Today in History: June 13, first Pentagon Papers excerpts published
In 1942, during World War II, a four-man Nazi sabotage team arrived by submarine on Long Island, N. Y., three days before a second four-man team landed in Florida. (All eight men were arrested within weeks, after two members of the first group defected.)
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In 1966, the Supreme Court ruled, in Miranda v. Arizona, that criminal suspects had to be informed of their constitutional rights to remain silent and consult with an attorney.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall to become the first non-white justice on the US Supreme Court.
In 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam since 1945, that had been leaked to the paper by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg.
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In 1983, the US space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, became the first spacecraft to leave the solar system as it crossed the orbit of Neptune.
In 1996, the 81-day-old Freemen standoff in Montana ended as the 16 remaining members of the anti-government group left their ranch and surrendered to the FBI.
In 2000, the first meeting between leaders of North Korea and South Korea since the Korean War began as South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung met North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang.
In 2013, the White House said it had conclusive evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad's government had used chemical weapons against opposition forces seeking to overthrow him.
In 2022, the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol was told that President Trump's closest campaign advisers, top government officials, and even his family were dismantling his false claims of 2020 election fraud ahead of the insurrection, but the defeated president was becoming 'detached from reality' and clinging to outlandish theories to stay in power.
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Fox News
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MSNBC host erupts over SCOTUS ruling on Trump's birthright citizenship order
MSNBC host Symone Sanders Townsend unloaded on the Supreme Court's ruling on President Donald Trump's birthright citizenship executive order, calling it "insane" during a discussion on Friday. "I just don't, I can't believe that we are asking the question, 'is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution constitutional?' That is what, it is crazy. And I am sorry, but people need to call, 'this is crazy.' They are asking us… They're asking us not to believe our own eyes and our own ears. They're asking us to go against everything that we know to be true. This is insane," Sanders Townsend said. The Supreme Court delivered a major victory in Trump's effort to block lower courts from issuing universal injunctions that had upended many of his administration's executive orders and actions on Friday. The Justices ruled 6-3 to allow the lower courts to issue injunctions only in limited instances, though the ruling leaves open the question of how the ruling will apply to the birthright citizenship order at the heart of the case. The Supreme Court agreed this year to take up a trio of consolidated cases involving so-called universal injunctions handed down by federal district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state. Judges in those districts had blocked Trump's ban on birthright citizenship from taking force nationwide — which the Trump administration argued in their appeal to the Supreme Court was overly broad. "The applications do not raise – and thus we do not address – the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act," Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, writing for the majority. "The issue before us is one of remedy: whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions." MSNBC host Michael Steele responded, "this is the landscape we find ourselves on now." "I mean, the reality is that they have been very effective. Trump and his minions inside the government have been very effective at setting the stairsteps to the various narratives that they want to get accomplished," he said. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern also criticized the ruling, and insisted that no one could explain how Trump's order would work in practice. "When a child is born in America, the doctor doesn't demand the papers of their parents to ensure that they're a citizen or a green card holder. All they need is a birth certificate showing that they were born here. You, me, most people we know, we are citizens because of our birth. And once the government takes that away, once it introduces this wild, chaotic new system where it depends on your parents, and you get punished if your parents didn't have the right papers, then everyone's citizenship is thrown into disarray, and advocates need to present that very clearly to the Supreme Court because, frankly, this conservative majority is very selective in its empathy," Stern argued.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
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After criticism from MAGA world, Amy Coney Barrett delivers for Trump
WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump reveled in a major Supreme Court victory that curbed the ability of judges to block his policies nationwide, he had special praise for one of the justices: Amy Coney Barrett. 'I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,' he said at a White House press conference soon after Friday's ruling. Barrett's majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, which at least temporarily revived Trump's plan to end automatic birthright citizenship, is a major boost to an administration that has been assailed by courts around the country for its broad and aggressive use of executive power. It also marks an extraordinary turnaround for Barrett's reputation among Trump's most vocal supporters. Just a few months ago, she faced vitriolic criticism from MAGA influencers and others as she sporadically voted against Trump, including a March decision in which she rejected a Trump administration attempt to avoid paying U.S. Agency for International Development contractors. CNN also reported that Trump himself had privately complained about Barrett. That is despite the fact that she is a Trump appointee with a long record of casting decisive votes in a host of key cases in which the court's 6-3 conservative majority has imposed itself, most notably with the 2022 ruling that overturned the abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade. One of those outspoken critics, Trump-allied lawyer Mike Davis, suggested that the pressure on Barrett had the desired effect. 