublica also reports that Samuel Alito, who flies insurrectionist flags outside his Virginia mansion and New Jersey beach house, has accepted the hospitality of the Republican mega-donor Paul Singer; the billionaire took Alito along on his private jet to a fishing resort in Alaska, where the justice stayed, played and reportedly drank $1,000 wine on the billionaire’s dime. (Alito has disputed aspects of ProPublica’s characterization.)There is no reporting to indicate that the justices received this expansive and expensive generosity in direct compensation for their extremely conservative jurisprudence, even though the judges’ legal writings have furthered the billionaire’s material interests and social preferences. It seems reasonable, to me, to infer that the gifts, as frequent and valuable as they are, are not the product of explicit agreements to exchange things of value for specific official acts.If anything, I think that these relationships do not seem corrupt to the men who take part in them; that they see their relationships with billionaires, and their receipt of these billionaires’ largesse, as innocent and proper expressions of affection between friends and ideological fellow travelers. Clarence Thomas may be able to feel something, in the dark depths of his soul, that we might recognize as akin to love, and he may indeed feel that love for Harlan Crow.But this “love”, or whatever it is, does not mean that what is happening between these men is not corruption, and it does not mean that the law has nothing to say about it. Connections like these are cultivated with both the intention and the effect of rewarding and encouraging conservative outcomes; an explicit quid pro quo comes to seem vulgar and unnecessary in their midst, in which social reinforcement and personal loyalty do the work that a more explicit bribe would otherwise accomplish.Adding money – or, in the court’s parlance, “gratuities” – to these arrangements only makes this more obvious. It is not a coincidence that the court has chosen to legalize for state and local officials exactly the sort of corruption that they partake of so conspicuously themselves.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Supreme court says Idaho abortion ruling ‘inadvertently’ published online – as it happened

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      The supreme court has acknowledged to Bloomberg Law that the ruling in a case over whether hospitals in Idaho can be required to carry out abortions in emergencies was published by accident.The court’s public information officer Patricia McCabe told the outlet: “The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website. The Court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”Bloomberg Law goes on to report that the ruling is 6-3 in favor of the Biden administration, with conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissenting. However, the ruling is structured to allow litigation over the issue to continue, and not resolve the broader question of whether the federal government can require emergency abortions be performed in states where the procedure is banned:
      The high court decision “will prevent Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban when the termination of a pregnancy is needed to prevent serious harms to a woman’s health,” Justice Elena Kagan said in a concurring opinion.
      Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to say that she wouldn’t have dismissed the case, according to the copy that was briefly online.
      “Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay,” she wrote. “While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.”
      The posted decision indicates the court won’t resolve broader questions about the intersection of state abortion bans and a federal law designed to ensure hospitals treat patients who arrive in need of emergency care.
      The case is the supreme court’s first look at a state abortion ban since the conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. The court on 13 June preserved full access to the widely used abortion pill mifepristone, saying anti-abortion doctors and organizations lacked legal standing to press a lawsuit.
      The supreme court turned down an attempt by Republican-led states to block the Biden administration’s coordination with social media companies on fighting disinformation, one of only two decisions the conservative-dominated panel released today. They still have yet to rule on cases concerning Donald Trump’s prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election and the scope of federal government regulations, but will issue more opinions on Thursday and Friday. But perhaps an even bigger story than what the court actually decided is what it inadvertently decided. Bloomberg Law noticed that the court had accidentally posted its opinion in a closely watched case pitting Idaho against the Biden administration, and a 6-3 majority was going to require the Republican-led state to allow emergency abortions – at least for now.Here’s what else happened today:
      House Republicans convened a little-known congressional body to intervene on behalf of top Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s attempts to stay out of jail.
      The supreme court once again overturned the ultra-conservative fifth circuit court of appeals, in its ruling over social media disinformation. Here’s why that’s significant.
      Trump claims he can get detained US journalist Evan Gershkovich out of jail in Russia, if he wins the November election. The Wall Street Journal reporter’s trial began behind closed doors today.
      Encounters at the southern border dropped by 40% after Joe Biden imposed restrictions that will temporarily restrict access to asylum seekers, the homeland security department said.
      Progressives are not pleased after congressman Jamaal Bowman lost his Democratic primary yesterday, and are training their ire on the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
      A group of Black campaign surrogates for Donald Trump met at a barbershop in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood Wednesday, ahead of the head-to-head between Trump and Joe Biden here tomorrow.Trump made a phone appearance to tout his accomplishments for the Black community while in office and his proposal to end taxation on tips.“Let the people earn what they earn,” Trump said, adding that he was aware he was talking to people in a barbershop who do tipped service work. “And it has been so popular beyond anything.”Both Trump and Biden are blitzing metro Atlanta with events leading up to the debate. Rocky’s Barber Shop, a Black-owned business in Atlanta’s more affluent neighborhood, hosted conservative Black leaders from metro Atlanta. Shelley Winter, a conservative talk show host here, asked Trump if he thought that CNN debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash would treat him fairly.“Well, I think it would be good for them if they did,” Trump replied. “I think probably not,” he added, expressing lingering ire about Tapper cutting off his televised victory speech after winning the primaries.
      So they cover the whole primary, but they don’t cover my victory speech. So am I going to get it fair? Probably not, but it would be very good for CNN. They’re having a lot of ratings problems.
