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    u.s. supreme court

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    The Senate’s Budget Bill Could Silence the Courts

    Why the Big Beautiful Bill’s bond provision is a direct assault on constitutional rights.

    John Marks
    Jun 19, 2025

    The Senate’s latest reconciliation bill, officially titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” is a sprawling package aimed at slashing Medicaid, cutting taxes, and gutting federal regulatory power. But buried deep within its language lies a provision so dangerous, so surgically designed to undermine judicial oversight, that it threatens the very architecture of American democracy. It would require plaintiffs seeking to block a federal policy through a court injunction to first post massive financial bonds, potentially in the millions or even billions of dollars. If enacted, this single clause could shield unconstitutional actions from judicial review, deny due process to millions, and render our courts effectively powerless in the face of unlawful executive action.

    There is a line we are never supposed to cross. A final guardrail, often invisible but deeply trusted. It is the courts. Imperfect, slow, sometimes maddening, yet still the one place where an ordinary citizen can stand toe to toe with the federal government and say, “This is wrong. This is illegal. This must stop.”

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    Opinion
    u.s. senate
    Supporters of trangender youth rally outside Children's Hospital Los Angeles

    Warnings of 'Untold Harm' After US Supreme Court Rules Against Trans Youth

    Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that "there is no constitutional justification" for the decision, and access to gender-affirming care "can be a question of life or death."

    Brett Wilkins
    Jun 18, 2025

    LGBTQ+ advocates decried Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee's prohibition on gender-affirming medical treatments for minors as a dangerous green light for states to violate personal privacy and ban healthcare that many transgender people say saved their lives.

    Writing for the 6-3 majority in U.S. v. Skrmetti, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that S.B. 1, Tennessee's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for people under age 18, does not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The majority concurred with a lower court's ruling that S.B. 1 is not subject to heightened scrutiny, a standard of judicial review also known as intermediate scrutiny used to determine a law's constitutionality, especially in cases involving classifications based on sex or gender.

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    How the Right-Wing Supreme Court Uses the Shadow Docket to Boost Trump’s Agenda

    Although the Supreme Court has a long history of entertaining emergency appeals, emergency requests in high-profile cases proliferated during Trump’s first term and continue in his second.

    Bill Blum
    Jun 04, 2025

    In an unsigned two-page decision (Trump v. Wilcox) released on May 22, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s move to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board without cause and in the middle of their designated terms. The decision reversed two separate judgments issued by two different D.C. District Court judges that had blocked the firings as unconstitutional.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling was issued on an expedited basis as part of a rapidly expanding and highly controversial set of truncated decisions known as the “shadow docket,” a term coined by University of Chicago professor William Baude in a 2015 law review article to describe emergency appeals that come before the court outside of its standard “merits” docket and that are typically resolved without complete briefing, oral arguments, or detailed opinions. Although shadow-docket rulings are frequently used to lift, or “stay,” lower-court injunctions while further litigation continues, they often have the same practical effect as final decisions.

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    Opinion
    u.s. supreme court

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    Alarm as White House Says Trump Has Not Ruled Out Dropping Nuclear Weapon on Iran

    Trump Reportedly Greenlights Plan for US Attack on Iran Without Congressional Approval

    The Invention of the Iranian Threat

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