congress

A Democratic candidate for Congress and her husband were arrested after a fight at their home, authorities said.

Stephanie Studebaker and her husband, Sam, were booked on domestic violence charges, police said. Studebaker, 45, a veterinarian and first-time political candidate, is running against Republican Rep. Michael R. Turner for the Dayton-area seat.

Studebaker’s campaign has suspended all activities “for the time being” due to personal issues, her website said.

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told lawmakers Tuesday that a sharp increase in threats targeting her and other justices is increasingly encroaching on their personal and family lives.

During a rare appearance by justices before Congress, Barrett said she had to wear a bulletproof vest home a few years ago, something she struggled to explain to her 12-year-old son.

“I didn’t expect that performing this service would put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was, why I had to wear one,” she said.

She and Justice Elena Kagan testified before a House appropriations panel in support of a request to increase security funding for members of the nation’s highest court.

Judges around the country have seen a rise in threats of violence and intimidation. Barrett’s home was also targeted by a swatting call to police in May.

The hearing comes two weeks after the conservative-majority court finished handing down a series of major opinions, including a decision that increased President Trump’s power over federal regulatory agencies and another that rejected his wide-ranging tariffs, sparking harsh personal criticism.

It’s the first time justices have testified before Congress since 2019, and the two justices are facing wide-ranging questions about the court’s work.

Security is central to the Supreme Court’s budget request

The Supreme Court requested a total of $228 million for next fiscal year, a roughly 10% increase over the year before. About $18 million of that is for maintaining the building and grounds.

Much of the requested increase, $14.6 million, would go to expanding personal protection for justices, with six more agents for each.

An additional $2 million would fund an off-site residential security post aimed at making emergency responses faster, as well as increasing the number of Supreme Court police officers.

The U.S. Marshals Service, responsible for protecting judges, reported 564 threats in the government fiscal year that ended in September, an increase from the year before.

That total includes threats to the hundreds of federal judges around the country, though the nine-member Supreme Court has not been immune.

In May, Barrett’s security detail worked with police to quickly deal with the swatting incident, a fake 911 call designed to provoke a police response. Last year, her sister was the victim of a bomb threat in Charleston, S.C., police said. No bomb was found.

In 2022, shortly after the leak of a draft opinion overturning the Roe vs. Wade abortion decision, a would-be assassin was arrested near the home of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh with weapons and zip ties. Threats to the Supreme Court increased after that leak and have continued to grow, Kagan said.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has condemned the threats to all U.S. judges, saying during a speech in March that criticism of judicial opinions is understandable, but personally directed hostility is “dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.

The largest single piece of federal housing legislation to come out of Congress in at least a generation is is now law.

It happened in the middle of night early Saturday, without fanfare — or even President Trump’s signature — and it might be a while before many Californians notice its effects.

That’s because the bill, though politically monumental — both chambers approved it overwhelmingly — doesn’t do one big thing. Instead, it does a lot of little things. Individually, none of the bill’s 56 regulatory tweaks, pilot programs and low-cost loans and grants are likely to move the needle on the nation’s housing affordability woes, nor on California’s specifically.

Supporters hope that collectively, they just might.

Even the law’s path to enactment had an under-the-radar quality to it. The White House abruptly canceled a planned signing ceremony late last month, with Trump vowing not to sign the bill until Congress first passed his restrictive national voter ID proposal. That bill has stalled out in the Senate.

Still, Trump did not veto the housing package, so it automatically became law Saturday just after midnight, as per the Constitution.

For all that, supporters say this is still a big deal: a major, bipartisan piece of legislation aimed at boosting housing construction from a hyperpartisan legislative body that doesn’t typically touch the topic.

“We don’t often gather to celebrate federal housing legislation,” Stephen Russell, president of the San Diego Housing Federation, said at a news conference Thursday. “I think the last time Congress passed anything of this magnitude, many of you were not even alive. … It is almost a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

That’s thanks in part to a growing caucus of lawmakers aligned with the “Yes In My Backyard” movement that helped push the bill into law. Many hail from California, a state that has had more experience than most contending with wildly unaffordable housing. But the cause of making housing more affordable, and attributing high housing costs to a lack of sufficient supply, has become a national and bipartisan concern. Case in point: The bill originated as a joint proposal by Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), an ardent conservative, and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), among the most liberal members of the Senate.

While the constituent parts of the bill are relatively narrow and none is specifically focused on California, experts highlight a few provisions that could leave a notable imprint on the state.

Build now (or else)

For high-cost cities that don’t build much housing, as in much of urban California, the federal bill includes a novel carrot and stick.

This portion of the bill would change the Community Development Block Grant, one of the largest sources of federal funding for affordable housing and local economic development. Pricey cities — defined through a variety of data benchmarks like median prices and vacancy rates — with a track record of under-building that continue to see below-average housing construction will have their grant funds cut by 10%. The savings will go to their municipal counterparts that build at a faster clip.

That’s likely to have “real implications for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco that have traditionally lagged behind” in adding housing supply, said David Garcia, the deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

The city of Los Angeles received $48.4 million in its last award from the block grant program in 2024, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data. San Francisco received $18.9 million.

Those numbers aren’t enough to make or break the budget of either city.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, in an email. “Which taken across the country could still have a good impact! Little nudges add up.”

More dramatic than the number of dollars involved may be the precedent the policy sets. Even in California, where the state government has aggressively incentivized cities to plan for more housing development and penalized those that don’t, lawmakers have never punished municipalities for failing to actually grow — an outcome that may not always be under a city government’s control.

Such an idea would have been “inconceivable in previous congresses,” Garcia said.

Despite that, the provision hasn’t engendered much public opposition from local government groups yet. In an online summary, Michael Wallace, a lobbyist with the National League of Cities, applauded the overall housing bill as an example of the federal government “choosing partnership with local governments over preemptions.” He singled out other provisions of the bill that provide expanded flexibility for Community Development Block Grant spending, new incentive programs for adding supply, and new supports for local urban planning.

Chassis change

Manufactured housing units are often colloquially referred to as mobile homes, but they don’t tend to move around much. Built on assembly lines and shipped to where they’re needed, these naturally affordable houses — the likes of which lawmakers across California and the United States claim we need in droves — are often placed upon permanent foundations where a fewer than 1 in 10 ever move again.

Even so, the federal building code applied to manufactured housing includes a costly, vestigial reference to its mobile origins: a permanent chassis.

A giant steel frame with removable axles and wheels, the chassis ostensibly exists to make it easier to pick up and move a manufactured house by truck. In practice, it serves as a 10- to 12-inch-thick floor beneath the floor. Because it cannot be removed upon delivery, it just serves as “dead space and wasted money,” said Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s trade group. Aside from adding thousands of dollars in added costs per unit, it also makes it harder for manufactured units to be stacked into double story homes or multifamily apartment buildings.

The federal housing bill removes the permanent chassis requirement, something that manufacturers and some housing policy experts have been pushing for since the mid-1980s.

“That relatively minor change will expand access to one of the most affordable forms of home ownership available,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) said at the Thursday news conference.
Maxcy said he doesn’t expect the end of the chassis requirement to trigger an overnight building boom in the manufactured home industry. But especially in California, where, due to the high price of land, new single-family homes are more likely to be built stacked on small lots, the regulatory change “provides more opportunities and helps us reduce the price.”

Recovering after disaster

In the months after a natural disaster, long after emergency federal dollars have come and gone, Congress has provided communities with long-term rebuilding grants through the Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery program. Over the last three decades, the program has spent more than $100 billion on the long-term work of recovery, like home construction, infrastructure repair and rental and relocation assistance. That money tends to be reserved for low-income people and communities “who are not going to bounce back without the funds,” said Marion McFadden, who used to run the program under the Biden administration and now works at the disaster preparation and recovery consulting company IEM.

