Senate Republicans hauled President Donald Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts bill to passage Tuesday by the narrowest of margins, pushing past opposition from Democrats and their own GOP ranks after a turbulent overnight session.
The outcome capped an unusually tense weekend of work at the Capitol, the president’s signature legislative priority teetering on the edge of approval or collapse. In the end that tally was 50-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Three Republican senators — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky — joined all Democrats in voting against it.
“In the end we got the job done,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said afterward.
The difficulty for Republicans, who have the majority in Congress, to wrestle the bill to this point is not expected to let up. The package now goes back to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana had warned senators not to overhaul what his chamber had already approved. But the Senate did make changes, particularly to Medicaid, risking more problems ahead. House GOP leaders scheduled a Wednesday vote and vowed to put it on Trump’s desk by his July Fourth deadline, which is Friday.
It’s a pivotal moment for the president and his party, as they have been consumed by the now 887-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which was its formal title before Democrats filed an amendment to strip out the name. Republicans are investing their political capital in delivering on their sweep of power in Washington.
Trump acknowledged it’s “very complicated stuff” as he departed the White House for Florida.
“I don’t want to go too crazy with cuts,” he said. “I don’t like cuts.”
What started as a routine but laborious day of amendment voting, in a process called vote-a-rama, spiraled into an all-night slog as Republican leaders bought time to shore up support.
The droning roll calls in the chamber belied the frenzied action to steady the bill. Grim-faced scenes played out on and off the Senate floor, amid exhaustion.
Thune worked around the clock, desperately reaching for last-minute agreements between those in his party worried the bill’s reductions to Medicaid will leave millions more people without care and his most conservative flank, which wanted even steeper cuts to hold down deficits ballooning with the tax cuts.
The GOP leaders had no room to spare. Thune could lose no more than three Republican senators, and two — Tillis, who warned that millions of people will lose access to Medicaid health care, and Paul, who opposes raising the debt limit by $5 trillion — had already indicated opposition.
Attention quickly turned to two other key senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Collins, who also raised concerns about health care cuts, as well as a loose coalition of four conservative GOP senators pushing for even steeper reductions.
Murkowski in particular became the subject of GOP leaders’ attention, as they sat beside her for talks. Then all eyes were on Paul after he returned from a visit to Thune’s office.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Republicans “are in shambles because they know the bill is so unpopular.”
An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law. The CBO said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the decade.
Pressure built from all sides. Billionaire Elon Musk said anyone who voted for the package should “hang their head in shame” and warned he would campaign against them. But Trump had also lashed out against the GOP holdouts, including Tillis, who abruptly announced his own decision over the weekend not to seek reelection.
Few Republicans appeared fully satisfied as the final package emerged, in either the House or the Senate.
Collins fought to include $50 billion for a new rural hospital fund, among the GOP senators worried that the bill’s Medicaid provider cuts would be devastating and force them to close.
While her amendment for the fund was rejected, the provision was inserted into the final bill. Still she voted no.
The Maine senator said she’s happy the bolstered funding was added, but “my difficulties with the bill go far beyond that.”
And Murkowski called the decision-making process “agonizing.”
She secured provisions to temporarily spare Alaska and other states from some food stamp cuts, but her efforts to bolster Medicaid reimbursements fell short. She voted yes.
All told, the Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to the latest CBO analysis, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.
The Senate package would roll back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits, which Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide. It would impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older Americans, making sign-up eligibility more stringent and changing federal reimbursements to states.
Additionally, the bill would provide a $350 billion infusion for border and national security, including for deportations, some of it paid for with new fees charged to immigrants.
The Supreme Court has been very good to President Donald Trump lately.
Even before he won a new term in the White House, the court eliminated any doubt about whether Trump could appear on presidential ballots, then effectively spared him from having to stand trial before the 2024 election on criminal charges he tried to overturn the 2020 election. That same ruling spelled out a robust view of presidential power that may well have emboldened Trump’s aggressive approach in his second term.
In the five months since Trump’s inauguration, the court has been largely deferential to presidential actions, culminating in Friday’s decision to limit the authority of federal judges who have sought to block Trump initiatives through nationwide court orders.
