supreme court

April 10 (UPI) — President Donald Trump‘s tariffs are back in court Friday to decide on their legality.

The U.S. Court of International Trade will consider the president’s 10% global tariff that he created on Feb. 20 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his previous tariffs over his use of emergency powers. The new tariffs are based on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

That law allows the president to unilaterally surcharge imports up to 15% for up to 150 days “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

Challenging the new levies are Democratic-led states and small businesses.

“This is another case where the president invokes a statute to impose whatever tariffs he wants, its limits be damned,” the states wrote in court filings.

Timothy C. Brightbill, a trade lawyer for the Washington law firm Wiley Rein, told The New York Times that he expects the court to be “skeptical of President Trump’s ability to impose broad tariffs,” including the global 10% rate.

Brightbill said it could be months before the legal system can give a full verdict.

“By then, there will most likely be a new tariff regime in place,” Brightbill said.

The White House said in a statement that Trump was “lawfully using the executive powers granted to him” and the administration was “committed to robustly defending the legality of the president’s actions in court.”

“For over a century, Congress has supplemented the president’s constitutional power over foreign affairs and national security by delegating to him the authority to manage foreign trade in response to international conditions, including by imposing tariffs,” the administration said.

But critics say Trump’s position only includes the U.S trade deficit. They argue that the president is ignoring inflows of foreign capital and financial investment. Those help “balance” the deficit.

They argue that a balance-of-payments crisis is impossible because the United States stopped using the gold standard and a fixed exchange rate system in the 1970s.

“A balance-of-payments crisis is a currency crisis that was of great concern when Congress enacted Section 122, but which can no longer exist,” the states wrote in court filings.

There are 24 states in the suit, along with two small businesses: spice and e-commerce business Burlap & Barrel and Basic Fun!, a toy company that designs and markets Tonka, Lincoln Logs, K’nex and others. They filed separate suits against the tariffs, but the cases will be heard together.

“When these tariffs were first announced last April, we made two promises: we would not raise our prices, and we would not ask our partner farmers to absorb the costs,” Burlap & Barrel wrote on its website. “A year later, we’re proud to say we’ve kept those promises. This lawsuit is about protecting our ability to continue doing that.”

The plaintiffs are represented by the Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian firm that worked on the tariff case that the administration lost at the Supreme Court. The three-judge panel is made up of different judges from the previous panel at the Court of International Trade.

WASHINGTON — Morning broke in the Middle East on Wednesday with a wave of attacks by Iran. Air defenses in Kuwait were overwhelmed. Three dozen drones and 17 ballistic missiles were shot down over the United Arab Emirates. The most important oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia suffered a hit. Sirens flared in Tel Aviv, and a devastating drumbeat of Israeli strikes targeting Iran’s allies in Lebanon killed scores in Beirut.

A day after President Trump hailed a ceasefire in his war with the Islamic Republic, reversing course on his threat to escalate, the only country spared from attack appeared to be Iran itself.

The “fragile truce,” as Vice President JD Vance called it, began with a calculated show of force from an Iran militarily weakened by six weeks of U.S.-Israeli strikes, yet strategically positioned to press for sweeping concessions from an American president eager to end the war.

Strait flush

A naval vessel sails on March 1 in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which much of the world’s oil and gas passes.

(Sahar al Attar / AFP/Getty Images)

The president’s main conditions for a truce were the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and, through negotiations, a definitive end to Iran’s nuclear work. But Tehran offered no sign of relenting on its enrichment program, and by Wednesday afternoon, had warned that tanker traffic would halt through the strait until Israel paused its attacks in Lebanon.

It was the clearest demonstration yet of Iran’s emboldened position to use the strait — treated for decades as a free and open international waterway — as a bargaining tool, threatening its closure over any number of demands, or else implementing a toll system as reparations for its war damage.

By Friday, U.S. negotiators flying to Islamabad for talks can expect Iran’s hold on the strait to weigh against all other priorities, including American demands that Iran relinquish its right to enrich uranium, the source of decades of tortured diplomatic efforts.

The White House said that traffic had increased through the strait on Wednesday. But it also described reports of its closure, briefed to a displeased president, as “completely unacceptable,” serving as a stark reminder in the West Wing of the new world its war had brought.

James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the ceasefire framework “a foreign policy disaster” for the United States that revealed Iranian leverage long predicted by independent experts and intelligence analysts.

“Let’s assume the ceasefire actually takes hold — and as far as I can see, it hasn’t done so far,” Acton said. “Iran has the upper hand, and frankly, it’s not close.”

“The negotiations are likely to focus on opening the Strait of Hormuz, which is clearly Trump’s top goal, not Iran’s nuclear program,” he added. “Because Iran has demonstrated it can close the strait — and inflict large economic costs on the U.S. and large political costs on Trump — it now has plenty of leverage over the United States.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on Wednesday. Leavitt spoke to reporters on a range of topics including a two-week ceasefire deal between the U.S., Iran and Israel.

(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

Unclear terms

The Trump administration reportedly urged two allies of Tehran — China and Pakistan — to pressure the Iranians into a ceasefire ahead of a Tuesday evening deadline, self-imposed by Trump, to escalate the conflict. The resulting truce was described not in a shared statement among the warring parties, but in separate, differing social media posts that all but guaranteed misinterpretation between the two sides.

A statement from the Pakistanis, who have helped mediate the talks, said the ceasefire extended to hostilities in Lebanon. The Israeli statement said it did not; Trump’s post omitted any mention of Lebanon at all.

But the president’s statement did say that a 10-point plan from Iran could serve as the basis for negotiations over a long-term truce going forward. The White House was forced to walk that back Wednesday afternoon, claiming that Iran had presented its diplomats with another, secret 10-point plan substantially revised from those detailed in the press.

“They put forward a more reasonable and entirely different and condensed plan to the president and his team,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “The idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.”

In social media posts and interviews with select reporters on Wednesday, Trump appeared to suggest exactly that — floating sanctions relief for Tehran and proposing a plan to share revenue from a Strait of Hormuz toll system that could raise global oil prices while directly funding the Iranian government.

Limited achievements

Experts agree that the U.S.-Israeli campaign succeeded in significantly degrading Iran’s drone and ballistic missile infrastructure. But in a statement on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said any deal between Washington and Tehran had to include structural limits on those programs — suggesting concern in Israel that Iran could reconstitute its military within a matter of years.

Iran’s continued attacks on its neighbors Wednesday, its downing of American aircraft last week, and its retention of its nuclear material have raised doubts among U.S. allies about whether Washington’s military capabilities can deliver on its promises.

“There is less respect for what the United States — and Trump in particular — can accomplish, be it through military force or diplomacy, and for the strategic thinking that underlies U.S. policy,” said Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “These attitudes are even stronger in Europe, Russia and China.”

Iran’s military weaknesses have been uncovered as well. Few of its missiles and drones inflicted physical damage throughout Israel and the Arab world.

Yet the psychological impact — on local populations, on the economy of metropolitan Dubai, on the commercial shipping sector and the oil market — has proven Iran is capable of exacting greater pain than its conventional military capabilities would suggest.

Whether the United States can return the Strait of Hormuz to its status before the war, as a free and open waterway, may depend on longstanding allies that Trump has ostracized over the course of the war.

“We launched a war that affected the rest of the world, with little consideration for its effects,” said Dennis Ross, a veteran diplomat on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who served in the George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.

“When you berate allies and leave them out but expect them to be there when you need them, you discover that you don’t have them,” Ross added. “No one is going to assume that the U.S. is more reliable after this.”

What else you should be reading

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More to come,
Michael Wilner
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April 8 (UPI) — Republican Clay Fuller has claimed victory in Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s former House seat as Democrat Chris Taylor won a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.

The two contests were closely watched Tuesday as voters in Georgia and Wisconsin cast ballots in races Democrats hoped would help them regain ground ahead of November’s midterms.

Fuller, a district attorney in northwest Georgia, had secured President Donald Trump‘s endorsement and ran on a platform supporting many of the president’s key priorities: an America First economy, mass deportations, conservatism founded on Christianity and being tough on crime.

The District 14 runoff between Fuller and Democrat Shawn Harris was held after neither candidate won a majority in the March 10 special election, when Fuller trailed Harris by about 2 points.

During his victory speech Tuesday night, the former U.S. Air Force lieutenant thanked Trump for elevating his campaign with his endorsement.

“So much of what the story has been when this race started and so much of what you’re going to hear from the fake news media is that President Trump doesn’t mean anything to Georgia 14 anymore,” he told supporters.

“Well, you can see with the results on March 10 and you can see the results of what we’re seeing here today that President Trump is the most critical factor in our election, and he has made sure that we were going to win. He made sure that he was the ultimate trump card.”

With all 10 localities reporting late Tuesday, Fuller had secured about 72,304 votes for nearly 56% of the vote share compared to Harris’ 57,000 votes for 44.1%, according to unofficial results from the office of Georgia’s secretary of state.

The district is solidly Republican, with Greene winning District 14 with about 64.4% of the vote in 2024, the same year Trump carried the state.

Harris framed Tuesday’s election loss as a victory in the fight against Trump during his speech Tuesday night, noting that he had cut the GOP margin in the district to far fewer votes than the more than 108,000-vote margin Greene had won by in 2024.

“Donald Trump came right here to Rome, Ga., and didn’t do a damn thing,” he told supporters.

“We have absolutely no fear because we have Democrats, independents and, yes, Republicans voting for us because they are ready for change.”

The District 14 seat became available after Greene, a firebrand politician and former staunch Trump supporter, resigned in November as she sparred with the president, whom she accuses of distancing himself from his America First policies.

