⚖️ Supreme Court Rules Trump Can End TPS for Haitians and Syrians

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday by a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines that President Trump has virtually unreviewable authority to terminate the Temporary Protected Status program, clearing the way for mass deportations of people who have lived and worked legally in the United States for years, in some cases for decades. Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that under the statute Congress passed in 1990, the president’s decision to end TPS is not subject to judicial oversight. The ruling immediately affects an estimated 330,000 Haitians and roughly 3,800 Syrians currently living legally in the United States. Without TPS status, those individuals will revert to unlawful presence and face deportation, in many cases leaving behind American-born children. The three liberal justices dissented. The Trump administration had already moved to strip TPS from thirteen of the seventeen countries that held the designation when the second term began, with four remaining countries — El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine — facing renewal decisions later this fall.

Congress enacted the TPS program in 1990 precisely to address situations in which migrants cannot safely return to their home countries because of armed conflict, natural disasters, or extraordinary conditions. The State Department currently warns Americans against traveling to both Haiti and Syria in the strongest terms available, citing dangers including terrorism, kidnapping, and the near-total collapse of civil infrastructure. TPS holders in the workforce include tens of thousands of agricultural workers, nursing assistants, and caregivers who together contribute billions of dollars annually to the American economy and pay an estimated $1.5 billion each year in federal and state taxes. The administration has sought to end TPS on the grounds that the determinations were made improperly and that the program has expanded well beyond its original purpose.

The constitutional question here is genuinely complex, and the court’s majority does not simply ignore it. Congress delegated the TPS determination to the executive, and the court has held that delegation to be broad enough to preclude judicial review. That is a defensible reading of the statute. The harder question, and the one the republic will have to answer in the months ahead, is whether the removal of hundreds of thousands of people who followed the law, maintained legal status, paid taxes, and in many cases raised American citizens is wise governance or merely permissible governance. The Founders understood that a republic’s legitimacy depends not only on the legality of its acts but on the justice of them. The courts have spoken. Congress, which created this program and could modify or restore it, has not.

🔫 Supreme Court Strikes Down California’s Gun-Carry Restrictions in Stores and Private Spaces

In a second major ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down laws in California, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland that had required concealed-carry permit holders to obtain explicit permission from a business owner before bringing a firearm into a privately owned establishment open to the public. The 6-to-3 decision, again written by Justice Samuel Alito and again along ideological lines, held that the default-ban approach adopted by these states unconstitutionally hobbles the Second Amendment right to carry arms for self-defense in the course of daily life. The decision reverses the framework those states had constructed following the court’s landmark 2022 Bruen ruling, under which businesses had to affirmatively post permission for firearms rather than affirmatively prohibiting them. Under Thursday’s ruling, the presumption flips back: licensed carriers may bring firearms into stores, restaurants, and similar spaces unless the property owner has posted a prohibition. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissent, accused the majority of distorting its own Second Amendment framework to favor gun owners.

The case arose from Hawaii’s law, though its effect extends immediately to the four other states with nearly identical statutes, and legal challenges to similar measures in additional jurisdictions are expected to follow. The court heard oral arguments in January and accepted the case in October 2025 after lower federal courts reached conflicting conclusions about how to apply the Bruen standard to private-property carry restrictions. The ruling is one of the most significant expansions of Second Amendment rights since Bruen itself and builds on a line of decisions that have progressively limited states’ ability to restrict where and how licensed gun owners may carry their firearms. Property owners retain the right to prohibit firearms on their premises; what they may no longer do, in the affected states, is rely on a government-imposed default ban to do that work for them.

The Founders who wrote and ratified the Second Amendment did so in a world where arms were carried as a practical matter of self-defense, not confined to the home and produced only in extremis. The court’s originalist majority has been methodically reconstructing the Second Amendment’s practical scope according to that historical understanding. States that disagree retain meaningful tools: they can require licensing, mandate training, and permit businesses to prohibit carry on their premises. What they cannot do, after Thursday, is presume that a law-abiding citizen forfeits the right to bear arms the moment he steps into a grocery store. That is a constitutionally sound result, and one Jefferson, who famously carried a pistol in his own time, would likely have recognized without difficulty.