      Two potential choices for vice president who did not need a haircut found themselves at the shop anyway Wednesday: congressman Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and former housing and urban development secretary Dr. Ben Carson.“I just want to encourage you to continue to speak out because the attacks on you have been absolutely ridiculous,” Carson said. “We’re praying that God will give you the strength to bear it because you’re standing in there for all of us.”Donalds said we would see if he was Trump’s vice presidential pick. Does he want to be vice president? “Of course!” he replied.Trump said on Saturday that he had already made up his mind about who he would choose to be vice president, and that his choice would be present in Atlanta for the debate.The number of encounters at the south-west border was down 40% in the three weeks since Joe Biden announced new rules restricting asylum, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Wednesday.According to a DHS fact sheet, the average daily arrests over a seven-day period has fallen to under 2,400 encounters per day, the lowest level of encounters since January 2021. It is still not low enough to lift the order. Asylum processing resumes when encounters fall to an average of 1,500 encounters across a seven-day period.“It’s a remarkable feat that our personnel have accomplished in just such a short period of time,” DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday. “Congress failed to act. The president has acted.”But he said congressional action was needed to send more resources to border patrol and that without legislation the order could be lifted or reversed by the courts or a future administration.Last week, CBP said encounters fell by 25%, meaning illegal border crossings dropped significantly since then.Encounters were already on a downward trend before Biden’s asylum order, due in part to a crackdown on northward migration by Mexican officials. Seasonal patterns also affect crossings.Opponents have sued the administration to block the order.Cori Bush, the Democratic congresswoman of Missouri and another prominent member of the progressive “Squad”, has issued a statement calling Jamaal Bowman her “brother-in-service” and attacking Aipac’s role in his primary defeat last night.Bowman is the “true representation of transformational leadership and brings … the power of everyday people from our communities to Congress each and every day,” Bush wrote.
      AIPAC and their allies—backed by far-right Donald Trump megadonors—poured a tidal wave of cash into this primary race showing us just how desperate these billionaire extremists are in their attempts to buy our democracy, promote their own gain, and silence the voices of progress and justice. There should be no question about the need to get Big Money out of politics.
      A recent poll shows Bush at risk of losing in her own primary contest for Missouri’s 1st congressional district, one point behind challenger Wesley Bell. The pollster, The Mellman Group, said:
      Bush is still seen favorably, but assessments of her and her performance are moving in a negative direction, while Bell’s image is improving, leaving him with an underlying image advantage. With some six weeks to go and 11% [of voters surveyed] still undecided, this race can go either way, but Bell has achieved a slight advantage.
      Jamaal Bowman’s primary defeat on Tuesday was a “loss for young people and anyone who cares about our continued movement toward justice, peace, and building a multiracial democracy,” Protect Our Power said in a statement.The progressive group blamed “Aipac and the Maga billionaires who recruited and paid for George Latimer’s campaign from start to finish” for the defeat, and vowed “to tell Aipac they have no business creating division in our democracy”.In a separate letter of protest, Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP) said it was “saddened” by the results that had unseated a congressman who “has been one of the few members of Congress committed to defending Palestinian human rights”.“Today is a sad day for American democracy,” said JVP’s political director, Beth Miller. She added:
      To protect progressive candidates moving forward it is essential that Democrats reject Aipac.
      Progressive groups are calling on House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to reject the endorsement and donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in the wake of congressman Jamaal Bowman‘s primary loss in New York.The United Democracy Project, a super Pac affiliated with Aipac, dumped nearly $15m into Bowman’s district as part of its successful effort to elevate George Latimer to the Democratic nomination.A coalition of progressive groups, outraged over Aipac’s involvement in the race, sent a letter to Jeffries today demanding that he reconsider his association with the group and denounce its tactics.“AIPAC turned the NY16 race into the most expensive Democratic primary in history, waging anunacceptable assault on our democracy, our communities, and our shared future. We call on you to take action to address this threat,” the letter reads.
      AIPAC’s interference in Democratic politics poses a grave danger to the vision our organizations fight for every day: a future in which everyone can access a high quality education, comprehensive healthcare, a liveable climate, affordable housing, good jobs for good pay, humane immigration policies, human rights centered foreign policy — and more.
      Latimer defeated Bowman by 17 points yesterday, and he is now heavily favored to win the seat in November, as the Cook Political Report rates the district as solid Democrat.The abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has said it agrees with Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson’s reported reservations in the copy of the opinion briefly posted on the supreme court’s website.“This is not a victory but a delay,” the group said in a statement responding to the court’s reported decision to permit abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho.
      The abortion bans that are putting people’s lives on the line in the first place will continue to remain on the books. We’re grateful that the Biden administration is fighting to preserve the shreds of access possible in states where anti-abortion extremists are doing everything in their power to block people from the care they need, even under the most dire of circumstances.
      The group said it will not forget that Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans are responsible for those bans, adding:
      Our rights are on the line, and we must send President Biden back to the White House to restore the federal right to abortion and end these bans once and for all.
