🏅 Supreme Court Upholds State Bans on Transgender Athletes in Girls’ Sports

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws in West Virginia and Idaho that bar transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams at public schools, delivering the first ruling from the nation’s highest court on a question that has roiled state legislatures for half a decade. The justices divided 6-3 on whether the laws violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee, with the conservative majority finding they do not, while ruling unanimously, 9-0, that the laws do not violate Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination in education. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, stating plainly that the Constitution and Title IX “do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, arguing the court denied the challengers, West Virginia’s Becky Pepper-Jackson and Idaho’s Lindsay Hecox, a full opportunity to litigate their claims.

The ruling effectively settles the legal status of similar bans now on the books in more than two dozen states, all enacted in the years since Idaho became the first to pass one in 2020. Both plaintiffs in the case had taken puberty-suppressing medication, and their attorneys argued that the laws unfairly excluded them from teams matching their gender identity. States defending the bans, along with organizations including the NCAA, argued that the physical differences between male and female athletes are well documented and form a legitimate basis for sex-separated competition. President Trump, who signed an executive order in February directing federal agencies to withhold funding from schools allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports, called the decision a “big win” on social media.

Kavanaugh’s opinion rests on a premise the Founders would have recognized immediately: that a statute’s words mean what they meant when written, and that courts overstep when they rewrite that meaning to fit a later social consensus. Title IX was passed in 1972 to guarantee women equal opportunity in education and athletics precisely because biological differences between the sexes had for generations been used to deny women a fair shot. Reading that same statute to now require what amounts to mixed-sex competition would not vindicate the law’s original purpose. It would invert it. The states that passed these laws did so through their elected legislatures, the constitutionally proper venue for resolving exactly this kind of contested social question, and the Court was right to let that democratic process stand.

📬 Supreme Court Sides With States on Late-Arriving Mail Ballots, Rejecting GOP Challenge

In one of the more closely watched election cases of the term, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Mississippi may continue counting mail-in ballots that arrive up to five business days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked on time, rejecting a challenge brought by the Republican National Committee and Mississippi’s own state party. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s three Democratic-appointed justices, holding that federal statutes setting a uniform Election Day govern when voters must cast their ballots, not when election officials must receive them. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, dissented, warning that the ruling “creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections.”

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, carries consequences well beyond Mississippi. Roughly thirty states and the District of Columbia have similar grace periods for ballots mailed by Election Day but received afterward, and a contrary ruling would have forced last-minute changes to election administration in all of them just months before the midterms. The Trump administration had filed a brief supporting the RNC’s position, consistent with the president’s long-standing skepticism of mail voting, and reacted to Tuesday’s decision by renewing his call for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would tighten mail-ballot eligibility and impose new voter ID and citizenship-verification requirements. Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, said he disagreed with the ruling and would urge the legislature to shorten the state’s own deadline regardless.

This is a case where conservatives can find principled reasons to land on either side, and the disagreement between Barrett and Alito illustrates exactly that. Barrett’s textualist reading, that Congress fixed the day voters must act and left the details of receipt to the states, sits comfortably within the same constitutional framework that assigns election administration to the states in the first place. Alito’s concern that an election’s outcome should be knowable on a fixed date is not unreasonable either. What both opinions share, and what is worth noting, is that neither one hands the question to the executive branch. The fight over Mississippi’s law was conducted entirely within Congress’s statutes and the Court’s interpretation of them, precisely where the Constitution intends election disputes to be resolved.

⚖️ Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to End Birthright Citizenship

The Supreme Court delivered the administration its most significant defeat of the term on Tuesday, ruling against President Trump’s executive order seeking to end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, pointing to the Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark and finding “scant evidence” to support what he called the administration’s “dramatically revisionist view” of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, calling the ruling “a serious mistake,” while Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that he did not believe the order violated the 14th Amendment but that it ran afoul of a separate 1940 federal statute.

Trump signed the order on his first day back in office in January 2025, directing that children born after a 30-day grace period to undocumented or temporarily present parents would no longer automatically receive citizenship documents. Several district courts and two federal appellate circuits had already blocked the order before it reached the Supreme Court, and Trump himself attended April’s oral arguments, the first sitting president to do so. Following Tuesday’s ruling, the president posted on social media that the decision was “too bad for our Country,” but argued that Congress could achieve the same result through ordinary legislation rather than a constitutional amendment. Senators Rand Paul and Eric Schmitt both announced plans to introduce constitutional amendments narrowing birthright citizenship in the ruling’s aftermath, acknowledging that the amendment process, not executive order, is now the only available path.

Roberts’s opinion is, in the truest sense, an originalist one. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was written in 1868 in direct response to the Dred Scott decision, specifically to place birthright citizenship beyond the reach of shifting political majorities and, by extension, beyond the reach of a single president’s executive order. The Framers of that amendment chose constitutional text precisely because they did not trust statute or executive whim to protect so foundational a right. Whatever the merits of changing immigration policy going forward, and there is a serious conservative argument for doing so through Congress, the proper remedy was always written into the document itself: the amendment process the Constitution provides. Senators Paul and Schmitt are now pursuing exactly that path, which is precisely how this question should have been approached from the start.

