Politics Desk

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed off on a 100% state tax on money any Californians receive from Trump’s $1.8-billion “anti-weaponization” fund for his political allies.

Newsom unveiled his proposal in May, after Trump’s Justice Department said it would create a fund to compensate Trump’s allies who claim they have “suffered weaponization and lawfare” under Biden’s Justice Department.

The settlement fund was criticized by politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who described it as a “slush fund to pay people who assault cops.”

The fund remains in legal limbo. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Virginia extended a court-ordered block on the plan, which critics warned could be used to pay pardoned Jan. 6 rioters.

Fast-tracked into law as part of Senate Bill 122, Newsom’s plan imposes “a tax on any settlement fund payment from the federal Anti-Weaponization Fund, or any subsequent fund, settlement, or agreement, as provided, at a rate of 100%,” according to the bill text. The tax applies to all tax years between 2026 and 2030.

Newsom signed the bill Tuesday. In a statement, his office said the tax is meant to ensure that, should Trump’s fund proceed, California recipients won’t “receive favorable state treatment on those payments.”

“We believe democracy is worth defending, the rule of law matters, and public dollars should support victims—not those who attacked the very institutions that protect our freedoms,” Newsom said in the statement.

University of Southern California law professor Ariel Jurow Kleiman, an expert on tax law and policy, said that while Newsom’s tax is a “novel legal strategy,” she believes there is “no categorical legal restriction” preventing California from implementing it.

States have a “wide degree of discretion” to design their tax systems — including how they define income — so long as they do not violate their constitutions, Jurow Kleiman said.

If a California resident wanted to challenge the tax in court, they would need to show they were harmed by it to have standing to sue, according to Jurow Kleiman. That would mean receiving a payment from Trump’s settlement fund and then paying the 100% California tax. Unless the settlement fund is established and distributes payments, that scenario is unlikely.

While there have been proposals to levy a 100% tax on income above certain thresholds — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2023 said he supports a 100% tax on income exceeding $1 billion — Jurow Kleiman said she is not aware of any governments that have adopted such a policy.

WASHINGTON — New Jersey Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. revealed Tuesday that he spent months away from Congress being treated for depression.

“It is physical, it is emotional, and until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be,” he said on the House floor.

Kean’s reappearance comes after he won an uncontested primary on June 2 and months since he last voted in the House.

“Today I stand before you healthier, stronger and excited to return to the work that I love,” Kean said.

A second-term lawmaker and scion of a New Jersey political family, Kean represents a battleground district that includes President Trump’s Bedminster golf club. He’s missed more than 100 votes in Congress this year and hadn’t been seen publicly in Washington or his district despite winning the Republican nomination to serve another term.

The mystery over Kean’s absence carries potential political implications, given the competitive district he represents and the Republican Party’s narrow control of the House. His office has said he is still running for reelection and is set to face Democratic nominee Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot, in New Jersey’s most high-profile contest in November.

Democrats have targeted the district as a prime pick-up opportunity, given that the seat has changed hands in the last two midterm elections. Kean won in 2022 by defeating Democrat Tom Malinowski, who had defeated Republican Leonard Lance in 2018.

Kean’s last vote was months ago

Kean last voted in the House on March 5, but his absence wasn’t explained.

In April, his social media account said he had been dealing with a personal medical issue and his doctors expected him to recover.

Kean’s absence has also complicated matters for House Republican leaders, who are struggling every day to pass bills with their razor-thin majority, 218-212. Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders repeatedly told reporters they were in touch with Kean, but said he would have to address the circumstances himself.

Trump has endorsed Kean’s reelection, without mentioning his absence.

Kean comes from a long line of public servants, stretching 250 years to the country’s founding when one of his ancestors became New Jersey’s first leader since independence.

His great-grandfather was a senator, his grandfather was a congressman and his father is the former two-term governor, Tom Kean Sr.

Catalini and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Federal agencies long regarded as pillars of nonpartisan stability are facing an identity crisis after the Supreme Court this week swept away nearly a century of precedent limiting presidential power.

The high court’s decision in Trump vs. Slaughter, allowing the president to remove members of historically independent agencies without cause, has sent shock waves through institutions that once believed their legal protections were secure. And it has raised concerns about the future credibility of agencies that serve crucial public functions, from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which protects investors, to the National Labor Relations Board, which safeguards the rights of private-sector workers.

Some experts question the ruling’s practical impact, noting that existing laws still require political balance on many agency boards. Presidents already wield significant influence over agency leadership. Still, most agree the decision could inject overt partisan politics into agencies that have traditionally resisted it, eroding public trust in their rules and judgment, chilling enforcement and kicking off a cycle of regulatory whiplash.

Already, President Trump has removed members of several independent regulatory bodies and appointed new leadership — including Brendan Carr as chair of the Federal Communications Commission — stoking fear among critics that these agencies are being used to advance the administration’s political priorities.

The ruling, Trump said, is the “greatest increase in presidential power in the last 100 years,” praising the decision as a necessary expansion of his authority.

Now, “the president can fire the principal officers heading these agencies at will,” said Gillian Metzger, a professor of administrative and constitutional law at Columbia University. “That will allow for dramatic swings in policy when administrations of different parties come into office, and seek to undo decisions and policies of prior administrations.”

The Slaughter decision overturned a 1935 ruling from the Supreme Court that found independent agencies — established and mandated by Congress, but housed under the executive — should have special removal protections, reflecting their hybrid roles between branches of government.

That ruling, Humphrey’s Executor vs. United States, found that Congress intended for members of independent bodies to be guarded against the winds of politics, providing long-term stability, professional consistency and nonpartisan expertise.

“Presidents will be more able to direct these agencies to implement particular policies and actions, and the independent decision-making and expertise-based decision-making that Congress intended these agencies to wield will be significantly undermined,” Metzger added. “That, it seems fair to say, is a real blow to the credibility of these entities as independent and expert regulators.”

In a separate opinion this week, the Supreme Court singled out the Federal Reserve as an exception to its otherwise sweeping rollback of protections for independent agencies.

But it leaves bodies like the SEC — created after the 1929 stock market crash to prevent market manipulation, enforce corporate transparency and maintain fair markets — vulnerable to accusations of political capture.

“The SEC has some Fed-like characteristics as a guardian of market confidence and financial stability, but it will not receive Fed-like protections under the two decisions released yesterday,” said George Georgiev, a law professor at the University of Miami and chair of the Investor Advisory Committee to the SEC.

“The practical consequences will depend on how aggressively future administrations use the removal power, and who is appointed to the Commission in the first place,” Georgiev added. “Yesterday’s decisions certainly upend how we think about independent agencies.”

John C. Coffee Jr., a leading authority on securities law at Columbia, said the decision will lead to “a loss of credibility for the SEC.”

“The lobbyists will redouble their attacks, and money will dominate good arguments in their approach,” Coffee said. “It is likely to become a much more politicized agency that has less interest in hiring independent professionals.”

“In such an environment, policy principles get ignored or shabbily distinguished, and marching orders come from the Executive Office Building,” he added.

Kristin Hickman, a distinguished professor and associate director of the Corporate Institute at University of Minnesota Law School, characterized public reaction to the ruling as “overblown.”

“Frankly, I don’t know if their function is going to be all that different,” Hickman said. “Statutorily, they still have to have members that are divided by party. Their statutory responsibilities don’t change. The president has always had the authority to change who serves as the chair of the agency upon coming into office.”

“On the one hand, doctrinally, Slaughter is a shift. You’re overruling a 90-year-old precedent,” she added. “On the other hand, it’s not clear to me that the everyday functioning of these agencies will change dramatically.”

Some of the agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board, have no statutory requirement for political balance — and could simply cease functioning under an administration opposed to labor law enforcement.

But other experts share Hickman’s skepticism that the ruling will fundamentally change agency operations.

A study published two years ago in the Cornell Law Review examined the true independence of congressionally mandated agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, FCC, SEC and others, and found that the independent agency design did not work particularly well, with presidents already exercising substantial control.

“By appointing the chair and general counsel, presidents had agenda setting power and some policy power. For agencies without independent litigation authority, the DOJ controlled legal arguments,” said Neal Devins, a professor of law and government at the College of William & Mary and an author of the study. “By the time presidents were able to have a majority of commissioners from their party — typically just over a year — presidents often called the shots.”

“Yesterday’s decisions certainly matter, as they give the president immediate direct control,” he added. “They are also significant symbolically. But the real story is taking presidential control from the shadows into a very public place.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will hear a 2nd Amendment challenge to the gun laws in Connecticut and Cook County, Ill., that ban most semiautomatic assault weapons.

Before leaving for the summer recess, the justices issued orders on new cases that will be heard in the fall. The new 2nd Amendment case figures to be a major test of what kinds of firearms and ammunition are off-limits to state or federal regulation.

The outcome will affect California and all the states led by Democrats that strictly regulate or prohibit semiautomatic rifles, such as the AR-15.

Gun-rights advocates say these are among the most common and popular weapons in the country, and they should not banned in some states.

In response, Connecticut state attorneys said only about 2% of Americans own assault weapons, and they rarely use them for self-defense.

Since 1989, California has prohibited the sale and possession of most semiautomatic rifles and pistols that can fire more than 10 shots before reloading. Nine other states led by Democrats have similar laws.

State lawmakers said these rapid-fire guns are not needed for self-defense but can be a weapon of mass murder. All of the blue-state bans could be struck down next year if the court’s conservatives rule in favor of the 2nd Amendment claim.

Gun-rights advocates say firearms in “common use” by law-abiding owners cannot be prohibited by the government.

Four of the court’s conservatives have said in past dissents they believe the state bans on assault weapons run afoul of the 2nd Amendment. They are Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

That suggests the fate of those state laws depends on Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Joining in support of the gun-rights challenge were the state attorneys for Montana, Idaho and 25 other Republican-led states.

They urged the court to prevent liberal judges and states led by Democrats from “rewriting the 2nd Amendment … to allow hostile jurisdictions to continue infringing on their citizens’ core constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

In 2016, California’s voters approved a ballot measure that makes possession of large-capacity magazines illegal. At least 10 states have similar laws, but they apply only to the manufacture and sale of large-capacity magazines.

Gun-rights advocates sued in San Diego, leading to nearly a decade of back-and-forth litigation. A federal judge struck down these restrictions under the 2nd Amendment, but the state appealed. They were eventually upheld by the 9th Circuit Court in an en banc ruling.

Meanwhile, the 7th Circuit Court in Chicago has upheld an Illinois law and the Cook County ordinance prohibiting semiautomatic rifles and pistols. Its opinion said rapid-fire guns do not differ significantly “from machine guns and military-grade weaponry,” which can be banned under the 2nd Amendment.

Before Tuesday, the justices had repeatedly refused to weigh in on whether the 2nd Amendment’s right to “keep and bear arms” includes the right to semiautomatic “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines.

Since 2015, the court has turned down gun-rights appeals from blue states like Illinois and Maryland over their bans on “assault weapons,” despite dissents from Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch.

As an appeals court judge in Washington, D.C., Kavanaugh voted to strike down the city’s ban on assault weapons.

Three years after John Roberts became chief justice, the court ruled for the first time in 2008 that the 2nd Amendment protected individual gun rights, not just state militias. But the 5-4 decision simply struck down a city’s ban on having a hand gun at home for self-defense.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller said the Constitution gives law-abiding persons a right to have weapons in “common use” for self-defense, but not “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Ever since, advocates for gun rights and gun control have been arguing over whether semiautomatic guns with large-capacity magazines can be regulated because they are uniquely dangerous or are protected because they are very common.

In the past two years, the Supreme Court has a mixed record on gun regulation.

Last year, the justices in a 6-3 decision struck down a federal regulation that banned “bump stocks,” which allow rapid-fire shooting with a semiautomatic rifle.

That regulation was adopted in the first Trump administration in response to the mass shooting at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas where a lone gunman fired as many as 1,000 shots from a hotel window.

The conservative majority ruled the bump stock devices did not fit the definition of a prohibited machine gun.

Earlier this year, however, the court in a 7-2 decision upheld a regulation prohibiting unregistered “ghost guns” that were made by parts kits.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to pull a measure from the Nov. 3 ballot that would have created a pathway to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

The council, on a unanimous vote, sent the draft ballot language to a committee for additional study after several councilmembers said it had not been properly vetted.

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez acknowledged that he had not done enough outreach on the proposal, and had received letters from members of the Black community voicing concerns.

“I grew up in South Central Los Angeles. The Black and Brown solidarity is deep to me, and means something to me, and I don’t want this to be something that gets pushed through that is seen as a negative, something negative for the city of Los Angeles,” he said.

Soto-Martínez said he would keep pursuing the proposal in a future election so that when it passes, the city can have a “big celebration.”

The noncitizen voting proposal was not the only one dropped by the council at the 11th hour.

In a separate vote, the council scrapped plans for a Nov. 3 ballot measure that would have given council members power over policy at the Los Angeles Police Department. The Board of Los Angeles Police Commissioners, whose members are appointed by the mayor, currently have that responsibility.

The council voted 8-6 to further study the ballot proposal after the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file members, threatened to sue the city, saying labor negotiators failed to meet and confer with them over the proposal.

The plan for expanding voting rights for noncitizens was unveiled by Soto-Martínez two months ago, It would have authorized the City Council to pass an ordinance allowing noncitizens to cast ballots in L.A. city and school board elections.

But many of the details had not yet been worked out, such as which groups would receive the franchise and whether Los Angeles County election officials would be capable of adopting such a system.

These questions were raised again Tuesday by Councilmember Traci Park, who voted “yes” on the proposal two weeks ago, but said this time that too much is still unknown about how it would work. She voiced fears about the city’s ability to protect noncitizen voters if federal immigration agents show up at polling places.

“My concern here is that if this goes to the ballot, the voters won’t really know what they’re voting for, because we don’t really know either,” she said. “These are things that should be figured out well in advance before we put anything in the charter at all.”

Councilmember John Lee held up a print-out of a warning on the San Francisco elections website. San Francisco allows noncitizens to vote in school board elections, and the website includes a notice stating: “Any information you provide to the Department of Elections, including your name and address, may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies, organizations, and individuals.”

“Given the experience of the only California city that currently allows noncitizen voting, it is not fear mongering to raise these concerns,” he said. “They are real issues that must be addressed before Los Angeles asks voters to approve a similar system.

Soto-Martínez said he viewed the warnings from Lee and Park as fear mongering, noting that immigrant rights groups were ready to move forward with his proposal.

“This country was created by people taking courage and pushing so that everyone can have the right to vote,” he said.

NEW YORK — The Trump administration on Tuesday said it would freeze federal funding for New York’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, a state agency responsible for investigating and prosecuting fraud in the safety-net government healthcare program.

In a letter sent to New York officials, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Thomas March Bell accused the state of not securing enough criminal indictments and said millions of dollars in funding would be suspended through at least Sept. 30.

The move is the second suspension of a state Medicaid fraud unit this year by the Republican Trump administration, and part of a barrage of anti-fraud actions it has aggressively promoted in the healthcare sector. They have included the creation of a new task force, targeted investigations, funding deferrals and demands for revalidation of healthcare providers that have touched all states but are focused largely on Democratic ones.

The pulled funding also comes after the administration admitted a glaring error in figures meant to help justify a fraud inquiry into New York’s Medicaid program this year, a mistake critics said revealed a Trumpian tendency to attack first and verify the facts later.

New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James, a Democrat, immediately vowed to fight Tuesday’s funding freeze.

“During my time as Attorney General, my office has recovered over $627 million for Medicaid and was recognized by this very administration for leading the nation in anti-fraud efforts,” she wrote. “We are considering all legal options to stop this outrageous action.”

Letter accuses New York of low performance compared to other states

Bell’s letter to James and New York Medicare Fraud Control Unit Director Amy Held argues that the unit is moving too slowly on cases and amassing too few indictments and convictions for wrongdoing in the Medicaid system. It notes that compared with four similarly sized units in other states, it secured the lowest number of criminal fraud convictions between 2023 and 2025.

The letter acknowledges that one reason the state has fewer criminal convictions than others is that it made a deliberate choice to focus on “high impact, complex fraud cases” rather than smaller-scale individual cases, but says that trade-off didn’t produce sufficient results.

“Enough is enough,” Bell wrote. “The New York MFCU has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of its MFCU grant award.”

Bell said in the letter that the funding suspension could be lifted before Sept. 30 if New York takes corrective action, “showing it has remediated concerns that formed the basis for this suspension.” He said if the state doesn’t fix the problems, the freeze will continue.

New York officials dispute the Trump administration’s claims

New York’s attorney general’s office said in a statement that it has “long been recognized as a national leader in effectively investigating and prosecuting Medicaid fraud schemes,” including by the Health and Human Services inspector general’s office. A 2025 report from the office notes that New York is one of four states that made up half the total civil recoveries in that year.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said most of the unit’s criminal convictions focus on company owners, executives and corporations that would return large amounts to Medicaid.

“This administration’s unprecedented attack on New York is another political distraction,” James said in a statement.

The funding cutoff follows a similar move in Hawaii. In early June, Bell told Hawaii officials that Medicaid fraud funding would be cut off there, saying that it had a three-year stretch without a Medicaid fraud indictment or conviction.

Joan Alker, executive director and co-founder of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, said there’s an irony in the federal government cutting off money intended for prosecuting fraud when its stated goal is to do just that.

“If you want to fight fraud, don’t take away money from states’ fraud control units,” she said. “I chalk this up to more political theater to distract voters from historic Medicaid cuts before the midterms.”

Move follows months of federal warnings and deferrals

For months, the Trump administration has contended that states — especially some Democratic-led ones — have been lax about fraud in social safety-net programs, including Medicaid.

It has demanded that at least five states, four of them governed by Democrats, share information about how they identify, prevent and address Medicaid fraud.

The federal government has also withheld some Medicaid funding from Minnesota and California over fraud concerns. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who was Kamala Harris’ 2024 running mate, accused President Trump of making cuts because of retribution.

The fraud-busting efforts have also targeted Medicare programs. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced a six-month moratorium on new enrollments for providers of hospice and home care nationally.

Swenson and Mulvihill write for the Associated Press. Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, N.J. AP writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.

Britain’s culture minister may challenge Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — presenting a potential speed bump to David Ellison’s plan to wrap up his $111-billion deal by September.

Earlier this month, Paramount secured the U.S. Justice Department’s blessing to buy the Warner assets, which include CNN, HBO, Cartoon Network, Animal Planet and the Warner Bros. film and TV studios in Burbank.

Paramount also must win the approval of British and European regulators, who are known for drilling deeply into media matters because of their influence on society.

Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority took a preliminary step this month by opening an investigation into Ellison’s proposed merger.

On Tuesday, Lisa Nandy, Britain’s secretary of state for culture, media and sport, notified Parliament that she was inclined to intervene in the blockbuster deal.

In a written statement, Nandy cited her ability to weigh in on “public interest grounds,” due to concerns about maintaining a competitive media market in Britain.

“The UK’s move to intervene in the Paramount–WBD deal confirms what we’ve been saying for months. The real regulatory risk was never in the US — it’s in Europe,” Forrester VP Research Director Mike Proulx said Tuesday in a statement.

While Nandy cautioned she has not made “a final decision on intervention at this stage,” she has invited Paramount and Warner Bros. to respond to her concerns by Monday.

Lisa Nandy, Britain’s secretary of state for culture, media and sport, has said she may intervene in the deal on “public interest grounds.”

(Alishia Abodunde / Getty Images)

Paramount did not offer immediate comment.

The company owns CBS News, children’s channel Nickelodeon and Channel 5, one of the largest over-the-air television broadcasters in the United Kingdom.

Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, Cartoon Network and TNT Sports, which broadcasts the Olympics, Champions League and Premier League soccer matches.

“I am conscious that the proposed acquisition is global in nature,” Nandy wrote in her statement. “In reaching this decision, my focus has been, and will remain, on the UK public interest and the range of services available to UK audiences, including Channel 5, TNT Sports, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and CNN International, as well as Paramount+ and HBO Max.”

If Nandy decides to intervene, the Office of Communications, known as Ofcom, would launch an assessment of the deal. Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority also would determine how the merger might reshape the competitive landscape.

Teams from the two companies have been huddling for months to plan for the melding of the two operations as soon as Paramount receives all of its regulatory approvals.

Australia, New Zealand, China, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Serbia, France and Italy have already given their approvals to the deal.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is planning to contribute $10 billion to help the billionaire Ellison family pull off the merger, which would make the Saudi royal family a significant, although passive, equity owner. In addition, the royal families of Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to each contribute $7 billion in equity financing.

The Federal Communications Commission must evaluate the foreign ownership stakes due to Paramount’s holding of CBS broadcast licenses. U.S. antitrust regulators already have concluded the combination would not violate federal anticompetition laws.

Approval had been expected because President Trump — who has friendly ties with Ellison and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison — favors the deal.

Trump has been eager for changes at CNN.

The U.S. government stopped short of asking Paramount to make concessions or divestitures. Many expect that Paramount may have to reconfigure its children’s television holdings abroad due to the proposed combination of two large players — Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.

Nandy suggested that Britain also should scrutinize the impact of combining two major streaming services, HBO Max, a Warner property, with Paramount+.

HBO programming, including “Game of Thrones,” “Boardwalk Empire” and “Succession,” has long been popular in Britain.

A coalition of state attorneys general, led by California‘s Rob Bonta, also is expected to challenge the deal, in part, due to concerns about news media consolidation. Bonta’s office has said the matter remains under review.

Opposition to the deal has been building in the U.S. for months. A group of Hollywood activists — led by actors Jane Fonda and Mark Ruffalo — have spearheaded a “block the merger” campaign that now has support from more than 5,000 entertainment workers.

The group’s open letter calls on Bonta to take action to thwart the Ellison expansion effort. Paramount’s Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim has blasted the campaign, calling it “fear-mongering” and a partisan distortion of antitrust law.

Forrester’s Proulx noted differences in attitudes toward the deal among the various constituencies.

“For U.S. consumers, this merger has become a proxy fight about political influence and control of media,” Proulx said. “In the UK, it’s being treated as a structural competition issue where regulators, not consumers, will decide how this deal plays out and how long it takes.”

ATLANTA — President Trump has tried many ways to tighten his grip on U.S. elections, from signing executive orders to pushing restrictive legislation in Congress. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling siding with states that accept late-arriving mail ballots was the latest example showing the limits of his reach.

It followed back-to-back rulings last week that barred his two sweeping executive orders seeking to change national election rules, more court rulings preventing his Department of Justice from obtaining detailed state voter data and his stalled attempts to get the Senate to pass the SAVE Act. That measure would eliminate nearly all absentee voting, require citizenship documents to register to vote and impose photo identification requirements nationwide right before the midterm elections.

“It’s been a mixed bag for Republicans,” said University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller. But the president, he added, “has come up mostly empty-handed.”

Trump’s efforts have not been entirely fruitless. Republican-run states have satisfied his demands to redraw congressional district lines, efforts buoyed by the Supreme Court striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, and he has been directing his Department of Justice to investigate voting and election operations, which Democrats see as a possible prelude to their involvement in November.

All the activity around how the nation votes and runs its elections is a reflection of the Republican president’s long fixation on his false claim that his 2020 election defeat was rigged. He has been so frustrated by the inability of the Senate to pass the SAVE Act that he has refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill.

He weighed in again Monday after the Supreme Court’s decision in the mail ballot deadline case, saying on his social media account that he is trying to “save America from crooked elections.” Voting rights groups and Democrats see him abusing power and attempting to suppress legal voters to gain an advantage in the midterms, when control of Congress is at stake.

Regardless, Muller said Trump faces legal and political realities: The Constitution gives the states and Congress authority over elections while providing no such role for the president.

