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us supreme court
'At Least He Admits It': Trump Says Pro-Democracy Resolution Would Destroy GOP
"The Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans," said Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Jul 06, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Sunday attacked a pro-democracy resolution recently introduced by key House caucus leaders, warning that the measure's adoption would strike a fatal blow to the Republican Party.
"They do this, and the Republican Party is DEAD!" Trump wrote in a social media post, citing a Politico story on the resolution. The proposal, unveiled last month by the heads of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, calls for the restoration and strengthening of voter protections gutted by the US Supreme Court as well as court reforms—including possible expansion of the number of justices and term limits.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the CPC, wrote Sunday that Trump's post amounted to an acknowledgment that "the Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Republicans."
"At least he admits it," the progressive leader wrote on social media.
This is what Trump says about my resolution with @RepYvetteClarke, @RepEspaillat, and @RepGraceMeng to restore voting rights, end the filibuster, and reform the Supreme Court.
At least he admits it: the Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights are about rigging elections for Rs. pic.twitter.com/GgQzhlwo4Q
— Congressman Greg Casar (@RepCasar) July 5, 2026
Politico reported that while the resolution "stands virtually no chance of adoption" in the current GOP-controlled Congress, "it is the latest indicator of how the Congressional Black Caucus and other key Democrats want to respond to the April decision that cleared the way for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts"—a reference to the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.
Trump seized on the ruling to push state-level Republicans to aggressively gerrymander their maps ahead of the critical 2026 midterm elections. The president is also pressuring congressional Republicans to force through legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and documentation requirements nationwide, potentially blocking millions of American citizens from casting ballots under the pretext of cracking down on noncitizen voting—something that is already illegal and rare.
Trump is currently holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage in a bid to get the stalled SAVE America Act through Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) affirmed on Sunday that Republicans intend to attach the assault on voting rights to a filibuster-proof budget reconciliation package in a last-ditch effort to get the measure through the Senate, where it has not received enough support to clear the upper chamber's 60-vote threshold. Trump has called for elimination of the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, but Senate Republicans have thus far declined to remove the barrier.
The progressive resolution that Trump attacked on Sunday also proposes "the elimination of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate"—but it specifies that the action should only be taken "under the next pro-democracy governing moment."
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Killing Trust: The Parlor Games of John Roberts’ Court
By relying on the fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power.
Jul 05, 2026
While driving home on June 30, my head nearly exploded as I listened to the evening news. Reporting on a raft of last-minute decisions passed by the Supreme Court in advance of the summer holidays, the SCOTUS correspondent explained that certain contra-Trump statutes barely managed to hold on for dear life while a more substantial pile of pro-Trump agenda items flew through with room to spare. It was the “you win some, you lose some” tone of the report that set my blood boiling. It felt like I was being told that, on the one hand, SCOTUS had cleared the way for the private purchase of thermonuclear weapons over the internet, exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended, but on the other, that such weapons could not (at least for the moment) be purchased by children under 12 without parental consent. So it’s a win for both sides.
It wasn’t as blatantly bad as that, I admit. But the strained attempt to keep things balanced, if only for old time’s sake, was certainly there. Times being what they are now, it did not sit well with me.
But the single most infuriating moment of the report was when the SCOTUS correspondent quoted Chief Justice Roberts defending the 6-3 decision to strike down a 91-year-old precedent that barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) other than for reasons of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” In writing for the majority, Roberts argued that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.”
It was upon hearing those exact words that my head exploded. Did Chief Justice Roberts actually write what the reporter just claimed he wrote? Could he really have allowed himself to frame the decision in terms of trust?!! The absurdity of the rationale blew my mind. The whole idea of creating multi-member commissions, such as the FTC, as independent agencies in the first place was to ensure that they could be trusted. It is their independence that actually allows the members of the commission to do their work without fear of reprisal. It’s what keeps them from becoming a board of lackeys subservient to the whims of whoever happens to be in power. In a word, the thing that the Supreme Court ruled out by this decision is the one thing that has always allowed us to trust these agencies. Without it, trust disappears.