🗽 Mamdani Declines to Endorse Changing the Constitution’s Natural-Born Citizen Clause

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday that he does not support amending the Constitution’s requirement that presidents be natural-born citizens, closing the door on speculation about his own national ambitions even as his political movement notches victories well beyond New York City. Karl noted during the “This Week” interview that Mamdani, 34, will soon meet the Constitution’s age threshold for the presidency, but that his birth in Kampala, Uganda, leaves him constitutionally ineligible regardless. “I think the Constitution looks good the way it is,” Mamdani said, laughing off the question before pivoting to his focus on city government. The exchange capped an interview centered on the Democratic Party’s direction following a sweep of New York congressional primaries by Mamdani-backed candidates.

Mamdani was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018 after immigrating as a child, and under Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, naturalized citizens are categorically barred from the presidency and, by operation of the 12th Amendment, the vice presidency as well. The question arose only because Mamdani’s national profile has grown rapidly since his upset mayoral win last November, and three House candidates he endorsed all advanced past incumbents or establishment favorites in last week’s New York primaries. President Trump responded to that primary sweep on social media, writing that “the Communists are finally making their move,” a charge Mamdani has not directly engaged.

The natural-born citizen clause has been challenged before, including a mid-2000s push by Senate Republicans to amend it so Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger could run, and it has never come close to the two-thirds congressional majorities and three-quarters state ratification the Constitution requires for amendment. That high bar is the point, not an obstacle to be engineered around. The Framers placed the presidency’s eligibility requirements directly in the constitutional text, not in statute, for the same reason they placed citizenship itself there: so that the qualifications for the nation’s highest office could not be loosened by a passing political mood or a single charismatic candidate’s popularity. Mamdani’s answer, whatever one thinks of his politics, was the constitutionally correct one. The document does not bend to fit whoever might wish to occupy the office next.

📮 Postal Service Presses Ahead on Plan to Withhold Ballots From States That Withhold Voter Data

The fight over the Trump administration’s effort to insert the U.S. Postal Service into election administration intensified this week as Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed that USPS will not deliver mail-in ballots to voters in states that refuse to turn over voter data to the federal government, even as a federal judge has already halted a related piece of the underlying executive order. The proposed rule, tied to a March executive order from President Trump, would require states to provide the Postal Service with the names, addresses, and ballot tracking numbers of voters requesting absentee ballots at least 30 days before an election. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan pressed Steiner directly on whether USPS would carry through on the threat, and Steiner confirmed it would: “Under our proposed regulation, no,” he said, when asked whether ballots would still be delivered to noncompliant states.

A federal judge in Boston, Indira Talwani, last week blocked a separate portion of the same executive order that would have created a federal voter list, ruling that it “unconstitutionally violate[s] the separation of powers” by placing election rule-making authority with the executive branch rather than Congress and the states. Steiner himself acknowledged during the hearing that USPS has no legal authority to administer elections, even as he defended the proposed rule as a procedural safeguard meant to ensure ballots reach only eligible voters. Twenty-three Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia are now suing over the broader order, while organizations including the National Association of Letter Carriers and the Brennan Center for Justice have separately warned the proposal exceeds the agency’s legal authority.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with wanting confidence that ballots reach the people who are actually entitled to receive them. But the Constitution gives that authority to the states, and Congress, not to the Postal Service or the executive branch that oversees it. Judge Talwani’s ruling against the related voter-list order applies with equal force here: an agency whose own postmaster general admits it has no statutory role in election administration cannot simply assume that role by regulatory fiat, however well-intentioned the goal. If federal standards for mail-ballot security are needed, and a credible case exists that they are, the proper vehicle is legislation passed by the people’s elected representatives in Congress, not a rule written by an agency that delivers the mail.

💰 Supreme Court Strikes Down Limits on Party Spending in Coordination With Candidates

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a federal law limiting how much money political parties may spend in direct coordination with their own candidates, ruling 6-3 that the restriction violates the First Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, overruling the Court’s own 2001 precedent in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, which had upheld the same type of limits by a narrower 5-4 vote. Kavanaugh wrote that the ruling “treats all political parties equally” and will allow committees from both parties “to participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process.” Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing the majority “rewrites the rules” in a way that “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”

The case began in 2022, when then-Senator J.D. Vance, then-Representative Steve Chabot of Ohio, and the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees sued in federal court, arguing that the coordinated-spending caps under the Federal Election Campaign Act unconstitutionally prevented party committees from working with their own candidates to deliver a unified political message. A federal appeals court had sided against the challengers, with Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton acknowledging their arguments had merit but ruling that the 2001 precedent left him no choice. Notably, the Trump administration declined to defend the existing limits when the case reached the Supreme Court, agreeing instead with the challengers that the restrictions were unconstitutional, which prompted the Court to appoint an outside attorney to argue in the law’s defense.

This ruling sits squarely within a line of First Amendment cases stretching back to Buckley v. Valeo that treats political spending, including spending by the parties that exist to elect candidates, as core political speech deserving the Constitution’s highest protection. The Founders did not anticipate national party committees in their modern form, but they would have understood instinctively why a law restricting how closely a political party may coordinate with its own candidates raises serious free-speech concerns. A party and its candidate sharing a campaign message is not corruption; it is the ordinary, healthy functioning of representative democracy. The 2001 Colorado decision treated that coordination with suspicion it never deserved, and Tuesday’s ruling corrects course.