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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | How the Supreme Court just made life tougher for tortured immigrants…

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There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.

“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”

Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.

The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.

Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.

This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.

While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.

“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”

Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.

The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)

Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law. The Trump administration argued that the Supreme Court had repeatedly narrowed Humphrey’s Executor, particularly in recent years, and that it was finally time to scrap it altogether.

“Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work,” Roberts wrote for the court. “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people.”

To reach this conclusion, Roberts crystallized a rigid interpretation of the separation of powers. He spun a tale of the Constitutional Convention where early American luminaries reached “the Decision of 1789,” which gave the president a broad power to remove subordinate officers at will. Roberts pointed to the 1926 ruling Myers v. United States, in which then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft—a former president himself—asserted a broad removal power over congressional encroachments since Reconstruction.

Congress may establish independent agencies “to assist it with its functions,” Roberts claimed, but could not “foist those agencies upon the president, and thus deprive him of the ‘executive power vested [in him] by the Constitution.’” The president-as-victim framework is a defining trait of the unitary executive theory, which often paints the executive branch as an avatar of the popular will that is shackled by a burdensome legislature and a meddlesome court.

Indeed, in Roberts’ opinion in Slaughter, the legislative branch is framed as a disembodied, eldritch force that constantly tries to undermine the executive. “Since its creation in 1914, the FTC has accumulated vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory powers under more than 80 statutes,” Roberts noted at one point. One might also describe that as the legislative process. To the conservative majority, however, Congress is treated as some kind of natural force to be endured and resisted, like rust or erosion.

What is actually being washed away is a century of American governance that brought individual prosperity and economic growth, even if Americans did not actively realize it. “Today, the majority replaces 90 years of proven, workable practice with a half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions,” Sotomayor wrote in her Slaughter dissent. “The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The second camp is Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sided with their conservative colleagues in Slaughter but formed a majority with the liberal justices in Cook. They sought to harmonize a unitary executive with the practical necessity of the Federal Reserve’s independence.

Lisa Cook, the latter case’s titular plaintiff, became the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors when the Senate confirmed her appointment in 2022. As one of the board’s seven members, Cook is charged with overseeing the nation’s monetary system. She also automatically serves on the Federal Open Markets Committee, which is best known for setting interest rates.

Since its establishment in 1913, the Fed has served as the nation’s de facto central bank. Congress sought to protect its decision-making process from day-to-day political meddling by only allowing governors to be removed by the president for cause. Lawmakers hoped to avoid a scenario where a president would install pliant governors who would prioritize the White House’s short-term political interests over the long-term stability of the American financial system.

Past presidents have obeyed the law even when they sharply disagreed with the Fed’s decisions. That century-long status quo came to an end after Trump was elected to his first term in 2016. The president had long advocated for lower interest rates that would make it easier for businesses to borrow money. While lower interest rates can stimulate economic growth in the short term, the Federal Reserve is also charged by Congress with ensuring that inflation stays within a 2 percent growth rate.

Things came to a head in 2018 and 2019 when Trump openly criticized Jerome Powell, the then-Fed chairman, for supporting higher interest rates to cool what economic experts saw as excessive asset prices. Trump himself had appointed Powell to the chairmanship in 2018, only to sour on him as Trump’s trade war with China dragged on the economy. In one notable Twitter post in the summer of 2019, Trump publicly questioned whether “our bigger enemy” was Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping. (It was unclear whether “our” referred to the United States or to Trump himself.)

Ironically, Powell turned out to be the most competent public servant appointed by the first Trump administration. He received widespread and bipartisan praise for stabilizing the American economy as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged American businesses and workers. Powell is also credited with managing the “soft landing” by raising interest rates enough to cool inflation during the Biden administration but without short-circuiting economic growth.

While Trump had stopped criticizing Powell in 2020 and redirected his energies to other matters, the president returned to office in 2025 on a mission to bring the Fed to heel. The White House moved quickly to destroy the Justice Department’s traditional independence upon taking office by staffing it with Trump’s former personal lawyers; the Supreme Court also cleared the way for Trump to remove protected Democratic appointees at a wide range of federal agencies during Trump’s first year.

