The New Republic

“This is Citizens United 2.0,” Representative Greg Casar said Tuesday about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing political party campaign committees to coordinate directly with campaigns without a cap on spending. Republicans praised the decision, while Democrats issued dire warnings about the fate of democracy.

But behind the partisan divide, there’s an interesting disagreement about what, exactly, the ruling will do: Some analysts say this decision could weaken the power PACs have over elections, making political parties the dominant spending force. Unfortunately for Democrats, though, the decision will probably heighten a fundraising advantage Republicans already have this year.

Then-Senator JD Vance, then-Representative Steve Chabot, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, first brought National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission to federal court in 2022. They argued that the court should overrule its 2001 decision restricting the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates—particularly via committees like the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, or House and Senate campaign committees. The petitioners argued that these limits violated the First Amendment.

Due to Tuesday’s ruling in favor of Vance and his associates, political parties can now both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds—giving them an advantage over PACs, which can raise unlimited funds but cannot coordinate directly with candidates.

Super PACs have become a dominant force in campaign spending since 2010, when the Supreme Court struck down caps on independent spending by corporations in Citizens United. That decision gave corporations immense power to influence elections, but with the important caveat that super PACs aren’t able to coordinate with campaigns. (Campaigns have found creative ways to get around this, namely by putting “red boxes” on their websites that instruct PACs how to spend their money without directly communicating with them.) Super PACs will remain important forces in elections. But after Tuesday’s decision, political parties may once again have an advantage over super PACs.

Democrats are concerned about both the short- and long-term impacts of the decision. In the short term, they say, this could deal a blow to vulnerable House and Senate candidates, since the RNC has a major fundraising advantage over the DNC. At the end of May, the RNC reported its highest-ever cash-on-hand total, $125 million. In comparison, the DNC had just $14.4 million on hand and was $18 million in debt.

On the Senate side, candidates in competitive races like Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio may face better-funded opponents this fall. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “frontline” candidates, incumbents running in swing districts, could face a similar challenge from their Republican opponents. The ruling could throw a wrench into the Democratic Party’s confidence that they will be able to retake the House, and perhaps the Senate, this fall.

In a statement, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, Chair Suzan DelBene, and DNC Chair Ken Martin downplayed the threat to Democratic candidates. “In November, voters will reject Republicans’ toxic agenda and efforts to rig the system and weaken our democracy by electing a Democratic House and Senate majority,” they wrote.

In the long term, Democrats say the ruling will make elections more corrupt and flooded with dark money. Casar called the decision an example of the “hyperpartisan donor-purchased Supreme Court” reversing one of the landmark campaign finance wins of the post-Watergate era. “It’s essentially legalizing corruption in our political system,” he said.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, had a similar view. “Republicans would get laughed out of Congress if they tried to repeal the few remaining guardrails against dark money and special interest influence,” he wrote in a statement. “So instead, Republicans run to their captured Supreme Court to do the democracy-damaging work for them.”

President Trump’s 927-page 2025 financial disclosure shows that he made over $2 billion during his first year back in the White House, thanks to cryptocurrency, foreign real estate, stock trading, and more.

The disclosure, released on Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, revealed that more than half of those earnings come from the president’s various cryptocurrency endeavors. He took in $526 million in token sales from World Liberty Financial, the crypto group run by his sons Eric and Donald Jr., and $635 million from a license agreement with a company connected with his $TRUMP meme coin.

Critics noted that the wealth from the meme coin in particular wasn’t trickling down to any of the regular people who invested in it.

“If you invested $10,000 in Trump coin on January 20th, 2025, it would be worth $415 today,” liberal podcaster Chris Mowrey wrote Tuesday on X. “You lost everything. He made half a billion.”

Trump also raked in nearly $60 million from licensing fees for foreign real estate projects in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Bucharest, Vietnam, the Philippines, Oman, and Scotland. He saw nearly $80 million in earnings last year from his Mar-a-Lago resort.

The president made money in the stock market as well, buying or selling a whopping 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly like Nvidia and Intel. His initial self-reporting of his trading last year showed only 800 transactions—way less than what he actually did. He also received over $350,000 in “gifts and travel reimbursements”—Super Bowl tickets, World Cup tickets, NASCAR tickets—from wealthy individuals trying to curry favor with him.

The president maintains that he has no active role or conflicts of interest in managing his ever-increasing wealth. He was asked to respond to criticism that he was “profiting off the presidency” on Wednesday morning.

“Well, you know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money, and a lotta cash, and I give it to institutions.”

Q: Critics say you're profiting off the presidency

TRUMP: I'm profiting because the stock market is going up. Everybody is profiting. Thank you President Trump. pic.twitter.com/3KrZsB1yJc

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

The primaries on Tuesday in Colorado weren’t a sweeping victory for the Democratic left like last week’s in New York, where three very progressive candidates won, knocking out two incumbent members of Congress along the way. But the defeats of Representative Diana DeGette and Senator Michael Bennet in his gubernatorial bid and the strong challenge to incumbent Senator John Hickenlooper are the latest signs of a shift happening across the country: It’s no longer enough for Democratic politicians to just vote the right way on key issues. The party base is looking for fighters and disrupters—and will cast aside solid politicians who they don’t think will aggressively battle Donald Trump, MAGA, and right-wing billionaires.

Unlike New York, where there were three House candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and effectively running as a slate, Colorado’s primaries were more ideologically complicated. Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Senator Bernie Sanders, and other progressive leaders and groups both in Colorado and across the country, fairly easily defeated DeGette, who has represented the Denver area since 1997. Kiros will likely defeat the longtime incumbent by double digits, a result no one would have anticipated a few months ago.

State Senator Julie Gonzales, who was not endorsed by the DSA but had the support of many progressive groups in the state, lost to Hickenlooper but received more than 45 percent of the vote, an unusually high number when facing an incumbent senator.

Attorney General Phil Weiser won comfortably in the gubernatorial primary over Bennet, who had been considered the heavy front-runner until recently. Weiser isn’t much more liberal than Bennet but positioned himself as more anti-Trump. He hammered Bennet for his votes to confirm several of Trump’s executive branch nominees last year and won the backing of the state’s Indivisible chapter.

It’s normal to have multiple candidates seeking an open governorship (incumbent Jared Polis is term-limited), so Weiser’s decision to take on Bennet wasn’t unusual or surprising. But House Democratic incumbents rarely face strong primary challenges, and Democratic senators almost never do. And it’s not as if Hickenlooper or DeGette are Joe Manchin–style centrists. They strongly backed Joe Biden’s agenda and have opposed most of Trump’s. DeGette is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. While neither of them has been a leading critic of Israel, they haven’t been vocally pro-Israel like Representative Dan Goldman, who was defeated last week in New York.

So why did DeGette and Hickenlooper get primary challengers, and why were those challenges so popular with voters? How did a man (Bennet) who has voted against nearly all of Trump’s proposals in Washington lose a contest over who would be the most anti-Trump?

For the same reasons Mamdani won the Democratic primary in New York last year, Graham Platner won in Maine earlier this year, Abdul El-Sayed has surged in Michigan Senate polls, and other progressive candidates are gaining ground and winning around the country. Democratic voters are mad at party leaders for not defeating Trump in 2024 and then last year having to be coaxed by the base into aggressively opposing him. They are also curious if newer politicians will do a better job than those from the party establishment in fighting MAGA. Those two factors provide an opening for challenges to incumbents and front-runners, even those with fairly liberal voting records.

“A big difference in this race is, what’s your approach to the Trump administration? Are you committed to fighting back, standing for our rights? Or, as Sen. Bennet has said, do you want to support some of these Trump administration Cabinet picks because you think maybe it’ll get you a better relationship?” Weiser told Deseret News in a preelection interview.

I know there’s a lot of talk about how Democratic voters increasingly like socialism and hate the Israeli government. The left-wing candidates have something of a playbook: Call for Medicare for All and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement; declare what Israel has done in Gaza a genocide; bash the outsize role of billionaires and corporations in American politics.

But these primaries are not simply ideological referendums. Many insurgent candidates don’t identify themselves as socialists or even progressives. The Denver DSA chapter is nowhere near as organized and powerful as the one in New York City. The Gaza war isn’t a huge issue in some races that upstarts are winning, such as the Maine primary.