“That’s how federalism works,” Muller said.

Here’s a look at Trump’s efforts to reshape election rules and what options he might have left for the November midterms.

Focus on noncitizens and voter data has met roadblocks

The president has repeatedly said U.S. elections are riddled with fraud in part because of noncitizen voting. Research shows the problem to be rare, accounting for a minuscule percentage of fraud cases. Convictions are measured in the hundreds over periods in which tens of millions of ballots are cast.

Trump’s view resulted in a multiagency push to nationalize voter data and use federal resources to help states remove voters from the rolls. The Department of Justice has sought detailed voter files from multiple states, data that would include dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. Democratic and some Republican secretaries of state balked, and federal lawsuits followed. The administration has lost every case so far.

Homeland Security citizenship check rejected in court

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, with help from the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk, revamped a government tool called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). The program has been a key pillar of his efforts to cull potentially ineligible voters from state rolls.

Last week, a federal judge blocked its use as a mass citizenship check.

The administration, according to its own news releases, had allowed local election administrators to search users by the thousands, using a wider range of metrics rather than DHS-issued identification numbers. At least 67 million registrations, primarily in Republican-controlled states, were analyzed. Tens of thousands were flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died, but some voters were wrongly identified as ineligible.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled that Trump’s changes aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from the rolls.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan said in her order.

Executive orders used in place of legislation

As presidents before him, Trump signed executive orders when Congress would not enact his policy preferences.

Trump’s first order reflected his emphasis on noncitizens. Like the SAVE Act pending on Capitol Hill, it sought to require would-be voters to document their citizenship to be able to register to vote.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper put a temporary block on the order last year as she considered the case and last week made her decision permanent. The Constitution, Casper wrote, “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”

Trump issued a second order in March, as the SAVE Act’s rough path in Congress became obvious. He called for a national voter list using data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration. Further, the order would have empowered the U.S. Postal Service to determine who gets an absentee ballot and threatened local elections officials with prosecution.

Absentee voting is a staple of U.S. elections, but Trump describes the practice, incorrectly, as allowing fraud — even as he has used it himself. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution found that mail voting fraud occurred in only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast.

Democratic secretaries of state sued, and U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani made the same legal assessment as Casper. The provisions, she wrote last week, “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.”

The White House has indicated it will appeal.

Even Trump says the SAVE Act has long odds

Trump on Monday called the Senate logjam “crazy” and one of the holdouts, Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, “Trump-deranged.”

It’s the latest legislative tussle that prompted Trump to demand Republicans scrap the filibuster, which requires most major legislation to get support from 60 of the 100 senators. But that likely wouldn’t matter in this case, with four of the Senate’s 53 Republicans declaring their opposition to the bill itself: Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

The president acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is “probably not going to happen.”

Trump still has options for the November elections

Both major parties have national operations to monitor elections, including legal teams ready to file challenges.

Despite the Republican National Committee losing the mail ballot case, Chairman Joe Gruters on Monday alluded to those efforts: “We are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day,” he said.

Meanwhile, Trump has been developing a possible roadmap for more aggressive actions.

His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said in June that he had opened multiple election fraud investigations, and he sent a prosecutor to the county’s vote-tabulation center after California’s June primary. Six months earlier, FBI agents executed a warrant and seized ballots and other records from the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.

Muller, the law professor, said local elections officials “already are having conversations about chain of custody disputes” for ballots as they are cast, collected, counted and stored.

He and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen noted that judicial warrants are required for the kinds of actions that happened in Fulton County. Muller predicted “the bar would be even higher” for any warrant the administration requests during a live election.

Hasen added that he’s working to educate judges around the country on the importance of chain of custody for ballots.

“Republicans believe him when he says the election is rigged. And then when Republicans try to change voting rules to tighten things up, that causes Democrats to also think that the election system is being rigged,” Hasen said. “So, if what he’s trying to achieve is undermine voters’ confidence in the election process, he seems to have succeeded spectacularly.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — He’s a prize-winning presidential historian who wrote an entire biography of Thomas Jefferson. But even Jon Meacham needs to think for a moment before defining what it means to be a “Jeffersonian.”

“Well for a long time, before the civil rights movement, it meant to be more inclined toward states’ rights and limited government,” says Meacham, the National Constitution Center’s Semiquincentennial Scholar. He then pauses, and asks to start over, recalling how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt evoked Jefferson as an “apostle of liberty” who would have supported the U.S. fighting the Nazis in World War II.

You could define it in so many ways. Historians may argue over the “greatness” of individual founders, but as the country’s 250th anniversary approaches many agree that no one’s life and work resonates like Jefferson’s. He embodied the “very best and the very worst” of the United States, Meacham says.

And a great deal in between.

America’s birth is rooted in his most profound contradiction — the man who proclaimed that “all men are created equal” while being a slaveholder to the end of his life. But Jefferson advanced and explored both sides of so many issues and world views that have defined the country’s path: agrarian self-sufficiency and worldly innovation, pluralism and separatism, limited government and dreams of an “empire of liberty.”

“There is no more malleable figure in early America than Jefferson,” says Andrew Burstein, a professor of history at Louisiana State University who has summed up Jefferson’s legacy in a book he published a decade ago: “Democracy’s Muse: How Thomas Jefferson became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead.”

“There have been times in American history when just about everyone would have considered themselves ‘Jeffersonian,’” says historian Peter S. Onuf, author of numerous works on Jefferson. “Yet even at those moments, he was a controversial figure.”

It’s an argument without end

Jefferson’s legacy is debated even in settings that owe their existence to him.

On the campus of the University of Virginia, the college he founded and regarded as a signature achievement, stands a memorial to thousands of enslaved people who lived and worked there.

At Monticello, the mountaintop estate and plantation outside of Charlottesville where Jefferson lived when not in public office, a banner near the entrance features the Declaration and the caption, “After all, our guy wrote it.” But once on the grounds, reminders of his enslavement of hundreds are found throughout, from its “Burial Ground for Enslaved People” that includes dozens of graves to an exhibit dedicated to Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson is widely believed to have had six children.

Monticello’s director of historic interpretation and audience engagement, Brandon Dillard, cites the staff’s mission “to tell unflinching stories of America’s complex origins and fitful progress toward the ideals Jefferson articulated in the Declaration of Independence.”

Jefferson regarded Monticello as a refuge from the times, but the times inevitably find their way here. A guide on the gardens and grounds tour points out that a foldable plant Jefferson tried and failed to grow — the “Mimosa Pudica,” or “sensitive plant” — now thrives because of climate change. The visitors’ center is LEED Gold-certified for green energy, Dillard says, and geothermal systems have been installed in other buildings for temperature control.

Monticello raises questions old and new about race. Virtually all of the guides are white, an issue Dillard notes is prevalent nationwide. A recent survey released by the American Association for State and Local History found that around just 10% of workers at museums, historic sites and historical societies were nonwhite and that many “Latino/a/x, and multiracial respondents reported higher rates of discrimination and harassment.” (Dillard declined to answer in detail the experience of guides of color at Monticello.)

There is a Jefferson for every occasion

Jefferson’s contradictions date back through much of American history; he was claimed by both sides of the Civil War and both sides of the civil rights movement.

Nineteenth-century Confederates and 20th-century segregationists cited his defense of states’ rights, while Abraham Lincoln and civil rights leaders emphasized Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence. In the space of a few months in 1963, he would be invoked in the inaugural speech of Alabama Gov. George Wallace as he vowed defiance of federal efforts to integrate the state’s schools and by the Rev. Martin Luther King as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.

Roosevelt enlisted Jefferson as an ideological ally for the New Deal (the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., began as a New Deal project) and a former New Dealer-turned conservative, President Reagan, held up Jefferson decades later as a foe of wasteful spending. Jefferson has been cited often by free-speech advocates for his crucial support for the Bill of Rights, while President Trump has quoted Jefferson’s 1807 lament that “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper” as an implicit endorsement of his modern war against “fake news.”

Jefferson has also been placed on either side of today’s divide over immigration. Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” cites his well-documented belief in colonization for Black people as inspiration for contemporary scapegoating and xenophobia. Meanwhile, at a time when the Trump administration is aggressively trying to restrict immigration and even denaturalize some citizens, Monticello continues its decades-old July 4 naturalization ceremonies, with Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger scheduled as this year’s keynote speaker.

“As new citizens share their personal stories every Fourth of July,” Dillard says, “we are reminded that the values uplifted in that Declaration are values toward which people from all backgrounds aspire.”

Many Monticello visitors, many reasons to visit

Monticello attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. They come for many reasons.

Erin Porter is a Virginia native in her 40s who until recently had never been to Monticello and wanted to cross it off her bucket list, while Nathan Jaycox of Connecticut is a former nuclear engineer now seeking to absorb history for a class he hopes to teach. Duane Cromwell, a longtime resident of Vancouver, was here on a very personal mission.

Cromwell, 70, grew up in Greenville, S.C., where she was taught that slavery was “an economic necessity” and learned nothing about Jefferson’s history of enslavement. In town last month for a family reunion, she arrived at Monticello anxious to get past the “whitewashed Southern version” and the myths of evil “yankees” and the victimized rebels who defied them.

“Did you (ever) notice kudzu growing up over trees and buildings while in the South? It is an invasive plant brought to the region to control erosion. Well, it is like racism. It is pervasive, part of the horizon, always there but soon you don’t notice it,” she says.

“Having said that, I do think that people do go along better, there is more interactions, relationships than when I was growing up. Everyone needs each other and in the South, there is a great sense of humor and friendliness that help people navigate the awkward moments.”

For Cromwell, Monticello was a chance to educate herself, to become a better person — and, like countless others before her, using Thomas Jefferson as a prism.

“Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Watergate-era limits on how much political parties can spend in a coordinated campaign with their candidates.

By a 6-3 vote, the court said the restrictions on parties and their campaign ads violate the 1st Amendment.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the court was restoring broad free speech protections for parties and their candidates.

“For nearly 200 years after the ratification of the 1st Amendment, parties could spend freely to support their candidates during campaigns and could do so in coordination with the candidates,” he wrote. “Notably, no one suggests ‘that these elections were not functional or that they were marred by corruption’.”

The decision is a victory for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and is likely to give a boost to Republicans this year in their bid to maintain control of Congress.

That’s because the national Republican committees that support their Congressional candidates have $230 million available to spend this year, while the struggling Democratic committees have less than $120 million.

The party funding limits were challenged in 2022 in a lawsuit filed by JD Vance, who was then running in Ohio for a Senate seat, along with the Republican party committees.

Republicans argued these restrictions on parties were outdated and unwise in an era when “SuperPACs” can raise and spend huge amounts of money to promote candidates because they are independent.

If so, they asked, why shouldn’t the parties be free to raise money and coordinate their campaign ads with the candidates?

Under the current limits, the Federal Election Commission says an individual donor may give only $3,500 to a candidate seeking a federal office, but $132,900 to the national party committees.

Since the 1970s, however, federal election law has limited the parties from funding the campaigns of their candidates on the grounds that it could allow wealthy donors to buy influence.

But the court’s conservatives have repeatedly ruled that campaign money is protected as free speech under the 1st Amendment.

In the Citizens United case of 2010, they struck down the laws that restricted election spending by individuals, companies, unions and other groups.

Left standing were the rather low limits on direct contributions to candidates as well as the limits on how much parties could contribute to directly support candidates.

The limitations on parties and how they support their candidates have been disputed for decades.

The Supreme Court upheld the limits by a 5-4 vote in 2001 and said these “coordinated expenditures” were more like contributions than independent spending, and therefore, could be limited to protect against corruption.

Two years ago, the Biden administration defended the law, and an appeals court upheld it based on the court’s 2001 decision.

But last year, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the new challenge in National Republican Senatorial Committee vs. FEC.

Rather than defend the law, the Trump administration sided with the GOP and said the party limits should be struck down.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan looked back to the history of the Watergate era.