At the same time, the Supreme Court signaled that it would not brook an attack on the Fed’s independence. In Wilcox, the aforementioned shadow-docket case, one of the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board who had been removed by Trump warned that her ouster could pave the way for an attack on the Fed. Not so, said the justices. The Fed, they wrote, “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Trump did not get the message. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Financial Agency, spent the summer of 2025 accusing various Democrats and Trump political targets of mortgage fraud. Among them was Cook, though the allegations against her appear dubious at best. In August, Pulte referred her to the Justice Department for prosecution. Trump used the referral as a pretext for her dismissal.

At Trump’s behest, federal prosecutors in D.C. also opened a criminal investigation into Powell claiming that he had misled Congress about a renovation project at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. Powell announced in a video message in January that he had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury over the claims. Amid significant blowback on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, the Justice Department dropped the spurious probe in April.

Roberts, this time in Cook, leaned heavily on the idea that the Fed was a true constitutional successor to the First and Second Banks of the United States. This is only somewhat true: The early republic’s central banks were structurally quite different than the Fed is, and they operated in substantially different economic contexts. No matter, the chief justice wrote, because the linkage is enough to give a “history and tradition” rationale for distinguishing the Fed from the FTC.

“It is true, of course, that this tradition has not stood still; as Justice [Clarence] Thomas notes, the Federal Reserve is more powerful than its predecessors, managing a vastly more complex economy in a vastly more complex world,” Roberts explained, referencing his colleagues’ dissent. “We see no reason, however, why our central bank ought to be ‘trapped in amber’ any more than any other aspect of our constitutional scheme.”

Roberts did not directly reference the court’s Slaughter ruling in his majority opinion and focused largely on Myers. Reconciling the two decisions instead fell to Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion. His reasoning is largely pragmatic: the Fed “occupies a unique role in the U.S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies,” and it also “follows in a distinct historical tradition of central bank independence that has long coexisted with Article II.”

All of which brings us to the third camp. Neither Roberts nor Kavanaugh proved persuasive to the court’s other conservatives, who chose ideological purity over the nation’s financial stability. “Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas complained in his dissent. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the President’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”

Other conservative justices were more cautious. Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion joined by Gorsuch, suggested that the court could have granted Trump’s request for a stay and left a host of constitutional questions for future briefing. This would have had the practical effect of removing Cook from office, which in turn would effectively decide the case. (Other officials who were denied interim relief often resigned rather than live without a paycheck indefinitely during litigation.)

Alito’s response to Roberts’s concerns about the stability of the American financial system was essentially one step short of denying them. “Granting a stay on the ground set out above would have had no such effect,” he speculated. “It would have simply returned the case to the courts below so that the litigation could continue in the normal course.” If the markets only responded to cold logic, this would be a stronger argument. Instead they would have likely drawn the easiest conclusion: the Fed’s independence, once rock-solid, was no longer indisputable.

It must be stressed that the outcome in Cook is, indeed, good news. The ruling does not represent the end of the road for Cook herself, who must continue to defend herself against allegations of mortgage fraud. But it does send a strong signal from the high court to the country—to markets, to banks and businesses, and  most importantly to presidents—that the Fed’s independence remains functionally intact. It is easy to scoff at this, but financial crises never limit their damage to the people responsible for them. It’s not hard to see Roberts’s invocations of the dangers of “leaving the public in limbo,” or otherwise “sowing doubt,” as a nod toward preventing panic in the marketplace.

At the same time, Slaughter represents a landmark victory for the conservative legal establishment. It will allow presidents to exert unchallenged control over major financial regulators like the FTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as a host of other independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission. It enshrines a radical expansion of presidential power into the law of the land and further diminishes Congress’s central role in the American constitutional order. 

“Many do not share the court’s rosy appraisal of the past century,” Thomas complained towards the end of his Cook dissent. Rarely is the conservative legal movement described so succinctly. Both the American economy and Americans’ quality of life grew by leaps and bounds over that timespan, thanks at least in part to competent regulatory institutions that combined the executive branch’s flexibility with the legislative branch’s stability. The party is now over.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host tapped by President Donald Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doesn’t understand how health insurance works.

Speaking on Fox News Monday in front of the president’s desolate fairgrounds, Oz presented his proof that the Obamacare marketplace was plagued by fraud—and in the process revealed how little he actually knows about health insurance.

Oz claimed that of 23 million people who were signed up for the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—40 percent of enrollees had never actually used their insurance.

“It raises, again, the reality that there are many people who are signed up who are getting paid for, but don’t believe they have the insurance, don’t know they have insurance, don’t want the insurance,” Oz said.