      The copy of the opinion suggesting that the supreme court may rule to permit abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho may not be final and could be changed.According to the copy obtained by Bloomberg, a majority of justices will reportedly dismiss the case as “improvidently granted”, meaning the supreme court should not have accepted the case.The ruling would reinstate a lower court’s order that had allowed Idaho hospitals to perform abortions in cases where a woman’s health may be endangered, according to the outlet.Currently, the state’s law only allows abortions when a woman’s “life” is in danger. Idaho has sought to have abortion exempted from the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), a precedent critics said would endanger pregnant people in any state that has abortion restrictions.Although many states allow doctors to perform an emergency abortion when a woman’s life or health is at risk, effectively mirroring Emtala, Idaho only allowed doctors to intervene when a woman was on the brink of death, a much higher bar for intervention. The Biden administration sued Idaho to enforce the law.The Emtala law, signed by abortion opponent Ronald Reagan, sought to protect pregnant women in active labor in particular. Until its passage, hospitals often transferred or “dumped” women who could not pay when they suffered an emergency on public hospitals, even when in advanced stages of labor.Emtala had endured a series of attacks, including by some hospital administrators who viewed it as an “unfunded mandate”. Although the federal government required hospitals to treat sick patients, it never provided money to care for indigent patients.Bernie Sanders has joined those blaming the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) for congressman Jamaal Bowman’s primary loss in New York last night.Bowman, whose criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza made him a target for pro-Israel lobbying groups, was defeated by George Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist, after Aipac and an affiliated group spent almost $15m to defeat him.Sanders, in a statement today, said it was an “outrage and an insult to democracy that we maintain a corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaire-funded super PACs to buy elections.” He added:
      AIPAC and other super PACs spent over $23 million to defeat Bowman. He spent $3 million. That is a spending gap which is virtually impossible to overcome.
      It is not a coincidence that with our corrupt campaign finance system we also have a rigged economy that allows the very rich to get much richer while many working people are falling further behind. Big Money buys politicians who will do their bidding, and the results are clear.
      The Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus has responded to the news that the supreme court may be poised to allow abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho.“We are all watching,” the caucus posted to X, adding:
      With lives hanging in the balance, we hope this indicates a step forward for patients’ access to emergency abortion care.
      Now, it is up to #SCOTUS to confirm that this is true and they will indeed protect that right and uphold federal law.
      Alexis McGill Johnson, the head of Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider, writes that any decision that falls short of guaranteeing patients’ access to abortion care in emergencies would be “catastrophic”. More

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      ‘A healthcare crisis’: Harris takes aim at Trump on anniversary of Roe’s fall

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris marked the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade with forceful campaign statements that laid the blame squarely on Donald Trump for ending the national right to abortion.In a video released on Monday, Biden pledged to restore the right to an abortion and “protect American freedom” if he is re-elected.The video, along with a campaign event headlined by the vice-president, came two years to the day since the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed nearly half a century of guaranteed federal abortion rights, and reflect the centrality of abortion in Biden’s presidential campaign.In College Park, Maryland, Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years”. In her remarks, Harris laid out what she said were the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term would be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state – in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”Nodding to her background as a prosecutor, Harris called Trump’s attack on women’s reproductive rights “premeditated” and said he has “not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions”.“In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty,” she said.Harris called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices” and warned that he would go even further by curtailing access to contraception and IVF.Pointing to the statistic that one in three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year despite a fatal fetal anomaly, introduced Harris in Maryland.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said. “I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it.”Cox ultimately left Texas to receive care. Growing emotional from the stage on Monday, she shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause. “I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.In Biden’s video, the president, too, placed the responsibility for reversing abortion rights on Trump, quoting him boasting about the decision and taking credit for putting three conservative justices on the court.“Here’s what Donald Trump says about your freedom: ‘After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,’” Biden says, quoting a Trump statement last year.“Two years ago, the supreme court justices that Trump handpicked helped overturn Roe v Wade,” Biden continues. “Decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the White House.”“We’re up against extremism. Send me back to the White House and I’ll fight like hell to restore Roe v Wade and protect American freedom.”The offensive comes amid polling evidence that with consistently weak approval ratings for Biden, concerns over reproductive rights represent Democrats’ best hope of retaining the White House in November.Since Roe v Wade was overthrown in 2022, ballot measures in several states – including ones that tend to vote Republican – have upheld or enshrined abortion rights locally, signalling that the issue has popular resonance particularly among female voters.On Friday, a group of Montana abortion rights supporters became the latest to announce that they had secured enough signatures to hold a November ballot measure asking voters to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Although that measure has not yet been confirmed by state officials, voters in roughly a dozen states are expected to weigh in directly on abortion rights this year, including in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona.Democrats are hoping that these measures will boost turnout in their favor.Several groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Freedom for All – announced on Monday a $100m Abortion Access Now campaign across several states.Since Roe fell, Biden has frequently promised to “codify” Roe’s protections into law. Although his administration has issued executive orders aimed at boosting access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception, as well as defended abortion access in two supreme court cases this year, Biden cannot re-establish a federal right to abortion without congressional support. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that blocks states from totally banning abortion before fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.In a call with reporters on Monday, White House officials declined to reveal any plans for future abortion-related executive actions. Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the Gender Policy Council, also acknowledged that, if the supreme court rules against the Biden administration in a highly anticipated case over emergency abortions, “our options on emergency medical care are likely to be limited”.Trump has sought to backpedal on his stance in recent months, telling congressional Republicans in a meeting on Capitol Hill this month that the matter should be left to the states and warning them against pursuing a national ban. More