“For over half a century, a federal statute has guarded against actual and apparent quid pro quo corruption in our political system by limiting the amount of money a donor can contribute to a candidate,” she said. “The law’s theory is simple: A candidate may be induced to trade official acts for campaign contributions—and the bigger the contribution, the stronger both the candidate’s temptation and the public’s suspicion.

“But today, the court rewrites the rules, to allow circumvention of the contribution limits … and ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.

The Democratic National Committee and attorney Marc Elias had stepped in to defend the limits.

He said the parties are free to speak in favor of their candidates but he argued that allowing them to “subsidize the campaign expenses of their candidates” is a contribution that can be regulated.

Otherwise, the “potential for actual or apparent corruption is is obvious,” he said.

The ruling is another election-year boost for the GOP.

Last month, the court’s conservatives ruled the Voting Rights Act did not prevent Republican-controlled states in the South from redrawing congressional districts that favored Black Democrats.

New maps in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida are expected to flip several seats in favor of the GOP.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the Constitution’s promise that all those born here are citizens of the United States, regardless of the status of their parents.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices rejected President Trump’s plan to revise the Constitution by executive order and to end citizenship at birth for newborns whose parents were here illegally or temporarily.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts spoke for the court to reject Trump’s proposed limits on birthright citizenship.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” he said. “The Framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined in full. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh concurred in the outcome based on the federal law that incorporates birthright citizenship.

But the outcome was closer than most had predicted.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented in agreement with Trump.

The decision is the second major defeat for Trump from a conservative court that usually supports broad presidential power.

In February, the court struck down Trump’s sweeping worldwide tariffs, his signature economic policy. Roberts said Congress, not the president, has the power to raise revenue and impose taxes, including duties on imports.

In April, Trump came to the court to hear the arguments over birthright citizenship. He sat in the gallery while the justices posed steadily skeptical questions to his solicitor general.

He left after an hour having heard enough to know he was likely to lose.

It was the rare Supreme Court case which was decided based simply on the words of the Constitution.

The justices, both conservative and liberal, say they look to what the Constitution says and how its words were originally understood.

The 14th Amendment adopted in 1868 says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside.”

The amendment overturned the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which declared that Black persons could not become U.S. citizens.

In its place, the Reconstruction Congress adopted the broad view of citizenship based on the place of birth, not parentage, that had been part of English law for centuries.

In the 19th Century, it was understood that the only exceptions to this rule of birthright citizenship were for the children of foreign diplomats, foreign troops on American soil or, for a time, Native Americans who lived on tribal reservations.

In 1924, Congress extended full citizenship to all Native Americans who were born in this country.

The Supreme Court had also confirmed the broad understanding of birthright citizenship in 1898. The justices upheld the U.S. citizenship of Wong Kim Ark who born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who later returned to China.

“The 14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory,” the court said then. “In clear words and in manifest intent, [it] includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color.”

Congress added birthright citizenship to the immigration laws in 1952.

But in his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order to revise the citizenship laws.

“The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift,” he wrote, and in the future, it will not extend to newborns whose parents are in this country unlawfully or temporarily, such as on tourist, student or work visa, he said.

His proposal was quickly blocked by judges as unconstitutional, and it never went into effect.

In his appeal, Trump’s attorney argued that judges have been “misreading” the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction.”
He said this refers to “political allegiance.”

By that standard, the children of temporary visitors and unlawful immigrants are not citizens because they and their parents “not completely subject to the United States’ political jurisdiction,” according to the administration.

Trump could have proposed legislation on tariffs and birthright citizenship and urged the Republican-led Congress to adopt new laws. Instead, he chose to try to change the law and revise the Constitution by executive order.

Before the Supreme Court, Trump’s attorney pointed to the surge of illegal immigration in recent decades.

“We’re in a new world now,” he said, one that calls for new restrictions on citizenship.

“It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution,” responded Roberts.

DETROIT — Jerry Esters proudly displays the American flag each day on his Detroit home. A few miles away, Yvonne Pistochini says there is no scenario under which she would allow the Stars and Stripes to cast its shadow where she lives.

Both are Black.

For Esters, the flag represents the opportunities that allowed the great-great-grandson of slaves to find success and flourish. Pistochini, 79, simply says the America identified by the flag is not the same country she saw growing up.

Americans’ views of “Old Glory” are divided by politics, age and race, according to a new survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration.

Republicans and older, white adults are especially likely to say they fly the American flag, while younger Democrats and Black adults are more likely to say they don’t fly it. Views of the flag — and whether it’s a unifying or divisive symbol — track with other deep divisions among Americans, who see their country’s history and accomplishments very differently.

“A lot of Black Americans see the flag as a symbol of both inclusion and exclusion,” said Matthew Delmont, professor of American history at Dartmouth College. “Black Americans, more so than white Americans, also understand the flag can be used to justify a version of patriotism that is rooted in exclusion, with the flag being used to say ‘you don’t belong here.’”

The survey of 2,596 adults was conducted April 16-20. It suggests that older white Americans, especially Republicans, are more likely to see the flag as unifying.

About half of U.S. adults said they display the flag at home throughout most of the year, or during holidays. About 7 in 10 Republicans and about 6 in 10 Americans ages 60 and older fly the flag at least during holidays.

About 6 in 10 Democrats and independents, on the other hand, say they “never” fly the U.S. flag. That includes the vast majority, 75%, of Democrats under 45.

Opportunities worth fighting for

Esters, a 64-year-old retired clay sculptor for a Detroit automaker, flies three American flags at his Sherwood Forest home on the city’s west side.

“When these homes were built, Black men like me, my mother and my family … we couldn’t even buy these homes,” he said. “To me, that’s one reason I fly the flag. We went through a lot to be able to own nice homes, and this is what we fought for.”

The other reason is Moriah Martin, Esters’ great-great-grandmother, who was born into slavery.

“I’m kind of living out her dreams — what I did for a living, having a business, having a nice home,” he said. “I think that’s the American way, but we got to fight for it and we, as Blacks, fought for it.”

He’s in the minority among Black adults, according to the survey, which found that only about 3 in 10 Black adults say they ever display the American flag, compared with about half of white and Hispanic adults.

Pistochini says current divisions over political leanings and perspectives, and inequality of opportunities for the poor and people of color are not what she believes the flag should stand for. People confuse flying it with being patriotic, she added.

“Just because you fly a flag doesn’t make you a patriot,” Pistochini said. “If there was patriotism, we would not have all this. We can’t look at (what’s going on) and say this is America.”

For country and freedom

Ben Gaskins, chair of political science at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, says the flag is an important symbol of patriotism for many Americans.

“It is those who are older people, who are white and people who are more conservative,” Gaskins said. “They take it as more central to their identity.”

Nancy Hansen, a 73-year-old retired Customs and Border Protection clerk in Culvertson, Montana, believes “you have to be for the country, no matter what” and that the flag means “freedom.”

“Freedom to live where we want to live, travel where we want to travel, raise our kids where we want to raise our kids,” said Hansen, who is white and identifies as Republican.

Each year around July 4, the American Legion posts flags outside businesses and homes in Culvertson, including Hansen’s home.

Linda and Greg Cunningham also equate the flag with freedom.

The white, conservative Pontiac, Michigan, couple are going all out this summer. The exterior of their home northwest of Detroit is awash in red, white and blue. The flag sits atop a flagpole just feet from their door.

“It’s no political thing, at all,” said Linda Cunningham, 63. “It’s our freedom. I love the American flag. I love the whole concept of it. I love America. I know there’s so much going on in the world, right now, and I know everyone has their own views, and I’m just sad that politics have to be brought into the flag.”

Flag as a ‘painful reminder’

Of those who took the survey, 47% see the flag as a “more unifying” symbol. About 16% call it a “more divisive” icon, while 36% say it’s neither divisive nor unifying.

Only 22% of Black adults see the flag as a unifying symbol, compared with 55% of white adults and 42% of Hispanic adults.

“It’s a painful symbol. It’s a reminder of what we could be and how it’s failed to live up to that for Black people, for Indigenous people and people of color,” said Allison Wiltz, a Black author and founder of Writers and Editors of Color.

Paul Walthour, 71, occasionally flies the flag outside his Minneapolis-area home on special occasions and some holidays. Walthour says that when he’s away from home and at his cabin, the flag goes up each morning and is taken down at the end of the day.

“This is antiquated, perhaps,” said Walthour, who is white and a retired advertising agency creative director. “I feel it’s a symbol that you’re proud to be an American.”

“Unfortunately, I kind of think it’s kind of a symbol of dividing more than uniting,” added Walthour, who identifies as a Democrat. “The people who fly it on the far right have one kind of feeling about it, and the people who fly it on the left have a different kind of feeling about it.”

The AP-NORC poll of 2,596 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Williams, Sanders and Parwani write for the Associated Press. Sanders and Parwani reported from Washington.

Reporting from Washington — Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s first appointee to the Supreme Court, is proving to be a different kind of conservative.

He is a libertarian who is quick to oppose unchecked government power, even in the hands of prosecutors or the police. And he is willing to go his own way and chart a course that does not always align with the traditional views on the right or the left.

In several of the term’s biggest cases, Gorsuch voted as expected. He joined the court’s conservatives, including Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, to reject legal challenges to partisan gerrymandering. The two Trump appointees voted in dissent to uphold the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

In the case of whether a giant cross on a Maryland highway violated the separation of church and state, Gorsuch took the most conservative position and said lawsuits filed by people who are “offended” but not actually harmed by such things should be tossed out.

But in the last month, he also wrote several broad and bold opinions — mostly in dissent — urging the court to revive the Constitution’s protections for individual liberty. He did so while taking the side of people not usually embraced by conservative justices, including a sex offender from Maryland, an Alabama man who was prosecuted twice for carrying a gun in his car, and two African American men from Texas who were sentenced to more than 50 years in prison for robbing gas stations.

Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, calls Gorsuch “a maverick conservative with a libertarian streak. It’s remarkable that he and Kavanaugh disagreed in 30% of the term’s cases. This shows they are quite different types of conservatives.”

Earlier this year, Gorsuch wrote an opinion clearing the way for long-haul truckers to sue their employers over substandard wages, and he wrote dissents in favor of an injured railroad worker who was battling the train line over the damages he won, and a disabled construction worker fighting the Social Security Administration over disability benefits.

“Walk for a moment in Michael Biestek’s shoes,” he wrote in a dissent in the construction worker’s case that was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and in part by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “As part of your application for disability benefits, you’ve proven that you suffer from serious health problems and can’t return to your old construction job. Like many cases, yours turns on whether a significant number of other jobs remain that someone of your age, education and experience, and with your physical limitations, could perform.”

At Biestek’s hearing, an expert testifying for the agency said there were 360,000 jobs nationwide that he could perform. “Where did those numbers come from?” Gorsuch asked. When pressed about the source of this data, the expert said it came from a confidential private survey. The agency examiner ruled this evidence was good enough to justify denying Biestek’s claim, and the high court agreed by a 6-3 vote. “Count me” with the lower-court judges who were skeptical, Gorsuch said.

His most important opinion of the term came in a case that was seen as an opening salvo in the war over the “administrative state.” Conservatives have sought to rein in federal regulators, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Liberals are just as determined to defend them. The battle was fought, oddly enough, in the case of Herman Gundy, a sex offender who served five years in prison in Maryland and then moved to New York in 2012.

There, he was charged with failing to register as a sex offender as required under a law adopted by Congress in 2006, two years after his crime. The law said the “attorney general shall have the authority” to decide whether to apply the registration rule to the more than 500,000 offenders like Gundy whose crimes predated it.

Sarah Baumgartel, a federal public defender in New York, appealed Gundy’s conviction, in part, for violating “the non-delegation doctrine.” This refers to the principle that Congress may not delegate its lawmaking power to the president or executive agencies. It’s a doctrine studied in law schools, but not since 1935 has the high court struck down a law on this basis.

But she thought the appeal might interest Gorsuch and other justices, even though it had lost in every lower court. “This has been considered a dead-letter doctrine by many people. But he has a libertarian streak and a greater skepticism about federal power,” she said.

