Supreme Court Takes Up Case That Could Change Elections as We Know It

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a Republican-led case that could upend campaign finance law and allow national party committees to spend even more on elections.

Right now, political parties can spend an unlimited amount on a candidate individually, but are limited in their “coordinated spending”—renting out venues, hiring consultants, or paying for travel. This case, introduced by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee along with then-Senator JD Vance and former Representative Steve Cabot, seeks to overturn that coordinated spending limit.

If ruled in the GOP’s favor, this would be another massive blow to the effort to keep money out of politics. The country’s wealthiest have flaunted their ability to essentially buy elections, or have at least attempted to, for some time now. This most current effort is particularly shameless, given that the high court already upheld the same restrictions in a 2001 ruling. Now it may be repealed with the court’s 6–3 conservative majority.

“The court’s reasoning upholding these party spending limits has been undermined by more recent court campaign finance cases,” UCLA School of Law election expert Rick Hasen told NBC News. “The status quo—where outside groups like super PACs can raise unlimited sums but political parties face much more severe limitations—may create worse conditions in terms of empowering unaccountable groups and increasing negative ads.”

The case is set to be heard in the fall or early 2026.

Even the Iranians are surprised by how little damage Donald Trump’s bombs apparently did.

An intercepted communication between Iranian officials indicated that the nuclear facility airstrike had not achieved the level of damage touted by the Trump administration, reported The Washington Post, which spoke with four sources familiar with the classified material.

The president’s attack, conducted earlier this month without the express approval of Congress, damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. Trump celebrated that the attack had “completely and totally obliterated” the three sites in the immediate aftermath, but intelligence assessments have suggested otherwise.

A battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm determined that the missile barrage only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, rather than the “years” that Trump had advertised.

As with the Pentagon assessment, the White House did not dispute that the Iranian call had taken place, but fervently rejected its findings.

“It’s shameful that The Washington Post is helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense. Their nuclear weapons program is over.”

Whether the sites had been hit by 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs was not in doubt, but the exact extent of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear program has been heavily debated since the attack took place.

One Trump administration official brushed off the leaked call details, telling the Post that the Iranians were “wrong” because “we’ve destroyed their metal conversion facility.”

Senior U.S. intelligence officials warned that intercepted phone calls can only relay some information as they lack critical context.

“A single phone call between unnamed Iranians is not the same as an intelligence assessment, which takes into account a body of evidence, with multiple sources and methods,” one official told the Post.

Before the attacks took place, Iran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation has undergone years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and as of two weeks ago was allowing IAEA inspectors to remain in the country, according to the United Nations entity.

Trump has been irate over the coverage of the bombings, insisting that journalists who reported on the Pentagon leak should be fired. Last week, Leavitt took that to a new level, using two minutes out of the White House press briefing to singularly lambast CNN reporter Natasha Bertand.

Under Donald Trump, the Department of Justice is looking to ramp up denaturalization, or the revocation of citizenship, in order to fulfil its mass-deportation immigration agenda.

A June 11 memo from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate listed “prioritizing denaturalization” as a key administration directive for the civil division of the DOJ under Trump.

The DOJ’s civil division will now “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.” These include those “who pose a potential danger to national security,” those who engaged in fraud, and those who acquired citizenship through “material misrepresentations,” as well as “any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”

This would mark a notable departure from current norms.

Political scientist Patrick Weil estimates that, between 1907 and 1967, over 22,000 Americans were denaturalized—including, infamously, for political reasons during the first and second red scares. Denaturalization then fell out of use considerably, with only about 11 cases occurring each year from 1990 to 2017.

Denaturalization efforts were expanded under Obama, and increased further under the first Trump administration—which realized, as journalist Rafia Zakaria wrote in The Nation, that civil denaturalization cases have a lower burden of proof than criminal cases and no statute of limitations, making them easier targets.

The June 11 directive recalls Trump aide Stephen Miller’s October 2023 vow that the “denaturalization project” will be “turbocharged” in 2025, as well as Trump’s own statements in support of deporting naturalized citizens and even “homegrown criminals.”

The news comes as threats of denaturalization have become a common cudgel on the MAGA right, whose adherents—from media personalities to lawmakers—have increasingly called for the denaturalization and deportation of their ideological opponents, such as Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, Representative Ilhan Omar, and journalist Mehdi Hasan. It also comes as the Trump administration has conflated pro-Palestinian activism with support for terrorism.

Elon Musk threw himself back into the federal fray over the weekend, drawing more attention to the conservative opposition to the president’s tax extension bill.

Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would extend his 2017 tax cuts for millionaires and corporations at a cost to critical social programs such as Medicaid. On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate legislation would increase the deficit by more than $3.9 trillion over the next 10 years.

After Democrats forced a full read-through of the 1,018-page text on Saturday (which took approximately 16 hours), Senate Republicans initiated a “vote-a-rama,” in which lawmakers can propose an unlimited number of amendments as they vote back-to-back on the legislation. But by Monday, it wasn’t clear that the upper chamber actually had the support of the nation in moving to pass the bill—CNN data chief Harry Enten analyzed five recent polls that cumulatively indicated the bill is historically unpopular, with 49 percent of the country believing it will hurt their families as opposed to the 23 percent who think it will help them.

And despite publicly stitching up his feud with the president several weeks ago, Musk was right there with the majority of the American public in resisting the bill.

“Polls show that this bill is political suicide for the Republican Party,” Musk posted Saturday, sharing polling from polling firm the Tarrance Group suggesting that 58 percent of all registered voters in the country agreed with his previous assessment that the bill is “pork-filled.”

Musk also retweeted a statement from North American Building Trades Union President Sean McGarvey, who torched Trump’s bill as “a massive insult” to American construction workers, and underscored that “critical infrastructure projects essential to that future are being sacrificed at the altar of ideology.”

“We are especially outraged because all of this, all of these job losses for hardworking Americans, is being done for one reason only: to make room for more tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations and individuals in America,” McGarvey wrote.

The multibillionaire Musk went head-to-head with Trump earlier this month, when he threatened to change the tune of his Republican contributions and instead use his enormous wealth to influence the country to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”

Republicans plan to offset the expensive tax cut by slashing some $880 billion from Medicaid. But Musk’s issue with Trump’s plan has little to do with its slashing of programs aimed at supporting and uplifting the most vulnerable Americans—instead, he’s condemned the bill on the basis that it would effectively undo his work atop the Department of Government Efficiency, which was tasked with paring down government spending.

Musk was Trump’s top financial backer in the 2024 election, spending at least $250 million in the final months of the president’s campaign after Trump was shot in July. Musk had also promised to funnel funds toward other Republicans, declaring in the wake of the November election that his super PACs would “play a significant role in primaries.” In the following months, Musk threatened to use his money to fund primary challengers to Trump’s agenda and go after Democrats, and that he would be preparing “for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.”

Trump’s centerpiece legislation currently faces a self-imposed July 4 deadline.

Senate Republicans are dropping to new lows to sidestep the filibuster and pass Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill.

In an effort to more painlessly pass Trump’s wildly unpopular tax and spending bill, Republicans are pushing for a creative accounting method that uses a “current policy” baseline, which would prevent a filibuster and allow the bill to pass with 51 votes instead of 60.

Ironically, many Democrats have sought for years to eliminate the filibuster, a move Republicans opposed. In November, Republican Senate leadership swore they’d keep the filibuster in place.

To use a “current policy” baseline assumes the continuation of existing policy such as Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which is set to expire at the end of the year. The more typical “current law” baseline, which was used to pass the House’s version of the bill, assumes that Trump’s 2017 tax plan would expire in the next 10 years.

By using “current policy” rather than “current law,” Republican lawmakers can pretend that the bill’s exorbitant estimated costs are far lower than they actually are. A new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would add nearly $4 trillion to the national deficit through 2034, and continue to grow the deficit afterward, in violation of the Senate’s Byrd Rule. Republicans using “current policy” have claimed that the bill would only add $500 billion to the national deficit and doesn’t break any rules that would prevent it from being passed.

Although Democrats sought a meeting with the Senate parliamentarian to oppose the use of such a blatant gimmick, Republicans refused to hold a bipartisan meeting, arguing that it was up to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who had opted to use “current policy.”

A “current policy” baseline has never been used for a budget reconciliation bill—and if allowed, could be used by the Democrats should they reclaim the majority next year.

“There is no filibuster if the Senate R’s do this and when Dems take power there is no reason why we should not use reconciliation to pass immigration reform,” wrote Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego on X Sunday.

A ProPublica report Monday reveals that Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem received and failed to publicly disclose an $80,000 payment from a dark-money group.

ProPublica reports that in June 2023, Noem, then the governor of South Dakota, set up an LLC in Delaware. Within four minutes, a dark-money group (i.e., a group that doesn’t disclose its sources of funding) was created, called the American Resolve Policy Fund. The group reported having no employees in 2023, and its activities are “unclear,” according to ProPublica.

