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Supreme Court hollows out a landmark law that had protected minority voting rights
Legal Business |
2026/05/16 09:39
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President Lyndon B. Johnson knew the legislation he was about to sign was momentous, one that took courage for certain members of Congress to pass since the vote could cost them their seats. To honor that, he took the unusual step of leaving the Oval Office and going to Capitol Hill for the signing ceremony. It was Aug. 6, 1965, five months after the "Bloody Sunday" attack on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, gave momentum to the bill that became known as the Voting Rights Act. In the six decades since, it became one of the most consequential laws in the nation's history, preventing discrimination against minorities at the ballot box and helping to elect thousands of Black and Hispanic representatives at all levels of government. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court knocked out a major pillar of the law that had protected against racial discrimination in voting and representation. It was a decision that came more than a decade after the court undermined another key tenet of the law and led to restrictive voting laws in a number of states. Voting and civil rights advocates were left fearful of what lies ahead for minority communities. "It means that you have entire communities that can go without having representation," said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter. "It is literally throwing us back to the Jim Crow era unapologetically, and that's not exaggeration." Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice's Washington office, said the court's steady work to erode the Voting Rights Act, culminating in Wednesday's decision, amounted to "burying it without the funeral." The Supreme Court's ruling came in a congressional redistricting case out of Louisiana after the state created a district that gave the state its second Black representative to Congress. It found that map to be an unconstitutional gerrymander because it took race into account to draw the lines. In an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court's conservative majority said the provision of the Voting Rights Act in question, called Section 2, was designed to protect voters from intentional discrimination. |
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Partial shutdown seems increasingly likely as Democrats demand ICE changes
Legal Business |
2026/01/28 21:13
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With a partial government shutdown looming, Senate Democrats laid out a list of demands Wednesday for the Department of Homeland Security, including an enforceable code of conduct for federal agents conducting immigration arrests and a requirement that officers show identification as the country reels from the deaths of two protesters at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis.
It remained unclear if President Donald Trump and Republicans would be willing to meet those demands, even as funding for DHS and a swath of other government agencies was at risk of expiring Saturday. Irate Democrats have pledged to block a spending bill unless their demands for reforms are met.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that the legislation won’t pass until U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “reined in and overhauled.”
“The American people support law enforcement, they support border security, they do not support ICE terrorizing our streets and killing American citizens,” Schumer said.
With an uncertain path ahead, the standoff threatened to plunge the country into another shutdown just two months after Democrats blocked a spending bill over expiring federal health care subsidies, a dispute that closed the government for 43 days as Republicans refused to negotiate. That shutdown ended when a small group of moderate Democrats broke away to strike a deal with Republicans, but Democrats are more united this time after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents.
There’s a lot of “unanimity and shared purpose” within the Democratic caucus, Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith said after a lunch meeting Wednesday.
“Boil it all down, what we are talking about is that these lawless ICE agents should be following the same rules that your local police department does,” Smith said. “There has to be accountability.”
As the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement surge goes on, Schumer said Democrats are asking the White House to “end roving patrols” in cities and coordinate with local law enforcement on immigration arrests, including requiring tighter rules for warrants.
Democrats also want an enforceable code of conduct so agents are held accountable when they violate rules. Schumer said agents should be required to have “masks off, body cameras on” and carry proper identification, as is common practice in most law enforcement agencies.
The Democratic caucus is united in those “commonsense reforms” and the burden is on Republicans to accept them, Schumer said. He has asked Republicans to separate out the Homeland Security bill from the others to avoid a broader shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has said he was waiting for Democrats to outline what they want, and he suggested that they need to be negotiating with the White House. He indicated that he might be open to some of their demands, but encouraged Democrats and the White House to talk and find agreement.
It was unclear whether Trump would weigh in, or how seriously the White House was engaged — or whether the two sides could agree on anything that would satisfy Democrats.
The White House had invited some Democrats for a discussion to better understand their positions and avoid a partial government shutdown, a senior White House official said, but the meeting did not happen. The official requested anonymity to discuss the private invitation.
With no serious negotiations underway, a partial shutdown appeared increasingly likely starting Saturday.
The House passed the six remaining funding bills last week and sent them to the Senate as a package, and that makes it difficult to strip out the homeland security portion as Democrats are demanding. Republicans could break the package apart with the consent of all 100 senators, which would be complicated, or through a series of votes that would extend past the Friday deadline.
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Federal data website outage raises concerns among advocates
Legal Business |
2025/08/22 06:15
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A federal website that informs the public about what information agencies are collecting and allows for public comment went down last weekend, and it has only been partially restored. The outage has raised concerns among advocates who already were troubled by the disappearance of data sets from government websites after President Donald Trump began his second term.
The https://www.reginfo.gov/public/ website went offline at the end of last week and was partially restored this week. Data was missing after Aug. 1, according to dataindex,us, a collective of data scientists and advocates who monitor changes in federal data sets.
As of Thursday, the website’s landing page said, it was “currently undergoing revisions.” Emailed inquiries to the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration weren’t returned on Thursday.
In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official public portal for health data, data.cdc.gov, was taken down entirely but subsequently went back up. Around the same time, when a query was made to access certain public data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life, users for several days got a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance” before access was restored.
Researchers Janet Freilich and Aaron Kesselheim examined 232 federal public health data sets that had been modified in the first quarter of this year and found that almost half had been “substantially altered,” with the majority having the word “gender” switched to “sex,” they wrote last month in The Lancet medical journal.