Her instinct was right. The eight-member court heard the case in the first week of October, a week before Kavanaugh was confirmed. But on June 20, the court ruled against Gundy in a splintered 5-3 decision, with Gorsuch writing a 33-page dissent in Gundy vs. U.S.

“The Constitution promises that only the people’s elected representatives may adopt new federal laws restricting liberty,” Gorsuch wrote. “Yet the statute before us scrambles that design. It purports to endow the nation’s chief prosecutor with the power to write his own criminal code governing the lives of a half-million citizens. Yes, those affected are some of the least popular among us. But if a single executive branch official can write laws restricting the liberty of this group of persons, what does that mean for the next?”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with Gorsuch. Justice Samuel A. Alito said he would be willing to accept this argument in a future case. And with Kavanaugh on board, the conservatives would have a majority.

Gorsuch was also on the losing end of an effort to reject the “dual sovereigns” doctrine that allows both the federal government and a state to prosecute a person for essentially the same crime. This double prosecution seems, to some, to conflict with the 5th Amendment, which says: “No person shall … be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy for life and limb.”

The case began in 2015 when a police officer in Mobile, Ala., pulled over Terance Gamble for a damaged headlight and found a loaded handgun in his car. Gamble had an earlier robbery conviction and pleaded guilty to state charges for having a gun in his possession. Later, federal prosecutors also charged him as a felon with a gun, and he was given three more years in prison.

The Supreme Court rejected his double-jeopardy claim on June 17, over dissents by Gorsuch and Ginsburg. “A free society does not allow its government to try the same individual for the same crime until it’s happy with the result,” Gorsuch wrote in Gamble vs. United States. “Unfortunately, the court today endorses a colossal exception to this ancient rule against double jeopardy.… The separate sovereigns was wrong when it was invented, and it remains wrong today.”

But on June 24, Gorsuch spoke for a 5-4 majority to overturn about half of 50-year prison terms given to Maurice Davis and Andre Glover of Texas for robbing four gas stations. They were convicted of the robberies and for brandishing a gun and given long prison terms. They were given an extra 25 years under a 1986 law for conspiring to engage in conduct that, “by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force” will be used.

In United States vs. Davis, Gorsuch said this part of the law is so vaguely worded that no one can tell for sure what it means. “Vague statutes threaten to hand responsibility for defining crimes to relatively unaccountable police, prosecutors and judges, eroding the people’s ability to oversee the creation of the laws they are expected to abide,” said Gorsuch, who was joined by the court’s four liberals. In dissent, Kavanaugh called the ruling a “serious mistake” and said it could mean “many dangerous offenders … might walk out of prison early.”

Brandon Beck, a federal public defender in Lubbock, Texas, who appealed on behalf of Davis, said he tailored his argument to Gorsuch because he “is very concerned by the text and the separation of powers. … He is also very independent, and I have lot of respect for that.”

Progressive lawyers stress that Gorsuch is a reliable conservative on most issues. Brianne Gorod, counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center, said he “is like the justice he replaced — Justice Antonin Scalia — in more ways than one.”

Gorsuch’s record is exceptionally conservative, she said. But also like Scalia, he has sometimes demonstrated a willingness to part ways with his fellow conservatives in criminal justice cases. “Those votes suggest possible libertarian-liberal alliances may be something to look out for in the terms ahead,” Gorod said.

A Colorado native, Gorsuch has also tilted the court in favor of Native Americans and tribal treaties. In March, he cast the fifth vote with the liberals to rule for the Yakama tribe, which relied on a 1855 treaty in refusing to pay a fuel tax to Washington state for using its highways.

Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion in Washington State vs. Cougar Den, joined by Ginsburg, to explain the history and closed with this passage: “Really, this case just tells an old and familiar story. The state of Washington includes millions of acres that the Yakamas ceded to the United States under pressure. In return, the government supplied a handful of modest promises. The state is now dissatisfied with the consequences of one of those promises. It is a new day, and now it wants more. But today and to its credit, the court holds the parties to the terms of their deal. It is the least we can do.”

For the next five years, the Environmental Protection Agency has indicated it will not require public water utilities to test for microplastics or pharmaceuticals in drinking water, according to a proposed rule published in the Federal Register.

On Friday, the EPA submitted a list of chemicals it plans to test for under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a mandatory testing program used to collect information about concerning chemicals in drinking water that could be harming human health. It did not include microplastics or pharmaceuticals.

The omissions come after announcements by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin earlier this year that his agency was designating microplastics and pharmaceuticals priority contaminants for testing.

“This is a direct response to the concern of millions of Americans who have long demanded answers about what they and their families are drinking every day,” he said at an April news conference with Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy at EPA headquarters.

Zeldin’s announcement was seen at the time as a move to placate the increasingly disgruntled Make America Healthy Again contingent of Trump supporters.

Now the agency says it has no validated or standardized method to test for the plastic particles in drinking water, and wouldn’t be able to develop one before December, when testing is required to begin.

Among the 33 chemicals the EPA will require water utilities to test for are seven PFAS, or forever chemicals, and three pesticide residues.

It will be five years before the EPA proposes another list.

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.

The agency noted in its proposed rule that it will collaborate with other federal agencies to “evaluate risks and exposures” of microplastics for future monitoring.

Environmentalists reacted with frustration and resignation. They pointed out that the European Union has developed methods to test for the tiny plastic particles, which have been found in people’s blood, brains and lung tissue. California has one in the works.

“The California water board has spent a lot of time and money on how to measure in drinking water,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and president of the anti-plastic environmental group Beyond Plastics “EPA should give them a call.”

California was required by a 2018 state law to establish a protocol for local water utilities to test for the particles in drinking water. The state has not yet begun reporting its results, but protocols were established in 2021. Blair Robertson, a spokesman for the State Water Resources Control Board, said it’s not “a fully validated, end-to-end regulatory method” yet.

At the April meeting, Zeldin announced that he would place microplastics on what is known as the Contaminant Candidate List, which acts as a preliminary “watch list” of unregulated, priority contaminants in drinking water. Like the mandatory monitoring list, it is updated only every five years. The most recent list was published on April 2 — the day he made his announcement.

“Americans have been ignored as they sound the alarm about plastics in their drinking water,” Zeldin said at the April announcement. “That ends today by placing microplastics on the contaminant candidate list for the first time ever. EPA will follow the science, will pursue answers and will hold ourselves to the highest standards to protect the health of Americans.”

There appears to be no clear association between these two lists, although the contaminant list is supposed to inform the monitoring list. Seventy-five chemicals and four chemical groups (microplastics, pharmaceuticals, PFAS chemicals, and disinfection byproducts) were listed on the 2026 contaminant list. Only seven of those chemicals were also on the proposed monitoring list (as well as seven PFAS chemicals).

When Zeldin announced microplastics as “‘a priority contaminant for regulation,’ and called it ‘a historic action on microplastics,’ he made it seem like the administration was going to take microplastics seriously,” said Mary Grant, water policy director for the environmental group Food & Water Watch.

“By not including them, they made it clear they don’t actually have plans to immediately address this crisis by getting the real-world monitoring data that we need right now to really start correcting ourselves,” she said.

Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council — the nation’s largest trade group for chemical companies — said that while his organization supports microplastic research, it also agrees with the EPA’s decision not to include them in the monitoring list.

“National drinking water monitoring should be based on validated, standardized methods that can produce reliable and comparable data,” said Davis in a statement. He said “limited” national monitoring resources should be focused where data can produce “actionable public health information.”

The public has 60 days to comment once the plan is published in the Federal Register.

WASHINGTON — To much of America, he may be Mr. Environment. But at home, Al Gore was just another scofflaw. Finally one of his kids urged: “Dad, turn off the water when you’re brushing your teeth!”

He denounces violent images in entertainment. Yet one of his favorite movies is “The Matrix,” a sci-fi film filled with blood and . . . gore.

A minor contradiction in each case, to be sure. But they are emblematic of the sort of duality that defines Albert Arnold Gore Jr.

Now, in his relentlessly combative bid to become the next president of the United States, Gore remains–after 23 years in public life–a study in contrasts, an enigma to friends and supporters.

“He’s just like everybody else,”insists Tipper Gore, the vice president’s wife of 29 years. “We all struggle with our idealism and our practical daily realities.”

Known for his high-wattage intellect, Gore also is working on becoming a better listener, especially with well-meaning advisors.

Few people have had to grapple with more competing demands–and his own demons–in so public a manner as the vice president.

Now the conflicts of his biography mirror the challenges of his campaign to succeed Bill Clinton.

A decade ago, Gore resolved to no longer “put a finger to the political winds” when facing tough choices. Yet when he embarked on this campaign, Gore assembled an organization top-heavy with pricey pollsters and controversial consultants.

As vice president, he has wielded more clout than any of his 44 predecessors. He is among the nation’s most cerebral politicians–an extraordinarily disciplined and competitive man on a never-ending quest for excellence. Yet he has an inexplicable tendency to embellish his resume.

‘It’s a Tightrope He’s Had to Walk’

He clings to President Clinton’s popular economic policies but distances himself from the White House on issues such as global trade and abortion funding, saying that he would do things differently–even while urging Congress to back Clinton’s agenda.

“It’s a tightrope that he’s had to walk all his life,” says a longtime Gore confidant.

But the vice president does not see his life as a high-wire balancing act.

“A tightrope has a lot of tension–you always worry about falling off one side or the other,” Gore said.

He has worried about the inconsistencies in his life before.

In his best-selling book, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” Gore acknowledged his own hypocrisy by riding in an air-conditioned car while en route to deliver a speech calling for a ban on the very chemicals that were keeping him cool.

He mused that such are “distractions and distortions that interfere with the task.”

The challenge of balancing competing imperatives was thrust upon Gore virtually from Day One, nearly 52 years ago.

He was born in a Washington hospital a mere dozen blocks from the White House. But his arrival was heralded on the front page of the Nashville Tennessean.

In Washington, Gore was the exquisitely mannered progeny of an influential congressman and then senator from Tennessee.

When he was growing up, the Gores lived in a hotel suite on Embassy Row that also served as a salon to the power elite. Young Gore often sat in as politicians and statesmen held forth.

“Al was raised in a political family and he had always been fascinated by politics,” said Tipper Gore.

At one of the city’s premier prep schools, St. Alban’s, Gore excelled in academics and sports–and served as a student leader.

Just Another Unruly, Fun-Loving Kid

But he lived for the glorious summers on the 225-acre family farm, about 50 miles east of Nashville.

His father invariably had a list of back-breaking farm chores for him, but when done, Gore was just another rambunctious, fun-loving kid. As a prank, he once hypnotized a flock of chickens and left them on a neighbor’s porch. At age 14, he drove so fast down a country lane that he overturned his father’s station wagon. To this day, he keeps his motorcycle license current.

Gore kept his two worlds distinctly apart from one another. For a brief time during his senior year in high school, he even had a girlfriend in each city. But Tipper won out.

Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson was a fun-loving, drum-playing teenager from across the Potomac River in suburban Virginia, an only child who grew up in a broken home. The attraction was immediate and mutual.

“I’ve always had two separate lives,” Gore recalled.

But when it came to which world he preferred, there was no contest.

”. . . If you’re a boy, and you have the choice between the eighth floor of a hotel and a big farm with horses, cows, canoes and a river, it was an easy choice . . . ,” he said.

For Gore, Washington felt like a “temporary assignment.” That he returned to it as a profession–and now aspires to its pinnacle–would not surprise those who knew him earlier.

At Harvard University, Gore participated in his share of anti-war demonstrations but steered clear when students took over the administration building.

Despite his opposition to the war, Gore joined the Army within two months of graduation. At Ft. Rucker in Alabama, a gung-ho Pfc. Gore was named post soldier of the month.

After five months as an Army journalist in Vietnam, Gore returned to civilian life–”probably as disillusioned as any person you have ever met,” he said.