The decisions from a court that includes three justices Trump appointed during his first term have provoked a series of scathing dissents from liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They accuse the conservative supermajority of kowtowing to the president and putting the American system of government “in grave jeopardy,” as Jackson wrote Friday.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, author of the opinion limiting nationwide injunctions, responded to Jackson’s “startling line of attack” by noting that she “decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”
To be sure, the court has not ruled uniformly for Trump, including by indefinitely stopping deportations to a notorious prison in El Salvador without giving people a reasonable chance to object.
That’s where the court deals with cases that are still in their early stages, most often intervening to say whether a judge’s order should be in effect while the case proceeds through the courts.
While preliminary, the justices’ decisions can signal where they eventually will come out in the end, months or years from now. Emergency orders are generally overshadowed by decisions the justices issued in the cases they heard arguments between last fall and the spring.
Almost since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the court’s emergency docket has been packed with appeals from his administration. For a while, the justices were being asked to weigh in almost once a week as Trump pushed to lift lower court orders slowing his ambitious conservative agenda.
Trump scored a series of wins on issues ranging from the revocation of temporary legal protections for immigrants to Elon Musk’s dramatic cost cutting at the Department of Government Efficiency.
And that was before Friday’s decision on nationwide injunctions, court orders that prevent a policy from taking effect anywhere.
Many of the recent orders are in line with the conservatives’ robust view of executive power.
The three liberal justices dissented from each of three cases involving transgender rights or LGBTQ issues more generally.
Trump has moved aggressively to roll back the rights of transgender people and the court has rebuffed attempts to stop him.
In another emergency appeal, the court’s conservatives allowed a ban to take effect on transgender members of the military, even after lower courts had found the policy unconstitutional.
In mid-June, Roberts wrote the opinion for a conservative majority that upheld Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatment for transgender youth, rejecting arguments that it amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. The decision probably will affect a range of other pending court cases on transgender issues, including those involving access to health care, participation on sports teams and gender markers on birth certificates.
On the final day of decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Maryland parents with religious objections who don’t want their children exposed to public school lessons using LGBTQ storybooks. The case was about religious freedom, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “threatens the very essence of public education.”
The Supreme Court is in the homestretch of a term that has lately been dominated by the Trump administration’s emergency appeals of lower court orders seeking to slow President Donald Trump’s efforts to remake the federal government.
But the justices also have 10 cases to resolve that were argued between December and mid-May. One of the argued cases was an emergency appeal, the administration’s bid to be allowed to enforce Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents who are in the country illegally.
The court typically aims to finish its work by the end of June. On Wednesday it decided one of its most closely watched cases, handing down an opinion that upheld a Tennessee ban on some healthcare for transgender minors.
Trump’s birthright citizenship order has been blocked by lower courts
The court rarely hears arguments over emergency appeals, but it took up the administration’s plea to narrow orders that have prevented the citizenship changes from taking effect anywhere in the U.S.
The issue before the justices is whether to limit the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have plagued both Republican and Democratic administrations in the past 10 years.
These nationwide court orders have emerged as an important check on Trump’s efforts and a source of mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies.
At arguments last month, the court seemed intent on keeping a block on the citizenship restrictions while still looking for a way to scale back nationwide court orders. It was not clear what such a decision might look like, but a majority of the court expressed concerns about what would happen if the administration were allowed, even temporarily, to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally.
Democratic-led states, immigrants and rights groups who sued over Trump’s executive order argued that it would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than 125 years.
The court seems likely to side with Maryland parents in a religious rights case over LGBTQ storybooks in public schools
Parents in the Montgomery County school system, in suburban Washington, want to be able to pull their children out of lessons that use the storybooks, which the county added to the curriculum to better reflect the district’s diversity.
The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children from those lessons, but then reversed course because it found the opt-out policy to be disruptive. Sex education is the only area of instruction with an opt-out provision in the county’s schools.
The school district introduced the storybooks in 2022, with such titles as “Prince and Knight” and “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.”
The case is one of several religious rights cases at the court this term. The justices have repeatedly endorsed claims of religious discrimination in recent years. The decision also comes amid increases in recent years in books being banned from public school and public libraries.
A three-year battle over congressional districts in Louisiana is making its second trip to the Supreme Court
Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since 2022 and the justices are weighing whether to send state lawmakers back to the map-drawing board for a third time.
The case involves the interplay between race and politics in drawing political boundaries in front of a conservative-led court that has been skeptical of considerations of race in public life.
