|
Happy
birthday, America. Your president is a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser, a
convicted felon, and a man whose name appears more than a thousand times in
the Epstein files. I refuse to sugarcoat any of this on your 250th birthday.
You deserve the truth laid out the way a trial lawyer presents evidence to a
jury. So here comes the evidence. The
Courts Already Ruled In
May 2023, a unanimous federal jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump liable for
sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room
and then defaming her. The jury awarded her $5 million. Federal Judge Lewis
Kaplan went further in a written opinion, stating the evidence established
Trump raped Carroll as most Americans understand the word rape. A second jury
later ordered him to pay $83.3 million more for continuing to smear her. Five
days ago, on June 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court refused to
hear his appeal. Not one justice dissented. The facts, law and verdict
stand. Forever. A
Felon in the Oval Office Now
the criminal record. On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump
on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide hush money
payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. Twelve ordinary citizens
heard the evidence and voted guilty 34 times. He became the first American
president ever convicted of a felony, sentenced in January 2025, and he
carried a criminal record into his second term. No president in 250 years of
American history has done what he forced this country to witness. He
Lit the Match, Then Freed the Arsonists He
summoned the mob. On January 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd he assembled
to fight like hell, and his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the
certification of an election he lost. More than 140 police officers suffered
injuries. Several died. The House impeached him for incitement of
insurrection. Special counsel Jack Smith indicted him on four felony counts
for the scheme to overturn the election, and Smith’s report concluded the
evidence would have convicted him at trial. On
day one of his second term, Trump erased the accountability. He granted
clemency to nearly 1,600 rioters, including hundreds of convicted felons, and
freed militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. By this June, at
least 97 of the people he released had been arrested for new crimes. The
Epstein Files Trump
fought the release of the Epstein files with everything he had. Congress
overruled him, passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the Justice
Department finally released millions of pages in 2026. His name shows up more
than a thousand times. Flight logs place him aboard Epstein’s private jet at
least eight times after he told the country he was never on the plane. His
DOJ is still refusing to release the last several million records. You get to
decide what his resistance to transparency tells you. Why July
4th Matters More This Year Two
hundred fifty years ago, ordinary people risked everything to declare no king
rules here. The law binds the farmer and the president alike. Trump attacks
reporters, judges, calls sworn jury verdicts hoaxes, and treats the
Constitution as an obstacle. Every time he does, he spits on the promise your
ancestors bled to secure. Take
Your Stand This July
4th, I celebrate America. I celebrate her Constitution, her courts, and her
juries of everyday citizens who stared down a president’s legal army and
spoke the truth under oath. I refuse to celebrate him. Epstein’s “best
friend” and a man adjudicated as a sexual abuser and convicted as a felon
belongs in a courtroom answering for his conduct, never on a stage wrapping
himself in your flag. Fly
your flag high today. It and this country belong to you. Then wake
up on July 5th and act like the citizen of a free country. Speak
up, show up, and stay loud. Two hundred fifty years of America were built by
people who refused to stay quiet. Be one of them. -Mitch
Jackson, Esq. |
Saturday, July 4, 2026
Why July 4th Matters More This Year
"A Declaration of Independence"
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Walt Whitman wrote, but the nation was conceived in prose. Other countries have national holidays that commemorate feats of revolutionary or military glory. This one celebrates a document. The Declaration of Independence was a charter and a manifesto, yes, but in essence it was a memo, a hastily drafted, feverishly edited, hand-copied piece of committee work. A masterpiece, too.
It’s poetry, philosophy and polemic, all in a little more
than 1,300 words and all represented in its second and most famous sentence.
The Declaration of Independence
1776
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. No matter how many times you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again. Each idea flows from the previous one, and a comprehensive argument takes shape.
We are equal.
We have rights. Those rights describe
the very essence of our humanity.
That’s a lot. Pages and pages have been written on this
passage, seeking out its ideological subtext, its historical context and its
intellectual pretexts in classical and early modern thought. But the plain
English of the first 35 words — from “We” to “happiness” — is still remarkable
in its sweep and radical in its implications.
It moves from a theory of knowledge to a vision of the
good.
We — putting aside for a moment just who this “we” might
be — don’t appeal to precedent, tradition or any other external authority, but
to the evidence of our own eyes. Human equality is not aspirational: It’s
obvious.
Furthermore, this equality isn’t just a formal,
mathematical axiom. It has a specific moral and metaphysical content. A human
creature is defined by the possession of rights, by a divinely granted
entitlement to live, to act and to prosper. This is remarkable writing — and
also a slippery and variable text.
English grammar was a more fluid enterprise in 1776;
punctuation and capitalization were irregular. In the first printed version,
for example, there was no period after “happiness.” The sentence kept going,
swelling to paragraph length and encompassing all of human nature in a chiming
succession of clauses.