Dr Oz on ACA "fraud" -- "Of the people who signed up, 40% never use the insurance. Let me ask you, John, you have health insurance -- do you use it once a year? In Obamacare right now 40% of the people ostensibly signed up never use the insurance ... we have a lot of fake people… pic.twitter.com/UsN5fGbyP8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2026

Of course, that’s not really how health insurance coverage works: just because you have it doesn’t mean you actually use it. The only “reality” that Oz’s statistics raised was that health care in this country is way too expensive.

“Over 50% of insured Americans struggle to afford seeing a doctor, and 1 in 4 insured Americans skip medical treatments because of out-of-pocket costs,” Melanie D’Arrigo, director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on X. “The actual fraud is Americans being price gouged on healthcare.”

Many Americans on Obamacare marketplace plans struggle to pay their deductibles, or out-of-pocket costs, which have surged to record highs in 2026 and increase by more than $1,000 on average year over year. Still, more Americans are now choosing high-deductible plans after Trump stripped essential health care subsidies.

Over the weekend, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration had uncovered more than one million people who were enrolled in Obamacare without Social Security numbers on file. Oz claimed that it was part of a plot by shady insurance agents to enroll unsuspecting—and potentially fake—Americans for Obamacare plans in order to collect “millions of dollars” in improper fees.

“The reality is we have a lot of fake people on the policies. We want them off because they don’t want the insurance, they’re covered elsewhere, or at least they never wanted to be in the program,” Oz told Fox News Saturday.

President Donald Trump still won’t say whether he’ll sign a bipartisan housing bill that’s coming to his desk Monday, declaring it “a big yawn” compared to his voter suppression bill.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Monday, Trump brushed aside mention of the legislation, which aims to boost housing supply and address affordability issues.

“Big deal. It’s a yawn,” Trump said. “Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn,” Trump said.

Trump on Housing Bill: To me, compared to the Save America Act, everything is a big yawn! pic.twitter.com/Z49vLFK1WP

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and a photo ID when voting. Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizens voting is incredibly rare. Plus, the bill as written doesn’t have enough support to pass the Senate; making it law before the housing bill, like Trump wants, is essentially impossible.

“I think it’s so unimportant by compared to the SAVE America Act. I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says—it’s saving America from crooked elections. And the housing bill is a bill that can get approved, they worked on it long and hard. It’s very bipartisan—that means the Democrats like it,” Trump said, seemingly insinuating that the bipartisanship of the housing bill was a flaw.

Reporter: What are your plans for the housing bill?

Trump: I don’t know. I think it's so unimportant compared to the Save America Act. Democrats like it. They are getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. I made a lot of money with housing. pic.twitter.com/8aQYHfEPs0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 29, 2026

“They’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to,” he continued. “Nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody did well like me in housing. I made a lot of money with housing. But when I look at that bill, it’s a bill. But when I look at the SAVE America Act, it’s about saving America,” Trump said, demonstrating his ability to read.

Republicans and Democrats alike are looking to the passage of the housing bill for a pre-midterm reputation boost. Republicans have a lot riding on this in particular. However, it seems like Trump would rather talk about his glory days as a slumlord than help out the vulnerable members of his own party—not to mention the millions of Americans who can’t afford homes.

President Donald Trump is attempting to portray his celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary as a resounding success, but reports from the National Mall, site of the “Great American State Fair,” show a low turnout. “Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people…

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The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected three ballot measures that would have allowed Democrats to redraw the district map in their favor before the 2028 elections, dealing a blow to national party efforts in the gerrymandering race kick-started by President Donald Trump.

The decision blocks Democrats from securing a map that would have likely given them three more seats in the House of Representatives. Under the proposed new map, the only safe Republican district would be that of Representative Lauren Boebert.

The Supreme Court rejected the ballot measures on the basis of the state’s constitutionally mandated “single subject” policy, which requires measures to only handle a single issue.

“Changing long-settled law by modifying the timing, frequency, criteria, and entity responsible for congressional redistricting represents a significant change beyond the proponents’ stated central purposes [of] … congressional redistricting by adopting a new temporary map,” Chief Justice Monica Márquez said in one of her opinions.

Now, Colorado is out of the redistricting wars. So far, the only blue states that have approved a redistricting measure are California and Utah. But the groundwork has been laid for other states to do the same before 2028.

