ReportWire

Tag: U.S. Supreme Court

  • Bill would ban prop bets on sports apps in Colorado as lawmakers seek to curb gambling addictions

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    Colorado lawmakers who are concerned about rising gambling addiction and betting scandals in professional sports filed a bill Wednesday that would prohibit sports betting apps from offering proposition bets on individual athletes’ performances.

    The bipartisan responsible gaming bill — SB26-131 — would also attempt to slow down gambling habits by eliminating credit card usage on sports betting apps, limiting the number of deposits a person can make into an account, and banning push notifications to gamblers’ cellphones from betting companies such as DraftKings and FanDuel.

    “Frankly, the more I looked into i,t the more I became really, really alarmed by everything that has happened as a consequence of legalized sports betting and, in my view, placing very few restrictions on it,” said Sen. Matt Ball, D-Denver, one of the bill’s sponsors.

    Ball, who is sponsoring the bill with Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, said the rapid growth of sports betting in Colorado is causing unexpected problems — including financial debts — across the state, and the legislature needs to move to protect people and the integrity of professional and collegiate sports. The bill also has a Democratic and a Republican sponsor in the House.

    He cited studies that show more than half of 18-to-22-year-olds have engaged in some form of sports betting, and surveys of high school students that report that between 60% and 80% have gambled for money within the previous 12 months.

    “We just didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Ball said of Colorado’s quick entry into legalized sports betting. “It’s just exploded and it’s happened very fast. I think we can see the harm that’s happened very clearly.”

    Colorado voters legalized sports betting in 2019 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a law that previously had prohibited states from allowing it. It was one of the first states to launch online sports books in May 2020, just after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the country, including putting a pause on most sports. But the state’s residents quickly took to sports betting apps as the world returned to normal.

    The amount Colorado bettors have wagered has steadily increased each year, with people betting more than $6 billion on sports in 2025. At the same time, the number of people calling the state’s problem gambling hotline has risen, too. The hotline averaged about 350 calls per month in 2025, according to the Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado.

    Joshua Ewing, executive director of Healthier Colorado, an advocacy group that pushes for better health policies in the state, said new studies are showing a growing rate of addiction among young men and boys who gamble, and addiction is causing financial debt, strained relationships and emotional stress.

    “It’s not about rolling back voter-approved betting. It’s about guardrails,” Ewing said of the bill. “The goal is smart policy, not prohibition.”

    The sports betting industry is prepared to push back on the legislation.

    “Colorado should seize this moment to strengthen its state-regulated market — not hand it back to illegal operators or chase bettors to federally regulated platforms,” said Joe Maloney, president of the Sports Betting Alliance. “This proposal undermines the very consumer protections it claims to advance, rewarding actors who openly flout Colorado law and contribute nothing to the state’s communities by way of tax revenues.”

    Maloney said the alliance will continue to engage elected leaders and regulators to reinforce consumer protections and responsible gaming standards that the industry already follows.

    Proposition bets, or prop bets, are the moneymakers for sports betting apps because they come with higher odds. In those bets, a gambler could bet on whether Denver Nuggets star Nicola Jokic will score 30 or more points in a game or whether Denver Broncos quarterback Bo Nix will throw more than one touchdown.

    Sports betting apps also allow gamblers to make multiple prop bets at one time to form parlays, which further increase odds in favor of the sportsbooks, but are wildly popular with gamblers.

    For example, Bet365 on Wednesday offered a parlay bet called “Joker x Jamal,” where a gambler would win if the Nuggets’ Jokic and Jamal Murray both scored more than 20 points, and if Murray had more than 10 assists and Jokic grabbed more than 10 rebounds. A $10 wager could earn $100 if all four things happened in the Nuggets game against the Celtics.

    Colorado already prohibits prop bets on college athletes, but Ball and the bill’s other sponsors want to prohibit all of these bets because of the temptation among athletes to take bribes to influence outcomes for gamblers.

    The bill also aims to curb the barrage of television advertisements and phone notifications that people see during sporting events.

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    Noelle Phillips

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  • The Supreme Court’s Complicated Takedown of Trump’s Tariffs

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    The case that the Court decided, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, was the consolidation of two lawsuits, brought by small businesses and states, challenging Trump’s use of IEEPA. IEEPA is a powerful tool; its provisions include a long list of commerce-related actions, such as imposing export restrictions and quotas, that a President can take in the case of a national emergency. The problem for Trump is that “tariffs” is not on the list. Neither are related terms, like “duties” or “customs.” The entire world-market-upsetting tariff scheme—under which, Roberts wrote in the majority decision, Trump asserted that “the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time”—was built on nothing more than the awkward placement of the word “regulate” a couple of lines away from the word “importation.” And, as Roberts stated and a six-Justice majority found, “Those words cannot bear such weight.”

    Justice Elena Kagan, in a concurrence joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, tallied up nine verbs in IEEPA (such as “investigate,” “block,” “direct”) and eleven objects related to foreign commerce (“acquisition,” “withdrawal,” “transfer”), meaning that there are “99 actions a President can take to address a foreign threat.” But, if the action in question, “regulate . . . importation,” really meant “impose tariffs,” it would be the “the odd man out,” in Kagan’s words, because “exactly none of the other 98 involves raising revenues.” IEEPA has been used, by various Presidents, more than seventy times, for example, to impose sanctions on Iran and Cuba; none has used it for tariffs.

    This question of revenue was highly significant to the Justices, because tariffs are a kind of tax, and, in our constitutional system, the power to tax is a central aspect of Congress’s power, not the President’s. (In 2012, the statute creating Obamacare survived a major constitutional challenge because the Court decided, in a landmark decision also written by Roberts, that the individual mandate to acquire health care was a form of tax.) The presumption is that, if Congress gave the President the ability to impose tariffs, as it sometimes does, it would make it reasonably clear that it was doing so. But IEEPA does not look like any kind of a tax law. In the oral arguments for the case, D. John Sauer, Trump’s Solicitor General, tried to get around the problem by contending that Trump’s tariffs shouldn’t really be thought of as taxes at all—a position that was met with near-mockery from even some of the conservative Justices.

    And Trump’s new tariffs have raised a great deal of revenue—almost two hundred billion dollars’ worth, according to an estimate by economists at the Penn-Wharton Budget Model for Reuters. But Roberts’s opinion says nothing about whether or how that money might be refunded. “While the Supreme Court’s decision was pending, hundreds of importers filed suit at the Court of International Trade, seeking refunds of the tariffs paid,” Mark Wu, a professor of international trade law at Harvard Law School, told me. “Those cases were stayed, but with the decision handed down, those cases can now proceed.” Trump, on Friday, wondered why the Court hadn’t put in a sentence telling him whether to “keep the money or don’t keep the money.” He added, “I guess it has to get litigated for the next two years.” A moment later, Trump upped that estimate to five years.

    The lack of guidance on refunds may be an indication that Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump was not a simple case for the Justices, despite the lopsided outcome. There are seven separate opinions, adding up to a hundred and seventy pages. The principal dissent, by Brett Kavanaugh—whom Trump, on Friday, thanked for “his genius”—is more than sixty pages. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined Kavanaugh; Thomas also wrote a dissent in support of broad tariff powers for Presidents. And even the Justices who agree with one another are in some ways at odds. Roberts only mustered a majority for part of his opinion; midway through, the three liberals peeled off, meaning that, although there is a 6–3 majority on striking down the tariffs, there is no full consensus on the reasoning or its implications. Specifically, the liberals declined to join the section in which Roberts wrote that Trump’s tariffs are unlawful because they do not meet the demands of something called the “major questions doctrine.”

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    Amy Davidson Sorkin

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  • How Justice Alito’s Retirement Might Upend the Midterms

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    Photo: Chip Somodevilla//Getty Images

    This week, there’s been a lot of attention focused on the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to its stunning decision blowing up the rationale for Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. In his bitter remarks about the decision, the president went out of his way to praise dissenters Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh.

    It’s Alito who could make some additional political news later this year. To understand why, you must step back to 2018, when Trump faced his first midterm election as president and the dynamics looked grim. He had lost the popular vote in 2016. His job-approval ratings had been underwater from the second week of his term in office. One of his two big first-term initiatives, legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, had ended in dismal failure. And unsurprisingly, his party wound up losing 40 net U.S. House seats and control of that chamber.

    But at the same time, Republicans actually posted a net gain of two U.S. Senate seats and increased their majority from a fragile 51-to-49 margin to a more robust 53 to 47. Why? Well, according to many GOP spin-meisters, it was to a significant degree owing to “Kavanaugh’s revenge,” as CNBC reported at the time:

    Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both credited the so-called Kavanaugh effect for Republican victories in key Senate races against red-state Democrats.

    Graham, in a thread of tweets Wednesday morning, said that the constituents of those Democratic incumbents who voted against Kavanaugh “held them responsible for being part of a despicable smear campaign orchestrated by the left.”

    The ”#KavanaughEffect,” Graham said, should be renamed ”#KavanaughsRevenge” …

    Republicans in critical states for the party were “highly offended” by the Democrats’ conduct during the confirmation proceedings, McConnell said, and the fallout from the process acted “like an adrenaline shot” for GOP turnout.

    Graham, as you may recall from his feral attacks on Senate Democrats during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, chaired the Judiciary Committee during that confirmation fight and contended that accusations of sexual assault against the soon-to-be Justice were blatantly unfair — nay, villainous. So it was natural for him to claim the hearings enraged both Republicans and swing voters and saved the Senate (an interpretation that also inflated his own importance, as it happens).

    It was a dubious interpretation of the midterms at the time, but the important thing is that many Republicans believed it. And that could feed a parallel development going into the 2026 midterms: a possible retirement by Kavanaugh’s senior and very right-wing colleague Samuel Alito.

    Alito has been on retirement watch for a while now. He’s 75 years old (and will turn 76 on April 1) and recently celebrated 20 years on the Supreme Court. And as the intrepid Court watcher Joan Biskupic noted in 2024 after he twice lost an initial majority on a case, Alito’s influence within the Court has been slipping, leaving him visibly frustrated:

    Alito has long given off an air of vexation, even as he is regularly in the majority with his conservative ideology. But the frustration of the 74-year-old justice has grown increasingly palpable in the courtroom. He has seldom faced this level of internal opposition.

    Overall, Alito wrote the fewest leading opinions for the court this term, only four, while other justices close to his 18-year seniority had been assigned (and kept majorities for) seven opinions each.