Even the simplest gloss — the near-heretical attempt to
put the language of the Declaration “in other words” — hints at the
complexities rippling through the crystalline clarity of the prose. Every word
is a fighting word, begging to be contested. What exactly did they mean by
“equal”? By “Creator”? By “Liberty”? By “We”? Over the years, writers of
various scholarly, literary and political temperaments have proposed answers.
One assumption that has guided generations of
interpreters is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their collaborators meant
a lot more than they said. Their simple words reflect deep learning and
complicated agendas. Some historians have highlighted the influence of John
Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment; others have emphasized the
economic and political concerns of merchants, artisans and farmers in a
prosperous outpost of the British Empire.
Those specific contexts and hidden meanings are
important. But if the Declaration remains relevant and vital for ordinary
readers after 250 years, it may be for the opposite reason: Its writers said so
much more than they meant. The genius of the document lies not in the original,
local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that
later generations have projected onto it.
Unlike its younger sibling, the U.S. Constitution, the
Declaration isn’t an instruction manual. Interpreting it isn’t the job of
tenured specialists. It belongs to the secular realms of politics and
literature, which means that it lives to be adapted, quoted (and misquoted),
wrenched out of its original bearings and repurposed.
The contradictions and limitations of the historical text
are self-evident. The founders proclaimed liberty in a slave-owning society.
They could hardly have anticipated the raucous, pluralistic, self-polarizing
democracy the United States would become. (For what it’s worth they didn’t, in
1776, imagine what we know as the United States at all, but rather 13
autonomous, loosely affiliated political entities.) They wrote, as everyone
does, in the heat of a chaotic present and in the face of an unknowable future.
That future, a succession of chaotic presents, including
the one we now occupy, has looked back at those men gathered in Philadelphia as
signers of an as yet uncashed check.
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg cited the words of the Declaration as a promise to be, however belatedly, fulfilled. And nearly 100 years later, at the March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the check had bounced.
For Lincoln and King, the Declaration functions as both a
sacred text and an unfulfilled promise. The conditions that it holds to be
self-evident in that second sentence did not, at the time it was written, exist
in any known reality. Whether they subsequently did or ever could is the
subject of debates that have more or less defined our politics ever since, but
the ringing confidence of the statement has not diminished.
The source of that confidence, the conviction that gives
the prose its bracing clarity, lies in the founders’ understanding of what they
were against. Liberty and equality were ideals yet to be realized, but tyranny
was a fact. The main body of the Declaration is devoted to describing its
manifestations in exacting detail — taxing the colonists without their consent,
suspending their legislatures, keeping standing armies among them — in order to
justify the radical and unprecedented disruption of the status quo put forth at
the beginning.
The invocation of self-evident truths and inherent rights
is a warrant for the destruction of existing order, a rhetorical erasure not
only of the divine right of kings but also, more generally, of the prerogatives
of power.
This is a revolutionary document. Many years after it was
written, when the world, emerging from the Napoleonic Wars, seemed to be
entering an era of reaction and retrenchment, Jefferson wrote to Adams that
“the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the
globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism. On the contrary
they will consume those engines, and all who work them.”
-A.O. Scott, NYTimes
Friday, July 3, 2026
The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism
 |
Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate
people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold
them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy
theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid
addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the
inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of
worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.
Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It
dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It
neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal
apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice,
retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and
political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed
globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs,
understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their
neoliberal masters.
Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump,
who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional
neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the
political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the
betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.
Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking.
Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make
America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did
previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump
embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic
predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed.
He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump
is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.
Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic
elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world —
is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the
antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism
and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions.
Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”
As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant
success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were
marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial
organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs
such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given
prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the
official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by
Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.
Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates
of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on
the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once
unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to
sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be
happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the
rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the
moral and political morass.
The media bears much of the blame. In the name of
objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class
war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or
its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of
neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of
the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too
became despised.
Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the
highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice,
Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires
social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and
desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality
and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off
libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually
narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social
justice through the conquest of state power.”
Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From
Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the
private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of
religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly
‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal
and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to
commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is
absent?”
“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and
living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of
values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack
of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since
humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount
of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in
dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient
themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of
neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and
desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention
of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”
Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad
freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism.
They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until
exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example,
jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The
fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.
Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech,
freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are
snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the
freedom of the few. The result is fascism.
Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation
and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring
factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared
values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are
branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of
national security.
The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who
were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A
ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest,
but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of
concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other
materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case
were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements
received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines
Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.
The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is
routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented
into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place
in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as
terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they
were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.
It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappears. The tens in of
millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will
still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes.
“And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even
if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will
find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values
and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”
Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was
methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal
protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who
champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the
“radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose.
This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized
or driven into exile.
Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires
such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of
gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to
pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation
where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.