I suspect that Kiros (and New York’s Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier) won many voters who aren’t die-hard democratic socialists but rather are traditional Democrats who want to see if a fresh face in Washington might be more effective than the kind of people they’ve been sending to Congress for a long time. And politicians like Hickenlooper, DeGette, and New York’s Adriano Espaillat are vulnerable both because they have been in office for a long time and because they haven’t been fighting the right in high-profile ways like Sanders or Senator Elizabeth Warren.

If you were trying to cast for traditional liberals who vote the right way on most issues but are entirely forgettable and rarely lead on progressive causes, it would be hard to choose a better trio than DeGette, Bennet, and Hickenlooper. In writing this article, I struggled to recall anything particularly good or bad that any of them had done on Capitol Hill. Do you remember that Bennet ran for president in 2020? I had forgotten.

My guess is that many liberals in very blue Denver feel they can have a representative like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not just a progressive but a prominent, fiery one. In the run-up to the primary, DeGette emphasized her support for Medicare for All and abolishing ICE. But she hasn’t been a high-profile advocate of those ideas—or really anything else.

“A scandal-free and reliably Democratic-voting incumbent losing in her primary basically for being too ‘establishment’ and not being strident enough against Republicans would strike me as an important moment, suggesting that what happened in New York last week is a national phenomenon,” University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket wrote in his Substack newsletter on the eve of the election.

The boring normalness of Bennet, DeGette, and Hickenlooper (and the lack of Mamdani-like progressive presence) is why these primaries were so important. They are more representative of how the Democratic Party is changing than New York’s races last week. The Democratic base is angry. Democratic politicians can channel that anger against Trump—or it will be channeled against them.

E. Jean Carroll is wasting no time collecting the $5.8 million President Trump has to pay her after the Supreme Court refused to hear his effort to overturn his defamation verdict.

Following the court’s decision Monday, Carroll immediately moved to collect from the bond Trump deposited in the court’s registry. Carroll is requesting the $5 million ordered in the jury verdict in the defamation case, as well as nearly $800,000 in interest due to the delayed payment.

But even though the Supreme Court is supposed to be the end of the line, the president is still trying to delay paying up.

Trump should have no ability to delay the court decision, as not a single justice registered a dissent. But he has difficulty accepting when things don’t go his way, especially in his second term as president. After the court turned him down Monday, Trump crashed out on Truth Social.

“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” Trump posted.

“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump added.

Future presidents and candidates hopefully won’t have a long, dragged out case of sexual assault against them where they refuse to admit wrongdoing and repeatedly defame their accuser. Trump has made history in multiple ways as president, including a refusal to just take the L and move on. It’s not like he can’t afford the payout, anyway.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 1 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump lost a big one when the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in a blockbuster ruling on Tuesday. But the way the ruling came down strongly suggests we’re heading into a much longer battle over this going forward. In that regard, MAGA’s furious reaction to the ruling was deeply unnerving. As many pointed out on social media, getting rid of birthright citizenship is going to become akin to Roe v. Wade for the right, especially the MAGA right. How should liberals and Democrats proceed?

We’re talking about all of it with Raul Pinto, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council. Raul, good to have you on.

Raul Pinto: Thanks, Greg. Good to be on. Quite a day.

Sargent: So the Supreme Court ruled by six to three against Trump’s executive order ending automatic citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. Five justices upheld the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. Brett Kavanaugh voted with them, but not on the constitutional argument—he effectively said Congress can theoretically change this with legislation. So only five justices are with us on the constitutional argument. Good, but not good enough. Raul, what’s your immediate reaction to how this happened?

Pinto: Yeah, I would put it as a five-four decision, because it’s a razor-thin margin, right? And as you’re saying, five justices actually said that this was enshrined in the Constitution, that birthright citizenship is actually part of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it’s very discouraging to see that four other justices didn’t agree with that, and that at the end of the day, we may have to battle this again.

Sargent: So Trump and MAGA absolutely exploded in rage over this. Trump said that Congress can now act to end birthright citizenship, which is false, since five justices say it’s protected by the Constitution. But I want to read what MAGA personality Matt Walsh said:

“Now that SCOTUS has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement, militarize the border, mass deportations, round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it. Use whatever force is necessary.”

Whatever force is necessary—Raul, that’s a straight-up threat of mass violence, is it not?

Pinto: Yeah. And I do think that the concept of birthright citizenship as established in the Constitution—it’s historical. The decision today was based on historical principles and how the Fourteenth Amendment came about. And so I do find that those views are very extreme, and hopefully cooler heads prevail. But we know that that hasn’t always been the case—i.e., January 6.

Sargent: Right. I think Matt Walsh is essentially saying pretty explicitly that MAGA doesn’t give a shit about the Constitution, and especially the Fourteenth Amendment. They really have special disdain for the Fourteenth Amendment for all sorts of reasons. He’s essentially saying, screw the Constitution, let’s just use mass violence to, quote-unquote, protect the country against invaders.

Pinto: It’s sad that it’s being approached in this particular way. The decision today is rooted in historical precedent as to how the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted, as well as trying to correct some of America’s darkest periods, like the Dred Scott decision. It allowed—the descendants of slaves to become U.S. citizens, as well as Wong Kim Ark, the decision which allowed a descendant of Chinese immigrants to become a U.S. citizen as well.

Sargent: Well, here’s Stephen Miller:

“One of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court. American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.”

Let’s talk about how deranged that is. Immigrants are not obliterating us. He treats that as a given. It’s complete fantasy. How does he think people become Americans? He personally is descended from people who immigrated here and were attacked with very similar language.

But, Raul, most important, I think this sets the stage for drastic action. Remember, Miller was already urging Trump to defy the courts if this situation is tantamount to national self-destruction. Surely Miller will expect Trump to do that here, yes?

Pinto: I don’t want to get into Stephen Miller’s head. I really don’t. But what I can say, right, is that immigrants are definitely not ruining the United States. And as a matter of fact, birthright citizenship was still a thing in the first Trump administration and the world didn’t end. And immigrant contributions continued throughout the darkest periods of the administration and beyond.

And so one of the interesting things that it’s important to know is the impact that this decision has on those children that would have been targeted by the executive order. It would have created a second-class system for them.

They wouldn’t have been eligible for Social Security numbers, passports, or any proof that they actually belong to a certain nation. And that’s also something that’s addressed by Justice Roberts.

Sargent: And it’s really good that he addressed that. Because I think at bottom, what MAGA really wants is that two-tiered system. They really want to end the Constitution’s guarantee of equality. That to them is really the big kahuna—ending equality. They want a hierarchical system.

What they want is a large subpool of stateless and rightless people that they can target with state violence. I think that’s the essence of this. And I think it’s good that Justice Roberts made it clear that that was off the table.

Pinto: It is why I think it’s important that the court today said that it is a constitutional right. And as you’re saying, that comes with certain weaknesses. And yes, it was a flimsy majority, but we do have decades of precedent that would have to be overturned for that to happen. I’m still worried. But today’s decision was important, and I think it was positive.

Sargent: One of the core tactics that this administration is using, that MAGA is using to try to ethnically cleanse the country, is to use whatever legal lever they can to make life fundamentally unlivable for immigrants. What they were really hoping for was to be able to create this new second-class caste that could then be subjected to all sorts of maltreatment and discrimination, and wouldn’t have any legal protections of pretty much any kind. Let’s listen to MAGA personality Tim Pool.

Tim Pool (voiceover): Kagan, Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson—we know exactly what they think, and they want to burn this country to the ground. Unfortunately, Trump won’t make the moves needed, Congress won’t make the moves needed, and Republicans should pack the court right now. Thirteen federal district circuits, thirteen Supreme Court justices. And Trump can add a good old four more conservative court members, which guarantees we will never lose another ruling again. But he won’t. So I can only say this: without men of action, your nation be damned. We do not have men of action.

Sargent: Note how he says they want to burn the country down—meaning you and me want to burn the country down, because we want to uphold birthright citizenship as a constitutional mechanism. And note how he says only men of action can save us. He’s basically saying we need Caesar, isn’t he?

Pinto: It’s such a dog whistle, right? But it is also extremely important to point out that many of the children of immigrants who would have been subject to the executive order—America is all they’re going to know as a home. And they are going to be rooting for the U.S. in the World Cup and part of the social fabric of this country.

And so I find it troubling that that is the rhetoric that happens on the other side, because they can become as patriotic as you and I and uphold those American values that we hold here.

Sargent: Right. America is the only country that many of these kids are ever going to know.