Unfortunately for California, the program only kind of exists. Since the mid-1990s, it’s been stood up and funded on an ad hoc basis, one appropriation bill at a time. That presents a challenge for communities planning in the middle of post-disaster planning. It also means the rules that govern the program — when the money goes out, to whom, under what conditions and for what purposes — are redrafted with each political administration. That’s had the effect of slowing things down considerably. No program funding has gone to Los Angeles in the wake of the 2025 fire storms, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Congress has yet to appropriate any.

The new housing bill would officially write the program into law for at least three years.

“It creates the ability for HUD to have money on hand before a disaster and then make a decision within 15 days about whether they’re going to provide funding,” McFadden said.

What the housing bill doesn’t do: provide fresh funding. Disaster-prone communities will need to wait for Congress to take that up later.

A ‘bottleneck’ removed

For the last two decades, public housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have been turning to the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program to help repair and upgrade their aging stock of increasingly dilapidated public housing. The program works by switching up funding sources in a way that gives locals more flexibility to borrow money and attract private investment dollars.

Until the new law took effect this weekend, the federal government was only authorized to permit 455,000 of these conversions. The law raises the cap by an additional 100,000.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years and that bottleneck just got removed,” said Russell with the San Diego Housing Federation.
Not all affordable housing advocates are cheering the development. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently opposed expansion of the program on the grounds that the change in funding source could weaken existing tenant protections. It’s unclear whether and to what extent that might be true. A study from last year found no evidence that conversions under the program lead to more evictions.

Wall Street out of suburbia

If you’ve heard only one thing about this housing bill, it’s that it bans “large institutional investors” from buying up more single family homes.

Caveats apply in the final version of the law. The bill defines “large” as any of a number of business structures with control over more than 350 single-family homes. It doesn’t apply retrospectively, so current investors with portfolios brimming with houses need not divest. Exemptions exist for new construction, renovations and senior housing. In California specifically, where corporations and other major investors do not play a significant role in the housing market, the effect is likely to be muted.

The measure “takes a hyper-salient issue for lots of people across the country and does a pretty modest intervention to address it,” said Chad Maisel, a fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress and a former housing policy advisor to President Biden.

Even so, the provision has plenty of bipartisan appeal. Earlier this year, Trump called for an even stricter crackdown on so-called corporate landlords. Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit the same week.

The anti-investor language was considerably watered down from earlier this year, when a related provision threatened to undermine “build-to-rent” projects: well-financed subdevelopments of single-family homes reserved for renters. That prompted a revolt by many developers and YIMBY activists who had otherwise enthusiastically supported the bill, who argued that such communities are one of the fastest growing sources of the U.S. housing stock and provide some of the few opportunities for renters to live in suburban-style, family-sized housing.

After the build-to-rent provision was left on the cutting room floor of Congress, state Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Fremont Democrat who is now running for Congress, introduced a bill that picked it back up again. SB 880 would have banned the bundled sale of multiple single-family homes, striking at the heart of the build-to-rent business model. That bill died in the Assembly Judiciary committee in late June.

Christopher writes for CalMatters.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court’s conservative justices say they decide cases based on the words and original history of the Constitution — and not on their personal or political views.

Following the lead set by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, they say they see history and “originalism” as a guiding principle to prevent judges from changing the Constitution to adjust to new and changing times.

This text-and-history approach is said to contrast with an evolving or “living Constitution” favored by progressives and liberal activists.

But this year saw a flip of sorts on birthright citizenship.

The foremost conservatives agreed with President Trump that the surge of illegal immigration called for reconsidering the promise of citizenship at birth set out in the 14th Amendment of 1868.

“The number of illegal immigrants in this country exploded” in recent years, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in dissent. The rule of citizenship at birth provides “a powerful incentive to enter or remain in this country illegally,” he added.

“The Constitution is an enduring document,” wrote Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, but its rules and meaning must adjust to “modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.”

In a concurring opinion, he said that “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868.”

There were no federal immigration laws in the mid-19th century, but it was an era when a surge of Irish immigrants had settled on the East Coast and large numbers of Chinese immigrants came to California.

Under the law, their children were deemed to be citizens at birth.

Among the conservative originalists, only Justice Amy Coney Barrett signed the majority opinion that was written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and joined by the three liberals.

The opening words of the 14th Amendment of 1868 say: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the rule of citizenship at birth in the case of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents.

In an executive order, Trump proposed to end birthright citizenship for the newborns whose parents were in the country illegally or temporarily.

Writing for the court, the chief justice said the words of the 14th Amendment were clear and were clearly understood at the time. He dismissed the “dramatically revisionist view” that has been cited recently.

Kavanaugh voted with the majority to block Trump’s order from taking effect. He did so because Congress had adopted birthright citizenship in a 1952 law.

“Consistent with the 14th Amendment, Congress could … enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship,” he wrote.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Alito wrote long dissents arguing that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not or would not have favored birthright citizenship.

They pointed to recent scholarship by law professors that raised questions about the accepted understanding of the 14th Amendment and the citizenship rule.

Thomas said citizenship of the child should turn on whether the parents were “domiciled” in this country. Black people who were enslaved were undoubtedly domiciled here, but the same is not true of temporary visitors.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch agreed in part with Thomas and questioned whether the newborns of temporary visitors should be deemed as citizens at birth.

Many court commentators were surprised by the close 5-4 divide on the constitutional issue.

“Given how clear the language was, I expected it to be 7 to 2,” said Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor. “I really gasped when I saw it was 5-4. This is not settled. We’re not done with this debate.”

Sarah Isgur, a podcaster and SCOTUSblog analyst, said that “originalism is getting more and more muddled. Either the history matters or it doesn’t.”

However, she agreed with Kavanaugh’s approach of leaving it to Congress to reconsider the issue.

Not all originalists are conservative.

Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, a constitutional historian, argued that the history of birthright citizenship is clear and not subject to revisionist thinking. He said the Reconstruction Congress adopted this principle of citizenship at birth and stated their intent in clear words in the 14th Amendment.

“When a baby is born on American soil and an American flag flies above, that baby is a birthright citizen, as the Reconstruction Republicans across the land understood,” he wrote in February. This rule “has virtually nothing to do with the baby’s parents.”

Last week, he was mostly cheered by the court’s ruling.

“It’s a triumph, but it should have been 9-0,” Amar said on a review of the court term sponsored by SCOTUSblog. “Shame on the dissenters. They didn’t even the address the statute” and its wording.

But the majority led by Roberts “clearly affirmed the plain meaning of the constitutional text and its history. And that’s a win,” he said.

History has a recurring role at the Supreme Court.

Isgur noted the court will hear arguments in the fall on whether the 2nd Amendment of 1791 gives gun owners a right to have “assault weapons” like AR-15 rifles.

She said the court will decide then between history and changed circumstances.

At issue is whether these modern rapid-fire rifles fit within the history of the gun rights protected by the 2nd Amendment or instead represent a new and dangerous threat to public safety that was unknown in 1791.

Scalia’s opinion upholding gun rights in 2008 is often cited as a model of originalism, but it too emerged from a court divided 5-4.

The 2nd Amendment says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bears Arms, shall not be infringed.”

For decades, the Supreme Court had all but ignored the 2nd Amendment, viewing it as a somewhat outdated provision involving militias, akin to the 3rd Amendment. It forbids having soldiers “quartered in any house … in time of peace.”

Four liberal dissenters in 2008 said the court should stand by that understanding of history.

Justice John Paul Stevens said the 2nd Amendment was added to the Constitution to protect state militias from federal interference. Moreover, the reference to “bear arms” suggests it was about militias, he said.

But Scalia’s opinion stands as the landmark precedent, and he said the dissenters had the history all wrong.

