House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against President Donald Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship, claiming it jeopardized national security. Conservatives were broadly outraged over Tuesday’s ruling, which ruled 6-3 that Trump’s executive order was unlawful and 5-4 that it was unconstitutional, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump nominee, joining […]
The Supreme Court gutted one of President Trump's signature policies, rejecting his effort to end birthright citizenship. Jan Crawford has more details.
The Supreme Court justices weighed in on whether states can ban transgender athletes from competing in female school and college sports. Jan Crawford has more.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) lashed out at far-right rebels in his caucus as their plan to force passage of the SAVE America Act crumbled around them on Tuesday, CNN reported.The SAVE America Act, pushed aggressively by President Donald Trump for months, would add draconian new requirements to voter registration and verification, billed as proof-of-citizenship requirements, that would make it vastly more difficult for millions of people to vote. It doesn't have the votes to pass in the Senate.The plan, spearheaded by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and backed by figures like Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), was to pass a rule attaching the legislation to the must-pass defense spending bill, and play chicken with the Senate to force them to adopt it or let Pentagon funding lapse. However, 14 House Republicans crossed the aisle to oppose the rule, blowing up the plan and leaving the House floor paralyzed.According to the report, while Johnson watched the votes come in against him, "the speaker walked up to two of the lawmakers voting against him with a stark warning," telling Luna and Burchett "that they were wrong, they don’t get it and that their votes would lead to embarrassment, according to three sources familiar with the remarks."The Republicans didn't shift their votes, and Luna remained defiant in conversation with reporters, saying, “The fact that I’m being singled out because I know procedure — I’m not stupid. I’m going to fight on behalf of the American people. They’re saying they won’t, so now that you saw what happened on the floor.”All of this comes as the Trump administration, under pressure by a court order, quietly scraps a major proof-of-citizenship database controlled by the Department of Homeland Security, blowing up a major provision of the SAVE America Act that would have required states to use it.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down federal limits on how much political parties may spend in coordination with candidates, handing party committees a major win and reshaping campaign-finance rules ahead of the midterms.Why it matters: Freed from the caps, party committees can now spend without limit alongside their candidates — making them a far more powerful magnet for the big-dollar money that's flooded into super PACs over the past 15 years.Driving the news: In a 6–3 decision with a majority opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court held that the coordinated party expenditure limits violate the First Amendment.The decision overturns a 25-year-old precedent that had upheld the same limits.The intrigue: The decision comes at a time when insurgent anti-establishment candidates have garnered success in both parties.Supporters of striking down Congress' limits on coordination have said the guardrails weaken parties while super PACs and other outside groups have become dominant players, especially after the court's landmark 2010 Citizens United decision.Critics say removing the caps could let major donors evade the few remaining anti-corruption safeguards, which is a stepping stone to allowing PACs to directly coordinate with candidates.The decision could make party committees more attractive vehicles for donor money in competitive races.What they're saying: "More speech is generally better than less speech," Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the ruling brings about an old era of corruption: The "Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check."President Trump praised the ruling on Truth Social, calling it "A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and, more importantly, The First Amendment!" His administration had declined to defend the law in court.Catch up quick: The case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, was brought by two Republican committees, Vice President Vance and former Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot.They argued the law prevented party committees from coordinating effectively with their own candidates on core political speech.The ruling is the latest in a line of Supreme Court campaign-finance decisions narrowing the government's power to restrict political spending.
Republican-appointed Justice Clarence Thomas tore into transgenderism as a "lie to the public" in his concurrence on the Supreme Court's decision to uphold state-level policies restricting girls' sports to biological females.
The Supreme Court decision on Little v. Hecox out of Idaho and West Virginia v. B.P.J. allows states to do what's right.
Congress is not powerless to stop the worst aspects of birthright citizenship.
In an apparent admission of defeat, the Trump administration is dismantling the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a controversial tool at the Department of Homeland Security to verify people's citizenship that they had been hoping to run every registered voter in the country through.The news was broken on X by ProPublica reporter Jen Fifield on Tuesday.It comes after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a judge in Washington, D.C., who has shut down a number of President Donald Trump's extralegal schemes, issued an order further prohibiting the use of SAVE as a violation of data privacy laws."The revamped tool allowed officials to check entire voter rolls for noncitizens, using partial or full Social Security numbers," wrote Fifield, noting that prior reporting from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune "revealed that DHS had rushed it into use before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information," with the result that "hundreds of voters had been falsely flagged as potential noncitizens."This system was integral to the SAVE America Act, the controversial legislation pushed by Trump and Republican hardliners in Congress to curtail voting rights. Among much else, the law would have required all voter rolls in the country to be checked through the SAVE database."It's unclear if that provision will survive now," wrote Fifield.In a further indignity, she noted, even with all of the false positives being flagged by the system, SAVE "hasn’t validated President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that millions of noncitizens are registered to vote" for the time it was in use.All of this comes as the SAVE America Act itself hit yet another dead end in Congress, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) failing in his attempt to pass a rule tying it to the national defense budget bill and leaving the House floor paralyzed.