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The high court strikes down campaign spending limits, citing First Amendment protections in a 6-3 decision

On the final day of rulings for the Supreme Court’s current term, the top US court overruled a case that would limit campaign spending by rejecting restrictions on coordinated spending efforts between political parties and their candidates on free speech grounds.

The court handed down the ruling on Tuesday in a 6-3 split, with the six conservative judges in the majority, citing free speech grounds, and the three liberal judges dissenting.

The Supreme Court ruled that a spending cap on campaign spending, with input from candidates, violates the United States Constitution’s First Amendment after a lower court upheld the limits.

The decision, stemming from a Republican-led lawsuit, strikes down a provision of a more than 50-year-old federal election law limiting coordinated party spending. Among the Republican candidates at the centre of the lawsuit is now Vice President JD Vance. Vance was running for the US Senate in Ohio when the lawsuit challenging the restrictions was filed in 2022.

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 regulates fundraising and spending in US elections by limiting the amount that can be spent on a candidate, aiming to prevent corruption.

Under that law, spending by a political party to advocate for or against a candidate that is not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign is considered an “independent expenditure” – and not subject to a cap.

Spending that is coordinated between a party and a campaign, however, has been restricted.

Tuesday’s decision overruled a 2001 decision in which the Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee challenged the rule against the Federal Election Commission, but the high court had upheld the limits on a vote of 5-4.

In 2024, the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals had also upheld the limits.

On appeal, the plaintiffs said that developments in campaign finance over the intervening decades, including shifts in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, had eroded the rationale for that 2001 ruling and urged the justices to overrule it.

Then, when Donald Trump took office, the Federal Election Commission declined to defend the provision of federal law challenged by Vance and the other plaintiffs. The Supreme Court appointed lawyer Roman Martinez to do so. It also granted a request by the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to intervene to defend the spending limits.

These spending limits have varied by state, being lower in states with smaller populations and higher in those with larger populations. In 2025, restrictions ranged from about $127,000 to $3.9m for Senate candidates and from approximately $63,000 to $127,000 for House of Representatives candidates.

The Supreme Court issued its campaign finance ruling with the November midterm elections looming, as President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans seek to retain control of Congress.

The three major Republican committees – the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee — ended May with $256m in cash and no debt. That was more than double the roughly $126m held by their Democratic counterparts, who also carried more than $18m in debt.

Election implications

The Supreme Court has issued multiple rulings during its current term that have election implications.

The justices on Monday backed state laws that allow mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted, rejecting a Republican-led challenge to a five-day grace period in Mississippi and dealing a setback to Trump.

The court in April gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, opening the door for Republican-led Southern states to dismantle Democratic-held majority-Black and majority-Latino districts ahead of the midterms. Black and Latino voters tend to support Democratic candidates.

That decision prompted several Republican-led states to pursue redrawn electoral maps ahead of the midterms in an effort to threaten US House seats long considered safely Democratic.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that states can ban transgender women from competing in female school and college sports.

The court considered cases from students in two different states who had challenged bans on participation. The two states, Idaho and West Virginia, enacted laws that required public school and college sports teams to compete in accordance with their sex recorded at birth.

One of the two challenges said the ban violates equal rights protections in the US Constitution. The other said it contradicts civil rights laws.

More than two dozen states have enacted bans since Idaho did so in 2020.

Under those state bans, a transgender woman – a biological male who identifies as a woman – is not permitted to compete in female sports at schools and colleges.

All nine justices on the court decided the state bans do not violate a civil rights law called Title IX which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools.

But the judges were split along ideological lines on whether the bans contravene the constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The six conservative justices said it did not violate the constitution but the three liberal justices disagreed.

“The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh who authored the ruling.

In her partial dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority opinion had applied “a diminished view of equal protection” to sports.

The challenge launched in Idaho came from a transgender woman, Lindsay Hecox, a long distance runner, who lodged it shortly after the law was enacted. She was later granted an injunction by both a district court and an appeals court.

State lawmaker Barbara Ehardt, who introduced the law, said at the time of its passing that it would ensure “boys and men will not be able to take the place of girls and women in sports because it’s not fair”.

But in the appeals ruling, a panel of three judges found that the Idaho law violated constitutional rights. They said the state had failed to provide evidence that its ban protects “sex equality and opportunity for women athletes”.

President Donald Trump made the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports a regular focus of his 2024 election campaign. Last year, he signed an executive order that aimed to ban transgender women from competing on female sports teams in schools and colleges.

Following that decision, the NCAA, the governing body for US college sports, banned transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

Supporters of the bans argued that transgender women had a biological advantage over athletes who were recorded female at birth.

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced in March it was going to limit the women’s category of Olympic sports to biological females, it said its working group reviewed the latest scientific evidence over the previous 18 months and had concluded there was a “clear consensus”, external that “male sex provides a performance advantage in all sports and events that rely on strength, power and resistance” .