At arguments in March, several of the court’s conservative justices suggested they could vote to throw out the map and make it harder, if not impossible, to bring redistricting lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act.
Before the court now is a map that created a second Black majority congressional district among Louisiana’s six seats in the House of Representatives. The district elected a Black Democrat in 2024.
A three-judge court found that the state relied too heavily on race in drawing the district, rejecting Louisiana’s arguments that politics predominated, specifically the preservation of the seats of influential members of Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson. The Supreme Court ordered the challenged map to be used last year while the case went on.
Lawmakers only drew that map after civil rights advocates won a court ruling that a map with one Black majority district likely violated the landmark voting rights law.
The Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear an appeal from Chevron, Exxon and other oil and gas companies that lawsuits seeking compensation for coastal land loss and environmental degradation in Louisiana should be heard in federal court.
The companies are appealing a 2024 decision by a federal appeals court that kept the lawsuits in state courts, allowing them to move to trial after more than a decade in limbo.
A southeast Louisiana jury then ordered Chevron to pay upwards of $740 million to clean up damage to the state’s coastline. The verdict reached in April was the first of dozens of lawsuits filed in 2013 against leading oil and gas companies in Louisiana alleging they violated state environmental laws for decades.
While plaintiffs’ attorneys say the appeal encompasses at least 10 cases, Chevron disagrees and says the court’s ruling could have broader implications for additional lawsuits.
Chevron argues that because it and other companies began oil production and refining during World War II as a federal contractor, these cases should be heard in federal court, perceived to be friendlier to businesses.
But the plaintiffs’ attorneys — representing the Plaquemines and Jefferson Parish governments — say the appeal is the companies’ latest stall tactic to avoid accountability. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit already rejected similar arguments from Chevron.
“It’s more delay, they’re going to fight till the end and we’re going to continue to fight as well,” said John Carmouche, a trial attorney in the Chevron case who is behind the other lawsuits. He noted that the companies’ appeal “doesn’t address the merits of the case.”
Chevron’s counsel, Paul Clement said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the Supreme Court’s decision. Exxon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The court’s decision to hear the appeal offers the chance for “fair and consistent application of the law” and will “help preserve legal stability for the industry that fuels America’s economy,” said Tommy Faucheux, president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association, in an emailed statement.
In April, jurors in Plaquemines Parish — a sliver of land straddling the Mississippi River into the Gulf — found that energy giant Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, had for decades violated Louisiana regulations governing coastal resources by failing to restore wetlands impacted by dredging canals, drilling wells and billions of gallons of wastewater dumped into the marsh.
“No company is big enough to ignore the law, no company is big enough to walk away scot-free,” Carmouche told jurors during closing arguments.
Louisiana’s coastal parishes have lost more than 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) of land over the past century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has also identified oil and gas infrastructure as a significant cause. The state could lose another 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) in the coming decades, its coastal protection agency has warned.
Chevron’s attorneys had argued that land loss in Louisiana was caused by other factors and that the company should not be held liable for its actions prior to the enactment of a 1980 environmental law requiring companies to obtain permits and restore land they had used.
The fact that the lawsuits had been delayed for so long due to questions of jurisdiction was “bordering on absurd,” the late-federal judge Martin Leach-Cross Feldman remarked in 2022 during oral arguments in one of the lawsuits, according to court filings. He added: “Frankly, I think it’s kind of shameful.”
Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, a longtime oil and gas industry supporter, nevertheless made the state a party to the lawsuits during his tenure as attorney general.
“Virtually every federal court has rejected Chevron’s attempt to avoid liability for knowingly and intentionally violating state law,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement. “I’ll fight Chevron in state or federal court—either way, they will not win.”
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from limiting passport sex markers for many transgender and nonbinary Americans.
Tuesday’s ruling from U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick means that transgender or nonbinary people who are without a passport or need to apply for a new one can request a male, female or “X” identification marker rather than being limited to the marker that matches the gender assigned at birth.
In an executive order signed in January, the president used a narrow definition of the sexes instead of a broader conception of gender. The order said a person is male or female and rejected the idea that someone can transition from the sex assigned at birth to another gender.
Kobick first issued a preliminary injunction against the policy last month, but that ruling applied only to six people who joined with the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit over the passport policy.