Pinto: Absolutely. Absolutely. And not only that, but ending birthright citizenship would have again left them without a real home, despite the fact that their parents may have been in the country for a long period of time. The Fourteenth Amendment is very clear. And Justice Roberts says, we are grounding this decision on the Constitution. And that’s important.

Sargent: Yes, it was really important that he said that. I just want to return to something that you said earlier, which really resonated with me, which is that Donald Trump has actually succeeded in, quote-unquote, securing the border. He’s used a lot of tactics that I think are obviously heinous and indefensible. But what’s interesting to me is that MAGA can’t even accept that as a victory.

Trump constantly says he’s reduced border crossings to zero or whatever—that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s true that he’s gotten them way down. And MAGA can’t say to themselves, well, we won on that, we got what we wanted, because they need to feel like they’re being invaded by immigrants at all times.

And here’s why. Their movement isn’t actually just about securing the border. It’s about ethnically cleansing the country. They want mass removals. They want to roll back the demographic evolution of this country and reverse-engineer it in some sense. And that’s why they can’t accept Trump securing the border as a victory, because it doesn’t count as ethnic cleansing, which is the thing they really want.

Pinto: Well, you also have to remember that this decision comes on the heels of two other immigration decisions that went in the Trump administration’s way. One of them limited access to asylum at the border, and the other allows the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people.

So the general rhetoric that the world is going to end because we have birthright citizenship is just incorrect. Or that this court is by any means sort of favorable to immigrants because of a birthright citizenship decision that is actually rooted in the Constitution—that’s just incorrect.

Sargent: Right. They can’t even accept the ending of TPS in effect as a victory, and the ending of asylum in effect as a victory. They want those things, but they don’t constitute the dramatic mass removals, the enormous ethnic purging that they really want. I think that’s the essence of this.

Pinto: Yeah. And I would say that, exactly what you’re saying—if you’re ending birthright citizenship, there are thousands of children who would have been undocumented and potentially subject to immigration enforcement with their family members. And so that is obviously problematic, because now you’re expanding the universe of folks who would be subject to removal.

Sargent: That’s exactly what they want to do. So let’s just close this out. What do Democrats and liberals do now? I mean, if you look at this situation, it’s now clear that this is going to take on the cast of a major cause—something like targeting Roe v. Wade the way the right did for decades. They are clearly going to set in their sights the ending of birthright citizenship. Do you think that that’s a major thing that we should take seriously, and how should we proceed?

Pinto: Yeah, as we said at the top, it’s concerning that the margin of victory was that small. I do think that precedent and history is on our side, and it will be going forward. But obviously we are concerned, and there are concerns with that.

I would say that ending birthright citizenship is not popular among the American population. Most Americans support birthright citizenship. So I take some solace in that. I take some solace in the fact that Justice Roberts, who sided with the majority on the other cases that went the other way on immigration—I would say that if he’s able to think through this issue and see it as a constitutional matter, I think that’s important. And if precedent continues to be important to the U.S. Supreme Court, then we will continue to get good rulings on this issue.

That doesn’t mean that we won’t see attempts to try to do this through legislative action. But it is a constitutional issue now. Granted, I will give you the fact that there could be a different interpretation and someone can come in and agree with the other four judges.

But it is important, then, for that majority of individuals who is in favor of keeping birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil, that we are expressing those views to Congress so that that doesn’t happen. Because I do think that at the end of the day, Americans are not going to stand for that.

Sargent: I’m going to choose to be optimistic about this as well. We won today, and that’s a big deal. Raul Pinto, great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Pinto: Likewise, Greg. Thank you.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling giving President Donald Trump a free hand in firing government regulators is less about Trump than it is about President Woodrow Wilson. In the text of Trump v. Slaughter and its various concurrences and dissents, I count 15 Trump mentions compared to 23 for Wilson. Partly that’s because no brief to enlarge presidential power will benefit from too close a look at the crazy bastard slumped in the Oval Office today. But mostly it’s because the high court wants to repudiate a set of good-government principles associated with the Progressive era and articulated in some detail by the twenty-eighth president. In the right’s political typology, Wilson is the snake in the garden of limited government who proffered the shiny red apple of the administrative state. Trump v. Slaughter is meant to drive a stake through Wilson’s undead heart.

These days, liberals aren’t too crazy about Woodrow Wilson, either, because of his appalling white supremacist views and his 1913 directive to segregate Black and white employees in the federal workforce, which led to wholesale firings and demotions of Black employees and was a catastrophe for Washington’s fledgling Black middle class. Princeton took Wilson’s name off its School of Public and International Affairs in 2020, and in 2022 the District of Columbia took Wilson’s name off a high school built atop the ruins of Reno City, a Black neighborhood that federal authorities wiped off the map in the 1930s. I can’t quarrel with either decision. But life is complicated, and Wilson also helped bequeath a valuable legacy of government policy that drew on expertise and dispassionate analysis. Liberals take that legacy for granted, but conservatives have lately made that hard to do.

Liberal distaste for Wilson pales in comparison to conservatism’s loathing of the man. Wilson “ushered in a new view of government,” Charlie Kirk said in a February 2025 podcast. “That we’re gonna have these in-de-pen-dent agencies that exist regardless of political pressure.… He wanted to have these agencies be permanent. A tech-no-cratic class untouchable by the sovereign, untouchable by we the people.” The right’s Wilson-hating cult is about 20 years old and was first popularized by the former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. “I have to tell you,” Beck said at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.… He gives us the Fed.” (True.) “He gives us the income tax.” (That was really more President William Howard Taft, a Republican.) “Prohibition. So, he took away the alcohol.” (False. Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, and then Congress overrode him.)

Wilson did much less to invent the administrative state than his enemies profess. Only two major agencies were created on his watch. By contrast, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, created the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Corporations (forerunner to the Federal Trade Commission), the Food and Drug Administration, the Labor Department, and the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. In truth, the administrative state evolved, starting in the nineteenth century, alongside the growing power of industry, as a necessary check on that power.

What makes Wilson a favored target is that, as a political scientist, he wrote favorably about such developments. In his 1886 essay “The Study of Administration,” Wilson observed that democratic governance “does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping necessarily consists in cooking dinner with one’s own hands.” (Before you call this aristo presumption, recall that Wilson was writing at a time when middle-class families frequently employed full-time cooks.) “The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens.” In much the same way, civil servants with expertise in various technical matters should be given leeway to make regulatory decisions, with political appointees and the public, of course, looking over their shoulders.

Trump v. Slaughter repudiates that notion as antidemocratic. Previously, a subset of regulatory agencies called independent agencies, acting in quasi-judicial fashion and with top presidential appointees (typically a five-person panel) affiliated with both political parties, was protected from excessive partisan interference by legislative language stipulating that the president could remove these top officials only for cause. Nobody, including the high court, thought these independent agencies acted independent of politics. Because a majority of top slots were reserved for the president’s party, a Democratic Federal Trade Commission or National Labor Relations Board or Merit Systems Protection Board ruled differently than a Republican one. But the differences were somewhat muted and these independent agencies operated within an atmosphere of comparative professionalism; outright partisan hackery was frowned upon. And because the members had fixed (usually five-year) terms, there were no opportunities for empire building along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign at the FBI.

That world is now gone, because under Trump v. Slaughter the president can fire any of these officials if he opposes their politics or suspects them of disloyalty. The same groveling demonstrations of loyalty to Trump that we see Cabinet secretaries put on nauseating display in photo ops will now be required of agencies tasked with protecting consumers, workers, investors, voters, and so on.

What has this got to do with Woodrow Wilson? Justice Neil Gorsuch—the biggest Wilson-hater on the high court—explains in his concurring opinion to Slaughter that Wilson belonged to a group of scholars who, inspired by what Gorsuch sneeringly describes as “the perceived competence of the Prussian bureaucracy,” called for bringing to American government “the utmost possible efficiency.” Central to this project was the hiring of scientific and technical experts and shielding them from excessive political control. But “those in charge of these new agencies often became very difficult to dislodge.”

No, they didn’t. They served fixed terms, and whenever a president of the opposite party came in, they lost majority status. Gorsuch’s real beef with independent agencies isn’t that they operate beyond presidential control but that they exist at all:

Independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the Nation’s affairs. They regulate our businesses, and our financial markets. They set the rules for the internet and airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. They determine what toys our children will play with and how we interact with each other at work.… Often, these agencies do all this with hardly any statutory guidance, based on broad grants of legislative authority.

Translation: Repeal the Progressive era!