    His unique year in chambers was matched by the extraordinary public scrutiny for his off-bench activities, including lingering ethics controversies and a newly reported episode regarding an upside-down flag that had flown at this home in January 2021, after the pro–Donald Trump attack on the US Capitol. 

    There is also evidence that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, would like him to step down from the bench so that both of them can openly express their political opinions.

    Thus, there’s been speculation, mostly from the political left, that an Alito retirement could happen before or immediately after the current Supreme Court term. The Nation’s legal expert Elie Mystal, then Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Joseph Stern, drew attention to the odd timing of a new Alito book. Here’s the clue on which Mystal focused:

    [T]he book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.

    It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it.

    There’s also a political reason Alito might want to step down at this particular moment. He clearly cares about his legacy on the Court and wants to solidify the conservative majority for which he and Justice Clarence Thomas have served as the point of an ideological spear. Trump is leaving office in 2029, and it’s possible Republicans will lose their Senate majority in November. Confirmation of anyone remotely like Alito would be impossible with a Democratic Senate and difficult with a smaller majority than Republicans currently enjoy.

    Add in the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” theory of 2018, and you can see why Republicans might really want to press for an Alito retirement and then a good, savage Senate confirmation fight over a controversial nominee to succeed him, possibly 40-somethings like Andrew Oldham or Emil Bove, both Trump-nominated Circuit Court judges. If Alito was to retire at the end of the current term (perhaps announcing the retirement earlier), then the shape of the future Supreme Court could become a base-mobilizing issue for the GOP, all right — but potentially also one for Democrats.

    That leads us back to the idea that poor Kavanaugh’s persecution by Democrats “saved the Senate” in 2018. The alternative explanation is that Republicans had an insanely favorable Senate landscape that year in which three Democrats who lost (Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri) were doomed from the get-go by the rapidly rightward trends of their states, and a fourth, Florida’s Bill Nelson, lost by an eyelash in another red-trending state after being massively outspent by then-Governor Rick Scott.

    Even if you believe the Kavanaugh fight provided Republicans with a net benefit in 2018, there’s no reason to assume the same thing will happen in 2026, a year in which the Senate landscape is far less favorable to the GOP than it was in 2018 (according to the Cook Political Report, four of the seven competitive Senate races this year are on GOP turf). We also don’t know how the confirmation hearings for an Alito successor will turn out.

    But between Alito’s motives for retiring, the GOP’s fear that it could lose control of the confirmation process, and the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” mythology about 2018, don’t be surprised if there’s a Supreme Court fight this summer or fall. Democrats would be happy to bid farewell to the author of the infamous decision reversing Roe v. Wade. Even if it hurts rather than helps their midterm prospects, Alito’s right-wing fans will be happy to welcome a younger version of the cranky conservative onto a life-time seat on the Court.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • How Trump Is Still Deporting People Wherever He Wants

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    In March of 2025, the Trump Administration was widely criticized for sending more than two hundred Venezuelans to CECOT, a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador. Yet, over the past eleven months, the Administration has continued the practice of deporting large numbers of noncitizens to so-called third countries, or countries to which the deportee typically has no connection. This is often because many immigrants living in America have judicial orders that prevent the government from sending them to their home country owing to the risk of persecution. This third-country practice has continued, however, despite the fact that a number of deportees have been sent back to their home countries after arriving in the third country. (Others remain stuck in prisons.) Recently, the Administration sent nine people of various nationalities to Cameroon, where most of them are now being held in detention until they agree to return to their home countries.

    I recently spoke by phone with Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy there. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how judges have tried to limit the Trump Administration’s use of this third-country loophole by demanding that it bring wrongly deported immigrants home, the legal process that allows this type of deportation, and how the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to rein in the Trump Administration has strained federal courts.

    Early in Trump’s second term, there was a lot of concern about the degree to which immigration authorities would start removing people from America and sending them to third countries. A year later, how prevalent is this?

    I think it’s important to distinguish between third-country arrangements that result in the deportees being imprisoned in a foreign country, and other kinds of third-country arrangements, where, for example, Mexico has agreed to take in people who are not from Mexico and then, in some way or another, encourage those people to go back to their home countries. I would say that, in the case of the latter, the deportations to countries where people are just left at sea have happened on a massive, really unprecedented scale.

    The former, which are these deportation-to-prison arrangements, obviously happened with El Salvador, and then in other places like Ghana, and they’re also very troubling. But the total number of them is small. It’s probably less than a hundred, if you leave out the ones to El Salvador.

    In January, the Trump Administration secretly deported nine people to Cameroon, where none of them are from, according to the Times. It seems like when the Administration is legally prohibited from deporting people to a country where they may be persecuted, they send people to a third country, and then essentially throw up their hands and say, “Well, if the third country is going to send them to the country that they’re not supposed to be sent to, we can’t do anything.” Some legal observers argue that this workaround is just as illegal. How do you see it?

    I think it’s clearly illegal for two different reasons. The Administration’s recent arrangement with Cameroon resulted in the imprisonment of these nine people in Cameroon, and, at least in the reporting that I’ve read, most of them will be imprisoned unless they agree to go back to their home country. So that’s punishment. When you send somebody to a place to be imprisoned, that is imprisonment without trial. And so that, I think, is unquestionably illegal.

    Separate from that, even in cases where they’re being sent to these places, and it’s not necessarily resulting in imprisonment, but it’s resulting in a follow-on deportation, that is illegal—absent the person having had an opportunity to challenge that arrangement in the United States in immigration court. The law requires deportees to receive notice of the country to which they are going to be removed, and then an opportunity to raise any claims against that decision in court. This was challenged in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. last year, a class-action lawsuit challenging the government’s practice of sending people to third countries without providing any notice or opportunity to challenge the legality of that arrangement. A lower court held a hearing, took evidence, and issued a ruling declaring that procedure unlawful and requiring the government to provide notice in such situations. But the Supreme Court then stayed that order in mid-April without real explanation. They didn’t say that the lower court was wrong. They just said that the government can keep doing third-country deportations while the case is pending.

    Is the Court going to come back and provide an explanation for why it stayed the order at some point?

    The way the Supreme Court handles stay orders requires that the case come back to the Supreme Court, and then the Court has to either agree to take it or not. And if they decide not to take it, then the stay expires at that point. So you’re right that every time the Supreme Court stays an order in these cases, it means that the case will return to the Supreme Court, but it’s not like that happens immediately. That can take months and months, and there is, in my view, a direct line from the Supreme Court’s stay order in the D.V.D. case to the months of third-country removals that we’ve been seeing without people having any opportunity to contest the legality of that practice.

    So is the lack of any opportunity for the deportees to have the Supreme Court rule on the challenge to third-country removal before they were flown away the reason that you think this was illegal?

    The law on this is that a noncitizen gets to elect the country to which they will be deported in the event of an order of removal after a deportation hearing. The immigration judge asks the person to elect which country they wish to be removed to. In that case, the government has to try to send the person to their requested country. But if they can’t, for whatever reason—and one reason might be because the immigration judge has said, “You’ll be tortured there,” and barred it—then the government has to go through a whole list of other possible places to which they can send the person, like places where the person transited through or any other place where the person held any residency status. If none of those places agree to take them, they can be deported to any other country that accepts the person. But in that case they have to tell the person, We’re going to send you to this country. And because that wasn’t the subject of the original removal proceeding, they have to be given the opportunity to challenge the removal to that country.

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    Isaac Chotiner

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  • Is ICE Leading Us Into a Constitutional Crisis?

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    So they do not want a constitutional crisis, but what is the alternative? You tiptoe around it and hope that the government comes into compliance by baby steps?

    That’s right. It’s a very sensitive interaction. And, in some of these cases, with the threats, the government has come into compliance. But, at a certain point, it does seem as though the courts are going to have to take that next step, which is civil or criminal contempt against individuals. They also have the capacity to refer individuals for disciplinary measures, and they can disqualify particular Justice Department attorneys from handling certain cases before their courts—reputational hits for some of these individuals. I think that will be the next escalation.

    There was a lot of discussion last year about the Trump Administration ignoring the courts. My own feeling from following the issue had been that they would walk up to the line in most instances, and then, in the rare cases where the Supreme Court ruled against them, they would comply. It seems like the Trump Administration wants to show that it can be uncompliant, but it doesn’t want to actually spark something that would create a huge drama or constitutional crisis, pitting it against the Supreme Court. Is that your understanding?

    I do think they are playing a game of pushing it as close to the line as they can. I also think, in some instances, it is actually just gross incompetence or internal miscommunications. For instance, the Department of Justice lawyers might tell D.H.S. not to transfer somebody to another jurisdiction, but the communication doesn’t reach them in a timely fashion.

    In the higher-stakes cases, the Justice Department is doing something more egregious. They do appear to be defying court orders to effectuate a policy. The key case for that is the Alien Enemies Act case, which came before Judge Boasberg. This happened within the first several hours of the President’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, in March. It’s about the flights that took off to El Salvador to bring those people alleged to be Venezuelan gang members to the CECOT torture prison.

    Erez Reuveni, a D.O.J. lawyer and whistle-blower, revealed what happened behind the scenes, including text messages that corroborate his account. He alleges, with strong evidence, that it was a deliberate policy to, no matter what, get those people to El Salvador, even if there were court orders preventing their deportation. According to Reuveni, Emil Bove, a Trump loyalist at the D.O.J., had said in a meeting before the hearings that they would have to consider telling the courts, “Fuck you.” And then there’s contemporaneous text messaging between the D.O.J. attorneys during the oral hearing, in which they say that this is the “fuck you” moment. [Bove has testified that he does not recall saying this.] It’s just very clear, based on these allegations, what happened there. So I think that, to me, that would be the constitutional-crisis moment, that a case would get to the Supreme Court and they would do that to a Supreme Court order. They think they can get away with it more when it’s in district courts.

    This feels like one area among many where, even if we aren’t yet in a worst-case scenario, or we convince ourselves that we are not, if you told someone ten years ago what was going on, they would think, Oh, well, that is a worst-case scenario.

    Absolutely, yes, I think that’s right. Coming into this Administration, I was worried about some of the things that this Administration could do that would constitute crossing the red line. That would include open defiance of a court order. And here we are in the dozens. So I do think we’re in a new normal, and I do worry that the public has been desensitized to how concerning this is. But, going back to the subject of immigration, the defiance of these court orders is creating a lawless situation that I think judges are rightly concerned about. Another district court judge in Minnesota, Michael Davis, accused the government of attempting to undermine the regulatory and statutory authority of the immigration courts to coerce perpetual, infinite detention. So I think it really is setting up a parallel system of immigration detention that exists in defiance of the courts.