Harris had campaigned on supporting farmers, protecting SNAP benefits, defending Medicaid and Medicare, cutting the cost of living and fixing the U.S. immigration system.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the U.S.-based pro-Israel lobby, congratulated Fuller on his victory.

“Fuller replaces Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose tenure was marked by repeated efforts to undermine the U.S.-Israel relationship and disparage millions of pro-Israel Americans engaged in the democratic process,” AIPAC said in a statement.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, also congratulated Fuller.

“I was proud to have appointed Clay as District Attorney and even more proud to now see him take that same fighting spirit to Congress,” Kemp said online.

“Keep Chopping, Clay!”

In Wisconsin, Taylor, a Democrat-backed appeals judge, claimed victory in a seat on the state’s Supreme Court left vacant by retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley.

“Tonight, the people of Wisconsin stood up for our rights and freedoms, our democracy, our elections and a strong state Supreme Court that will protect the independence of our beloved state,” she said in her victory speech Tuesday night in Madison, Wis.

“Once again, Wisconsin showed the entire nation that we believe that the people should be at the center of government and the priority of our judiciary — not the billionaires, not the most powerful and privileged, but the people.”

With Taylor’s victory over Maria Lazar, a Republican-backed appeals judge, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court tilts even more heavily to the left, now with a 5-2 liberal majority.

During her speech, Taylor said Lazar had called her to concede the race.

Lazar confirmed the phone call in her own speech before supporters in Pewaukee on Tuesday night.

“I think that this race was run so that people in this state from now on will know that judicial races are not political races, and the next race and the next race and the next race we will keep fighting to put judges — good, talented judges with experience — on the bench and we will not take that status quo,” she said.

Justices serve a 10-year term on the bench, with no term limits.

Voters on Tuesday cast ballots to fill a state Supreme Court seat left vacant by retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley.

Last year, Democrat-endorsed Susan Crawford was elected to the court despite Elon Musk pouring millions into the race.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate and State Rep. Francesca Hong congratulated Taylor on her victory.

“Wisconsinites voted for a Supreme Court that will protect their rights and freedoms,” she said on social media.

“This shows voters are ready for leadership that represents our state motto — Forward.”

MADISON, Wis. — Democrats hoped to increase liberal control of the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin on Tuesday in an election that has focused largely on abortion rights as cases affecting congressional redistricting, union rights and other hot button issues also await in the perennial battleground state.

This year’s Supreme Court election stands in stark contrast to the swing state’s previous two, where national spending records were set in battles over majority control. Spending and national attention is down dramatically this year without control of the court at stake.

Democrats are looking to tighten their control of the court just months before a November election in which they seek to keep the governor’s office and flip the state Legislature, where Republicans have held the majority since 2011. Democrats aspire to undo a host of Republican-enacted laws that made Wisconsin a focal point for the nation’s conservative movement in the 2010s.

In Tuesday’s Supreme Court race, Democratic-backed Chris Taylor, a former state lawmaker who also worked for Planned Parenthood, faces Republican-supported Maria Lazar. Both Taylor and Lazar are state Appeals Court judges.

Liberals would increase their majority on the court to 5-2 from 4-3 with a Taylor win. That would lock in the liberal majority until at least 2030.

Liberals took control of the state’s top court in 2023, ending 15 years under a conservative majority. They held onto their majority with last year’s victory in a race that drew involvement from President Trump and billionaires George Soros and Elon Musk, who personally handed out $1 million checks to voters in the state.

Liberals argued that democracy was at stake in the 2025 election, noting that when the court was controlled by conservative justices in 2020 it came just one vote shy of siding with Trump in his attempt to invalidate enough votes to overturn his loss in that year’s presidential election.

Since liberals took control, the court has reversed several election-related rulings, including one that overturned a ban on absentee ballot drop boxes, and it is poised to once again be in the spotlight around the 2028 presidential election.

Races for the court are officially nonpartisan, but support for candidates breaks down mostly along partisan lines.

Taylor has focused much of her campaign on abortion rights, with one TV ad saying that “abortion is on the ballot.” In another ad, she criticized Lazar for calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 “very wise.”

Lazar, who was supported by anti-abortion groups in her run for the appeals court, tried to brand Taylor as nothing more than a politician who will push a partisan agenda on the court.

They sparred over each other’s partisanship during the campaign’s sole debate last week.

Lazar accused Taylor of being a “radical, extreme legislator” and a “judicial activist.” Taylor said that Lazar would bring “an extreme, right-wing political agenda to the bench.”

Lazar has had a much harder time getting her message out. Taylor had a large fundraising advantage and spent about nine times as much as Lazar on television ads, based on a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The liberal-controlled court has already struck down a state law banning abortion and ordered new legislative maps, fueling Democrats’ hopes of capturing a majority this November.

Taylor has been a judge since 2020 and before that she spent 10 years as a Democrat representing the liberal capital city of Madison in the state Assembly.

Lazar, a judge since 2015, previously worked four years under a Republican attorney general in the state Department of Justice. In that role, she defended a law enacted under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers.

A circuit court judge ruled in December that the law is unconstitutional, a decision expected to ultimately land before the state Supreme Court.

Lazar also defended laws passed by Republicans and signed by Walker implementing a voter ID requirement and restricting abortion access.

Democrats are optimistic given the past two Supreme Court elections, which saw candidates they backed winning by double digits.

The seat is open due to the retirement of a conservative justice. Another conservative justice is retiring next year, giving liberals a chance to take 6-1 control of the court if they win on Tuesday.

Bauer writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Why would an immigrant living here illegally risk jail and deportation by trying to vote? That has always puzzled me.

And why would a political pro waste time and money soliciting votes from noncitizens when there are millions of legal voters available to persuade?

The answer is that undocumented immigrants don’t. And neither do campaign consultants.

President Trump and MAGA Republicans who echo his diatribe are hallucinating or outright lying when they claim without evidence that there’s widespread fraud in American elections — specifically in blue states like California that vote for Democrats.

Trump reiterated the fabrication last week when he signed an executive order seeking to place tight federal controls on increasingly popular mail-in voting.

“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump reiterated. “Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on.”

“See you in court,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom replied.

California and several states partnered in filing a lawsuit accusing the president of an illegal power grab. They pointed out that states have a constitutional right to administer elections pretty much as they see fit.

Trump hypocritically voted by mail himself in a recent Florida special election.

“You know what, because I’m president of the United States,” he told reporters when asked about the vote. “I had a lot of different things” to do. For him, voting by mail was convenient.

As for the rest of us, apparently in Trump’s mind we don’t do anything important enough to warrant handy mail voting.

The reality is that egotistical Trump still can’t admit to himself that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden fair and square. Democrats must have cheated, he thinks — or says he does.

The main way Democrats cheat, Trump and his followers assert, is to round up noncitizens and register them to vote — especially immigrants from Latin America.

It’s nonsensical. As if some undocumented immigrant struggling to survive and dodge ICE agents really gives a rat who’s elected governor or senator. Voting fraudulently is a crime — a misdemeanor or a felony, punishable by a steep fine and/or jail time.

And a campaign pro is going to break the law by offering cash or groceries to a noncitizen for her vote? That would be felony stupid.

“We can’t get Latinos who have been here legally for three generations to vote. If you’re going to spend money getting votes, that’s where you’re going to spend it,” says Republican consultant Mike Madrid, who has written a book about Latino political influence.

“The notion that Democratic operatives are going after undocumented immigrants is absurd.”

People who migrated here illegally, Madrid adds, “don’t want to touch the government in any shape or form. They just want to put in a hard day’s work and retreat to the shadows. They couldn’t care less about politics and voting in the United States.”

No hard evidence of significant election fraud in America in recent years has been produced by Trump or anyone else.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate for governor, apparently was trying to impress Trump and win his endorsement by seizing more than 650,000 ballots cast in November’s Proposition 50 election.

The sheriff said he was investigating claims — unsubstantiated — of election fraud. But the project is now on hold. A good place for it.

It was a waste of the sheriff’s resources to collect the ballots and would be an even bigger misuse of personnel and money to sift through all of those documents in a fruitless search for fraud.

I called Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin, a Democrat who was Santa Cruz County’s chief elections official for 27 years. She chairs the Assembly Elections Committee.

In all of those years supervising elections, Pellerin told me, she encountered only one clear case of fraud. A landlord snatched a ballot that had been mailed to a tenant and illegally cast it.

But a voter must sign the envelope containing a mailed ballot and the landlord’s signature didn’t match the intended voter’s as given when she originally registered. Election officials contacted the intended voter, who said she hadn’t received her ballot yet. The landlord was prosecuted and convicted.

Signatures are checked with the use of technology in California. That’s the main method of verifying a mailed ballot’s legality.

Pellerin says her own signature didn’t match up once. “I got sloppy and my signature had changed since I registered 20 years earlier.” She was contacted by an elections official and her ballot ultimately was counted.

In every election, she says, there are cases of a mother signing the ballot for a daughter who’s away at college, or someone signing for an aging parent. The signatures invariably don’t match and the voters are contacted.

But that’s about the extent of so-called cheating, Pellerin says.

“Immigrants are here to make their lives better,” she says. “They’re not going to risk any path to citizenship by trying to participate in an election.”

When voters register, they must answer under penalty of perjury whether they’re a citizen.

Trump’s convoluted intervention in state-operated voting would, among other things, direct the United States Postal Service to design new envelopes with bar codes that verify voter legality. The feds would refuse to send ballots to people deemed ineligible to cast them.

Gosh, what could possibly go wrong under the Trump administration?