The majority opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, mentions Wilson by name only to acknowledge Wilson’s firing of a Portland, Oregon, postmaster, which occasioned the Supreme Court’s decision in Myers v. United States (1926), which voided a statutory requirement that Wilson had to secure Senate approval for such dismissals, which the high court argues should have prevented independent agencies from enjoying the job protection the Supreme Court now invalidates. But Wilson and the Progressive movement are doubtless what Roberts has in mind when he writes, “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection)’ does not deliver us to a promised land of technocratic governance [italics mine].” The high court wants you to know that no such techno-paradise exists. It’s uniquely galling to be lectured on the phoniness of expertise by a legal expert whom the president cannot fire.

But it would be untrue to say the high court rejects Wilson’s vision of technocratic governance in every nonjudicial context. On the same day it handed down Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court also handed down Trump v. Cook, which says the president can’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook because … I still can’t understand why not. I draw some comfort from the fact that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion to Trump v. Slaughter (joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson), can’t understand it, either:

For most agencies, the majority here says, removal protections like the FTC’s make the President’s job “impossible” and so are unlawful. For [the Fed], however, the Court recognizes that the Founders were acutely aware “of the calamities that could arise from even the ‘suspicion’ of political manipulation of monetary policy” and that they therefore “guaranteed [such agencies] independence from Presidential control.” … What is unclear is why these principles should be limited only to agencies, like the Federal Reserve, that in some respects influence “monetary policy.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, coming from the opposite ideological direction, writes in her dissent to Trump v. Cook that she too can’t figure out this inconsistency:

The Court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter, which we also decide today. Slaughter announces a categorical rule: Whenever “an agency ‘executes’ a congressional mandate against private parties, it exercises executive power” and must be subject to plenary executive control—“no ifs, ands, or quasis about it.” Yet here, the Court claims a special exception “sanctioned by history” and based on the Federal Reserve’s role in setting monetary policy. How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?

Answer: It can’t. As is so often the case, it falls to the women to call bullshit on the men. But Wilson gets the last laugh because, as Glenn Beck rightly pointed out, Wilson signed into law the legislation that created the Federal Reserve. When it comes to protecting your 401(k), we’re all Wilsonians.

The United States is bracing for another heat wave. More than 180 million people across the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast were under “major” or “extreme” heat warnings as of Tuesday morning. Temperatures are expected to peak above 100 degrees on the East Coast over the holiday weekend as a high pressure “heat dome” traps hot, humid air in place. The heat index, which takes humidity into account, is predicted to hit as high as 115 degrees in some places.

The elephant in the room here—the force making record-breaking heat a more common occurrence—is climate change. Last week’s deadly European heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without the greenhouse effect of fossil fuel emissions, concluded a group of researchers from Europe and the U.S. But coverage of that heat wave in U.S. media barely mentioned climate change, referring only vaguely to the fact that the European continent is “warming faster than any other,” per CBS’s evening broadcast. The media watchdog FAIR noted that NBC, CBS, and ABC news reports all “failed to mention climate change even in passing.”

This is not just a media failure. Fearing backlash from swing voters and Republicans, Democrats have largely stopped mentioning climate change too. A recent analysis by the nonprofit newsroom Inside Climate News found that mentions of climate change in congressional Democrats’ press releases started to taper off in 2022, following the by now received wisdom among party pollsters and pundits that talking about rising temperatures is a political death wish certain to turn off would-be Democratic voters. As I’ve written before, this approach is somewhat baffling considering that Democrats talked a lot about climate change in an election they won, in 2020, then lost an election four years later where they mostly avoided the subject.

Climate-fueled heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods are becoming an unavoidable reality for tens of millions across the United States. Refusing to talk about climate change in that context means refusing to engage with the world as it is. If left-of-center politicians and ostensibly fact-based news organizations aren’t willing to accurately interpret our climate-changed reality, however, the right will be more than happy to do it for them.

Over the last few years, GOP politicians have chalked up deadly wildfires to Democratic mismanagement and Jewish space lasers. After flash flooding in Valencia, Spain, killed 229 people in 2024, the far-right party Vox capitalized on widespread frustration with the “political class” to pin the disaster on the country’s center-left governing coalition in Madrid. Much of the blame, meanwhile, lay with Valencia’s regional government, where Vox had just recently served as part of a governing coalition that undermined disaster response and emergency planning. During the recent European heat wave, when an estimated 1,300 people died from heat-related causes, right-wingers rushed—without evidence—to blame “degrowth” and climate concerns for the continent’s lack of air conditioning. Degrowth is, notably, not the law of the land in Europe, where air conditioning is not illegal and where the European Commission has recently dismantled several of its modest climate policy commitments.

People are baking to death in Europe for the same reason that whole towns are being zapped off the map by wildfires in California, and that home insurance is becoming a luxury in places now being regularly inundated by floods that should only happen every thousand years: Our societies are navigating a climate-changed world with last century’s infrastructure. That’s not the result of some surplus of climate policies but of a profound lack of them. A few years ago, it wasn’t impossible to imagine a more climate-conscious European Union embarking on a bloc-wide mobilization to create millions of jobs installing reversible air-to-air heat pumps, which cool homes efficiently too; readying the grid to meet increased summer electricity demand with as little imported oil and gas as possible; and retrofitting old housing stock built primarily to retain heat in the winter. That never happened because European politicians, like their counterparts in the U.S., decided that preparing for and mitigating the climate crisis just wasn’t worth the the hassle.

Widespread air conditioning will thankfully help the U.S. withstand this week’s brutal temperatures. But our country is no closer than Europe to having a plan for how to live with the climate crisis. Blasting the A.C. won’t keep roads and tarmacs from melting, droughts from lowering crop yields, coastal Louisiana from becoming uninhabitable, or Malibu from burning. Because the right has no intention of protecting most people from climate-fueled destruction, it’ll blame these things—like all things—on Democrats and leftist conspiracies. As they did during last week’s European heat wave, right-wingers will even go so far as to blame climate policy itself for climate-induced deaths.

There’s good evidence to suggest that mentioning climate change won’t kneecap Democrats politically. And as warming continues to destabilize our world, it certainly isn’t in anyone’s interest to let Republicans control the narrative. That way lies more inaction, and more deaths.

“There are tons of people here,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV quack who now runs Medicare and Medicaid, at the Great American State Fair on Monday. He was speaking with Dean Cain, another former TV man—he played Superman on ABC in the 1990s—who has acted as a kind of hype man for the event, ostensibly a celebration of America’s 250th birthday, that is currently taking place on the National Mall. 

Oz seemed to know he was lying—there were not tons of people there. “This is a huge space and it’s just going to be more and more crowded as the week goes on,” he added. He’s right that it’s a huge space, but videos showed he was speaking to a sparse crowd of maybe 100. Cain later shared a picture from the top of the Ferris wheel where you can literally count the attendees. There are a few hundred. 

Dr. Oz on stage with Dean Cain talks about how great the crowd is at the Great American State Fair... so @hicharliecotton pans his camera to reveal quite the opposite. https://t.co/vZ3exnGWS3 pic.twitter.com/4e1ugj7AVw

— TMZ (@TMZ) June 29, 2026

Just as President Trump insists his lackeys dress like him, he also demands they adopt his Norman Vincent Peale–inspired embrace of positive thinking—which is to say, the refusal to acknowledge politically inconvenient truths. But it’s hard to argue with the wealth of video and photographic evidence of the Great American State Fair. It may very well get more crowded, but right now it’s a flop. That’s no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to this administration, which is itself a total failure—a group of losers and buffoons so incompetent they … well, can’t even put on a state fair. If they can’t even manage a corn maze, no wonder they’re losing a war.

But the Great American State Fair is also failing because it’s the reflection of a president who has no substantive story to tell about the country he leads. While the U.S. is meant to be celebrating its semiquincentennial, Trump can only tell a story about himself. The centerpiece of the fair, after all, is a cheap scale model of a massive triumphal arch Trump hopes to build near Arlington National Cemetery. What triumph does that arch celebrate? When CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe asked Trump whom the 250-foot-tall structure is for, he pointed at himself and said, “Me.” The same could be said of the fair, the war, and so much else that this administration has done—while the World Cup offers a fitting counterpoint.