    Do you mean that they’re essentially normalizing a practice where detainees do not get their time in court?

    I’m definitely concerned about that. I think the reason the system is still holding is that we have instances in which the courts, by threatening civil and criminal contempt, are able to bring the government back into line. [The Times reported last weekend that hundreds of detainees have now been released from immigration detention after habeas petitions began filling up the federal-court dockets.] We have a court concluding that a government’s in flagrant violation of its orders, while still being able to coerce the government back into place. That’s the kind of knife’s edge we’re on right now.

    What’s happening in the courtroom is part of a broader slide towards lawlessness, because defiance of court orders is connected to another ICE policy: the agency repeatedly states that its entire system of arrest is based on reasonable suspicion. And that is legally invalid because arrests have to be based on probable cause. A D.C. district-court judge, Beryl Howell, chastised the agency for this in December, summarizing several instances in which D.H.S. had repeatedly said that ICE arrests were based on reasonable suspicion, and they continue to do it. They’ve done it as recently as the past couple of weeks.

    What’s the difference between reasonable suspicion and probable cause?

    Reasonable suspicion is similar to stop-and-frisk policies, in which a law-enforcement officer can stop somebody very briefly and ask them questions on the basis of a low threshold of evidence. But actually arresting somebody and putting them in custody requires a much higher level of proof, which is probable cause. In the immigration context, to apprehend and detain someone for a long time, they’d need to have more than a reasonable suspicion, meaning much greater evidence indicating that the person is in the country unlawfully. So, for them to state and restate again and again that they’re basing their arrests on reasonable suspicion is like a failing answer on the bar exam. And they’re doing that continually, despite the court calling them out for it.

    It is also important to note that D.H.S. has authorized ICE agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant. To me, these two policies are putting ICE operations on the road to a very different form of legal system than the one we’re used to. They’re breaking rules.

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    Isaac Chotiner

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  • The Trojan Horse Before the Supreme Court

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    Photo: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post/Getty Images

    Sometime in 2018, Republican legislators became obsessed with fair play in youth sports. It started when a trans high-school student won a track-and-field championship in Connecticut and Idaho legislator Barbara Ehardt decided she couldn’t let the same thing happen in her state. Claiming that trans girls, whom she referred to as “biological boys,” had a competitive advantage in girls’ sports, she drafted a bill that would bar them from “interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural, or club athletic teams.”
    The so-called Fairness in Women’s Sports Act passed the Idaho state legislature in 2020 and quickly became a national model for the right. Republicans proposed nearly identical laws in 30 states, and Ehardt went on a national tour bankrolled by “pro-family” groups. One of her biggest backers was the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal group that helped write Ehardt’s law and is best known for its work to overturn Roe v. Wade, ban gay marriage, and bar trans people from using bathrooms that match their gender. Conjuring images of innocent children being cheated out of trophies and ribbons, the ADF helped legislators pass bans in 29 states.

    The truth is that as complex as the task of making sports truly gender–inclusive — or “fair” — might seem, there is limited evidence that trans girls possess any athletic performance advantages. A review of scientific literature published between 2011 and 2021, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, found that to be the case even for girls who are not actively taking testosterone suppressants. Republicans are not pushing for more research (or, tellingly, advocating for any documented equity issues in women’s sports, such as those surrounding funding or pay). Instead, the bluster about fairness in sports has taken on a life of its own and become an obsession of the current administration. This past February, President Donald Trump issued an executive order revoking funding from schools where trans women and girls compete in women’s sports, making Ehardt’s law perhaps one of the most consequential pieces of legislation of the decade.

    But the argument that these actions protect the integrity of sports has always been a convenient mirage, and the façade of “fairness” finally slipped this month when the Supreme Court heard challenges to two statewide bans on trans athletes.

    One case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., was brought by a 15-year-old trans girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson, who runs high-school track and field and transitioned before hitting puberty. Instead of addressing how she could possibly have an athletic advantage under those circumstances, the appellate lawyer Hashim Mooppan, representing the government, called any argument about a level playing field “irrelevant.” The question of whether “taking testosterone suppression eliminates any physical advantage doesn’t matter,” he said. The issue at hand was the definition of sex in Title IX, the rule governing equal gender access in education. He argued that the Court should agree that sex in that law refers not to gender but only to sex assigned at birth, a move that would allow states to separate sports teams by sex assigned at birth.

    That the Trump administration openly dismissed its own stated concerns underscores the disingenuous nature of the right-wing furor about fairness in sports and reveals the scope of the government’s aim and how wide-ranging a Court ruling on this could be.

    Legal commentators largely agree that the Court seems inclined to uphold the bans on trans girls and women in sports when it issues its decision, likely in June. It’s possible a ruling that favors the government’s definition of sex and Title IX could allow legislatures and courts “to use this kind of ban toward trans women and girls in other areas of society, well beyond sports,” says Sydney Bauer, who writes about Olympic sports through the lens of gender identity.

    If the Supreme Court can be made to say “a trans woman is a man on the sports field,” the Court can extend that same logic to trans women “applying for jobs or applying for houses and whether or not they can access gender-specific spaces in terms of rape counseling or hospitals,” Bauer says. “If you can get legal discrimination toward trans people in some aspect of society, it will be easier to expand to other areas, even if it contradicts existing civil-rights law.” Already, 27 states have used the precedent of sports laws to restrict trans kids from accessing health care.

    The Trump administration isn’t waiting for the Court’s decision. With an eye toward the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, the State Department has said it will deny visas to trans women athletes seeking to enter the U.S., and on January 14, the Trump administration launched a probe of 15 school districts and three colleges that it says violate “women’s rights, dignity, and fairness” by allowing trans girls to compete in sports. Under pressure from Trump, both the NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee have already caved and banned trans women athletes from participating.

    In doing so, the administration has seeded precedents that advance a right-wing feedback loop: During oral arguments, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed to the fact that the NCAA and the USOPC now bar trans women from competing as evidence that “allowing transgender women and girls to participate will undermine or reverse that amazing success” — omitting any mention that these groups were pressured to do so. The mere existence of anti-trans laws and policies, passed at the behest of right-wing groups, are now being offered as proof of their own legitimacy.

    Female athletes have always been the subject of intense scrutiny, and sports are so interlaced with confused ideas of gender and sex that, at the beginning of the 20th century, newspapers like the Daily Herald insisted that athletic competition would turn women intolerably “masculine,” creating a “new type of human being, neither male nor female.” But perhaps the modern era of scrutinizing women’s bodies in sports started in 1936, after Helen Stephens, a cis American sprinter, won gold at the Berlin Olympics. European newspapers accused her of being a man, pointing to her biceps and deep voice as proof that she had transgressed the boundaries of femininity. Stephens’s gold medal stood, but a group of sports officials successfully whipped the controversy over her victory into the first policy requiring medical examinations of women athletes. Thereafter, track-and-field officials could strip test any woman about whom there were “questions of a physical nature.”

    What followed were decades of criticism from doctors, including from the American Medical Association, that led elite sports bodies to largely phase out sex tests by around 2000. Now, because of the current anti-trans panic, they are embracing bodily surveillance once again. Next month, at the Winter Olympics in Italy, all women skiers and snowboarders will be forced to sit for DNA tests that would effectively exclude anyone with a Y chromosome from competition. The tests have also received endorsements from World Athletics and World Boxing; Kirsty Coventry, the new leader of the International Olympic Committee, has promoted a “scientific approach” to “protect the female category.”

    The downwind effects seem imminent. Conservative activists in Washington State have submitted more than 400,000 signatures supporting a ballot measure that would require verification of a student’s biological sex, including genital inspections, to participate in school sports. A similar policy was included in the original version of Ohio’s bill to ban trans women and girls from school sports, though it was eventually spiked. While advocates frame these sex-testing policies as a way to safeguard women’s access to sports, increasingly, the opposite seems to be true. In Edmonton, Canada, a recent requirement that the parents of girls ages 12 and up present a form attesting that their child is “of the female sex at birth” led to a decline in enrollment. Rather than deal with constant scrutiny of their bodies, many girls may just opt to abandon sports entirely.

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    Michael Waters

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  • Gov. Jared Polis stops releasing prisoners who’ve spent decades behind bars for youthful crime

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    Gov. Jared Polis unilaterally stalled a specialized prison program aimed at rehabilitating and releasing people who have served decades behind bars for crimes they committed as juveniles and young adults, The Denver Post found.

    Polis has not approved any of the program’s graduates for early release since 2023 — an about-face from the prior three years, during which the governor approved releases for all 17 such prisoners, according to records kept by the Colorado Department of Corrections.

    The governor’s inaction has created a backlog of 11 prisoners who have completed the three-year program and have gone before the Colorado State Parole Board but are nevertheless still incarcerated, waiting for Polis to sign off on their freedom.

    “The uncertainty of the situation is one of the scariest things I have ever gone through, because it pertains to the emotion of hope,” said prisoner Rory Atkins, 55, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole for a murder he committed in 1988, when he was 18. “Many of us with long sentences in prison kind of accept that hope is painful. You learn to be fearful of having high hopes.”

    Colorado lawmakers created the Juveniles and Young Adults Convicted as Adults Program, or JYACAP, in 2016 after the U.S. Supreme Court found that children are constitutionally different from adults and should not be automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Lawmakers that year also changed Colorado law to prohibit such punishment.

    Initially limited to juveniles, the program was expanded in 2021 to include prisoners who committed a crime when they were 20 or younger and who have served at least 20 years of their sentence. The prisoners must also meet a variety of other conditions to enter the three-year program, which focuses on building life skills and preparing for life outside of prison.

    After prisoners finish the program, the governor — after receiving a recommendation from the parole board — must give the final approval for them to be released on early parole.

    “For whatever reason, there was this dollop of mercy that was required (in the law),” said Ann Roan, a retired attorney who represented a program participant. “And for years it has worked well. … So to have the brakes put on it so suddenly, with no explanation whatsoever, has really upended everyone’s justified expectations.”

    Shelby Wieman, a spokeswoman for Polis, said in a statement that the prisoners’ applications are still under review, that the governor “takes these decisions very seriously” and that the serious nature of prisoners’ crimes requires “careful deliberation.”