Those who opposed the bans argue that they unfairly discriminated against transgender students and dispute whether there is a scientific consensus that transgender women and girls have an inherent advantage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the outcome was closer than most had predicted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress added birthright citizenship to the immigration laws in 1952.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of the justices registered a dissent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I will continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength. This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed Monday to hear a case over Arizona’s election law requiring documentary proof of citizenship in voting.

The high court will hear arguments over whether federal law prohibits such a law when voting in state elections. The court will hear the case during its next term which starts in October.

It is already illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal and state elections. Some municipalities allow noncitizen voting in local elections.

President Donald Trump has called for a national proof-of-citizenship requirement in elections while continuing to repeat unfounded claims of election fraud. The SAVE Act, a bill being mulled by Congress that Trump is in support of, includes a proof-of-citizenship requirement which Trump is in support of.

In 2022, the Arizona legislature adopted a law requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote on a state form. Documentary proof of citizenship that is allowable under Arizona’s law includes but is not limited to a birth certificate and a passport.

Nonprofit advocacy organizations Mi Familia Vota and Voto Latino filed the lawsuit challenging the proof-of-citizenship requirement.

The Republican National Committee appealed a lower court decision that struck down the proof-of-citizenship law.

The legislature also passed a law outlining how state election officials review voter rolls, putting in place a procedure to cancel the voter registrations of noncitizens.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on whether police may obtain cellphone data to find crime suspects.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices said this location data showing where a cellphone user has traveled is personal and private and subject to the protection of the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.

Justice Elena Kagan said these “records serve as a personal journal of a user’s movements.”

She said the data “resembles other private materials—think of emails, documents, photographs, or calendars—that even if stored on Google’s servers, a user reasonably views as his own…and reasonably expects to be shielded from the inquisitive eyes of the government.”

Because an “individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in his cellphone location data,” she said police investigators need a valid search warrant from a magistrate.

The court stopped short of deciding the proper basis for a search warrant in such cases. Instead, the justices sent the case back to judges in Virginia.

But the outcome casts doubt on “geofence warrants.”

In recent years, police have gone to Google and cellphone companies seeking tracking data on cellphones that were at a crime scene. Some times, they have had a warrant from a magistrate.

Civil libertarians say the use of this tracking data raises the specter of mass surveillance on innocent people.

Police and government lawyers say no one has a reasonable right to privacy when they are walking on a sidewalk or driving down the street.

The case before the court arose from the armed robbery conviction of a Virginia man who stole $195,000 from a credit union in a small town near Richmond.

By the time police arrived, the robber had fled. But surveillance cameras showed he was carrying a gun and a cellphone.

Lacking other leads, detective Joshua Hilton asked a judge to issue a special type of warrant seeking information from Google.
Referred to as a “geofence warrant,” it seeks data from phones in a particular area at a particular time.

The detective sought data on phones that were within 150 yards of the credit union within one hour of the late afternoon robbery.

After examining and paring down the data, the detective asked for the phone records of Okello Chatrie. Then, with a search warrant of his home, investigators found two robbery-style demand notes, a semi-automatic pistol and about $100,000 in cash.

A judge refused to suppress the evidence from an allegedly unconstitutional “search”, and Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea.
The full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals split evenly on the legality of the geofence warrant, and the Supreme Court agreed to decide the issue in Chatrie vs. U.S.

Usually investigators obtain warrants to search the home or vehicle of a known crime suspect.

The new and disputed geofence warrrants seek to find a suspect by examining data on the cellphones that were at the scene of a crime.

The FBI used this cellphone data in 2021 to identify suspects who broke through police barracks on Jan. 6, 2021, and pushed their way into the Capitol to disrupt the official counting of electoral votes.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed on the outcome in Chatrie vs. U.S.

In a 21-page dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito said the court had “carefully set the stage for its planned performance: striking a pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age. I cannot support this irresponsible escapade.”

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed in a one-paragraph dissent. “Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in data about his public movements that he voluntarily disclosed to Google,” she said.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Monday turned away Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s defamation suit against CNN, refusing to reconsider the high bar for press freedom set in the New York Times vs. Sullivan case.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.

The no-comment decision may signal the justices are not anxious to revisit another civil rights era landmark.

But the Dershowitz lawsuit may have been a less than ideal test case.

He sued CNN for $300 million, alleging its commentators distorted his arguments during President Trump’s first impeachment trial before the Senate.

He lost before a federal district judge and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Judges said he had presented no evidence of “actual malice” or knowing falsehoods, citing the doctrine set in the landmark decision.

Dershowitz’s appeal urged the Supreme Court to reconsider and discard the “actual malice” rule or to limit its use against private citizens who are treated as public figures.

In 1964, a unanimous Supreme Court said the 1st Amendment’s protection for the freedom of speech and the press limited state libel verdicts.

An all-white Alabama jury had awarded a $500-million judgment to Montgomery city commissioner L.B. Sullivan over a fund-raising ad for the Rev. Martin Luther King that had appeared in the New York Times.

The ad did not mention Sullivan by name but he said he was defamed by the ad’s criticism of the police.

Reversing that verdict, the court’s opinion said the 1st Amendment was intended to protect debate and criticism of public officials.

With that goal in mind, the justices barred defamation suits over minor or honest mistakes and said plaintiffs must show the defendants displayed “actual malice” by making statements they knew were false or showed a “reckless disregard” for the truth.

The decision was later extended to include public figures like Dershowitz.

In 2020, he defended President Trump’s conduct and told senators it fell short of an impeachable offense.

The House had accused Trump of threatening to withhold military aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.

In response to a question about an alleged quid pro quo, Dershowitz said a president can make deals that are in the public interest or his political interest, but not for a corrupt personal benefit.

“If a President does something which he believes will help get him elected — in the public interest — that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” he said.

That statement drew sharp and immediate criticism on CNN.

Commentator Paul Begala asserted the “the Dershowitz doctrine would make presidents immune from every criminal act.”

CNN aired the full video of Dershowitz’s testimony and invited him to appear twice in the next two days to clarify his comments.

Months later, he filed a lawsuit alleging defamation and said CNN had perpetrated “a deliberate scheme to defraud its own audience.”

His suit was dismissed by judges who said he did not have enough evidence to send the case to a trial.

“In his zealous and highly scrutinized representation, Dershowitz made a spontaneous series of remarks before Congress that, he says, were misinterpreted by pundits,” Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee wrote for the 11th Circuit Court.

“If anything, the evidence shows that they believed in the truth of their reporting, and that they formed their opinions independently. Without evidence of actual malice Dershowitz’s defamation claim cannot go forward,” she said.

June 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that Congress’ restriction of the president from firing independent agency employees without cause violates the separation of powers.

The court upheld President Donald Trump‘s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, overturning 90 years of precedence. The ruling came down along ideological lines with the conservative majority upholding Slaughter’s firing in a 6-3 decision.

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said Congress’ “for cause” removal protections, meant to shield independent agencies from political influence, violate the separation of powers.

“What text, history, and structure settle, our precedent confirms — the president may remove his subordinates at will,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the minority opinion that the decision has given the president “far greater power than ever before.”

“It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him. In granting the President this unbridled authority, the Court upends its precedent, misconstrues our history, and sheds any pretense of judicial modesty. I respectfully dissent.”

The court’s decision upends the precedent set in 1935 in the case Humphrey’s Executor vs. United States. The high court in that case ordered that Congress could restrict the president from firing members of the FTC without cause.

“Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work with, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work,” Roberts wrote. “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.”

While the high court allowed Trump to fire Slaughter, it rejected his bid to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve for the moment.

Trump attempted to pause a federal court ruling that prevented him from firing Cook last year. A lawsuit was filed challenging the attempt. In a 5-4 ruling Monday, the Supreme Court rejected the attempt by Trump.

Roberts penned the majority opinion in this case as well, joining the three liberal justices and conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“Not only the fact of independence but also the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design,” Roberts wrote.

June 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear President Donald Trump‘s request for the panel to overturn a ruling that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.

Trump sought to have his $5 million civil penalty tossed, but the high court’s decision Monday leaves that in place, along with a separate $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages she was awarded for defamation.

A jury awarded the damages in 2023 after finding him liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s and for defaming her by denying the allegations in 2019.

An appeals court also upheld the verdict in 2024. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Trump’s lawyers failed to show any errors in the ruling that would lead to a new trial.

Trump has denied Carroll’s allegations since she first made them and called the $5 million judgment excessive.

The US Supreme Court will not hear an appeal requested by President Donald Trump to review the civil case that found he defamed and sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll.

A New York jury awarded Carroll $5m (£3.6m) in damages in 2023 over her civil claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, and then branded the incident a hoax on social media.

Trump denied the allegations and repeatedly claimed that the judge who oversaw the civil trial improperly allowed evidence to be presented that affected how the jury viewed him.

A federal appeals court agreed with the jury’s verdict last year and said a new trial was not warranted. Trump then asked the highest court to intervene.

The Supreme Court gave no details about their decision not to take up the case, as is customary.

It was Trump’s final hope of overturning the jury’s unanimous verdict and means he will have to pay Carroll the damages she had been awarded.

“The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes,” a spokesman for Trumps legal team told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.

“President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he continues to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again.”

Caroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s decision “affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict that President Donald J Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E Jean Carroll”.

“His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed and today’s ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions,” she added.

Carroll’s counsel had not previously commented on the president’s decision to bring a challenge to the Supreme Court.

In the petition, Trump’s lawyers argued Carroll’s lawyer should not have let jurors see the 2005 Access Hollywood tape that showed the president saying he groped and kissed women.

Trump’s comments about the jury’s findings in the case led a separate jury to order him to pay Carroll $83m for defaming her. A panel of federal judges denied his appeal of that decision in September.

While Trump was found to have defamed and sexually abused Ms Carroll, the jury rejected her claim of rape as defined in New York’s penal code.

Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 81, sued Trump for attacking her in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room in Manhattan. The defamation stemmed from Trump’s post on his Truth Social platform in 2022 denying her claim.

Trump has said Carroll was “not my type” and that she had lied.

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.”

The 250th anniversary of America’s liberation from a king kicked off with a campaign-style rally on the National Mall by President Trump, whose face already stares down from banners fluttering from federal buildings across the nation’s capital.

The images illustrate how the president has dominated daily life since returning to power, evoking more the style of a monarch than the leader of the world’s oldest democracy. But more than anything, it is how he has wielded that power that has led to comparisons of an imperial reign.

Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has nominated one of his personal lawyers to serve as attorney general, ordered the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies, deployed the U.S. Marines to the nation’s second largest city and leveraged the presidency to enrich himself and his family.

He has demanded that comedians who mock him be fired, has slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, has pushed to seize control of elections, has filed lawsuits against news organizations whose coverage he disliked and has sued his own government seeking $10 billion in taxpayer money.

Trump also is the only convicted felon to hold the presidency, and a separate felony indictment over his attempts to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 election was dismissed only after he was reelected four years later despite those facts.

With the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding approaching, Trump’s own celebrations have overshadowed the bipartisan, congressionally authorized commission that was supposed to coordinate events commemorating the moment. He plans to return to the National Mall on July Fourth for what he calls a “Trump rally.”

The president’s actions have led to comparisons with King George III, the British monarch whose rule inspired the American Revolution. It is a parallel Trump rejects.

“I’m not a king,” he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” earlier this year. “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

A different view of the presidency

There is a long American political traditional of opponents reviling presidents as kings. But Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian, said the label fits differently on Trump.

“It’s more about how he imagines who is he and what the presidency is,” Zelizer said. “We’re celebrating founding principles, and that was a driving issue — fears of how a centralized power can be corrupted. And here we are again.”

When King Charles III visited Trump this year, the official White House X account posted an image of the two men with the caption “Two Kings.” At the start of his second term, Trump declared he had ended a New York City transportation program and posted: “LONG LIVE THE KING.” The posts also seemed to indicate a willingness to leverage the label and the reaction it provokes in his critics.

The main resistance movement in Trump’s second term has adopted the slogan “No Kings.” Ezra Levin of the group Indivisible said activists were thinking ahead to 2026 and the America 250 celebration when they chose the label.

“It looks like the same kind of tyranny we were rebelling against 250 years ago, the type of domination of Americans by a secret police force that’s murdering people in the streets like in Minneapolis this year and in Boston in 1770,” Levin said, referring to demonstrations against the administration’s immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two protesters this year by federal officers.

When asked for comment, the White House referred to Trump’s statements about his use of executive power. The president has weighed in multiple times defending his maximalist approach.

During his first term, he referred to Article II of the Constitution when he told participants in a youth summit, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” while declaring that it “gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.” He told the New York Times in an interview this year that the only check on his global power was “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Yet he also has said that portrayals of his approach as authoritarian were wrong: “I’m not a dictator,” he told reporters last year. In response to a question about whether he was concentrating power in the presidency, Trump told Time in an interview last year, “I don’t think so. I think I’m using it properly, and I’m also using it as per my election.”

Supreme Court has sided with him

With a deferential, Republican-controlled Congress, courts have become the last check on Trump. The president has harshly criticized judges who have ruled against him, and his administration has sometimes defied their orders.

Yet his quest to expand presidential power has been aided by the conservative majority — including three of his appointees — on the U.S. Supreme Court, which has sided with Trump numerous times after lower court rulings hampered him.

In the middle of his 2024 campaign, the high court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. The decision derailed multiple investigations stemming from Trump’s first term, including the one focused on his attempts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Trump has argued the courts cannot constrain the president on key issues, including his claims that he has the ability to fire members of independent agencies. The most notorious example was in 2024, when a judge asked during the immunity case whether a president could be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of a political rival. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, answered with a “qualified yes.”

Sauer is now solicitor general, the administration official who oversees arguments before the high court. He has continued to insist that courts cannot review presidential acts.

“Once the president has made a determination … at that point, there’s no work for the reviewing court to do,” Sauer said during Supreme Court arguments in a case over whether Trump could fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.

But the Supreme Court has allowed Cook to remain on the board while it considers the case. The majority also slapped down his global tariffs, finding that only Congress had the authority to impose them.

Such rulings demonstrate that presidential power does have its limits, according to John Yoo, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley who served in the George W. Bush administration.

“The presidency today, even when colored by President Trump’s worst excesses, is not a monarchy,” he said.

Direct financial enrichment

Trump was the richest man to ever become president. During his first term, he was criticized for owning properties where foreign dignitaries and others hoping to curry his favor spent lavishly. The conflicts of interest have escalated in his second term.

Trump launched cryptocurrencies before and after returning to office. By conservative estimates, one has pulled in $320 million this year alone, while another sold $550 million worth of tokens. A third received a $2-billion investment from a foreign wealth fund.

Trump took a new step earlier this year, filing a private $10-billion lawsuit against the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first term. His Department of Justice directed the IRS to settle the litigation to create a $1.776-billion fund to pay damages to people who claimed the federal government unfairly prosecuted them.

The administration pulled back the settlement amid an outcry from congressional Democrats and some Republicans. But Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump who is now acting attorney general, said at least one provision remains — a ban on the IRS auditing Trump.

Zelizer said Trump’s financial entanglements might be the most monarchical part of his administration.

“We have not seen a person who has a business operation of this scale and scope benefiting directly from the decisions he makes,” Zelizer said.

Targeting political rivals

The Justice Department’s role in the IRS lawsuit is one example of how Trump has decreed that executive branch employees should act as agents of his will.

In breaching what is supposed to be a firewall between the White House and Justice Department, Trump has demanded that federal prosecutors target his foes. In one social media post last year, he called out by name Pam Bondi, who was attorney general at the time, in pushing her to prosecute several of his political opponents: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote.

Indictments followed shortly after, including against former FBI Director James B. Comey and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James. The charges against both eventually were dismissed, but the department under Blanche filed new charges against Comey.

The pursuit is not limited to Trump enemies of the past.

For his 80th birthday this month, the president hosted a fight held by UFC — a company he invested in — on the White House lawn. The event was broadcast on a network owned by the son of one of the president’s major donors. The spectacle drew a rebuke from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a persistent critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender.

“The White House was built to serve the American people. Tonight it was used to promote a company the President owns stock in, sell subscriptions, promote corporate sponsors, push Trump crypto, and enrich the President and his family,” Newsom wrote on X. “The founders warned us about kings enriching themselves from public office.”

Days later, Newsom disclosed that Trump’s Department of Justice was investigating him and his wife.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Lindsay Whitehurst and Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the administration of US President Donald Trump to do away with a special legal status for Haitians and Syrians has sent shockwaves through communities across the country.

Immigration advocates say the 6-3 majority decision allowing the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will have a resounding impact on nationals of Haiti and Syria, raising the spectre of deportation and family separation, while likely leaving US employers in the lurch.

But the ruling is set to have more far-reaching implications, advocates have warned, creating a new tool to “empower Trump’s ICE deportation machine to take away legal protections and work permits from hundreds of thousands of people”, according to Hector Sanchez Barba, the president of the Mi Familia Vota advocacy group.

“This has been a defining element of the Trump- [White House adviser Stephen] Miller campaign of cruelty, revoking legal or temporary status, taking away work permits and forcing immigration judges to dismiss cases to accelerate detentions and deportations,” Barba said in a statement following Thursday’s ruling.

Here’s what to know.

What does the ruling mean for Haitians and Syrians on TPS?

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was created by Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. It allowed the executive branch, particularly the Secretary of Homeland Security, to declare that it is unsafe for foreigners to return to their home countries in light of extraordinary temporary conditions, such as armed conflict, natural disasters or other internal crises.

When a country is designated under TPS, its nationals are granted temporary legal status to reside and work in the US.

Haiti was first designated for TPS following the devastating earthquake in 2010, which killed over 250,000 people. The status has been repeatedly renewed as the Caribbean nation has suffered overlapping political, security and humanitarian crises.

Syria has been designated for the status since 2012, after the start of the civil war which lasted almost 14 years.

All told, about 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians are believed to be in this status.

Immigration advocates say the ruling will send TPS recipients scrambling to find other legal pathways to stay in the US or become deportable under Trump’s mass deportation drive.

Given that both countries have been designated for TPS for over a decade, the decision also raises the spectre of family separation, particularly for parents with children born in the US.

“Ending these protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians will tear families apart, disrupt workplaces and communities and place vulnerable individuals at risk,” Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad said.

“Many TPS holders have lived in our nation for years, raised American children, built businesses, contributed to our economy and become integral members of their communities.”

What does it mean for US employers?

Several labour organisations and unions have underscored the impact the sudden change in status could have on US industries.

Neidi Dominguez, the executive director of Organized Power in Numbers, called the ruling a “gut punch that requires workers, immigrant communities and the employers who rely on them to hit back together through our organising”.

“They work in hospitality, food service, education, construction, health care and every industry,” Dominguez said. “These are our coworkers, our neighbours and the backbone of the economy across this country, from service to construction and healthcare.”

The healthcare industry is expected to be particularly hard-hit by the decision, with the Migration Policy Institute finding that Haitian immigrants held over 103,000 healthcare jobs in 2021.

“This unconscionable ruling will leave thousands more immigrants – not just registered nurses and healthcare workers, but also teachers, airport workers, hard-working people – vulnerable to the Trump administration’s deadly, money-making deportation machine,” the National Nurses United union said in a statement.

“This decision will further strain our healthcare workforce and worsen the nurse staffing crisis,” it said.

Why does this extend beyond Haitian and Syrian TPS?

Lower courts had previously ruled that the Trump administration did not follow proper procedures, including conducting an inter-agency review to determine that conditions in both countries had improved, in terminating TPS for Haiti and Syria.

But, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, explained, the Supreme Court’s majority ruling did not even address whether the Department of Homeland Security Secretary had followed the legally mandated procedures in terminating TPS.

“Rather, the Court said that questions of whether the DHS secretary followed the law cannot be heard by courts in the first place,” he wrote, “meaning that in the future even an openly unlawful decision to grant or terminate TPS could be entirely insulated from judicial review”.

The ruling will further allow the Trump administration to “return to federal court in other cases and overturn decisions ruling against the termination of TPS for countries such as Venezuela, Somalia, Ethiopia and others”, he added.

Angelica Sedgwick Oun, a US immigration researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the ruling “leaves the DHS secretary with unfettered power to make a life-and-death decision about whether it is safe enough to send someone back to a country facing rampant violence, like Haiti, or conflict, like Syria, without meaningfully consulting on human rights conditions there”.

What comes next?

Because the Supreme Court is the top appellate court in the US, there is little recourse available through the judiciary.

But an array of advocacy groups have called on Congress to intervene.

In a rare bipartisan move on immigration, the US House of Representatives in April passed an extension to Temporary Protected Status for Haitians until 2029. The Senate has not yet taken up the measure.

Others have called on Congress to pass legislation to assert a process for courts to review any TPS terminations.

WASHINGTON  — Licensed gun owners have a right to carry a concealed firearm into stores and other private places unless the owner objects, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The 6-3 decision extends gun rights and strikes down laws in Hawaii, California, New York, New Jersey and Maryland.

Those measures would prohibit carrying guns onto private property that is open to the public unless the owner has expressly authorized them.

“This regime hobbles what the 2nd Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives. We hold that the law is unconstitutional,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said for the court.

The new laws, if upheld, would “impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the state’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit. When these permit holders leave home in the morning, … they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats.”

The three liberals dissented, saying the law would protect property owners who don’t want guns in their stores.

“There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Trump administration lawyers had joined a coalition of Hawaii gun owners in urging the court to strike down these blue state laws in the case of Wolford vs. Lopez.

They said the laws, if enforced, would mean “a person carrying a handgun for self-defense commits a crime by entering a mall, a gas station, a convenience store, a supermarket, a restaurant or a coffee shop.”

This litigation is part of much broader debate over where guns may be permitted or prohibited.

Four years ago, the justices ruled that law-abiding persons had a right to obtain a permit to carry a concealed gun when they left home. They also agreed there are “sensitive places” where guns may be prohibited, such as schools, courts and other government buildings.

In response, lawmakers in California and Hawaii adopted their own lists of “sensitive places.” They imposed restrictions on concealed weapons at parks, beaches, playgrounds, places of worship and public transit as well as bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

Gun owners sued but the 9th Circuit Court refused to block most of those restrictions in a single 83-page opinion covering Hawaii and California. Both states would prohibit carrying guns onto private property open to the public without the owner’s consent.

The 9th Circuit upheld that measure in principle but said California went too far by requiring the owner to post a prominent sign expressly authorizing guns.

“While today’s ruling in Wolford is disappointing, owners still have every right to decide whether firearms are allowed in their stores and businesses,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment Litigation at Everytown Law. “The Supreme Court may have changed the default rule, but it cannot take away a private property owner’s authority over their own land.”

The Firearms Policy Coalition said the court had properly protected gun rights and barred states from carving out their “own regional version of the 2nd Amendment.”

“The historical record does not support forcing peaceable people to obtain advance permission before carrying for self-defense in places held open to them,” the group said.

Last week, the court upheld gun rights in a Texas case and said the government may not make it a crime for an “unlawful user” of a drug such as marijuana to own a gun.

June 25 (Asia Today) — A South Korean court has again rejected a request to preserve ballots, ballot boxes and other election materials kept at a counting center in Seoul’s Songpa District.

The First Civil Division of the Seoul Eastern District Court, led by Presiding Judge Joo Jin-am, dismissed an appeal Tuesday filed by the Freedom and Innovation party against the chair of the Songpa District Election Commission.

The materials were stored at a counting center inside the Olympic Park Handball Gymnasium.

The court rejected the party’s initial evidence-preservation request on June 12, prompting the party to appeal.

Freedom and Innovation claimed that ballot-paper shortages, the transportation of ballot boxes and other alleged irregularities during the June 3 nationwide local elections could have affected the voting and counting results.

The party sought court preservation of ballots, ballot boxes and related materials for possible use in future litigation.

The court, however, found that the application failed to satisfy legal requirements including relevance and necessity.

Judges said there was no sufficient connection between the ballot shortages and the requested preservation of ballots and ballot boxes from polling places where voting had been completed normally.

The court also determined that obtaining the materials would not help establish the disputed issues in an underlying lawsuit.

It said a separate preservation order was unnecessary because election law already requires the materials to be retained.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260625010009154

June 25 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Hawaiian law that required people to ask permission to carry a concealed firearm onto a private property.

The Court’s majority, in a 6-3 ruling, said that Hawaii cannot block a properly licensed person from carrying a concealed weapon on private properties that are open to the public.

Hawaii was one of five states that enacted similar laws after the Court in a 2018 ruling said that states could not limit gun licenses to “exceptional cases” because it violated the 2nd Amendment right to carry a firearm.

The law required people who wanted to carry their firearm in places such as gas stations, restaurants, grocery and other stores, dry cleaners and other properties that are “open to the public” to get permission to carry their gun.

“Under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner’s express authorization,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

“The effect of this new rule is to impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the State’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit,” Alito wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed with the majority that the Hawaii law is an “attempt to end-run our Second Amendment precedents,” suggesting instead that it applies the first principle of property law, the right to exclude.

In addition to noting that Hawaii has a long history of restrictive gun laws, Brown Jackson said it enacted the permission law in order to prevent confusion among property owners that federal law had affected traditional expectations in the state.

“The public might well have an implied license to enter private property open to the public, and such permission might generally include the ability to enter armed,” she wrote in the dissent.

“But,” she wrote, “any such license is not a matter of right — a license is a creature of state law and custom, and it can vary accordingly.”

WASHINGTON — Asylum seekers may be turned away without a hearing at the southern border, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a historic retreat from the promise of relief for those who say they are fleeing persecution.

The justices split over whether this was a simple dispute over legal wording or a moral question involving desperate families.

Siding with the Trump administration, the court’s conservatives said the Refugee Act of 1980 offers a right to seek asylum to migrants who “arrive in the United States” but not those who are turned back when they approach a border crossing or a port of entry.

“This case presents a straightforward question” that turns on the word “in,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a city, or a country — before the person enters that place.”

The liberal dissenters agreed with immigration rights lawyers who saw this as a nonsensical reading of the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the asylum law arose from the “international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.”

She cited the infamous voyage of the MS St. Louis in 1939. More than 900 Jewish refugees attempted to flee persecution in Nazi Germany by setting sail aboard the ship, which was turned away from Cuba and the United States.

Most of the passengers were returned to Europe, and several hundred died in the Holocaust, she said.

“Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past. Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U. S. soil,” Sotomayor wrote.

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.

The decision upholds a turn-back policy that began in 2016 as an emergency response to a surge of Haitian immigrants at the San Ysidro border crossing.

The Department of Homeland Security said these asylum seekers must wait on the Mexican side of the border until they could return for a scheduled interview. The policy was extended to other border crossings, but it was challenged as illegal in federal court in San Diego.

Last year, a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those restrictions were illegal if they prevented migrants from applying for asylum.

“To ‘arrive’ means ‘to reach a destination,’” wrote Judge Michelle Friedland. “A person who presents herself to an official at the border has ‘arrived.’”

She said the “government’s reading would reflect a radical reconstruction of the right to apply for asylum because it would give the executive branch vast discretion to prevent people from applying by blocking them at the border.”

The 2-1 decision upheld a federal judge in San Diego who ruled for migrants who had filed a class-action suit and said they were wrongly denied an asylum hearing.

But Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to review and reverse the appellate ruling, noting 15 judges of the 9th Circuit joined dissents that called the decision “radical” and “clearly wrong.”

The administration argued federal immigration law “does not grant aliens throughout the world a right to enter the United States so that they can seek asylum.”

From abroad, they may “seek admission as refugees,” Sauer said, but the government may enforce its laws by “blocking illegal immigrants from stepping on U.S. soil.”

Defenders of the asylum system denounced the decision.

“We believe that today’s ruling violates international law, as well as the express intent of Congress,” said Erika Pinheiro, executive director of the migrant support organization Al Otro Lado, which led the legal fight. “For decades, the United States has allowed individuals and families who are fleeing persecution, torture and death to ask for protection at U.S. borders.”

“Cruelty is not a substitute for real solutions. Blocking people from seeking asylum at official ports of entry will do nothing to fix our broken immigration system, said Rebecca Cassler, senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council. “It only makes things more chaotic and dangerous for vulnerable families.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform applauded the decision.

“Our immigration laws are written to be pro-enforcement, not-anti-enforcement,” said Christopher J. Hajec, deputy general counsel of FAIR. “Because of this, courts that hamstring enforcement are often forced to violate basic logic, as the 9th Circuit did here. We are pleased the Supreme Court saw that the lower court’s reading would make immigration law incoherent, and reversed.”

The United States Supreme Court has sided with the maker of Roundup weedkiller in a ruling expected to block thousands of lawsuits alleging it failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.

The ruling on Thursday was tied to a case that came before the justices after a tidal wave of litigation that included some multibillion-dollar verdicts against the global agrochemical manufacturer Bayer, a Germany-based company that acquired Roundup when it bought its original producer Monsanto in 2018.

The decision is a victory for US President Donald Trump’s administration, but one that could be tricky politically since allies in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement want to rein in pesticide use.

The high court, in a 7-2 ruling, found that the company cannot face failure-to-warn lawsuits in state courts because federal regulations have found a cancer link unlikely and do not require a warning label.

The justices overturned a jury verdict in Missouri awarding $1.25m to a man named John Durnell who said he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of exposure to glyphosate in Roundup. The Supreme Court agreed with Bayer that a US law that governs pesticides precludes failure-to-warn claims that are brought under state law from moving forward in court.

Bayer shares jumped nearly 18 percent following the ruling.

Trump’s administration had backed Bayer in the case.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the ruling, said the US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has concluded glyphosate does not cause cancer and has not required a cancer warning on Roundup.

The law preempts Durnell’s claim because it “would require Monsanto to add a cancer warning to Roundup’s label even though federal law requires Monsanto to use the EPA-approved label without a cancer warning”, Kavanaugh wrote.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent joined by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, said that Durnell’s claim would impose equivalent labelling requirements on Monsanto that the federal law requires and so should not be preempted.

Jackson called the ruling “remarkable and regrettable, for it unjustifiably closes the courthouse doors to state tort plaintiffs like Durnell”.

Bayer acquired Roundup as part of its $63bn purchase of agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018. More than 100,000 plaintiffs have filed cases in US state and federal courts alleging a cancer link, and the German drugmaking and crop science company had said that the lawsuits could threaten its ability to supply the herbicide to farmers.

The torrent of litigation already prompted Bayer to remove glyphosate from its consumer version of Roundup. Bayer said before the Supreme Court ruled that a decision in its favour could largely end the Roundup litigation.

“The US Supreme Court decision is good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation. It should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles. The ruling should result in the dismissal of current warning-based claims and bar future failure-to-warn claims,” Bayer spokesperson Tino Andresen said in a statement.

The company emphasised throughout the litigation that the EPA repeatedly found that glyphosate does not cause cancer and approved its product labels without a warning.

Facing billions of dollars in potential liability, Bayer announced in February a proposed $7.25bn settlement to resolve tens of thousands of current and future lawsuits. The settlement would not affect claims that stem from pending appeals or that fall outside the deal, according to the company. Those amount to nearly $1bn, it said.

‘Disaster for public health’

Environmental activists and others criticised the court’s ruling on Thursday.

“Once again, the Supreme Court has sided with big business over people and the environment. Today’s ruling is a disaster for public health,” said Tarah Heinzen, legal director at the advocacy group Food and Water Watch.

“The harm from this decision will perpetuate our cancer, infertility and general chronic disease epidemic for generations to come,” said Kelly Ryerson, co-executive director of advocacy group American Regeneration and a Make America Healthy Again activist who posts on social media under the moniker “The Glyphosate Girl”.

The sprawling dispute centres on a US law called the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, that governs the sale and labelling of pesticides and bars states from imposing differing or additional requirements.

The measure prohibits pesticides that are “misbranded” with labels that lack an adequate warning to protect health and the environment.

Bayer has argued that Durnell’s claims are preempted by this law. The EPA has repeatedly approved labels without such a cancer warning, demonstrating that these products are not misbranded, the company said, adding that labels cannot be substantially changed without the agency’s approval.

Durnell’s lawyers said that despite the EPA’s registration of Roundup, the label may still be challenged as misbranded. They also said Durnell’s claims are not preempted because Missouri state law that requires products to adequately warn of dangers imposes the same requirements as FIFRA’s prohibition on misbranding.

‘A new era’

Union Investment fund manager Markus Manns called Thursday’s ruling a significant milestone for Bayer, adding that a decade after the Monsanto acquisition, the company is “entering a new era”.

“While future lawsuits are not entirely off the table, they will become considerably more difficult. A final breakthrough would come if the settlement is accepted by the plaintiffs and approved by the competent court in July. This would bring Bayer’s glyphosate litigation chapter to a definitive close, allowing management to fully refocus on operational and strategic matters,” Manns said.

Durnell sued Monsanto in Missouri state court in 2019, claiming it failed to warn users of the dangers associated with Roundup and glyphosate.

He was diagnosed with a rare and often aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer that starts in the white blood cells, and attributed the disease to his exposure to Roundup starting in 1996. For about 20 years, he was the “spray guy” for a neighborhood association in St Louis, killing weeds at local parks without protective equipment, according to court papers.

A jury sided with Durnell in 2023, and in 2025, a state appeals court upheld that verdict.