🛢️ Strait of Hormuz Shipping Resumes as Oil Prices Near Pre-War Levels

Oil markets moved sharply lower Thursday as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz continued to ramp up under the framework of last week’s U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, with Brent crude falling to roughly $73 a barrel, its lowest point in nearly four months and approaching the $70-per-barrel level at which it was trading before the war began in February. The drop reflects cautious but genuine optimism that the commercial shipping corridor through the strait is reopening to traffic, a development that would have significant downstream effects on energy prices across the global economy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Bahrain Thursday for a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting after visiting Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday, working to reassure Gulf allies that their security concerns — particularly regarding Iran’s missile program and its support for regional proxy forces — will be addressed in the broader negotiating process that the memorandum of understanding is meant to initiate. Rubio pledged to Gulf partners that Washington would be “completely aligned” with their interests as the sixty-day negotiating window unfolds.

The diplomatic picture remained complicated. The Senate, one day after passing a war powers resolution directing the president to withdraw from hostilities with Iran, reversed course Wednesday on a second such measure, rejecting a procedural motion 50 to 47 after Republican Senators Rand Paul voted present and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — who had backed the first resolution — ultimately could not secure the votes needed to advance Senator Tim Kaine’s version. The whipsaw pattern reflects the genuine tension within the Republican caucus between members who believe the constitutional war powers argument is sound and members who are reluctant to hand Democrats a political victory on an issue the White House has framed as executive prerogative. The administration has asked Congress for approximately $88 billion in supplemental emergency funding to cover munitions expended and other costs from a conflict that has already run an estimated $100 billion in total.

The Founders who framed the Constitution distributed the war power deliberately: Congress declares, the executive conducts. The Iran conflict has unfolded almost entirely outside that constitutional design, with the executive initiating, sustaining, and now negotiating to end a war that Congress never formally authorized. The Senate’s one-day reversal illustrates precisely why the Founders were wary of congressional deference to executive action in matters of war: the political pressures that make declaration difficult in the early stages of conflict do not disappear simply because the conflict has become expensive and complicated. Declining oil prices are a welcome economic development. A durable constitutional settlement of the republic’s war-making authority is a more important one.

🗳️ Federal Judge Halts Trump’s Executive Order to Create a National Voter List

A federal judge in Boston on Thursday struck down President Trump’s executive order directing the federal government to create a national voter list and restrict mail ballot delivery to those who appear on it, issuing a summary judgment that applies to this year’s midterm election cycle. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, appointed by President Obama, sided with a coalition of 22 state attorneys general and found that the order’s provisions unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers by having the executive branch set election rules that belong to Congress and the states. It was the second ruling in consecutive days against Trump’s election executive orders, following a Wednesday ruling that barred his proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration. The March executive order would have required the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to individuals on a federally maintained voter list, a mechanism that election officials in both parties argued would create chaos and provide opportunity for abuse. The Postal Service had already published a proposed rule in the Federal Register implementing the order’s requirements.

The Trump administration had argued in its motions to dismiss that the challenges were premature and that plaintiffs lacked standing under the Administrative Procedure Act. Judge Talwani rejected that argument, noting the executive order’s specific deadlines over the next three months and the November 3 midterm election five months away. The administration has not yet indicated whether it will appeal. A parallel lawsuit challenging the same executive order, brought by Democratic and civil rights groups in a Washington, D.C., federal court, was dismissed in May on ripeness grounds, but that ruling has been appealed. The order emerged from Trump’s continued assertions of widespread noncitizen voting, a phenomenon that election officials in both parties and repeated audits — including Republican-led reviews — have found to be extraordinarily rare. Noncitizen voting is already a federal felony punishable by deportation.

The Constitution is explicit: the time, place, and manner of federal elections are matters for Congress to regulate, and the states, as the framers designed, administer elections with substantial independence. The Founders were acutely suspicious of any mechanism by which a sitting executive might influence the composition of the electorate that would judge his performance or that of his party. James Madison’s fear of faction extended to the faction in power. A federal voter list, maintained and enforced by executive branch agencies, is precisely the kind of consolidated electoral authority the constitutional design was built to prevent. The judge’s ruling, whatever one thinks of the politics surrounding it, reflects a constitutional principle the Founders would have recognized immediately.