    “The governor’s office has also previously expressed discomfort with the governor’s role in the process, and proposed legislative changes to this program in the past, which the legislature declined to address,” Wieman said, apparently referring to a failed 2024 bill that would have cut the governor out of the process and shifted full authority for early releases to the parole board.

    “We look forward to continuing to explore potential improvements with legislators and stakeholders,” Wieman said.

    She did not answer questions about what changed from the program’s first few years, when Polis routinely approved graduates’ releases.

    ‘Like we are being just dropped’

    The governor’s inaction comes as he considers whether to commute the sentence for Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk serving a nine-year prison sentence for crimes related to unauthorized access to state voting machines, and as he did not issue end-of-year pardons and sentence commutations for the first time in his tenure.

    The state’s prisons are also nearly at capacity and are projected to run out of beds in the coming months.

    “We feel like we are being just dropped,” said Rose Martinez, who is waiting for the release of her cousin, Daniel Reyes, 56. He is serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole for a 1987 homicide he committed during a robbery when he was 18.

    Martinez has, over the last decade, watched her cousin yearn for release as his 2027 parole eligibility date has drawn closer.

    “I’ll never forget the day he told me, ‘I can’t wait until I can be outside of these walls and I can actually lean up against a tree,’” she said. “That was probably five years ago.”

    Reyes has been waiting for the governor’s sign-off since April, he said. Atkins’ wait began in July, when the parole board recommended his release, he said. Others in the program, like Raymond Gone, who killed a Denver police officer in 1995 when he was 16, have been waiting on the governor for more than a year, he said.

    “What would I say to the critics who say the crime I was convicted of was so serious that I should finish my entire sentence? Honestly, I would agree with them, if all I knew was that I was convicted of such a horrible crime,” said Gone, now 47. “…I know I am responsible, I am the cause, for an unfathomable amount of trauma in so many people’s lives. There isn’t any amount of time I could spend in this place to make up for what I did.

    “But the opportunity I have been given through JYACAP was only made available to me because of a Supreme Court ruling… someone way above me decided that my life was worth saving and should be given a second chance.”

    Since 2017, 112 prisoners have applied to participate in the JYACAP program; 44 were accepted, according to the Department of Corrections. Prisoners were denied for poor behavior in prison, the nature of the crimes they committed, and for not meeting the program’s basic eligibility requirements.

    Last year, 40-year-old Raul Gomez-Garcia, who killed a Denver police officer in 2005 when he was 19, was denied entry to the program after his application stirred outrage within the slain officer’s family and the police department.

    None of the 17 people released after completing the program have had their parole revoked, said Alondra Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections. One participant had “subsequent involvement with the criminal justice system,” she said, but it did not prompt parole revocation. She did not answer follow-up questions about that participant.

    “Nobody reoffends, because they’ve grown up,” said Roan, who previously represented Gone. “…Every one of us at some point has been 16, and a lot of us who have children have watched what it is to be 16 from that perspective, and I don’t think anyone would say that is who you are for the rest of your life.”

    ‘A program that he signed into law’

    Phillip “Mike” Montoya went into the JYACAP program after he’d spent 26 years behind bars. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison after he participated in a 1993 gang shooting as a 16-year-old, although he did not actually fire the fatal shot.

    He found the program to be too basic at times, with tedious instruction on very basic tasks like how to brush your teeth or how to use a spatula. The curriculum wasn’t tailored to each individual, he noted.

    “If you go inside the prison at 16 years old and maybe you never done anything in your life prior, like cook for yourself, do your own laundry, go to a grocery store and buy your own food, then maybe you are going to need a lot more assistance,” he said. “But for someone like me, I pretty much had to raise myself. I had to raise my brother and sisters. So going into prison, even though I went in at such a young age, I had a lot of knowledge of the world.”

    Still, he is quick to praise the program’s pathway to release and the second chance it gives people who have been imprisoned since they were teenagers. Montoya has been working as a barber since he got out in August 2023, about three years before his parole eligibility date. He ultimately served 30 years and two days.

    He’s tried to advocate for the program’s other participants, he said, seeking out meetings with officials and stakeholders.

    “The response has always been the same, that (Polis) doesn’t want to deal with it for political reasons,” he said. “…We’re talking about a program that he signed into law that he doesn’t believe in now.”

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  • The Supreme Court Gets Back to Work

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    There are distinctive aspects to both of the transgender-athletes cases. For one thing, Hecox has changed her mind about bringing the case—she has said that she no longer wants to play sports at B.S.U., and that the Supreme Court should consider the matter moot. The Justices have said that they will decide on that question after oral arguments. Pepper-Jackson, meanwhile, brought what is known as an “as applied” challenge, meaning that she is not arguing that the ban could never hold up, but that it is unconstitutional and discriminatory as applied to her, given that she transitioned at a young age and took puberty blockers followed by other hormone therapies to forestall standard male puberty. (Last year, in U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on such treatments for minors—a harbinger for this case.) B.P.J. lost at the district-court level but succeeded on appeal in the Fourth Circuit, and has been able to keep playing during the litigation. Her recent relative success as a high schooler in shot-put and discus events has become a point of dispute; her lawyers claim that her prowess has been exaggerated, while the governor of West Virginia complained about her participation in a statewide tournament (where she came in third in the discus event). A central question in the cases is what and whom Title IX, the federal anti-sex-discrimination law that has allowed girls’ and women’s school sports to develop in recent decades, was meant to protect. It is a good bet that the oral arguments will include a grab bag of claims about the physiology of children and adults as well as reflections on the emotional and social meaning of sports and on profound questions of identity and fairness.

    Next week, the Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Cook, a case that came to the Justices on the emergency docket—it involves a lower-court judge’s stay of Trump’s removal of Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, from her position. In a general sense, it is linked to Trump v. Slaughter, the case about the leadership of independent agencies, which was argued in December. In Slaughter, the Justices are expected to allow Trump to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, without cause (and, in doing so, to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, a precedent from the nineteen-thirties, which allowed Congress to insulate the heads of agencies led by multiple commissioners or governors, such as the F.T.C., from being fired at will by the President). But Cook’s case is different, for a few reasons. The Supreme Court has, in the past, indicated that the Fed’s independence is distinct and worth safeguarding. The Fed’s credibility is also important to both the U.S. and the world economy. And although Trump says that he dismissed Cook for cause, it’s not clear how good his cause was. The Trump Administration accused her of engaging in mortgage fraud; a question in the case is whether the Court is expected to take this claim at face value. (His Administration has levied the same charge against other opponents, such as the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Both James and Cook have denied the allegations.)

    Oral arguments in one of the most consequential cases of the term, Trump v. Barbara, on the question of whether Trump can order the denial of birthright citizenship to certain babies born in the United States, still need to be scheduled. There is perhaps no other case in which the Justices will need to lay their allegiances as bare as in that one. That ruling, too, may not come until the end of June or even early July. What will the Justices be saying if they announce, in the week that the country celebrates the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that the meaning of citizenship has in some way changed? The Court doesn’t seem entirely in Trump’s hands; before Christmas, siding with the state of Illinois, it kept in place a lower court’s order blocking Trump from deploying a federalized National Guard in Chicago and its suburbs. At the same time, the Court managed to leave open questions about what Trump might do with the Guard, and even with the regular military, in the future.

    There is more, including a challenge the Justices will hear, on March 2nd, to a law restricting gun ownership for habitual drug users—a statute under which Hunter Biden, the former President’s son, was convicted, before his father pardoned him. Another case to be scheduled concerns a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to five days after Election Day, if they are postmarked by Election Day. Perhaps predictably, the discussions around that case have been rife with accusations of voter fraud. Politics and the law are never all that far apart. This spring, in front of this Supreme Court, they may be almost inseparable. ♦

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    Amy Davidson Sorkin

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  • Colorado got schooled by the courts on our constitutional freedoms, again in 2025 (Opinion)

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    2025 was the year of remedial education for the Colorado General Assembly.

    Since legislators in the majority just can’t seem to understand the First Amendment, they got schooled by the courts on multiple occasions.

    Constitution 101: the First Amendment forbids government agencies, federal, state or local, from enacting a law or regulation “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.”

    The government cannot quash or coerce speech, establish religion or prevent its exercise. If state legislators and regulators learn these principles, taxpayers will not have to foot the bill for yet another needless trip to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Lesson one: Agencies cannot abridge free speech by forcing people to parrot the government’s ideological message. That’s called coerced speech. A week ago, a Biden-appointed federal judge blocked Colorado from enforcing a 2025 law, House Bill 1161, that requires cigarette pack-style health warnings on gas stoves and imposes a fine of up to $20,000 per violation if they don’t.

    The judge agreed with the plaintiffs, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, that the law likely infringes on their First Amendment freedoms. “The court disagrees that the labeling requirement merely enables customers to access information — the only reason customers can access this information is because the State compels peddlers of gas stoves to speak it,” the court ruled. “Further … whether the information is truthful and accurate is subject to substantial disagreement within the scientific community.”

    In addition to familiarizing themselves with the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers v. Weiser decision, legislators will want to read the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in the Colorado case 303 Creative LLC vs Elenis and the cases it cites as homework.

    Lesson two: The government cannot abridge free speech by censoring it. Earlier this year, Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor, defended her First Amendment rights to the Supreme Court. A 2019 law prohibits counselors from helping clients come to terms with their biological sex through talk therapy. The law threatens counselors with thousands of dollars in fines and a potential loss of license unless they stick to government-approved speech. Based on the justices’ questions during oral argument, the Colorado law is likely to be struck down.

    In addition to familiarizing themselves with the Chiles v. Salazar case, legislators will want to read Riley v. National Federation of the Blind of N.C., Inc. and the National Institute of Family & Life Advocates. v. Becerra decisions as homework.

    Lesson three: The government cannot establish religion, or prohibit its exercise. Laws must be neutral toward religion neither advancing nor hindering its practice, and the government cannot discriminate against people for their beliefs. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court received 19 friend-of-the-court briefs from 22 states, numerous representatives from policy and law think tanks and various faith traditions, and Colorado families urging the Supreme Court to hear St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, a suit brought by the Archdiocese of Denver, two Catholic parishes, and two parents of preschool-age children. Colorado has been excluding Catholic preschool providers from its “universal” state preschool program for upholding church doctrines. Catholic families seeking a preschool education that aligns with their faith must pay out of pocket while other families get 15 hours of preschool education for free.  That’s not fair or consistent with the First Amendment.