History, at least in an abstract sense, has always been a part of Trump’s political project. He did not invent the slogan that gave the name to his movement—Ronald Reagan used “Make America Great Again” in his 1980 campaign—but he now owns it. Of course, the genius of those four words for Trump is that they don’t really mean anything. They harken back to an earlier, supposedly rosier period without actually saying what period that is. It’s not hard to extrapolate, given Trump’s long history of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, that he is gesturing at a past when white supremacy went unquestioned. But the statement’s utility as a political slogan is entirely dependent on its vagueness. Trump wants to return America to greatness. When was it great? Let’s not get into specifics. 

Trump, of course, has no genuine interest in history, not even America’s. Although some observers have floated supposed models for his presidency—Andrew Jackson in Trump’s first term, William McKinley in his second—he has never expounded knowledgeably on Jackson’s populism or McKinley’s protectionism, only gesturing at them half-heartedly in an attempt to explain his own xenophobia and imperial ambitions. No, Trump is only interested in history to the extent that he will feature prominently in it. He wants to be seen as a “great man” who changed the world.

This unbridled narcissism is how you get a fiasco like the Great American State Fair and the larger project of which it is a part, Freedom 250—an organization that Trump created despite the fact that Congress had already created an organization, America250, for the purpose of celebrating the country’s anniversary. The primary purpose of Freedom 250, which is not subject to congressional oversight and does not have to disclose its donors, is the elevation of Trump and his political movement. That’s why so many musicians withdrew from performing at the Great American State Fair, and organizers had to turn to Kash Patel’s girlfriend. With just a few days to go before America’s “birthday,” Freedom 250’s most notable event so far was the UFC fight held on the White House lawn on Trump’s actual birthday.  

Under a different administration—one helmed by Kamala Harris, say, or even a doddering Joe Biden—it’s not hard to imagine a different, nonpartisan celebration of America’s 250th. The textbook narrative of American history has been increasingly contested on the left, so such a celebration would not have been without minor controversy, whether genuine or manufactured. But it would have actually reckoned with this nation’s history. It also would have featured much better music, and perhaps wouldn’t have attempted to gouge visitors with $25 pretzels.

Of course, there is another celebration happening in America at the same time as the debacle that is Freedom 250: a World Cup that’s primarily being hosted by blue cities. That tournament has, like everything else, been marred by the Trump administration’s incompetence and maliciousness. But it has largely been what the Great American State Fair ostensibly wants to be: a mass celebration where people come together in a spirit of unity and togetherness. 

Of course, the tournament’s attendees—in spite of the Trump administration’s best efforts—aren’t just coming from all over America, but the world too. Still, if you look at stadium audiences or fan fests—or even just videos of fans celebrating in the street after their team wins, as happened with Morocco supporters in Queens last night—you can see a different story about America than Trump is trying to tell. This is not the story of an egomaniacal, fascist president who dreams of an all-white America, but of a country that embraces foreigners with generosity and respect. This July 4, that’s the only story we should be celebrating.

After the Supreme Court upheld the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, Trump and MAGA lost it. Trump threatened to get Congress to end the guarantee, which it can’t do, and he lamely claimed it was a “WIN” for China: The sheer haplessness of his response hinted at how disoriented the ruling left him. But MAGA exploded: One personality called on the masses to “use whatever force is necessary” to repel “invaders,” a clear threat of violence. Another one, flagged by Media Matters, accused the liberal justices of wanting to “burn the country to the ground” and suggested “men of action” must stop them, also a dark, veiled threat. And Stephen Miller absurdly described the ruling as “national self-obliteration,” which would seem to justify anything in response. We talked to Raul Pinto, deputy legal director of the American Immigration Council. We discuss why the ruling was too close for comfort, how that’s inviting MAGA to wage a longer war to overturn birthright citizenship, how that might unfold, and why there’s cause for cautious optimism about what’s next. Listen to this episode here.

The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to curb birthright citizenship on Monday, dealing a crushing blow to the administration’s efforts to redefine a central tenet of the American constitutional order.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote for the court in Trump v. Barbara. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Roberts was joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a fellow conservative, as well as the court’s three liberal members: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Standing athwart the majority were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who all wrote separate dissenting opinions.

Thomas, who led the charge, argued that the Citizenship Clause meant to affirm citizenship only for formerly enslaved Black Americans after the Civil War. He leaned heavily on the idea that one’s parents must be “domiciled” in the United States to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth, as well as a burst of right-wing legal “scholarship” that emerged last year to sloppily backfill a legal rationale for Trump’s executive order.

“I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time,” Thomas wrote in his dissent. “The Citizenship Clause ‘added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship.’ Today’s opinion devalues that citizenship.” Alito, who wrote separately, also lamented that the court had “made a serious mistake” in his view in “one of the most important decisions in the history of the court.”

Alito is right, if nothing else, about the decision’s significance. By affirming the longstanding rule of birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court prevented the Trump administration from robbing millions of Americans of their constitutional right to live in the only country that they have ever known. In short, as our nation’s 250th anniversary nears, it is a victory worth celebrating.

Congress and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 to resolve a variety of post-Civil War legal disputes, mainly involving the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans in the South. Among the amendment’s provisions is the Citizenship Clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had already affirmed the citizenship of formerly enslaved Americans by statute, but Republicans in Congress sought to entrench it even further and place questions of citizenship beyond future political dispute. The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification also permanently nullified the Supreme Court’s disastrous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford that held, among other things, that people of African descent could never become citizens of the United States.

The Citizenship Clause’s sole exception was for people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at birth. This language applied, according to contemporaries, to children born to foreign diplomats who possess diplomatic immunity, as well as to Native Americans living under tribal governments beyond U.S. jurisdiction. The former exception is still operative; the latter was superseded by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, in which Congress extended U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans by statute.

In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed the clause’s protection of birthright citizenship in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The plaintiff was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who had emigrated to California prior to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. They returned to China with Wong in the 1870s, where he lived until adulthood before returning to California multiple times. On the second trip, in 1895, customs officials detained Wong and denied him permission to enter the country because, in their view, he was not a U.S. citizen.

The Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion when it ruled on the case three years later. Justice Horace Gray, writing for the high court, held that Wong had acquired U.S. citizenship by virtue of his birth on U.S. soil, even though his parents were not U.S. citizens themselves and later returned to China. As a result, the court affirmed the principle of birthright citizenship for anyone within U.S. jurisdiction. The Nationality Act of 1940 later repeated the clause’s language into statutory law.

At odds with this longstanding view of American citizenship is the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has long viewed himself as the arbiter of who is and isn’t an American. His initial entry into the American political scene came in the early 2010s when he falsely claimed that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus not a natural-born citizen. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump also proposed ending birthright citizenship, but he did not seriously pursue it during his first term.

On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It claimed that the Citizenship Clause only meant to extend citizenship to people of African descent who had been denied it by Dred Scott. Trump ordered the executive branch to deny recognition of U.S. citizenship to children born on U.S. soil whose mother and father were undocumented immigrants or on temporary visas. Legal challenges naturally followed.

By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, Trump and his allies had congealed around a few overlapping arguments. They argued that “children of temporarily present aliens” and “children of illegal aliens” were not subject to the United States’ political jurisdiction. Proponents had to add “political” to the clause’s text because the idea that they weren’t subject to the ordinary jurisdiction of the United States is patently absurd: They can be arrested, sued, fined, taxed, and so on.

The Justice Department also argued that their interpretation did not clash with Wong Kim Ark by leaning heavily on that decision’s references to Wong’s parents as domiciled in the United States. Again, there was some flubbing here. The administration had to add “lawfully” to “domiciled” to read the concept of illegal immigration into the Fourteenth Amendment. Such a concept did not exist in American law or practice in 1869.

Roberts, writing for the court, dispensed with this nonsense handily. He traced the American law of citizenship back to its British roots. (I’ll refer to those origins as “British” for coherence’s sake even though some sources predate the Act of Union 1707.) British subjecthood, Roberts explained, was a reciprocal relationship between king and subject. It did not extend to those born to foreign diplomats, who served another sovereign, or to those born under foreign occupation.

That relationship attached at birth under British law. “A foreign mother could enter the British Isles, give birth, and leave with her child the very next day, and that child would remain a British subject,” Roberts explained, citing a famous 1608 decision known as Calvin’s Case. “Why? Because the child owed an implied allegiance to the sovereign who protected him at his birth—no matter how ‘momentary and uncertain’ his presence in the King’s realms.”

Even children born to parents “subject to expulsion,” the chief justice wrote, fell under that rule. “For those children, and all others born in Britain, the rule was the same: With protection came allegiance, and with allegiance came the status of a natural-born subject,” he wrote. This rule “crossed the Atlantic with the colonists” and was “adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution,” albeit by changing “subject” to “citizen.”