In 2023, American Resolve reportedly raised just over a million dollars, and spent only about a fifth of that, including an $80,000 payment to Noem’s LLC, allegedly for having fundraised $800,000. When she was appointed by Trump, Noem then failed to publicly disclose the payment on the public financial disclosure form required of high-level government officials.

“If donors to these nonprofits [dark-money groups] are not just holding the keys to an elected official’s political future but also literally providing them with their income, that’s new and disturbing,” Daniel Weiner, former Federal Election Commission attorney and current campaign finance program director at the Brennan Center, told ProPublica.

Lee Schoenbeck, a South Dakota politician and attorney, added that the payment may have violated state law barring the governor from receiving “for any of their official services any other compensation, emoluments, or perquisites than the salaries provided by law.”

“There’s no way the governor is supposed to have a private side business that the public doesn’t know about,” Schoenbeck told ProPublica. “It would clearly not be appropriate.”

Noem’s attorney assured ProPublica that Noem had “fully complied with the letter and the spirit of the law,” and underwent proper scrutiny from the Office of Government Ethics. The attorney also said Noem had “fully disclosed all of her income on public documents that are readily available,” but failed to respond to ProPublica with evidence supporting this in light of the unreported $80,000 payment.

The revelation adds to a record of eyebrow-raising spending habits on the part of Noem—to say nothing of the Trump administration writ large. Noem faced scrutiny for carrying around hefty wads of cash, as well as for conspicuously sporting a $50,000 gold Rolex during a March trip to a prison in El Salvador. That same month, the Associated Press, despite Noem’s best efforts, exposed that taxpayers had footed the bill for her personal travel expenses as governor, including for a trip to go on a bear hunt in Canada and receive dental work in Houston.

Senator Bernie Sanders thinks that Trump’s budget bill is “the most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.”

On Sunday evening, the country’s most recognizable socialist took time to offer a scathing rebuke of the president’s most significant piece of legislation to date, highlighting the bill’s obvious skew toward the wealthy at the expense of the working class.  

“If you are in the top one percent, you and the class you represent will receive a $975 billion tax break—$975 billion tax break—at a time when the richest people in this country have never ever had it so good,” Sanders said. “If you are among the wealthiest two-tenths of one percent—not talking about one percent, talking about the top two-tenths of one percent—you will be able to pay zero taxes on your $30 million inheritance. So all of you folks out there who are waiting to inherit at least $30 million, today is a good day for you! Collectively, you will receive approximately $211 billion in tax breaks. For the top two-tenths of one percent: Congratulations, you hit the jackpot.” 

Sanders then moved to the massive corporate bias baked into Trump’s bill. 

“If you are a large corporation, and you want to throw workers out on the street and replace them with artificial intelligence, or maybe you want to shift your profits to the Cayman Islands or other tax havens: You are going to get a $918 billion tax break. Congratulations to the CEOs of large profitable corporations,” he said sarcastically. 

The senator from Vermont was most incensed about the bill’s attacks on Medicaid. 

“If you are concerned about health care, which I suspect that everybody in the world is, this bill throws over 16 million people off the health insurance they have, according to the Congressional Budget Office, by cutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by over $1.1 trillion,” Sanders said. “In other words, the top one percent [is] getting a $975 billion tax break, and that is coming directly by throwing 16 million people off of the health insurance they have. 

“Over fifty thousand Americans will die unnecessarily every year,” Sanders warned. “Fifty thousand Americans will die unnecessarily in order to give tax breaks to billionaires who don’t need them. In other words, this bill is literally a death sentence for low-income and working-class people.”

Even two Republican senators have come out against the bill on the grounds that it will hurt their own constituents and possibly set the GOP back with voters in 2026 and 2028. 

“Alright, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?” Senator Thom Tillis said Sunday, shortly after announcing his retirement. “The people in the White House advising the president … are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

As Trump puts on his faux-populist act and lauds himself for little gifts like his no taxes on tips policy, it’s obvious that this bill is tailor-made for people like him: those who are incredibly wealthy and have a vested interest in protecting that wealth, even at the expense of health care for those in need.  

“Bottom line is that this legislation is the most significant attack on the health care needs of the American people in our country’s history,” Sanders said. 

Americans oppose Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” so overwhelmingly that the president may need to find a new name for it, according to CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten.

“Yeah, if we’re talking about adjectives, how ’bout they think it’s ‘awful,’ they think it’s ‘horrible,’ and to quote our colleague Charles Barkley, ‘terrible, terrible, terrible,’” Enten explained Sunday night.

