Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to Mail-in Voting in Win for Trump

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that candidates for office have standing to challenge how a state counts votes—in a major blow to mail-in voting, a particular target of Donald Trump’s.

In a 7–2 decision, all six of the court’s conservative justices and one liberal justice sided with Representative Michael Bost, a longtime Trump ally, who alleged that the Illinois State Board of Elections had violated federal law by counting mail-in ballots received within two weeks of Election Day.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the court agreed counting ballots after Election Day threatened election integrity. “Rules that undermine the integrity of the electoral process also undermine the winner’s political legitimacy. The counting of unlawful votes—or discarding of lawful ones—erodes public confidence in election results and the elected representative,” Roberts wrote.

In a concurring opinion, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett warned that the ruling wrongly lowered the bar for candidates to challenge state laws.

“By holding that a candidate always has an interest in challenging vote counting rules, even if those rules do not impose a competitive disadvantage on him, the Court today relieves candidates of having to show any real harm,” Barrett wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the court had undermined the democratic process and opened up a can of worms by creating a harm-free, status-based standing. She was joined in her opinion by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“By carving out a bespoke rule for candidate-plaintiffs—granting them standing ‘to challenge the rules that govern the counting of votes,’ simply and solely because they are ‘candidate[s]’ for office, ibid.—the Court now complicates and destabilizes both our standing law and America’s electoral processes,” she wrote.

The recent anti-mail-in-ballot push has clearly been influenced by Trump’s whims. Despite having voted by mail in the past, Trump has railed against the practice as part of his baseless claims of sweeping election fraud.

This story has been updated.

Senator John Kennedy shared some revealing information about his fellow GOPer Lindsey Graham in his new book, confirming Graham’s hawkish sensibilities and his penchant for alcoholic beverages.

“If you want to stump Lindsey, just ask him to name a country he wouldn’t bomb,” Kennedy wrote in his book, How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will.

Then Kennedy moved on to the drink.

“Invite him to dinner, and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fish tank. But that’s why I like him.”

This isn’t the first time Graham’s drinking has come up. In 2015, New York magazine wrote that Graham “likes a drink so much he thinks drinking more might just solve the problems in Washington.” And just last month, he appeared visibly drunk while answering questions at a news conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Senator Elissa Slotkin said Monday that she has learned federal prosecutors are investigating her for a video she made in November, along with other congressional colleagues, urging members of the military to disobey illegal orders.

Slotkin said she found out about the investigation from Jeanine Pirro, appointed by President Trump as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro had emailed the Senate’s sergeant at arms requesting an interview with Slotkin or her personal attorney, according to The New York Times. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny the investigation to the Times.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, helped to organize the video, along with five other Democratic members of Congress who served in the military: Senator Mark Kelly and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan. They each urged service members to refuse illegal orders, drawing anger from President Trump, who accused them of sedition and suggested they be executed.

The investigation of Slotkin follows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s attempts to target Kelly, censuring him and going after his military pension. In response, Kelly has sued Hegseth on free speech and due process grounds.

While Slotkin isn’t a military veteran, a Justice Department investigation could result in criminal charges. Is the Trump administration willing to try and punish Slotkin merely for exercising her free speech rights?

Multiple military officials have sought legal counseling in the wake of President Donald Trump’s escalating (and illegal) military operations in the Caribbean.

Steve Woolford, a resource counselor with the GI Rights Hotline, told HuffPost that calls for advice started coming in at the end of September, after the U.S. military had killed 17 people in a series of extrajudicial strikes on boats the government claims—but won’t prove—are smuggling drugs.

The official, who Woolford said had an important role in approving the strikes, questioned whether what they were doing was a “legal military operation.”

Woolford recalled the reluctant service member saying, “‘This doesn’t look like what the military is supposed to be doing, and the military is doing it.’” Woolford referred the member to legal counsel.

“They didn’t want to be doing it,” he told HuffPost.

In October, another service member reached out to Woolford to express concern that they would be ordered to participate in future boat strikes.

Since then, the calls from concerned service members have only become more common. Hours after the U.S. military’s large-scale operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Woolford said the hotline received three calls from service members. One expressed concerns that the operation was unlawful, and another described it as “imperialist.”

While Woolford referred his worried callers to The Orders Project, a group providing legal advice to military service members, nonprofit Vice President Brenner Fissell said that he’s received no calls from officers involved in the strikes.

“People are really scared of at all stepping out of line,” Fissell told HuffPost. “I mean, when you see someone like [Admiral Alvin] Holsey lose his position, and he’s one of the top five people in the military, do you really want to reach out?”

Holsey, who has served as commander of the U.S. Southern Command for only a year, offered in December to resign from his position after he questioned the strikes’ legality, sources told CNN.

The number of calls to Woolford may continue to rise, as the U.S. military continues to wade into Trump’s illegal war. Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer, told HuffPost that capturing Maduro had triggered the Geneva Conventions, raising the stakes of U.S. strikes on vessels linked to Venezuela. “These individuals involved in mere criminality are civilians who are not directly participating in the hostilities, and therefore not legally targetable,” he said.

Service members stuck executing these strikes were left in a “terrible bind,” he said.

A 21-year old anti-ICE protester has been left permanently blinded in California after a Department of Homeland Security agent shot him in the face with a nonlethal round at point-blank range on Friday.

