Closing summary
Democrats went on the attack as they marked the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech near Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.
Here’s what else happened today:
Trump plans to rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, the day after his debate with Biden. His campaign believes the state is winnable in November, even though it voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020.
The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors …
… but first it will release decisions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, almost certainly on at least some of the high-profile cases the justices have yet to decide.
The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.
A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.
Meanwhile, in Florida, the judge handling Donald Trump’s stalled prosecution over the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort is in the midst of a major hearing that could determing the case’s trajectory. Here’s the latest on what the two sides are arguing, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell:
The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution for retaining classified documents is expected on Monday to consider modifying his conditions of release to include a prohibition on making statements that could endanger the safety of FBI agents involved in the case.
The request to the US district judge, Aileen Cannon – the first time prosecutors have sought to limit Trump’ public remarks in this case – raises the stakes for Trump. Unlike in his other cases, where prosecutors sought gag orders, a violation of release conditions carries a risk of jail.
The latest dispute over Trump’s inflammatory statements stems from his blatantly false characterization of the FBI’s use-of-deadly force policy when they executed a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago club in August 2022 and retrieved more than 100 classified documents.
The order, which limits FBI agents to use deadly force only if they face extreme danger and became public after the FBI’s operational plan for the search was unsealed, used standard language that is routinely used in hundreds of warrants executed across the country.
But Trump and some allies twisted the limiting language to claim the FBI was authorized by the Biden administration to shoot him when they searched Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump was not there during the search and the language is standard US justice department policy.