By then his father had been defeated in a brutal reelection campaign. The assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were still fresh in Gore’s mind. The Watergate scandals were unfolding.

He viewed politics as “the last thing I would do with my life.”

Instead, Gore became a government watchdog–as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean.

In time, he started to see the good in public service–and discovered that at times he could influence the Nashville Metro Council’s debate by the degree of interest, or boredom, that he displayed. When council members saw Gore taking notes, they figured they were on to something. Conversely, some would drop an issue when the young reporter yawned or doodled in his note pad.

“I began to see things that I thought needed to be done,” Gore recalled. “And I began to think: If I got involved in that. . . .”

Gore Pounced on Father’s Old Post

That opportunity arose unexpectedly in 1976, when the local Democratic congressman announced his retirement. Gore leaped at the chance to run for the seat once held by his father.

Gore was so nervous that minutes before showing up for a news conference to declare his candidacy, he vomited. He was 28.

Twenty years later, while aboard Air Force II, the vice president self-effacingly reenacted his awkward campaign style as a political neophyte. “If you think I’m stiff now . . . !” he bellowed.

About the time he ran for Congress, Gore stopped smoking marijuana. Although he disclosed his pot use in 1988, during a short-lived bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, the issue resurfaced this year amid questions over the frequency of his pot smoking.

Gore told reporters in Iowa recently that it had been rare, adding: “When I was young, I did things young people do. When I grew up, I put away childish things.”

In the House, Gore was one of its hardest working members, returning to his district almost every weekend to hold town hall meetings–still a favored Gore setting.

On Capitol Hill, he served on an investigative subcommittee that held more public hearings than any other–from ozone depletion and genetic engineering to contaminated infant formula and toxic wastes. He quickly became among the most visible House members.

“Few there could match his ability to seize an issue, uncover a pattern of abuses, draw attention in the media and propose a solution,” said Congressional Quarterly, a journal that covers Congress.

In 1979, when the House opened its proceedings to television cameras, Gore was the first member to speak.

Five years later, he won his father’s old Senate seat, capturing more than 60% of the votes despite a Reagan landslide.

The Senate was something of a culture shock for Gore.

In the House, he had a group of basketball buddies. But even after more than seven years, Gore could claim few genuine friends in the Senate, where many had viewed him as a pedigreed upstart with aspirations for higher office.

“An automatic distance set in,” recalled Roy Neel, a top Gore aide for almost two decades in Congress and the White House.

Gore’s somewhat imperious demeanor also rubbed some the wrong way.

During a floor vote in the late 1980s, Gore was chatting with another Democrat when the colleague’s eyes strayed.

Gore snapped: “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

Shortly after a failed bid for his party’s presidential nomination in 1988, another life-changing event occurred.

Gore’s young son nearly died after being hit by an automobile. Albert III eventually recovered, but Gore emerged from the family crisis a more patient and introspective man.

“I changed all of my priorities to ensure that I was able to spend a lot more time with each child and with the family as a whole,” Gore recalled.

Gore also decided to not run for president in 1992. Yet when Bill Clinton asked, Gore did not hesitate to join what became the nation’s first baby boomer ticket.

His fortes–arms control, the environment, foreign policy–neatly complemented Clinton’s message of economic revival.

As vice president, Gore was involved in virtually every foreign policy decision, from the bombing of Iraq to the deployment of troops in Haiti and Somalia. In the domestic arena, Gore led the fight for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the V-chip and gun control. He also directed the effort to downsize the federal bureaucracy and develop “empowerment zones” that helped revitalize cities.

Gore said he has been surprised by “the intensity . . . and the bracing challenges” of working in the White House but added: “I’ve really enjoyed it. I love it. I love it.”

It was often Gore who clashed with congressional Republicans in budget disputes when Clinton sought compromises.

Gore’s willingness to mix it up suggests that his campaign mantra–”I want to fight for you!”–is no idle boast. That same brawler’s instinct got Gore ejected from a high school football game for fighting. After the 1992 election, Gore waged one bureaucratic fight after another to enhance his power and influence in the new administration–and even bested First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for a prime West Wing office just 18 paces from the Oval Office.

Another little-known Gore trait, which some aides have found more troubling, is his tendency to be aloof and intellectually arrogant.

“He’s so competitive. He has to be smarter, faster and better than you,” said one former top aide. “He has a disdain for people who aren’t as prepared or as smart. If you can’t keep up with him intellectually, he gets bored.”

This ex-staffer recalled an occasion when Gore slammed the phone down on her late one night when she did not have a piece of information that she regarded as trivial.

“Gore does have an edge,” Neel conceded. “He’s a man with a mission in life, and that can be off-putting. He’s just not a hail-fellow-well-met politician. So he’s often misunderstood . . . . I don’t think he’s always the smartest guy in the room, but often he’s the person in the room who has thought the most about an issue.”

Many aides also say that it is often difficult to give Gore advice.

A stark example occurred in March of 1997. Gore had come under criticism for his prodigious fund-raising efforts in 1995 and 1996, including having made numerous telephone solicitations from his office.

After those calls came to light, Gore held a strategy session in his office. White House lawyers told him that he had done nothing wrong, that there was “no controlling legal authority.”

“He latched on to that phrase,” recalled one aide present at the meeting.

Gore wanted to hold a news conference to defend himself. But the advice to Gore was all but unanimous: Don’t.

Gore not only ignored the advice but flatly rejected the suggestion by one top White House aide that he refrain from using the legalistic phrase.

The vice president turned on the aide (who was not an attorney) and all but snarled: “You’re not a lawyer, are you?”

Asked about the perception among insiders that he is a difficult man to advise, Gore replied after a long pause and a deep sigh:

“Well, if I was ever that way, I’m not now–because learning requires an appropriate appreciation for what you don’t know. If anybody ever felt that way, then I didn’t intend to make them feel that way.”

Aides say that one way to influence Gore–who many say is slow to trust hired hands–is by going through his wife and his eldest daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff.

Gore also responds readily to facts, aides and confidants say. “You’ve got to go through his head,” said one longtime Clinton-Gore advisor.

At his core, the vice president remains a private, even shy man, someone who seems more comfortable reading a book (or writing one) than mixing with strangers. On the road, the exercise-conscious Gore uses a treadmill in his hotel suite. He relaxes by painting–a hobby he developed in second grade. Until recently, he also has been refining ideas for two novels.

In an election cycle when voters yearn for authenticity and personalities seem to trump issues, one of Gore’s major vulnerabilities may be his tendency to distort his record by exaggerating, which baffles even friends and longtime aides.

“He makes mistakes when he’s tired,” ventured one close friend.

Among the many statements that Gore has had to retract or revise: that he created the Internet; that he and Tipper were the models for “Love Story”; that he saw more action in Vietnam than he did; that his work as an investigative reporter had sent people to jail.

Gore also has been ridiculed for shaking up his staff, moving his campaign headquarters from here to Nashville and adopting an earth-tone wardrobe–in short, for reinventing himself and his message.

As one exasperated Democratic senator put it: “One day he’s in his cowboy boots. The next day, he’s Eddie Bauer. The day after he’s Brooks Brothers. Which is the real Al Gore?”

The answer may well be: all of them.

Restless Drive to Improve Himself

For Gore’s restless drive to improve himself is his very essence–whether it’s devouring a book on how to connect with people or mastering the intricacies of ballistic missiles.

And trying to become a better candidate, in fact, may be consistent with the “intensive search for truths about myself and my life,” to use Gore’s words.

That journey–for a man who has described himself during this campaign as “someone who has a lot of imperfections and shortcomings”–seems likely to continue through Campaign 2000 and beyond–thus defying the simplistic portrayals of Gore as a stiff, wooden politician.

“I don’t know how you get around the end result of taking a complex, fragile, wonderful human being–no matter who it is–it’s very difficult to convey that this is a complex person with all kinds of experiences,” said Tipper Gore. “And what comes out is a stereotype . . . something one-dimensional.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile:

Albert Arnold Gore Jr.

* Born: March 31, 1948, to the late U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr. and Pauline Gore

* Residence: Washington, D.C.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in government, Harvard University, 1969. Attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School, 1971 to 1972. Law degree, Vanderbilt University, 1976.

* Career highlights: U.S. Army (including service in Vietnam), 1969 to 1971. Reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, 1973 to 1976. U.S. representative from Tennessee, 1977 to 1985. U.S. senator, 1985 to 1993. Vice president, 1993 to present. Wrote “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit” (1992).

* Family: Married 29 years to former Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson. Three daughters, one son.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed his final state budget as governor, a $351.7-billion spending plan that seeks to uplift the poorest Californians through a tax system reliant on the stock market gains of the wealthy.

In a video message, Newsom extolled free school meals, universal transitional kindergarten, 130,000 subsidized childcare slots and other accomplishments in his tenure at the state Capitol, a period in state history marked by a dramatic expansion of state government and over $100 billion in increased spending.

“Over the past eight years, we built great things for the people of California — some of the boldest actions any government in this country has taken in a generation,” Newsom said. “And we did this without breaking the bank. We did this by design.”

The agreement ends weeks of lobbying by outside interests and negotiations among lawmakers and the governor at the state Capitol about how to handle a surge of income tax collected on stock market gains related to artificial intelligence.

Economists have warned that the revenue bump is potentially temporary and analysts say the growth in state spending could leave California in a challenging position if the economy declines.

Assemblymember David Tangipa (R-Fresno) agreed with Democrats that the budget is “compassionate.”

“My fear is that it’s not too much of a competent budget, and the budget continues a pattern that Californians know all too well: Spend now, justify it later, and hope somebody else pays the bill,” he said during a floor debate Monday.

Here’s what you need to know about the spending plan, which takes effect July 1.

Who decides the state budget?

The simplest answer is: Democrats. California voters have elected Democrats to represent 30 of the 40 seats in the Senate and 60 seats of the 80 seats in the Assembly. The budget was passed through a majority vote in each house of the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat.

A more complex answer is that the budget is a product of dozens of legislative hearings, millions of dollars spent on lobbying by outside interests, talks among lawmakers and the governor and ultimately subject to the same political dynamics that rule the Democratic party.

Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón (D-Goleta) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister), in consultation with the chairs of the budget committees, represent their Democratic caucuses and reach a final agreement on the details of the spending plan with Newsom. In reality, staff members for the three parties handle most, if not all, of the back of forth negotiations to get there.

Union leaders seeking better pay, working conditions, benefits for workers and opportunities to expand their ranks are often brought in to consult or hammer out thorny deals as business groups try to fight off more regulations, taxes and costs, and support policies that increase their financial performance.

Democrats are spending more than ever before. How is that possible?

The Legislative Analyst’s Office, the nonpartisan fiscal advisor for lawmakers, recently examined the increase in state spending since 2019-20, Newsom’s first full year in office.

Between the budget approved that year and the spending proposal Newsom unveiled in January, spending from the state’s main operating fund had grown by over $100 billion, or 70%. That was largely by a 60% increase in revenue during that time. California typically operates with a spending deficit because Democrats spend more money than the state brings in.

The LAO found that the increase in spending stemmed from the growing cost of sustaining programs and services that were already in place when Newsom took office. About 30% of the remaining spending growth was categorized as new, either by newly created programs or the expansion of existing services.

Among the report’s conclusions: California could not afford the programs that predated Newsom and the ones he and the Legislature adopted.

To balance the budget over the last few years, Newsom and lawmakers have dipped into the state’s reserves at a time when California is experiencing strong revenue growth, which the LAO has cautioned against. Democrats have also increased taxes on businesses, paid for programs out of other funds and suspended reserve deposits among other solutions.

This year, the state budget places $6.4 billion in higher than expected revenue into a temporary holding account to knock down a deficit and balance the budget through 2027-28.

Democrats are pursuing a change to the state constitution on the November ballot that would allow them to set aside more money in years of good revenue growth to prevent cuts in future downturns.

Where is the money going?

Education and Medi-Cal are the two largest costs for the state.

Medi-Cal is the state’s version of subsidized health insurance for low-income Californians and provides medical, dental and vision care for an estimated 14.5 million people, or about one-third of the state population.