We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.
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Thursday, July 2, 2026
A Troubling Milestone: Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes with Little Justification
In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court.
These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow
docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely
include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and
justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal
precedent.
The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its
regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the
administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has
repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked — and has
done so with little to no explanation.
These emergency decisions have thrown lower courts’
processes into turmoil and have sometimes directly contradicted longstanding
legal precedent. The outcomes have been consequential: The high court has used
the process to limit federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions and
diminished Congress’ authority over federal agencies, and it has allowed for
the detention
of American citizens by immigration agents.
ProPublica analyzed over two decades of Supreme Court rulings, which cover all of the years under Chief Justice John Roberts and go as far back as the online archives allow. We found that when the last court term ended, justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket, as opposed to 56 orders on the more traditional merits docket — where the court hears oral arguments scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions. Legal scholars and court watchers were shocked by our finding. They told ProPublica it’s likely the first time in modern history that so many consequential decisions were made in secret by its nine members.
“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst. He said that our findings reinforce the appearance that the justices are voting on their political preferences. “That’s the real blow to the court’s credibility,” he said. Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House wrote,
“President Trump has faced a historically unprecedented number of injunctions
by liberal lower court judges, the same judges who would rather push their own
policy schemes and undermine the Administration’s lawful agenda. President
Trump will not stop implementing the America First initiatives on which he was
elected.”
For the First Time in Two Decades, Decisions on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Outnumber the Merits Docket.
There are two
ways to get a decision from the Supreme Court. One is to exhaust your appeals
to lower courts and ask to argue your case in front of the high court. The
justices determine whether to take the case on, and if they do, lawyers argue
their case in front of them. The other is to petition the justices directly via
the emergency docket — to freeze a lower court ruling or government policy
while the case goes through appeal.
The appeals to the emergency docket have long outnumbered
those to the merits docket, but most are procedural requests or requests to
stay execution for capital offenses. When those are removed, what’s left is
known as the shadow docket — cases that seek to skip the usual order of things
and ask for a quick ruling from the court’s justices.
The modern shadow docket was born in 2016 when the
Supreme Court issued an emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s Clean
Power Plan, experts say. Papers obtained
by The New York Times show that liberal justices at the time urged
Roberts not to decide the case on an emergency basis because it broke with
longtime precedent. The conservative justices, meanwhile, forcefully argued
that the president’s plan would eventually be overturned by the court anyway
and that it would put too much of a burden on the energy industry.
Driven by its numerous losses in lower courts, the current Trump administration appeals to the emergency docket significantly more often than previous administrations, and the court has increasingly agreed to take quick action on its appeals. The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed just eight petitions in 16 years. The Trump administration filed 32 in 2025 alone, an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found.
The increased willingness of the Roberts court to
intervene on Trump’s behalf — as well as in other issues that favor
conservatives and Trump allies — has upended American life, said Donald Ayer, a
former deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general who served under
the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. “On many subjects of real
importance to our future, they’ve demolished what used to be the law,” he said.
Public scrutiny of the shadow docket ramped up in
September 2021 after the Supreme Court used it to issue a one-paragraph,
unsigned opinion that further rolled back abortion rights established
in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In the order, the court refused to block Texas’
Senate Bill 8, the “Heartbeat Act,” which banned abortion after an embryo’s
cardiac activity is detectable, typically at six weeks of pregnancy and before
many people know they are pregnant. Protests erupted nationwide, and the Senate
held a hearing on the shadow docket.
In an unusual public acknowledgement, Justice Elena Kagan
referenced the shadow docket by name in her scathing dissent, accusing the
majority of green-lighting a “patently unconstitutional law” with only a
cursory review in less than 72 hours. “In all these ways, the majority’s
decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decision making
— which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to
defend,” Kagan wrote.
That an opinion was even issued and that four of the
justices signed their names to it was uncommon. On the shadow docket, justices
do not have to make their votes known. In rare cases, their votes are revealed
in terse indications that they grant or deny the application, or even more
rarely, as an opinion. We found that just 17% of votes cast had any sort of
public record of a vote or opinion.
Responding to public criticism, Justice Samuel Alito contended that the court isn’t to blame for the rise in shadow docket cases. “We do not file these emergency applications,” he said. “Parties file them.” The debate has continued. “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we consistently green-light harmful acts that do real damage,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during an April speech on the shadow docket at Yale Law School.
Until this past Supreme Court term, emergency
applications fluctuated year to year but showed no clear upward trend. The
applications are given first to a single justice, who decides if a case is
worth referring to the full court. In recent years, justices have referred more
of such appeals for a review and vote by the full court. Last term, when there
were both more cases and more referrals to the full court, the appeals to the
shadow docket finally overtook those to the merits docket.
Emergency Applications Referred for a Full Court Vote
Have Risen Sharply.