On Monday, officials in 25 states and Washington, DC sued Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz over the interim final rule for Medicaid work requirements established by President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The new rule, their lawsuit contends, “will create unnecessary bureaucracy and lead people who are either already working or eligible for an exclusion to lose or be denied coverage.”

As I previously reported, the rule released near the beginning of June was even more onerous than many state officials feared. It was a surprise to states that individuals already on Medicaid with serious health conditions would have to jump through further hoops to prove that they were unable to work:

State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me. “We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”

The lawsuit specifically raises the point that CMS “provided no indication
that it intended to place specific limits on States’ ability to rely on self-attestation” rather than requiring health care workers’ certification in all circumstances.

In a press release, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who helped lead the suit, said that the “abrupt changes in [federal] implementation of the statute leave states insufficient time to adjust…or effectively communicate to members what is required.”

“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha, who is also joining the suit, in a press release.

The lawsuit asks that a federal judge stay the interim final rule and vacate parts of it. The rule would otherwise go into effect in states with Medicaid expansion by January 1.

The Supreme Court has issued a raft of recent decisions benefiting Donald Trump. But on Monday, the justices rejected his latest effort to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll millions of dollars a jury awarded her after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Carroll had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carroll successfully sued him in 2023, after he not only denied the allegation—calling it a “hoax” and a “conjob”—but mocked Carroll as “not my type.”

A federal jury found Trump liable for $5 million in damages in May of 2023, after which Trump immediately denied the assault and once again mocked Carroll, leading to a second similar lawsuit, in which a jury quickly found that Trump owed an additional $83.3 million.

Trump appealed both jury decisions, but a federal appellate court ruled against him in 2024. He took the initial case to the Supreme Court last summer. On Monday, the court declined to hear the case, leaving the initial judgment in place.

Theoretically, the much larger second judgment could still be taken up by the Supreme Court. But today’s decision suggests the president is running out of legal avenues to avoid paying Carroll the money the juries said he owes.

Trump posted an angry message on Truth Social following the Court’s decision. He insisted he would keep fighting the case—he didn’t explain how—and tried to reframe Carroll’s lawsuit against him as an attack on America.

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

Trump specifically cited the fact that Carroll had sued him under New York State’s Adult Survivors Act, a 2022 law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations on civil lawsuits in which victims allege they were sexually assaulted. Previously, the statute of limitations had been only three years.

In his post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the law had been written specifically to target him, which is not true. The law was modeled on a similar law that temporarily allowed lawsuits by victims of child sexual abuse, who otherwise would have been prevented from suing because of the statute of limitations. Nor was he the only defendant sued under the law—besides Carroll’s lawsuit, the law also enabled lawsuits against Bill Cosby and Sean Combs.

During the 2023 trial, Carroll testified, in sometimes graphic detail, about the incident, her confusion over how to handle it, and her eventual decision to write a book that included the allegation.

Asked on the stand if she regretted going public with her accusation, she said, “I regretted it about 100 times, but in the end”—she paused as she broke down into tears—“being able to get my day in court…I’m crying, but I got to tell my story in court.”

DOGE may be dead, but its employees are still alive and kicking—and they’ve been quietly rebuilding sensitive federal websites in a way that may violate federal law, The Guardian reports.

The National Design Studio (NDS) is a governmental agency established via executive order last August, and is full of former DOGE employees. It operates four federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpacounts.gov.

The sites are used for passport applications, getting prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, and voter registration. Until The Guardian contacted NDS about their operations, all four websites ran visitor-tracking software configured to evade traditional privacy tools. And they still don’t have the public filings required by federal privacy laws.

In its investigation, The Guardian also found that NDS’s spending isn’t listed on the federal contract database, making its contracting opaque.

In the meantime, the group is potentially giving the White House access to information about Americans that it normally wouldn’t have: NDS’s passport application site bypasses the State Department’s site, and the agency has built a copy of vote.gov.

Altogether, these sites route sensitive information through a system that the White House apparently controls, and they’re doing it without oversight.

Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb and Trump supporter, leads the agency, which is staffed by the same hiring authority that ran DOGE. Gebbia was at DOGE himself for six months in the first half of 2025, and at least two other former DOGE staffers work with him: Greg Hogan and Akash Bobba, one of DOGE’s original engineers.

According to The Guardian, several photos and a video on the NDS website also appear to show none other than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the young DOGE-er who allegedly exposed millions of Americans’ Social Security data.

Once again, the Trump administration is giving people with a “move fast and break things” mentality access to incredibly sensitive data on the American people—and seems like it’s trying to do it all in secret.