Californians have embraced mail-in voting. In the gubernatorial election 40 years ago, only 9% of ballots were cast by mail; 20 years ago, 42% were. In November, it was up to 89%.

But baseless claims by Trump and his grovelers of “cheating” will persist. It fires up the conservative base and raises political money.

It also maligns noncitizens and dedicated elections officials who keep voting fraud-free.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: California election experts sound alarm as rate of rejected ballots quadruples
What the … : Californians may need to mail ballots early as Supreme Court signals support for new election day deadline
The L.A. Times Special: The loophole that keeps a Trump loyalist serving as L.A.’s top federal prosecutor

Until next week,
George Skelton

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WASHINGTON — President Trump spent much of last week railing against the courts. The courts, in turn, spent it ruling against him.

While Trump made history as the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court, where he stared down justices as they questioned his bid to end birthright citizenship, quieter courtrooms across the country were challenging his agenda.

The challenges came in on immigration, on his White House ballroom project, on his own liability in the run-up to Jan. 6.

“Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday.

By Friday, judges had served him loss after loss, each finding the administration had taken executive authority too far, too fast.

Immigration rulings

On immigration, the keystone of Trump’s policy platform, he faced a number of setbacks.

On Monday, a federal judge in California took a step that would allow a class-action lawsuit against the administration’s handling of certain asylum claims. The case concerns thousands of asylum seekers who had made appointments with immigration officials by using a Biden administration phone app called CBP One.

In many cases, migrants from around the world had waited months in Mexico for their turn to speak with border agents after securing appointments through the app.

Those appointments were suddenly canceled after Trump took office. The judge certified those asylum seekers as a class that can challenge the administration’s action in court.

In a similar case, a federal judge in Boston ruled Tuesday that the administration had unlawfully terminated the temporary legal status of as many as 900,000 immigrants who entered the country after using the phone app. Tens of thousands of those told by the administration to leave the U.S. “immediately” have since left or been deported.

The judge ordered the administration to reinstate the legal status and work authorization of those remaining.

“Today’s ruling is a clear rejection of an administration that has tried to erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a legal organization that represented the migrants.

Sanctuary laws

Also Tuesday, a federal judge threw out a Justice Department lawsuit that accused Denver and Colorado of interfering with immigration enforcement and claimed that the city and state’s “sanctuary” laws violated the Constitution.

The ruling found that the federal government had not shown it could override state and local decisions about how to use their own resources. The Constitution, the judge said, does not let Washington commandeer local governments.

“Colorado gets to make a choice: How will our law enforcement operate in Colorado. The federal government, they don’t get to make that choice for us,” Colorado Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser said.

Birthright citizenship

The next day, the Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical of Trump’s claim that birthright citizenship doesn’t apply to babies born in the U.S. to parents who are here unlawfully or temporarily.

Conservative and liberal judges alike questioned the arguments of Solicitor Gen. John Sauer, who represented the administration, saying he relied on “some pretty obscure sources,” including precedents that dated back to Roman law.

Trump, sitting feet from the proceedings, left the Supreme Court building halfway through.

“We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” he wrote shortly after departing.

Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University professor who studies immigration enforcement, wrote on Substack after the Supreme Court hearing that, on immigration policy, there is always a gap between what an administration says it will do and what the government can actually deliver. That gap, he argued, is particularly evident in the second Trump administration.

“The White House has built its political identity around the promise of mass deportation, and the rhetoric has been relentless: record arrests, expanded detention, military flights, the spectacle of enforcement as governance,” Kocher wrote.

“But over the past several days,” he added, “developments from multiple fronts suggests that the operational foundations of the mass deportation campaign are more fragile than the administration would like anyone to believe.”

Defying judicial orders

In some cases, the Trump administration has been undeterred by judicial orders to stop certain practices. In a March ruling unsealed Thursday, a federal judge found that Border Patrol agents had continued making illegal arrests in California’s Central Valley without reasonable suspicion.

The government’s explanations for the arrests, wrote Judge Jennifer Thurston in Fresno, “rely on unsupported assumptions, hunches and generalizations about the relationship between a person’s apparent status as a day laborer and their immigration status.”

White House ballroom

Trump had kicked the week off March 29 by touting his 90,000-square-foot ballroom project, showing designs to reporters on Air Force One.

“I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world,” he said. Two days later, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered a temporary halt to construction.

Leon stated that the president is the “steward” of the White House, not its “owner,” and ruled that he cannot proceed with such a massive structural change without express authorization from Congress.

In response, Trump raged on Truth Social: “In the Ballroom case, the Judge said we have to get Congressional approval. He is WRONG! Congressional approval has never been given on anything, in these circumstances, big or small, having to do with construction at the White House.”

His administration filed a motion Friday to block the judge’s ruling.

Jan 6. liability

On the same day, a judge ruled that Trump remains personally liable in a civil lawsuit tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, allowing those claims to move forward.

It is among the most consequential legal threats he faces.

Trump entered the presidency on the heels of a major Supreme Court win that found former presidents have criminal and civil immunity for official acts during their term.

But Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta deemed Trump’s Jan. 6 speech — in which he directed supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” — was a political act, not a presidential one, and therefore not shielded by immunity.

“President Trump has not shown that the speech reasonably can be understood as falling within the outer perimeter of his Presidential duties. The content of the ellipse speech confirms that it is not covered by official-acts immunity,” Mehta wrote.

The week ended with yet another setback for Trump when a federal judge on Friday blocked the administration from forcing universities to submit extensive data on applicants and students to prove they don’t illegally consider race in admissions.

Reading the losses

For Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA who has tracked the administration’s legal battles closely, the losing streak had a clear through line.

“It was an awful week for Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s not that the courts are anti-Trump. In fact, he wins a lot. It’s really that he takes such an aggressive approach to policy making that he runs afoul of existing precedents.”

Taken together, last week’s rulings signaled that the courts are insisting that the president is as accountable for his actions as anyone, and that states have constitutional powers he alone cannot override.

“The Trump administration’s recent court losses illustrate that there is still much that the other branches of government can do — in connection with civil society — to uphold the rule of law and mitigate the harms of the administration’s destructive agenda,” said Monika Langarica, deputy legal director at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

“They are one more reminder,” she added, “that the administration will not always have the last word with respect to its unlawful and unconstitutional actions.”

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. fell ill at an event in Philadelphia last month and was treated for dehydration before returning home to suburban Washington, the court’s spokeswoman said Friday.

Alito’s illness did not require an overnight hospital stay and he was back on the bench the following Monday, spokeswoman Patricia McCabe said in a statement.

Alito was an active questioner during arguments that day in an important case about mailed ballots and participated in all the court’s hearings over the ensuing two weeks.

Alito, who turned 76 on Wednesday, is the second-oldest member of the court, after 77-year-old Justice Clarence Thomas.

The episode was first reported by CNN, which also said the treatment was administered at a Philadelphia hospital. The court did not say where Alito had been taken.

The incident is the latest example of the justices’ reticence to discuss their health, at least until the news somehow leaks.

In 2020, the court confirmed that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had spent a night in the hospital after a fall that required stitches in his forehead, only after the Washington Post reported it first.

Alito was driven by his security detail from Washington to what CNN said was a dinner following a Federalist Society panel that looked at his 20 years on the court.

When he didn’t feel well in the evening, “he agreed with his security detail’s recommendation to see a physician before the three-hour drive home” to northern Virginia, McCabe said. He was given fluids for dehydration, she said.

While the justice has not said anything about retirement, speculation has swirled that Alito might soon step down, which would give President Trump the chance to appoint a fourth justice, after the three who were confirmed during his first term.

While Alito is young by Supreme Court standards, he might not want to stay around and gamble on the possibility of Democrats flipping the Senate in the November elections and seeing a Democrat capture the White House two years later.

Retiring in the summer would allow Trump to name a similarly conservative but much younger replacement who would almost certainly win confirmation from the Republican-led Senate.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

April 3 (UPI) — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was taken to a Philadelphia hospital after a Federalist Society dinner in his honor last month, the court confirmed Friday.

Alito “felt ill during an event in Philadelphia” on March 20, a Supreme Court spokesperson said in a statement to the media.

“Out of an abundance of caution, he agreed with his security detail’s recommendation to see a physician before the three-hour drive home,” spokeswoman Patricia McCabe said. “After that examination and the administration of fluids for dehydration, he returned home that night, as previously planned. Justice Alito was thoroughly checked by his own physician, and he returned to work the following Monday for oral argument.”

Alito, 76, is the court’s second-oldest justice. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005.

Sources told ABC News that those who saw him at the event said he looked tired and was not as engaging as usual. They said he stayed seated when people came by to greet him during the dinner.

The dinner capped off a daylong symposium by the society titled, “An Examination of the Jurisprudence of Samuel Alito,” which featured several of his former law clerks, law professors and attorneys who practice before the court. It was at the University of Pennsylvania law school.

Alito was not there during the day, as he was driving from Washington. The court was in session to hand down opinions, but Alito was on the road.

WASHINGTON — One year ago, Donald Trump stood in a sun-kissed, unpaved Rose Garden and defiantly announced a new era of global trade, raising tariffs on countries worldwide and sending shock waves through the global economy.

The president promised short-term pain rippling through American households would make way for a U.S. economy that would soon take off. But experts say they are still waiting for receipts — and question whether they will ever come.

A year of turbulence

Tariff rates shifted so unpredictably for so long — across countries and with remarkable speed — that companies are still struggling to build stable, long-term supply chains capable of supporting future planning and growth. U.S. markets recorded one of the most volatile years in history, marked by extreme swings and modest gains driven by a handful of stocks for tech companies largely inoculated from import duties.

A customer visits a Costco food court in San Diego on March 18.

