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The chief justice faced down the president, forged unlikely coalitions and achieved long-sought goals.
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Ahead of the July Fourth holiday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we speak with the acclaimed scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, who examines how Black radicals have interpreted the document throughout U.S. history in a new essay for Hammer & Hope. Although the declaration famously asserts that "all men are created equal," Kelley says that clearly did not extend to Indigenous or enslaved Black people. "When the drafters developed this declaration, they assumed that human beings were basically white men," he says. But despite the "hypocrisy" of the declaration, many Black radicals still found value in its words, including a "justification for rebellion," says Kelley.
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President Donald Trump has received another setback in his ongoing quest to control U.S. elections. In a 5-4 split, the Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots do not need to be received by Election Day to be counted, as long as they were postmarked by then. Although a "rare victory for voting rights," the conservative justices' assertion that voting by mail is prone to fraud — a disproven theory that Trump blames his loss in the 2020 election for — is "very disturbing," says Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. "My fear is that this is going to embolden Republicans to double down on their efforts to try to get rid of mail voting, including the SAVE America Act, Trump's sweeping voter suppression bill, which he seems desperate to go to any lengths to try to pass," says Berman, who also comments on the court's decision to strike down a federal law limiting campaign spending.
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The Supreme Court has ruled that states can prohibit transgender student athletes from competing in women's and girls' sports teams, with the court's conservative justices finding that such bans — currently introduced in Idaho and West Virginia — do not violate the Constitution, and all nine justices agreeing that they do not violate Title IX, the federal anti-sex discrimination statute. These bans are part of an "effort that we're seeing escalate to push trans people out of public life," says Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project. They have the ultimate effect of "increasing the legitimacy of the Trump administration's authority over every aspect of our bodily autonomy and everyday life."
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