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      The US supreme court’s rightwing justices are fighting legal monsters of their making | Moira Donegan

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      In the late 18th century, when the constitution was ratified, men’s abuse of women was penalized by neither custom nor by the law. Men were allowed to beat their wives, their children and any women they held authority over in their personal lives: such beatings were not generally illegal, nor especially frowned upon, but understood as a private prerogative that all men held over the women in their lives.Many men still treat such beatings this way: as an entitlement of manhood. The supreme court’s 2022 Bruen decision, authored by Clarence Thomas – a ruling that drastically expanded gun rights and restricted government ability to regulate guns to a sphere no greater than that which was practiced at the time of the constitution’s ratification – would have largely agreed with them. At least, until this Friday.In the wake of the 2022 ruling, lower courts have ruled that, under Bruen, no gun restriction is permissible unless it has an exact historical analogue from the founding era. In the fifth circuit, this interpretation would have restored gun rights to Zackey Rahimi, a brutal and prolific domestic abuser, according to police and court records, who challenged the federal government’s right to take his guns away. In an 8-1 ruling on Friday, the supreme court narrowed its Bruen decision to keep guns out of Rahimi’s hands.The decision is likely to save lives. Two-thirds of women who are murdered by their current or former intimate partners are killed with a gun; a woman whose abuser has access to a gun is five times more likely to die at his hands. That a circuit court would have restored gun rights to men who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders reflects just how extreme the federal judiciary’s gun jurisprudence has become – and, as in their abortion jurisprudence, how casual and careless many federal judges are with women’s lives.But the supreme court’s decision in United States v Rahimi also reveals the logical inconsistencies in the foundation of so-called “originalist” legal interpretation, the unworkability of the court’s insistence on historical precedent for every government regulation and the growing divisions among the conservative justices about just what “history and tradition” should mean.The court’s ultimate ruling was lopsided, with eight of the justices joining John Roberts’s majority opinion and only Thomas, Bruen’s original author, dissenting. But the decision in Rahimi seems to have been an unusually contentious one, animating and dividing the court. In addition to Roberts’s majority opinion and Thomas’s dissent, Rahimi yielded no fewer than five concurrences – with Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh each chiming in to explain their vote against abusers’ rights individually, and Jackson and Sotomayor also writing independently to express their concern about Bruen’s methodology.Roberts stressed that the historical test in Bruen was loose enough to allow for some gun restrictions, including those on domestic abusers. It was a mistake, he said, to read Bruen “to require a ‘historical twin’ rather than a ‘historical analogue’.” His reasoning was echoed by Barrett, who advocated for a historical test of what she called “original contours”, one that “looks at historical gun regulations to identify the contours of the [second amendment] right”.Gorsuch, meanwhile, was much more sympathetic to the Thomas dissent, suggesting that an abuser like Rahimi might have prevailed in securing access to guns again if he had challenged the federal law on narrower grounds. Kavanaugh, as usual, said nothing of importance. Only Thomas insisted that Bruen’s originalism created a demand for an exact historical precedent for government regulation; he would have rearmed Rahimi, the man who was only exercising what, in the late 18th century, would have been understood as his private right.The case is another signal of infighting among the court’s conservatives: they cannot decide what they think “originalism” demands, or what they mean when they say “history and tradition”. The court’s appeal to history has always been selective and pretextual, deployed with little consistency, intellectual honesty or concern for historical accuracy, in order to achieve the preferred policy outcomes of Republican justices.That so many of the justices who voted for Thomas’s interpretation of Bruen just two years ago voted against that same interpretation today just goes to show how hollow an approach “originalism” really is – it is a doctrine that can expand or contract based on the justices’ political preferences in whichever case happens to be before them. Similarly, that this “originalism” remains the guiding force of a majority of the justices goes to show how unaccountable the supreme court’s vast policymaking power has become: they have so much control over the law, and so much indifference to precedent and consistency in how they wield it, that they can call upon virtually any interpretive scheme they choose, label it “originalism”, and claim to have exercised a principled interpretive strategy.Perhaps the justices don’t care about being consistent: perhaps the capaciousness and mutability of “originalism” is precisely its appeal: it works well as a cover for their actual project, which is the exercise of raw power. But it has never been a workable or acceptable reality that “originalism” and its selective, often fact-free fantasies of the past, has been called upon to determine policy outcomes in the present.The lives of women who have survived domestic abuse should never have depended on what nine unaccountable jurists imagine the founding era to have been like; that they did is an insult to citizenship itself.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden says supreme court preserved ‘critical protections’ for domestic violence survivors – as it happened

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      Joe Biden said the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing guns preserves “critical protections” for victims of abuse.“No one who has been abused should have to worry about their abuser getting a gun. As a result of today’s ruling, survivors of domestic violence and their families will still be able to count on critical protections, just as they have for the past three decades,” the president said.“Vice President Harris and I remain firmly committed to ending violence against women and keeping Americans safe from gun violence. We will continue to call on Congress to further strengthen support and protections for survivors and to take action to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing our communities apart.”The supreme court upheld a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing firearms, in a decision cheered by Joe Biden, and supported by all justices on the conservative-dominated court, with the exception of Clarence Thomas. Kamala Harris, however, warned that the law was exactly the type of thing Donald Trump would go after, if elected president. Meanwhile, all signs point to a blockbuster week for the court beginning Wednesday. The justices will release more decisions that day, perhaps including cases on Trump’s immunity petition, whether cities can stop people from sleeping outside, and whether the Biden administration can require states to perform emergency abortions.Here’s what else happened today:
      Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, has asked the supreme court to delay the start of his jail sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
      Anti-Trump group the Defend Democracy Project said the supreme court has “very likely guaranteed” that his trial on federal election subversion charges is not resolved before the November election.
