USA News and Discussions

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Gabbard resigns as Trump's top US intelligence official

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/gabbar ... 026-05-22/

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[caltrek]

Roberts and Kavanaugh Just Broke Ranks in a 5-4 Supreme Court Vote
By Gabe Whisnant
May 28, 2026

Introduction:

(Newsweek) The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a Black Mississippi death row inmate can pursue renewed challenges to his conviction, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s liberal wing in a 5-4 decision.

The ruling highlights differences on the conservative-majority court over how aggressively to police claims of racial bias in jury selection and reinforces precedent barring discrimination against Black jurors. It reopens a decades-long legal battle for Terry Pitchford and sends his case back to lower courts, where his conviction and death sentence could again be reconsidered.

“Mr. Pitchford is now entitled to a fair trial in the state court,” Joseph Perkovich, who argued the case for Pitchford at the Supreme Court, told the Associated Press.

A Fractured Conservative Block Over Racial Bias

At issue was whether prosecutors improperly removed Black prospective jurors during Pitchford’s 2006 capital murder trial, in which he was sentenced to death for his role in the robbery and killing of grocery store owner Reuben Britt in northern Mississippi. Prosecutors struck four of the five eligible Black jurors, leaving a panel with just one Black member, prompting objections from defense attorneys who argued the moves were racially motivated.

The case turned on the court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which prohibits excluding jurors on the basis of race and requires courts to scrutinize prosecutors’ explanations for such strikes. Pitchford’s lawyers contended they were not given a meaningful opportunity to argue that those explanations were pretextual, a conclusion a federal district judge reached in 2023 when overturning his conviction.

Read more here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ ... f16&ei= 38

caltrek’s comment: It is good to see that the Supreme Court has apparently not totally removed itself from the notion of fair play in our judicial system.

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Wow

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Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, blocks Trump order

Source: CNBC

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the right to citizenship for people born in the United States, rejecting an executive order by President Donald Trump that sought to undo that longstanding constitutional principle for children born to many immigrants.

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts said.

Roberts was joined by his fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in the majority ruling on 14th Amendment grounds.

Another conservative, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote that he did not believe Trump’s executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but that it “does contravene a federal statute” adopted in 1940 that addresses the citizenship of people born in the U.S. The court’s justices had signaled during oral arguments in April that they would affirm that individuals born in the United States to non-U.S. citizens are automatically granted citizenship.

Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/supreme ... uling.html

[caltrek]

Born in the USA
By Robert Reich
June 30, 2026

Introduction:

Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day One executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.

Additional Extract:

Today, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the deeply-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen was enshrined in the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in in 1868: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

In another era, this would have been a no-brainer. No constitutional lawyer I know thought the Court would decide otherwise. The lower federal courts had consistently and unanimously ruled against Trump
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What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.

Read more here: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/born-in-the-usa

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CREW Statement on NRSC v FEC
June 30, 2026

Introduction:

(Crew) Today, the Supreme Court ruled that limits on political parties’ coordinated expenditures violate the First Amendment in NRSC v FEC. Following this ruling, CREW President Donald K. Sherman released the following statement:

“Yet again, the Supreme Court ignored the real-world impacts of its decision to grant high dollar donors greater influence over our democracy. Its justification for striking down the sensible limits on coordination between parties and candidates, which it quite recently upheld, is laughably weak. Earmarking and bribery enforcement are not enough to prevent the corruption this decision invites. This decision, as with its other campaign finance decisions since Citizens United, will inevitably render the government more responsive to special interests and indifferent to the demands of the American people.”

Read more here: https://www.citizensforethics.org/new ... sc-v-fec

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The Roberts Court Just Put Trump in Charge of Independent Agencies, Vastly Expanding His Powers
By Pema Levy
June 29, 2026

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) 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 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.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -powers/