Deviating from this norm were Southern states that held the children of slaves in permanent servitude. “The common law ‘made no distinction on account of race or color” when it came to citizenship, Roberts explained. “But the slave states did.” Dred Scott, the chief justice wrote, “imposed the Southern states’ beliefs onto the nation. […] For them, blood, not soil, was made the rule.” Only through the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification was the proper rule restored, which endures to the present day.

Describing this as a 5-4 ruling or a 6-3 ruling would oversimplify the different positions of the dissenting justices. The only justice who endorsed the executive order in its entirety was Alito. His 39-page dissent is primarily focused on undocumented immigration, writing at length about various policy decisions since the 1970s that led to the current status quo.

“As a result of the events of the past 50 years, the United States now has a huge contingent of people who entered or remained in this country illegally, as well as a large group of people who were born here to such parents,” Alito wrote. “The Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment makes all the members of this latter group citizens.”

Alito disputed Roberts’ account of the rule of citizenship before 1869. In his view, it was “unsettled” and there was “little litigation about the meaning of American citizenship.” He argued that the Citizenship Clause established a new rule that only children who are “not subject to any foreign power.” Alito is also the only justice who took issue with Wong Kim Ark itself, arguing at first that it “showed little respect for precedent” before reconciling himself to a much narrower reading of it.

Towards the end of his dissent, with a whiff of desperation, he also claimed there were national-security risks to the majority’s approach due to birth tourism. “Suppose that country is a strategic adversary or enemy of the United States,” he warned. “Suppose the child never visited the United States while growing up and was inculcated with hatred of this country. According to the Court, that person is a citizen of the United States.” One hypothetical person’s imaginary crime does not seem like a very good reason to exclude millions of people from American citizenship.

Alito’s position drew the support of no other justice. The only other isolationist was Kavanaugh, who concurred with the majority on the outcome but sharply disagreed on how to reach the result. Kavanaugh disagreed with the court’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause, but argued that the executive order was still invalid because it ran counter to a provision in federal immigration law known as Section 1401(a).

Section 1401 defines those who are “nationals and citizens of the United States at birth,” and Subsection (a) says that one of the categories is “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” In other words, it simply restates the relevant text of the Fourteenth Amendment. If you are baffled by this approach, you are not alone. Both the government and the plaintiffs stipulated at oral arguments that the clause and the statute should be read identically. No other justice adopted this interpretation either.

This too-clever-by-half approach allows Kavanaugh to vote with the majority on the outcome, but also propose that Congress could end birthright citizenship by legislation—namely, the legislation that merely repeats the Citizenship Clause. He argued that the clause’s exceptions were not fixed or closed at ratification; instead, Congress or the courts could add new ones to confront new situations.

This is not really how the Constitution or citizenship works, either. As Roberts said, citizenship is essentially the “right to have other rights.” Even Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch highlight its special significance in their own opinions, and they all found constitutional principles to anchor it in, disparate as they may be. Kavanaugh’s approach is simply “we’ll know it when we see it.”

The third and most important dissent is by Thomas, which Gorsuch joined. The court’s seniormost justice argued for narrowing the Citizenship Clause by hinging its application on the parents’ domicile status. “Both the Civil Rights Act [of 1866] and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race,” he wrote. “Neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”

It is worth noting, of course, that the word “domicile” is not present in either the Civil Rights Act of 1866 or the Citizenship Clause. It can be found instead in Wong Kim Ark, where the court frequently noted that Wong’s parents were “domiciled” in San Francisco when he was born. Roberts interprets this language to be merely descriptive; as he noted, this conflation of domicile with citizenship does not follow either historical practice or common understanding.

This emphasis on domicile does not take Thomas and Gorsuch as far afield from Roberts’ majority opinion as it may seem. Indeed, in some crucial ways, they are much closer to the majority than to the other dissenters or the government. The greatest gap with Roberts is with children of temporary visa holders and “birth tourists,” where the domicile question is much more cut-and-dry.

On undocumented immigrants, however, both Thomas and Gorsuch are much less enthusiastic. Most of their respective dissents are focused on the non-domiciled temporary visitors. When it comes to the children of long-term undocumented immigrants, there is palpable discomfort with excluding them categorically.

The two justices’ position was that the government need only prove that the administration’s order was valid to survive a facial challenge like the one brought by the parties. Under his and Thomas’s domicile reading, that held true for children of temporary visa holders, so they voted to uphold it. Nevertheless, they declined to conclude the executive order was constitutional in all circumstances.

The Trump administration (and some of its allies) claimed undocumented immigrants could never claim domicile status. “About that, however, I harbor doubts,” Gorsuch noted. “Perhaps Wong Kim Ark does not squarely foreclose the government’s position. After all, that case addressed a child born to parents who lawfully resided in this country. Still, I wonder: Is a child born here to parents who have long chosen to make this Nation their permanent home not a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment solely because his parents’ presence violates statutory law? If those parents are not domiciled here, then where are they domiciled? And if the answer is nowhere, how can we reconcile that conclusion with this Court’s longstanding recognition that every person is domiciled somewhere?”

Thomas also did not view it as a closed question. “That said, many others understandably have suggested that long-term resident illegal aliens satisfy the elements of domicile because they reside here with the intent to permanently remain,” he added, pointing to Gorsuch’s separate dissent. “Such questions are best resolved in the context of as-applied challenges.” Thomas is rarely hesitant to share his thoughts on future legal questions for the court to consider, so his reticence to take a stand here is notable.

This distinction might seem arcane, but it could be crucial in a future as-applied case. Imagine a modern-day Wong Kim Ark: a child born to two parents of undocumented Somali immigrants in Minneapolis who lived there for 20 years. The child’s parents returned to their home country during Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, but the child returns to the United States as an adult sometime in the 2030s.

A future Republican administration, adopting Alito’s reasoning, tries to challenge Barbara by arguing that immigration agents could exclude the child from re-entry as a non-citizen. Their parents had no allegiance to the United States and therefore the child did not obtain U.S. citizenship at birth. If Thomas and Gorsuch are still on the court, they could consistently hold that this 21st-century Wong Kim Ark was a U.S. citizen by birth by virtue of their parents’ domicile status, no matter their lawful immigration status.

To sum up: President Donald Trump and the Justice Department argued that children of undocumented immigrants are categorically excluded from U.S. citizenship at birth. On that proposition, it lost 8-1. Roberts and the other four justices in the majority say those children are always covered by the Citizenship Clause. Thomas and Gorsuch say they might be covered by the Citizenship Clause if their parents are domiciled. And Kavanaugh says they’re covered by statute, at least for now.

On whether the children of temporary visa holders and birth tourists are categorically excluded from U.S. citizenship at birth, it’s a 6-3 result. Again, Roberts and the majority say they’re covered by the Citizenship Clause and Kavanaugh says they’re covered by statute. Thomas and Gorsuch say that they aren’t domiciled so the Citizenship Clause does not apply.

In an ideal world, Trump v. Barbara would have been a 9-0 decision. It should have been one. In April, I wrote about my concerns that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority might limit or narrow birthright citizenship in some way even when ruling against Trump’s executive order. Fortunately, those fears were unrealized. Roberts’ majority opinion is clear, eloquent, and uncompromising. Future generations will likely rank it among the finest of his judicial career.

Whatever the count, Tuesday’s ruling is ultimately a triumph. There is no reward for second place at the high court, and the right-wing legal scholars who claim to have shifted the Overton window must still reckon with their failures, both moral and professional. In an era where the promise and the power of the Reconstruction Amendments is fading once more, any victory is better than a defeat.

President Donald Trump invited Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, to the White House on Tuesday.

Trump took to Truth Social to brag about the “honor” of meeting up with a fellow election denier.

“Tina Peters just came to the White House to thank me for getting her released from prison in Colorado,” the president wrote. “She was put there because she found Election Fraud, but instead of arresting the people that committed the Fraud, they arrested her!”

Trump posted a photograph of the two of them smiling from behind his desk in the Oval Office.

Peters became a mascot of the MAGA movement’s supposed victimhood after she was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to publicize the voting machine records in Mesa County. She turned all the cameras off while allowing fellow election denier Conan Hayes to copy, photograph, and download information in an effort to prove Trump’s election fraud claims in 2020. Peters was freed from prison after the Trump administration pressured Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis into granting her clemency.

“What she went through should never happen to anyone again,” Trump wrote. “Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”

Of course, the Mesa County district attorney’s office uncovered zero evidence to back up Peters’s claims of voter fraud. The only evidence of any election meddling in 2020 came from Trump’s own camp.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s complaints about media coverage came back to bite him Tuesday.

A federal judge ordered a preliminary injunction against the Defense Department’s restrictions on press access to the Pentagon, based in part on “a consistent stream of derisive comments beginning shortly after the confirmation of Secretary Hegseth and continuing through the present.”

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman temporarily blocked a rule stating that all journalists visiting the Pentagon were required to have an official escort while a lawsuit The New York Times filed against the rule is reviewed in full by the court.

“This court has spoken at several points about the critical importance of protecting the freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, and that evergreen message bears repeating,” Friedman wrote.

Hegseth has criticized media outlets whose coverage has not reflected well on himself or the department. The judge quoted Hegseth’s March attack on the Times, where he accused the paper of “slashing and burning people to ruin their reputations.”

Friedman quoted Hegseth’s complaints about the “legacy Trump-hating press” peddling “endless stream of garbage,” as well as the time he compared reporters to the biblical “Pharisees” who “held counsel against [Jesus]” and “scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.”

The judge also made sure to include several quotes from Sean Parnell, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, including when he called the Times “garbage.”

In October, the Department of Defense said that it would revoke the press passes of journalists who shared classified or unclassified information without the Pentagon’s preapproval. The Times sued, and Friedman ruled in the newspaper’s favor in March, after which the DOD issued a revised policy with the escort rule. In May, the Times sued again over the new rule, which prevented journalists from free movement around the building in authorized spaces without an escort.

The DOD has argued that reporters have gained sensitive information based on roaming around Pentagon headquarters, alleging that they “maintain a persistent physical presence near sensitive spaces within the Pentagon.” It has also granted press credentials to friendly right-wing media outlets and influencers at the expense of critical outlets. On Tuesday, though, Hegseth and the rest of the department had to face the consequences of their own words and actions.

A procedural vote on the National Defense Authorization Act failed to pass the House Tuesday, in no small part because the SAVE America Act was attached to it.

The lower chamber voted 198-224 to reject the rule, with 14 Republicans joining Democrats to oppose the last-minute addition of Donald Trump’s voter restriction bill to the proposed Pentagon budget.

Representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Eli Crane, Randy Fine, Andy Harris, Anna Paulina Luna, Max Miller, Chip Roy, Keith Self, Victoria Spartz, Mike Turner, Thomas Massie, and Lauren Boebert all voted no. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise switched his vote as well, but only so that Republicans could readdress the matter in future.

The stalled NDAA vote is a major blow to leaders of both parties, who have historically passed the defense spending package with minimal partisan objections. But the wide rejection also illustrates the low support behind the SAVE America Act, despite repeated insistence from the White House that it needs to be turned into law.

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have amped up their base over contrived claims of voter fraud, a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. Trump has worked overtime to force his unpopular election reform proposals through the legislature, throwing confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings to the wayside while demanding Republicans prioritize passing the SAVE America Act.

The backlash to the bill—which was introduced months ago—has been grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

Yet Trump has nonetheless opted to make it a legislative priority once again, effectively paralyzing the House for another week. House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday that the lower chamber would work on the matter for another day and a half and try to hold another vote by the end of the week.

An anonymous victim of Jeffrey Epstein who has accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her is reportedly living in fear of retaliation.

The Guardian reports that the woman identified in the federal government’s Epstein files as “Jane Doe 4” is “living off the grid” and fears retaliation from the Trump administration, according to one of her relatives.

“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys. She’s coping as best she can,” the relative told the publication, saying the woman had been abused since early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”

Jane Doe 4 spoke to the FBI in 2019, telling agents she was abused by Epstein in the 1980s and sexually assaulted by Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. In March, South Carolina’s Post and Courier confirmed certain details of the woman’s life outlined in the Epstein files. None of these details were related to her allegations against Trump.

There’s no evidence the FBI followed up after the woman made the allegations. One of her attorneys, who accompanied her in two of her FBI interviews, said he never received follow-up calls from the agents nor got copies of their reports, which normally are given to defense counsel. In her final FBI interview, the woman cut off contact with the bureau, telling agents that she believed she was being followed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Post and Courier the woman’s allegations were “baseless accusations from decades ago’’ that “are backed by zero evidence or facts,” describing her as “a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.”

The woman’s account is one of the few from the Epstein files that accuse Trump directly, and the Justice Department has been criticized for its handling of her case files. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and either release any unreleased Epstein files—including interview notes on Jane Doe 4—or explain why it can’t do so.

There are about 2.5 million unreleased government files on Epstein, which were either classified as “duplicative” or remain legally protected by the DOJ for unknown reasons.

“It should not be Jane Doe 4’s responsibility to keep coming forward,” Sky Roberts, the brother of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, told The Guardian. “She’s already given her testimony to the FBI. It should be Justice’s responsibility to take that evidence and press forward.”

President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair just gets weirder and weirder. 

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles stopped by the Great American State Fair Monday to play the “Yes or No Game,” the conservative commentator’s weirdly political alternative to Cards Against Humanity. 

A video showed Knowles on the mainstage, appearing to debate a young girl about the Salem Witch trials—and reveal his own outrageous opinions. 

“But the one area where the Salem Witch trials went a little far is, I would say, they weren’t organized enough,” Knowles said. “So, you had these like random judges who were, you know, kind of, burning these ladies.” 

“I don’t know if they were guilty or not,” he continued. “But I think more—if it were more formalized, built up a little bit more, maybe with like a grand inquisitor or something that would’ve been the way to do it.”

Just left the great American state fair where I watched Michael Knowles debate a ten year old girl about the Salem witch trials in front of DOZENS of people pic.twitter.com/j06YTbKrbv

— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) June 30, 2026

What’s worse: that Knowles thinks the problem with the Salem Witch trials was that they were too disorganized, or that he can’t say whether the women were actually guilty of witchcraft? Actually, nevermind. The second one is definitely worse. 

It appears that after several high profile musical artists backed out of the fair, the brains behind  the festivities have seriously struggled to come up with alternative programming—and the visibly low attendance clearly reflects that. 

So far, Trump’s Great American State Fair has been supremely underwhelming, and beset by bad reviews, technical difficulties, and disappointing weather delays.

The MAGA world raged Tuesday at Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for voting to uphold birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court’s ruling left right-wing pundits predictably fuming, as Donald Trump has made it perfectly clear that he believes the high court’s conservative justices—especially the ones he saw appointed to the bench—owe their fealty to him over the law.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called Barrett the worst thing he could possibly think of: a woman.

“It turns out that Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire, little better than Kentanji Jackson. Terrible pick,” Walsh wrote on X Tuesday. “When’s the last time we had a Republican president who didn’t put a liberal justice on the court?”

“The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint,” Walsh wrote in a separate post, including an image of the high court’s four female justices.

But Walsh had originally celebrated Barrett’s nomination in 2020, calling the jurist’s selection a “bullet proof choice.” Ouch.

Conservatives had previously raged against Barrett last year after she joined the court’s liberal justices in dissenting against a decision granting Trump emergency relief to use the “Alien Enemies Act” to deport immigrants at whim. The fervor was reignited Monday after Barrett sided with the liberal justices to reject the Trump administration’s plan to gut mail-in voting.

Speaking on her radio show Monday night, Megyn Kelly fumed that Barrett had become a “turncoat,” because she was “constantly siding with the left.”

Before the Supreme Court had even delivered its opinion on birthright citizenship, Joey Mannarino, a far-right internet personality, wrote on X: “If Amy Coney Barrett really votes against ending birthright citizenship, we should begin to look into how to deport her Haitian child back to Haiti.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a challenge to state and local bans on assault weapons, a move that could destroy restrictions on semiautomatic weapons like AR-15s—which are popular with mass shooters.

While the court chose not to adjudicate the issue last year, four of the court’s six conservative justices at the time expressed their opposition to such bans on Second Amendment grounds. The issue will be taken up in the court’s next term in October.

The specific bans that will be challenged originate in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois—part of the greater Chicago area. Connecticut’s law is directly related to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults with an AR-15, a shotgun, and two semiautomatic pistols.

