BOSTON — The Trump administration has agreed to release $1.1 billion in funding for post-COVID-19 pandemic academic recovery it clawed back from Massachusetts and other states before the move was challenged in federal court.
The agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, announced Friday in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Edgardo Ramos, settles a multi-state lawsuit filed in March by Attorney General Andrea Campbell and other Democrats alleging the federal agency’s move to claw back the congressionally approved funding violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups urged the Supreme Court on Friday to block new California laws that will require thousands of companies to disclose their emissions and their impacts on climate change.
Their lawyers argue the measures violate the 1st Amendment because the state would be forcing companies to speak on its preferred topic.
“In less than eight weeks, California will compel thousands of companies across the nation to speak on the deeply controversial topic of climate change,” they said in an appeal that also spoke for the California Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles County Business Federation.
They say the two new laws would require companies to disclose the “climate-related risks” they foresee and how their operations and emissions contribute to climate change.
“Both laws are part of California’s open campaign to force companies into the public debate on climate issues and pressure them to alter their behavior,” they said. Their aim, according to their sponsors, is to “make sure that the public actually knows who’s green and who isn’t.”
One law, Senate Bill 261, will require several thousand companies that do business in California to assess their “climate-related financial risk” and how they may reduce that risk. A second measure, SB 253, which applies to larger companies, requires them to assess and disclose their emissions and how their operations could affect the climate.
The appeal argues these laws amount to unconstitutional compelled speech.
“No state may violate 1st Amendment rights to set climate policy for the Nation. Compelled-speech laws are presumptively unconstitutional — especially where, as here, they dictate a value-laden script on a controversial subject such as climate change,” they argue.
Officials with the California Air Resources Board, whose chair Lauren Sanchez was named as defendant, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
The first-in-the-nation carbon disclosure laws were widely celebrated by environmental advocates at the time of their passage, with the nonprofit California Environmental Voters describing them as a “game-changer not just for our state but for the entire world.”
Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who authored SB 253, said at the time that the laws were “a simple but powerful tool in the fight to tackle climate change.”
“When corporations are transparent about the full scope of their emissions, they have the tools and incentives to tackle them,” Wiener said.
Michael Gerrard, a climate-change legal expert at Columbia University, described Friday’s motion as “the latest example of businesses and conservatives weaponizing the 1st Amendment.” He pointed to the Citizens United case, which said businesses have a free speech right to unlimited campaign contributions, as another example.
“Exxon tried and failed to use this argument in 2022 when it attempted to block an investigation by the Massachusetts Attorney General into whether it misled consumers and investors about the risks of climate change,” he said in an email. “Exxon claimed this investigation violated its First Amendment rights; the Massachusetts courts rejected this attempt.”
Under the Biden administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted similar climate-change disclosure rules. Companies would have been required to disclose the impact of climate change on their business and what they intended to do to mitigate the risk.
But the Chamber of Commerce sued and won a lower court ruling that blocked those rules.
And in March, Trump appointees said the SEC would retreat and not defend the “costly and unnecessarily intrusive climate-change disclosure rules.”
The emergency appeal challenging California’s disclosure laws was filed by Washington attorney Eugene Scalia, a son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
The companies have tried and failed to persuade judges in California to block the measures. Exxon Mobil filed a suit in Sacramento, while the Chamber of Commerce sued in Los Angeles.
In August, U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II in Los Angeles refused to block the laws on the grounds they “regulate commercial speech,” which gets less protection under the 1st Amendment. He said businesses are routinely required to disclose financial data and factual information on their operations.
The business lawyers said they had appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asking for an injunction, but no action has been taken.
Shortly after the chamber’s appeal was filed, state attorneys for Iowa and 24 other Republican-leaning states joined in support. They said they “strongly oppose this radical green speech mandate that California seeks to impose on companies.”
The justices are likely to ask for a response next week from California’s state attorneys before acting on the appeal.
Savage reported from Washington, D.C., Smith from Los Angeles.
Right now the process is underway to reach that final vote in the House to end this longest government shutdown ever. We also wanted to lay out how it’s currently set to work. Over the last 2 days, House lawmakers have been flying in from across the country as they’ve been on recess during the entire shutdown. Some potentially face shutdown-related flight delays, but they are on their way back to the Capitol. The House agenda today was very specific, swearing in *** new congresswoman from Arizona when the House resumed this. Afternoon then debate and an initial procedural vote scheduled for around 5 p.m. Eastern today. If that passes, the House would debate again and is currently scheduled to hold *** final vote around 7 p.m. Eastern. That vote does not include healthcare subsidies, which started the whole shutdown in the first place. Of course we want to reopen the government. But that we need to decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis, and that begins with extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We believe the long national nightmare will be over tonight. It was completely and utterly foolish and pointless in the end, as we said all along. Democrats are largely expected to vote no on this. Republicans who hold *** majority in the House can only afford to lose 2 votes in order to pass this bill. And if that happens, the bill then heads over to President Donald Trump for his signature before the very likely long process of getting the government back up and running again. Reporting on Capitol Hill, I’m Amy Lou.
House returns, set to end record-breaking government shutdown
House lawmakers reconvened in Washington on Wednesday to vote on a bill that would end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
House lawmakers raced back to Washington on Wednesday to vote on a bill that could end the 43-day government shutdown, making it the longest in U.S. history. Over the last two days, lawmakers have been flying in from across the country, some facing their own potential shutdown-related delays, to get to Wednesday’s expected final vote. The House’s agenda included swearing in a new congresswoman from Arizona, followed by debate and an initial procedural vote scheduled for early evening. If that passes, the House debates again before holding a final vote on the bill, expected around 7 p.m. ET. The bill currently does not include Affordable Care Act subsidies, which started the shutdown in the first place.Democrats, who are largely expected to vote “no” on the bill, expressed disappointment.”Of course, we want to reopen the government, but we need to decisively address the Republican health care crisis,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said. “That begins with extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”House Republicans, who hold a majority in the chamber, were largely expected to pass the measure despite Democrats’ objections, but can only afford to lose two votes for the bill to pass. “We believe the long national nightmare will be over tonight,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said. “It was completely and utterly foolish and pointless in the end, as we said all along.”If the bill clears the House, it will require President Donald Trump’s signature before beginning the likely lengthy process of getting the government back up and running again.However, full Republican support is not clear-cut ahead of the final vote. The bill includes a controversial provision that would ban most hemp products in the U.S. Supporters say it would close a dangerous loophole on unregulated products, but others argue it would destroy the hemp industry for many farmers. In the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for example, voted against the bill. Similar action in the House on Wednesday could hold up its passage.Watch the latest coverage on the government shutdown:
WASHINGTON —
House lawmakers raced back to Washington on Wednesday to vote on a bill that could end the 43-day government shutdown, making it the longest in U.S. history.
