Supreme Court meets Friday to decide 6 remaining cases, including birthright citizenship
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These nationwide court orders have emerged as an important check on Trump's efforts and a source of mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies.
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Decisions also are expected in several other important cases.
The court seemed likely during arguments in April to side with Maryland parents in a religious rights case over LGBTQ storybooks in public schools.
Parents in the Montgomery County school system, in suburban Washington, want to be able to pull their children out of lessons that use the storybooks, which the county added to the curriculum to better reflect the district's diversity.
The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children from those lessons, but then reversed course because it found the opt-out policy to be disruptive. Sex education is the only area of instruction with an opt-out provision in the county's schools.
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The justices also are weighing a three-year battle over congressional districts in Louisiana that is making its second trip to the Supreme Court.
Before the court now is a map that created a second Black majority congressional district among Louisiana's six seats in the House of Representatives. The district elected a Black Democrat in 2024.
Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since 2022 and the justices are considering whether to send state lawmakers back to the map-drawing board for a third time.
The case involves the interplay between race and politics in drawing political boundaries in front of a conservative-led court that has been skeptical of considerations of race in public life.
At arguments in March, several of the court's conservative justices suggested they could vote to throw out the map and make it harder, if not impossible, to bring redistricting lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act.
Free speech rights are at the center of a case over a Texas law aimed at blocking kids from seeing online pornography.
Texas is among more than a dozen states with age verification laws. The states argue the laws are necessary as smartphones have made access to online porn, including hardcore obscene material, almost instantaneous.
The question for the court is whether the measure infringes on the constitutional rights of adults as well. The Free Speech Coalition, an adult-entertainment industry trade group, agrees that children shouldn't be seeing pornography. But it says the Texas law is written too broadly and wrongly affects adults by requiring them to submit personal identifying information online that is vulnerable to hacking or tracking.
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The billionaire behind mysterious immigration ads targeting Miami Republicans
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13 minutes ago
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New York Post
42 minutes ago
- New York Post
Texas Dems leave state to block vote on redrawn House map backed by Trump
Texas Democrats left the state Sunday in an attempt to prevent the state House from holding a vote Monday on new congressional maps that Republicans hope will net them several additional U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterm elections. The dramatic move could expose Democrats to fines and other penalties — with the state's attorney general having previously threatened to arrest them if they took such an action. Refusing to attend legislative sessions is a civil violation, however, so Democrats legally could not be jailed and it's unclear who has the power to carry out the warrants. 6 Texas Representative Chris Turner presenting a map of congressional districts during a redistricting hearing. AP Democrats have cast the decision to leave the state as a last-ditch effort to stop Republicans who hold full control of the Texas government from pushing through a rare mid-decade redrawing of the congressional map at the direction of President Donald Trump. 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AP 'My office stands ready to assist local, state, and federal authorities in hunting down and compelling the attendance of anyone who abandons their office and their constituents for cheap political theater,' Paxton said on the social media platform X on July 15. A large chunk of the Texas Democrats are heading to Illinois, where Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker had been in quiet talks with them for weeks about offering support if they chose to leave the state to break quorum. Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential contender, has been one of Trump's most outspoken critics during his second term. Last week, Pritzker hosted several Texas Democrats in Illinois to publicly oppose the redistricting effort. California Gov. Gavin Newsom held a similar event in his own state. 6 Last week, Pritzker hosted several Texas Democrats in Illinois to publicly oppose the redistricting effort. AP Pritzker also met privately with Texas Democratic Chair Kendall Scudder in June to begin planning for the possibility that lawmakers would depart for Illinois if they did decide to break quorum to block the map, according to a source with direct knowledge who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. Now, with Texas Democrats holed up in Illinois and blocking the Trump-backed congressional map, the stage may be set for a high-profile showdown between Pritzker and the president. Trump is looking to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House just two years into his presidency, and hopes the new Texas map will aid that effort. Trump officials have also looked at redrawing lines in other states, such as Missouri, according to a person familiar with conversations but unauthorized to speak publicly about them.