(Kevin Carter / Getty Images)

Federal customs duties brought in tens of billions of dollars. But a study published this week by the European Central Bank found that U.S. importers and consumers, not foreign exporters, bore the brunt of the costs that paid for it — and that an even larger share of the burden will fall on American households and companies the longer Trump’s tariff policies stay in place.

Despite the president’s pronouncements, tariff earnings have barely made a dent in the federal debt.

Tax cuts and additional spending on defense and immigration enforcement have increased the annual deficit. In the months of January and February alone, net customs duties hit an average of $27 billion — a significant figure that has essentially offset the costs of Trump’s war with Iran, now estimated to be more than $57 billion since its start.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority by bypassing Congress to impose tariffs on an emergency basis. But the decision has merely prompted the Trump administration to look for ways to bypass the high court, as well.

“Even after the court ruling, the Trump administration continues to wield tariffs in a haphazard and ill-conceived fashion,” said Kimberly Clausing, a professor of tax policy and law at UCLA School of Law. “One year in, Trump’s tariffs have only generated higher prices, economic disruption, frayed alliances, and manufacturing job loss.”

Farmers in New Delhi take part in a March 19 protest demanding a minimum support price for crops.

(Sajjad Hussain / AFP / Getty Images)

Since the court ruling, Trump has moved away from using broad emergency powers to justify tariff rates, now citing laws on national security and unfair trade practices to keep them in place. Those are being challenged, as well.

“Trump’s tariff mania injected uncertainty into global business supply chains that he is refusing to let the Supreme Court undo,” said Aaron Klein, chair of economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

“It would be one thing if Trump replaced the existing tariff system with a coherent strategy approved by the very Republican Congress he controls,” Klein added. “Instead, Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff by tweet and let the courts figure it out months later destroys business’ ability to plan and undermines global confidence in America’s trustworthiness.”

‘Mounting downside’

Whether or not the president’s tariff policies survive, they have succeeded in ushering in a new era of international trade, shifting global reliance on the U.S. dollar and on the American consumer market, experts said.

“The euro, the Chinese yuan and crypto will be the biggest beneficiaries as the dollar loses market share,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist and professor at Harvard. “Future historians may well look back some day and see Liberation Day as marking the beginning of the end of the dollar’s absolute dominance in global markets, and the ‘exorbitant privilege’ it has given to the United States as issuer of what once upon a time was the world safest currency.”

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that Trump’s tariff policies have upended global shipping, prompted China to increase offshore investments in countries like Vietnam to process Chinese inputs for the U.S. market, and elevated long-term uncertainty over investing in North America — a trifecta that has ensured that U.S. companies and consumers bear the costs.

“While the president promised an American ‘industrial renaissance,’ manufacturing jobs have been lost every month since early 2023,” Lovely said. “Easy to see the mounting downside of his tariff barrage, hard to find much upside.”

More than 100,000 net jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector have been lost over the last year, in part due to the increased costs facing U.S.-based manufacturing companies for parts and inputs, said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

That has made domestic manufacturing less competitive. “The trade war has also increased the prices facing consumers at a time when affordability is their top concern,” Strain added.

Customers shop at the Sanya International Duty Free City in Sanya, in south China’s Hainan province, on Jan. 10. In December 2025, China launched special customs operations in the Hainan Free Trade Port, allowing easier entry of overseas goods and expanding zero-tariff coverage.

(Guo Cheng / Xinhua / Getty Images)

The policy has become a political albatross for the president, who now proceeds through a midterm year with a bipartisan majority of Americans dissatisfied with his approach to their top concern. Seven in 10 Americans believe that tariffs have increased their costs of living, according to a recent poll, including 64% of Republicans and 67% of independents.

Sung Won Sohn, a former commissioner at the Port of Los Angeles, said that inflation aggravated by Trump’s tariff actions has complicated policy at the Federal Reserve, fueling uncertainty in the U.S. stock market.

The Supreme Court’s decision, which prompted legal ambiguity on the administration’s path forward and opened the door to a flood of litigation for potential tariff refunds, further added to uncertainty. “The net result is decreased economic efficiency,” Sohn said.

Trump faces worse poll numbers on inflation than former Presidents Carter and Biden, both of whom faced challenges with increased prices on goods. Today, 72% of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of rising prices, according to a CNN poll released this week.

“The real damage from the tariffs — and their uneven unwinding — is not captured in headline GDP figures,” Sohn added. “It shows up in slower decision-making, reduced productivity, and a persistent fog over the economic outlook.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: A serial arsonist terrorized Hollywood. It ended only after two sisters died in a house fire, authorities say
The deep dive: The books that created the César Chávez myth — and those that brought him down
The L.A. Times Special: Electric bikes can be fast and dangerous. Here’s how to stay safe

On a personal note, hats off to my colleagues for stepping in during my parental leave — it’s great to be back.

More to come,
Michael Wilner

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WASHINGTON  — Inside the Supreme Court, as justices heard oral arguments in the case over birthright citizenship, President Trump became the first sitting president to attend such a proceeding.

Outside the court, the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark — the San Francisco man whose landmark Supreme Court case affirmed birthright citizenship in 1898 — addressed a crowd of hundreds of people.

“Wong Kim Ark’s victory ensured that people like me and millions of others would be recognized as fully American, not outsiders in the country of our birth,” said Norman Wong. “This case transformed the 14th Amendment from words on paper into living promise. Today, that promise is still being tested.”

Surrounded by protesters in favor of birthright citizenship was a lone counter-protester. The woman, who wore a red baseball cap and a sweatshirt stating “Chicago flips red,” yelled into a megaphone as speakers addressed the crowd.

“Freedmen stand with Donald Trump,” she said as the Rev. William Barber II spoke. “America first. Americans first.”

The Rev. William Barber II speaks during a rally on protecting birthright citizenship outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

(Al Drago / Getty Images)

Undaunted, Barber noted that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, makes clear that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen.

“The 14th Amendment protects babies from a caste system,” Barber said. “They didn’t allow evil in 1868, and we’re not going to allow evil in 2026.”

“Stop lying, pastor,” the woman taunted him.

After Barber finished his remarks, the woman was drowned out by Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” playing over the speakers.

Inside the building, justices heard arguments over a Trump executive order which aimed to end birthright citizenship. The administration has argued that children born of parents who are in the country illegally or temporary visas should be denied citizenship.

A man from Cameroon said he chose to speak out because he doesn’t want future generations to become stateless and feel what he has felt. The man said he had been authorized to work in the United States Temporary Protected Status until the Trump administration terminated it last year.

“I know what it feels like to have your sense of belonging taken from you overnight,” he said.

Nancy Jeannechild, 69, traveled from Baltimore with a handwritten sign asking the justices to “Do your job.” She said Trump has amassed too much power and that the Supreme Court hasn’t stood up to him enough.

“This is another opportunity for them to do the right thing, and I hope that they will,” she said. “Just because Trump doesn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not what’s in the Constitution.”

Araceli Hernandez, 29, attended the rally with her 1-year-old son. She said she immigrated from Honduras five years ago and that her son being born here means he has better opportunities to study, access to healthcare and a safe environment to live in.

“We came to represent the children who are not yet born because they also have a right to have a better future in this country,” she said.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said he was confident birthright citizenship would prevail because the Constitution is clear. The fight is personal, he said, as the a proud American and son of immigrants.

“The moment I was born on U.S. soil I was born a citizen, and I’ll be damned if Donald Trump tries to take that away from me,” he said. “What’s on the line isn’t just a question about citizenship — it is about upholding the Constitution, respecting the rule of law and keeping the promise that the 14th Amendment has held for more than 150 years.”

After the arguments wrapped up, Cecilia Wang, who led the defense of birthright citizenship for the American Civil Liberties Union, addressed the crowd. She said she was confident that the Trump administration would lose the case.

“Whether you’re an indigenous American, whether you are descended from African Americans who were enslaved and free, whether you are the descendant of someone who came on the Mayflower or someone who arrived just before your birth, we all are Americans alike,” she said. “That is the principle that we stood up for together, all of us, in the Supreme Court of the United States today.”

April 1 (UPI) — A federal judge ruled that a civil suit against President Donald Trump for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, can continue.

District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled Tuesday that Trump’s speech on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 was not covered by the Supreme Court‘s immunity ruling, meaning it could not be considered a core presidential act.

The suit was brought by several Democratic lawmakers and Oakland, Calif., Mayor Barbara J. Lee. The American Civil Liberties Union is also helping with the case.

“President Trump has not shown that the Speech reasonably can be understood as falling within the outer perimeter of his Presidential duties,” Mehta wrote in his decision. “The content of the Ellipse Speech confirms that it is not covered by official-acts immunity.”

Trump has tried to get the case thrown out by claiming presidential immunity for his actions on that day and in the weeks before it.

But Mehta said, “Nearly all the individuals who ran the nuts and bolts of the operation [the Jan. 6 rally] were former Campaign officials, paid staff or consultants, who had concluded their formal work for the Campaign within the 60 days prior to January 6. In fact, on January 4, the President met with [Katrina] Pierson, still a senior campaign advisor only four days prior, in the White House to discuss the Rally’s production elements and speaker list. She — not White House officials — communicated the President’s wishes back to Rally organizers.”

Mehta also declared that Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to “find” more votes “can only reasonably be viewed as the act of an office-seeker” and was an effort “to alter the outcome of Georgia’s election, not those of an incumbent President acting in his official capacity.”

Joseph Sellers, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he welcomed the ruling.

“We’re very pleased that the court recognized that President Trump cannot avoid accountability for his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021,” Sellers said in an interview with Politico. “This decision, if it holds up, is going to pave the way to a trial in federal district court on these claims.”