The chief attraction at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair made people sick on Monday.

One of the events at the country’s semiquincentennial was a pancake-eating competition that had its four participants gagging and heaving after they’d stuffed themselves with the batter-rich flapjacks. An intern at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Douglas Ford, won the competition, though footage of his success didn’t make it look easy.

Fox News noted that the eating contest was made more difficult by a heat wave that has gripped Washington. The conservative network also ironically referred to the all-you-can-eat competition as a celebration of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement in a chyron.

the marquee attraction at Trump's fair today was a pancake eating contest where the contestants were gagging and nearly puking. 'Murica! pic.twitter.com/KQyoRk7fWD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 29, 2026

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive celebration has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae, a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be canceled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program, and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The state fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the festivities, yet even it is more of a Potemkin village than a sincere reverence. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his “Triumphal Arc” proposal sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “The president is bringing down the mood.”

Buckle up, because President Donald Trump has taken his whitewashed historical account of U.S. history on the road. Across the nation, six extremely patriotic, federally funded “Freedom Trucks” are making stops at schools, public events, and elsewhere to share a Trump administration-approved version of history. The trucks are fitted with a “Wall of Heroes” and intertwined with Christian…

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MAGA world is incensed after Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Comey Barrett sided with the liberal justices—and even wrote the majority opinion—rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to gut mail-in voting.

The court on Monday ruled to uphold a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after the election, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day. The decision effectively saves similar grace periods around the country, especially in big Democratic states. That was enough to set off Republicans.

“A shockingly wrong opinion,” wrote Republican Senator Eric Schmitt. “Justice Barrett joins with the liberal justices to hold that federal election law does not preempt states who allow late mail-in ballots to be counted. This is terrible for election integrity. Another reason we must pass the full SAVE American [sic] Act.”

“Remember Election Day?” said GOP Representative Abe Hamadeh. “This disastrous SCOTUS decision, authored by Justice Barrett, guarantees we’ll keep drifting away from it—as our sacred elections get bogged down by endless mail-in ballots and never-ending counts.”

Trump supporters outside of Congress made their discontent clear, as well.

“Barrett. AGAIN. WTF,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote.

“Amy Coney Barrett was a gigantic fucking disaster of a Supreme Court appointment. Absolutely horrible in the long run. She totally forgot who appointed her to the Court,” right-wing influencer Joey Mannarino said. “Scum of the earth.”

“Barrett is the biggest conservative judicial disaster since Souter,” conservative writer Hans Mahnke commented. “The difference is that few conservatives expected much from Souter whereas Barrett was supposed to be the future of the Court. The worst part is that she’ll be there pushing leftist policies for another 40 years.”

This isn’t the first time the Trump appointee has seemingly backstabbed the movement that put her in position to be nominated for the Supreme Court. Conservatives also raged against Barrett last year after she joined the court’s liberal justices in dissenting against a decision granting Trump emergency relief to use the “Alien Enemies Act” to deport immigrants at whim.

President Donald Trump crashed out Monday after the Supreme Court wouldn’t let him off the hook for the $5 million he owes E. Jean Carroll.

In a tirade on Truth Social Monday, Trump lamented the Supreme Court’s decision to reject Trump’s appeal of a verdict finding him guilty of sexually abusing and then defaming Carroll.

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

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

Of course, the case has nothing to do with America, but about Trump’s specific actions. Carroll, a former writer, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1996. When she spoke out publicly against him, he claimed the case was “a complete con job” and a “hoax and a lie.” In 2022, she sued him for both sexual abuse and defamation, seeking damages, and the jury agreed with Carroll that Trump was liable.

Trump had appealed the decision, claiming the case was tainted by the inclusion of “highly inflammatory” evidence—including testimony from two other women who claimed Trump assaulted them, and the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

Trump also railed against the state of New York for creating a temporary law that allowed adult sexual assault survivors in New York to file a civil case against an abuser, no matter when the assault took place, “in order to wrongfully ‘nab’” him.

“It was tailormade, and this Injustice cannot be allowed to stand!” he wrote on Monday.