Over the last two days, lawmakers have been flying in from across the country, some facing their own potential shutdown-related delays, to get to Wednesday’s expected final vote.
The House’s agenda included swearing in a new congresswoman from Arizona, followed by debate and an initial procedural vote scheduled for early evening. If that passes, the House debates again before holding a final vote on the bill, expected around 7 p.m. ET. The bill currently does not include Affordable Care Act subsidies, which started the shutdown in the first place.
“Of course, we want to reopen the government, but we need to decisively address the Republican health care crisis,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said. “That begins with extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
House Republicans, who hold a majority in the chamber, were largely expected to pass the measure despite Democrats’ objections, but can only afford to lose two votes for the bill to pass.
“We believe the long national nightmare will be over tonight,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said. “It was completely and utterly foolish and pointless in the end, as we said all along.”
If the bill clears the House, it will require President Donald Trump’s signature before beginning the likely lengthy process of getting the government back up and running again.
However, full Republican support is not clear-cut ahead of the final vote. The bill includes a controversial provision that would ban most hemp products in the U.S.
Supporters say it would close a dangerous loophole on unregulated products, but others argue it would destroy the hemp industry for many farmers.
In the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for example, voted against the bill. Similar action in the House on Wednesday could hold up its passage.
Watch the latest coverage on the government shutdown:
In the spring of 2023, while his classmates at Georgetown were cramming for finals, Brendan Foody was busy testing out his new theory of work.
“I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,” he told Fortune. “I just didn’t go to finals.”
By then, Foody had already found something he couldn’t learn in a lecture hall. A few months earlier, at a hackathon in São Paulo, he and his co-founders had stumbled onto a simple but powerful model: match companies with skilled engineers abroad, handle the logistics, and take a small cut of each deal. Their first client agreed to pay $500 a week for a developer; Mercor paid the engineer roughly 70% and kept the rest as a service fee.
What began as a way to connect talent soon evolved into something more ambitious: a marketplace where humans could help train the AI systems that might one day replace them. Mercor now hires professionals—consultants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors—to create “evals” and rubrics that test and refine models’ reasoning.
“Everyone’s been focused on what models can do,” Foody said. “But the real opportunity is teaching them what only humans know—judgment, nuance, and taste.”
Within nine months, he and his co-founders—high school friends and debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha—had turned that fledgling idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate. The trio’s early success was less a fluke than a proof of concept: that the same structured reasoning they once practiced on the debate circuit could be codified to teach machines how to think.
Two years later, Mercor has become a $10 billion company, turning the trio into the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The product of that São Paulo experiment had transformed into one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era, attracting major investors who view it as a linchpin in the future of human-in-the-loop automation.
To Foody, the leap from college dropout to billionaire founder was rational.
“When I was in college, work was something I had to be disciplined to do,” he said. “When I started Mercor, it became something I couldn’t stop thinking about.”
Foody still hasn’t taken a day off in three years. He says even when he’s at the dinner table with his parents, he thinks about work, which, to him, doesn’t feel like work.
“People burn out when they work hard on things that don’t feel compounding,” he explained. “I see the ROI of my time every day.”
That mindset has become the philosophical core of Mercor’s mission. In Foody’s view, AI isn’t eliminating labor: it’s reallocating it. As software automates repetitive white-collar tasks, humans will move up the value chain, teaching machines how to reason, decide, and create.
“It’s like we have this bottleneck of only so much human labor in the economy,” he said. “That shape is going to change radically over the next decade.”
How is Mercor alleviating the bottleneck? Its platform allows enterprises to commission thousands of micro-tasks that measure model performance in real professional contexts: writing a financial memo, drafting a legal brief, or analyzing a medical chart. Human evaluators grade each output against detailed rubrics, feeding structured feedback back into the model. Every evaluation helps AI learn how people make decisions, and how they measure quality.
At the center of that system is APEX—the AI Productivity Index, Mercor’s proprietary benchmark for assessing how well AI performs economically valuable work. Rather than test abstract reasoning or mathematical puzzles, APEX evaluates large models on 200 tasks drawn from the workflows of investment bankers, lawyers, consultants, and physicians. To build it, Mercor enlisted a heavyweight advisory group that includes former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, ex-McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and cardiologist Eric Topol. Each helped design the evaluation rubrics and case structures to mirror the realities of high-stakes professional labor.
As the company puts it: “It’s great to have 10,000 PhDs in your pocket—it’s even better to have a model that can reliably do your taxes.”
The implications of Mercor’s success are sweeping. In Foody’s eyes, this new labor market could employ millions of people globally while accelerating AI progress.
“We’ll automate maybe two-thirds of knowledge work,” he said. “And that’ll be incredible, because it lets us do things like cure cancer and go to Mars.”
For investors, Mercor’s growth story is irresistible. It sits at the intersection of two seismic shifts: the mainstreaming of AI and the rise of flexible, project-based work. Each corporate client adds new evaluators, and each evaluator helps refine more models, creating a flywheel of both data and demand.
“We have one of the fastest revenue ramps of any company in history,” Foody said matter-of-factly.
Foody likes to describe it as the next industrial revolution. He knows people are afraid of being replaced by AI, and constantly fields questions on the ethics of training AI to replace jobs. Foody argues we ought to just bite the bullet.
“It’s easy to fall into a Luddite mindset and see productivity gains as bad because they cause short-term job losses,” Foody said. “But every major technical revolution has ultimately made life better.”
After the industrial revolution, the economy went from 75% of Americans working as farmers to about 1%, and that freed people to do everything else, Foody said.
“The challenge now is to be thoughtful about what comes next: the higher, better things humans will spend time on,” Foody said, “and how quickly we can help make that future real.”
A senior federal judge in Massachusetts who was appointed by former President Reagan announced he has resigned in protest against President Donald Trump, who he says has been “using the law for partisan purposes.”
U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf, 78, resigned on Friday and explained that the Trump administration’s actions that he described as threatening the rule of law compelled him to speak out.
In a piece for The Atlantic, Wolf wrote that he had looked forward to serving for the rest of his life when Reagan appointed him in 1985 but decided to step down last week because of Trump’s “assault on the rule of law” that he finds “so deeply disturbing.”
“I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom,” the former judge wrote. “President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment. This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench. The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out. Silence, for me, is now intolerable.”
U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf announced he has resigned in protest against President Donald Trump.(Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“When I accepted the nomination to serve on the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, I took pride in becoming part of a federal judiciary that works to make our country’s ideal of equal justice under law a reality,” he continued. “A judiciary that helps protect our democracy. That has the authority and responsibility to hold elected officials to the limits of the power delegated to them by the people. That strives to ensure that the rights of minority groups, no matter how they are viewed by others, are not violated. That can serve as a check on corruption to prevent public officials from unlawfully enriching themselves. Becoming a federal judge was an ideal opportunity to extend a noble tradition that I had been educated by experience to treasure.”