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    Krista Kafer

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  • Court battle begins over Republican challenge to California’s Prop. 50

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    Republicans and Democrats squared off in court Monday in a high-stakes battle over the fate of California’s Proposition 50, which reconfigures the state’s congressional districts and could ultimately help determine which party controls the U.S. House in the 2026 midterms.

    Dozens of California politicians and Sacramento insiders — including GOP Assembly members and Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell — have given depositions in the case or could be called to testify in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles over the next few days.

    The GOP wants the three-judge panel to temporarily block California’s new district map, claiming it is unconstitutional and illegally favors Latino voters.

    An overwhelming majority of California voters approved Proposition 50 on Nov. 4 after Gov. Gavin Newsom pitched the redistricting plan as a way to counter partisan gerrymandering in Texas and other GOP-led states. Democrats acknowledged the new map would weaken Republicans’ voting power in California, but argued that it would just be a temporary measure to try to restore the national political balance.

    Attorneys for the GOP cannot challenge the new redistricting map on the grounds that it disenfranchises swaths of California Republicans. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that complaints of partisan gerrymandering have no path in federal court.

    But the GOP can bring claims of racial discrimination. They argue that California legislators drew the new congressional maps based on race, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, which prohibits governments from denying citizens the right to vote based on race or color.

    Republicans face an uphill struggle in blocking the new map before the 2026 midterms. The hearing comes just a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas to temporarily keep its new congressional map — a move that Newsom’s office says bodes poorly for Republicans trying to block California’s map.

    “In letting Texas use its gerrymandered maps, the Supreme Court noted that California’s maps, like Texas’s, were drawn for lawful reasons,” Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for Newsom, said in a statement. “That should be the beginning and the end of this Republican effort to silence the voters of California.”

    In Texas, GOP leaders drew up new congressional district lines after President Trump openly pressed them to give Republicans five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. A federal court blocked the map, finding racial considerations probably made the Texas map unconstitutional. But a few days later, the Supreme Court granted Texas’ request to pause that ruling, signaling that they view the Texas case — and this one in California — as part of a national politically motivated redistricting battle.

    “The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California),” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued, “was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

    The fact that the Supreme Court order and Alito’s concurrence in the Texas case went out of their way to mention California is not a good sign for California Republicans, said Richard L. Hasen, professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

    “It’s hard to prove racial predominance in drawing a map — that race predominated over partisanship or other traditional districting principles,” Hasen said. “Trying to get a preliminary injunction, there’s a higher burden now, because it would be changing things closer to the election, and the Supreme Court signaled in that Texas ruling that courts should be wary of making changes.”

    On Nov. 4, California voters approved Proposition 50, a measure to scrap a congressional map drawn up by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replace it with a map drawn up by legislators to favor Democrats through 2030.

    On Monday, a key plaintiff, Assemblymember David J. Tangipa (R-Fresno) — who serves on the Assembly Elections Committee — testified that the legislative panel was given only four days to analyze the redistricted maps and was not allowed to vote on them.

    “In the language of the bill, it actually states that the Assembly and Senate election committee prepared these maps,” Tangipa said. “This was a lie.”

    Tangipa claimed his Democratic colleagues repeatedly brought up increased Black, Latino and Asian representation to further their argument for redistricting.

    “They were forcing, through emergency action, maps upon us to dismantle the independent redistricting commission,” Tangipa said. “They were using emotionally charged arguments, racial justifications and polarized arguments to pigeonhole us.”

    Defense attorneys, however, referenced multiple instances in depositions and online posts where Tangipa had claimed that there was some “partisan” or “political” purpose for the existence of Proposition 50. Tangipa denied this and maintained that he believed that the redistricting effort was race-conscious since his conversations on the Assembly floor.

    The hearing began with attorneys for the GOPhoming in on the new map’s Congressional District 13, which currently encompasses Merced, Stanislaus as well as parts of San Joaquin and Fresno counties, along with parts of Stockton. When Mitchell drew up the map, they argued, he overrepresented Latino voters as a “predominant consideration” over political leanings.

    They called to the stand RealClearPolitics elections analyst Sean Trende, who said he observed an “appendage” in the new District 13, which extended partially into the San Joaquin Valley and put a crack in the new rendition of District 9.

    “From my experience [appendages] are usually indicative of racial gerrymandering,” Trende said. “When the choice came between politics and race, it was race that won out.”

    Defense attorneys, however, pressed Trende on whether the shift in Latino voters toward Republican candidates in the last election could have informed the new district boundaries, rather than racial makeup.

    The defense referenced a sworn statement by Trende in the Texas redistricting case: the Proposition 50 map, he said then, was “drawn with partisan objectives in mind; in particular, it was drawn to improve Democratic prospects” to neutralize additional Republican seats.

    Many legal scholars say that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Texas case means California probably will keep its new map.

    “It was really hard before the Texas case to make a racial gerrymandering claim like the plaintiffs were stating, and it’s only gotten harder in the last two weeks,” said Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University.

    Hours after Californians voted in favor of Proposition 50, Tangipa and the California Republican Party filed a lawsuit alleging that the map enacted in Proposition 50 for California’s congressional districts is designed to favor Latino voters over others.

    The Department of Justice also filed a complaint in the case, contending that the new congressional map uses race as a proxy for politics and manipulated district lines “in the name of bolstering the voting power of Hispanic Californians because of their race.”

    Mitchell, the redistricting expert who drew up the maps, is likely to be a key figure in this week’s battle. In the days leading up to the hearing, attorneys sparred over whether Mitchell would testify and whether he should turn over his email correspondence with legislators. Mitchell’s attorneys argued that he had legislative privilege.

    Attorneys for the GOP have seized on public comments made by Mitchell that the “number one thing” he started thinking about was “drawing a replacement Latino majority/minority district in the middle of Los Angeles” and the “first thing” he and his team did was “reverse” the California Citizens Redistricting Commission’s earlier decision to eliminate a Latino district from L.A.

    Some legal experts, however, say that is not, in itself, a problem.

    “What [Mitchell] said was, essentially, ‘I paid attention to race,’” Levitt said. “But there’s nothing under existing law that’s wrong with that. The problem comes when you pay too much attention to race at the exclusion of all of the other redistricting factors.”

    Other legal experts say that what matters is not the intent of Mitchell or California legislators, but the California voters who passed Proposition 50.

    “Regardless of what Paul Mitchell or legislative leaders thought, they were just making a proposal to the voters,” said Hasen, who filed an amicus brief in support of the state. “So it’s really the voters’ intent that matters. And if you look at what was actually presented to the voters in the ballot pamphlet, there was virtually nothing about race there.”

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    Jenny Jarvie, Christopher Buchanan

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  • Trump Loves to Fire People. This Supreme Court Decision Could Make It Easier.

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    Donald Trump’s recent turn as host of the Kennedy Center Honors, a first for any president, was the culmination of his purge, earlier this year, of half the center’s bipartisan board. Like other bodies shaped in his image since his return to power, Trump packed it with Republicans and other loyalists who then, inevitably, named him chairman of the board.

    This extreme makeover is but one data point in Trump’s systematic unraveling of Washington, which has had to endure everything from military deployments and the dismantlement of decades-old programs and institutions to even the armed, hostile takeover of the US Institute of Peace. All this, in addition to the mass firing sprees throughout the federal government, has come to define Trump’s second presidency.

    A linchpin of this smash-and-grab is the belief that, under Article II of the Constitution, the president can fire anyone he’d like—with little consequence or pushback from civic society or the courts. Since his first day back in office, Trump has acted as though Article II makes him the manager of the federal workforce; through it all, the firings up and down the chain haven’t stopped. The casualties, which are too many to name, include: the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden; Maurene Comey, who says the Justice Department fired her for no other reason than she’s the daughter of former FBI director James Comey; almost all the Democratic appointees on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other bipartisan agencies; more than a dozen inspectors general; the chair of the Federal Election Commission; and scores of career, apolitical public servants across the federal government in just about all 50 states, which includes the dismissals of thousands earlier this year in a wave of terminations that has come to be known as the Valentine’s Day massacres.

    Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court on Monday heard Trump v. Slaughter, a case that on paper will seal the future of the Federal Trade Commission—but in reality, the dispute is about whether the Constitution truly empowers the president to fire, without restriction, anyone who works in the Executive branch.

    Among them is Democratic FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, whom Trump fired without cause earlier this year, in violation of a statute that requires a finding of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” A federal judge, bound by law and longstanding precedent, reinstated her—only to be blocked by a Supreme Court that then took up the case and agreed to settle the question for good. To this day, Slaughter remains fired.

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    Cristian Farias

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  • What Will America Look Like After 3 More Years of Trump?

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    On and on and on and on.
    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

    Donald Trump has a flexible attitude toward truth and facts, typically embracing whatever version of reality that suits his purposes. His latest rally speech in Pennsylvania was something of a “greatest hits” display of fact-checker challenges on a wide range of issues. But he said one thing that no one should doubt or deny:

    Ain’t that the truth. Trump’s omnipresence in every form of media, his knack for audacious and offensive utterances, his huge echo chamber of followers and supportive media, and his unpredictable and often shocking presidential initiatives all combined to make his first four years in office feel like 40. And that experience was free and easy as compared to his second administration. It began with the appointment of some of the most controversial appointees in living memory, a blizzard of executive orders, and then the passage of the most sweeping single package of legislation in the history of Congress. Toss in the occasional military strike or domestic National Guard deployment, regular raids by masked ICE and border-control agents, and serial disfigurement of the White House, and you’ve got the show that never ends. Three more years could indeed feel like an eternity.

    So what will America look like after three more years of this barrage? As always, the administration’s intentions are opaque. But there are several outside variables that will dramatically shape how much Trump is able to do by the end of his time in office (assuming he actually leaves as scheduled on January 20, 2029). Here are the factors that will decide the outcome of this three-year “eternity.”

    One huge variable is the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections. If history and current polling are any indication, Democrats are very likely to gain control of the U.S. House and bust up the partisan trifecta that has made so much of Trump 2.0’s accomplishments (for good or ill) possible. With a Democratic House, there will be no more Big Beautiful Bills whipped through Congress on party-line votes reconfiguring the federal budget and tax code and remaking the shape and impact of the federal government. A hostile House would also bedevil the administration with constant investigations of its loosey-goosey attitude toward obeying legal limits on its powers, and its regular habits of self-dealing, cronyism, and apparent corruption. The last two years of the Trump presidency would be characterized by even greater end runs of Congress, and in Congress, by endless partisan rhetorical warfare (as opposed to actual legislation).