Total applications have varied over the last two decades,
with a surge last term under President Donald Trump. The cases were
consequential. On June 23, 2025, after a lower court had ruled that eight men
being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court
intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men
were deported. The majority didn’t issue an opinion justifying its ruling.
Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while still-ongoing litigation against it proceeded. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” These became known as “Kavanaugh stops.”
Last year, ProPublica found more than 170
citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50
Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all
Latino.
And in May, while an election in Louisiana was already
underway, the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral
map, removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana can now
use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle
for control of the House of Representatives — an effort touched off by Trump’s
call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.
Roberts once signed on to a Kagan
dissent that assailed the shadow docket. But our analysis found that
he has referred more substantive cases for a vote by the full court than any
other justice, going from just one in the 2005 term when he joined the court to
nearly half of all referrals in the last term.
There is an additional difference between the shadow
docket and the merits docket. After the court holds public argument, the
justices’ ultimate merits decisions are closely watched and extensively covered
by the press. The summer’s “decision season,” when the final and most
significant rulings come down, has a predictable cadence that ends when the
justices go on summer recess. Not so with the shadow docket. Increasingly, the
justices are making big decisions after they’ve issued their final merits docket
decision, when public attention has waned.
A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.,
have sponsored
legislation to make the shadow docket more transparent. Raskin told
ProPublica that the court’s legitimacy has fallen with every significant
decision made without “real opinions or analysis.”
“Lower federal courts have been deciding against the
Trump administration in an overwhelming majority of cases with weighty and
well-reasoned opinions,” Raskin said in a written statement. “Yet when things
get to the twilight zone of the shadow docket, the Supreme Court is overturning
100-page opinions with a flippant sentence or two.” He added, “The result is a
body that looks less like a Supreme Court and more like a Royal Court rubber
stamping the madness and folly of the Trump Administration.”
“The jurisprudence of the Roberts Court today is as murky
as the green algae water in the Reflecting Pool.”
How We Reported This Story:
To compare the number of cases on the Supreme Court’s
shadow docket to the traditional merits docket, we compared emergency
applications listed on the court’s online docket search with
counts of decisions compiled in Penn State’s Supreme Court Database (Version 2025
Release 01). For the merits docket, we counted only signed decisions in argued
cases, the typical format for those rulings.
The court’s online docket goes back to the year 2000, but
our analysis looks at Supreme Court terms from October 2003 to October 2025,
where emergency applications are easily identified by the letter “A” in their
docket number.
We identified more than 27,000 emergency applications
during that period, including thousands of requests that are not commonly
understood to be a part of the shadow docket. Most appeals to the emergency
docket are the type of requests that were traditionally handled there:
procedural requests, such as extending the time to file, and requests to stay
execution for capital offenses. The remainder are the focus of our reporting.
Substantive Shadow Docket Cases Are a Small Fraction
of All Emergency Applications.
Note: The COVID-19 lockdown impacted applications for
filing relief in the 2020-21 term. We defined a substantive application
on the shadow docket as any filing where the full court was asked to intervene
in the traditional appeals process, such as staying a lower court’s
order.
Most of the cases we excluded are decided by just one
justice, each of whom oversees one or more federal circuits and has the power
to refer filings to the wider court. When the cases are referred to the full
court, they are the subject of a vote by the justices. We ran our approach by
multiple experts; all of whom found it sound.
A filer can appeal to another justice if their
application is denied. The next justice to receive the application always
refers it to the full court. We did not include these renewed applications
because our analysis found the court has never granted one.
The court has labeled capital punishment cases only since
the October 2017 term. To identify them prior to that, we flagged applications
for stays of execution. We then manually reviewed every case referred to the
full court. For applications decided by a single justice, we used an AI model
to flag potential capital cases by examining the parties on the application and
the relief requested. The model flagged over 60 possible capital cases, and
those were manually reviewed. Despite our effort, it is possible some capital
cases may still be included in our final tallies before the 2017 term.
Although rulings on the shadow docket are typically
unsigned and do not include vote breakdowns, we were able to identify how a
justice voted in some cases. The analysis is based on either the opinions
issued by the justices, most of which are dissenting opinions, or if the
justice indicated they would have granted or denied. In some decisions, the
justices issued a statement not attached to either a grant or denial. We did
not record these as votes.
- ProPublica
-Ken B. Morales/ Nick McMillan contributed
data reporting.
The sad inevitability of Justice Alito’s birthright citizenship dissent
In 1913, Antonino Alati left southern Italy to find a better life in a land where many people regarded him as little better than scum. He joined millions of his fellow countrymen in the United States, where the press vilified Italians as poor, swarthy, violent Catholics who had too many babies, refused to assimilate and could never possibly be considered “white.”