There’s really no better way to put it than that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants people who use drugs to die. Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped new guidance on health programs at state, local, and tribal levels, demanding they agree to a list of “priorities” by July 1. One of those will lead us to abandon efforts we know can…

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The Supreme Court on Monday gave the president the authority to remove the leadership of most agencies that Congress had set up to act independently of presidential control. The ruling in Trump v. Slaughter may seem technical, but it represents a radical change in how our American government has functioned since the 1930s and, in some cases, since the founding, by creating agencies that operate with independence from presidential control and the expediency of presidential politics. Rather than allow Congress to decide how much control the president can exercise over an agency that Congress creates, the Supreme Court has seized that power for itself. Starting today, nine justices will decide which agency heads can be fired by the president and which cannot.

Today’s decision overturns a 91-year-old precedent, called Humphrey’s Executor, in which a unanimous Supreme Court upheld Congress’ authority to give independent commissioners protection from presidential removal. In his majority decision, Chief Justice Roberts derides this critical precedent while downplaying the gravity of overturning it. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” Roberts stated in his 6-3 opinion joined by other GOP appointees. “Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale.”

“The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The decision stems from President Donald Trump’s illegal firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a President Joe Biden appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. At the onset of his second term, Trump began firing Democratic appointees to independent agencies in violation of federal law, which protected their removal except for sufficient cause. He removed Biden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, among others. These agencies are designed to be insulated from immediate presidential control. They are run by a bipartisan board of commissioners who serve staggered terms. And unlike appointees to cabinet departments, the president cannot remove them over policy differences. The power to remove is the power to control. An impending firing can sway the decision-making of commissioners—and if it doesn’t, they can get the boot.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that chaos will ensue. “Today, the majority reshapes our Government,” she wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.” It does this, she wrote, in the service of the majority’s “half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions. The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”

The Roberts Court had already chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, and it was clear that in their quest to realize a so-called unitary executive with dangerous amounts of power and vanishing guardrails around him, it would use this case to knock down the precedent. Roberts does this with gusto. His opinion is a sweeping recitation of all the history he has mustered in his march toward a unitary executive, and relies on his own prior opinions inching toward this very moment—treating his decision as inevitable and right, rather than the result of his own political crusade. Legal historians have long complained that Roberts’ history is a house of cards. This opinion is “embarrassingly thin, full of historical errors and cherry-picked sources,” posted Boston University law professor Jed Schugerman, “reverse engineered from unitary ideology.”

The tricky task for the Republican-appointed majority, however, was how to exempt the Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency upon which rests the stability of the entire economy and which, under presidential control, could tank the markets and plunge the country into even more economic chaos. Indeed, the court in deciding this case while also deliberating whether the president can invent a bogus “cause” to remove a member of the Fed whom he doesn’t like in a blatant attempt to seize control of the agency. Roberts issued that opinion Monday as well, arguing that the Fed is different because of its allegedly unique history and therefore Trump cannot fire targeted governor Lisa Cook without following proper procedures. Roberts left to another day whether the charges against Cook are sufficient, but did reinforce his decision that the Fed’s independence should be maintained.

The solution to this problem—the desire to hand Trump almost unlimited firing power but not when it would cause brutal economic fallout—is to strip Congress of its power to decide when an agency it creates is independent and instead hand that policy determination to themselves. The decision sets up a new regime whereby the justices themselves decide when firing protections are constitutional based on whether an agency’s work falls “within the President’s ‘general administrative control'”—an amorphous standard that surely can be manipulated as the justices see fit. That allows the 6-3 majority today to allow Trump to fire commissioners at the FTC, but preserve Fed independence.

There are other agencies whose independent status and the removability of their commissioners are now uncertain. Congress could try to weigh in, but its decisions are now relegated to suggestions. Roberts’ decision oozes disdain for Congress and alleges that its attempt to insulate agencies from presidential control was an unconstitutional power grab. He cloaks the unitary executive theory as a democratic approach, making all government administration accountable to one man and, ultimately, the people who elect him, even though the Founders intended Congress to be the most democratic branch. The chief justice disagrees. “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection),'” Roberts writes, “often results only in an ‘increased subservience to congressional direction.'” He continued to accuse Congress of using Humphrey’s Executor to take “more power for itself.”

“The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”

But in Monday’s opinion, it is the court that hijacks Congress’ power for itself. Now, the justices will decide the fate of each agency’s independent status on a case-by-case basis. This is undoubtedly a question for Congress to decide, but the six justices seize that policy-making authority for themselves. As Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”

Trump v. Slaughter follows the clear modus operandi of the Roberts Court: disempower Congress, give more power to the president to buck the laws, and leave the nine justices as the only people who can shut down the president’s actions. The most infamous example is the court’s grant of criminal immunity to the president. Just as presidential immunity breeds corruption and political weaponization, this one will likewise turbocharge Trump’s ability to reward allies and donors and punish political enemies at the expense of good governance.