The federal government pays for more than half of the cost of the program. California is expected to spend about $50 billion from the general fund next year out of a total estimated at more than $220 billion in costs shared between the state and federal government, according to the LAO. State taxes and fees on providers also help fund Medi-Cal.

Overall, Medi-Cal costs more than any other state program and takes up about 40% of total spending, including federal funds the state receives, according to the LAO.

Spending on Medi-Cal has more than doubled over the last 10 years, which the LAO attributes to an increase in costs per enrollee, more enrollees and a greater share of seniors seeking care, among other factors.

Under Newsom, California has expanded Medi-Cal, including offering coverage to include all immigrants regardless of their immigration status, which the governor said has dropped the state’s uninsured rate down to 5.9%

The cost of Medi-Cal has grown beyond what Democrats expected and resulted in Newsom suggesting spending cuts.

The final budget agreement rejects a call by Newsom to lower the asset limit to $2,000 now and instead lowers it to $21,000 in 2027-28 to be eligible for Medi-Cal. The Legislature also delayed the governor’s proposal to reduce dental coverage and shift asylum seekers and other immigrants to restricted scope Medi-Cal, according to Jason Sisney, the lead budget advisor for the Assembly who posts about the budget on Substack.

The budget includes Newsom’s proposal to shift enrollees with unsatisfactory immigration status, a term that includes undocumented immigrants and others, from managed care to fee-for-service to save costs.

Under Proposition 98, approved by voters in 1988, California has a minimum funding guarantee for schools and community colleges and dedicates roughly 40% of general fund revenue to education.

Sisney said the budget increases the Local Control Funding Formula by $2.2 billion and provides historic general fund per pupil spending of $21,148. Support for special education also grew by $1.8 billion.

The California Community Schools Partnership Program received a $1-billion boost and Democrats directed $2.8 million in additional funding to the program that provides free meals for school children.

The budget also establishes 22,770 new slots for free or reduced childcare, which Newsom had proposed decreasing.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Monday turned down without comment President Trump’s appeal of a $5-million jury verdict for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan nearly 30 years ago.

None of the justices registered a dissent.

When Carroll reported the incident in a book, Trump called it “a hoax and a lie,” prompting her to file a second claim for defamation.

Trump and his lawyers argued he was unfairly held liable because the jurors heard from two other women who said Trump groped them. And they listened to Trump’s own words on his willingness to abuse women.

“When you’re a star … you can do anything,” Trump said on the “Access Hollywood” tape from 2005 that the jurors heard.

Trump defended those comments in a 2022 deposition that was used during the trial.

“Historically, that’s true with stars,” he said. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Unfortunately, or fortunately.”

Usually, a defendant’s prior bad acts are excluded from a jury trial.

But in 1994, Congress amended the federal rules of evidence to make an exception for civil suits involving alleged sexual abuse. Rule 415 says the judge “may admit evidence that the party committed any other sexual assault.”

In Trump’s case, the U.S. appeals court in New York said the rule “permits a jury to consider evidence of a different sexual assault precisely to show that a defendant has a pattern or propensity for committing sexual assault.”

Two women testified that Carroll had told them about the dressing room assault shortly after it happened. And two other women testified Trump had assaulted and groped them.

Carroll testified over three days at the trial. Trump did not attend and chose not to testify.

Trump posted on social media that he was surprised by the court’s refusal to act on his appeal.

“I will continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength. 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!”

The federal rules say judges may exclude “propensity evidence” if they decide its value is “substantially outweighed by a danger of … unfair prejudice, confusing the issues or misleading the jury.”

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, permitted the use of the propensity evidence, and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his decision in December 2024, shortly after Trump won election to a second term.

Lawyers for a Missouri law firm founded by Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed an appeal petition in November urging the court to review the case of Trump vs. Carroll and order a new trial.

They said Carroll’s claims were “facially implausible and politically motivated” and her trial “rested fundamentally on improper propensity evidence that courts ordinarily disavow.”

They devoted most of their appeal to arguing that the court should take up the case because judges are divided on when propensity evidence should be excluded.

But they also urged the court to intervene because they said Trump was being mistreated by the judges in New York.

“It is deeply damaging to the fabric of our Republic for President Trump, in the midst of a historic presidency, to have to take his focus away from his singular and unique duties as Chief Executive to continue fighting against decades-old, false allegations and the myriad wrongs throughout this baseless case,” they wrote.

Trump is also appealing a separate but related defamation verdict that ordered him to pay Carroll $83 million.

The embattled Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority sued the Trump administration on Monday to stop it from depriving the region of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, saying the effort is unwarranted and violates federal laws.

The authority, better known as LAHSA, said in its Monday filing that cutting off the funds would put more than 11,000 people — 1,900 of them children — at risk of losing housing or other services.

LAHSA, a joint city-county agency overseen by political appointees, is seeking a temporary restraining order to bar the federal Housing and Urban Development Department from suspending the funds.

“The people who will be harmed by this decision are not bureaucrats,” said Gita O’Neill, LAHSA’s interim chief executive officer, in a statement Monday. “They are families, veterans, seniors, and formerly homeless Angelenos who rely on these resources to remain housed.”

The filing in federal court comes nearly three weeks after HUD officials said they were suspending LAHSA from applying for or receiving federal funds, citing financial mismanagement, fraud and a lack of safeguards to prevent conflicts of interest.

In its 46-page lawsuit, LAHSA pushed back on HUD’s allegations, saying they were not supported by the evidence. Lawyers for LAHSA portrayed HUD’s actions as part of a larger political agenda — elimination of the federally approved “Continuum of Care” system, which makes LAHSA the overarching applicant for most federal homelessness funding across Los Angeles County.

The Trump administration “has made clear it wants to scrap the program entirely in favor of a homelessness policy favoring criminal enforcement, drug treatment, institutionalization and civil commitment of the mentally ill,” the lawsuit states.

HUD officials have said they are barring LAHSA from applying for funds on behalf of the Continuum of Care, which covers 85 cities, including Los Angeles. LAHSA secured $220 million in federal funds for various agencies in 2024 and $944 million since 2021, according to the June 11 letter from HUD Deputy Secretary Andrew D. Hughes.

HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the letter, Hughes said his agency had received information that LAHSA “may have committed violations of federal law” while carrying out its obligations as part of its HUD grant agreements.

“HUD has evidence that LAHSA’s repeated false statements and its irresponsible actions and failures, including its lack of financial management, internal controls, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, pose a threat to HUD, the public, and those living on the streets of Los Angeles,” he wrote.

In the letter, Hughes said that HUD’s inspector general had opened an investigation. Depending on the outcome, the money could be restored or LAHSA could be permanently barred from receiving funds.

LAHSA, in its lawsuit, said HUD has not provided any investigative findings to show violations of the funding agreements. Instead, agency lawyers said, federal officials relied on “a mash-up of old news articles, comments from public officials taken out of context, and findings from routine public audits that included recommendations that were all appropriately actioned.”

Lawyers for LAHSA contend that HUD’s actions violate the U.S. Constitution and override the dictates of Congress, which established many of the processes for distributing federal homeless funds.

The vast majority of the federal funds secured by LAHSA as a grant applicant goes toward permanent housing, agency officials said.

LAHSA, created in 1993, is overseen by a 10-member commission, half from the city and half from the county. Among those commissioners is L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who has made homelessness a central part of her agenda. Each of the five county supervisors has an appointee.

At stake in the battle between HUD and LAHSA is an array of services affecting some of the region’s most vulnerable residents.

LAHSA oversees the Homeless Management Information System, the federally-mandated software that tracks homeless people across the county. It has 8,000 individual users and is used by more than 300 agencies, according to the lawsuit.

HUD’s plan to suspend the funding would prevent LAHSA from using the system to match Angelenos — those on the street and in shelters — with housing and services, the lawsuit said.

LAHSA also oversees the annual “point in time” homelessness count across the county. Agency officials have pointed to the results from those counts as evidence that they have been making steady headway, with homelessness decreasing 4.3% countywide and 5.5% within Los Angeles between 2023 and 2025.

Unsheltered homelessness, which tallies the people living outside or in their vehicles, fell by a larger margin, declining 14% across the county and 17.5% within L.A. during that period.

Despite those numbers, LAHSA’s reputation has been battered by some highly critical assessments.

Last year, a global consulting firm retained as part of a federal lawsuit over the city of L.A.’s response to homelessness found that homeless services provided by LAHSA and the city lacked adequate financial controls, leaving the system vulnerable to waste and fraud.

Several months earlier, county auditors identified lax accounting procedures that resulted in LAHSA’s failure to pay its contractors on time. Even after that report was issued, nonprofit groups with LAHSA contracts continued to report that payments were behind schedule.

Last year, the county Board of Supervisors reached a breaking point, pulling more than $300 million — the vast majority of its funds — out of LAHSA and creating its own homelessness department. City officials have been weighing a similar move in recent months.

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement authorities are preparing for one of Washington’s largest and most complex security operations as the nation’s capital gears up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s freedom.

With rising political violence, including recent incidents near the White House, and a president who enjoys being at the center of public pomp yet has repeatedly faced attempts on his life, a major security challenge awaits.

“It comes as no surprise to you that D.C. on a normal day is a target-rich environment,” said Darren B. Cox assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office at a recent news conference detailing the security preparations. “We are prepared for any threats.”

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to visit Washington in the coming weeks for the festivities.

The throngs will be joined by thousands of law enforcement officers and agents and 5,000 National Guard troops, along with military-style vehicles and other hardware they don’t often see on the streets of America.

Authorities are preparing for a major security operation

The largest crowds are expected July 4, with multiple events happening simultaneously, including the Great American State Fair, a showcase for each state and a signature attraction of the celebrations that stretches across the National Mall.

The annual fireworks display that night is designated a National Security Special Event for the first time by the Department of Homeland Security, the highest classification for federal security coordination.

For visitors, that means strict ID requirements, long lines and magnetometers, similar to air travel security. Snipers are also expected to be deployed at some events.

Flights at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, which is across the Potomac River from Washington, will be suspended longer than in other years because of the scope of the celebrations — from noon on July 4 until the next day. Other America 250 events that include flyovers or parachute jumps could prompt more flight disruptions.

The FBI, Secret Service, U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Park Police and D.C. National Guard have all been involved in security coordination for the events. At the news conference earlier this month, equipment that could be deployed to guard the city was on display, including BearCat armored SWAT vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, as well as communication vans and FBI diving boats.

“Our protective model is meant to adjust to any type of direct or indirect threats that we come across,” said Tara McLeese, special agent in charge of the Secret Service Washington field office. “I can assure you that we have no lack of imagination as to the potential threats out there.”

Brig. Gen. Leland Blanchard II, interim commander of the D.C. National Guard, said the planning had been underway for months and included rehearsals.

Blanchard said the Guard members would continue the roles they have served the last 10 months as part of a deployment to the city President Trump says is meant to fight crime. Blanchard highlighted that guard members, including military police officers, would be helping with duties like traffic and crowd control as well as responding to emergencies around the events.

President Trump, who has already attended several events leading up to July 4, including the kickoff rally last week launching the Great American State Fair, has said on Truth Social that he would hold a rally on the National Mall.

Speaking at a news conference Monday updating the upcoming security preparations, Cox reiterated that “at this time we are not tracking any credible threats related to the July 4 event, but we always remain vigilant.”

Recent violence has shaped the threat picture

The festivities come at a fraught moment, with recent political violence creating a complex threat environment for authorities. One man, Cole Tomas Allen, has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president after he sprinted past security at the White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner in April. Allen has pleaded not guilty.

In the following weeks, two men on two separate occasions opened fired at Secret Service officers, the service said. Each incident happened in the vicinity of the White House.

More recently, the FBI announced it had thwarted a planned attack targeting Trump’s UFC cage-fighting show at the White House. Several suspects have been arrested in that case.