In Tuesday’s ruling she agreed to expand the injunction to include transgender or nonbinary people who are currently without a valid passport, those whose passport is expiring within a year, and those who need to apply for a passport because theirs was lost or stolen or because they need to change their name or sex designation.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The government failed to show that blocking its policy would cause it any constitutional injury, Kobick wrote, or harm the executive branch’s relations with other countries.
The transgender and nonbinary people covered by the preliminary injunction, meanwhile, have shown that the passport policy violates their constitutional rights to equal protection, Kobick said.
“Even assuming a preliminary injunction inflicts some constitutional harm on the Executive Branch, such harm is the consequence of the State Department’s adoption of a Passport Policy that likely violates the constitutional rights of thousands of Americans,” Kobick wrote.
Kobick, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, sided with the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which stays the action while the lawsuit plays out.
“The Executive Order and the Passport Policy on their face classify passport applicants on the basis of sex and thus must be reviewed under intermediate judicial scrutiny,” Kobick wrote in the preliminary injunction issued earlier this year. “That standard requires the government to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest. The government has failed to meet this standard.”
In its lawsuit, the ACLU described how one woman had her passport returned with a male designation while others are too scared to submit their passports because they fear their applications might be suspended and their passports held by the State Department.
Another mailed in their passport Jan. 9 and requested to change their name and their sex designation from male to female. That person was still waiting for their passport, the ACLU said in the lawsuit, and feared missing a family wedding and a botany conference this year.
In response to the lawsuit, the Trump administration argued that the passport policy change “does not violate the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution.” It also contended that the president has broad discretion in setting passport policy and that plaintiffs would not be harmed since they are still free to travel abroad.
A judge blocked New York City’s mayor from letting federal immigration authorities reopen an office at the city’s main jail, in part because of concerns the mayor invited them back in as part of a deal with the Trump administration to end his corruption case.
New York Judge Mary Rosado’s decision Friday is a setback for Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, who issued an executive order permitting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies to maintain office space at the Rikers Island jail complex. City lawmakers filed a lawsuit in April accusing Adams of entering into a “corrupt quid pro quo bargain” with the Trump administration in exchange for the U.S. Justice Department dropping criminal charges against him.
Rosado temporarily blocked the executive order in April. In granting a preliminary injunction, she said city council members have “shown a likelihood of success in demonstrating, at minimum, the appearance of a quid pro quo whereby Mayor Adams publicly agreed to bring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (”ICE”) back to Rikers Island in exchange for dismissal of his criminal charges.”
Rosado cited a number of factors, including U.S. border czar Tom Homan’s televised comments in February that if Adams did not come through, “I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’ ”
Adams has repeatedly denied making a deal with the administration over the criminal case. He has said he deputized his first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, to handle decision-making on the return of ICE to Rikers Island to make sure there was no appearance of any conflict of interest.
Rosado said that Mastro reports to Adams and “cannot be considered impartial and free from Mayor Adams’ conflicts.”
Mastro said in a prepared statement Friday the administration was confident they will prevail in the case. “Let’s be crystal clear: This executive order is about the criminal prosecution of violent transnational gangs committing crimes in our city. Our administration has never, and will never, do anything to jeopardize the safety of law-abiding immigrants, and this executive order ensures their safety as well,” Mastro said.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is running in the Democratic primary for mayor, called the decision a victory for public safety.
“New Yorkers are counting on our city to protect their civil rights, and yet, Mayor Adams has attempted to betray this obligation by handing power over our city to Trump’s ICE because he is compromised,” she said in a prepared statement.
State and local officials blasted the Trump administration’s widely anticipated list of “sanctuary” jurisdictions that are deemed uncooperative with federal immigration enforcement, with some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the White House wondering on Friday how they wound up on it.
The list, which was riddled with misspellings, included sparsely populated counties that have little interaction with immigration authorities, that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump and that have actively supported his hard-line immigration policies.
In California, the city of Huntington Beach made the list of hundreds even though it filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s immigration sanctuary law and passed a resolution this year declaring the community a “non-sanctuary city.”
“At first when I heard it I was like, accidents happen,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns. But after seeing so many other cities lumped in like his, he called it “negligent.” “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document — somebody’s got to answer to that.”
Meanwhile, those with policies protecting immigrants also pushed back, saying they are doing right by their communities.