🌎 Trump-Endorsed Conservative Wins Colombian Presidency as Petro Era Ends

Progressive candidate Iván Cepeda conceded Colombia’s presidential runoff Wednesday to Abelardo de la Espriella, a conservative outsider endorsed by President Trump who defeated the left-wing lawmaker by roughly one percentage point, or approximately 251,000 votes out of more than 26 million cast. De la Espriella, a 47-year-old businessman and lawyer who had never previously held elected office, holds dual Colombian and American citizenship, is a registered Republican, and has promised to model his crime policy on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s approach, including the construction of large-scale detention facilities that have dramatically reduced homicide rates in El Salvador while drawing accusations of human rights abuses from international observers. De la Espriella will take office August 7, ending the presidency of Gustavo Petro, whose “total peace” strategy of negotiating with armed groups across the country was widely seen as a failure and whose political heir Cepeda could not escape that verdict at the polls. Cepeda, the son of a senator assassinated by military officers in 1994, pledged in his concession address to lead a constructive democratic opposition.

The result adds Colombia to a pattern of Latin American nations turning toward political outsiders who promise firm action on crime, economic instability, and the failures of ideological governance. De la Espriella ran on a platform explicitly favorable to the Trump administration’s regional posture and has already announced plans to join the president’s “Shield of the Americas” coalition, a grouping of countries committed to coordinated action against criminal networks in the hemisphere. The election produced a historic turnout, with more than 26 million votes cast, though a notable fraction of the electorate — more than 426,000 people — chose a ballot option expressing rejection of both candidates, and nearly 29,000 cast blank ballots. The slim margin of victory prompted Petro and Cepeda to initially dispute the results before the latter ultimately accepted them and conceded.

The conservative wave that has reshaped politics in Argentina, El Salvador, and now Colombia is not simply a product of American influence or of Trump’s personal endorsement operation. It reflects something more fundamental: a public in multiple countries that has watched left-wing governments promise transformation and deliver disorder, and has concluded that the cost of ideological experimentation is too high. The Founders understood that free republics can only survive if the people who constitute them are willing to render honest verdicts on those who govern them. The Colombian electorate did exactly that, and the verdict was clear. Whether de la Espriella can govern more successfully than those he replaced is the question his four-year term will answer.

💰 Republican-Linked Super PACs Are Quietly Bankrolling Democratic Primary Candidates

Two political action committees with direct ties to the Conservative Americans PAC, a well-funded Republican super PAC, have spent more than $4.3 million in Democratic primaries across New Jersey, Maine, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska, boosting candidates whom Republican strategists believe will be easier to defeat in November’s general elections. The two groups, Real Change PAC and Lead Left, are linked through a nonprofit called the American Prosperity Alliance, which as a charity is legally permitted to conceal the identities of its donors. The Conservative Americans PAC spokesperson confirmed the strategy and framed it as payback for Democratic interference in Republican primaries over the past decade, noting that Democrats successfully boosted a weaker Republican candidate in a 2022 Michigan congressional primary. The results in 2026 have been uneven: in Maine, the Real Change PAC’s investment helped state auditor Matt Dunlap beat a stronger opponent, while in Texas, more than $750,000 spent promoting a controversial Democratic candidate failed to prevent her from losing her primary.

The mechanics of the operation depend on the post-2010 super PAC environment created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which eliminated caps on independent political spending and opened the door to “pop-up” super PACs formed expressly to funnel money through a primary cycle before dissolving. Because financial disclosure reports are filed after elections, voters in the affected primaries had no way of knowing during the primary campaign that the advertisements boosting their preferred candidates were funded by the opposing party. This is the same mechanism Democrats have used to their advantage in prior cycles. Both parties have employed variants of the tactic, and both have condemned it when the other party does it.

The Founders designed a republic in which the people would choose their representatives through honest electoral competition, with each party presenting its best candidates and the voters rendering judgment on the merits. The spectacle of one party secretly funding the other party’s primary in order to elevate weaker opponents is a corruption of that design that neither party invented and neither party has been willing to foreswear. The “dark money” infrastructure that makes this possible was built brick by brick by both sides, and the solution, if there is one, runs through the kind of transparency in campaign finance that the Founders would have considered essential to accountable self-government. A republic whose voters cannot know who is funding the campaigns competing for their votes is a republic whose consent is being manufactured rather than sought.