    It’s less likely that Democrats will flip control of the Senate in 2026, but were that to happen, Trump would struggle to get his appointees confirmed (though many could operate in an “acting” capacity). We’d likely see constant clashes between the executive and legislative branches.

    Conversely, if Republicans hold onto both congressional chambers, then all bets are off. Trump 2.0 would roll through its final two years with the president’s more audacious legislative goals very much in sight and limited only by how much risk Republicans want to take in 2028. You could see repeated Big Beautiful Bill packages aiming at big initiatives like replacing income taxes with tariffs or consumption taxes; a complete return to fossil fuels as the preferred energy source; a total repeal and replacement of Obamacare and decimation of Medicaid; a fundamental restructuring of immigration laws; and radical limits on voting rights. Almost everything could be on the table as long as Republicans remain in control and in harness with Trump. And with his presidency nearing its end, you could also see Trump tripling down on demands that Republicans kill or erode the filibuster, which could make more audacious legislative gains possible.

    The U.S. Supreme Court will also have a big impact on how much Trump can do between now and the end of his second term. Big upcoming decisions on his power to impose tariffs will determine the extent to which he can make these deals the centerpiece of his foreign-policy strategy and execute a protectionist (or, if you like, mercantilist) economic strategy for the country. Other decisions on his power to deport immigrants and on the nature and permanence of citizenship will heavily shape the size and speed of his mass-deportation program. The Supreme Court will soon also either obstruct or permit use of National Guard and military units in routine law-enforcement chores and/or to impose administration policies on states or cities. And the Supreme Court’s decisions on myriad conflicts between the Trump administration and the states could determine whether, for example, the 47th president can sweep away any regulation of AI that his tech-bro friends oppose.

    A separate line of Supreme Court decisions will determine Trump’s power over the executive branch — most obviously over independent agencies like the FTC and the Fed, but also over millions of federal employees who could lose both civil-service protections and collective-bargaining opportunities.

    Even a president as willful as Trump is constrained by objective reality. His economic policies make instability, hyperinflation, and even a 2008-style Great Recession entirely possible. If that happens, it could both erode his already shaky public support but also encourage him to assert even greater “emergency” powers than he’s already claimed.

    Trump’s impulsive national-security instincts and innate militarism could also lead to one of those terrible wars he swears he is determined to avoid. It’s worth remembering that the last Republican president was entirely undone during his second term by economic dislocations and a failed war.

    Let’s say Trump has the power to do what he wants between now and the end of his second term. What might America look like if he fully succeeds, particularly if his policies are either emulated by state and local Republicans or imposed nationally by Washington?

    • A country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling.
    • A more regressive system of revenues for financing steadily shrinking public services.
    • A fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor, and old and young, Americans.
    • Cities where armed military presence has become routine, particularly during anti-administration protests or prior to key elections.
    • Elections conducted solely on Election Day in person, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors, likely on the scene during vote counting as well.
    • A new “deep state” of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone.
    • A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
    • An economy where AI is constantly promoted as a solution to the very problems it creates.
    • A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
    • A scientific and health-care research apparatus driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads.
    • A public-education system hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates.
    • And most of all: a debased level of political discourse resembling MMA trash talk more than anything the country has experienced before.

    Some of these likely effects from Trump 2.0 are reversible, but only after much time and effort, and against resistance from the MAGA movement he will leave as his most enduring legacy.

    And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like J.D. Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what American could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Colorado legal scholar weighs in on SCOTUS taking up birthright citizenship case

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    A Colorado legal scholar is weighing in on the case that could upend life in the United States for millions of people.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to parents who are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily, are not American citizens. It is commonly called “birthright citizenship.”

    The birthright citizenship order, which the president signed on the first day of his second term, is part of his administration’s broad crackdown on immigration.

    Denver7 anchor Shannon Ogden spoke with P. (Deep) Gulasekaram, professor of law and director of the Byron R. White Center for the Student of American Constitutional Law at University of Colorado. Professor Gulasekaram said Trump’s order would upend more than 125 years of understanding that the constitution’s 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with the narrow exceptions for children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.

    “It has the possibility of creating hundreds of thousands of stateless individuals and depriving babies born in the United States of the ability to remain in the United States, to be educated in the United States and the possibility to be taken away from family in the United States,” said Gulasekaram.

    National Politics

    Supreme Court will take up case on Trump’s birthright citizenship changes

    Gulasekaram explained that the Trump executive order argues that it is upholding the original intent of the 14th Amendment.

    “If they are saying this was always the interpretation, this is what it meant from the jump, then we’re talking about generations of people who all of the sudden go, ‘Oh. We were never citizens,’” asked Ogden.

    “That’s right. We’re talking about millions and millions of people,” replied Gulasekaram.

    In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as unconstitutional, or likely so, even after a Supreme Court ruling in late June that limited judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.

    “You are talking about something that upends the way in which citizenship has been conferred and the settled expectations of the people of the United States for not just decades but centuries,” adds Gulasekaram.

    The high court will hear arguments next year and will likely hand down a decision by the end of June 2026.

    Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser joined 21 other attorneys general in a lawsuit attempting to block the president’s executive order banning birthright citizenship.

    Twenty-four Republican-led states and 27 Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are backing the administration.

    Denver7

    Denver7 | Your Voice: Get in touch with Shannon Ogden

    Denver7 evening anchor Shannon Ogden reports on issues impacting all of Colorado’s communities, but specializes in covering local government and politics. If you’d like to get in touch with Shannon, fill out the form below to send him an email.

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  • Robert Dear, shooter in Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood attack, dies in federal custody

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    The man accused of killing three people and wounding nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a decade ago died in custody over the weekend, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

    Robert Dear, 67, died at 6:30 a.m. Saturday in the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Randilee Giamusso said. His death was “preliminarily linked to natural causes,” Giamusso said Tuesday, and prison officials followed advanced medical orders before he died.

    Dear’s death ends a decade-long — and ultimately unsuccessful — effort to convict him of crimes connected to the mass shooting. Although Dear had been in state or federal custody since the 2015 attack and confessed to carrying out the mass shooting, he was never convicted because he was always considered to be too mentally ill to go through the court process — that is, he was consistently found incompetent to stand trial.

    Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen said in a statement Tuesday that the victims of the shooting were denied justice in the “evil attack.”

    “All three victims and this community deserved the full measure of justice in this case, but they are now denied that possibility,” Allen said. “Their family members and loved ones have endured this horror for far too long.”

    The Bureau of Prisons declined to provide any additional information about Dear’s death and officials with the Greene County Medical Examiner’s Office did not immediately return requests for more information.

    Dear’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

    Dear was accused of attacking the Planned Parenthood clinic on Nov. 27, 2015. Authorities believe he intended to wage “war” on the clinic because the staff performed abortions. He arrived armed with four SKS rifles, five handguns, two more rifles, a shotgun and more than 500 rounds of ammunition, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

    Twenty-seven people who were inside the clinic at the time hid until they could be rescued by law enforcement, according to prosecutors. Dear fired 198 rounds in the attack and tried to blow up propane tanks to take out law enforcement vehicles during a five-hour standoff.

    Those killed were Ke’Arre Stewart, 29, Jennifer Markovsky, 36, and Garrett Swasey, 44, a campus police officer who responded to the clinic after hearing there was an active shooter. Another four police officers were wounded.

    The issue of Dear’s competency stalled the state’s murder case against him in 2016. Federal prosecutors brought their own case alleging firearm and civil rights violations in 2019; those proceedings also stalled due to Dear’s compromised mental state.

    A competency evaluation considers whether a criminal defendant is mentally ill or developmentally disabled, and whether that mental illness impedes the defendant’s ability to understand the court process. Rooted in the constitutional rights to due process and a fair trial, competency centers on two prongs — whether defendants have a factual and rational understanding of the proceedings, and whether defendants are able to consult with their attorneys and assist in their own defenses.

    Experts previously testified that Dear understood the facts and circumstances of his case but was still incompetent to proceed because he could not assist in his own defense.

    Dear was known for frequent outbursts in court. During a 2019 hearing, he declared himself to be a “religious zealot” who was being prosecuted in a “political kangaroo court.” In 2021, he insisted in federal court that he was competent to stand trial, shouting, “I’m not crazy.”

    In September, a federal judge started the process for Dear to be committed long-term to the mental health facility in Missouri after finding he was unlikely to be restored to competency.

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  • Only the Supreme Court Can Save Trump’s Gerrymandering Drive

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    Where the midterms may be decided.
    Photo: Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    You’d need a 3-D bingo card to keep up with all the gerrymandering decisions that have been made around the country since Donald Trump began a drive this summer to rig midterm-election maps for 2026. But at the moment, it’s increasingly clear the big GOP advantage Trump envisioned when he pushed Texas into an abrupt gerrymander in July has faded and perhaps even disappeared. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn took stock of the situation:

    This week, Republicans encountered yet another round of roadblocks in Texas and Indiana. The two states once seemed likely to help the Republicans flip as many as seven Democratic-held districts combined, but after a federal court ruled against the new Texas map and Indiana failed to redraw its map, it suddenly seems possible that Republicans might not gain even a single district in these states.

    Without those seats, it’s now imaginable that the Democrats — not the Republicans — will narrowly win this year’s redistricting wars, and net the most seats heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

    Cohn estimated that before all this activity, Republicans could lose the national House popular vote by 0.2 percent and still retain control of the House. With new maps in place in California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah, that cushion increased to 0.9 percent — enough to really matter in a close national midterm election. If the adverse judicial decision earlier this week nukes the new Texas map, the GOP advantage would turn into a Democratic advantage of 0.6 percent. Add in the expected offsetting gerrymanders on tap in Republican-controlled Florida and Democratic-controlled Virginia, and you wind up with a Democratic advantage of 0.5 percent.

    All this back-and-forth maneuvering more or less leaves in place a national landscape in which the historically indicated Democratic midterm wave, even if it’s just a ripple, will be enough to flip the House and destroy the GOP trifecta that has made it so easy for Trump to implement his radical 2025 agenda. But there are two potentially big shoes that could still drop in Washington from the Supreme Court.