Wolf added that he now wants to do “everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.”
The former judge noted that Trump cannot replace him with a nominee of his own, as former President Obama named Judge Indira Talwani as his successor in 2013.
Wolf criticized the Department of Justice’s prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James. The former judge also took issue with Trump’s social media post in which he asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey, James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf said he wants to do “everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.”(Getty Images)
He also said that even if a prosecution ends in an acquittal, it “can have devastating consequences for the defendant.”
Wolf also wrote that the DOJ must ensure prosecutors do not seek an indictment unless they have “sufficient admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Trump has utterly ignored this principle,” Wolf wrote.
Wolf blasted Trump’s “unconstitutional or otherwise illegal” executive orders, criticized the president’s calls for judges to be impeached for ruling against him, said there was “corruption by [Trump] and those in his orbit” and emphasized that attacks on the courts have led to actual threats against judges.
“I resigned in order to speak out, support litigation, and work with other individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the rule of law and American democracy,” Wolf wrote. “I also intend to advocate for the judges who cannot speak publicly for themselves.”
U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf blasted President Donald Trump’s “unconstitutional or otherwise illegal” executive orders, as well as the president’s calls for judges to be impeached for ruling against him.(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
“I cannot be confident that I will make a difference,” he added. “I am reminded, however, of what Senator Robert F. Kennedy said in 1966 about ending apartheid in South Africa: ‘Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.’ Enough of these ripples can become a tidal wave.”
The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said Wolf’s “steadfast commitment to the rule of law, determination in wrestling with novel issues of fact and law, and dedication to making fair, equitable and legally sound decisions without fear or favor are the hallmarks of his time on the bench.”
“His many opinions on complex issues of law in notable cases have had a great impact on jurisprudence,” Chief Judge Denise J. Casper said in the statement. “In addition, his tenure as Chief Judge led to the increased engagement with the bar and community, including the initiation of the Court’s bench/bar conference and his continued support of the Court’s Fellowship Programs. I, along with my colleagues and this Court community, applaud his years of dedicated service.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed without comment a long-shot challenge to the constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples.
The justices turned away an appeal petition from Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who defied the court’s landmark decision in 2015 and repeatedly refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
She appealed after one couple sued and won $100,000 in damages plus attorneys fees for her deliberate violation of their constitutional rights.
She argued the court should hear her case to decide whether the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the 1st Amendment should have protected her from being sued.
Her appeal also posed a separate question she had not raised before in her long legal fight. She said the court should decide “whether Obergefell v. Hodges,” which established the right to same-sex marriage, “should be overturned.”
That belated question drew wide attention to her appeal, even though there was little or no chance it would be seriously considered by the high court.
Some LGBTQ+ advocates were concerned, however, because the conservative court had overturned Roe vs. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs case of 2022.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for himself alone, said then “we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” referring to cases on the rights to contraception, private sexual conduct and same-sex marriages.
But other conservative justices had disagreed and said abortion was unique. “Rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe … termed ‘potential life,’ ” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in his opinion for the court.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett in her new book “Listening to the Law” described the right to marry as a “fundamental right” that is protected by the Constitution.
“The complicated moral debate about abortion stands in dramatic contrast to widespread American support for liberties like the rights to marry, have sex, procreate, use contraception, and direct the upbringing of children,” she wrote.
In July, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimated there are 823,000 married same-sex couples in the United States and nearly 300,000 children being raised by them.
Davis had suffered a series of defeats in the federal courts.
A federal judge in Kentucky and the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati rejected her claims based on the free exercise of religion.
Former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis speaks to reporters in Kentucky in 2015. The Supreme Court on Monday rejected her appeal to overturn the right to same-sex marriage.
(Timothy D. Easley / Associated Press)
Those judges said government officials do not have free speech or religious right to refuse to carry out their public duties.
“That is not how the Constitution works. In their private lives, government officials are of course free to express their views and live according to their faith. But when an official wields state power against private citizens, her conscience must yield to the Constitution,” Judge Helene White wrote for the 6th Circuit Court in March.
Ten years ago, shortly after the court’s ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges, Kentucky’s governor, the county’s attorney and a federal judge all told Davis that she was legally required to give a marriage license to same-sex couples who applied for one.
She refused and said the county would issue no marriage licenses until she had been given a special exemption.
David Moore and David Ermold had been a couple for 19 years, and they filed suit after they were turned away from obtaining a marriage license on three occasions. Davis said she was acting “under God’s authority.”
A federal judge held her in contempt for refusing to comply with the law. While she was in jail, the couple finally obtained a marriage license from one of her deputies, but their lawsuit continued.
The Kentucky Legislature revised the law to say that county clerks need not put their name on the licenses issued by her office. Davis said that accommodation was sufficient, and she tried to have the lawsuit dismissed as moot.
The 6th Circuit refused because the claim for damages was still valid and pending. The Supreme Court turned away one of her appeals in 2019.
A federal judge later ruled she had violated the rights of Moore and Ermold, and a jury awarded each of them $50,000 in damages.
Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel in Orlando, which advocates for religious freedom, appealed on her behalf.
His petition to the Supreme Court said the court should hear her case to decide whether the 1st Amendment’s protection for the free exercise of religion should shield a public official from being sued “in her individual capacity.”
The 6th Circuit Court rejected that claim in a 3-0 ruling.
“The Bill of Rights would serve little purpose if it could be freely ignored whenever an official’s conscience so dictates,” Judge White said.
“Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine the dire possibilities that might follow if Davis’s argument were accepted. A county clerk who finds interracial marriage sinful could refuse to issue licenses to interracial couples. An election official who believes women should not vote could refuse to count ballots cast by females. A zoning official personally opposed to Christianity could refuse to permit the construction of a church,” she said.
Judge Chad Readler, a Trump appointee, said even if public employees have some rights based on their religious views, “her conduct here exceeded the scope of any personal right. … Rather than attempting to invoke a religious exemption for herself, Davis instead exercised the full authority of the Rowan County Clerk’s office to enact an official policy of denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples, one every office employee had to follow.”
The New Hampshire Department of Justice is reviewing Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald and the personnel moves that netted his former assistant a $50,000 payout.
NHPR’s Todd Bookman broke the story last month that Dianne Martin was laid off from her job as the administrative director at the judicial branch in April, and then hired two days later by the Supreme Court as the general counsel to the Office of Bar Admissions. During her brief unemployment, Martin cashed out her accrued employment benefits, including unused vacation and sick time, valued at more than $50,000.