'Sometimes feeling the heat helps people see the light,' he said in a text message. Quickly U-turning, MAGA influencers on Friday praised Barrett and turned their anger on liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson instead. They seized upon language in Barrett's opinion in which she gave short shrift to Jackson's dissenting opinion, in which the President Joe Biden appointee characterized the ruling as an 'existential threat to the rule of law.' Barrett responded by accusing Jackson of a 'startling line of attack' that was based on arguments 'at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.' Jack Posobiec, a conservative firebrand who a few months ago called Barrett a 'DEI judge,' immediately used similar language against Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve on the court. In an appearance on Real America's Voice, a right-wing streaming channel, he call Jackson an 'autopen hire' in reference to the unsubstantiated allegation from conservatives that Biden's staff was responsible for many of his decisions. He then described Barrett as 'one of the nicest people. She's not some flame-throwing conservative up there.' It is not just the birthright citizenship case in which the Trump administration has claimed victory at the Supreme Court in recent months. The court, often with the three liberal justices in dissent, has also handed Trump multiple wins on emergency applications filed at the court, allowing various policies that were blocked by lower courts to go into effect. In such cases, the court does not always list exactly how each justice voted, but Barrett did not publicly dissent, for example, when the court allowed Trump to quickly deport immigrants to countries they have no connection to or ended temporary legal protections for 500,000 immigrants from four countries. Barrett defenders dismiss suggestions she would be influenced by negative comments from MAGA world, with Samuel Bray, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, saying her ruling that limited nationwide injunctions simply shows her independent qualities as a judge. 'It should reinforce the sense that she's her own justice and she's committed to giving legal answers to legal questions. We shouldn't be looking for political answers to political questions,' he said. Barrett, via a Supreme Court spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment. More broadly, legal experts said that in the Supreme Court term that just ended, Barrett showed that on many traditional conservative issues she is 'solidly to the right,' noted Anthony Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. There were fewer examples of her going her own way than in the previous term, when which she staked out her own path in some significant cases. On Friday alone, she was part of a conservative 6-3 majority in three of the five rulings, including the birthright citizenship case. The others saw the court rule in favor of religious conservatives who objected to LGBTQ story books in elementary schools and uphold a Texas restriction on adult-content websites. 'I don't think we can say she was ever drifting left, but she was occupying a center-right position on the court that occasionally made her a key swing vote,' he added. 'This term's docket at the end just wasn't that.' One notable wrinkle in the birthright citizenship case is that Barrett, as the most junior justice in the majority, would not have been expected to write it. Often, Chief Justice John Roberts, who gets to assign cases when he is in the majority, will write such rulings himself. Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the assignment suited Barrett, who is known for her expertise on legal procedure. But she also wondered if Roberts might have considered the impact of the complaints against Barrett and wanted to 'give her a place to shine from the perspective of the right.' Even if that were a consideration in Roberts' thinking, Shapiro added, 'I don't see much evidence that she is doing things that she wouldn't have done if not for the criticism she received.' This article was originally published on
Yahoo
2 hours ago
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Big Trump wins, boomerang appeals define Supreme Court term
President Donald Trump unquestionably secured a big win as the conservative Supreme Court wrapped up its term this past week, but there were signs that the administration's long-running feud with the federal judiciary is far from over. Immigrant rights groups raced into lower courts hours after the justices handed down their final decisions, seeking to block Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship through class-action lawsuits. The outcome of those cases will almost certainly wind up back before the Supreme Court in short order. Uncertainty is also swirling around the court's other blockbuster 6-3 decision, handed down a week earlier, that upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. While the ruling will protect similar gender-affirming care bans in other conservative states, it did little to address other transgender legal disputes involving sports teams and health insurance coverage. 'In the high-profile cases, you see the court departing from settled precedent, changing the rules of the road, but ultimately leaving a lot open to be decided in the future,' Cecillia Wang, national legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN. 'It leaves us room to fight another day.' In all, the Supreme Court issued 62 opinions over the course of its nine-month term that began in October, including many that have already faded from memory. Just before Trump was inaugurated in January, the court upheld a controversial ban on TikTok that the president has since bypassed. And in March, a majority upheld Biden-era federal regulations on 'ghost guns,' mail-order kits that allow people to build untraceable weapons at home. Here are some of the major themes from the Supreme Court's term. Since he returned to power in January, Trump and his allies have waged a rhetorical war on the federal judiciary. But in recent weeks, the Supreme Court has repeatedly given the White House reason to celebrate. The birthright citizenship decision was the most notable example, but the court has also sided with the White House in a series of less high-profile emergency docket cases as well. Earlier in the week, the Supreme Court granted Trump's emergency request to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their homeland, including places like war-torn South Sudan. Trump has secured clear victories in eight of the last 10 emergency cases the court has decided, including decisions that allowed him to end humanitarian parole for certain migrants, to grant the Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive Social Security data, and to bar transgender Americans from serving in the military. At times, the Supreme Court's language has looked strikingly similar to the points Trump and his allies have been making for months. 