    First of all, Texas has appealed the federal-district-court decision dismissing the new gerrymandered House map adopted this summer to SCOTUS, which could set aside the lower-court order and let the good times roll for the Texas GOP. Cohn estimates that development would change the bottom line if everything else happens as expected from a 0.5 percent Democratic advantage to a one percent Republican advantage, a potentially significant shift.

    But second of all, the really large intervention could come from the pending SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Many observers fear or hope the Court will all but kill the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in that decision, eliminating the powerful impetus many states (especially in the South) had to adopt maps that gave nonwhite voters a good shot at winning or influencing the outcome. That it turn could lead Republican-controlled state governments in the South to conduct last-minute gerrymanders to eliminate nearly all majority-Black or plurality-Black Democratic U.S. House districts before the midterms (19 of them, according to one estimate). It would be a real bloodbath. But even if they choose to move in that fateful direction, SCOTUS might not act in time to let the blood flow in 2026. And of all the arcane mysteries surrounding Supreme Court decisions, the timing is among the most mysterious.

    Suffice it to say that the outcome of Trump’s bid to rig the midterm landscape is in the hands of exactly those black-robed lifetime appointees who may also determine the fate of Trump’s power grabs on tariffs, domestic deployment of military units, the rights of federal employees, control of federal agencies, election rules, and many other areas of political and civic life. If you’re involved in politics or political journalism, don’t plan any vacations for next June or July when SCOTUS traditionally drops its bigger decisions.

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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump administration renews Supreme Court appeal to keep full SNAP payments frozen

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    President Donald Trump’s administration returned to the Supreme Court on Monday in a push to keep full payments in the SNAP federal food aid program frozen while the government is shut down, even as some families struggled to put food on the table.

    The request is the latest in a flurry of legal activity over how the program that helps 42 million Americans buy groceries should proceed during the historic U.S. government shutdown. Lower courts have ruled that the government must keep full payments flowing, but the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to keep them frozen for now.

    The high court is expected to rule Tuesday.

    The seesawing rulings so far have created a situation where beneficiaries in some states, including Hawaii and New Jersey, have received their full monthly allocations and those in others, such as Nebraska and West Virginia, have seen nothing.

    Brandi Johnson, 48, of St. Louis, said she’s struggling to make the $20 she has left in her SNAP account stretch. Johnson said she has been skipping meals the past two weeks to make sure her three teenage children have something to eat. She is also helping care for her infant granddaughter, who has food allergies, and her 80-year-old mother.

    She said food pantries have offered little help in recent days. Many require patrons to live in a certain ZIP code or are dedicated to helping the elderly first.

    “I think about it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, literally,” Johnson said. “Because you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to eat.”

    Millions receive aid while others wait

    The Trump administration argued that lower court orders requiring the full funding of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program wrongly affect ongoing negotiations in Congress about ending the shutdown. Supreme Court Solicitor General D. John Sauer called the funding lapse tragic, but said judges shouldn’t be deciding how to handle it.

    The Senate Monday passed a compromise funding package that would end the government shutdown and refill SNAP funds. It now goes to the House for consideration.

    Trump’s administration initially said SNAP benefits would not be available in November because of the shutdown. After some states and nonprofit groups sued, judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ruled the administration could not skip November’s benefits entirely.

    The administration then said it would use an emergency reserve fund to provide 65% of the maximum monthly benefit. On Thursday, Rhode Island-based U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell said that wasn’t good enough, and ordered full funding for SNAP benefits by Friday.

    Some states acted quickly to direct their EBT vendors to disburse full monthly benefits to SNAP recipients. Millions of people in at least a dozen states — all with Democratic governors — received the full amount to buy groceries before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put McConnell’s order on hold Friday night, pending further deliberation by an appeals court.

    Delays cause complications for some beneficiaries

    Millions more people still have not received SNAP payments for November, because their states were waiting on guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP. Several states have made partial payments, including Texas, where officials said money was going on cards for some beneficiaries Monday.

    “Continued delays deepen suffering for children, seniors, and working families, and force nonprofits to shoulder an even heavier burden,” Diane Yentel, President and CEO, National Council of Nonprofits, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement Monday. “If basic decency and humanity don’t compel the administration to assure food security for all Americans, then multiple federal court judges finding its actions unlawful must.”

    Trump’s administration has argued that the judicial order to provide full benefits violates the Constitution by infringing on the spending power of the legislative and executive branches.

    Wisconsin, which was among the first to load full benefits after McConnell’s order, had its federal reimbursement frozen. The state’s SNAP account could be depleted as soon as Monday, leaving no money to reimburse stores that sell food to SNAP recipients, according to a court filing.

    New York Attorney General Letitia James said Monday that some cardholders have been turned away by stores concerned that they won’t be reimbursed — something she called to stop.

    New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said Trump was fighting “for the right to starve Americans.”

    “It’s the most heinous thing I’ve ever seen in public life,” he said.

    The latest rulings keep payments on hold, at least for now

    States administering SNAP payments continue to face uncertainty over whether they can — and should — provide full monthly benefits during the ongoing legal battles.

    The Trump administration over the weekend demanded that states “undo” full benefits that were paid during a one-day window after a federal judge ordered full funding and before a Supreme Court justice paused that order.

    A federal appeals court in Boston left the full benefits order in place late Sunday, though the Supreme Court order ensures the government won’t have to pay out for at least 48 hours.

    “The record here shows that the government sat on its hands for nearly a month, unprepared to make partial payments, while people who rely on SNAP received no benefits a week into November and counting,” Judge Julie Rikleman of the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals wrote.

    U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, presiding over a case filed in Boston by Democratic state officials, on Monday paused the USDA’s request from Saturday that states “immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits.”

    In a hearing later that Monday, Talwani said that communication to states was confusing, especially because the threat came just a day after USDA sent letters to states saying SNAP would be paid in full.

    Federal government lawyer Tyler Becker said the order was only intended for states to receive the full amount of SNAP benefits, and “had nothing to do with beneficiaries.”

    Talwani said she would issue a full order soon.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin; Margery Beck in Omaha, Nebraska; John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Kimberlee Kruesi in Providence, Rhode Island; Nicholas Riccardi in Denver; and Stephen Groves and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

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  • Oregon Leads Case Against Trump Tariffs Straight To Supreme Court – KXL

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    Oregon Attorney Dan Rayfield speaks to reporters during a virtual press conference Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 5, 2025.

    Washington, D.C. – The Supreme Court will decide the fate of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Justices heard arguments Wednesday in a 12-state lawsuit led by Oregon. 

    Oral arguments lasted nearly three hours, much longer than expected. “The court was grappling with the reality: did this President abuse an emergency power to be able to do this,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said Wednesday afternoon.

    Justices asked pointed questions of both sides, particularly over whether a President’s power to “regulate” imports includes taxation. The Trump Administration’s Solicitor General John Sauer told them, “When Congress confers the power to regulate imports, it is naturally conferring the power to tariff, which is delegated to the Executive branch.” But some Justices seemed skeptical. Rayfield said later, “You heard Chief Justice Roberts talk about, ‘So, Trump Administration, what you’re effectively saying is you can tax anything at any height for any length for any reason?’ And, that’s an immense amount of power.”  

    Rayfield also points out the President’s lawyers admit tariffs are not paid by foreign countries. “$4 trillion is the amount of money that’s expected to be raised,” said Rayfield, “They talked, even in their own words, about 30-80% – by their own calculations – are going to be paid by Americans.” He wants the tariffs deemed illegal and refunds sent to businesses and consumers, “The philosophy behind this is exactly what we teach our kids: if you make a wrong, you make it right. And if you screw up, you need to fix it.”

    Rayfield is cautiously optimistic about the outcome, “If I were sitting in the shoes of either the Trump administration or the states holding the line, I’d rather be sitting in our shoes right now, based on the questioning happening.” And, he thinks the ruling will be swift, but admits the timeline is unpredictable, “I would expect something to happen sooner than the normal schedule, just based upon past actions.”

    Three lower courts ruled in favor of the 12-state coalition led by Oregon.

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    Heather Roberts

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  • Texas man facing execution for fatally beating 13-month-old girl during ‘exorcism’

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    A Texas man faces execution Thursday for killing his girlfriend’s 13-month-old daughter during a torturous ordeal the couple said was part of an “exorcism” to expel a demon from the child’s body.Blaine Milam, 35, was condemned for the December 2008 murder of Amora Carson at his trailer in Rusk County in East Texas.Milam was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Thursday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. At around the same time Milam was to be put to death, authorities in Alabama were planning to execute Geoffrey West for fatally shooting a gas station employee during a 1997 robbery.Milam has claimed he is innocent, blaming then-girlfriend Jesseca Carson for the killing and alleging she was the one who claimed the girl was possessed by a demon. She was tried separately from Milam and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of capital murder for helping Milam. Both were 18 at the time.Prosecutors said Milam savagely beat the girl with a hammer and also bit, strangled, and mutilated her over a period of 30 hours.A forensic pathologist who performed an autopsy found the child had multiple skull fractures along with broken arms, legs, ribs and numerous bite marks. The pathologist testified at trial that he could not determine a specific cause of death because the girl had so many potentially fatal injuries.Milam’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution, arguing his conviction was based in part on “now-discredited” bite mark evidence as well as other unreliable DNA evidence. Milam’s attorneys also argued he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution.In their petition to the Supreme Court, Milam’s lawyers alleged Carson had experienced religious delusions and suffered from a neurological visual-perception disorder that caused her to see malevolent-seeming distortions in her daughter’s face, causing her to attack the child.“It was Carson who caused her daughter’s death. There is no credible evidence that Milam played any role in it,” Milam’s lawyers said.State and federal appeals courts have previously turned down efforts by Milam’s attorneys to stay his execution. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday denied Milam’s request to commute his death sentence to a lesser penalty. Milam previously had executions dates in 2019 and 2021 that were stayed.The Texas Attorney General’s Office has said Milam’s claims that he is intellectually disabled have been rejected in previous court rulings and a recent review of DNA evidence used at his trial “continues to forensically tie him to Amora’s body.”The attorney general’s office also said in court documents that even if bitemark and DNA evidence were excluded, there was other evidence pointing to his guilt, including his efforts to hide evidence and a confession he made to a nurse after his arrest.Rusk County District Attorney Michael Jimerson, who tried the case along with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, told The Associated Press in 2019 that authorities initially treated Milam and Carson as grieving parents.But Carson later told investigators Milam told her Amora was “possessed by a demon” because “God was tired of her lying to Milam,” according to court records.The use of bite mark evidence has been called into question in recent years, with a 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology saying bitemark analysis “is clearly scientifically unreliable at present.”Jimerson said he still couldn’t pinpoint a motive, believing the exorcism claim was just a way for Milam and Carson to cover up their crime.“It’s … very hard to confront the idea that someone would derive their gratification from the torture of a baby. That is really something that diminishes all of us and it’s just a very, very hard thing to face,” Jimerson had said.If the execution is carried out, Milam would be the fifth person put to death this year in Texas, historically the nation’s busiest capital punishment state. If both of Thursdays executions take place, that would bring this year’s total to 33 death sentences carried out nationwide. Florida leads the nation this year with a record 12 executions conducted so far in 2025 with two more scheduled in the state by mid-October.