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BOSTON — The state Senate is poised to approve a plan to restrict efforts to ban books from public libraries and schools in response to a rise in challenges from parents and conservative groups.
The “free expression” legislation, which cleared the Senate Ways and Means Committee on Thursday with bipartisan support, would make Massachusetts one of a handful of states to effectively outlaw book bans because of “personal, political or doctrinal” views by setting new restrictions on receiving state funding.
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Three lower courts have ruled President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose worldwide tariffs to be illegal. Now the Supreme Court, with three justices Trump appointed and generally favorable to muscular presidential power, will have the final word.In roughly two dozen emergency appeals, the justices have largely gone along with Trump in temporarily allowing parts of his aggressive second-term agenda to take effect while lawsuits play out.But the case being argued Wednesday is the first in which the court will render a final decision on a Trump policy. The stakes are enormous, both politically and financially.The Republican president has made tariffs a central piece of his economic and foreign policy and has said it would be a “disaster” if the Supreme Court rules against him.Here are some things to know about the tariffs arguments at the Supreme Court:Tariffs are taxes on importsThey are paid by companies that import finished products or parts, and the added cost can be passed on to consumers.Through September, the government has reported collecting $195 billion in revenue generated from the tariffs.The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.In February, he invoked the law to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, saying that the illegal flow of immigrants and drugs across the U.S. border amounted to a national emergency and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.In April, he imposed worldwide tariffs after declaring the United States’ longstanding trade deficits “a national emergency.”Libertarian-backed businesses and states challenged the tariffs in federal courtChallengers to Trump’s actions won rulings from a specialized trade court, a district judge in Washington and a business-focused appeals court, also in the nation’s capital.Those courts found that Trump could not justify tariffs under the emergency powers law, which doesn’t mention them. But they left the tariffs in place in the meantime.The appeals court relied on major questions, a legal doctrine devised by the Supreme Court that requires Congress to speak clearly on issues of “vast economic and political significance.”The major questions doctrine doomed several Biden policiesConservative majorities struck down three of then-President Joe Biden’s initiatives related to the coronavirus pandemic. The court ended the Democrat’s pause on evictions, blocked a vaccine mandate for large businesses and prevented student loan forgiveness that would have totaled $500 billion over 10 years.In comparison, the stakes in the tariff case are much higher. The taxes are estimated to generate $3 trillion over 10 years.The challengers in the tariffs case have cited writings by the three Trump appointees, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, in calling on the court to apply similar limitations on a signal Trump policy.Barrett described a babysitter taking children on roller coasters and spending a night in a hotel based on a parent’s encouragement to “make sure the kids have fun.”“In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park,” Barrett wrote in the student loans case. “If a parent were willing to greenlight a trip that big, we would expect much more clarity than a general instruction to ‘make sure the kids have fun.’”Kavanaugh, though, has suggested the court should not apply the same limiting standard to foreign policy and national security issues.A dissenting appellate judge also wrote that Congress purposely gave presidents more latitude to act through the emergency powers law.Some of the businesses that sued also are raising a separate legal argument in an appeal to conservative justices, saying that Congress could not constitutionally delegate its taxing power to the president.The nondelegation principle has not been used in 90 years, since the Supreme Court struck down some New Deal legislation.But Gorsuch authored a dissent in June that would have found the Federal Communications Commission’s universal service fee an unconstitutional delegation. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.“What happens when Congress, weary of the hard business of legislating and facing strong incentives to pass the buck, cedes its lawmaking power, clearly and unmistakably, to an executive that craves it?” Gorsuch wrote.The justices could act more quickly than usual in issuing a decisionThe court only agreed to hear the case in September, scheduling arguments less than two months later. The quick turnaround, at least by Supreme Court standards, suggests that the court will try to act fast.High-profile cases can take half a year or more to resolve, often because the majority and dissenting opinions go through rounds of revision.But the court can act quickly when deadline pressure dictates. Most recently, the court ruled a week after hearing arguments in the TikTok case, unanimously upholding a law requiring the popular social media app to be banned unless it was sold by its Chinese parent company. Trump has intervened several times to keep the law from taking effect while negotiations continue with China.
WASHINGTON —
Three lower courts have ruled President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose worldwide tariffs to be illegal. Now the Supreme Court, with three justices Trump appointed and generally favorable to muscular presidential power, will have the final word.
In roughly two dozen emergency appeals, the justices have largely gone along with Trump in temporarily allowing parts of his aggressive second-term agenda to take effect while lawsuits play out.
But the case being argued Wednesday is the first in which the court will render a final decision on a Trump policy. The stakes are enormous, both politically and financially.
The Republican president has made tariffs a central piece of his economic and foreign policy and has said it would be a “disaster” if the Supreme Court rules against him.
Here are some things to know about the tariffs arguments at the Supreme Court:
Tariffs are taxes on imports
They are paid by companies that import finished products or parts, and the added cost can be passed on to consumers.
Through September, the government has reported collecting $195 billion in revenue generated from the tariffs.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
In February, he invoked the law to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, saying that the illegal flow of immigrants and drugs across the U.S. border amounted to a national emergency and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.
In April, he imposed worldwide tariffs after declaring the United States’ longstanding trade deficits “a national emergency.”
Libertarian-backed businesses and states challenged the tariffs in federal court
Challengers to Trump’s actions won rulings from a specialized trade court, a district judge in Washington and a business-focused appeals court, also in the nation’s capital.
Those courts found that Trump could not justify tariffs under the emergency powers law, which doesn’t mention them. But they left the tariffs in place in the meantime.
The appeals court relied on major questions, a legal doctrine devised by the Supreme Court that requires Congress to speak clearly on issues of “vast economic and political significance.”
The major questions doctrine doomed several Biden policies
Conservative majorities struck down three of then-President Joe Biden’s initiatives related to the coronavirus pandemic. The court ended the Democrat’s pause on evictions, blocked a vaccine mandate for large businesses and prevented student loan forgiveness that would have totaled $500 billion over 10 years.
In comparison, the stakes in the tariff case are much higher. The taxes are estimated to generate $3 trillion over 10 years.
The challengers in the tariffs case have cited writings by the three Trump appointees, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, in calling on the court to apply similar limitations on a signal Trump policy.
Barrett described a babysitter taking children on roller coasters and spending a night in a hotel based on a parent’s encouragement to “make sure the kids have fun.”
“In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park,” Barrett wrote in the student loans case. “If a parent were willing to greenlight a trip that big, we would expect much more clarity than a general instruction to ‘make sure the kids have fun.’”
Kavanaugh, though, has suggested the court should not apply the same limiting standard to foreign policy and national security issues.
A dissenting appellate judge also wrote that Congress purposely gave presidents more latitude to act through the emergency powers law.