Politicians were already working to shut the door on
them. A
congressional report released two years before Alati’s arrival cited
southern Italians as evidence that “the new immigration as a class is far less
intelligent than the old.” They came to the U.S., the report asserted, “with
the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of
the new world and then returning to the old country.”
Alati wouldn’t let bigotry win. He soon sent for his wife
and children, including his infant son Salvatore. Alati turned to Alito,
Salvatore became Samuel. A generation later, the family had a Supreme Court
justice in Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the second Italian American, after Antonin
Scalia, to sit on the highest court in the land.
During
his 2005 confirmation hearings, Alito praised his father as an
“extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame
many difficulties” to ensure a better life for him and his sister. By then,
Italian Americans were established as an essential part of this country’s
fabric, from music to politics to food.
It’s the most American of tales — which is why it’s so
surprising, yet not, to read Alito’s blistering dissent in the Supreme Court’s
6-3 decision rejecting
President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship.
If there’s one constant in this country besides death and
taxes, it’s how quickly descendants of immigrants, and sometimes immigrants
themselves, forget how loathed their ethnic group was and how they proved the
haters wrong. Too many become uncharitable to the policies that helped them and
the immigrants who followed.
But Alito’s stance against birthright citizenship goes
beyond just forgetting his roots. His 39-page opinion describes the supposed
impact of undocumented migrants on the U.S., using words — “overran,” “soared,”
“exploded,” “massive,” “a stream,” “huge” — that read like the same invective
used against Italians in his grandfather and father’s time.
The justice channels anti-Italian conspiracies of the past by casting doubt on the national allegiances of the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants — the same patriotism test that Italian Americans faced generations ago when xenophobes questioned their Catholicism.
Alito claims without evidence that millions of agricultural
workers were able to apply for American citizenship after President Reagan’s
1986 amnesty “at least in part because of fraud” — a charge also leveled against
Italians who sought to naturalize back in the day.
And so it goes, each passage a jumbled argument dressed
up in judicial interpretations largely rejected by his fellow Catholic Supreme
Court justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Coney
Barrett signed on to the majority opinion that Roberts wrote, and Kavanaugh
concurred.
I know how quickly families forget their own immigrant histories. Yet I look at people like Alito and wonder how they ended up thinking the way they do, because I could never imagine doing the same. My maternal grandmother was born in Arizona to parents who fled their home country during the Mexican Revolution, becoming an American citizen by birthright. My father, who crossed the border in the trunk of a Chevy, legalized his status in an era when it was far easier to do so.
Like Alito’s paisans, my Mexican family was
also demonized for supposedly being insufficiently American and posing a threat
to national unity. They also sacrificed their own dreams so their children and
grandchildren could achieve theirs.
And just like Alito, some members of my family have
forgotten our history and support Trump or favor some of his immigration
policies, dismissing new arrivals as criminals or lazy. That’s why I will
always side with undocumented people and welcome anyone who gives birth in this
country with the hope that their newborn finds a better life.
It seems from his dissent that Alito somewhat agrees with
me. He posits that millions of Americans who were born in this country to
parents without papers “have a strong moral claim to be able to remain in the
land where they grew up.” Congress “can and should address their situation,” he
writes.
The justice blasts birth
tourism, where women from China and other countries travel to the U.S. to
have a baby, then return home, benefiting from our generosity and offering
nothing in return.
I agree that’s a mockery of what being an American should
be and ruins it for people who want to contribute to building a better nation.
But Alito throws out the baby with the bathwater by failing to recognize that
Trump’s attempt to erase birthright citizenship via executive order is
presidential overreach based on bigotry, not rule of law. He’d rather cut up
the Constitution to spite something he doesn’t like. Thank God his side lost,
yet it’s sad that Trump’s pathetic attempt to define who can be an American
went as far as it did.
Alito concludes by stating that the court’s decision to
uphold the 14th Amendment is “a mistake that will seriously affect the
country’s future.”
What new immigrants might inflict on this country is the
perpetual worry of immigration restrictionists — and yet history keeps proving
them wrong. Alito’s family did; so, did mine. Only in these United States can
the progeny of people once portrayed as parasites and invaders side with those
making the same argument about the latest batch of newcomers.
History will see Alito’s vote for what it is: a forsaking
of the promise his family once fulfilled, to support the people who never
wanted them here in the first place.
LA Times
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
"Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows"
All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion,
a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real
estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises
pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.
One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment
firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought
nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty
Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and
private enterprise.
Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars
from sales of his $TRUMP meme coin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital
tokens.
The results, detailed in Mr. Trump’s mandatory financial
disclosure report for 2025 and released on Tuesday, pulled back the curtain on
the president’s business operations. His crypto ventures, the report shows, are
now some of his most lucrative enterprises, a remarkable turnabout for a man
who once slammed crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
The president’s finances, which had been something of a
mystery, highlight a conflict in his crypto business: Mr. Trump is a major
crypto industry operator and its top policymaker.