The right to have guns for self-defense arose in England and came to the American colonies. “By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects,” he wrote.

The 2nd Amendment did not establish a new right, he said. Rather, it “codified a pre-existing right [of] having and using arms for self-preservation and [defense],” he wrote.

“There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history,” Scalia wrote, “that the 2nd Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

President Trump has ousted members of a bipartisan federal election commission that resisted his efforts to require would-be voters to document their U.S. citizenship before registering.

The White House on Friday confirmed the executive action against members of the Election Assistance Commission, which distributes federal grants to states, oversees the testing of voting systems and maintains the national voter registration forms.

It’s the latest move in the Republican president’s effort to expand White House influence over how U.S. elections are conducted and comes after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave the president new personnel authority to fire members of independent agency boards.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted. The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so,” said a White House statement to AP.

The president removed the commission’s two Democratic members, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland. The panel’s Republican member, Christy McCormick resigned. Former Republican commissioner Donald Palmer already had left his post voluntarily earlier this year.

The changes were first reported by VoteBeat, a news outlet that covers elections and voting across the U.S.

While the White House statement did not offer a specific reason for Trump’s action, the commission has previously declined to change the national voter registration form to require documentation of an applicant’s U.S. citizenship, as Trump’s urged in a sweeping March 2025 executive order on U.S. elections. A federal judge blocked the order, ruling it exceeds the president’s authority since the U.S. Constitution grants authority over elections management and oversight to Congress and the states. The administration has indicated it will appeal.

It was not clear whether Trump planned to nominate new members immediately or leave the positions vacant — a move that, months ahead of midterm elections, could prevent the agency from distributing new grants to state or local elections offices and, at the least, complicate its role in overseeing testing and certification of voting systems around the country.

“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the White House said.

Congress created the four-member commission as part of the Help America Vote Act, a bipartisan law signed by Republican President George W. Bush in 2002. The act requires the commission to include two Democrats and two Republicans, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Hicks and McCormick were appointed by President Barack Obama. Trump appointed Hovland during his first presidency.

According to VoteBeat, Hicks and Hovland were notified of their removal by an email signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, the deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President.

Barrow writes for the Associated Press.

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — Jared Huffman was unstinting and unbowed as he raised an arm heavenward. Not for fear of a thunderbolt hurtling through the blue sky and, punitively, creasing his skull. Rather, he was illustrating a point.

“I believe in a lot of things,” he said over a tuna melt at a small Marin County cafe. “I just don’t believe in magic and a sky god that looks like an old bearded man sitting just beyond the clouds.”

Huffman is the rare American — one of only about 10% or so — who flatly state they do not believe in God, or any higher power for that matter. What makes him rarer still is his place in Congress. Huffman, who represents a sprawling slice of Northern California, reaching from the Bay Area to the Oregon border, is one of just four members (out of more than 500) who are openly agnostic or religiously unaffiliated.

He is, by far, the most outspoken.

Huffman, who publicly revealed his nonreligious status in 2017, helped form the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which consists of about three dozen members of various religious stripe, each dedicated to the proposition that church and state should be distinct. He’s written a book, due out next month, raising an alarm and summoning Americans to fight the rising tide of Christian nationalism roiling our divided land.

An overwhelming favorite to win an eighth congressional term in November, Huffman, a Democrat, calls himself a humanist and described it this way:

“To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around.

Rep. Jared Huffman, right, greets Marin County Executive Derek Johnson during the opening of a housing community in Point Reyes Station, Calif., on Wednesday.

(Godofredo A. Vasquez / For The Times)

“There are people of faith who sometimes think, well, that must be sad, that must be incomplete,” Huffman went on. “I find it’s just the opposite. It makes this world and our opportunity to be part of it more sacred.”

Growing up in the Mormon faith

Huffman, 62, grew up in a religious household in Independence, Mo. His family practiced an offshoot of the Mormon faith; as a youth, Huffman served in the priesthood.

He began to question the church and its teachings when his father died of lung cancer at age 56. Huffman was 19 and enrolled at UC Santa Barbara on a full-ride volleyball scholarship. (A lean 6-foot-3, Huffman was a three-time NCAA All-American and is a member of the school’s athletic hall of fame.)

“I think in hindsight ignorant faith kept me from coming to terms with the fact that he was dying, and it made it way more traumatic than it should have been,” Huffman said of his father’s passing. “I didn’t really own up to the reality of what was happening, because I was this person of faith who thought rotten things would never happen to me and my father.”

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Shaken, Huffman spent years in a period of reflection and deep study — of various religions, spirituality, the Bible, which he can cite chapter and verse — before landing in his place of humanism and nonconformity.

After earning a law degree at Boston College, Huffman moved to the Bay Area and served as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group. His political career began in 1994 with his election to the Marin Municipal Water District. Huffman served for 12 years, until his election to the state Assembly. He won his congressional seat in 2012.

Huffman’s secularism never came up, he said, until his arrival in Washington, where religiosity, God-fearing and worship of a higher power are taken as articles of faith.

“All of a sudden, religion is all around you and everyone wants to know your religion,” Huffman said. “I knew that I was a nonbeliever. I knew that I was a humanist. But that was a very private thing and I had kind of intended to keep it that way.”

Losing his religion

Two things changed.

First, Huffman’s mother died at age 87. She was fervently religious, Huffman said, and “I didn’t really want to break her heart and tell her how deep my nonbelief actually was.” (In his book, Huffman recounts an awkward scene where he takes the congressional oath of office for the first time on a hastily borrowed Bible, to please his proud mom.)

The second factor was the ascent of Trump, riding a wave of ardent evangelical support.

Huffman was put off by the hypocrisy of such a blasphemous president surrounding himself with extremists using the language and symbols of religious faith to enact what he perceived, and perceives, as a distinctly antidemocratic, un-American agenda.

“I was always uncomfortable with the way I saw religion encroaching into government in Washington,” Huffman said. “My previous concerns were heightened by an order of magnitude because of what he did.”

Ignoring the counsel of family, friends and political advisors who, to a person, warned against it, Huffman revealed his religious disbelief in a series of statements and interviews in November 2017. At the time, the only member of Congress to ever publicly come out as an atheist was Rep. Pete Stark, who announced his sentiments in 2007; though the Fremont Democrat was reelected twice, he was eventually defeated by a Democratic rival who turned his lack of faith against him.

That rival was Eric Swalwell; make of it what you will.

Huffman braced for political blowback. There was none, though he’s gotten death threats and plenty of admonishments he’s bound for Hell.

(Meantime, the congressional ranks of the religiously unaffiliated have grown to include Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington and Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona.)

In the first election after his announcement, Huffman was returned to Washington with 77% of the vote. He’s won reelection three times since, with never less than 72% support. “It turns out [constituents] don’t much care what my religion is if I’m doing good work,” Huffman said, “and that’s pretty great in my opinion.”

He underscored the sentiment with a hearty bite of his tuna melt.

The book Huffman has coming out next month — with chapters that include “Breaking Faith,” “Christian Privilege” and “Christian Zionism” — is a work that explains his personal evolution and expresses a dire fear the country is headed, if unchecked, toward a system of authoritarian theocracy.

He describes the Christian nationalism that informed the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and explains the biblical prophecies behind the messianic support among some Trumpian true-believers.

“The book is not so much about humanism,” Huffman said. “It is about the fight to protect our secular democracy, which, I think, is the bedrock of America as we know it.”

The dedication reads, “For everyone who refuses to bow.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: 14 propositions that could remake California taxes, housing, healthcare and elections
The deep dive: Even without birthright citizenship, Supreme Court co-signs much of Trump’s immigration agenda
The L.A. Times Special: The right and left need to control the radicals in their own parties

Until next time,
mzb
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WASHINGTON — Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has turned repeatedly to the Supreme Court for clearance on its sweeping immigration enforcement plans. While the administration lost its bid this week to do away with birthright citizenship by executive order, its strategy has, in large part, been a success.

In a White House news release listing 60 actions the administration has taken as part of its America First agenda to restrict immigration, the first four actions were decisions by the Supreme Court.

After the court ruled in June that President Trump can, without judicial review, end temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, his administration celebrated the ruling as a “major victory for American sovereignty.”

The list of accomplishments also noted that the high court had granted immigration officers greater leeway to remove green card holders who are accused but not convicted of crimes; allowed the administration to limit how many people can apply for asylum; and gave it the green light to continue deporting immigrants to third-party countries where they have no connection.

The decisions raise significant consequences for immigrants who have made their lives in the U.S., and stand to reshape public views over the country’s historic position as a place of refuge. The administration has not only tried to restrict illegal immigration, it has also targeted people residing in the country legally and stepped up efforts to drive them out.

The court’s term that ended last week is the most robust judicial affirmation of executive power over immigration in the court’s history, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Chishti said the rulings signify that future presidents could continue to change immigration policies at their discretion.

“The biggest impact is that we have now fully understood the power of the presidency, especially in immigration matters,” Chishti said. “Where there is any discretion left to the president or the executive, this Supreme Court has widened the limits of that authority.”

One of Trump’s earliest wins since returning to the White House came last September, when the Supreme Court affirmed that immigration agents can stop anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally on the basis of their perceived race and ethnicity, job or the language they speak.

Afterward, federal officials launched enforcement operations in Chicago, North Carolina and Minneapolis, using increasingly aggressive tactics until two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents in January and the administration shifted course.

The Supreme Court’s rulings have landed with particular force in South Florida, which is home to the largest share of Venezuelan immigrants in the country.

The end of Temporary Protected Status — a program intended to protect people in the event of a natural disaster — heightened concerns about deportation to a country that is reeling after twin earthquakes from June 24. More than 100 Venezuelans deported from the U.S. hours before the disaster are among those missing.

Some Florida Republicans called on the administration to renew the legal protections for Venezuelans in the U.S.

“Congress specifically included earthquakes in the TPS statute for moments exactly like this,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.). “I urge the Administration to redesignate TPS for Venezuelans already in the United States because sending them back after this catastrophe is simply not the right thing to do.”

The White House did not respond to a request seeking comment on whether Trump would authorize humanitarian relief for Venezuelan immigrants.

Immigrants from El Salvador are now holding their breath for an upcoming decision on their TPS designation, which is set to expire Sept. 9.

About 1.3 million people from 17 countries were enrolled in the program when Trump took office last year. The administration has already terminated TPS for many of them, and the Supreme Court’s decision last week, which concerned Haitians and Syrians, clears the way for federal officials to continue.

“The implication of this is that at least most of the claims that have been litigated to challenge this administration’s illegal war on TPS are now foreclosed,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, who presented arguments for the Syria case.

The concern among advocates took on greater urgency after The New York Times and other outlets reported on Thursdaythat immigration officials, seeking to reach a goal of 2,000 arrests per day, had detained more than 10,000 people in less than a week.

Arnulfo De La Cruz, who leads a California union representing thousands of home care workers with temporary protected status, said he is alarmed by the Supreme Court’s many immigration rulings.

“We’re getting into really dangerous territory with, in some ways, the Supreme Court almost legislating the priorities of the administration,” said De La Cruz, who is president of SEIU California and SEIU Local 2015. “That’s the responsibility of Congress.”

In a blow to a centerpiece of the administration’s immigration agenda, the divided Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship — that, with few exceptions, a person born in U.S. soil is citizen.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired Cornell University immigration law professor, called the ruling one setback among Trump’s largely successful restructuring of how the U.S. treats immigrants. He pointed to a tracker led by a Stanford University law professor that lists more than 700 immigration policy actions by the Trump administration so far.

“Despite this seemingly historic loss, the Trump administration is winning its war on immigrants,” Yale-Loehr said.

And now some Republicans, including Trump, are saying Congress should lead the attack on birthright citizenship.

“You can’t have the kinds of immigration programs other countries have when you can just have a baby here, and now that child is an American citizen,” said Stephen Miller, a Trump aide who is behind much of his immigration agenda.

But Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute, said in reality, “Congress can’t do anything — it was left powerless by the Supreme Court.”

Other conservatives called on the administration to lean on the considerable authority it already has.

Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a hard-line restrictionist group, said the birthright decision “makes it all the more urgent to step up enforcement to the maximum possible extent.”

Democrats, meanwhile, cheered the win while acknowledging that their fight against the administration’s immigration policies continues.

“We cannot rest,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). “Because this is certainly not the end of Trump’s attacks on our Constitution, our democracy, and the notion of what it means to be American.”

More immigration-related cases are among those in the Supreme Court’s docket starting in October and could offer further expansions of executive power.

One case concerns more than 50,000 petitions filed in federal courts in hopes of obtaining the release of detained immigrants. Those petitions ballooned after the administration began limiting the ability of many immigrants to seek release through bond hearings in immigration court.

The administration is expected to put up a fierce defense.

July 4 (UPI) — On this date in history:

In 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming U.S. independence from Britain.

In 1826, in one of history’s notable coincidences, former U.S. Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

In 1863, Union troops defeated Confederate forces in a battle at Vicksburg, Miss.

In 1895, the poem “America the Beautiful,” by Wellesley College Professor Katherine Lee Bates, was published. The poem with music by Samuel A. Ward was published as a song in 1910.

In 1910, American boxer Jack Johnson took on former undefeated heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries, beating him in 15 rounds, to stake his claim as the as the greatest heavyweight in the world.

File Photo by Library of Congress/UPI

In 1939, Lou Gehrig gave his “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” speech in announcing his retirement from the New York Yankees. Gehrig had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a debilitating motor neuron disease. United Press writer Jack Cuddy wasn’t impressed with the Yankees’ “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day,” saying doctors made up his ailment to explain his unexpected retirement.

In 1976, Israeli commandos raided the airport at Entebbe, Uganda, rescuing 103 hostages held by Arab militants.

In 1986, more than 250 sailing ships and the United States’ biggest fireworks display honored the Statue of Liberty in its 100th birthday year.

In 1995, the British Parliament reconfirmed John Majors as prime minister.

In 1997, NASA’s Pathfinder reached Mars to become the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the planet in more than two decades. Pathfinder returned more than 16,000 images and some 8.5 million measurements back to Earth before its final transmission on September, 27, 1997.

File Photo courtesy of NASA

In 2006, North Korea test-launched seven ballistic missiles in what it called “routine military exercises,” causing a firestorm of anger among its neighbors and the United States.

In 2010, U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus took command of the Afghan war, acknowledging the “tough fight” ahead for NATO forces while pledging “We are in this to win.”

In 2013, the Statue of Liberty reopened to the public nine months after it was closed because of damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

In 2018, Hong Kong’s high court ruled unanimously that same-sex couples are entitled to spousal visas like married heterosexual couples.

In 2022, seven people died and dozens others were injured in a mass shooting during an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Ill., near Chicago. Far-right activist Robert Crimo III, then 22, was charged with murder for the shooting.

A participant of the March Fourth rally to ban assault weapons holds a sign for Eduardo Uvaldo, a victim of the Highland Park shooting, outside the Senate office buildings at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 2022. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI

WASHINGTON  — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led a fractured Supreme Court this year that both expanded a president’s power to run the government and dealt major defeats to President Trump.

In Trump’s second year back in the White House, Roberts and the court punctured his claim to have power with no limits.

The justices struck down his worldwide tariffs, ruling these import taxes are a matter for Congress, not the president.

They also threw out his executive order that would end the principle of birthright citizenship. The Constitution wrote this promise into law, Roberts said, and the president may not change it.

The court also ruled in December that the president did not have the power to put National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago.

The three decisions came over fierce dissents from conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. and with Neil M. Gorsuch in two of them.

The three liberal justices dissented angrily when the court ruled the administration may end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians.

They did the same when the court ruled the president may replace the top appointees of semi-independent agencies.

But they joined Roberts in a 5-4 ruling that affirmed the independence of the Federal Reserve and blocked Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

Trump has won on most immigration fronts because Roberts and the conservatives believe Congress put the enforcement power in the hands of the administration. They point to the law authorizing temporary protection which says there shall be “no judicial review” of the decision to end the protection.

Roberts is a solid conservative who also tries to keep the court on a middle course. It’s an approach that rarely wins plaudits from the right and almost never from the left.

This year the chief justice prevailed with different coalitions.

This week, the court ruled by a 5-4 vote against the Republican National Committee and upheld state laws that allow for counting late-arriving mail ballots. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Barrett also joined the chief justice in the rulings on tariffs and birthright citizenship.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. speaks to the Georgetown Law School graduating class in 2025.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

This week, the court also limited the power of police to use cellphone data to look for crime suspects. This too came on a 5-4 vote when Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined Roberts and the three liberals.

Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, who has been a friend of Roberts’ since their time in law school, said the chief justice “is clearly working very hard” to put together majorities.

“It is not easy to formally preside over a court in which five of its members (Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch on the right and Justices Sotomayor and Jackson on the left) deride the kind of efforts at moderation that is the chief’s preferred signature and harshly condemn him when he strays from their own views.”

Washington attorney Roman Martinez, a former clerk for Roberts, said the court is “clearly right of center” but the decision on tariffs was the most important of the year.

“It is a huge deal for the court to say ‘no’ to the president on his major policy initiative,” he said.

Stanford law professor Michael McConnell agreed. “It’s hard to claim the court is in Trump’s pocket when he lost the major cases,” he said.

Trump responded to the tariff defeat by calling the justices in the majority a “disgrace to our nation” and “disloyal to the Constitution.”

They “sicken me,” he said of Justices Barrett and Gorsuch, his two appointees who joined Roberts in the 6-3 majority.

Trump went to the court in April to hear his top attorney defend his executive order on birthright citizenship. He left after an hour of mostly skeptical questions.

On the term’s last day, Roberts issued a clear and eloquent 26-page opinion setting out America’s history of according citizenship to children who were born in this country, without regard to their parents.

This view came from England “and crossed the Atlantic with the colonists — and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution,” he wrote. “Nothing is better settled,” Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1830.

But it was unsettled by the fight over slavery.

“In the odious decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford, this Court imposed the Southern States’ beliefs onto the Nation” and decreed Blacks could not become citizens, Roberts wrote.

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were among the many who condemned the court’s decision, he said.

“It took more than a decade — and the addition of names such as Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville to our national canon — but Douglass’s vision of ‘our common humanity’ would be fulfilled,” he wrote.

The Reconstruction Congress wrote this rule into the 14th Amendment and said “All persons born” here are citizens by birth.

The principle of birthright citizenship had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, the chief justice wrote, and it had gone unchallenged until Trump returned to the White House last year.

But Thomas filed a 91-page dissent arguing that immigrants must be “domiciled” here before their children may become citizens.

Alito filed a separate 39-page opinion branding the Roberts opinion a “serious mistake.”

On that note, the court adjourned for its summer recess.

Ethics experts sounded the alarm Wednesday after new financial disclosure reports revealed that President Trump’s income ballooned to $2.2 billion in 2025, with $1.4 billion coming from various new cryptocurrency-related businesses.

“It’s bribery. It’s graft. It’s exploitation of public power for private financial gain,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert in government ethics. “Trump has — with the acquiescence of a somnolent, GOP-controlled Congress and the active assistance of John Roberts’ Supreme Court — transformed the presidency into a massive corruption racket.”

Trump reported income of over $600 million in 2024. But after he entered the White House in 2025, he reported that his income had soared to more than $2.2 billion.

The 2025 annual disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics shows that Trump ramped up his real estate business in countries across the globe, particularly in the Middle East, at a time when his government was negotiating over vital issues of military aid and economic tariffs. The president also expanded his dealings in the relatively new realm of cryptocurrency.

According to the 927-page report, Trump made $635 million in royalties from Celebration Coins and more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial crypto firm. He drew in millions from a raft of Trump-branded merchandise including God Bless the USA Bibles and sneakers depicting him with his hand raised in a fist. He also brought in $10.4 million from a property in the United Arab Emirates and $9 million from a property in Saudi Arabia.

Noah Bookbinder, an ethics expert and former president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington, described Trump’s business dealings while in the White House as “entirely unprecedented, certainly in modern history, but I think by most ways of measuring, in all of American history.”

“This is corruption,” Bookbinder said. “You have a president who has been quite transparently using the presidency in ways that benefit his business interests and intertwining the presidency and business interests.”

But the president and the White House brushed aside ethics concerns about the money Trump is making.

Trump told reporters Wednesday that he made a lot of money before he came to the White House, he had “big institutions” run his money, and that he had benefited, like every other American, as the stock market went up.

“We’re all profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”

In a statement, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest. … All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

Although the report does not show exactly how much Trump is earning — it provides details of revenue, rather than profit — the scale of the president’s cryptocurrency dealings elevated ethics watchdogs’ long-standing concerns.

Jordan Libowitz, a vice president at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said the most concerning detail of the new report is the hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from various crypto ventures partnered with companies that the American public knows little about.

“At a time when his own administration itself is setting regulation for these types of companies,” Libowitz said, “there’s just this massive opportunity for corruption when foreign governments and foreign nationals can pour tens of millions of dollars into the president’s pocket.”

As a real estate mogul, Trump has long invested in hotels, condominiums and golf courses. But cryptocurrency, Libowitz said, offers vastly more potential for corruption.

“There’s only so many hotel rooms you can book, so many rounds of golf, but there’s no limit with crypto,” Libowitz said. “You can just buy his meme coin and he gets a cut, so you kind of take out the middleman, but also the cap or the amount of money you can funnel to the president.”

Libowitz said it was also problematic for Trump to expand his real estate empire in foreign countries, particularly the Middle East.

“Now it seems that almost all his new developments are in foreign countries, and that opens up, if you’re building this giant resort, you’re going to need help from the local government, whether it’s tax breaks or utility issues, or building a road, or speeding up permits,” Libowitz said. “These are ways that foreign governments can do favors for the American president.”

In the half a century before Trump was elected, ethics experts say, presidents from Nixon to Obama publicly released their tax returns, sold properties or put the proceeds in a blind trust managed by someone they did not know.

“They weren’t doing it because they legally had to, but because they thought it was the right thing to do,” Libowitz said.

Ever since Trump was first elected in 2016 and opted to not sell his businesses or put them in blind trusts, ethics experts have urged Congress to impose more aggressive financial oversight over money in politics.

“Congress needs to update the law, and basically, mandate blind trusts and sale of assets and disclosure of tax returns,” Libowitz said.

Noting that the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause explicitly states that the president cannot accept things of value from foreign or domestic governments, ethics experts say Trump is flouting the law and Congress has chosen to not enforce it.

Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said Congress needed to close loopholes that exempt presidents from federal conflict of interest laws as well as enforce the Foreign Emoluments Clause.

“Nobody holding a position of trust with the United States government can accept emoluments, profits and benefits from foreign governments, and that is flatly prohibited under the United States Constitution,” Painter said. “Now, if the United Arab Emirates put money into Liberty Financial, as I understand they did … and then Trump makes money off Liberty Financial, that’s a Foreign Emoluments Clause problem.”

Congress, he said, should empower an independent prosecutor to investigate such conflicts.

“The problem with the Foreign Emoluments Clause is how do we enforce it?” Painter said. “The founders and head of the Congress enforced it by impeaching anybody who took a bunch of foreign government money, but I guess that system’s not working. That’s a serious problem.”

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.

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.

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.

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 — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld state laws that allow for counting mail ballots that are postmarked by election day but arrive later.

The 5-4 decision rejects a Republican challenge to laws in California and 13 other mostly Democratic states which permit the counting of these late-arriving ballots.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the three liberals to form the majority.

The decision is a mild surprise and should bolster Democrats in the fall election.

While California’s seven-day grace period for mail ballots has contributed to slow tabulations, it has not been shown to trigger fraud or unreliable vote counts.

Election law experts blame slow tallies on the surge in voting by mail combined with the need to carefully match signatures on these ballots.

The court said federal law since 1845 has set election day nationwide as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November and voters were required to cast their ballots that day.

Citing that fact, the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration joined a challenge to a Mississippi law adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed counting ballots that were up to five days late.

Trump’s lawyers said federal law preempted or overrode the state law.

“From the dawn of America, election day has meant the day the ballot box closes — and when election officials must be in receipt of all ballots,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.

Democrats said the Constitution says the “time, place and manner of holding elections” for Congress “shall be prescribed in each state” by its legislature. However, Congress was given the power to override those state rules and set its own regulations for federal elections.

Barrett said the federal election day requires only that the voter must decide by then.

“The election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote — as it is in Mississippi,” she wrote. “But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

While Congress could have prohibited the counting of late-arriving ballots, it had not done so. That may be because states wanted to count ballots from members of the military stationed overseas even if they arrived late.

Last year, however, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans struck down Mississippi’s law that allowed for counting ballots that were cast by election day but arrived up to five days later.

The opinion by three judges, all Trump appointees, concluded that the election day set by Congress “is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials.”

In its appeal, Mississippi stuck with a states’ rights view and argued that the federal election-day statutes mean that ballots must be cast — not received — by election day.

“This is a victory for voters and for an election system that meets the needs of the people it serves,” said Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomón. “Eligible Americans shouldn’t lose their voice because of mail delays outside their control.”

June 24 (UPI) — Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration Wednesday of seeking to push through a multimillion-dollar arms deal with Turkey by bypassing congressional review, the latest executive action critics say usurps the lawmakers’ authority.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he was informed by the Trump administration late Tuesday that it would bypass congressional review of an arms sale to Turkey worth more than $700 million.

“The State Department did not even attempt to justify its decision,” Meeks said in a statement.

“It did not invoke any emergency authority, did not present a written rationale and for months refused to make a good-faith effort to brief me on implications of the sale for the U.S.-Turkey relationship, Turkey’s continued possession of the Russian S-400 system and other regional security concerns,” he continued.

“It simply informed my office that it would immediately proceed with a formal notification of the sale.”

Turkey is a U.S. ally and NATO member with a robust defense industry. However, it’s led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an increasingly authoritarian leader who has maintained ties with Russia and whose government uses the Kremlin’s S-400 Triumph missile defense system.

The United States and NATO opposed Turkey’s adoption of the S-200 system, and Washington removed Turkey from the F-35 fighter program in 2019 during Trump’s first administration.

Meeks called the decision to bypass congressional review “yet another deeply troubling example of this administration’s open contempt for Congress’ oversight authority.

“There can be no pretense that this was urgent or unavoidable,” he said, stating the items will not be delivered to Turkey for years.

“This was a deliberate choice to shut Congress out and to treat legitimate oversight as an inconvenience to be brushed aside.”

Trump is scheduled to visit Turkey early next month. During a White House press conference alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Tuesday, he praised Erdogan as “a great friend.”

Erdogan is known to be seeking to acquire U.S.-made fighter jets, including the F-35. Asked if he was planning to announce a potential deal when he visits Ankara, Trump replied: “I’m going to probably do something that’s going to make him very happy.”

It was unclear if jets were part of the arms deal.

UPI has contacted the State Department for comment and to detail the contents of the sale.

Democrats and other critics of President Donald Trump have repeatedly accused his administration of bypassing Congress through executive orders and unilateral decisions, particularly in its use of the military.

The Trump administration has faced staunch criticism from opponents for launching a war against Iran in late February without congressional authorization. Democrats have frequently argued that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war.

Democrats have also criticized the administration’s use of the military to attack suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific and Caribbean without congressional authorization.

BOSTON — A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston in effect converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.

Casper rejected the administration’s argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be implemented. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump’s requirements violated the separation of powers.

The Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” she wrote.

Among other proposed changes, Trump’s order would have required people to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, prevented mail ballots from being counted if they arrive after election day, even if they were postmarked by then, and punished states that failed to comply by withholding certain federal money.

In a statement, New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James said she was grateful the court had blocked Trump’s “unconstitutional attempt to seize control of our elections” and would continue to defend voting rights in this year’s midterm elections.

“Generations of Americans fought tirelessly for the right to vote, and we honor their legacy by protecting that right against anyone who tries to undermine it,” she said.

Requests for comment sent to the White House and Department of Justice were not immediately returned.

It was the latest in a string of rulings against the elections executive order Trump signed just months after taking office for his second term. He has since signed another executive order on elections, seeking to create a national voter list and limit mail balloting. That directive also faces multiple legal challenges.

In the fall, a federal judge in Washington overseeing a separate challenge to the first election executive order by civil rights and Democratic Party-aligned groups blocked the government from taking steps to include the proof-of-citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form. That judge later barred the secretary of Defense from requiring documentary proof of citizenship when military personnel register to vote or request ballots.

In an apparent nod to the difficulty of implementing a proof-of-citizen requirement by executive order, Trump is pushing legislation in the Republican-controlled Congress to create such a mandate. The SAVE America Act has passed the House but has stalled in the Senate, leading Trump to advocate for eliminating the filibuster that is blocking the legislation.

On Wednesday, he abruptly canceled the expected signing of a bipartisan housing bill, saying he won’t do so until Congress passes his proof of citizenship requirement for voting.

The president and many of his Republican allies have been promoting the narrative that voting by noncitizens is a major problem, when in fact it’s quite rare. The federal voter registration form already requires people to attest that they are U.S. citizens, and violating that is punishable as a felony that can lead to prison or deportation.

In another major voting case, the U.S. Supreme Court is due to issue an opinion soon on whether mail ballots must arrive by election day. That could immediately change the rules in 14 states that allow grace periods ranging from days to weeks if the ballots are postmarked by election day.

Smyth and Casey write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Wednesday he would not sign the landmark housing bill Congress passed this week as scheduled, in a striking decision to jeopardize a rare bipartisan success in order to demand that lawmakers pass voter ID legislation.

It escalated tension between Trump and Senate Republicans, which had already neared a breaking point this week over the proof-of-citizenship bill, dubbed the SAVE America Act. GOP leaders have told Trump the bill does not have the votes to pass.

“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” Trump wrote online.

The president’s willingness to threaten a bill that he could have framed as a win on affordability ahead of the midterm elections is a remarkable gamble as Republicans fight to keep House control.

The reversal also underscored Trump’s fixation on asserting some federal control over elections processes and his apparent indifference to the cost-of-living issues that voters are most focused on. He has repeatedly dismissed affordability as a “fake” concept, and inaccurately claimed on Sunday that the U.S. has the “BEST ECONOMY EVER.”

Last week, polls from NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll and Fox News poll showed record dissatisfaction with the economy among Americans and Trump’s support slipping among key demographics. Trump also lashed out about that on Truth Social on Wednesday morning, writing without evidence: “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN. THANK YOU!!!”

The housing bill, which passed with overwhelming support in the House on Tuesday evening and the Senate on Monday, aims to boost housing supply. It is the most significant legislation Congress has passed on housing in more than 30 years, and it contains a host of provisions aimed at removing regulatory barriers, improving federal programs and incentivizing new building.

As president, Trump has 10 days to sign or veto bills after they are presented. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) indicated to reporters Wednesday that a signing could still be on the table, saying he had spoken to Trump about “delaying” the housing bill before the president announced the cancellation.

Johnson said he had promised an effort to advance the SAVE America Act.

“He decided — I didn’t announce it, I wanted him to announce it — but we’re delaying this,” Johnson said. “As you know, he has a window of time before he has to sign a bill and he’s going to use a little bit more of that window of time and we’re gonna go through this together.”

Bill Owens, chairman of the National Assn. of Home Builders, telegraphed hope that the legislation would be signed at some point.

“Although there was no bill signing today, we are confident the 21st Century Road to Housing Act will eventually become law,” said Owens, a home builder and remodeler from Worthington, Ohio.

Democrats were shocked, angry and confused when they found out about the cancellation Wednesday morning, according to a source within the House Committee on Financial Services, which led the legislation.

Lawmakers believed the bill was a done deal and are now scrambling, the person said. A stage for the bill signing had already been set up in the Capitol when Trump posted online. The night before, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had posted on X: “Tomorrow’s historic bill signing is another promise made, promise kept.”

Frustration with the president has been steadily mounting among Senate Republicans for more than a month, triggered by a host of issues including Trump’s endorsement of Republican primary challengers to sitting lawmakers. On Tuesday, four Republican senators joined with Democrats to approve a war powers resolution seeking to block U.S. military action in Iran.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has told Trump the SAVE America Act doesn’t have enough support to pass, the Associated Press reported this week.

The legislation would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register, require Americans show identification when casting a ballot and require states to send voter data to the Department of Homeland Security. Voting rights advocates say it would create unnecessary barriers to voting for citizens.

The effort is rooted in Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud and cheating by Democrats. He has said the bill would “guarantee” the midterms for Republicans.

Trump has previously called for the federal government to “nationalize” elections and “take over” voting in some states. He renewed accusations against Democrats of cheating in California this month.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) said Trump was holding the bill hostage in a bid “to control California’s elections.”

“The stage was set both physically and metaphorically for the president to sign a historic housing bill for the American people,” said Sherman, who contributed a provision to the housing bill that would help disabled veterans get rental assistance. “Trump must put his ego aside and put the American people first and sign this bill into law.”

Less than an hour before Trump posted online that he had canceled the bill signing, he labeled the legislation “the Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill” in a Truth Social post, and railed about the SAVE America Act.

“That is what Americans, both Dumocrats, Republicans, and everyone else, care about. Get the bad Republicans to approve it or, better yet, Terminate the Filibuster and approve it, AND EVERYTHING ELSE REPUBLICANS HAVE EVER DREAMED OF,” Trump wrote.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was one of the four bipartisan lawmakers leading the deal across the two chambers, said Wednesday morning on CNBC that Trump’s reversal “doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s a complete indifference to the cost squeeze on American families and to genuine efforts to do something about it,” Warren said. “He could be over here claiming a victory lap and instead he’s saying no, no, he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

WASHINGTON — The House passed Congress’ most significant housing legislation in decades on Tuesday, sending the bill to President Trump’s desk — a bid by both parties to show midterm voters that they’re paying attention to affordability concerns ahead of November’s election.

The legislation, which the Senate passed Monday, aims to boost the housing supply through dozens of targeted provisions whose effects are expected to be seen over the next several years. In California, measures to unlock some federal block grant dollars for new housing in big cities could be particularly significant.

The bipartisan agreement over the legislation, after weeks of negotiation, marks a highly unusual collaboration in the divided Congress. It reflects growing public pressure on Washington to address economic issues at a time when Americans’ economic woes are deepening amid inflation, elevated gas prices and the ongoing effects of Trump’s tariffs.

The bill passed in the House with a 358-32 vote after it was approved by the Senate on Monday in an 85-5 vote. Those opposed in both chambers were Republicans. The Trump administration has signaled support for the bill, meaning it will probably become law.

“This legislation must serve as a foundation for continued action, not the final step in addressing our nation’s housing crisis,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), one of the lawmakers who put together the deal, said on the House floor before the vote.

The bill aims to help housing supply by removing regulatory barriers to building affordable housing units, preventing large investors from buying up single-family homes and incentivizing new housing in cities with federal funding, among other measures.

The package focuses on addressing housing supply constraints and making federal programs easier to use, said David Gonzalez Rice, senior vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Though the legislation does not create major new funding streams, advocates see the bipartisan acknowledgment of the need for housing reforms as significant.

“It’s a big step in the right direction,” Gonzalez Rice said, “and there’s still a lot of work to do.”

Addressing cost-of-living issues has become high stakes for lawmakers engaged in midterm reelection campaigns, as Americans increasingly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Democrats are hoping to leverage affordability issues to gain control of at least one chamber of Congress, while Republicans are fighting to maintain their majorities.

It was politically crucial for members of both parties to be able to tell voters they had worked in good faith to address housing affordability, said David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

“It would’ve been hard to justify to voters during their campaigns that their party did not do everything they could to advance the first meaningful legislation on housing policy in decades,” Garcia said.

The legislation was a product of intense bipartisan negotiations led by Waters and Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), as well as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), after months of discussions in both parties about how to address housing.

“The work has been extraordinary between the majority and minority in this House, answering the call [for] solutions from the American people,” Hill said on the House floor.

Trump — who has largely dismissed the affordability issue, last week calling it “a fake word” — had indicated support for housing reforms.

In a March statement of policy, the administration indicated it “strongly supports” passage of the bill, saying it represented “significant advances in federal housing policy.” Trump also signed an executive order suggesting that regulatory barriers to home building should be removed, a concept reflected in the bill.

The nationwide affordability crisis has been driven for years by rising costs, a shortage of affordable housing, higher mortgage rates and other factors. Recent rising construction costs and labor shortages have exacerbated the issue, according to the National Assn. of Home Builders.

The number of new housing starts in May dropped by more than 15%, according to a report last week from the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

California has added housing supply in recent years, but its shortage remains significant and prices high. The state has among the highest rates of households spending disproportionate amounts of their income on housing, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The momentum in Washington to respond to those pressures — which came as something of a surprise to advocates — can be viewed as a reflection of current public sentiment, Gonzalez Rice said.

“It speaks to the broader understanding of the public that housing is a policy problem, that government can do something about it and the expectation that government will do something about it,” he said. “It’s clear elected officials are hearing from their constituents.”

The bill includes nearly 50 provisions, including the prohibition on investor purchase of single-family homes, which is intended to help increase the housing supply for individual buyers. It also seeks to help cities convert abandoned buildings into new housing and help landlords and homeowners make home repairs.

Two measures are expected to be particularly significant for cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, Garcia said: One ties some federal funding under the Community Development Block Grant program to housing production to motivate cities with low housing supply and high costs to build more housing. The other allows block grant money to be used for affordable housing construction, opening a new revenue source for cities.

California’s big cities may be spurred to increase new housing in future years, Garcia said, and they also could benefit from the ability to direct the block grant funding to housing.

“Costs to build are so high,” he said, “that any new funding could be critical.”

Among other steps that could have swift results is a plan to preserve a rental assistance program for nearly 400,000 rural homeowners and a measure to streamline the leasing process for families using vouchers, Gonzalez Rice said.

The bill also exempts certain projects from a set of environmental regulations, a step aimed at speeding up the review and construction process. And it seeks to make it easier to build manufactured homes by removing a requirement that they be built on a chassis, which the Senate committee estimated would reduce the cost of each new unit by up to $10,000.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has told senators it needs roughly $80 billion, mostly to cover the cost of the U.S. war against Iran, adding to what is already a sizable military spending boost being sought by President Trump.

Meanwhile, the Senate for the first time approved a war powers resolution Tuesday seeking to block U.S. military action against Iran, as lawmakers warily watch President Trump’s efforts to resolve a conflict that the administration launched on its own and now needs Congress to fund.

It was the 10th time the Senate has tried to stop the war, and the outcome, on a vote of 50-48, was a stunning turnaround from past efforts. Although the resolution is largely symbolic, and does not fully carry the force of law, it reflects the growing concerns from a number of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate over the war and the deal Trump struck with Iran to end it. The House approved the resolution earlier this month.

The White House Office of Management and Budget has yet to make a formal request to Congress for more money for the war. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill, including Monday evening. A top deputy Defense secretary told senators about the Iran funding request last week, according to two people familiar with the situation but not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the developments.

The push for billions of dollars in Iran war funding comes at a fraught political moment. Lawmakers are not only skeptical of the deal Trump struck with Iran to bring an end to the war, but also wary of next steps. The White House has requested a remarkable $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon — a nearly 50% increase over the current fiscal year’s funding levels.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he’s expecting a supplemental spending request from the administration for the war, and when it arrives, “we’ll work through it and see where the votes are.”

“We need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to replenish, resupply a lot our munitions that have been depleted — not only just with what’s happening with Iran, but prior to that,” said Thune (R-S.D.).

Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg spoke to several senators about the proposal in calls last week and he notified congressional committees that the $80-billion request had been sent to the Office of Management and Budget. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, the funding package will almost certainly run into trouble from lawmakers who refuse to support Trump’s decision to go to war and are reluctant to give the Pentagon more money at a time of high costs of living for Americans at home.

“You’re spending families’ hard-earned tax dollars on a war that many strongly oppose,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington told Hegseth in a hearing last month.

In addition to the Iran funding, Republicans hope to secure about $1.1 trillion through the regular appropriations process, which typically requires support from both parties for approval. Then, they hope to secure an additional $350 billion through a mostly party-line vote later this summer.

The amount being sought by the Pentagon is far higher than the $29-billion estimate of war costs that Hegseth gave Congress during his testimony last month. The bulk of that amount was related to replacing munitions and repairing equipment but also included operational costs to keep forces deployed. That estimate did not include the cost to repair or rebuild U.S. military sites damaged in the region.

It’s also far lower than the initial $200 billion the Pentagon floated as the costs at the start of the war. An early estimate put the cost of the first week of the war at $11.3 billion.

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a member of Democratic party leadership, said he expects the actual price tag could be much higher than the $80 billion being proposed.

Schatz said he hasn’t done any counting of Democrats about whether there is support for an Iran-focused bill, “but I haven’t found anyone who wants to do this.”

But Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana said, “To me it’s less about the war, it’s more about the stockpiles.”

Banks said, “I would sell it to my state as an investment in our defense industrial base, reshoring defense production to Indiana.”

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said funding for an Iran supplemental can’t be done in isolation. It has to be done after lawmakers from both parties have agreed to a total spending amount for both defense and non-defense programs, “then the rest of this would follow pretty quickly,” Reed said.

And Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, a member of the Appropriations subcommittee on Defense, said he has been working with the administration to broaden the package to include funds for disaster aid for California, Hawaii and other states hard hit by fires and weather problems, as well as agricultural aid for farmers.

“I think that’s the kind of combination that could pass,” Hoeven said.

Hegseth declined to answer questions from reporters late Monday as he strode around the Capitol.

But on the issue of the cost of the war, Hegseth responded rhetorically during a Senate hearing last month, asking, “What is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon?”

He acknowledged the president’s decision to confront the threat of a nuclear Iran “comes with cost — and we recognize that.”

Freking and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writers Konstantin Toropin and Ben Finley contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Senate for the first time approved a war powers resolution Tuesday seeking to block U.S. military action against Iran, as lawmakers warily watch President Trump’s efforts to resolve a conflict that the administration launched on its own and now needs Congress to fund.

It was the 10th time the Senate has tried to stop the war, and the outcome, on a vote of 50 to 48, was a stunning turnaround from past efforts. While the resolution is largely symbolic, and does not fully carry the force of law, it reflects the growing concerns from a number of Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate over both the war and the deal Trump struck with Iran to end it. The House approved the resolution earlier this month.

“Time after time, the vast majority of Senate Republicans sided with Trump and his war instead of the American people,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Schumer said Americans have paid the price for “Trump’s historic blunder in Iran. It’ll go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made.”

In the past, as many as four GOP senators have voted for the war powers resolutions, and they did so Tuesday — Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. One Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against the resolution.

On this vote, the absence of two Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was admitted to the hospital recently for an undisclosed matter, left the GOP without a full majority to halt the effort. Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) also missed the vote.

The vote also comes as the Pentagon is seeking $80 billion from Congress, mostly for the Iran war as it backfills munitions and stockpiles.

Trump to meet senators as Republicans balk at Iran deal

Trump himself is headed to the Capitol this week to meet with GOP senators as Vice President JD Vance has been overseas working to negotiate with Iran to end its nuclear ambitions — which had been among the stated rationales for the war.

The president is not pleased with the Republicans who have been critical of the deal he struck with Iran, according to one GOP senator granted anonymity to discuss the private dynamics.

The terms of the Iran deal are spelled out in a memorandum of understanding that Trump signed last week, starting a 60-day clock for the sides to reach a broader agreement over ending Iran’s nuclear program.

But Republicans have particularly objected to the $300-billion fund to help Iran rebuild, which is far greater than the $1.7 billion then-President Obama refunded the country under his administration’s 2015 Iran deal.

“I believe President Trump is getting very poor advice on Iran,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said last week on his podcast after the deal was made public.

Democrats have repeatedly forced Iran votes

Over and again, Democrats have been forcing votes on the Iran war, almost since the U.S. and Israel launched missile strikes on Iran on Feb. 28.

Nearly each week they’re in session, the Senate Democrats have put forward war powers resolutions, but they have failed to amass the majority needed for passage in the narrowly split chamber, where Trump’s Republican Party holds the majority.

The House pushed its own version to passage earlier this month, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in approving the war powers resolution, over the objections of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the GOP leadership.

While such resolutions do not go to the president for his signature, passage stands as a powerful, if symbolic, statement from Congress and a rebuke of the administration’s military actions.

Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democrat from Virginia who has led his party’s efforts, said the pause in warfighting, as Trump’s team works to shore up a fragile ceasefire, provides the perfect time for Congress to step back and assess “what should the next chapter be.”

Hegseth seeks $80 billion from Congress for the Iran war

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is also on Capitol Hill this week, seeking roughly $80 billion in supplemental funding to shore up defense supplies in the aftermath of the Iran war, which is drawing scrutiny when many Americans are reeling from high gas prices and costs of living.

The Pentagon early on had estimated the war cost $11.3 billion during its first week, and experts have put the overall price tag at close to $100 billion.

The Defense Department’s funding request is part of a broader beef-up of military money the White House wants as part of its budget request this year.

The Trump administration is seeking $1.5 trillion in defense funding this year — a 50% increase — including $350 billion that it wants in a so-called budget reconciliation package. Johnson and GOP leaders are working to pass that package on their own, over the objections of Democrats, much the way they approved Trump’s big tax cuts bill last year.

The 2025 tax cuts package also included a sizable increase of about $175 billion for the military.

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.