Some of the businesses that sued also are raising a separate legal argument in an appeal to conservative justices, saying that Congress could not constitutionally delegate its taxing power to the president.
The nondelegation principle has not been used in 90 years, since the Supreme Court struck down some New Deal legislation.
But Gorsuch authored a dissent in June that would have found the Federal Communications Commission’s universal service fee an unconstitutional delegation. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.
“What happens when Congress, weary of the hard business of legislating and facing strong incentives to pass the buck, cedes its lawmaking power, clearly and unmistakably, to an executive that craves it?” Gorsuch wrote.
The justices could act more quickly than usual in issuing a decision
The court only agreed to hear the case in September, scheduling arguments less than two months later. The quick turnaround, at least by Supreme Court standards, suggests that the court will try to act fast.
High-profile cases can take half a year or more to resolve, often because the majority and dissenting opinions go through rounds of revision.
But the court can act quickly when deadline pressure dictates. Most recently, the court ruled a week after hearing arguments in the TikTok case, unanimously upholding a law requiring the popular social media app to be banned unless it was sold by its Chinese parent company. Trump has intervened several times to keep the law from taking effect while negotiations continue with China.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservatives face a test of their own making this week as they decide whether President Trump had the legal authority to impose tariffs on imports from nations across the globe.
At issue are import taxes that are paid by American businesses and consumers.
Small-business owners had sued, including a maker of “learning toys” in Illinois and a New York importer of wines and spirits. They said Trump’s ever-changing tariffs had severely disrupted their businesses, and they won rulings declaring the president had exceeded his authority.
On Wednesday, the justices will hear their first major challenge to Trump’s claims of unilateral executive power. And the outcome is likely to turn on three doctrines that have been championed by the court’s conservatives.
First, they say the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning. Its opening words say: “All legislative powers … shall be vested” in Congress, and the elected representatives “shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposes and excises.”
Second, they believe the laws passed by Congress should be interpreted based on their words. They call this “textualism,” which rejects a more liberal and open-ended approach that included the general purpose of the law.
That 1977 law says the president may declare a national emergency to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” involving national security, foreign policy or the economy of the United States. Faced with such an emergency, he may “investigate, block … or regulate” the “importation or exportation” of any property.
Trump said the nation’s “persistent” balance of payments deficit over five decades was such an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”
In the past, the law has been used to impose sanctions or freeze the assets of Iran, Syria and North Korea or groups of terrorists. It does not use the words “tariffs” or “duties,” and it had not been used for tariffs prior to this year.
He and the five other conservatives said they were skeptical of far-reaching and costly regulations issued by the Obama and Biden administrations involving matters such as climate change, student loan forgiveness or mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for 84 million Americans.
And unless there is a “clear congressional authorization,” Roberts said the court will not uphold assertions of “extravagant statutory power over the national economy.”
Now all three doctrines are before the justices, since the lower courts relied on them in ruling against Trump.
No one disputes that the president could impose sweeping worldwide tariffs if he had sought and won approval from the Republican-controlled Congress. However, he insisted the power was his alone.
In a social media post, Trump called the case on tariffs “one of the most important in the History of the Country. If a President is not allowed to use Tariffs, we will be at a major disadvantage against all other Countries throughout the World, especially the ‘Majors.’ In a true sense, we would be defenseless! Tariffs have brought us Great Wealth and National Security in the nine months that I have had the Honor to serve as President.”
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, his top courtroom attorney, argues that tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security. And if so, the court should defer to the president.
“IEEPA authorizes the imposition of regulatory tariffs on foreign imports to deal with foreign threats — which crucially differ from domestic taxation,” he wrote last month.
For the same reason, “the major questions doctrine … does not apply here,” he said. It is limited to domestic matters, not foreign affairs, he argued.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has sounded the same note in the past.
Sauer will also seek to persuade the court that the word “regulate” imports includes imposing tariffs.
The challengers are supported by prominent conservatives, including Stanford law professor Michael McConnell.
In 2001, he and John Roberts were nominated for a federal appeals court at the same time by President George W. Bush, and he later served with now-Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.
He is the lead counsel for one group of small-business owners.
“This case is what the American Revolution was all about. A tax wasn’t legitimate unless it was imposed by the people’s representatives,” McConnell said. “The president has no power to impose taxes on American citizens without Congress.”
His brief argues that Trump is claiming a power unlike any in American history.
“Until the 1900s, Congress exercised its tariff power directly, and every delegation since has been explicit and strictly limited,” he wrote in Trump vs. V.O.S. Selections. “Here, the government contends that the President may impose tariffs on the American people whenever he wants, at any rate he wants, for any countries and products he wants, for as long as he wants — simply by declaring longstanding U.S. trade deficits a national ‘emergency’ and an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat,’ declarations the government tells us are unreviewable. The president can even change his mind tomorrow and back again the day after that.”
He said the “major questions” doctrine fully applies here.
Two years ago, he noted the court called Biden’s proposed student loan forgiveness “staggering by any measure” because it could cost more than $430 billion. By comparison, he said, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs will impose $1.7 trillion in new taxes on Americans by 2035.
The case figures to be a major test of whether the Roberts court will put any legal limits on Trump’s powers as president.
But the outcome will not be the final word on tariffs. Administration officials have said that if they lose, they will seek to impose them under other federal laws that involve national security.
Still pending before the court is an emergency appeal testing the president’s power to send National Guard troops to American cities over the objection of the governor and local officials.
Last week, the court asked for further briefs on the Militia Act of 1908, which says the president may call up the National Guard if he cannot “with the regular forces … execute the laws of the United States.”
The government had assumed the regular forces were the police and federal agents, but a law professor said the regular forces in the original law referred to the military.
The justices asked for a clarification from both sides by Nov. 17.
BOSTON — The state Legislature has been hit with another lawsuit over its refusal to open up the books to allow a voter-approved audit of its inner workings.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Middlesex County Superior Court by Republican candidate for lieutenant governor Anne Brensley, who asked a judge to declare a voter-approved law giving State Auditor Diana DiZoglio the power to audit the Legislature constitutional and invalidate an internal state House of Representatives rule on audits.
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For those of us who ride the commuter rails and subways daily, Saturday night’s mass stabbing on a London-bound train is a nightmare brought to life. In such confined and well-lit spaces, there isn’t any way to do what the experts say you should: run, hide and, as a last resort, fight.
A train car moving at high speed with the doors and windows closed is a violent psychopath’s dream—a veritable barrel full of unarmed, unsuspecting fish. Most of us have our heads buried in our phones, our ears distracted by music or podcasts. Some of us are poring over newspapers or dreamily watching the countryside fly by. Rarely do any of us do a threat assessment of those nearby. We are in our own little in-between place—not home, not at work. En route. Vulnerable.