      New York prosecutors are asking judge Juan Merchan to preserve parts of the gag order imposed on Trump in his business fraud case.
      Trump’s lawyers are planning a legal offensive against part of his indictment over allegedly possessing and hiding classified documents, the Guardian can reveal.
      A Nevada judge dismissed charges brought against six Republicans for allegedly plotting to submit fake certificates saying Trump won the state’s electoral votes in 2020.
      A judge in Nevada has ordered charges dismissed against six Republicans indicted last year for allegedly plotting to submit fake certificates certifying that Donald Trump won the state’s electoral votes in 2020, the Associated Press reports.The state’s attorney general Aaron Ford vowed to appeal the ruling by judge Mary Kay Holthus, who said the charges were filed in the wrong venue. Here’s more, from the AP:
      A Nevada state court judge dismissed a criminal indictment Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, potentially killing the case with a ruling that state prosecutors chose the wrong venue to file the case.
      Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford stood in a Las Vegas courtroom a moment after Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus delivered her ruling, declaring that he would take the case directly to the state Supreme Court.
      “The judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately,” Ford told reporters afterward. He declined any additional comment.
      Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case dead, saying that to bring the case now to another grand jury in another venue such as Nevada’s capital city of Carson City would violate a three-year statute of limitations on filing charges that expired in December.
      “They’re done,” said Margaret McLetchie, attorney for Clark County Republican party chairman Jesse Law, one of the defendants in the case.
      The judge called off trial, which had been scheduled for next January, for defendants that included state GOP chairman Michael McDonald; national party committee member Jim DeGraffenreid; national and Douglas County committee member Shawn Meehan; and Eileen Rice, a party member from the Lake Tahoe area. Each was charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, felonies that carry penalties of up to four or five years in prison.
      Supreme court rulings can have long and impactful ripple effects. This week, for instance, Louisiana’s Republican governor signed legislation to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms, which the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington reports was a consequence of decisions the court handed down two years ago:Louisiana’s decision to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments is the latest fallout from a spate of controversial rulings from the rightwing supermajority of the US supreme court which has opened up a Pandora’s box that is fueling efforts to turn America into a theocratic state.The new law, signed on Wednesday by the hard-right governor, Jeff Landry, puts Louisiana in the vanguard of a decades-long movement to obliterate the foundational US separation of church and state. It puts wind in the sails of those who want the US to be reinvented as an overtly Christian nation, and comes in the wake of two highly contentious opinions from the highest court.Both rulings, delivered within six days of each other in 2022, were backed by the six ultra-conservative justices who now have a stranglehold on the country’s most powerful court. The supermajority is one of the main legacies of Donald Trump, who placed three of the justices on the bench.The Second Amendment Foundation, a group supporting gun rights, gave a mixed review to the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bars domestic abusers from keeping firearms.In a statement, the group said that though the justices did not narrow their 2022 Bruen ruling, which expanded the ability to carry a firearm in public, as much as gun control advocates hoped, they took issue with the reasoning behind their ruling today in United States v Rahimi:
      Rahimi posed a difficult issue for the Court to resolve. And while the Court may have arrived at a conclusion that society believes to be best, it did so in a manner that poses some inconsistencies with what Bruen demands. To be clear, domestic violence is abhorrent and those who commit such acts should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law – for which a conviction would result in their disarmament through imprisonment.
      As Justice Thomas wrote “the question before us is not whether Rahimi and others like him can be disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment. Instead, the question is whether the Government can strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order – even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime.” Stripping an individual of their Second Amendment rights, when they have not been accused or convicted of a crime, is not consistent with what the Constitution protects.
      The Court’s justification in upholding the law by cobbling together bits and pieces of historical laws to find a “historical analogue” may allow future courts to uphold various infringements on the Second Amendment by the same sort of manufacture.
      Donald Trump has been criminally indicted four times, with one of his cases leading to a felony conviction on business fraud charges in New York City.The other three cases are stalled, for various reasons. Our case tracker tells you why:While the supreme court issued five decisions today, including one in a closely watched case dealing with gun restrictions, it has yet to rule on Donald Trump’s petition for immunity from the federal charges brought against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election.Trump’s trial on those charges cannot proceed until the court issues its ruling – which the Defend Democracy Project says is the point. In a statement, the anti-Trump group’s chair Mike Podhorzer and Norman Eisen, a legal analyst who assisted Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, accused the court’s conservative justices of “an act of election interference” by delaying their decision for so long that it is unlikely the case will go to trial prior to the November 5 election:
      Week after week, we all have waited for a ruling on Donald Trump’s presidential immunity claim. It’s time to acknowledge that the delay is the ruling. Regardless of the substance of the decision on presidential immunity, the delays engineered by Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the three judges Trump named to the Court have very likely guaranteed that he will avoid a jury verdict for his criminal conspiracy to overturn the last election before the American people vote in the next one. Those justices have ensured an irreconcilable showdown in the fall between the ordinary operations of the criminal justice system, which would require Trump’s speedy pre-trial and trial proceedings, and the ordinary functioning of the presidential election system, in which both nominees are free to campaign.No matter what the Supreme Court concludes, the MAGA justices on the Supreme Court have already achieved their goal. The MAGA wing of the court has shielded Trump from facing a jury of his peers for so long that it has become an act of election interference. It’s been over six months since the court was first petitioned on December 11 to address Trump’s ludicrous version of presidential immunity that embraces the right to assassinate his political rivals. These delays blow past the markers for prior cases of comparable importance. They are a lifeline for Trump to escape the final judgment of a jury before the next election, and a reminder that the American people lack the impartial judiciary we all deserve.
      Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, said he is “relieved” that the supreme court upheld the ban on domestic abusers possessing guns, writing on X that there was “absolutely no sane legal argument” for striking down the ban.Blumenthal added that Friday’s ruling was the court’s attempt “to try to clean up its own mess” after the “legal catastrophe” of the landmark ruling of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, in which the six conservative justices allowed handguns to be carried in public in most instances. Blumenthal added:
      While I welcome today’s correct decision, I remain fearful about the fate of future gun violence prevention laws in the hands of this ideologically inconsistent & extreme Court.
      While sifting through his work emails one February afternoon, Clyde Estes saw a message that dismayed him.“I started reading it and was just shocked,” recalled Estes, chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. “It’s something you don’t expect to see.”It relayed what Kristi Noem said at the state legislature just a few days prior. In her address at the state capitol, the second-term South Dakota governor blasted US immigration policy, saying that “invasion is coming over the southern border”.Noem alleged that tribal leaders in South Dakota were profiting off drug cartel activity. These remarks, and her controversial comments about Native children, have been met with staunch condemnation from Indigenous leaders, and have dredged up a bitter history between the tribes and the state.As a result, all nine of South Dakota’s federally recognized tribes, which cover more than 12% of the state, have now banned Noem from their reservations.If the governor attempts to enter the reservation, Estes said that tribal law enforcement would notify county sheriffs and ask her to voluntarily leave the reservation.“She would be charged with trespassing,” said Estes, calling the situation “very, very unfortunate”.
      We’re going to stand up to defend our people.
      Read the full story here: Native tribes on banning Kristi Noem from reservations: ‘She’d be charged with trespassing’Kamala Harris has released her own statement responding to the supreme court’s ruling upholding a federal ban preventing anyone placed under a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a gun.Harris’ statement echoes the one earlier distributed by the Biden campaign, where she says while she and Joe Biden “stand up to the gun lobby, Donald Trump bows down.”She notes that the Biden administration have passed “the most significant gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years” and have “stopped nearly 30,000 firearms sales to convicted domestic abusers”, adding:
      If Donald Trump returns to power, all that progress would be at risk.
      Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has doubled down on his accusations that the US is holding back weapons and ammunition from Israel in its war in Gaza.The Israeli leader caused a furious reaction in Washington this week after he posted a video on social media saying that it was “inconceivable” that the Biden administration had held up weapons shipments to Israel, and implied that Israel’s ability to prevail in the nine-month war with Hamas was being hampered as a result.The White House responded by cancelling a high-level meeting with Israeli officials on Iran.John Kirby, the White House’s national security adviser, strongly denied the claims and called Netanyahu’s comments “vexing”, “disappointing” and “incorrect”.Netanyahu, in an interview with Punchbowl News published this morning, said he had aired his criticisms because he “felt that airing it was absolutely necessary after months of quiet conversations that did not solve the problem.” He said:
      I raised this issue with Secretary Blinken. And I said that we are being told by our Defense Department officials that barely a trickle is coming in. He said, ‘Well, everything is in process. We’re doing everything to untangle it and to clear up the bottlenecks.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s what I expect to happen. Let’s make sure that it does happen.’ It must happen.
      The supreme court has upheld a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing firearms, in a decision cheered by Joe Biden, and supported by all justices on the conservative-dominated court, with the exception of Clarence Thomas. Kamala Harris, however, warned that the law was exactly the type of thing Donald Trump would go after, if elected president. Meanwhile, all signs point to a blockbuster week for the court beginning Wednesday. The justices will release more decisions that day, perhaps including cases on Trump’s immunity petition, whether cities can stop people from sleeping outside, and whether the Biden administration can require states to perform emergency abortions.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, has asked the supreme court to delay the start of his jail sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
      New York prosecutors are asking judge Juan Merchan to preserve parts of the gag order imposed on Trump in his business fraud trial.
      Trump’s lawyers are planning a legal offensive against part of his indictment over allegedly possessing and hiding classified documents, the Guardian can reveal.
      The supreme court is scheduled to release more opinions on Wednesday of next week, and chances are good that the justices will by then decide at least one of the cases concerning major constitutional questions that are pending before them.University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck has a rundown of the court’s unfinished business:Prominent on that list is Trump v United States, which is the former president’s request for immunity from the federal election meddling charges against him.Also outstanding is Idaho v United States, which concerns whether the Biden administration can require the state’s federally funded hospitals to carry out emergency abortions, despite the state’s strict ban on the procedure. There’s also City of Grant’s Pass v Johnson, which deals with whether municipalities can pass laws against people sleeping outside.In a statement distributed by Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump would present a threat to gun laws such as the one the supreme court upheld today, which bans domestic abusers from possessing firearms.Harris’ statement was markedly more political than the president’s, who instead focused on the importance of protecting domestic abuse victims. Here’s what she had to say:
      While President Biden and I stand up to the gun lobby, Donald Trump bows down. Trump has made clear he believes Americans should ‘get over’ gun violence, and we cannot allow him to roll back commonsense protections or appoint the next generation of Supreme Court justices. I have worked my entire career to protect women and children from domestic violence—from prosecuting abusers to supporting survivors. President Biden and I will never stop fighting for the rights of every American, including every survivor of domestic violence, to live free from the horror of gun violence. To continue that work, we must defeat Donald Trump in November.
      Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s presumptive opponent in the November presidential election, Donald Trump, remains under a gag order imposed by the judge in his business fraud case that prevents him from attacking witnesses, jurors and other players.The Associated Press reports that prosecutors have asked Juan Merchan, the judge who presided over the case, to maintain parts of the order ahead of Trump’s debate face-off with Biden scheduled for next Thursday.Here’s more:
      Prosecutors on Friday urged the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case to uphold provisions of a gag order that bar him from criticizing jurors and court staff, while agreeing to lift a restriction on his public statements about trial witnesses.
      In court papers filed Friday, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that portions of the gag order remained necessary given the Republican former president’s “singular history of inflammatory and threatening public statements,” as well as efforts by his supporters to “identify jurors and threaten violence against him.”
      “Since the verdict in this case, defendant has not exempted the jurors from his alarming rhetoric that he would have ‘every right’ to seek retribution as president against the participants in this trial as a consequence of his conviction because ’sometimes revenge can be justified,” the filing states.
      The gag order, issued in March, prohibited Trump from making or directing others to make public statements about witnesses, jurors and others connected to the case. It does not restrict comments about the judge, Juan M. Merchan, or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office prosecuted the case.
      Attorneys for Trump have called on the judge to lift the order following the culmination of his trial last month, which ended in his conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying records to cover up a potential sex scandal. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, is set to be sentenced on July 11.
      Joe Biden said the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing guns preserves “critical protections” for victims of abuse.“No one who has been abused should have to worry about their abuser getting a gun. As a result of today’s ruling, survivors of domestic violence and their families will still be able to count on critical protections, just as they have for the past three decades,” the president said.“Vice President Harris and I remain firmly committed to ending violence against women and keeping Americans safe from gun violence. We will continue to call on Congress to further strengthen support and protections for survivors and to take action to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing our communities apart.”Steve Bannon, a prominent ally to Donald Trump, has appealed to the supreme court to delay the beginning on his four month-prison sentence for contempt of Congress, the Associated Press reports.Bannon was ordered to report to prison by 1 July after being convicted nearly two years ago of charges related to defying a subpoena from the January 6 committee. He is now asking for the intervention of the nation’s highest court, which turned down a similar request from Peter Navarro, another former Trump White House adviser who was convicted of similar charges.Here’s more, from the AP:
      The request came after a federal appeals court panel rejected Bannon’s bid to avoid reporting to prison by July 1 to serve his four-month sentence. It was addressed to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in Washington, D.C.
      The high court swiftly denied a similar request from another Trump aide in March. Bannon’s request comes a week before the court is set to begin its summer recess.
      Bannon was convicted nearly two years ago of two counts of contempt of Congress: one for refusing to sit for a deposition with the Jan. 6 House Committee and the other for refusing to provide documents related to his involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
      Bannon has cast the case as politically motivated, and his attorney David Schoen has said the case raises “serious constitutional issues” that need to be examined by the Supreme Court.
      If Bannon goes to prison next month, he will likely have to serve his full sentence before the high court has the chance to review those questions, since the court is due to take its summer recess at the end of June, attorney Trent McCotter wrote in his emergency application.
      Attorney general Merrick Garland said the justice department will continue enforcing the federal law that bars domestic abusers from possessing guns, after the supreme court’s ruling today in United States v Rahimi.“The Justice Department will continue to enforce this important statute, which for nearly 30 years has helped to protect victims and survivors of domestic violence from their abusers. And we will continue to deploy all available resources to support law enforcement, prosecutors, courts, and victim advocates to address the pervasive problem of domestic violence,” Garland said in a statement.Here’s more:From the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, here’s more on the significance of the supreme court’s ruling today in United States v Rahimi, in which the justices upheld a law banning domestic abusers from carrying guns, while weighing in on a major 2022 decision that expanded the ability to carry weapons in public nationwide: The US supreme court has upheld a federal ban preventing anyone placed under a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a gun.The ruling in US v Rahimi, supported by eight justices to one, with Clarence Thomas dissenting, will leave in place legal protections against a major source of gun violence in America. Writing the opinion, the chief justice, John Roberts, said that individuals can be temporarily disarmed if they pose a “credible threat to the physical safety of another” without violating the second amendment to the constitution that allows the right to bear arms.“Since the founding, the nation’s firearm laws have included regulations to stop individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.The judgment will come as a relief to gun control advocates who had feared that the ability to disarm dangerous people might fall prey to the radical interpretation of the second amendment advanced by the court’s conservative supermajority. In the 2022 ruling New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, the six conservative justices allowed handguns to be carried in public in most instances.They said that any restrictions on ownership had to conform to the “history and tradition” of firearms regulations stretching back to the 18th century. Gun control groups feared that the ruling might be used to unravel America’s already lax regulations, with potentially disastrous consequences.The ruling in United States v Rahimi comes two years after the supreme court’s Bruen decision, in which the court’s conservative supermajority dramatically expanded the ability to carry weapons in public.But many of those same justices today found in Rahimi that the government could also take weapons away from domestic abusers. That opinion was supported by five of six conservatives, all of whom supported the ruling in Bruen. The court’s three liberals also signed on to Rahimi, with conservative justice Clarence Thomas the lone dissenter: More