It is hardly the only issue to arise from having a
businessman serve as president. The president’s family business, the Trump
Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts
of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are
crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for
Mr. Trump last year, the filing shows.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though in the past, Mr. Trump has noted that he is exempt from federal conflict of interest laws. Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a recent statement that Mr. Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.”
Although the report released on Tuesday offered revenue
figures for Mr. Trump’s crypto and real estate ventures, it did not reveal
whether all of the businesses turned a profit or a loss, which is consistent
with his previous filings.
The report also offers little clarity on the president’s net worth, much of which is tied to estimated property values and the fluctuating paper worth of crypto assets and his stock portfolio. For his largest assets, including cryptocurrency and real estate, Mr. Trump reported a minimum valuation of $50 million with no upper limit.
The president’s shares in
his own publicly traded social media company, Trump Media & Technology
Group, are worth about $875 million, according to other public filings,
representing one of the single greatest sources of the president’s net worth.
(Those shares have plummeted over the last year, eroding some of his net
worth.)
But it was Mr. Trump’s crypto business that proved to be a top revenue stream. Once an outspoken skeptic of crypto, Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail in 2024 and started a series of ventures that have reaped enormous sums. With his three sons, he helped create World Liberty, a crypto firm that sells a digital currency called $WLFI.
Last year, World Liberty marketed its coin to investors
around the world, with 75 percent of each sale allocated to a Trump business
entity, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing the president
would make money even if the value of the token declined. The president
received about $500 million from those sales last year, according to the filing, compared
with $57 million in 2024.
World Liberty enriched the Trump family in other ways, as
well.
In January 2025, days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, an
investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. bought a 49 percent stake
in World Liberty, raising a slew of ethical concerns. Soon the Emiratis struck
a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security
officials — for the export of valuable computer chips that power artificial
intelligence.
The filing released Tuesday did not explicitly refer to
the deal, but it mentioned unnamed investments that generated more than $200
million for Mr. Trump.
The other major source of Mr. Trump’s crypto wealth was his meme coin, a novelty currency known as $TRUMP that he started selling days before his inauguration. He earned more than $600 million from sales of the coin, according to the filing. The coin’s price shot up briefly, before plummeting, with its price recently hovering around $1.67, a roughly 80 percent drop from a year ago.
The Trump family also continued to pull in chunks of
money from real estate branding deals, the new report showed, including some in
the Middle East that generated a minimum of $35 million in revenue last year.
Deals in Vietnam and Romania, as well as older ones in India, Turkey and
Indonesia, combined to bring in at least another $20 million.
And the president’s major real estate holdings in the
United States, like Trump National Golf Club near Miami, pulled in $122 million
in revenue, while his Mar-a-Lago club generated a total of $77 million for him,
the report said.
Now that Mr. Trump is flush with cash, and now that he
has eliminated some of his long-running legal problems, he has reduced the
liabilities on his balance sheet, including after an appeals court overturned a
nearly half-billion-dollar legal judgment stemming from a civil fraud case in
New York.
The disclosure report shows that Mr. Trump still owes
more than $50 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of
sexually abusing and defaming her. The Supreme Court on Monday declined the
president’s request to review one of the judgments Ms. Carroll secured against
him.
The financial disclosure captured several other legal
wins for Mr. Trump, including payouts he collected from media and technology
giants like ABC News, Paramount and Meta. ABC settled a defamation lawsuit,
while Paramount agreed to pay him over the editing of an interview on the CBS
News program “60 Minutes.” Meta settled a lawsuit he filed over the suspension
of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the
Capitol.
The disclosure also captured gains in Mr. Trump’s
investments in the financial markets. While these numbers appear in wide
ranges, making it difficult to decipher meaningful trends or specific amounts,
they suggest that Mr. Trump continues to get richer as president.
At the end of last year, the disclosure shows, he held
investment assets of at least $857 million, compared with a minimum reported
value of $236 million the year prior.
-NY Times
Ben
Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering
President Trump.
Andrea
Fuller is a data journalist at The Times, using data analysis to
make sense of complex topics.
Eric
Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad
range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.
David
Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry for The Times from
New York. He can be reached at davidyb@nytimes.com.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Your $7,000 Limit, Their $551,300 Check. The Supreme Court Made Sure of It Today
Six justices struck down the limit on party spending and the door to buying a senator swung wide open. Here's what happened and what to do about it. How
does a $7,000 limit become a $551,300 weapon in the hands of one wealthy
donor, with nobody breaking a single law and nobody facing a single charge?
You are about to learn the answer, and the answer should make you furious. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a
case called National Republican Senatorial Committee versus Federal Election
Commission. The name sounds sleepy. The result is a wrecking ball.¹ Six
justices erased one of the last guardrails standing between your vote and the
open purchase of your government. I read every page of the opinion and every
page of the dissent. As a trial lawyer who has spent decades watching how
power moves through a courtroom, I am telling you plainly. Your voice in
American elections got smaller today, and the checkbook of the wealthy
got a direct line to the people who write your laws. What
the Court Did Today Federal
law sets a hard ceiling on how much money one donor hands a single candidate.