“This is simply the latest attempt by the Trump administration to strong-arm cities like Seattle into changing our local policies through bluster and threats to critical federal funding for public safety and homelessness,” Bruce Harrell, the city’s mayor, told The Associated Press in an email. “It’s not going to work — the law is on our side — and we will not hesitate to protect our people and stand up for our values.”
The list was published as the Trump administration ramps up efforts to follow through on the president’s campaign promises to remove millions of people who are in the country illegally. It came out as Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced major leadership changes, and after a White House official said the administration wanted to increase daily immigration arrests.
Misspelled communities on the list included Cincinnati, which was spelled Cincinnatti. Also, some counties were mislabeled as cities and vice versa.
The administration has said each listed jurisdiction will receive formal notification that the government has deemed them noncompliant and if they’re believed to be in violation of any federal criminal statutes.
In response to questions Friday about the list, the Department of Homeland security reiterated that it was compiled using a number of factors, including whether the localities identified themselves as sanctuary jurisdictions, how much they complied with federal officials enforcing immigration laws, if they had restrictions on sharing information with immigration enforcement or had any legal protections for people in the country illegally.
The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended a publicly funded Catholic charter school in Oklahoma, dividing 4-4.
The outcome keeps in place an Oklahoma court decision that invalidated a vote by a state charter school board to approve the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first religious charter school. But it leaves the issue unresolved nationally.
The one-sentence notice from the court provides an unsatisfying end to one of the term’s most closely watched cases. The Catholic Church in Oklahoma had wanted taxpayers to fund the online charter school “faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Opponents warned that allowing it would blur the separation between church and state, sap money from public schools and possibly upend the rules governing charter schools in almost every state.
Only eight of the nine justices took part in the case. Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn’t explain her absence, but she is good friends and used to teach with Notre Dame law professor Nicole Garnett, who has been an adviser to the school.
The issue could return to the high court in the future, with the prospect that all nine justices could participate. The court, following its custom, did not provide a breakdown of the votes. But during arguments last month, four conservative justices seemed likely to side with the school, while the three liberals seemed just as firmly on the other side.
That left Chief Justice John Roberts appearing to hold the key vote, and suggests he went with the liberals to make the outcome 4-4. The case came to the court amid efforts, mainly in conservative-led states, to insert religion into public schools. Those include a challenged Louisiana requirement that the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms and a mandate from Oklahoma’s state schools superintendent that the Bible be placed in public school classrooms.
St. Isidore, a K-12 online school, had planned to start classes for its first 200 enrollees last fall, with part of its mission to evangelize its students in the Catholic faith.
A key unresolved issue is whether the school is public or private. Charter schools are deemed public in Oklahoma and the other 45 states and the District of Columbia where they operate. North Dakota recently enacted legislation allowing for charter schools.
They are free and open to all, receive state funding, abide by antidiscrimination laws and submit to oversight of curriculum and testing. But they also are run by independent boards that are not part of local public school systems.
“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer. While the Supreme Court’s order is disappointing for educational freedom, the 4-4 decision does not set precedent, allowing the court to revisit this issue in the future,” said Jim Campbell, who argued the case at the high court on behalf of Oklahoma’s charter school board. Campbell is the chief legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that appears often at the court in cases on high-profile social issues.
On the other side, the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which are among groups representing parents and other opponents of the school in a separate lawsuit, applauded the outcome for preserving public education.
“The very idea of a religious public school is a constitutional oxymoron. The Supreme Court’s ruling affirms that a religious school can’t be a public school and a public school can’t be religious,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Oklahoma officials also offered differing views.
Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and state School Superintendent Ryan Walters said the fight is far from over. “There will be another case just like this one and Justice Barrett will break the tie,” Stitt said.
Attorney General Gentner Drummond, also a Republican, sued to stop the school. He called the 4-4 vote “a resounding victory for religious liberty” that also will ensure that “Oklahoma taxpayers will not be forced to fund radical Islamic schools, while protecting the religious rights of families to choose any school they wish for their children.”
During arguments, Justice Samuel Alito said, “We have statement after statement by the attorney general that reeks of hostility toward Islam.”
Arizona prosecutors pressing the case against Republicans who are accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in President Donald Trump’s favor were dealt a setback when a judge ordered the case be sent back to a grand jury.