According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.”
One of the biggest problems in states ruled by autocrats is precisely that: Trust goes missing, becoming a rare commodity desperately sought after, but rarely found. During the Hellenistic Period in ancient Greece, regional monarchs would invite Cynic philosophers into their courts so that they might have just one person to talk to who could be counted on to tell them the truth. As impoverished beggars, happy in that condition, the Cynics had nothing to gain by lying, nothing to lose by telling the truth. They were independent.
But Chief Justice Roberts would have us believe that he knows better about such things. He and the wiser minds of his Supreme Court treat their legal interpretations as a kind of parlor game played by experts for the sake of theoretical purity and one-upmanship. Like Medieval scholars arguing over how many thorns were in Christ’s crown, they don their robes, play their game, issue their rulings, and retire to their summer homes. Meanwhile, their decisions have consequences in the world outside the parlor that, somehow, aren’t really their concern. No. Their focus is on the intentions of the Constitution’s framers. They are the ones they want to make sure are happy and well cared for by their decisions. They, the long dead, ghosts of their own invention, are the ones that really matter.
In fact, the one non-dead person whom Chief Justice Roberts expressed a keen interest in helping with his decision was just that: one person. The president. Not the demos of our democracy, the voting citizens of this country, to the tune of several hundred million people who are still very much alive. He worried that that one man’s power might be unduly hampered if he were not allowed to fire whomever he wanted for whatever reason. His rationale amounts to a set of quotes from the rule book of a new game that he and his like-minded friends on the court have invented. They play it within his parlor while sipping brandy. It’s called “The Unitary Executive.”
This is a fantasy game, rather like Dungeons and Dragons. In it, the rules of reality outside the parlor, out in the real world, are called off in favor of the rules of the parlor and of the game itself. According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.” It’s all quite wonderful.
To make this game work, Justice Roberts and his parlor friends had to invent an equally fantastical person to do the trusting: a president who has our best interests in mind, one who can always be counted on to act in good faith. This, their game-piece president, is not a vindictive liar, greedy for power. He is a wonderful fiction, good to play with. And so it is that, by relying on the parlor fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power. But not to worry. They assure us that, according to the rules of the game, nothing bad can come of this.
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By Upholding State Bans on Transgender Athletes, the Supreme Court Bowed to Bigotry
The decision codifies transphobic language and opens the potential for the sex testing of youth athletes.
Jul 03, 2026
In one of its final decisions of the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court of the United States solidified its place in the onslaught of eradicating trans rights, in a ruling that revolved largely around whether state bans of transgender athletes violated Title IX and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In response to the question placed before the court of whether states could implement bans on transgender athlete participation in girls’ and women’s sports, 6 of the 9 justices said, “Yes.”
Outside of patchy citations and contradicting interpretations of legal precedents, the rationale behind the majority opinion of the court, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, echoed three key premises in the “sports context.” First, female bodies are inherently physiologically different from male bodies, which map onto sex-based athletic advantages for males. Second, regardless of these differences, girls and women should have equal opportunities to boys and men. And third, because of these differences and because of equal guarantees between the sexes, “competitive fairness” and “safety” look different for the female category as compared with the male category. Consequently, the only way to ensure equal sporting opportunities for girls and women is to keep transgender girls and women, or “biological males,” out of the female category.
Anti-transgender advocates in the broader “save women’s sports” movement frequently draw from these rationales, but also ignore the underlying deeply problematic and troubling considerations. On an ethical level, this approach undermines inclusive efforts and further stigmatizes transgender individuals. On a public health level, this reasoning deprives an exceptionally vulnerable population from enjoying the social, mental, and physical benefits from physical activity that should be enjoyed by all. And on a pragmatic level, these declarations overlook the minimal number of out transgender youth, of which even fewer participate in high school level sports.
Notably, of all the documented issues in and across women’s sports, there is no evidence demonstrating that transgender athletes, in any way, contribute to these inequalities.