$7,000 per candidate for the whole election cycle. That ceiling comes from
the Federal Election Commission. The cap runs $3,500 per election, and the
primary and the general count as two separate elections, so $3,500 plus
$3,500 gives you the $7,000 total. Congress
built more walls behind that ceiling. One of those walls limited how much a
political party spends in direct coordination with its own candidate. Picture
the party and the candidate sitting at the same table, planning ads, moving
as one operation. The law capped how much the party pours into the joint
effort, because a party check spent hand in hand with a candidate works
exactly like cash in the candidate’s pocket. The
Supreme Court knocked that wall down. In a six to three ruling, the majority
declared the cap on coordinated party spending a violation of the First
Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts and
Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett signed on. Justice Kagan wrote
the dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. The majority overruled
a precedent called Colorado II from 2001, a decision where this same Court
looked at the same wall and upheld the cap as fully constitutional. The
Math They Hope You Never Run. Run the numbers with me, because the numbers tell the whole story. You, an ordinary citizen, hand your candidate the legal max. $7,000. A wealthy donor wants to move far more to the same candidate. The old rules blocked the easy routes. Today the donor walks through a door the Court swung wide. Here
is the play. The donor does not write the candidate one giant check, because
a check that size breaks the $7,000 cap and breaks the law. The candidate
builds a different tool, a single collection account that holds a stack of
committees at once. The legal name is a joint fundraising committee. Give it
a friendly label, like the John Smith Victory Fund. The
fund links 52 separate committees under one roof. The candidate’s own
campaign, the national party committee, and the party committees of all 50
states. Each committee carries its own legal limit, and the fund lets one
donor max out all 52 with a single check. These three limits come straight
off the FEC’s 2025 to 2026 chart: -Candidate,
$7,000. The most one donor may give a candidate for the cycle. -National
party committee, $44,300 per year. This figure rises with inflation, and
$44,300 is the current number. -Each
state party committee, $10,000 per year. This figure is fixed in the statute
and has held at $10,000 for years. Now
watch the total climb. Fifty state parties at $10,000 each comes to $500,000.
Add $44,300 for the national committee. Add $7,000 for the candidate. One
donor signs a single check for $551,300 and never hands any one committee a
dollar more than the law allows. Then
the money moves. Federal law lets a party shuffle unlimited sums between its
state and national committees. So the 50 state parties wire their $10,000
shares up to the national party, often the very same day. Stack those
transfers on the national committee’s own $44,300, and the national party
sits on $544,300 from one donor. The candidate already pocketed his $7,000
directly. Here is what changed today. The old rules let the party spend only a small, capped amount in coordination with the candidate, so most of that $544,300
had to flow into other party work. The Court removed the cap. The national
party can now spend the full $544,300 backing the candidate. Ad buys.
Polling. Office rent. The catering for a campaign event. Every dollar lands where the candidate needs the money. So, a
$7,000 limit becomes a $551,300 pipeline to one candidate. Around 80 times
the cap Congress wrote. Justice Kagan laid out this exact math in her
dissent, step by step, and the majority brushed past it. Here is the door the Court left standing open. The candidate makes the ask. A senator sits across from a billionaire and says, max out my victory fund. The donor needs no earmarking words, no written instruction, nothing the rules would flag. A naked deal, your money for my official act, stays a federal crime, one now nearly impossible to catch with the guardrail gone. The Court calls the gratitude protected speech. You and I call the result the wealthy buying a government. Here’s what you actually need to remember. Forget the legal maze for a second. One donor used to be capped at $7,000. That same donor can now move more than half a million dollars to one candidate. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
How We Got Here, and Why I
Despise Citizens United. None
of this happened in a vacuum. Today’s ruling is the newest brick in a
wall the Court has been building against you for sixteen years, and the
foundation stone has a name. Citizens United. In 2010, in Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, five justices decided corporations and outside groups hold a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums influencing your elections. I have detested this decision since the day the Court released the ruling, and time has proven every fear right. Citizens United, paired with a lower court ruling months later, birthed the Super PAC. Suddenly a handful of billionaires and corporate
interests poured oceans of money into races and drowned out the voice of the
ordinary voter. The 2024 cycle tells the tale in cold figures. PACs raised
more than fifteen billion dollars. The parties raised under three billion.