Former Census Bureau official Chris Dick, who is part of the dataindex.us team, said Thursday that no one is quite sure what is going on with the regulatory affairs website, whether there was an update with technical difficulties because of staffing shortages from job cuts or something more nefarious.
“This is key infrastructure that needs to come back,” Dick said. “Usually, you can fix this quickly. It’s not super normal for this to go on for days.”
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Judge bars deportations of Venezuelans from Texas under the Alien Enemies Act
Legal Business |
2025/05/04 10:50
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A federal judge on Thursday barred the Trump administration from deporting any Venezuelans from South Texas under an 18th-century wartime law and said President Donald Trump’s invocation of it was “unlawful.”
U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. is the first judge to rule that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used against people who, the Republican administration claims, are gang members invading the United States. Rodriguez said he wouldn’t interfere with the government’s right to deport people in the country illegally through other means, but it could not rely on the 227-year-old law to do so.
“Neither the Court nor the parties question that the Executive Branch can direct the detention and removal of aliens who engage in criminal activity in the United States,” wrote Rodriguez, who was nominated by Trump in 2018. But, the judge said, “the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
In March, Trump issued a proclamation claiming that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was invading the U.S. He said he had special powers to deport immigrants, identified by his administration as gang members, without the usual court proceedings.
“The Court concludes that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful,” Rodriguez wrote.
In an interview on Fox News, Vice President JD Vance said the administration will be “aggressively appealing” the ruling and others that hem in the president’s deportation power.
“The judge doesn’t make that determination, whether the Alien Enemies Act can be deployed,” Vance said. “I think the president of the United States is the one who determines whether this country is being invaded.”
The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., said in a statement the judge had made clear “what we all knew to be true: The Trump administration illegally used the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process.”
The Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times before in U.S. history, most recently during World War II, when it was cited to intern Japanese-Americans.
The proclamation triggered a flurry of litigation as the administration tried to ship migrants it claimed were gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Rodriguez’s ruling is significant because it is the first formal permanent injunction against the administration using the AEA and contends the president is misusing the law. “Congress never meant for this law to be used in this manner,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer who argued the case, in response to the ruling.
Rodriguez agreed, noting that the provision has only been used during the two World Wars and the War of 1812. Trump claimed Tren de Aragua was acting at the behest of the Venezuelan government, but Rodriguez found that the activities the administration accused it of did not amount to an invasion or “predatory incursion,” as the statute requires.
“The Proclamation makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation,” Rodriguez wrote. “Thus, the Proclamation’s language cannot be read as describing conduct that falls within the meaning of ‘invasion’ for purposes of the AEA.”
If the administration appeals, it would go first to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That is among the nation’s most conservative appeals courts and it also has ruled against what it saw as overreach on immigration matters by both the Obama and Biden administrations. In those cases, Democratic administrations had sought to make it easier for immigrants to remain in the U.S.
The administration, as it has in other cases challenging its expansive view of presidential power, could turn to appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, in the form of an emergency motion for a stay pending an appeal.
The Supreme Court already has weighed in once on the issue of deportations under the AEA. The justices held that migrants alleged to be gang members must be given “reasonable time” to contest their removal from the country. The court has not specified the length of time.
It’s possible that the losing side in the 5th Circuit would file an emergency appeal with the justices that also would ask them to short-circuit lower court action in favor of a definitive ruling from the nation’s highest court. Such a decision likely would be months away, at least.
The Texas case is just one piece of a tangle of litigation sparked by Trump’s proclamation. |
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Trump’s tariffs expose Ukraine’s steel industry to another war
Legal Business |
2025/02/17 10:26
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The steel mill in a partially occupied region of Ukraine is a dystopian maze of flames, chutes and tentacled pipes, vast enough to be a small city. Thunderous blazes of sparks flash above the open furnaces where workers smelt iron ore into streams of molten metal day and night.
The Zaporizhstal Iron and Steelworks, one of Ukraine’s largest steel plants, lies in the country’s industrial east, where Russia’s 3-year invasion of its neighbor threatens to throttle production at any moment. Daily battles unfold along a front line 40 kilometers (25 miles) away as the plant churns out materials for military equipment and for foreign manufacturers to use in cars, appliances, and construction.
“Morale is not as high as it was before. We are pretty tired here,” plant supervisor Serhii Zhyvotchenko said, reflecting on the hardships. “But there is no way to go back; the only way is forward.”
Last week, though, a second war came to the doorstep of the hulking factory complex: the possible trade war that U.S. President Donald Trump has provoked since returning to office four weeks ago. Trump imposed tariffs of at least 25% on all imported steel and aluminum, a decision that could hurt an essential sector of Ukraine’s battered economy.
Last week, though, a second war came to the doorstep of the hulking factory complex: the possible trade war that U.S. President Donald Trump has provoked since returning to office four weeks ago. Trump imposed tariffs of at least 25% on all imported steel and aluminum, a decision that could hurt an essential sector of Ukraine’s battered economy.
The tariff order was not the only action by the president or his administration to cause alarm in Kyiv last week. Trump signaled changing winds in U.S. policy by having a direct call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom former President Joe Biden and other Western leaders had tried to isolate since Putin sent troops into Ukraine.
Trump also said that he would “probably” meet in person with the Russian leader in the near future, heightening concerns that Kyiv would be left out of or undermined in any ceasefire talks. Comments by both the president and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejecting NATO membership for Ukraine further reinforced the fear that the country no longer had Washington in its corner.
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