Kaden Rummler can be seen on video rushing to help a fellow protester at Civic Center Plaza in Santa Ana before being shot by a federal agent. He crumples to the ground in a heap, covering his face before an officer drags him away by his hoodie. Rummler’s aunt said he was left with a fractured skull and shards of plastic, glass, and metal stuck all throughout his eyes and face, and would have died if not for the six hours of surgery he went through.

“That could have cost him his life,” Jeri Rees told the Los Angeles Times. “But now, for the next six weeks, he can’t sneeze or cough because it could do a lot of damage.… The other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye.’”

This is one of countless instances of excessive, brutal force being used against U.S. residents in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Rummler’s blinding happened just two days after ICE shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the scene as “a highly coordinated campaign of violence where rioters wielded shields,” but had no comment on the use of excessive force from her agents. A spokesperson from the Santa Ana Police Department said the only coordinated violence they saw were demonstrators throwing orange cones.

The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter on Wednesday, as part of what government officials said was an investigation into the sharing of government secrets, The New York Times reports.

Hannah Natanson has been covering the White House’s efforts to cut down the federal workforce and reshape the civil service to support President Trump’s agenda. In her work, she spoke to several government employees frustrated with the Trump administration. The Post said that the bureau was investigating a government contractor accused of illegally holding onto classified materials.

Federal agents searched Natanson’s home as well as her personal devices. The search warrant stated that the investigation concerns Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland with a top-secret security clearance accused of accessing classified intelligence reports. Perez-Lugones allegedly took the reports home, and they were found in his lunchbox and basement, according to an FBI affidavit.

Natanson told the Post that a phone and a smartwatch were taken by agents. While Trump and other administration officials have a reputation for being hostile to the press, a search of a reporter’s home is extremely rare.

This story has been updated.

The Michigan Ford autoworker who screamed “pedophile protector” at President Trump on Tuesday—eliciting a “Fuck you” and a middle finger from the president—has been suspended from work.

White House communications head Stephen Cheung described the man as a “lunatic” who was “wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage.” But TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old United Auto Workers Local 600 line worker, seems to be in his right mind, and says he would probably do it all over again.

“As far as calling him out, definitely no regrets whatsoever,” Sabula told The Washington Post, after confirming that he was the one to heckle the president. He also added that he believes he’s being “targeted for political retribution” for “embarrassing Trump in front of his friends.”

“I don’t feel as though fate looks upon you often, and when it does, you better be ready to seize the opportunity,” said Sabula, an independent who is particularly disturbed by the lack of transparency surrounding the Epstein files. “And today I think I did that.” A fundraiser for Sabula has already raised $150,000.

Donald Trump has stepped up his rhetoric on Greenland hours before Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance will meet its foreign minister along with Denmark’s at the White House.

Early Wednesday morning, the president posted on his Truth Social account, “The United States needs Greenland for the purposes of National Security.

“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he added, referring to the massive boondoggle he seeks to build. “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”

The governments of Denmark and Greenland requested Wednesday’s meeting in an attempt to clarify Trump’s renewed push to seize the territory. NATO’s leading parties, Greenland’s political parties, and Denmark all oppose the move, but that has not dissuaded Trump, who is dead set on taking Greenland despite a complete lack of evidence that Russia or China have their own plans to conquer it.

At a joint press conference on Tuesday, the premier of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said firmly that “if we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”

But Trump’s statement shows that his mind is made up, raising tensions ahead of Wednesday afternoon’s meeting. It will be interesting to see how Rubio and Vance treat the visiting Danish and Greenlandic officials, especially considering Vance’s past experiences with foreign leaders.

Top Justice Department officials Tuesday tore into a Trump-appointed federal judge who dared to ask why Lindsey Halligan is still calling herself a U.S. attorney.

In an 11-page filing, Halligan—fully backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—slammed U.S. District Judge David Novak of Richmond for ordering Halligan to explain on what basis she has identified herself as U.S. attorney despite another ruling that she was improperly appointed.

Novak had pressed her on why that should not constitute a false or misleading statement, and why he should not strike her title from her cases—even suggesting that she might face disciplinary consequences for blatantly ignoring the law.

“The Court’s thinly veiled threat to use attorney discipline to cudgel the Executive Branch into conforming its legal position in all criminal prosecutions to the views of a single district judge is a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers,” the government wrote in the filing.

After Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled in November that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney—and her indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were dismissed—Justice Department officials continued to sign Halligan’s name on criminal indictments. When Novak questioned the legal basis for this, the DOJ suggested that Novak had somehow made a “fundamental error” in asserting that they were bound by Currie’s ruling.

The government claimed that Halligan could continue to identify as a U.S. attorney because Currie’s ruling “did not and could not require the United States to acquiesce to her contrary (and erroneous) legal reasoning outside of those cases,” pretending as if Currie had simply expressed a “disagreement” with the government’s view. The government claimed that it was within its rights to maintain its own “contested legal position.”

The government also claimed that Novak had a “fixation on a signature block title,” and claimed that “no authority exists for a court to strike an attorney title out of a signature block.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.

The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”

The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer, Joshua Block of the ACLU, argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.

While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.

“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teens,” he said, arguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the spot entitled to a cisgender girl.

Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes to begin with. Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported in 2024 that of the 510,000 total college athletes, there were fewer than 10 transgender students.

Trapped in the minority, the liberal justices suggested that the plaintiffs could seek “as applied” challenges to their states laws, meaning the cases could go back through lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their assigned sex at birth.