Big money owns the field, and your single vote started to feel like a whisper
in a hurricane. Four
years after Citizens United, the Court struck again in a case called
McCutcheon. The justices erased the overall ceiling on how much one donor
gives across an entire election cycle. Remove the ceiling, and the joint
fundraising committee I described becomes a loaded weapon. In 2022, the Court
kept chipping in a case called Cruz. Today the demolition reached
the party coordination wall. Each of these rulings sounds technical. Every
one of them moves money in the same direction, toward the people who already
hold the most of it. The
majority dressed today’s ruling up as fairness. Parties deserve a chance
to catch the Super PACs, the Court said. Read the logic twice. The same Court
built the Super PAC era, and now points to the imbalance the Court itself
created as the reason to knock down one more guardrail. Justice Kagan caught
the circular game in her dissent and called it out cold. The
Fingerprints on This One. Here
is the detail you deserve to sit with. When a federal law gets challenged in
court, the government usually defends the law. Stands up for the rule
Congress wrote. The people’s lawyers argue for the people’s statute. The
Trump administration refused. Donald
Trump’s Justice Department had already stopped enforcing the cap on party
coordination, the cap protecting you from half million-dollar end runs around
the contribution limit. Then the administration walked into the Supreme Court
and argued the cap should die. The government’s own Solicitor General stood
with the people tearing the law down. The Court had to reach outside and
appoint a private lawyer to defend the people’s statute, because the
President’s lawyers would not. Sit
with the meaning of this move. The administration that swore an oath to
uphold the laws stood aside and let one more wall protecting your democracy
collapse, and the wall happened to protect a system the President and his
donor's profit from. One
of the original challengers carries a familiar name too. JD Vance filed as a
Senate candidate back when the suit began. He sits in the Vice President’s
chair today, and his old candidacy paperwork kept the case alive long
enough for the Court to rule. The people who brought this fight now run the
executive branch. The people who refused to defend the law now run the
Justice Department. Connect the dots, and the picture comes into sharp, ugly
focus. What
This Means for You. Strip
away the legal vocabulary, and the ruling lands in your living room. Your
government grows more responsive to the people writing the biggest checks and
less responsive to you. A megadonor now buys a level of access and gratitude
you will never afford. When a billionaire funnels half a million dollars to a
senator through the party side door, the senator remembers. The next time a
vote touches the billionaire’s business, the billionaire’s taxes, the
billionaire’s industry, the senator returns the donor’s call first. Yours
waits. You
feel the result everywhere. In the prescription drug prices nobody reins in.
In the tax loopholes nobody closes. In the industries nobody holds
accountable. Money talks in Washington, and the Court keeps handing the
wealthy a louder microphone, and your kids and grandkids inherit a government
tuned to the frequency of the rich. I
worry about them constantly. I worry about the country we leave behind. A
democracy where a half million-dollar check outweighs ten thousand ordinary
voices stops being a democracy and starts becoming an auction. What
Happens Next. Brace yourself, because the wealthy and the operatives around them read these rulings the day they drop, and the planning starts immediately. Expect the joint fundraising committees to balloon. Both parties will build them bigger, link more state committees, and chase the largest checks in the land. The Federal Election Commission, already toothless and now stripped of one more enforcement tool, steps further back. The flood of money through the party channel grows. The arms race accelerates. Watch
the next targets too. Justice Kagan, in her dissent, flagged a warning every
voter should hear. The same logic the majority used today points
like an arrow at the remaining guardrails. The rule treating a donor’s
coordinated spending as a capped contribution sits in the crosshairs. Even
the base contribution limits, the seven thousand dollar line itself, look
more fragile tonight than they did this morning. This Court
has shown a steady appetite for dismantling campaign finance protection one
case at a time, and the appetite has not been satisfied. Justice
Kagan summed up the wreckage with a line I will carry for a long time. Years
ago, Justice Breyer warned that an earlier ruling left the nation’s campaign
finance laws a hollow remnant. Kagan looked at what survived after today and
called the result a remnant of a remnant. She is right. Brick by brick, the
wall built to protect your vote from open corruption keeps coming down. This Is Where You Come In. I refuse to treat today as the end of the story. The Court wrote the latest chapter. You write the next one. Money
found new lanes into our politics. Your power lives in the one place no
billionaire outspends you. The ballot box, and the organized voice of an
awake public. A megadonor buys access. A movement of informed voters buys
outcomes. They are counting on you to feel small, to shrug, to look away as
the auction runs. Prove them wrong. Learn
the names of the candidates who take these mega checks and the names of the
ones who refuse. Back the leaders fighting for real reform and a
constitutional amendment to undo this entire rotten line of cases. Vote in
every race, the small ones included, because the operatives bankrolling this
machine pray you skip them. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your kids. Make
this your dinner table conversation. Then
do one more thing today. Share this piece with one person stuck in the
fog and pull them into the fight. The wealthy already know how this system
works, and they have stayed quiet about the mechanics on purpose. Your job,
starting right now, is to make sure everyone you know understands the game
and refuses to sit out. They built this for the few. We take it back for the
many. Let’s go. -Mitch
Jackson, Esq. |