In a statement, Trump’s legal team disputed the judge’s conclusion.

“The facts show that on January 6, 2021, President Trump was acting on behalf of the American people, carrying out his official duties as President of the United States,” Politico reported the statement said. “President Trump will continue to fight back against the Democrat Witch Hoaxes and keep delivering historic results for the American People.”

“Donald Trump thinks he can get away with murder,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

“This lawsuit is long overdue for his hand in the destruction of our Capitol and the attack on our democracy on January 6. This case is for my colleagues, the brave Capitol Police officers, Americans everywhere, and the future of our nation. Those who incited and fueled the violence must be held responsible. I’m thankful that we will get some accountability and some measure of closure from that dark day. And that finally, the truth will come to light. We deserve it,” Swalwell said.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday became the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court, inserting himself directly into a high-stakes legal battle over one of the most consequential orders of his administration.

Trump arrived at the court Wednesday morning by limousine for arguments over whether the president has the authority to effectively rewrite the Constitution by ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are in the country unlawfully or temporarily.

In the run-up to Wednesday’s arguments, Trump suggested that Supreme Court justices appointed by Republicans who have ruled against his agenda are “so stupid.”

“Some people would call it stupidity; some people will call it disloyal,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

“Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!” the president wrote on Truth Social on Monday.

The unprecedented appearance highlights how high Trump believes the stakes are, according to Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA.

“It’s not clear why Trump is attending,” Winkler said. “Maybe he is just interested in the unusual drama of a Supreme Court argument. Or perhaps he is trying to intimidate the justices, like the scene in ‘The Godfather Part II’ where the mob boss shows up at a hearing to scare the witness into recanting his testimony.”

Regardless, Trump’s presence probably won’t change any minds on the bench, Winkler said.

The justices prize their independence, including many who share Trump’s judicial philosophy. Still, it will likely change the mood, Winkler said — most hearings are quiet and academic.

The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, is a keystone of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown.

Trump has framed the policy as a necessary step to curb what he describes as abuse of the immigration system.

“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!”

Every lower court that has considered the issue has found the order illegal and prevented it from taking effect. A definitive ruling by the nation’s highest court is expected by early summer.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear President Trump’s claim that he has the power to revise the Constitution and to end birthright citizenship for babies born in this country to parents who were here unlawfully or temporarily.

Trump proposed this potentially far-reaching change in an executive order. It has been blocked by judges across the country and has never been in effect.

His lawyers contend they seek to correct a 160-year misunderstanding about the Constitution’s promise that “all persons born” in this country are deemed to be citizens.

The president’s executive order “restores the original meaning of the citizenship clause” and would deny “on a prospective basis only” citizenship to the “children of temporarily present aliens and illegal aliens,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote in his appeal.

But the first hurdle for Trump and his lawyers may concern the powers of the president.

In February, the court blocked Trump’s sweeping worldwide tariffs on the grounds the Constitution gave Congress, not the president, the power to impose import taxes.

By comparison, the president has even less power to set the rules for U.S. citizenship. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.”

After the Civil War, Congress adopted a civil rights act in 1866 that said “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, including Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States … of every race and color.”

To make sure that rule stood over time, it was added to the Constitution in the 14th Amendment. Its opening line 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 wherein they reside.”

In 1898, a conservative Supreme Court upheld that rule and affirmed the citizenship of Wong Kim Ark. He was 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. “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.”

In 1952, when Congress revised the immigration laws, it added the same provision without controversy. Lawmakers set multiple rules for deciding disputes over American parents who live abroad, but the first rule was simple and undisputed.

“The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: a person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the law said.

Critics say Trump’s plan could replace a clear and simple rule with a confusing and complicated one. States would have to look into the history and legal status of a newborn’s parents to decide whether they met the new qualifications.

Until now, a valid birth certificate had been sufficient to establish a person’s U.S. citizenship.

Last week, Trump was urging Senate Republicans to pass a new election law that would require millions of Americans to present a birth certificate as proof of their citizenship if they register to vote or move to a new state.

“Proving citizenship to vote is a no brainer,” the White House said.

This week, however, Trump’s lawyers are urging the court to rule that their birth in this country is not proof of their citizenship.

There is a “logical inconsistency” here,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center.

In the legal battle now before the court, the key disputed phrase is “subject to the jurisdiction.” That has been understood to mean that people within the United States are subject to the laws here, except for foreign diplomats and, for a time, Native Americans who lived on tribal reservations.

But Sauer contends it excludes newborns who are “not completely subject to the United States’ political jurisdiction” because their parents are in this country unlawfully.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union called this a “radical rewriting” of the 14th Amendment, which says nothing about the parents of a newborn child.

If upheld, this order could apply to “tens of thousands of children born every month, “ they said, “devastating families around the country.” But worse yet, they said, the outcome “would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”

Some legal experts predict the court may rule narrowly and reject Trump’s executive order because it conflicts with federal immigration laws. Such a ruling would be a defeat for Trump, but it could allow Congress in the future to adopt new provisions, including a limit for expectant mothers who enter this country to give birth.

April 1 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in a case on Wednesday that could reshape what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

The case, Trump vs. Barbara, is over President Donald Trump‘s Jan. 20, 2025, executive order “Protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship,” which seeks to change the application of the Citizenship Clause, ending birthright citizenship.

In his executive order, Trump argued that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

The law of the land, as it has been recognized since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868, has been that “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 wherein they reside.”

Trump’s executive order remains blocked from taking effect, with lower courts affirming that his attempt to end birthright citizenship is unconstitutional. In December, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, beginning with oral arguments starting on Wednesday.

U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer will argue on behalf of the Trump administration.

“If the Trump executive order is upheld, it would mark an enormous change in how the United States understands who is a citizen and who is not,” Kate Masur, John D. MacArthur Professor of History at Northwestern University, told UPI.

Masur filed an amicus brief supporting a challenge to Trump’s executive order.

“There’s certainly never been a president who issued an executive order trying to undermine birthright citizenship in this way,” Masur said. “Congress has repeatedly, through legislation, affirmed birthright citizenship and the Supreme Court has also affirmed birthright citizenship.”

The Trump administration’s argument against birthright citizenship hinges on its interpretation of the term “jurisdiction” in the context of the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

In an amicus brief by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and other Republican lawmakers, they contest that the authors of the 14th Amendment could have written “subject to the laws.” Instead, the use of the term “jurisdiction” requires “allegiance” to the United States.

“Allegiance is also a reciprocal relationship. The person must be present with the consent of the sovereign, a factor on which this Court extensively relied in United States v. Wong Kim Ark,” the Republican lawmakers argue. “But illegal aliens and their children are present in the United States without consent, i.e., only by defying its laws.”

The lawmakers also argue that their interpretation of total allegiance looks to “early English caselaw.”

The challenges to birthright citizenship by Republicans are not new, Masur said.

The Wong Kim Ark case that the Republican lawmakers referred to affirmed birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. The case was brought on when the U.S. government denied the son of Chinese Immigrants, Wong Kim Ark, re-entry into the United States.

Ark, who was born in San Francisco, had taken a trip to China and was detained upon his return to the United States. The case took place in 1898, more than a decade after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese workers from seeking citizenship in the United States.

Since Wong Kim Ark, there have continued to be opponents of birthright citizenship, though the immigrant groups their movements targeted have changed. Since the 1990s, immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries have largely been the central focus of those seeking to end birthright citizenship.

Former Sen. Steve King, R-Iowa, repeatedly introduced legislation on Capitol Hill trying to end birthright citizenship. His most recent effort was in 2015. In 2019, King was removed from all committee assignments after defending white supremacy and white nationalism, following years of racist comments throughout his 17-year career.

“The thing that these movements have in common over time is their desire to limit who among people born in the United States gets to be a citizen,” Masur said. “Usually it is driven by various anti-immigrant sentiments.”

Daisy Hernandez, author of Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth, told UPI that there are modern examples of what happens when birthright citizenship is taken away.

The Dominican Republic amended its constitution in 2010 to remove birthright citizenship for Haitians in the country. In 2013, it made the law retroactive to 1929, removing the citizenship of an estimated 200,000 people overnight.

“That is an example of what would happen in the United States. However, for us it would happen in terms of millions of people,” Hernandez said.

Children of immigrants who have their citizenship revoked become stateless, Hernandez explained. With no country to call home, they are left adrift without the right to exist anywhere.

“Statelessness means that you have no government which you can turn to in any way,” she said. “It means you do not have any documentation of any kind. You don’t have documentation that you have a right to be anywhere. The philosopher Hannah Arendt said ‘citizenship is the right to have rights.’ You need a government to recognize that you have rights.”

There are more than 4 million children in the United States who have parents who are undocumented immigrants.

If Trump’s executive order is allowed to stand by the Supreme Court, Hernandez and Masur said the United States could return to an era of the 19th century when citizenship varied from state to state.

“It is really jarring to remember once upon a time certain states within the United States recognized the citizenship and humanity of Black Americans and we had other states that did not,” Hernandez said. “So are we going to end up in a situation where a child born to an undocumented parent is recognized as a citizen as long as they stay within the state of New York or of Massachusetts but would then become stateless if they crossed into Connecticut or further south or further west?”

Most countries in the Western Hemisphere recognize birthright citizenship. The Dominican Republic and Colombia are rare exceptions.

“We have always understood being American as being very closely tied with birthright citizenship,” Hernandez said. “It would be a collapse of how we understand American identity in the United States.”

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that state laws forbidding “conversion therapy” for minors may violate the free speech rights of licensed counselors.

The 1st Amendment ruling is likely to undercut similar laws in California and 23 other states.