Beyond parroting this tired transphobic logic, the majority opinion also points to other sports governing bodies, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, who have “drawn a biological line” to ensure safe and fair competition by banning transgender athletes. What Justice Kavanaugh omits, however, is that both organizations abruptly changed their policies following President Donald Trump’s Executive Order No. 14201, rather than in response to any scientific evidence or domination of transgender athletes (in response to a Senate hearing question about how many transgender athletes compete in the NCAA, NCAA President Charlie Baker infamously responded that of the more than 500,000 athletes competing, he knew of “only 10”).
While this ruling itself does not necessarily come as a surprise to those who have followed along with the US’ steady rollback of transgender rights, perhaps the most shocking element of the SCOTUS’ majority opinion is the brazen use of transphobic and misogynistic language in their ruling. “Biological males” and “biological females,” which are used 64 and 31 times respectively in Justice Kavanaugh’s 29-page majority opinion, are not rooted in medical terminology. Instead, these are terms that have become popularized and mobilized by anti-transgender advocates to reinforce a binary model of sex difference. This type of sex segregation is premised on patriarchal beliefs of male athletic superiority and female athletic inferiority, and has historically led to harmful body policing, racial discrimination, and erasure of intersex persons.
There is also reference to an “ongoing medical and scientific debate” surrounding whether transgender athletes maintain athletic and performative advantages after transitioning. What is absent from this brief discussion of science, however, is the concrete evidence that has shown the abundant health disparities experienced by the transgender community, particularly transgender youth. In 2024, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, compared with their cisgender counterparts, transgender youth are more likely to report violence, victimization, unstable housing, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Similarly, a 2024 study in Nature Human Behavior found that anti-transgender state laws, including transgender sport participation bans, directly increased incidents of suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth by as much as 72%.
The (mis)direction of attention to abstract ideas of “competitive fairness” and unsettled science also disregards the rampant incompliance of institutions with Title IX. In 2023, Florida State University (FSU) agreed to add women’s lacrosse as a varsity sport after threats of a sexual discrimination lawsuit from its women’s club lacrosse team. The threat came on the heels of an 18-month USA TODAY investigation, which revealed that the university was egregiously out of Title IX compliance. FSU was far from the exception, however, as the investigation exposed how hundreds of colleges and universities manipulated their roster numbers for women’s sports to create a mirage of compliance. These Title IX transgressions emerged under the backdrop of several systemic issues in women’s sports, such as the decline in the number of women coaches for women’s sports, consistent underfunding, disproportionate rates of harassment and abuse experienced by girls and women, and media underrepresentation. Notably, of all the documented issues in and across women’s sports, there is no evidence demonstrating that transgender athletes, in any way, contribute to these inequalities.
Despite these relevant considerations, and as Justice Sonia Sotomayer wrote in her dissent, “to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.”
In addition to the immediate impact on transgender athletes, this decision prompts questions around how girls’ and women’s sports will now be policed to “catch” athletes who do not fit within normative assumptions or understandings of female bodies. International sports governing organizations, such as World Athletics and the International Olympic Committee, have recently paired bans on transgender athlete participation with implementations of sex testing via chromosome tests, which has long been established as a fraught, unethical, and discriminatory practice.
The impacts on youth and high school sports are, and will be, more pronounced. Organizations at these levels lack the same resources and financial capacities, meaning that, for high school athletic associations, sex testing would most likely involve some type of genital or physical examination. While these might be conducted by medical personnel (though the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal is evidence that this does not guarantee safeguarding minors), depending on access or finances, these could also be conducted by coaches, other parents, or officials, which prompts further questions and justified concerns surrounding training, confidentiality, consent, and protections of minors. These practices not only impact transgender athletes, but all athletes, regardless of gender identity or, to borrow from Justice Kavanaugh, “biological sex.”
The ruling closes with a half-hearted remark that “no student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.” What the SCOTUS fails to recognize, however, is that their ruling is predicated on the misguided vilification of transgender athletes, with impacts that will continue to ostracize transgender people in sports and broader society.
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