Arizona’s fake elector case remains alive after Friday’s ruling by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers, but it’s being sent back to the grand jurors to determine whether there’s probable cause that the defendants committed the crimes.
The decision, first reported by the Washington Post, centered on the Electoral Count Act, a law that governs the certification of a presidential contest and was part of the defendants’ claims they were acting lawfully.
While the law was discussed when the case was presented to the grand jury and the panel asked a witness about the law’s requirements, prosecutors didn’t show the statute’s language to the grand jury, Myers wrote. The judge said a prosecutor has a duty to tell grand jurors all the applicable law and concluded the defendants were denied “a substantial procedural right as guaranteed by Arizona law.”
Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat whose office is pressing the case in court, said in a statement that prosecutors will appeal the decision. “We vehemently disagree with the court,” Taylor said.
Mel McDonald, a former county judge in metro Phoenix and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, said courts send cases back to grand juries when prosecutors present misleading or incomplete evidence or didn’t properly instruct panel members on the law.
“They get granted at times. It’s not often,” said McDonald, who isn’t involved in the case.
In all, 18 Republicans were charged with forgery, fraud and conspiracy. The defendants consist of 11 Republicans who submitted a document falsely claiming Trump won Arizona, two former Trump aides and five lawyers connected to the former president, including Rudy Giuliani.
Two defendants have already resolved their cases, while the others have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Trump wasn’t charged in Arizona, but the indictment refers to him as an unindicted coconspirator.
Most of the defendants in the case also are trying to get a court to dismiss their charges under an Arizona law that bars using baseless legal actions in a bid to silence critics.
They argued Mayes tried to use the charges to silence them for their constitutionally protected speech about the 2020 election and actions taken in response to the race’s outcome. Prosecutors said the defendants didn’t have evidence to back up their retaliation claim and that they crossed the line from protected speech to fraud.
Eleven people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried the state in the 2020 election.
President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document later was sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme.
The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to strip temporary legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to being deported.
The Justice Department asked the high court to put on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month.
The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.
A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request.
President Donald Trump’s administration has moved aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the country, including ending TPS for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. TPS is granted in 18-month increments.
The emergency appeal to the high court came the same day a federal judge in Texas ruled illegal the administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelans under an 18th-century wartime law. The cases are not related.
The protections had been set to expire April 7, but U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ordered a pause on those plans. He found that the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.
Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, found the government hadn’t shown any harm caused by keeping the program alive.
But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration that Chen’s order impermissibly interferes with the administration’s power over immigration and foreign affairs.
In addition, Sauer told the justices, people affected by ending the protected status might have other legal options to try to remain in the country because the “decision to terminate TPS is not equivalent to a final removal order.”
Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.
Citizen activists supporting a public vote on important issues could have to brush up on their reading, writing and arithmetic if they want to get their initiatives on next year’s ballot in some states.
A new Arkansas law will bar initiative ballot titles written above an eighth-grade reading level. And canvassers will have to verify that petition signers have either read the ballot title or had it read aloud to them.
In South Dakota, sponsors will need to make sure their petition titles appears in 14-point type on the front page and 16-point font on the back, where people typically sign.
And in Florida, volunteers will have to register with the state if they gather more than 25 petition signatures from outside their family or risk facing felony charges punishable by up to five years in prison.
Across about dozen states, roughly 40 bills restricting or revamping the citizen initiative process have passed at least one legislative chamber this year, according to a review by The Associated Press. Many already have been signed into law. Some advocates for the initiative process are alarmed by the trend.
“Globally, as there’s movements to expand direct democracy. In the United States it’s contracting,” said Dane Waters, chair of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, who has advised ballot campaigns in over 20 nations.
Most of the new restrictions come from Republican lawmakers in states where petitions have been used to place abortion rights, marijuana legalization and other progressive initiatives on the ballot. GOP lawmakers contend their measures are shielding state constitutions from outside interests.
“This is not a bill to restrict. It is a bill to protect — to make sure that our constitutional system is one of integrity, and that it’s free of fraud,” said state Sen. Jennifer Bradley of Florida, where the new initiative requirements already have been challenged in court.
Since Oregon voters first used the process in 1904, a total of 2,744 citizen initiatives have appeared on statewide ballots, with 42% wining approval, according to the Initiative and Referendum Institute.
But the process has long caused tension between voters and their elected representatives.