In an 8-1 decision, the justices said Colorado’s ban on “talk therapy” may prevent Christian counselors from helping teens work through their feelings about sexual attractions or their gender identity.

State lawmakers passed the new measures in response to healthcare professionals who said that efforts to change a teenager’s sexual orientation were both ineffective and harmful.

Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in Colorado Springs, sued and argued the state’s law violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

She said she does not seek to “cure” young clients of same-sex attractions or to “change” their sexual orientation. Instead, she said she is guided by their goals.

“As a talk therapist, all Ms. Chiles does is speak with clients; she does not prescribe medication, use medical devices or employ any physical methods,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said for the court.

But she could run afoul of the state’s law because she said she may help some of her clients “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions or change sexual behaviors.”

If so, the law “censors speech based on viewpoint” and is therefore unconstitutional, he said.

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. But the 1st Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country,” Gorsuch wrote.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone in a 35-page opinion. She said the issue was one of regulating medical practice.

“The 1st Amendment cares about government efforts to suppress ‘speech as speech’ (based on its expressive content), not laws, like [Colorado’s] that restrict speech incidentally, due to the government’s traditional, garden-variety regulation of such speakers’ professional conduct,” Jackson wrote. “States have traditionally regulated the provision of medical care through licensing schemes and malpractice regimes without constitutional incident.” she continued.

The Trevor Project, a crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, condemned the ruling.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to treat the dangerous practice of conversion therapy as constitutionally protected speech is a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk. These efforts, no matter what proponents call them, no matter what any court says, are still proven to cause lasting psychological harm,” Chief Executive Jaymes Black said in a statement.

The conservative First Liberty Institute called the ruling a “great victory for religious liberty.”

“Americans should never have their professional speech censored simply because the government disfavors that speech,” said Kelly Shackelford, the group’s president.

The ruling is the third significant defeat for LGBTQ+ rights advocates in the last year.

The conservative majority upheld state laws that prohibit puberty blockers and other “gender affirming” care for minors. And last month, the justices said parents in California have a right to know about their child’s gender identity at school.

They said California’s student privacy policy violated parents’ rights, including the free exercise of religion.

The Alliance Defending Freedom appealed her case to the Supreme Court and described her as “a practicing Christian [who] believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design.”

Her clients “seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires,” they said. “But Colorado bans these consensual conversations based on the viewpoints they express.”

The state law defines “conversion therapy” as “any practice or treatment by a licensee that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to … eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Violators may be fined up to $5,000, but no one had been fined, the state says.

The challengers had lost in the lower courts.

A federal judge and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver rejected the free speech claim. By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court said the state law was not a ban on free expression. Rather, it regulated the conduct of licensed medical professionals. States have the authority to regulate the practice of medicine.

In their appeal to the high court, lawyers for Chiles said the state was “censoring” voluntary conversations and forbidding speech on only one side of a controversy.

The Trump administration supported the 1st Amendment challenge because the state seeks “to suppress a disfavored viewpoint.”

In response, the state said its law “safeguards public health” by prohibiting “a discredited practice” that was shown to be harmful. It stressed the law regulates licensed professionals only and does not extend to religious ministers or others who provide private counseling to young people.

In 2012, California was the first state to ban licensed counselors from using conversion therapy for minors.

Then-Gov. Jerry Brown said these “change” therapies “have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

Equality California condemned the court’s ruling and said it “has weakened the ability of state licensing boards to intervene if clinicians use unproven, misleading, or coercive techniques.”

The group urged support for a pending bill in Sacramento that would “extend the statute of limitations for survivors to pursue civil claims against licensed mental health providers who subjected them to these harmful practices.”

Tuesday’s ruling was also criticized for undercutting state regulations of medical practice a year after taking the opposite view in a Tennessee case.

In June 2025, the court in a 6-3 decision upheld laws in Tennessee and 24 other red states that prohibit “gender affirming” puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors.

The majority said then it was deferring to the state and their lawmakers who decided to prohibit such medical treatments for minors.

But in the Colorado case, the court majority did not defer to the state’s judgment that conversion therapy was harmful and potentially dangerous.

The decision is also the third victory for the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom in its free speech challenges to Colorado laws. A maker of custom wedding cakes and the designer of websites won suits seeking an exemption from the state law that required them to provide equal service for same-sex weddings.

March 30 (UPI) — The Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal from Joe Exotic, the former Tiger King star who is serving time for trying to have an animal rights activist killed.

The court declined to consider tossing the 2019 conviction of Joe Exotic for a murder-for-hire plot to kill animal rights activist Carole Baskin. Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, is serving 21 years for the plot. He was also convicted of falsifying wildlife records and violating the Endangered Species Act.

Baskin was also part of the Tiger King series. She founded Florida rescue center Big Cat Rescue and was an advocate of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which limited owning big cats and cross-breeds to wildlife sanctuaries, state universities and certified zoos. Former President Joe Biden signed the law in 2022.

Maldonado-Passage’s lawyer, Alexander Roots, told the court that the case arose out of an “intense personal, litigation, operational, and even political, rivalry between two of America’s two largest big cat exhibitors,” The Hill reported.

“By denying any hearing and by refusing to evaluate the evidence as a whole, the lower courts departed from principles that safeguard every criminal prosecution in the nation,” he wrote in the petition to the court.

At the trial in 2019, prosecutors said Maldonado-Passage, 63, hired two men to kill Baskin, one of whom was an FBI agent. They also said he shot and killed five tigers in October 2017 and sold and offered to sell tiger cubs.

Maldonado-Passage has asked President Donald Trump for a pardon. He also asked Biden while he was in office.

In his feud with Baskin, Maldonado-Passage alleged without evidence that she killed her second husband, who disappeared in 1997, and he rebranded his traveling show Big Cat Rescue Entertainment, for which she sued him for trademark infringement. He settled with her for $1 million.

In his petition to the Supreme Court, Maldonado-Passage argued that the lower courts “shrugged off” evidence that three witnesses had recanted their trial testimony, including Allen Glover, a zoo employee and the other hired hitman, and Florida businessman James Garretson.

He also alleged federal prosecutors failed to tell the defense that the witnesses were promised immunity for testifying.

But the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the new evidence wasn’t likely to change the trial’s result.

In July, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, 65, another Tiger King alum, was sentenced to federal prison for crimes related to trafficking exotic animals. He was given 12 months and one day, plus a $55,000 fine and three years of supervised release for violating the Lacey Act, which bans the sale of illegally acquired wildlife, fish or plants, including those designated as protected species by the federal government.

SACRAMENTO — It’s probably time for California to reform the outdated “reform” that could be leading us into an absurd November election with no Democratic candidate for governor allowed on the ballot.

The absurdity is that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in California by nearly 2 to 1. But the voters’ choices for governor could be restricted to just two Republicans — both disciples of President Trump, who is despised in this state.

We’d be electing our first GOP governor in 20 years.

The odds against this scenario are high. But it’s an increasing possibility.

It’s conceivable because of a crowded Democratic field of candidates and a 2010 reform placed on the ballot after a late-night deal demanded by a Republican state senator — Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria — in exchange for his vote to pass a stalled budget and tax increase.

The compromise led to voter approval of California’s unique top-two open primary. The top two vote-getters advance to the November runoff, regardless of party. It’s called an open primary because voters can choose any candidate, no matter their party.

So two Democrats or two Republicans might be the only choices in November — in statewide, congressional and legislative races. That doesn’t happen often, but it has a few times.

It doesn’t reflect the current reality of American politics, with voters sharply polarized between Democrats and Republicans. They want to vote for someone from their own party and are not interested in choosing among two perceived evils.

We should consider returning to a primary system that produces party nominees — one Democrat and one Republican — to give voters a more varied selection in November. Maybe even allow a third or fourth candidate to emerge from minority parties.

It’s too late to change for this year, but we could for future elections. It would require voter approval.

For the present, we’re saddled with the unwieldy dilemma of there being eight major Democratic candidates and just two Republicans. If the combined Democratic vote is splintered among the eight Democrats in the June 2 primary, the two Republicans could end up finishing first and second.

Political data guru Paul Mitchell, who has been running primary election simulations, pegs the chances of a Democratic lockout at 20%.

“There’s only a one-in-five chance, but you don’t want to see a one-in-five chance with something this important,” says the statistician, who works mostly for Democrats.

“To be safe, the Democratic Party needs to have a candidate polling at 20% or more. And none of the Democratic candidates are half way there. It’s scary.”

Mitchell bases his assessment on a poll released last week by state Democratic chairman Rusty Hicks, part of an effort to pressure low-polling Democratic candidates to step out of the race.

The survey showed both Republicans leading the field — former Fox News host Steve Hilton with 16% and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco at 14%. At 10% each were three Democrats: Rep. Eric Swalwell of the San Francisco Bay Area, former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter and wealthy climate activist Tom Steyer. No other Democrat registered above 3%. There were 24% undecided.

The straggling candidates need to ask themselves, Hicks says: “if you’re polling 1% to 2%, do you have a path to get to 20?

“All of these candidates are experienced. They know in their gut when they’re viable or not.”

Mitchell says, “A lot of folks are now looking at why we have a wacky system that causes [a party chair] to tell candidates they should drop out of a race.”

Yes, it does smack of being undemocratic even if it’s practical politics.

Mitchell says the top-two system should be scrapped.

Hicks agrees.

“Things that were promised [by top-two promoters] have not been delivered,” the state party chairman told me. “It’s time to consider going back to the kind of system voters like.”

Appealing to the middle

I called around and got different views from veteran Democratic strategists.

