President Trump referred to a bipartisan housing bill as a “yawn” on Monday, arguing that the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act is more important. “It’s so unimportant compared to the SAVE America Act,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “When I look at the bill, it’s a bill. When I look at…
President Donald Trump downplayed pressure to sign a bipartisan housing bill Monday, arguing that it’s “unimportant compared to the SAVE America Act.” Affordability remains a top issue heading into November’s midterm elections, and while the president has seen national gas prices decrease in recent weeks following a ceasefire in the Iran war, he’s also made […]
Katy Perry declined an invitation to perform at President Donald Trump's America250 celebrations at Cinquantenaire Park in Belgium, prompting a public rebuke from Ambassador Bill White. According to reporting by the Daily Beast, the invite-only event featured performances by Zac Brown Band and Alexis Wilkins, FBI Director Kash Patel's girlfriend and a country music artist. Perry was already contracted to headline Belgium's Werchter Boutique festival that same weekend, which was subsequently canceled due to bad weather. Belgium's U.S. ambassador criticized Perry before the crowd, "So we were gonna have Katy Perry. Who cares?" White told the crowd. He then made a crass joke about karma. In February, White had acknowledged Perry's festival contract but indicated organizers would attempt to secure her appearance anyway. He told a Belgian news outlet, Perry's contractual obligations prevented her from discussing other Belgian events until the concert sold out, leaving open the possibility she might perform the following evening.Watch the video below. Your browser does not support the video tag.
President Donald Trump's Federal Aviation Administration is shutting down flights at Reagan National Airport for 15 hours across two days to clear the skies for his Freedom 250 celebration.The FAA posted the warning on Monday on X, saying it has been coordinating with stakeholders "for months to help ensure the safe and efficient movement of air traffic during celebrations of America's 250th birthday, including the iconic flyovers and fireworks.""Flight operations at DCA are expected to be temporarily paused from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on July 3 and from noon to 11:59 p.m. on July 4 to support Independence Day events," the FAA wrote."These times are subject to change," the post added. "Travelers should check with their airline for the latest flight status."President Donald Trump established Freedom 250, a White House-backed commission, to organize the semiquincentennial celebrations. He wrote on Truth Social that he would personally launch "the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY."Pyrotecnico, the company behind the July 4 display, plans to fire roughly 851,000 fireworks from 10 sites — including eight barges on the Potomac River — over 40 minutes starting at 10:30 p.m. That would shatter the current Guinness World Record of 810,904 fireworks, set by a megachurch in the Philippines in 2016."Our main focus is to make this the most memorable fireworks display that this generation will have ever seen," Pyrotecnico CEO Stephen Vitale told NPR.Freedom 250 spokesperson Rachel Reisner told Axios the finale will "shatter world records and stand as the most spectacular firework display the world has ever seen."The July 4 program also includes flyovers by the Thunderbirds, the Blue Angels, the F-22 Raptor Demo Team and the Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II Demo Team — what Freedom 250 calls the first aerobatic demonstrations ever held over Washington.
CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel didn't sugarcoat President Donald Trump's Supreme Court setback, tracing it straight back to his refusal to accept the 2020 election.The court ruled 5-4 Monday in Watson v. Republican National Committee that states may count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive afterward, rejecting an RNC challenge Trump's Justice Department had backed. Trump called it a "tremendous loss."Gangel agreed it was a loss, but said Trump brought it on himself."So, is this a loss for President Trump? Yes," she said. "But big picture, he's obsessed with this. It is sort of a loss of his own making, because the underlying problem here is he doesn't want to admit he lost in 2020, so he's looking for fraud and corruption where there isn't."She noted the practice isn't partisan — Trump himself has voted by mail — and said it's "not about corruption or fraud."Gangel said his fixation is holding up a major bipartisan housing bill aimed at reining in costs, which she said had reached his desk, but that he won't sign it because he's so focused on curbing mail voting and passing his stalled election overhaul, the SAVE Act.In the Oval Office moments earlier, Trump said the housing bill "hasn't been sent to me yet" but was "coming." Next to his voting bill, he said, "just about everything is a big yawn."The decision set off fury among MAGA allies and came as the justices also turned away his E. Jean Carroll appeal.Former Trump aide Hogan Gidley pushed back, calling the housing measure "a political win" the president would "take a victory lap" on.
The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s bid to remove the Fed’s Lisa Cook for now but expanded his power over other agencies. Hear what the rulings mean for the Fed’s future on the Big Take podcast. (Source: Bloomberg)
There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law.
Justices rule that Trump cannot fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook
Trump slams Supreme Court ruling allowing late mail-in ballots, demands Congress pass the SAVE Act requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship.