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For years, originalists have lectured us that they no longer look to "the Framers' intent," but to the "original public meaning" of the Constitution. Here, Kavanaugh throws all that out the window to lash the citizenship clause in his subjective guess as to what its Framers intended it to do.

First, significant illegal immigration into the United
States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as
of 1868 and that the Framers of the Fourteenth
Amendment could not have fully anticipated. And the
Framers likely would not have anticipated (and presumably
would not have intended) the odd result of granting a
substantial birthright citizenship benefit to (i) those foreign
citizens who violate U. S. immigration law and illegally
enter or overstay and then have children in the United
States over (ii) those foreign citizens who follow U. S.
immigration law and have children in their home countries
while seeking to lawfully immigrate to the United States.
Nor presumably would they have wanted to grant
constitutional birthright citizenship to children of foreign
citizens unlawfully in the country while simultaneously
denying constitutional birthright citizenship to children of
tribal American Indians. So too, the issue of temporary
visitors who give birth in the United States presents a new
and different circumstance than in 1868 given the
significant changes in immigration laws and travel.

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NEW: The Supreme Court will decide next term whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own assault rifles.

Viramontes v. Cook County
Docket No.
25-238
Op. Below
7th Cir.
Term
October Term 2026
SCOTUS Page
Issue
Whether the Second and 14th Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.

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The vote on the constitutional question in the birthright citizenship case is an absolute scandal slate.com/news-and-pol...

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that the first sentence of the 14th Amendment means exactly what it says: Birthright citizenship is the nation’s fundamental law, and Donald Trump cannot repeal it via executive order. The vote was 5–4. This outcome is, of course, a relief. But the margin is a scandal. It is nothing short of stunning that Trump came one vote away from convincing the Supreme Court to repeal the bedrock of the Reconstruction Amendments based on a brazenly partisan contortion of their text and history. A view held only by fringe, far-right nativists until very recently has secured support from four of the nine members of the court: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. This is a shocking development that should upend all expectations that this Supreme Court can be trusted to apply the most basic constitutional guarantees when a Republican president seeks to nullify them. If a theory flatly rejected by all serious legal scholars and historians can come one vote away from success, no rights are safe. Everything is on the table.

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As Kagan sharply points out, Kavanaugh's opinion simply transforms Thomas' dissent in that 2001 case into controlling law of the land. She highlights how radically the newer justices have changed campaign finance precedent. Whole thing feels like a farce. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Almost to
flaunt the point, the analysis gives pride of place to JUSTICE
THOMAS’s dissent in that case; if only the rest of the majority had been there to join him! See ante, at 23. Today’s
decision thus can join the parade of those recently overruling established law because of a new majority’s new outlook
on a consequential matter.

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The language Kavanaugh uses to describe transgender students in this opinion is so relentlessly bad www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Second, we do not accept the dissent’s assumed monopoly
on understanding the effects on individuals involved in
disputes over transgender athletes. We are acutely aware
of the difficulties sometimes faced by boys who identify as
girls (and by girls who identify as boys) in middle school,
high school, and beyond. And we greatly admire the desire
of all students, including transgender students such as
B. P. J., who want to participate in sports. But in
conducting the equal protection inquiry, we must also
account for the effects on girls who are forced to compete
against biological males in sports.

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Kavanaugh doesn't decide whether rational basis review or heightened scrutiny applies, because (he says) the state laws satisfy both. This gives him an opportunity to gut heightened scrutiny for anti-trans laws by applying it in a weirdly deferential way. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

In these cases, we need not definitively resolve whether
rational basis review or intermediate scrutiny applies to
transgender classifications. In either event, the
classification here readily satisfies rational basis review or
intermediate scrutiny for the reasons already explained at
some length above. The States’ interests in ensuring safety
and competitive fairness amply justify the States in
maintaining women’s and girls’ sports for biological
females. Under the Equal Protection Clause, therefore,
schools may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’
sports based on biological sex.

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In a concurrence, Gorsuch tries to distinguish Title IX from Title VII to explain why Bostock's reasoning doesn't control here. I am unconvinced for the reasons Sotomayor lays out in dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

In Bostock,
again, no one doubted that firing someone because of his
biological sex qualified as “discrimination” under Title VII.
See 590 U. S., at 681. Here, though, we face the question
whether it qualifies as discrimination under Title IX for a
federal funding recipient to sponsor sports teams restricted
to biological women or girls alone. And for the reasons just
laid out above and explored in depth by the Court, it does
not.

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Co-sign @stevevladeck.bsky.social. It may feel good to purge Trump holdovers under the next Democratic president. But the deeper damage that Slaughter inflicts on the infrastructure of our democracy will ultimately cause way more pain. www.stevevladeck.com/p/236-three-...

I saw lots of folks claim online yesterday that Slaughter is a good thing (or, at least, that it has a silver lining) because it will make it easier for the next Democratic president to simply clean house-and fire many, if not most, individuals who were appointed/hired/installed by President Trump. That may be true in the short term, but that comes at the enormous expense of (1) Congress, which will find itself increasingly hamstrung in trying to exert any control over how the executive branch exercises the powers Congress authorizes and delegates; and (2) the American people, who will find themselves subject to executive branch agencies doing the bidding of the incumbent administration rather than the goals Congress set for them by statute.
That may feel good when we like the current administration, but it's a recipe for instability and for the elimination of expertise in almost every
facet of governmental regulation. And in the interim, it also gives even more power to the courts (the Supreme Court, in particular), to sort out all of the subsidiary questions that Slaughter has already raised.

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A lie. Slaughter allows Trump to purge the heads of the MSPB and Office of Special Counsel, which protect civil servants from unlawful firings. When those agencies are paralyzed or corrupted, civil servants’ job protections become worthless. Thomas and Barrett endorsed this outcome just last month.

This is sloppy and highly misleading. It addresses only principal officers. Even Chief Justice Taft, in Myers, accepted that the appointment of inferior officers can be vested in the department heads and they can be granted removal protections, creating the civil service.
This decision doesn't even come close to touching that issue.
Barb McQuade &
@BarbMcQua...•20h
The Slaughter case, overturning precedent, returns us to a spoils system where a president can "clean house" every four years, destroying our professional, independent civil service.

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In the same vein: It is extraordinary just how little effort Roberts (and Kavanaugh) put into distinguishing the Federal Reserve from every other independent agency. They can just speak it into existence. There's basically no law here, and barely any pretense of it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

On what basis could Roberts and Kavanaugh possibly allow Trump to purge Democratic appointees from the rest of the administrative state while zealously protecting members of the Fed? Roberts barely bothered to explain. After recounting the various permutations of a central bank throughout American history, he concluded that the Fed’s independence constitutes a “special arrangement sanctioned by history.” What does that mean? Kavanaugh, in a concurrence, added his own gloss, reiterating the court’s previous declaration that the Fed is a “quasi-private, uniquely structured entity” with a “distinct historical tradition.” But its board of governors is not actually quasi-private or unique, except in the sense that all federal agencies have some unique origin story. So, again: What is the constitutional distinction that allowed the court to spare the Fed from its otherwise categorical execution of agency independence?

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John Roberts handing down Slaughter and Cook together felt like a weird domination ritual in which he gets to flaunt his power to issue irreconcilable rulings that perfectly track his partisan preferences and we all just to take it because, really, who's gonna stop him? slate.com/news-and-pol...

On Monday, the Supreme Court banished any doubt that it has claimed absolute authority to reshape the federal government as it sees fit. Its decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook are almost comically irreconcilable as a matter of logic: The court at once allowed the president to fire the heads of almost every independent agency while preventing him from removing a leader of the one agency it really values, the Federal Reserve. These rulings make sense only as one step in the court’s broader campaign of empowering the president—specifically this president, Donald J. Trump—to enact most of his agenda through executive action without becoming complicit in a catastrophic recession. But the biggest winner here isn’t even Trump; it’s SCOTUS itself. The court not only gets to establish sweeping new rules of American governance, but also to tweak those rules as necessary to favor presidential policies it prefers while quashing those it dislikes. Who could possibly call this a democracy?

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Roberts' core holding is that (a) the Federal Reserve is special because of history, and (b) Trump did not allow Lisa Cook to exercise her statutory right to dispute the charges against her. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Having rejected the Government’s view that the courts
are to play no role in assessing the validity of a Governor’s
removal, we may decide this application on narrow
grounds. No matter the precise definition of cause, or the
scope of our review of any such determination, the President failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to
which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the President laid against her. We thus need not address Cook’s constitutional due process argument, for the statute alone
makes it unlikely that the Government will prevail on appeal as to the validity of the procedures used to fire Cook.

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Applying the Katz test, the majority holds that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our cell phone location information, so the government conducts a 4th Amendment "search" when it invades that privacy. I think that's pretty clearly correct. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

For all those reasons, we hold that police officers invade
a cell-phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy when
they access his Location History. It does not matter if the
time period scrutinized was only two hours. Nor does it
matter that the materials obtained were handed over by a
third-party tech company. When the government “accesses
historical cell phone” location information—Location History as much as CSLI—it “conducts a search under the
Fourth Amendment.” Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 300.

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The Supreme Court's second opinion is Chatrie v. U.S. By a 6–3 vote, the court holds that a geofence warrant (described below) IS a "search" under the 4th Amendment. But it declines to say whether THIS search was "reasonable." Kagan writes. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

JUSTICE KAGAN delivered the opinion of the Court.
In recent years, law enforcement officers have employed
so-called geofence warrants to obtain information that technology companies collect about their users’ cell-phone locations. Suppose that investigators know a crime was committed at a particular place and time, but do not have a
suspect. They may draw a “geofence”—a virtual perimeter—around the crime scene and get a warrant compelling
a company to hand over data about the cell phones located
in that area near the time of the crime. Following a process
specified in the warrant, the company will turn over the
cell-phone data and eventually identify by name one or
more of the users thus disclosed

729279

Barrett's opinion is pretty sharp—she says (correctly) that this is an easy case because federal law simply says nothing about ballot receipt deadlines, states get to make their own rules. The 5th Circuit and the dissenters just want to rewrite the law. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

The Framers recognized the difficulty of crafting election
laws “applicable to every probable change in the situation
of the country.” The Federalist No. 59, at 362. So instead
of constitutionalizing election law, they decided that “a discretionary power over elections” needed to be lodged “somewhere.” Ibid. Suffice it to say, that power was not lodged
in this Court. The election-day statutes say nothing about
ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress
chose

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The Supreme Court's first opinion is Watson v. RNC. By a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court UPHOLDS state laws that allow the counting of mail ballots that are sent by Election Day but arrive shortly thereafter. Roberts and Barrett join the liberals. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

JUSTICE BARRETT delivered the opinion of the Court.
Three federal statutes set the day for the election of Representatives, Senators, and the President. A Mississippi
law permits the counting of absentee ballots postmarked by
election day but received up to five days later. We must
decide whether the federal election-day statutes preempt
Mississippi’s law. They do not.

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The Supreme Court will NOT reconsider a grant of qualified immunity to prison guards who pepper sprayed an inmate on a hunger strike then stripped him naked and locked him in a freezing cold cell for 23 hours. The three liberals dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

When Smith was first placed in the cell around noon, Van
Lanen told Smith that Smith could request a shower any
time and that he would come back to discuss “‘clothing and
stuff,’” but he never returned. Ibid. Three and a half hours
later, Smith requested clothing, bedding, and a mattress
from Lieutenant Timothy Retzlaff and asked to be moved to
a warmer cell given the cold. Retzlaff said he would check
with Van Lanen. Twelve additional hours went by with no
word from Van Lanen or Retzlaff. Then, around 3 o’clock in
the morning, a different officer told Smith that if he submitted to future wellness checks, he could have a smock,
but that otherwise, “he would remain naked and cold.” Ibid.
Smith declined. Another eight hours came and went without any word from Van Lanen or Retzlaff. Smith remained
naked and frigid overnight as the temperature dropped below freezing to 25 degrees. After 23 hours, prison staff removed Smith from the cell. Smith later stated that he
stayed on his feet for most of those 23 hours because it was
too painful to sit, lie down, or sleep.