“It was sold as reform, but it’s not reform. It’s a distortion of the process,” one former political consultant told me, asking for anonymity because of his current employment. “Everybody thought it would yield more moderate, consensus candidates, but that’s not what’s happening.”

Consultant Steve Maviglito, who ran the 2010 campaign against the top-two system, says it’s undemocratic because it risks not giving voters “a chance to cast a ballot for a candidate they have some belief in. That’s what our system is built on.”

The grand theory, he notes, was that candidates would be forced to appeal to the middle.

“Just the opposite,” Maviglio argues. “Democrats want a strong Democrat and Republicans want a strong Republican. The only thing in the middle of the road is a dead armadillo.”

Moreover, he points out, the top-two system has been manipulated by Democrats — including Sen. Adam Schiff and Gov. Gavin Newsom — to boost a Republican in the primary to guarantee a non-competitive, easy election in November.

That’s a bit sleazy.

“The top-two has actually been hugely good to Democrats,” says Democratic strategist Garry South. “They need to think this through. Since the top-two primary was implemented, there have only been three same-party runoffs for state office out of 26 races — all three of them Democrats.

“The current specter of two Republicans [in November] is not the fault of the top-two primary system. It’s due to every Democrat and their brother — or sister — taking a flier and filing for governor.”

“Never,” replies consultant David Townsend when asked whether the top-two primary should be junked. He ran the ballot campaign authorizing it. Townsend insists today’s Legislature contains more moderate Democrats because of the top-two and that they provide a check on the liberal majority.

That’s true to some degree.

OK, we could leave the top-two system for the Legislature and scuttle it for statewide offices.

The thought of being limited to a choice between two Republicans — or two Democrats — for governor is unacceptable and un-American.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: USC cancels gubernatorial debate amid uproar over candidates of color being excluded

The L.A. Times Special: It’s been decades since California had a governor’s race like this one. That was a shocker

Until next week,
George Skelton

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Voter fraud conspiracies are like methamphetamine running through MAGA veins, stirring up equal parts passion and paranoia.

President Trump, of course, is the king pusher of this particular addiction, pathologically certain he won the 2020 presidential election (he did not). In his second term, and in advance of the November election, Trump has supercharged voter fraud lies; installed election deniers in key positions; and is attempting through the so-called SAVE America Act to disenfranchise poor and female voters.

Here in California, the seductive power of Trump’s crusade can be seen in Riverside County, where gubernatorial candidate and Sheriff Chad Bianco is definitely not pursuing a vote fraud investigation for political reasons.

“From the very, very beginning, Chad Bianco didn’t say this was political,” Bianco told me, referring to himself in the third person. “Chad Bianco said we have an allegation of fraud with numbers that don’t add up, and no one has an exact reason why. So we have to find out the exact reason why. It’s plain and simple. Plain and simple.”

If you’re clueless as to what Bianco is talking about, let me give you the short version. A citizens group of election “auditors” claimed that in the last election over Proposition 50 in November, there were about 45,800 more ballots counted than cast.

The Riverside County Registrar of Voters, Art Tinoco, a highly respected election official, gave a long presentation explaining why that number was not accurate. He said that the actual difference in ballots cast and counted is only 103, within the acceptable margin of error for the 1.4 million voters in his area.

But unhappy with that answer, the group apparently took their concerns to Bianco, who decided to use his powers of criminal investigation to circumvent the many established avenues for vote audits through his own county and the California secretary of state (though he hasn’t revealed publicly exactly what led to the investigation).

Using a secret, sealed warrant — so none of us actually know what he’s alleging — he seized more than half a million ballots. The court has apparently appointed a special master to count those ballots, though Bianco at first said his deputies would do their own counting. But we don’t know who that special master is, or even if he or she has yet been appointed.

Here’s what we do know, and why it counts as a danger not just to Riverside, but also to American democracy writ large, when a politically ambitious lawman decides to run elections himself.

The fraud fiasco

So where did the citizen-auditors get their 45,800 number? Like many California counties, Riverside tallies ballots as they come in. So for the 11 days voting was happening (and for the mail-in ballots that came later) someone was making a handwritten note for every ballot that the county received.

Yes, I said handwritten, for more than 600,000 ballots going through 2,500 workers and volunteers. It’s often inaccurate and not every ballot is going to end up being a good one — some lack signatures, for example.

Tinoco, the registrar, called these handwritten logs “raw data” that also are missing ballots from other sources that increases the final tally, such as people who register on the day they vote. So no one who understands elections expects this number to be accurate or final.

Once all these ballots are checked to make sure they should be counted, they are sent to an entirely separate system, which reads them electronically and provides the election results.

When the number of vetted ballots is compared with the number of ballots that are counted by the second system, the difference is 103, Tinoco said.

So no fraud, only human frailty with the difficult business of counting by hand.

Matt Barreto, a UCLA political science professor and director of its Voting Rights Project, said Bianco’s actions were similar to what happened in Fulton County, Ga., where the FBI seized ballots after Trump’s debunked claims of fraud — despite plain and simple explanations from election officials.

“In both cases, Georgia and Riverside, independent elections offices had already verified the accuracy of the ballot count, and in both cases the results had been certified by the Secretary of State,” Barreto said. “It is worrisome that a very partisan law enforcement officer is questioning the integrity of an election, perhaps because he did not support the results.”

The investigation

Bianco has been investigating the 45,000 claim for months, but it came to a head in recent weeks, in no small part thanks to a news conference he held. Bianco’s office, as first reported by the Riverside Record, served a warrant on the election office one day before Tinoco made his presentation to the Board of Supervisors in early February.

Since then, the California secretary of state, which handles elections, and the state Department of Justice have both tried to intervene to stop Bianco from taking ballots or doing his own recount, Pillow Guy-style. But they’ve had little luck.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber called the allegations “unsubstantiated” and questioned the legality — and common sense — of having deputies hand count ballots. Now, her office is trying to make sure folks trained in elections are involved in whatever happens next.

“The sheriff’s assertion that his deputies know how to count is admirable,” Weber said. “The fact remains that he and his deputies are not elections officials.”

Separately, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has gone to the courts to try to keep Bianco from spiriting away the ballots. Bonta’s office went straight to the California Court of Appeals to ask it to force the sheriff to comply with their requests to take no further action and supply the Justice Department with the probable cause evidence used to obtain the search warrant — basically tell them exactly what proof he’s using to claim a crime might have been committed.

The appeals court declined to intervene until Bonta went to the lower Riverside County Superior Court. But in the meantime, Bianco went back to his judge and asked for another secret, sealed warrant — which he got.

The bigger problem

And that brings us to why we should all be concerned about Riverside County.

First, why all the secrecy? Shouldn’t elections and everything about them be transparent, so we all can feel confident any investigation is on the up and up?

I asked Bianco why the warrants are sealed, and he told me I didn’t understand investigations.

“In an ongoing investigation, we never unseal the warrants,” Bianco said. “No, I can’t say never. I can’t say never. Why are you coming at me like I’m the bad person here, instead of like a rational person?”

When I asked him why a sheriff needed to be involved, rather than allowing the state officials who handle elections to investigate, he told me this was a crime investigation just like any other — domestic abuse or murder, for example.

“It’s called fraud,” he said. “Let me ask you this: Do we just let, do we let doctors investigate themselves for medical malpractice?”

The implication there is that election officials are in a conspiracy to commit an actual crime — fraud — and can’t be trusted. That jumps the shark from maybe election staff counting sloppy in their handwritten tallies of ballots received, to a — yes, folks, here it is — a conspiracy of Democrats, from those volunteers up to the highest state officials.

That is a political vendetta, straight from Trump, and has little to do with tracking down crime — which, by the way, Bianco’s office is not great at. It has some of the lowest clearance rates in the state.

“Oh, please,” Bianco said regarding my questions on whether this was, in fact, political. “I’m the sheriff of Riverside County, and my investigators are responsible for crime. I have nothing to do with this investigation.”

His news conference would beg to differ.

And now we have a precedent for a politics-driven sheriff seizing ballots, maybe to make headlines, maybe to please Trump, maybe both. What happens if other Republican sheriffs across the country decide to do some ballot seizing of their own in swing states or contested races come November?

Is it all fair game now for whoever can physically take the ballots to be the arbitrator of results?

“The political corruption in California just gets bigger and bigger,” Bianco said on social media recently.

On that, we can agree.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids
The deep dive: ‘He’s an election skeptic. And he’s in charge of elections in Shasta County
The L.A. Times Special: Court denies AG’s petition to block Republican sheriff’s investigation of 650,000 ballots

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. Here’s Bianco on social media not long ago, once again definitely not espousing partisan voter conspiracies.

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court made it harder for music and movie makers to sue for online piracy, ruling Wednesday that internet providers are usually not liable for copyright infringement even if they know their users are downloading copyrighted works.

In a 9-0 decision, the justices threw out Sony’s lawsuit and a $1-billion verdict against Cox Cable for copyright infringement.

Lower courts upheld a jury’s verdict against Cox’s internet service for contributing to music piracy, which the company did little to stop.

Sony’s lawyers pointed to hundreds of thousands of instances of Cox customers sharing copyrighted works. Put on notice, Cox did little stop it, they said.

But the high court said that is not enough to establish liability for copyright infringement.

“Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.

Two decades ago, the court sided with the music and motion picture producers and ruled against Grokster and Napster on the grounds their software was intended to share copyrighted music and movies.

But on Wednesday, the court said “contributory” copyright infringement did not extend to internet service providers based on the actions of some of their users

“Cox provided Internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used to commit copyright infringement,” Thomas said. “Cox neither induced its users’ infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement.”

