With America’s 250th birthday coming up, the Supreme Court decided to get its celebration on a few days early. However, like everything else in this administration’s orbit, the party came with a catch.
First, the good news: in a 6-3 ruling, the Court rejected Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order, a fight DEFIANCE members helped fund back in December alongside Norm Eisen and the Democracy Defenders Fund. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion himself. Justice Thomas, unsatisfied, wrote a 90-page dissent for a 194-page ruling. Read the room, man.
Then the other shoe dropped. In a separate 6-3 decision, the Court stripped away federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates, just in time for the midterms. Kavanaugh called it neutral. Justice Kagan called it an open door to “quid pro quo corruption.” We’ll let you guess which party is sitting on the bigger war chest.
Meanwhile, the people’s house got a $500 million makeover nobody approved. The Washington Post reports that the Trump White House quietly handed out a no-bid contract for the new ballroom, bypassing procurement rules entirely. This, after Trump told everyone private donors had it covered.
And as the country turns 250, the White House is reportedly floating a plan to hand out 250 pardons to mark the occasion. One defense attorney described the resulting scramble as a “three-ring circus.” Another, more bluntly, put a price tag on access: two million dollars.
To help us make sense of the pardon chaos, we’re joined by Liz Oyer, the former U.S. Pardon Attorney whom this administration fired in March. She says Trump has turned clemency into the Hunger Games, and she’s got new reporting on how Bureau of Prisons policy changes may have quietly worked in Ghislaine Maxwell’s favor.