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The Supreme Court won't review the dismissal of Alan Dershowitz's defamation suit. Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, once again calls for the court to reconsider (and likely overrule) New York Times v. Sullivan, gutting First Amendment protections against libel suits. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

THOMAS, J., dissenting
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ v. CABLE NEWS NETWORK,
INC.
ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED
STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
No. 25–770. Decided June 29, 2026
The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
JUSTICE THOMAS, with whom JUSTICE GORSUCH joins,
dissenting from the denial of certiorari.
Alan Dershowitz sued respondent, a major news network,
alleging that it defamed him. Because Dershowitz is a
“public person,” our precedents required him to prove not
only the elements of common-law defamation, but also that
the network acted with “actual malice.” See Gertz v. Robert
Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 327–328, 342 (1974). Predictably, Dershowitz did not prevail under that exacting standard, which this Court created in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254 (1964). Dershowitz now asks this Court
to overrule Sullivan and related precedents.
The “actual malice” standard for public figures “bears ‘no
relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.’” Berisha v. Lawson, 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021)
(THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op.,
at 2) (quoting Tah v. Global Witness Publishing, Inc., 991
F. 3d 231, 251 (CADC 2021) (Silberman, J., dissenting); emphasis deleted); see also Gertz, 418 U. S., at 370–371, 380–
381 (White, J., dissenting); 153 F. 4th 1189, 1206 (CA11
2025) (case below) (Lagoa, J., concurring). Instead, the
founding generation believed that, if anything, public figures had stronger claims for damages when they were defamed. See McKee v. Cosby, 586 U. S. 1172, 1177 (2019)
(THOMAS, J., concurring in denial of certiorari). I and others have thus called for reconsideration of the actual-malice

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The Supreme Court will NOT decide whether New York violated healthcare workers' religious rights when it denied them an exemption from the COVID vaccine mandate. Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

JUSTICE GORSUCH, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS and
JUSTICE ALITO join, dissenting from the denial of certiorari.
Once again, this Court faces a case involving healthcare
workers who “served on the front line of a pandemic” and
were then “fired . . . for adhering to their . . . religious beliefs.” Doe v. Mills, 595 U. S. 1029, 1035 (2021) (GORSUCH,
J., dissenting from denial of application for injunctive relief ); see also Dr. A. v. Hochul, 595 U. S. ___ (2021) (Dr. A.
I ) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting from denial of application for
injunctive relief ); Dr. A. v. Hochul, 597 U. S. ___ (2022) (Dr.
A. II ) (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari).
Their case raises an important and recurring question of
federal law that warrants this Court’s attention.
I
The present “chapter in this grim story” involves a lawsuit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See Dr.
A. I, 595 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 14). That statute makes
it unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or
privileges of employment because of such individual’s race,
color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 78 Stat. 255, as
amended, 42 U. S. C. §2000e–2(a)(1). And the law broadly
defines “religion” to “includ[e] all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief.” §2000e(j).

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The Supreme Court will decide whether noncitizens seeking a green card must maintain current asylum status, or if they can still seek lawful permanent residence with terminated asylum status. Have a bad feeling about this one in light of Blanche v. Lau—this court is openly hostile to LPRs.

CERTIORARI GRANTED
24-1016 RISEANDSHINE CORP. V. PEPSICO, INC.
25-159 HOFFMANN, LEONARD W., ET AL. V. WBI ENERGY TRANSMISSION, INC.
25-840 INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS, ET AL. V. FERGUSON, GOV. OF WA, ET AL.
25-842 WASSILY, TAMER S., ET AL. V. BLANCHE, ACTING ATT'Y GEN.
25-1017 REPUBLICAN NAT. COMM. V. MI FAMILIA VOTA, ET AL.
The petitions for writs of certiorari are granted.
25-1223 MONTOYA PALACIOS, KEVIN I. V. LIGGINS, VERNON, ET AL.
The motion of Eva Daley, et al. for leave to file a brief as
amici curiae out of time is denied. The petition for a writ of
certiorari is granted

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The Supreme Court will decide whether two nonprofits and several parents have standing to challenge a Washington state law that requires licensed shelters to notify state officials, rather than parents directly, when runaway minors are seeking gender-affirming or reproductive health care.

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NEW: The Supreme Court will decide whether Arizona (and potentially other states) may require proof of citizenship on state voter registration forms. A huge case, and I fear the outcome is predetermined. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

13556235

The food hall features literal emojis printed onto flags but be aware that almost none of these options are actually available. I promised my son pizza on the basis of that first flag and he was disappointed when we discovered there was no pizza to be had. (It’s also all insanely overpriced.)

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It was a reasonable assumption right??

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And yes, clearly attendance is WAY lower than the administration anticipated. There was no line whatsoever the whole time we were there despite preparations for a long one. It’s not empty, but it’s very far from full. A LOT of attendees were DC residents like us who were just curious to witness it.

No line to get into the fair despite preparation for a huge one

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