Security was already enhanced on the National Mall ahead of the launch of festivities, as Trump claimed without providing evidence that vandals had damaged the Reflecting Pool that he had recently renovated.

Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies extremism, said Trump posed a unique security challenge because he is “both an accelerant and a target of political violence.”

The nation’s bicentennial offers a historical parallel

Observers draw some parallels to the 1976 bicentennial. The nation was coming off Watergate and Vietnam, and 10 months before the celebration there were two assassination attempts against then-President Ford.

“There was a lot of sourness in the country in ’76, a lot of cynicism about the direction of the country,” Dallek said. But both Ford and his Democratic opponent Jimmy Carter understood the threat political divisions posed and “were looking to bring down the level of vitriol.”

Angelyn Spaulding Flowers, professor of Homeland Security & Administration of Justice at the University of the District of Columbia, said the amount of security was unparalleled for the city, citing the ongoing and open-ended National Guard presence that has flooded Washington with additional security patrols for months.

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Monday gave President Trump new power to fire the heads of most independent agencies created by Congress — but not the Federal Reserve.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced two opinions, one of which bolstered the president’s power as the chief executive and a second which said this authority did not extend to the Federal Reserve board.

The first was a 6-3 decision that had the support of five conservatives, while the second had a 5-4 majority that included the three liberals.

Roberts, a former White House lawyer, has long been skeptical of independent agencies whose officials may wield regulatory power in conflict with the views of the president.

Since the 1880s, however, Congress has at times created independent agencies led by a bipartisan board of experts. In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court had upheld these multi-member boards and commissions.

But Roberts and the court overturned that precedent and declared it conflicts with the executive power of the president.

“Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President,” he wrote. “To discharg[e] the duties of his trust, the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust. … 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.”

The decision upholds Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member Federal Trade Commission.

The Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic appointee to the Federal Trade Commission.

(Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the ruling “distorts the structure of government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control. The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.”

Under what has been dubbed the “unitary executive” theory, the court’s conservatives believe the president’s executive power in Article II of the Constitution overrides Congress’power in Article I to write the laws and structure the government.

The departments and agencies of the federal government exist only because Congress created them by law.

But in the second opinion, the court blocked Trump’s bid to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, an appointee of President Biden.

Roberts said the central bank dates back to the nation’s founding, and Congress created the Federal Reserve Board in line with “our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”

Trump tried to fire Lisa Cook in a social media post, he said.

But “the Federal Reserve’s Governors do not serve at the President’s pleasure — they instead serve staggered 14-year terms, and may be removed only ‘for cause’,” he wrote.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh cast a crucial vote to support the Fed’s independence. He said he joined the majority because it “confirms the longstanding historical practice and understanding that the Federal Reserve is an independent agency whose Governors enjoy for-cause removal protection consistent with Article II of the Constitution.”

The court did not finally decide on Cook’s case, except to say she deserved due process of law. She could not be fired without a hearing and evidence, the court said.

The setback for independent agencies came as no surprise, however.

Even prior to Trump’s election, Roberts has insisted agency officials must be accountable and under the control of the president.

Last year, the justices blocked lower court rulings that would have reinstated agency officials who were fired by Trump.

For most of American history, however, it had been understood that Congress had the power to structure the government and to create semi-independent agencies to carry out specific tasks like regulating railroad rates or the money supply.

These agencies and commissions were led by a bipartisan board of experts who were appointed with a fixed term. They could be fired only for cause, not because of a political disagreement with the president.

The Supreme Court upheld these multi-member commissions in 1935 on the grounds their work was more legislative and judicial than simply enforcing the law.

But the court’s current conservative majority has contended these commissions and boards wield executive authority and are therefore, subject to direct control by the president.

In creating such bodies, Congress often was responding to the problems of a new era.

The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to regulate railroad rates. The FTC, the focus of the court case, was created in 1914 to investigate corporate monopolies.

The year before, the Federal Reserve Board was established to supervise banks, prevent panics and regulate the money supply.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market and the National Labor Relations Board to resolve labor disputes.

Decades later, Congress focused on safety. The National Transportation Safety Board was created to investigate aviation accidents, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission investigates products that may pose a danger. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission protects the public from nuclear hazards.

Typically, Congress gave the appointees, a mix of Republicans and Democrats, a fixed term and said they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Slaughter was first appointed by Trump to a Democratic seat and was reappointed by Biden in 2023 for a seven-year term.

WASHINGTON — A conservative law professor known for his expansive views of presidential power and for decades-old memos that justified harsh interrogation techniques after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks says he will be advising a team of prosecutors investigating whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against President Donald Trump.

John Yoo confirmed in an email to the Associated Press on Monday that he would be assisting Joe diGenova, the former Justice Department prosecutor who was assigned in April to investigate whether officials, who over the last decade scrutinized Trump, participated in a criminal conspiracy against the Republican president.

“He’s a lawyer. He’s going to be helping us,” diGenova said in a brief telephone interview about Yoo. He did not elaborate.

A law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Yoo was a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who served as a lead author of the so-called “torture memos” that government officials used to justify using “enhanced interrogation” techniques on potential terror suspects. The Justice Department later rescinded the memos.

In the years since, he’s remained a prominent proponent of broad executive authority, telling the AP in a 2020 interview that he had told Trump administration officials multiple times that a Supreme Court ruling which rejected Trump’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, opened the door to enormous new presidential power.

The conspiracy investigation is being conducted in Florida, but the scope is unclear, as is whether any criminal charges will be brought.

Prosecutors have centered at least part of the probe on the long-concluded investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Investigators have issued a broad swath of subpoenas for records and conducted interviews related to the creation of an intelligence community assessment, released in January 2017, that found that Russia engaged in wide-ranging election interference to boost Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

A 2019 report by special counsel Robert Mueller affirmed that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf and that the Trump campaign repeatedly welcomed the assistance, but it did not find sufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the campaign.

Several subsequent investigations into the Russia probe have identified multiple errors into how it was conducted, and a former FBI lawyer pleaded guilty in 2020 to doctoring an email during the course of the inquiry. But none of the reviews have identified criminal misconduct by any senior law enforcement or intelligence official involved in the investigation.

Trump has nonetheless continued to demand retribution and has sought to punish top officials from that time at the FBI and CIA.

Asked in a Fox News Channel interview in May what the Justice Department had done to address claims of a long-running conspiracy to bring down Trump, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “That’s exactly what we’re investigating right now.”

Yoo’s involvement in the investigation was earlier reported by Politico and CNN.

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

California officials cheered a U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday that allows states to continue counting mail ballots postmarked by election day but received in the days after — calling it a win for voter participation and access, including in the upcoming November midterm.

They also acknowledged delays in recent vote counting have spurred frustration, and promised to speed the process through other solutions — including by investing millions into new election infrastructure and vote processing capabilities.

Gov. Gavin Newsom — who called the court ruling a “win for voters, plain and simple” — has previously said the state should be able to count ballots faster, and his latest budget includes $29 million for “increased staffing, technology and equipment upgrades and purchases for counties,” $10 million for voter education and outreach at the state and county levels and $750,000 for combating election misinformation.

The court decision, a loss for President Trump and other critics who contend such policies contribute to unacceptable delays in vote counting, specifically upheld a Mississippi policy to accept mail ballots received within five business days of an election.

But it also lets stand similar policies in other states — including California, which counts ballots postmarked by and received within seven days of an election.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who has long prioritized voter participation over a speedy count, called the high court’s ruling a “win for voters, for the rule of law, and for the future of our democracy.”

She said that she will “keep working to ensure every eligible Californian has the opportunity to be heard, because our democracy is strongest when every voice and vote count.”

Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, said in a statement to The Times that the ruling “affirms what Los Angeles County voters deserve: the assurance that a ballot cast by Election Day will be counted if received within the legal timeframe established in State Law.”

“Our office will continue to provide voter education, multilingual outreach, and leverage available resources to ensure voting access for our 5.8 million registered voters,” Logan said.

Many voting rights experts agree California’s vote counting should and could be faster, but disagree with the Trump administration’s efforts to step in with policies such as election day deadlines.

In 2024, California counted more than 406,000 late-arriving mail ballots, but they represented only about 2.5% of the statewide total. Experts say California’s delayed results have far more to do with the massive influx of mail ballots that are placed in ballot drop boxes or arrive at processing facilities on or just before election day.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said the court’s decision was a “symbolic loss” for Trump, in that the court rejected his preferred policy on mail ballots, but “doesn’t appreciably change how long it takes to count ballots” because late-arriving ballots were never the problem.

In a report published Thursday, the California Voter Foundation recommended statewide adoption of “sign, scan, and go” programs that allow elections officials to immediately process mail ballots that voters submit in person at polling centers or drop boxes.

The foundation recommended ballot curing programs that speed up the process by utilizing a secure text platform when double checking whether a ballot is legitimate when a voter’s signature doesn’t match state records.

It also urged the state to invest $35 million in a voter education campaign to encourage early ballot returns, and more than $55 million in improving counting capacity and efficiency in county elections facilities.

Trump and other conservatives had called for an end to state policies allowing late-arriving mail ballots to be counted as an overdue fix to a voting system that often can’t produce election results in close races for days after polls close, as was the case in California’s recent primary races for governor and L.A. mayor.

Trump has pointed to California’s time-consuming count as proof of widespread fraud to undermine Republican candidates, though he has never produced evidence to support that claim and Democrats have fiercely denied it.

On Monday, Trump called the high court’s decision to uphold such state policies a “tremendous loss,” and more reason to pass the Save America Act — a bill he has backed that would enforce new voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements and ban mail ballots except for military personnel, individuals suffering from illness, disability, and in other rare circumstances.

He said politicians have “no excuse” other than “CHEATING!” to oppose such measures, especially at “a time when there is a powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country, one more dangerous than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11th.”

But California leaders rejected that — saying the criticisms of mail ballots are baseless and an attempt by Trump and his allies to undermine elections in which they are poised to lose, particularly in big blue states such as California, by attempting to wrest control over voting processes that have always been the purview of states, not the federal government.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Monday that states have been “primarily responsible for regulating elections” since the nation’s founding, and his office was “pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court has respected that authority.”

“Today’s decision recognizes a basic reality: Mail delays happen. When people vote by election day, their ballots should not be discarded because of those delays,” he said.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which has oversight over federal elections, praised the high court Monday for acknowledging that nothing in federal law precludes states from counting mail ballots in the days after an election.

“Today’s decision is a victory for voting rights and a rejection of Trump’s attacks on mail and absentee voters,” Padilla said.

Liberal groups and many voting rights experts also hailed the ruling as a win for voters.

Moving up deadlines for mail ballots is just one effort in a much broader political war over voting and the rules that govern it. The U.S. Constitution generally gives states the authority to run their own elections, but the Trump administration has been trying to assert greater federal control — especially around mail ballots.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to assert control over mail balloting by designing new envelopes with special bar codes that would allow the federal government to ensure ballots only go to and get returned by eligible voters. The order prompted the Postal Service to propose new rules requiring states to hand over their voter mailing lists so it could implement Trump’s directive.

In a letter to U.S. Postmaster ‌General David Steiner on Wednesday, Democratic senators denounced the proposed rule as an “unconstitutional and illegal attempt to transform [USPS] into an election administration agency controlled by the White House and President Trump.”

In a Senate hearing the same day, Steiner said that under the new rule, the USPS would not mail the ballots of a state that refused to turn over its voter lists, but also that his agency would adhere to any court orders curtailing its implementation.

On Thursday, just such an order came down in a federal case in which California and other Democrat-led states challenged Trump’s executive order. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the Constitution does not grant the president “any specific powers over elections,” and blocked his order as unlawful.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who is chair of the Democratic Assn. of Secretaries of State, said states such as California were right to focus on increasing investment in their own election infrastructure rather than accepting the Trump administration’s “bad policy ideas” for speeding things up.

Newsom’s office on Monday said that is exactly what California has been doing. It pointed to laws passed by the state Legislature last year that allow election officials to begin processing mail ballots earlier and require them to finish counting ballots sooner.