From approving mergers and regulating Wall Street and Crypto to determining which toys are safe for babies, independent agencies play a critical role in regulating the economy, the environment, our jobs, and the objects we rely on every day. Handing these decisions to donors or weaponizing them for political gain will line some pockets but almost certainly harm the public.

The Roberts Court claims to be an originalist court, basing its constitutional rulings on the document’s original public meaning. But ever since the Roberts Court’s hard turn toward unitary executive theory—the idea that the president has unrestricted authority over the entire executive branch—and its movements against independent agencies, scholars have gone back to the archives to investigate the originalist bona fides of these related judicial trends. It turns out that there is little historical evidence for a unitary executive (and mountains of evidence against) and that there are many instances of independent agencies in the founding era and the 19th century. They are not an invention of the New Deal, even though that is the time in which they grew in number and significance—and is indeed the era this court seeks to erase from the law books.

In her dissent, Sotomayor recounts the history that the majority eschews, demonstrating how Roberts’ opinion relies more on discredited fictions than sound history. “From the start, the majority’s theory rested on shaky ground,” she wrote. “Over time, its arguments have grown weaker still, as historical evidence has undermined key pillars of its theory. Today, the Court faced a choice: plow ahead… Unfortunately, the Court repeats and expands upon several prior errors that require correction.”

The historical anomaly is not independent agencies or presidents with limited authority, as Roberts asserts. It’s this court and the Trump actions it blesses.

A new poll has revealed that Americans’ favorite politicians are also the ones that conservatives bellyache about the most.

A Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll published Monday asked Americans to rate a dozen contemporary political figures on a scale of zero through 100, with the bottom of the scale representing “coldness” and the top of the scale representing “warmth.” The winners, by and large, were Democrats.

Leading the popularity contest was former President Barack Obama, with an average rating of 54 on the reputation thermometer. Behind the 44th president was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party at large, and Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in that order.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also polled high, earning a 42 and 41 rating, respectively.

Two Democrats fell towards the bottom of the poll: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who received a 36 rating, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who came in last in his party with a 30 rating.

Republicans generally fared much worse than Democrats. Among them, State Secretary Marco Rubio came in first with a 41 rating. Behind him was Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump, who each received an average rating of 38.

Elon Musk, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and ex-Fox News star Tucker Carlson fared even worse than the team in the White House, and scored less than 36 across the board.

Per our new polling out today, the most popular politicians in America are…

Barack Obama
Bernie Sanders
Zohran Mamdani
Pete Buttigieg
Jon Ossoff
& Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Trump is tied with Elon Musk and Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer and Carlson in lasthttps://t.co/vGWqUvS0Pk pic.twitter.com/9Zmb1SHxki

— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) June 29, 2026

The poll follows a pivotal moment for the burgeoning Democratic Socialists of America, which saw two of its New York-area candidates win big in primaries across the state last week: Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez. Both of them, as well as Mamdani-endorsed Brad Lander, beat out candidates endorsed by Democratic leaders such as Jeffries and Schumer. Their success underscores a new chapter in left-wing politics in the U.S., and illustrates that candidates tied to Democratic leadership have lost their sway with traditionally Democrat voters.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, dealing a setback to Trump’s campaign to take control of monetary policy. The court’s 5-4 decision preserves Cook’s job as she continues to fight her removal, but it is not the final word on Trump’s bid to fire her. The narrow decision almost guarantees that this same dispute will return to the high court soon.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts expresses explicit support for Fed independence. As an independent bank regulator, the Fed is run by a board of presidentially appointed governors who serve 14 year terms and are only removable for cause. The Trump administration argued that it had cause and that the Supreme Court could not review its removal decision. But the majority found the government’s arguments at odds with an independent Fed.

“To accept any one of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,” Roberts wrote.

The decision comes at a time when the future of Fed independence is in doubt. Trump’s pick for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, is awaiting confirmation by the Senate. Keeping Cook in her seat steadies the ship, if only a little. The majority’s decision, however, is explicitly “narrow.” It requires that Cook be given proper notice of the cause of her removal and an opportunity to contest those charges. The decision does not lay out what that process looks like. And it saves for another day—which will almost certainly come soon—a court decision on whether Trump’s obviously pretextual allegations will be enough to remove Cook.