At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.
To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.
But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comes in.
For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, Black’s Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels and brass scales of justice.
The dictionary is Garner’s magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray’s Anatomy is to physicians.
Now, Black’s definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago — one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.
That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textualism, a conserative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.
On a recent weekday, the country’s leading legal lexicographer was ensconced among the 4,500 some-odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home, revising the entry for the adjective “calculated” ahead of Black’s 13th Edition.
But, despite his best efforts not to dwell on the stakes of his work, the noun “rebellion” was never far from his mind.
Federal authorities stand guard at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of protests against the Trump administration.
(Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)
“One of the very first cases citing my book sent a man to his capital punishment,” he explained of an earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was put to death. I was very disturbed by that at first.”
He managed his distress by doubling down on his craft. In its first 100 years, Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and reissued six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner produced six new editions.
“I work on it virtually every day,” he said.
Most mornings, he rises before dawn, settling behind a desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin the day’s defining.
That fastidiousness has not stopped the lexical war over his work in recent months, as judges across the country read opposite meanings into “rebellion.”
The Department of Justice and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois have likewise sparred over the word.
In making their case, virtually all have invoked Black’s definition — one Garner has personally penned for the last 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.
“The word ‘rebellion’ has been stable in its three basic meanings in Black’s since I took over,” he said.
“Ooo! So at some point I added, ‘usually through violence,’” he amended himself.
This change comes from the definition’s first sense: 1. Open, organized, and armed resistance to an established government or ruler; esp., an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usu. through violence.
States have touted this meaning to argue the word rebellion cannot possibly apply to torched Waymos in Los Angeles or naked bicyclists in Portland.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has leaned on the second and third senses to say the opposite.
The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue rebellion means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or tradition,” including disobeying “a legal command or summons.”
“But it is not remotely plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt that expansive definition,” the state said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks onstage to deliver remarks as part of the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.
(Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)
Although the scope and the stakes of the rebellion fight make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.
The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has surged in recent years, with the rise of Scalia-style textualism and the growing sense in certain segments of the public that judges simply make the law up as they go along.
By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, up dramatically from prior years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
Splitting hairs over what makes a rebellion is a new level of absurdity, he said. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court’s obsession with dictionaries.”
“Reducing the meaning of a statute to one (of the many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “What it gives you is a means of manipulating the definition to achieve the result you want.”
Garner has publicly acknowledged the limits of his work. Ultimately, it’s up to judges to decide cases based on precedents, evidence, and the relevant law. Dictionaries are an adjunct.
Still, he and other textualists see the turn to dictionaries as an important corrective to interpretive excesses of the past.
“The words are law,” Garner said.
Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as a protester stands outside in an inflatable frog costume on Oct. 21 in Portland, Ore.
(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)
Judges who cite dictionaries are “not ceding power to lexicographers,” he argued, but simply giving appropriate heft to the text enacted by Congress.
Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of jurists bent on reading the law to suit a political agenda.
“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility for saying ‘Yes, there’s a rebellion’ or ‘no, there isn’t,’ so they say ‘the dictionary made me do it.’” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “No, it didn’t.”
Though he agreed with Black’s definition of rebellion, Segall rejected the idea it could shape jurisprudence: “That’s not how our legal system works,” he said.
The great challenge in the troops cases, legal scholars agree, is that they turn on a vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.
Unlike past presidents, who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump deployed an obscure subsection of the U.S. code to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and surge military forces into American cities.
Before Trump deployed troops to L.A. in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.
With little interpretation to oppose it, the Justice Department has wielded its novel reading of the statute to justify the use of federalized troops to support immigration arrests and put down demonstrations.
Administration attorneys say the president’s decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “unreviewable” by courts, and that troops can remain in federal service in perpetuity once called up, regardless of how conditions change.
Border Patrol official Greg Bovino marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they have split on the thornier issues of whether community efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement leave Trump “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — another trigger for the statute — and if sporadic violence at protests adds up to rebellion.
As of this week, appellate courts also remain sharply divided on the evidence.
On Oct 23, Oregon claimed the Department of Justice inflated the number of federal protective personnel it said were detailed to Portland in response to protests to more than triple its actual size — a mistake the department called an “unintended ambiguity.”
The inflated number was repeatedly cited in oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon’s troops — an order the court reversed Tuesday while it is reviewed.
The 7th Circuit noted similar falsehoods, leading that court to block the Chicago deployment.
“The [U.S. District] court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct 11 decision.
A Supreme Court decision expected in that case will probably define Trump’s power to deploy troops throughout the Midwest — and potentially across the country.
For Garner, that decision means more work.
In addition to his dictionaries, he is also the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.
The editor credits his prodigious output to strict discipline. As an undergrad at the University of Texas, he swore off weekly Longhorns games and eschewed his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinist devotion ever since.
“I haven’t seen a game for the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, though he makes a biannual exception for the second halves of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.
As for the political football with Black’s “rebellion,” he’s waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.
“I will be looking very closely at what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If it writes anything about the meaning of the word rebellion, that might well affect the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”
On this day in 1715, the village of Byfield was incorporated. It was named after Judge Nathaniel Byfield, a member of the Massachusetts General Court. He served repeatedly as first judge of the vice-admiralty court. He was strongly opposed to…
BOSTON — Democratic Attorney General Andrea Campbell is running for reelection, touting her efforts to protect civil rights and consumer protections and filing litigation pushing back against the Trump administration’s divisive policies.
Campbell, the state’s first Black attorney general, announced Tuesday that she plans to seek another four-year term as the state’s top law enforcement official in the 2026 elections.
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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is set to rule for the first time on whether the president has the power to deploy troops in American cities over the objections of local and state officials.
A decision could come at any time.
And even a one-line order siding with President Trump would send the message that he is free to use the military to carry out his orders — and in particular, in Democratic-controlled cities and states.
Trump administration lawyers filed an emergency appeal last week asking the court to reverse judges in Chicago who blocked the deployment of the National Guard there.
The Chicago-based judges said Trump exaggerated the threat faced by federal immigration agents and had equated “protests with riots.”
Trump administration lawyers, however, said these judges had no authority to second-guess the president. The power to deploy the National Guard “is committed to his exclusive discretion by law,” they asserted in their appeal in Trump vs. Illinois.
That broad claim of executive power might win favor with the court’s conservatives.
Administration lawyers told the court that the National Guard would “defend federal personnel, property, and functions in the face of ongoing violence” in response to aggressive immigration enforcement, but it would not carry out ordinary policing.
Yet Trump has repeatedly threatened to send U.S. troops to San Francisco and other Democratic-led cities to carry out ordinary law enforcement.
