Today's recap
Several major supreme court rulings came down on Friday, including on birthright citizenship, LGBT books in schools and Obamacare – the majority of which delivered Donald Trump wins. On the international front, Trump once again cut off trade talks with Canada over its new digital services tax. He said he’d set a new tariff rate on Canadian goods next week. The Senate also voted down the Iran War Powers resolution in a 53-47 vote on Friday evening. The resolution aimed to compel Trump to seek approval from Congress before taking further military action in Iran.
Here’s what else happened today:
Trump hosted top diplomats from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo for a peace agreement between the two countries. The event kicked off with an unusual start when Trump brought an African reporter by his side and told her she was beautiful.
Melissa and Mark Hortman, a Minnesota state representative and her husband, laid in state at the capitol after they were killed by a politically motivated assassin who posed as a police officer.
Border Patrol agents raided a home using an explosive device in Huntington Park, California. Everyone in the house were US citizens, which included a 1-year-old and a 6-year-old.
The supreme court, in a 6-3 ruling, delivered Trump a major victory by ruling that individual district court judges lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Trump has said many of these injunctions have blocked his policies, including his executive order aiming to end the right to automatic birthright citizenship.
United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said that the US-backed Israeli aid operation in Gaza is “killing people.” This followed calls by Médecins Sans Frontières for Israel to immediately end its siege on Gaza, calling the Israeli-US food distribution scheme “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”.
The Trump administration is planning to deport Kilmar Ábrego García for a second time, but does not plan to send him back to El Salvador. It is not clear when the deportation might occur.
The supreme court ruled 6-3 in favor of Christian and Muslim parents in Maryland who sued to keep their elementary school children out of certain classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read. The justices in a 6-3 ruling overturned a lower court’s refusal to require Montgomery County’s public schools to provide an option to opt out of these classes.
The supreme court ruled against challengers to a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of users. The adult entertainment industry argued that the measure violates the free speech rights of adults.
The supreme court preserved a key element of the Obamacare law that helps guarantee that health insurers cover preventive care such as cancer screenings at no cost to patients.
Two senators jumped the aisle on Friday on the vote over whether to curb Donald Trump’s authority to wage war with Iran. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, voted to back the resolution. John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, voted against.
The resolution failed to pass the Senate, ending in a 53–47 tally. The aim of the resolution was to compel Trump to seek authorization from Congress before taking military action. It came with the backdrop of Trump backing Israel and ordering bomb strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities earlier this month.
Fetterman explained his no vote to reporters on Thursday, saying: “I’m going to vote no on that simply because I would never want to restrict any future president, Republican or Democrat, to do this kind of military exercise.”
On the Senate floor on Friday, Paul said the reason he was backing the resolution was because the power to declare war is only meant for Congress. “The Constitution is clear: Congress, not the president, has the authority to declare war,” Paul said.
Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who sponsored the resolution, also harkened back to the founders’ drafting of the constitution when he spoke to his colleagues on Friday. He spoke about how George Washington was president at the time.
“As much as they respected leaders like George Washington, they said war is too big a decision. It’s too big a decision for one person,” Kaine said. “So, they wrote a constitution that said the United States should not be at war without a vote of Congress.”
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