    HOUSTON —

    A Texas man faces execution Thursday for killing his girlfriend’s 13-month-old daughter during a torturous ordeal the couple said was part of an “exorcism” to expel a demon from the child’s body.

    Blaine Milam, 35, was condemned for the December 2008 murder of Amora Carson at his trailer in Rusk County in East Texas.

    Milam was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Thursday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. At around the same time Milam was to be put to death, authorities in Alabama were planning to execute Geoffrey West for fatally shooting a gas station employee during a 1997 robbery.

    Milam has claimed he is innocent, blaming then-girlfriend Jesseca Carson for the killing and alleging she was the one who claimed the girl was possessed by a demon. She was tried separately from Milam and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of capital murder for helping Milam. Both were 18 at the time.

    Prosecutors said Milam savagely beat the girl with a hammer and also bit, strangled, and mutilated her over a period of 30 hours.

    Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP

    This undated booking photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Texas death row inmate Blaine Milam.

    A forensic pathologist who performed an autopsy found the child had multiple skull fractures along with broken arms, legs, ribs and numerous bite marks. The pathologist testified at trial that he could not determine a specific cause of death because the girl had so many potentially fatal injuries.

    Milam’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution, arguing his conviction was based in part on “now-discredited” bite mark evidence as well as other unreliable DNA evidence. Milam’s attorneys also argued he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution.

    In their petition to the Supreme Court, Milam’s lawyers alleged Carson had experienced religious delusions and suffered from a neurological visual-perception disorder that caused her to see malevolent-seeming distortions in her daughter’s face, causing her to attack the child.

    “It was Carson who caused her daughter’s death. There is no credible evidence that Milam played any role in it,” Milam’s lawyers said.

    State and federal appeals courts have previously turned down efforts by Milam’s attorneys to stay his execution. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday denied Milam’s request to commute his death sentence to a lesser penalty. Milam previously had executions dates in 2019 and 2021 that were stayed.

    The Texas Attorney General’s Office has said Milam’s claims that he is intellectually disabled have been rejected in previous court rulings and a recent review of DNA evidence used at his trial “continues to forensically tie him to Amora’s body.”

    The attorney general’s office also said in court documents that even if bitemark and DNA evidence were excluded, there was other evidence pointing to his guilt, including his efforts to hide evidence and a confession he made to a nurse after his arrest.

    Rusk County District Attorney Michael Jimerson, who tried the case along with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, told The Associated Press in 2019 that authorities initially treated Milam and Carson as grieving parents.

    But Carson later told investigators Milam told her Amora was “possessed by a demon” because “God was tired of her lying to Milam,” according to court records.

    The use of bite mark evidence has been called into question in recent years, with a 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology saying bitemark analysis “is clearly scientifically unreliable at present.”

    Jimerson said he still couldn’t pinpoint a motive, believing the exorcism claim was just a way for Milam and Carson to cover up their crime.

    “It’s … very hard to confront the idea that someone would derive their gratification from the torture of a baby. That is really something that diminishes all of us and it’s just a very, very hard thing to face,” Jimerson had said.

    If the execution is carried out, Milam would be the fifth person put to death this year in Texas, historically the nation’s busiest capital punishment state. If both of Thursdays executions take place, that would bring this year’s total to 33 death sentences carried out nationwide. Florida leads the nation this year with a record 12 executions conducted so far in 2025 with two more scheduled in the state by mid-October.

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  • Kansas Republicans yearn to touch the hot stove of redistricting. We’ll see if they get burned.

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    Twenty members of the Kansas Legislature absorbed public comment on redistricting and the evils of gerrymandering during an August 2021 town hall in Lawrence. Similar town halls were held throughout the state. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)

    Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

    Just because the law allows something doesn’t mean you should eagerly try it.

    And just because Kansas Republicans want to redistrict the state to hand their party another seat in the U.S. House doesn’t mean that our best interests will be served in the process.

    Let’s get this out the way first. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states can enact partisan gerrymanders without running afoul of the Constitution. State lawmakers from coast to coast can slice and dice maps however they like to extract the last bit of blue or red juice. That’s usually done once a decade, after the U.S. Census, but Texas decided to go for broke this summer and pass a new set of maps to benefit Republicans. California lawmakers then passed a referendum that would allow similar redistricting there to benefit Democrats.

    With the 2026 midterm elections looking like a tough test for the governing party, Republicans see an acute threat. So they’re bringing Kansans along for the ride. Never mind that we have only one seat to offer — the one held by U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat — GOP officials want it anyway.

    They have a right to do so. If Republicans stick together and call a special session, they can override any veto from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

    They can have their way.

    But it won’t be good for the state. It won’t be good for our representation in Washington, D.C. And it won’t be good for those hundreds of thousands of Kansans who want to elect a politician from the party of their choice.

    Kansas Reflector reporter Tim Carpenter collected comments from leading Republicans early this month, and a quick scan should show you which way the winds are blowing.

    Former Gov. Jeff Colyer: “National Democrats have gerrymandered Congress to make it more liberal than the real America. Kansas needs to lead the way in restoring sanity to our federal government.”

    Senate President Ty Masterson said a special session was under consideration: “I am actively engaged in the battle for the heart and soul of America, helping the president to Make America Great Again.”

    U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall: “Most of the blue states are gerrymandered to the point that … I don’t know what else they could do to change the ratio. The Democrats have always led in this gerrymandering.”

    Both Colyer and Masterson are running for governor next year. That fact perhaps explains their eagerness to curry favor with President Donald Trump, who has encouraged such mid-decade redistricting. Again, however, that doesn’t make redrawing maps a good idea. It strikes me as a nakedly partisan exercise. The comments listed above support that.

    Kansans do not overwhelmingly support the Republican Party or Trump. Looking at registered voters in the state, 898,429 are Republican, 497,801 are Democrat and 573,048 are unaffiliated. Taken as a whole, only 41% have declared themselves members of the GOP. In the 2024 presidential election, more than a half-million Kansans voted for Kamala Harris.

    Kansans have repeatedly elected Democratic governors — John Carlin, Joan Finney, Kathleen Sebelius and Kelly in my lifetime alone. We have regularly elected Democratic U.S. representatives, such as Dan Glickman, Jim Slattery, Dennis Moore and Davids.

    Republicans have tried to defeat Davids through gerrymandering before. Former Senate President Susan Wagle gave the game away in 2020, telling a Wichita audience: “So redistricting, it’s right around the corner. And if Governor Kelly can veto a Republican bill that gives us four Republican congressmen, that takes out Sharice Davids up in the 3rd — we can do that. I guarantee you we can draw four Republican congressional maps. But we can’t do it unless we have a two-thirds majority in the Senate and House.”

    The party eventually secured those supermajorities and redrew maps. Surprise of surprises, it didn’t work. Davids hung on to her 3rd District seat. Will she survive next year’s election? It depends on how willing lawmakers are to touch the blazing-hot stove of partisanship.

    Kansans have elected Democrats at the federal, state and local levels. State Republicans have the right to enact more obstacles in their path to doing so. But preventing the people you purport to represent the right to elect their chosen candidate?

    We’ll see how that works out for them.

    Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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  • Amy Coney Barrett Wrote a Book for People Who Already Like Amy Coney Barrett

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    Amy Coney Barrett has very little in common with her fellow justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom preceded her as authors of bestselling memoirs that, in one way or another, illuminate how they or their families surmounted poverty, discrimination, and other societal barriers on their way to the pinnacle of American law. All three saw the law’s impact firsthand in the trenches, as lawyers—working in government or defending people from it in court. Many found their stories compelling precisely because these authors traced their paths without dwelling much on how they think about their current, far more isolating jobs. Their remembrances stopped, in other words, at or near the Supreme Court steps.

    That’s not what Barrett set out to do with her first book, Listening to the Law, which is less about her rise from the legal academy than an apologia about the institution she now inhabits—which, without explaining itself, just yesterday greenlit an effort by the Trump administration to racially profile Latino workers on the basis of their looks, their language, and where they work or seek work. “If I leave you with a better understanding of the Court’s role, how the Constitution shapes American life, and how I think about my job, I will have achieved my goal,” she writes.

    Treatises about the law or how judges wrestle with it don’t normally burn up the charts, and so this is a big bet for Penguin Random House, which reportedly offered Barrett a $2 million book deal for pulling back the curtain.

    She doesn’t pull back much. Entire sections are devoted to legal history, constitutional debates, and how framers and justices of yesteryear interpreted the Constitution. Neither does she reckon with how she and the current six-justice supermajority on the Supreme Court have upended decades of constitutional law and people’s settled expectations since her arrival there in 2020, right after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg—a law professor who helped transform the Constitution before she set out to teach it. Suppose Barrett’s high opinion of the high court were the controlling, final word (luckily, it isn’t): a person who isn’t already a big supporter of its actions might think everything there is fine. They wouldn’t know that its legitimacy and public support remain near historic lows.

    Below are six takeaways from Listening to the Law, which comes with an appendix reprinting the entire Constitution of the United States, should readers ever make it that far:

    Neither a Democrat nor a Republican. History is written by the victors, and one thread throughout Listening to the Law is the idea that the Supreme Court, which has been steadily ruling for Donald Trump since he took office a second time, does everything according to the law rather than the politics of the issues or the parties that appear before it. Recounting the day of her swearing-in ceremony as associate justice, which was delayed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she marvels at how her commission—the presidential document that appoints her to the position—bore Trump’s signature but was delivered by President Joe Biden’s deputy attorney general, the second in command at the Justice Department. “Once a judge is on the bench, she is a United States judge, not a Democrat or Republican official beholden to a particular administration or party,” Barrett writes.

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    Cristian Farias

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