When he sent 4,000 Guard members and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June, their mission was to protect federal buildings from protesters. But state officials said troops went beyond that and were used to carry out a show in force in MacArthur Park in July.
Newsom, Bonta warn of dangers
That’s why legal experts and Democratic officials are sounding an alarm.
“Trump v. Illinois is a make-or-break moment for this court,” said Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, a frequent critic of the court’s pro-Trump emergency orders. “For the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that allows the president to send troops into our cities based upon contrived (or even government-provoked) facts … would be a terrible precedent for the court to set not just for what it would allow President Trump to do now but for even more grossly tyrannical conduct.”
“On June 7, for the first time in our nation’s history, the President invoked [the Militia Act of 1903] to federalize a State’s National Guard over the objections of the State’s Governor. Since that time, it has become clear that the federal government’s actions in Southern California earlier this summer were just the opening salvo in an effort to transform the role of the military in American society,” their brief said.
“At no prior point in our history has the President used the military this way: as his own personal police force, to be deployed for whatever law enforcement missions he deems appropriate. … What the federal government seeks is a standing army, drawn from state militias, deployed at the direction of the President on a nationwide basis, for civilian law enforcement purposes, for an indefinite period of time.”
Conservatives cite civil rights examples
Conservatives counter that Trump is seeking to enforce federal law in the face of strong resistance and non-cooperation at times from local officials.
“Portland and Chicago have seen violent protests outside of federal buildings, attacks on ICE and DHS agents, and organized efforts to block the enforcement of immigration law,” said UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo. “Although local officials have raised cries of a federal ‘occupation’ and ‘dictatorship,’ the Constitution places on the president the duty to ‘take care that the laws are faithfully executed.’”
He noted that presidents in the past “used these same authorities to desegregate southern schools in the 1950s after Brown v. Board of Education and to protect civil rights protesters in the 1960s. Those who cheer those interventions cannot now deny the same constitutional authority when it is exercised by a president they oppose,” he said.
The legal battle so far has sidestepped Trump’s broadest claims of unchecked power, but focused instead on whether he is acting in line with the laws adopted by Congress.
The Constitution gives Congress the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel Invasions.”
Beginning in 1903, Congress said that “the President may call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary” if he faces “danger of invasion by a foreign nation … danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States or the president is unable to execute the laws of the United States.”
While Trump administration lawyers claim he faces a “rebellion,” the legal dispute has focused on whether he is “unable to execute the laws.”
Lower courts have blocked deployments
Federal district judges in Portland and Chicago blocked Trump’s deployments after ruling that protesters had not prevented U.S. immigration agents from doing their jobs.
Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, described the administration’s description of “war-ravaged” Portland as “untethered to the facts.”
In Chicago, Judge April Perry, a Biden appointee, said that “political opposition is not rebellion.”
But the two appeals courts — the 9th Circuit in San Francisco and the 7th Circuit in Chicago — handed down opposite decisions.
A panel of the 9th Circuit said judges must defer to the president’s assessment of the danger faced by immigration agents. Applying that standard, the appeals court by a 2-1 vote said the National Guard deployment in Portland may proceed.
But a panel of the 7th Circuit in Chicago agreed with Perry.
“The facts do not justify the President’s actions in Illinois, even giving substantial deference to his assertions,” they said in a 3-0 ruling last week. “Federal facilities, including the processing facility in Broadview, have remained open despite regular demonstrations against the administration’s immigration policies. And though federal officers have encountered sporadic disruptions, they have been quickly contained by local, state, and federal authorities.”
Attorneys for Illinois and Chicago agreed and urged the court to turn down Trump’s appeal.
“There is no basis for claiming the President is ‘unable’ to ‘execute’ federal law in Illinois,” they said. “Federal facilities in Illinois remain open, the individuals who have violated the law by attacking federal authorities have been arrested, and enforcement of immigration law in Illinois has only increased in recent weeks.”
U.S. Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, shown at his confirmation hearing in February, said the federal judges in Chicago had no legal or factual basis to block the Trump administration’s deployment of troops.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Trump’s Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer presented a dramatically different account in his appeal.
“On October 4, the President determined that the situation in Chicago had become unsustainably dangerous for federal agents, who now risk their lives to carry out basic law enforcement functions,” he wrote. “The President deployed the federalized Guardsmen to Illinois to protect federal officers and federal property.”
He disputed the idea that agents faced just peaceful protests.
“On multiple occasions, federal officers have also been hit and punched by protestors at the Broadview facility. The physical altercations became more significant and the clashes more violent as the size of the crowds swelled throughout September,” Sauer wrote. “Rioters have targeted federal officers with fireworks and have thrown bottles, rocks, and tear gas at them. More than 30 [DHS] officers have been injured during the assaults on federal law enforcement at the Broadview facility alone, resulting in multiple hospitalizations.”
He said the judges in Chicago had no legal or factual basis to block the deployment, and he urged the court to cast aside their rulings.
BEVERLY — A lawsuit brought by parents over the November 2024 Beverly teachers strike is on hold as the state’s Appeals Court decides the fate of a similar case in Newton.
Janelle Donahue, of Beverly, and Erica Kostro, of Quincy, filed the suit on behalf of their children against the Beverly Teachers Association and its president, Andrea Sherman, in Salem Superior Court in June.
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Three of the country’s most powerful judges met in Pasadena on Wednesday for a rare conclave that could rewrite the legal framework for President Trump’s expansive deployment of troops to cities across the United States.
The move to flood Los Angeles with thousands of federalized soldiers over the objection of state and local leaders shocked the country back in June. Five months later, such military interventions have become almost routine.
But whether the deployments can expand — and how long they can continue — relies on a novel reading of an obscure subsection of the U.S. code that determines the president’s ability to dispatch the National Guard and federal service members. That code has been under heated debate in courts across the country.
Virtually all of those cases have turned on the 9th Circuit’s decision in June. The judges found that the law in question requires “a great level of deference” to the president to decide when protest flashes into rebellion, and whether boots on the ground are warranted in response.
On Wednesday, the same three judge panel — Jennifer Sung of Portland, Eric D. Miller of Seattle and Mark J. Bennett of Honolulu — took the rare move of reviewing it, signaling a willingness to dramatically rewrite the terms of engagement that have underpinned Trump’s deployments.
“I guess the question is, why is a couple of hundred people engaging in disorderly conduct and throwing things at a building over the course of two days of comparable severity of a rebellion?” said Miller, who was appointed to the bench in Trump’s first term. “Violence is used to thwart the enforcement of federal law all the time. This happens every day.”
The question he posed has riven the judicial system, splitting district judges from appellate panels and the Pacific Coast from the Midwest. Some of Trump’s judicial appointees have broken sharply with their colleagues on the matter, including on the 9th Circuit. Miller and Bennett appear at odds with Ryan D. Nelson and Bridget S. Bade, who expanded on the court’s June ruling in a decision Monday that allowed federalized troops to deploy in Oregon.