Lawmakers often perceive the initiative process as “an assault on their power and authority, and they want to limit it,” Waters said. “They view it, in my opinion, as a nuisance – a gnat that keeps bothering them.”
Because initiative petitions require thousands of signatures to qualify for the ballot, groups sponsoring them often pay people to solicit signatures outside shopping centers and public places. Some states now prohibit payments based on the number of signatures gathered.
States also are trying to restrict who can circulate petitions. A new Arkansas law requires paid petition canvassers to live in the state. And a new Montana law will make petition circulators wear badges displaying their name and home state.
The new Florida law expanding registration requirements for petition circulators also requires them to undergo state training and bars canvassers who are noncitizens, nonresidents or felons without their voting rights restored.
In addition to providing their name, address and birth date, people signing initiative petitions in Florida also will have to provide either their Florida driver’s license, state identification card or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
That information is not required in other states, said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a progressive group that has backed dozens of ballot initiatives in states. Hall said people concerned about privacy might hesitate to sign petitions.
“I work in ballot measures, and I deeply support many of the things that folks have tried to put on the ballot in Florida, ” Hall said, “and I don’t know if I could bring myself to do that – that’s a very prohibitive requirement.”
Many states already prescribe a particular format for initiative petitions. South Dakota’s new mandate for specific font sizes was prompted by allegations that some people got duped into signing a petition for abortion rights last year, said sponsoring state Sen. Amber Hulse, a Republican.
Printing the ballot title in large type “might make it harder for some issues to get on the ballot if people know what they’re signing. But that’s actually a good thing,” Hulse said.
More power for elected officials
Before they can collect signatures, petition sponsors must get approval from state officials. New measures in several states give those officials greater authority.
New Arkansas laws allow the attorney general to reject initiatives written above an eighth-grade reading level or which conflict with the U.S. Constitution or federal law. Utah’s lieutenant governor, who already can reject unconstitutional petitions, now also will be able to turn away petitions that are unlikely to provide adequate funding for their proposed laws.
A new Missouri law gives greater power to the secretary of state, instead of judges, to rewrite ballot summaries struck down as being insufficient or unfair.
The Supreme Court seemed likely to uphold a key preventive-care provision of the Affordable Care Act in a case heard Monday.
Conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, along with the court’s three liberals, appeared skeptical of arguments that Obamacare’s process for deciding which services must be fully covered by private insurance is unconstitutional.
The case could have big ramifications for the law’s preventive care coverage requirements for an estimated 150 million Americans. Medications and services that could be affected include statins to prevent heart disease, lung cancer screenings, HIV-prevention drugs and medication to lower the chance of breast cancer for high-risk women.
The plaintiffs argued that requirements to cover those medications and services are unconstitutional because a volunteer board of medical experts that recommended them should have been Senate- approved. The challengers have also raised religious and procedural objections to some requirements.
The Trump administration defended the mandate before the court, though President Donald Trump has been a critic of the law. The Justice Department said board members don’t need Senate approval because they can be removed by the health and human services secretary.
A majority of the justices seemed inclined to side with the government. Kavanaugh said he didn’t see indications in the law that the board was designed to have the kind of independent power that would require Senate approval, and Barrett questioned the plaintiff’s apparently “maximalist” interpretation of the board’s role.
“We don’t just go around creating independent agencies. More often, we destroy independent agencies,” said Justice Elena Kagan said about the court’s prior opinions.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas seemed likely to side with the plaintiffs. And some suggested they could send the case back to the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That would likely leave unanswered questions about which medications and services remain covered.
A ruling is expected by the end of June.
The case came before the Supreme Court after the appeals court struck down some preventive care coverage requirements. It sided with Christian employers and Texas residents who argued they can’t be forced to provide full insurance coverage for things like medication to prevent HIV and some cancer screenings.
They were represented by well-known conservative attorney Jonathan Mitchell, who represented Trump before the high court in a dispute about whether he could appear on the 2024 ballot.
Not all preventive care was threatened by the ruling. A 2023 analysis prepared by the nonprofit KFF found that some screenings, including mammography and cervical cancer screening, would still be covered without out-of-pocket costs.
The appeals court found that coverage requirements were unconstitutional because they came from a body — the United States Preventive Services Task Force — whose members were not nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Breaking Legal News - POSTED: 2025/07/02 12:27