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      Rightwing cases built on made-up stories keep making it to the US supreme court | Moira Donegan

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      The first of many lies at the center of Moore v United States, the major tax case that the supreme court decided on Thursday, was that the issue at stake was an existing tax law.Conservative movement lawyers had taken up the cause of Charles and Kathleen Moore, a Washington state couple who own a substantial stake in an India-based company that manufactures farm equipment. The Moores were given a one-time, $15,000 tax bill for their stake in the company under 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the law colloquially known as the Trump tax cut. To pay for the steep cuts to federal revenue, that bill included a tax on foreign assets held by American shareholders – hence the bill that the Moores received from the IRS.The Moores were nominally arguing that this provision was unconstitutional under the 16th amendment. But their argument was not confined to a narrow argument about that specific tax, because the case wasn’t really about the 2017 law at all. Rather, the Moores’ lawyers sought to use their case to drastically limit the scope of Congress’s taxation power, with an eye toward pre-emptively banning the wealth tax that has been proposed by the senator Elizabeth Warren.The 2017 provision, then, was a mere pretext: the case that came before the court was a much broader project, one that, by some estimates, would have unraveled as much as a third of the federal tax code.Ultimately, the court ruled 7-2 to uphold the tax, thereby preserving both the theoretical possibility of a future wealth tax and also much of the federal government’s funding structure. The majority opinion was authored by Brett Kavanaugh. Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, dissented, and would have thrown out the tax, narrowing congressional taxation power only to “realized income”. That interpretation has not carried the day – not yet.But the fact that the case came before the supreme court at all reflects a troubling trend in the conservative legal movement, aided by Republican-controlled lower courts: the advancement of cases that promise to promote rightwing policy priorities even when the alleged facts are demonstrably untrue. Because Moore v United States was based on another lie, too: the lie that the Moores have not received income from their investment in the Indian company. They have.The Moores’ case relies on the notion that the tax they faced is unconstitutional because they were minority shareholders without a major role in the operation of the company, who had not yet profited from their investment. Such are the facts as alleged by their lawyers. But these are not the facts in reality.In truth, the Moores invested much more money in the company than they initially claimed; Charles Moore, the husband, served as the director of its board for years. He traveled repeatedly to India to oversee it, and was reimbursed for that travel; he lent the company almost a quarter-million dollars and earned back interest. He seems to have worked closely with the founder of the company, a friend of his, to lower his stake in the company, so as to avoid the 2017 tax liability – and, perhaps, so as to make himself a more plausible plaintiff for a conservative movement legal vehicle.These lies did not persuade the court in this case. But Moore v United States is one of a growing number of high-profile, high-stakes lawsuits brought before the supreme court by the conservative legal movement that have turned out to be based on inaccuracies, falsehoods and outright deceptions as to the underlying facts that are presented by rightwing lawyers in their briefings.Some of these lie-based cases have had dramatic policy implications. In 303 Creative v Elenis, a case challenging a Colorado civil rights law that required companies to provide equal service to gay people, a website creator alleged that her religious freedom had been violated by the prospect of having to design wedding websites for same-sex couples, and cited a request for such a website she had received from a man named Stewart, who was planning to marry his partner, Mike.Only Stewart never asked for a wedding website: when the New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant contacted him, she discovered that the “Stewart” whose supposed request was at the center of the case was a straight man living in San Francisco, who had long been married to a woman; he was never going to marry a man named “Mike” let alone ask a bigoted religious extremist to make him a website in the process.“Somebody’s using false information in a supreme court filing document,” Stewart told Grant. No matter: the supreme court ruled in favor of the website designer anyway, thus dramatically limiting public accommodation non-discrimination protections in civil rights law.At times, the blatant disregard for facts on the part of the conservative legal movement – and the willingness to concoct stories of imaginary injuries in order to further cases that have conservative policy implications – has seemed to baffle and frustrate the court’s liberals. In her dissent in Kennedy v Bremerton, the so-called praying coach case, the justice Sonia Sotomayor included multiple photographs of the incidents in question – in which a Washington state high school football coach’s prayers before games were clearly public, coercive and made into a spectacle – to contradict the majority’s bold misrepresentation of the prayers as private and silent.The fabricated-facts trend has already appeared before the court once so far this term: in the mifepristone case. In a challenge to the FDA’s regulation of access to the abortion drug, a group of anti-choice doctors fabricated far-fetched claims of their own injury, based on scientifically illegitimate studies that have since been retracted, in order to try to take the drug away from abortion seekers. That case didn’t work, either: the court unanimously threw it out on standing grounds.But the fact that the case got all the way to the supreme court, with district and appellate judges either credulous of the false claims or indifferent to their veracity, says a lot about how far the conservative legal movement is willing to divorce its briefings from reality.It might be notable that this term, two cases based on fabricated claims were both thrown out in opinions authored by Kavanaugh. For figures so powerful and unaccountable as supreme court justices, psychologizing becomes necessary in imputing their motives, and Kavanaugh, perhaps more than any other justice in the conservative majority, is a deeply insecure man: he is aware of the stench of scandal and malfeasance that has attached to him since his confirmation, aware of the public perception that he is not the intellectual equal of some of his colleagues. His public statements evidence a deep and anxious desire to be liked.Perhaps this is why, though he doubtless shares the conservative legal movement’s policy agenda, he has been less willing to cooperate with their most transparent lies. He possesses, at least in some small degree, the only force that seems able to check the conservative justices’ impulses: shame.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More