Enten highlighted multiple polls from throughout June that found that Trump’s gargantuan budget and tax bill was wildly unpopular with voters. “I don’t just got one poll for you Omar, I got five of ’em,” Enten explained to CNN host Omar Jimenez.

A survey by The Washington Post found that 42 percent of Americans opposed the bill, while only 23 percent supported it, leaving the legislation with a net favorable rating of -19—and that was the most positive that the results got. A Pew Research Center poll found that the bill had a net favorable rating of -20, Fox News found a net favorable rating of -21, Quinnipiac found a net favorable rating of -26, and KFF found a net favorable rating of -29.

“You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know that when the net favorable rating of your bill is somewhere between negative 19 and negative 29 points that it is not a positive bill as viewed by the American public,” Enten said.

CNN’s reporting only continues to confirm what is already clear: The public doesn’t support legislation that will add $3.2 trillion to the deficit while slashing critical Medicaid and food stamp programs and giving tax breaks to wealthy people and corporations. Even members of Trump’s own base have been left feeling betrayed by the president.

Mister “Liberation Day” is suddenly tired of his tariff plan.

The newest chapter in Donald Trump’s global trade rearrangement will look like a series of “very fair” letters that will effectively dictate permitted trade rates with the U.S., the president outlined in a rough pitch on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.

“We made deals, but I’d rather just send them a letter, a very fair letter, saying, ‘Congratulations, we’re going to allow you to trade in the United States of America, you’re going to pay a 25 percent tariff, or 20 percent, or 40 or 50 percent.’ I would rather do that,” Trump said.

The Trump administration has already extended trade discussions until July 9. Last week, there were murmurings among senior Trump officials that the deadline could be extended yet again, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt describing the hard stop as “not critical.” But on Sunday, Trump didn’t seem sure that he’d need to extend the pause.

“I don’t think I’ll need to. I could, there’s no big deal,” he told Fox. “What I wanted to do is, and what I will do just—sometime prior to the ninth—is we’ll send a letter to all these countries.”

The letters, according to Trump, will be the “end of the trade deal,” suggesting that no negotiations will take place after the White House hits the mailbox. “We don’t have to meet. We understand, we have all the numbers,” he said.

But one provided example did little to evoke confidence in the plan, as Trump apparently forgot the name of Japan’s prime minister: “‘Dear Mr. Japan, here’s the story,’” Trump proposed. “‘You’re going to pay a 25 percent tariff on your cars.’”

It’s not the first time that Trump has offered to stamp out trade talks by issuing a string of letters. He made similar promises on May 16 and June 11, claiming both times that the letters would be issued in a handful of weeks, though that never came to fruition.

Trump’s tariff proposals haven’t won the U.S. too much negotiating ground. Instead, countries around the world began observing that—rather than playing the waiting game to meet with the White House over potential trade relief—China’s tough negotiating strategy with the former real estate mogul had actually gotten the Eastern powerhouse a significantly better deal.

In the end, it will be America that pays the price when the Trump administration runs out of time on its “90 deals in 90 days” promise. Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank would wait to see the residual impacts of the country’s new tariff plan before reducing its key interest rate, as companies have already decided to increase product prices this year in reaction to hampered global supply chains.

Senate Republican Thom Tillis spent his Sunday night railing against the Medicaid cuts contained in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in a fiery speech just hours after he announced he would retire at the end of this term. 

“Between the state-directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill—there’s a reduction of state-directed payments. And then there’s the reduction of the provider tax. They can’t find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that ‘yeah, it’s rough, but North Carolina’s used the system, they’re gonna have to make it work,’” Tillis said. “Alright, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? The people in the White House advising the president … are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Tillis went on to compare the bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid to Obamacare, and posited that the wave of Republican victories that followed that policy will now be transferred to the Democrats in both the upcoming midterms and the general election. 

“Now, Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betray a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump was in the Oval Office.” 

Tillis announced his retirement Sunday after once again angering the MAGA base with a vote against Trump’s budget bill the day before. He isn’t the only Republican to realize that Trump’s marquee piece of legislation will have a direct negative impact on Medicaid access for his constituents, many of whom are Trump supporters, and many of whom believed Trump when he promised to leave Medicaid alone. While Rand Paul was the only other “no” vote on the bill, a recent Fox News poll showed that Republican voters, especially white men with degrees, oppose the legislation. But the “big, beautiful bill” trudges on, as the Senate convenes on Monday to finalize the 940-page piece of legislation.