Most agreethat the statute itself is esoteric, vague and untested. Unlike the Insurrection Act, which generations of presidents have used to quell spasms of violent domestic unrest, the law Trump invoked has almost no historical footprint, and little precedent to define it.
“It’s only been used once in the history of our country since it was enacted 122 years ago,” California Solicitor General Samuel Harbourt told the court Wednesday.
Attorneys from both sides have turned to legal dictionaries to define the word “rebellion” in their favor, because the statute itself offers no clues.
“Defendants have not put forward a credible understanding of the term ‘rebellion’ in this litigation,” Harbourt told the panel Wednesday. “We’re continuing to see defendants rely on this interpretation across the country and we’re concerned that the breadth of the definition the government has relied on … includes any form of resistance.”
The wiggle room has left courts to lock horns over the most basic facts before them — including whether what the president claims must be provably true.
In the Oregon case, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland, another Trump appointee, called the president’s assertions about a rebellion there “untethered to the facts.”
But a separate 9th Circuit panel overruled her, finding the law “does not limit the facts and circumstances that the President may consider” when deciding whether to use soldiers domestically.
“The President has the authority to identify and weigh the relevant facts,” the court wrote in its Monday decision.
Nelson went further, calling the president’s decision “absolute.”
Upon further review, Sung signaled a shift to the opposite interpretation.
“The court says when the statute gives a discretionary power, that is based on certain facts,” she said. “I don’t see the court saying that the underlying decision of whether the factual basis exists is inherently discretionary.”
That sounded much more like the Midwest’s 7th Circuit decision in the Chicago case, which found that nothing in the statute “makes the President the sole judge of whether these preconditions exist.”
“Political opposition is not rebellion,” the 7th Circuit judges wrote. “A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows.”
The Trump administration’s appeal of that decision is currently before the Supreme Court on the emergency docket.
But experts said even a high court ruling in that case may not dictate what can happen in California — or in New York, for that matter. Even if the justices ruled against the administration, Trump could choose to invoke the Insurrection Act or another law to justify his next moves, an option that he and other officials have repeatedly floated in recent weeks.
The administration has signaled its desire to expand on the power it already enjoys, telling the court Wednesday there was no limit to where troops could be deployed or how long they could remain in the president’s service once he had taken control of them.
“Would it be your view that no matter how much conditions on the ground changed, there would be no ability of the district court or review — in a month, six months, a year, five years — to review whether the conditions still support [deployment]?”
“Yes,” McArthur said.
Bennett pressed the point, asking whether under the current law the militia George Washington federalized to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 could “stay called up forever” — a position the government again affirmed.
“There’s not a word in the statute that talks about how long they can remain in federal service,” McArthur said. “The president’s determination of whether the exigency has arisen, that decision is vested in his sole and exclusive discretion.”
A man was taken into custody late Tuesday after driving his car into a security barrier outside the White House, authorities said.The U. S. Secret Service said the man crashed into the security gate at a White House entrance at 10:37 p.m. on Tuesday. The man was immediately arrested by officers from the Secret Service’s uniformed division, the agency said.Investigators searched his car and deemed it to be safe, Secret Service officials said in a statement.Authorities did not immediately provide any additional information about the crash, the driver’s identity, or any potential motivation.
WASHINGTON —
A man was taken into custody late Tuesday after driving his car into a security barrier outside the White House, authorities said.
The U. S. Secret Service said the man crashed into the security gate at a White House entrance at 10:37 p.m. on Tuesday. The man was immediately arrested by officers from the Secret Service’s uniformed division, the agency said.
Investigators searched his car and deemed it to be safe, Secret Service officials said in a statement.
Authorities did not immediately provide any additional information about the crash, the driver’s identity, or any potential motivation.
The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings blocking the deployment of federalized National Guard troops to Chicago.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the emergency appeal, the first time Trump’s team has appealed directly to the highest court regarding the deployment of National Guard soldiers to a major city.
Newsweek contacted the offices of Sauer and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for comment on Saturday via telephone and email respectively, outside of regular office hours.
Why it Matters
The administration’s emergency Supreme Court appeal to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois represents a pivotal clash between executive authority and state sovereignty. The outcome will likely clarify the president’s power to federalize military resources within the U.S., especially in opposition to state and local leaders.
The case raises major constitutional questions about the use of federal military personnel in civilian law enforcement and the judiciary’s role in checking presidential power, as underscored by recent federal rulings and statements from both sides of the dispute .
What To Know
On Friday, President Trump’s administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, seeking to lift lower court orders that prevent the deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois.
The move comes after a district judge and the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals both blocked Trump’s attempted deployment, ruling that the conditions had not been met for such federal intervention under statutory requirements.
Sauer argued in the Supreme Court filing that troops are necessary in Chicago to address what the administration described as “ongoing and intolerable risks to the lives and safety” of federal agents. The appeal maintains that recent lower court rulings “improperly impinge on the President’s authority and needlessly endanger federal personnel and property.”
The Trump administration had previously federalized the Illinois National Guard against the opposition of Pritzker, who has decried military deployments in his state.
Additionally, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent several hundred National Guard troops to Illinois in support of Trump’s enforcement efforts. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals stated that “political opposition is not rebellion,” and concluded that Trump’s claims of uncontrolled violence were not substantiated by evidence.
This legal battle in Illinois is one of several across the country in which the Trump administration has sought to deploy the National Guard to assist in immigration enforcement or respond to protests—moves that have faced pushback from local leaders in California, Oregon, and elsewhere.
The Supreme Court has previously sided with Trump on some emergency appeals involving military policy and immigration enforcement.
What People Are Saying
Solicitor General D. John Sauer stated in the administration’s appeal, “The lower court’s ruling improperly impinges on the President’s authority and needlessly endangers federal personnel and property.”
Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, responded on X: “Donald Trump will keep trying to invade Illinois with troops — and we will keep defending the sovereignty of our state. Militarizing our communities against their will is not only un-American but also leads us down a dangerous path for our democracy.”
Vice President JD Vance told ABC’s This Week: “We think that we have the authority to provide proper safety to our citizens all over the United States, but particularly in Chicago.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson affirmed: “President Trump has exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets… We expect to be vindicated by a higher court.”
What Happens Next
The Supreme Court has ordered responses from Illinois and Chicago officials by Monday evening before considering the administration’s request.
A decision could set a legal precedent regarding the president’s power to federalize National Guard troops and direct federal action in states that oppose such interventions.
Pending the Supreme Court’s decision, further appeals and ongoing litigation in other states continue to unfold, with the potential for sweeping implications for the balance between federal authority and state sovereignty across the country.