“We will not back down from defending Cook County’s long-standing ban on assault weapons. These weapons of war are designed to inflict maximum carnage and have no place in our communities,” Cook County State’s Attorney Ellen O’Neill Burke wrote on X. “Countless victims have already endured the devastating impact of gun violence. We will defend this lawful ordinance before this nation’s highest court to continue protecting the people of Cook County.”

Donald Trump claims to have a trick up his sleeve to upend birthright citizenship—though his plan to do so would most likely run afoul of the law.

The president downplayed the Supreme Court decision Tuesday that killed his attempts to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming that he and his allies could “easily make it up in Congress through Legislation.”

“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”

But that’s simply not true. Any attempt to change or alter birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since the right was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868 when Dred Scott was overturned and the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.

Accomplishing that would require a level of coordination and bipartisanship seemingly beyond the current Republican Party. A constitutional amendment requires a supermajority—two thirds of both the House and Senate—to pass. Alternatively, the issue could technically be put to a Constitutional Convention, though two thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three fourths of the states.

The president was still embittered by the ruling hours after it was read at the bench, writing in a separate post that he “would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN.”

In another post, Trump went on to claim that while the Supreme Court’s birthright ruling was a “loss” for his second term agenda, he had actually won the “biggest and most consequential Decision” when they extended him (by a 6-3 margin) sweeping new authorities over some two dozen agencies that were originally intended to be independent. That included granting him the ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Look, I get it. Democrats have been burned by hopes for a Texas miracle so many times that it feels risky to place stock in this year’s Senate race. But a new poll of the contest from The New York Times finds a dead heat, with Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton each earning 47 percent of likely voters. In short: This is a real race. In Texas.

Some have reacted with consternation to this poll, because previous ones had Talarico slightly up. This is, in my view, the wrong reaction. The Times poll is the gold standard—if this survey finds a tie, the race truly is a dead heat, meaning it’s actually winnable for Talarico. This was always going to be close. It will be very hard for Talarico to win. But it’s doable.

Talarico’s candidacy is an object lesson in what happens when liberals speak forcefully on behalf of what they truly believe—and here the Times poll sheds some light. For instance: Majorities of Texas voters say Talarico has “good character” and “the right moral values,” whereas majorities don’t say that of Paxton. And more see Paxton as extreme (49 percent) than see Talarico (43 percent) that way.

What should we make of this? Paxton and the entire GOP-MAGA apparatus are spending enormous sums of money to tar Talarico as unmasculine based on his previous positions on gender and religion. Talarico has walked back some of them. But, critically, he hasn’t done this fearfully and defensively.

Instead, Talarico has characterized the criticism as ludicrously trivial, and has highlighted how absurd it is for Paxton—who has a long trail of corrupt and adulterous conduct—to criticize the manhood of others. His tone toward Paxton has been one of incredulity: This corrupt lowlife is claiming he’s a man’s man and a good Christian? This guy? Seriously?

Meanwhile, Talarico has offered up a vision of masculinity that’s rooted in rectitude and integrity, in showing loyalty to neighbors (including immigrants, i.e., showing loyalty when it’s politically hard), in selflessly serving the community, and in protecting the vulnerable, all of it rooted in his own Christian faith.

Along those lines, here’s another striking Times finding: Talarico is leading by 27 points, 58-31, among independents. That’s probably too rosy, but it’s instructive. The real GOP game plan is to smear Talarico as a vaguely alien (read: homosexual) figure who isn’t one of “us” Texans. Talarico’s response is to be forthright on what he really believes—to say what he means, and mean what he says—while tarring Paxton as the person of truly low character. For now, it’s appealing to independents. The poll also finds Talarico winning 9 percent of Trump voters.

It would be wildly premature to conclude from this poll that all this is working sufficiently to win Texas. Talarico will get bludgeoned by hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads. And the poll shows Paxton holds a huge lead in areas of the state outside the big urban centers. Talarico is badly trailing among working-class whites, and he’s 8 points behind among all working-class voters.

Still, there’s cause for optimism here. To win, Talarico needs some Trump voters and a lot of independents. He’s on track to do that, though he’ll have to win more working- class voters and cut into Paxton’s non-metro margins. While the Democratic brand is tarnished here (53 percent say the party is too far left), Talarico is mostly escaping that.

Winning in Texas also requires running up huge totals in the Latino-heavy border counties—and here the poll delivers another surprise. Talarico is trouncing Paxton among Latinos by 61-29, or 32 points. This is a big deal. Trump’s success at winning Texas Latinos fueled all the post-2024 talk of a major realignment. But those gains have evaporated, even in Texas.

What happened? Well, Trump’s mass deportations, for starters. Texas voters approve of Trump on immigration by a bare 50-49—not great for this deep red border state. But Latinos disapprove by an extraordinary 64-33, with 60 percent disapproving strongly. That’s remarkable—it helps explain how Trump squandered those Latino gains.

Trump is hovering over all of this. The Times poll finds his overall approval underwater at 44-52. He’s faring worse on the economy (43-55), the cost of living (39-60), and the war (41-57). Those numbers are quite bad for Texas. And it gives Talarico an opening in another sense.

As I argued last month, Talarico and a number of other Democrats are developing a new moral language for the era of “Late Stage Trumpism.” The broad idea of a new politics is gaining traction: E.J. Dionne and Jennifer Szalai both have good pieces detailing how Democrats are embracing a newly moralized politics. They’re talking about the common good, depicting corruption as a moral scourge, and casting both liberalism and democracy as ways of life rooted in ethical public conduct, in mutual respect among differing citizens.

Yet one central ingredient to this should be an indictment of the moral and spiritual rot that MAGA has inflicted on our common life. This can coexist with good-faith outreach to Republicans and even some Trump voters.

Here’s where “Late Stage Trumpism” comes in. All that’s left is the corruption, the self-enrichment, the naked cruelty, the ethnonationalism, the upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, and the stoking of petty enmities as political bloodsport.

I don’t know how directly Talarico can criticize Trump by name—a majority says Talarico will “oppose Trump too much.” But he’s facing a candidate who perfectly exemplifies the very worst of MAGA, and most people just want to get past MAGA’s nonstop degradations already. Talarico needs to speak to that MAGA fatigue without appearing too partisan. It’s a tall order: Winning in Texas will be hard. But even if he comes close, it’ll suggest that a new politics is emerging from all the wreckage.

Republican Representative Thomas Kean Jr. is back at work, and finally explained Tuesday why he went missing in March without any explanation.

In a speech on the House floor, Kean said that he was hospitalized on doctor’s orders for depression. He noted that it was a “difficult speech” for him to make as he is a private person and talking about himself doesn’t come naturally, but said that “I believe I owe an explanation to the people of New Jersey’s 7th district, my colleagues in this chamber, and to the American people for my actions.”

Kean said that months ago, he underwent medical testing at a hospital and was diagnosed with depression. While Kean didn’t believe he would need a long-term hospital stay, he said he was advised to remain put by doctors. Early on, he didn’t understand his condition, he added.

Rep. Tom Kean says his absence from the House was due to depression pic.twitter.com/AbQRdc4d88

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026

“It is physical. It is emotional. And until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be,” Kean said. He said he was hesitant to accept his doctors’ advice that a long-term stay would be the fastest way to recovery, given his obligations to his family, colleagues, and constituents.

“But, as the over 48 million of my fellow Americans being treated for this illness have come to discover, there is no timeline for healing. There is no timeline for recovery. Only the work of getting better, one day at a time,” Kean said.

It was a heartfelt speech, but the New Jersey congressman failed to explain why his social media accounts continued to post regularly and his office still introduced legislation while he was missing. Kean’s financial disclosures showed that he was also trading stocks in April while he was ostensibly in the hospital, and his reelection campaign racked up travel expenses showing him using Uber and Amtrak in San Francisco, far from his constituents, in that same month.

If Kean’s depression was so severe that he needed hospitalization, how does he explain personally trading stocks and racking up travel expenses on the other side of the country? Kean also missed several important votes in Congress, including on the budget. He’s not in a safe Republican district, either: Donald Trump carried it by just one percentage point in 2024, and Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill won it by two last November.

Kean is not the first member of Congress to deal with depression: Former Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. was treated at the Mayo Clinic for bipolar depression in 2012 and later resigned that year, and former Representative Patrick Kennedy dealt with depression throughout his congressional career, receiving in-patient treatment in 2006 and 2009 and deciding not to run for reelection in 2010.

While Kean won his primary unopposed, he faces Democrat and former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett in November’s general election. Kean may not be able to escape scrutiny for his lack of transparency over the last few months.