'No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law. But the judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation,' Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the court's birthright opinion. 'When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.' While the Supreme Court's term is over, the controversies the justices grappled with for weeks will likely be back — soon. As the justices rose from their mahogany bench Friday for their summer recess, it was increasingly clear that the rulings in their two most important cases — on transgender care and birthright citizenship — are likely returning to them in short order. The fallout from the conservative court's 6-3 decision to uphold Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors will land as soon as Monday, when the justices will decide how to deal with half a dozen other cases involving transgender issues pending on the docket, including appeals involving trans athletes. The birthright citizenship decision gave Trump's opponents a wide berth to maneuver their way back to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks. That fight got underway just hours after the Supreme Court handed down its blockbuster opinion Friday curbing the use of nationwide court orders to block Trump's agenda. The ACLU and others raced into lower courts with new litigation that will almost certainly shut down Trump's ability to enforce birthright citizenship again — rulings that, no matter how they turn out, will quickly be appealed. 'Justice Barrett's opinion doesn't actually prevent lower courts from quickly putting nationwide blocks on the birthright citizenship executive order back into place,' said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. If lower courts side with the pregnant mothers in a class-action case or with 22 blue states that also sued over the executive order, that would have the effect of pausing Trump's executive order while courts consider its constitutionality. 'It's not hard to imagine, if that happens, that the Trump administration will come right back to the court, which will then have to settle what it quite deliberately ducked on Friday,' Vladeck said. Just over 9% of the court's decisions this term were split along ideological lines, compared with 14% over the past four terms, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog. About 4 in 10 decisions were unanimous, the data showed, which is consistent with past terms. 'There's a lot of litigation still to come on these,' said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network and a former clerk to conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. 'But that is, in fact, why we consider those the big cases, because they're going to have a lot of downstream effects,' she added. 'There's always a period of the lower courts working out how to apply them.' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most junior member of the Supreme Court, but after three years on the bench, she is making sure her voice is heard. A series of scathing dissents penned by Jackson have, in recent days, drawn nearly as much attention as the court's majority opinions. Barrett's majority opinion in the birthright case spent a considerable amount of ink pushing back on Jackson's dissent, which she registered with 'deep disillusionment.' The junior justice described the majority's opinion as an 'existential threat to the rule of law' and a 'smokescreen.' 'Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,' Jackson wrote in her dissent. 'But this court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.' Days earlier, dissenting from a decision that sided with fuel producers, Jackson wrote that court's opinion left the impression that 'moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens.' And in a case dealing with whether Planned Parenthood and one of its patients could sue South Carolina over the state's decision to pull the organization's Medicaid funding, Jackson entered into a sharp exchange with Thomas over the meaning of a Reconstruction-era law that allows people to sue the government in federal court for potential violations of their civil rights. Jackson said that the majority, which barred Planned Parenthood's suit, was weakening 'the landmark civil rights protections that Congress enacted during the Reconstruction Era' and said the court's ruling 'is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.' 'At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,' she wrote. 'And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the 'ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.'' The Supreme Court has in recent terms sought to roll back the power of federal agencies to make decisions without approval from Congress. That was particularly evident last term, when the court struck down the so-called Chevron doctrine, a 1984 precedent that required judges to defer to an agency's interpretation of a statute in circumstances in which the law in question is vaguely written. But this term, the court rebuffed efforts by conservative groups to keep that momentum going. In some of those disputes, the Trump officials embraced positions originally taken by former President Joe Biden, even though the two administrations are diametrically opposed on many policies. And that put the Trump administration, at times, in the awkward position of defending a policy that Biden had backed but that was being challenged by conservative groups at the Supreme Court. In one of those cases, decided Friday, a 6-3 majority upheld a task force that recommends preventive health care services that insurers must cover at no cost under Obamacare. The Trump administration defended the task force over a challenge from a Texas company, Braidwood Management. The company was represented by Jonathan Mitchell, a veteran conservative lawyer who successfully defended Trump last year from an effort in Colorado to remove him from that state's primary ballot. The court also let stand a series of decades-old government programs that reduce the price of broadband internet and telephone services for poor and rural communities. The Federal Communications Commission pays for those programs with fees applied to Americans' phone bills. Groups had used the case to try to revive a New Deal-era legal doctrine that bars Congress from delegating its authority to federal agencies — a doctrine the court has not relied on since the 1930s. In an opinion joined by both conservative and liberal justices, the court signaled it was unlikely to do so again anytime soon. 'For nearly three decades, the work of Congress and the Commission in establishing universal service programs has led to a more fully connected country,' liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote for a 6-3 court. 'It has done so while leaving fully intact the separation of powers integral to our Constitution.'