In its defense, Cox argued that internet service providers could be bankrupted by huge lawsuits for copyright infringement, which they said they did not cause and could not prevent.

WASHINGTON  — The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to rule that it may block migrants from applying for asylum at ports of entry along the southern border.

The administration’s lawyers argued that the right to asylum, which arose in response to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, does not extend to those who are stopped just short of a border post in California, Arizona or Texas.

They pointed to part of the immigration law that says a non-citizen who “arrives in the United States … may apply for asylum.”

“You can’t arrive in the United States while you’re still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case,” Vivek Suri, a Justice Department attorney, told the court.

Immigration rights advocates called this claim “perverse” and illogical. They said such a rule would encourage migrants to cross the border illegally rather than present themselves legally at a border post.

The justices sounded divided and a bit uncertain over how to proceed. But the conservative majority is nonetheless likely to uphold the administration’s broad power over immigration enforcement.

Several of the justices noted, however, the Trump administration is not currently enforcing a “remain in Mexico” policy.

Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned why the court would make a major decision on immigration and asylum with no immediate, practical impact.

The case posed a fundamental clash between the government’s need to manage surges at the border and the moral and historic right to offer asylum to those fleeing persecution.

In 1939, more than 900 Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis were turned away by Cuba and the United States. They were forced to return to Europe and more than 250 of them died in the Holocaust.

The worldwide moral reckoning spurred many nations, including the United States, to adopt new laws which offer protection to those fleeing persecution.

In the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress said that non-citizens either “physically present in the United States” or “at a land border or port of entry” may apply for asylum.

To be eligible for asylum, a non-citizen had to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country due to their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Only a small percentage of applicants win their asylum claims, and only after years of litigation.

But faced with overwhelming surge of migrants, the Obama administration in 2016 adopted a “metering” policy that required people to wait on the Mexican side of the border.

The Trump and Biden administrations maintained such policies for a time.

Immigrant rights advocates sued, contending the metering policy was illegal. They won before a federal judge in San Diego who ruled the migrants had a right to claim asylum.

In a 2-1 decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 2024.

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

The Trump administration appealed.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said the “ordinary meaning of ‘arrives in’ refers to entering a specific place, not just coming close to it. An alien who is stopped in Mexico does not arrive in the United States.”

On Tuesday, the Justice Department attorney said the court should reverse the 9th Circuit and uphold the government’s broad power to block migrants approaching the border.

“I can’t predict the next border surge,” Suri said.

“For more than 45 years, Congress has guaranteed people arriving at our borders the right to seek asylum, consistent with our international treaty obligations,” said Kelsi Corkran, Supreme Court director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, who argued the case. “Yet this administration believes that Congress gave it discretion to completely ignore those requirements, and turn back those who are seeking refuge from persecution at its whim.”

“The people turned away at our border are fleeing rape, torture, kidnapping, and death threats. You cannot tell families running for their lives to go back and wait in danger because their suffering is inconvenient,” said Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, border rights project directo at Al Otro Lado which was the plaintiff in the case. “We brought this case because the United States made a legal and moral commitment to protect people fleeing persecution.”

WASHINGTON — Californians may be forced to put their ballots in the mail well before election day to be certain they will be counted.

That’s the likely outcome of a Republican challenge to mail ballots that came before the Supreme Court on Monday.

The court’s six conservatives sounded ready to rule that federal law requires that ballots must be received by election day if they are to be counted as legal.

In the 19th century, Congress set a national day for federal elections on a Tuesday in early November, but it did not say how or when states would count their ballots. The Constitution leaves it to states to decide the “times, places and manners for holding elections.”

California and 13 other states count mail ballots that were cast before or on election day but arrive a few days late. And most states accept late ballots from members of the military who are stationed overseas.

By law, California counts mail ballots that arrive within seven days of election day. In 2024, more than 406,000 of these late-arriving ballots were counted in California, about 2.5% of the total.

Other Western states — Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Alaska — also count late-arriving mail ballots.

But President Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by mail leads to fraud, and the Republican National Committee has gone to court to challenge the state laws that allow for counting the legally cast ballots of citizens which are postmarked on time but arrive late.

GOP lawyers argued that the phrase “election day” has always meant ballots must be in the hands of election officials on that day. In their questions and comments, all six conservatives agreed.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. saw a real prospect of fraud. There could be “a big stash of ballots” that arrive late and “flip the outcome,” he said.

Democrats and election law experts say that the proposed new rule conflicts with more than a century of practice, because most states allowed for some people to vote by mail if they were traveling on election day. They argued that election day is like the federal tax day of April 15. While tax returns must be postmarked then, the tax returns are legal even if they arrive at the Internal Revenue Service a few days later.

The GOP filed its challenge in Mississippi, which accepts ballots that arrive up to five days after election day. A district judge rejected the claim, but a 5th Circuit Court panel with three Trump appointees ruled that ballots are illegal if they are not received by election day.

The case before the court is Watson vs. Republican National Committee.

California has been criticized for taking weeks to count all the votes, but that issue was not raised in this case.

SACRAMENTO — President Trump claims Gov. Gavin Newsom is unfit to be president because he has a “learning disability.” It’s a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The centuries-old pot-kettle idiom points out hypocrisy — as when one person accuses another of a flaw that afflicts himself.

California’s governor has battled dyslexia all his life — very successfully, by any measure. Dyslexia is a learning disability that makes reading and writing difficult. But it doesn’t mean a stricken person is unable to learn. He just needs to learn differently, as Newsom has done since he was a teen.

Trump apparently isn’t dyslexic. But he clearly has some learning disabilities — including stubbornness, narrow-mindedness and intolerance.

The president still hasn’t learned, for example, that he lost the 2020 election. He persists in the belief — or maybe it’s merely another boldface lie — that the election was stolen in a Joe Biden conspiracy. That’s a bizarre fantasy.

He also didn’t learn from past administrations that a commander in chief should not wage war against Iran without a concrete plan to keep open the Strait of Hormuz so Middle Eastern oil can keep flowing to the world.

And he never has learned what most of us were taught by our parents: that you don’t berate your friends if you expect to keep them friendly — lashing out, for instance, at allies before and after their balking at sending warships to help protect the vital strait.

Moreover, he didn’t learn that the nation’s founders embedded a checks-and-balances governing system in the Constitution and that Congress has a role in imposing tariffs.

When the normally Trump-friendly Supreme Court ruled against his unilateral tariff agenda, the spoiled president did what he usually does: attack, insulting the justices who struck down his edicts.

“Fools,” “lapdogs” and a “disgrace to our nation,” he whined. “It’s an embarrassment to their families.”

Trump still hasn’t learned to shut up and try to be civilized.

Not even after shocking everyone by saying of the late Republican Sen. John McCain, a Navy Pilot who spent more than five years as a tortured POW in the Hanoi Hilton: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Any respect I might have had for the guy vanished in 2015 when the then-candidate for president publicly mocked a New York Times reporter’s disability. At a campaign rally, Trump jerked his arms and flailed his hands while making fun of the reporter’s palsy-like ailment.

So it wasn’t a surprise recently when Trump tore into Newsom for his dyslexia four times in one week.

Yes, Newsom has his eye on the 2028 presidential election and has been scoring points nationally with Democratic activists by using Trump as a punching bag. But Trump keeps offering himself up as an irresistible target.

Regardless, there’s no excuse — even in hard knocks politics — for attacking someone because of his disability.

“Gavin Newscum” — Trump’s synonym for the governor — ”has admitted he has learning disabilities, dyslexia,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities but not for my president.”

“Everything about him is dumb,” Trump added.

In a Fox News Radio interview, Trump said that “presidents can’t have a learning disability.” And on Facebook, Trump wrote: “I don’t want the president of the United States to have a cognitive deficiency.”

A quick Google search could have shown Trump that several presidents have had learning disabilities, including dyslexia.

Start with George Washington, who struggled with grammar and spelling. And Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who had trouble with reading and spelling.

Other presidents with learning disabilities: Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. “It’s a poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word,” Jackson asserted.

Scientist Albert Einstein was dyslexic. So were Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison.

Dyslexia affects roughly one in five Americans to some degree — more than 40 million people, although relatively few are aware of it, according to researchers.

Newsom has spoken openly for years about his struggles with dyslexia. It’s difficult for him to read, especially prepared speeches. So he reads and re-reads, underlines and highlights and meticulously takes notes. When a speech must be read off a teleprompter, he practices for hours.

In January, the governor began his State of the State address to the Legislature with this ad-lib:

“I’m not shy or, you know, embarrassed about my 960 SAT score. But I am a little bit about my inability to read the written [speech] text. And so it’s always been something that I have to work through and I’m confronting.”

In his recently released autobiography, “Young Man in a Hurry,” Newsom writes: “My high school grades were all over the place and I scored lousy on the SAT, three hours of dyslexic torture.”

Early in his political career as a San Francisco supervisor, he writes, “speaking to a crowd was not unlike the fear I felt in third grade reading to my classmates …. So I learned to memorize my talking points and best lines … and wing it from there.

“This is how I discovered one of the secret powers of dyslexia. I could read a room with the best of them. I’d walk in and immediately size up the faces, mood and manners. … I learned that an audience didn’t mind occasional hiccups of speech as long as you looked them in the eye.”

Newsom was twice elected mayor and twice governor.

None of this means he should necessarily be elected president.

There may be policy and political reasons to consider him unfit — but not because of any learning disability.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Newsom leads Harris for president among California Democrats, poll finds
The TK: Democrats excluded from USC gubernatorial debate urge rivals to boycott in solidarity
The L.A. Times Special: Rep. Eric Swalwell’s private AI company raises money, questions

Until next week,
George Skelton

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