Justice Sotomayor Warns Trans Athlete Bans Aren’t Based on Any Facts

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld West Virginia and Idaho state laws banning transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender, further restricting trans rights in the U.S.

This is the court’s first ruling on laws regarding trans athletes, and follows last year’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti allowing states to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The ruling contributes to an increasingly bleak legal landscape for trans people in the U.S. Both petitioners argued that the state bans are discriminatory, and violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. One argued that the restrictions are also a violation of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in schools on the basis of sex.

All three liberal justices dissented in the decision, noting that they would have sent the case back for further factual findings on the equal protection claim.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a partial dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

“States do have some room to legislate around issues when there exists significant, and genuine, scientific debate,” Sotomayor wrote. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.

“The majority’s opinion ends by reciting the many wonderful ways in which playing sports can be valuable to young people. It can help build resilience, tenacity, leadership, and discipline. It can lead to life-long friendships, community, and a sense of belonging. It can bring joy and the thrill of victory, along with all the lessons one learns from experiencing defeat. The benefits are immense,” Sotomayor continued. “Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B. P. J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”

“A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cisgender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth,” Justice Jackson wrote in an additional dissent. “Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX.”

The majority decision will have national repercussions on transgender athletes competing in youth and college sports. The number of trans athletes participating in these activities is already very slim.

Rachel Kahn contributed reporting to this story.

The Supreme Court has tossed another one of the president’s efforts to kill birthright citizenship.

In a 6-3 decision filed Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of the 1868 constitutional clause, which entitles any person born on U.S. soil to an American passport, further safeguarding the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Trump administration.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion, writing that “citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. Justice Brett Kavanaugh voted with the majority but wrote a dissenting opinion disagreeing in part with the court’s ruling.

Altogether, two Donald Trump appointees—Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—ruled against the executive order, marking the third such time in recent memory that the president’s Supreme Court appointments have turned against him.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the last year and a half to strip the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

In December, the nation’s highest judiciary agreed to hear another one of the administration’s birthright challenges, this time pertaining to a case out of New Hampshire. The executive branch argued in the case that language included in the Fourteenth Amendment—specifically, “subject to the jurisdiction of”—required applicable children not only to be present in the country at the time of the birth, but also to confer their allegiance to the United States.

The argument appeared thin at best, considering the administration did not clarify how it expected people who had just been born to declare their allegiance.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in legal arguments filed at the time that the naturalized citizenship pathway had become “pervasive” with “destructive consequences.”

During arguments in May 2025, justices on both ideological sides of the court flamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite birthright citizenship through America’s courts, questioning why the government’s attorneys would even bring the case to the judiciary’s doorstep when “every court has ruled against” the administration on birthright citizenship.

At the time, Kavanaugh pressed Sauer into a corner, forcing the solicitor general to admit that the Trump administration doesn’t even know how it would enforce its birthright citizenship order. Sauer managed to appall Barrett by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

In Tuesday’s case syllabus, the Supreme Court noted, “If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design; words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’—are absent from the Clause.”

This story has been updated.

Peace negotiations between the U.S. and Iran are once again inching along, days after the two countries exchanged strikes. But even top Trump officials aren’t confident in the burgeoning truce.

State Secretary Marco Rubio reportedly told lawmakers during a briefing Monday that the new peace deal wasn’t of the same caliber as the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove recounted Rubio’s admission while speaking with MeidasTouch’s Pablo Manríquez outside of the Capitol, claiming that Rubio had said the Obama administration’s set-up was a “real agreement with criteria and benchmarks and thresholds.”

“This [memorandum of understanding] is just a signed piece of paper saying we’re going to continue to talk about talking,” Kamlager-Dove said. “So you should ask yourself, a hundred-and-something billion dollars later, ‘What are these people doing with our money and our national security?’”

The unpopular war has so far cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion per day (the current total is estimated at more than $113.3 billion). It has also sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.

The country’s strained economy has also become a political talking point ahead of a contentious midterm season. The projected military expenses don’t encompass the heightened day-to-day costs for the average American. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told CBS News Monday that it’s likely every American household has spent roughly $1,000 more in heightened fuel and food costs since the war began in late February.

But those additional expenses have apparently not affected the White House.

Donald Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the peace negotiations. As the U.S. and Iran prepared Monday to send delegations to Qatar, the president said that the meeting in Doha would be “perhaps important, perhaps not.”

“We’re going to find out, but we’re winning militarily. It’s almost won militarily, I would say,” Trump said.

The envoys include special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Vice President JD Vance is leading the operation, though he is not expected to attend the upcoming talks.

President Trump is once again building something at the White House without any warning.

Trump is building a new helipad on the White House’s South Lawn, The Washington Post reports, with construction crews already working on the project Monday. The helipad is being built on the lawn’s south portico, near where the presidential helicopter, Marine One, is traditionally kept. A large fence is now blocking off the construction.

The project has not been officially announced. It is meant to solve the problem of new Sikorsky helicopters built by Lockheed Martin burning the White House lawn due to their exhaust vents. The defense company is reportedly donating $5 million to help pay for the helipad.

Other administrations have refrained from building a permanent helipad on the White House grounds due to concerns of historical preservation, as well as ruining the classical image of presidents boarding Marine One on the grass near the White House.

In his second term, Trump has shown that he has no regard for history or tradition where the White House is concerned, unceremoniously demolishing its East Wing to build a massive ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden and replacing it with a stone patio, and holding a UFC fight on the South Lawn.

Trump can at least argue that this project is operationally necessary. But he’s already done so much damage to the White House in order to push his own gaudy design aesthetic, and because he’s kept his helipad plans under the radar, nobody knows what it’s going to look like.

Trump has repeatedly shown in his second term that if he wants something built a certain way, he won’t listen to any criticism or preserve any history, no matter how tacky his designs. Just look at the hideous mock-ups of his “triumphal arch.”

The Trump administration has awarded Clark Construction a $500 million no-bid contract to build the president’s ballroom—even as he has promised multiple times that it would be privately funded and built at no cost to taxpayers, according to The Washington Post. Records show that the president was personally involved in the contract negotiations.

Competitive bidding is generally required for all federal contracts. However, the Trump administration filed this contract through the Executive Residence, which is exempt from competitive contract rules.

The White House justified the move by stating that under federal law, the president can spend however much on the “care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting” of the White House grounds. The Trump administration tried to cite the same law as authority to build the ballroom, but a federal judge rejected it in March. The administration’s no-bid contract, however, has yet to become a legal matter.

White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher noted on the contract that it skipped the typical bidding process because “the disclosure of the executive agency’s needs would compromise the national security.”

Trump has repeatedly said that private donors would foot the whole bill for the ballroom construction, but now it’s clearer than ever that’s not true. “They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump claimed earlier this year.