In a post on Truth Social Monday, Trump called the Cook ruling “strictly procedural” and pledged to “take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”

In short, this is a loss for Trump at this stage—but it may not be a permanent one.

In its ruling, the court declined to define what for-cause protection requires in order for a firing to be valid. Indeed, it hints that rather than leave it up to the president, it may ultimately be the final arbiter of what constitutes cause on a case-by-case basis. “Only after Cook has had the opportunity to respond to the charges made against her…may a final decision be made…And only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges,” Roberts wrote.

“To be clear, the ultimate question of whether the President can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” the chief justice added. “In this opinion, we have not addressed the facts.”

Here are those facts, as we know them.

Last August, the president posted a criminal referral against Cook on Truth Social, his social media platform, and demanded she resign. The accusation—created by Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director—is that Cook claimed primary residency on two different mortgage applications. If this charge sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one Pulte cooked up against two other Democrats—and it has yet to win the day against any of the president’s targets because, at most, Pulte appears to have discovered clerical errors. Five days after Trump’s social media post, the president announced in another post that he was firing Cook.

Trump claimed that the mortgage document discrepancy dug up by a political lackey was sufficient cause to fire Cook, and that the courts couldn’t review his decision to boot her, anyway. In other words, Trump’s argument is that he can state any cause for removal he likes, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s an obviously absurd argument because it renders the “for cause” removal restriction meaningless. Cook sued, and a district court judge blocked her removal, as did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump turned to the Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether Trump could temporarily remove Cook while her legal challenge to her firing moves forward.

The Supreme Court handed down its ruling Monday in conjunction with a related case—Trump v. Slaughter—in which the court gave Trump the power to remove the commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and other formerly independent agencies. That decision follows a string of cases in which the court’s this conservative majority found that the president’s power over the executive branch trumped Congress’ attempt to insulate agencies from political pressure. During Trump’s second term, the court had already waved through firings of Democratic commissioners on the National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Consumer Product Safety Commission on its shadow docket.

Logically, it’s hard to reconcile the court’s Cook decision with its rulings in Slaughter and other cases allowing Trump to fire independent agency commissioners. But the Federal Reserve Board’s independence is a pillar of the United States’ economy, and the US’s dominant global position makes that independence critical to the world economy, as well. Allowing Trump to turn interest rates, loans, bailouts, and access to the US banking system into political weapons would fundamentally reshape the economy and our democratic order. The Fed, in other words, is too important for one man to control.

To get out of this bind, Roberts—who wrote both the Cook and Slaughter decisions—insists that the Fed is simply different. Roberts’ opinion cites a history of independent bank regulators going back to the country’s founding and finds this history is relevant in determining whether it should uphold Congress’ legislative choice to make the Fed independent. “We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our Nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” Roberts wrote. “We would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”

This entire adventure stems from the Roberts Court’s own crusade to empower the president and hinder regulations disliked by big industry. The GOP-appointed majority has pushed forward its view of a “unitary executive” who controls all aspects of the executive branch, creating a roadmap for Trump to turn federal agencies into political weapons. Today, the court blesses Trump’s attempts to take control of most of the regulatory work that Congress deemed should be independent. But, at least to an extent, the Fed will be insulated from the consequences of that crusade.

Millions of student borrowers will see their bills significantly increase on July 1 as new regulations put in place by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans go into effect. On that day, the Trump administration’s Repayment Assistance Plan will go into effect, replacing the Saving on a Valuable Education plan put in place in 2023 under former President Joe Biden.

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump set to make another historic celebration all about himself…

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The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ right to privacy when it comes to their phone location data.

The justices ruled 6–3 to send a Virginia bank robbery case back to the lower courts for review in light of its decision. In 2019, Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union after police saw him using his phone in the security camera footage of the bank. They then used a “geofence warrant,” which compels tech companies to provide law enforcement with data from all devices at a specific place and time, to identify Chatrie.

Geofence warrants are regularly used, and let the government demand location data and records from anyone near a crime scene, without needing to identify an individual target.

Government lawyers argued to the court that Chatrie did not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, since he had willingly shared his location with Google.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the majority, and conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joined.

“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred, writing, “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”

The ruling is a win for data privacy, and will make it harder for the federal government to access personal information stored in the cloud without getting a specific warrant.