Jun 27, 2025 | Final SCOTUS decisions today, BBB negotiations underway

Hi everyone!
 

We're waiting for the last Supreme Court decisions of the season this morning, and by the time you get this some of them might already be out, so check at The Post Millennial to see what's happened so far, BUT if you want to know what we're looking at, here goes:

Birthright citizenship: Will the court agree with Trump that the 14th Amendment does not allow children of illegal immigrants to automatically become citizens if they are born on American soil? A Maryland court shot down Trump's January 20 executive order saying as much, and issued a nationwide injunction, and the administration went to the high court to see if they could get that reversed, or at least offer a stay while it litigates in the lower court. I could obviously be wrong (many such cases) but I think the court is going to side with the lower court on this one.

Banning porn in Texas: Can Texas prevent kids from seeing porn? The question is, do the age restrictions on porn to prevent minors from accessing it hinder adults' free speech rights? Texas isn't the only state that has put in the age restrictions, which require users to verify their ages before accessing pornographic content, so if Texas ends up being allowed to do it—which I think they will, because the issue isn't that adults can't access it but that they have to prove their age to do so—all those other states should be good to protect kids as well. The pornographers don't like it, and I hope they lose in court.

LGBTQ+ books in schools: Parents of different faiths in Maryland got together to complain about LGBTQ+ lessons being taught in their children's schools. They argue that they should be able to opt their kids out of learning about things like gender swapping, gay sex, and other sexual issues. The Maryland public schools said it was unreasonable for parents to opt their kids out and that the curriculum wasn't planned enough for them to be able to properly notify parents ahead of time. They also said it was like an undue burden or something for staff to have to remove kids from class during these types of lessons. My guess is that 6-3 the court will side with the parents.

There are three other cases, one on gerrymandering in Louisiana, another on the FCC that is basically about agencies being allowed to make policy after Congress outsources that to them (check in on WV v EPA from a couple of years ago to get a sense of how the court thinks of Congress outsourcing their job to agencies,) and another on a similar line about HHS making a task force to implement policy, with the idea that HHS' creation of said task force violated the Appointments Clause.

Despite the left being all up in arms about the Maryland case, saying that conservatives are banning books, leftists are banning books—or at least deplatforming them. There's a bookstore in San Francisco that announced they would stop selling books written by JK Rowling, author of the wildly popular Harry Potter series because they say she's transphobic. She's not "phobic" of anything, of course, she just doesn't believe men can become women with a little medical magic and by wishing hard enough. And science proves her right.

At issue for the bookstore was that Rowling said she'd use her non-profit fund to help women and groups who are fighting to preserve women's sex-based rights. Booksmith doesn't want people to buy Rowling's books because they don't want her to continue supporting women's rights. My guess is, if you asked these bookstore people 15 years ago if they would boycott an author over her support for women's rights, they'd say "hell no, absolutely not," yet here we are. On their website, they say unequivocally that they are against book bans and they've got a fundraiser to help them "ship crates of queer, affirmative, necessary books to deserts and communities with bans in place."

And finally, keep an eye on the Big Beautiful Bill this weekend. The Senate has a self-imposed deadline of July 4 to get the thing passed and they're hitting all kinds of snags on different aspects of it. Trump normally heads out of town on weekends, to Bedminster in summer and Mar-a-Lago in winter, but this weekend he's sticking around DC to whip the GOP in line and push them to push this thing through. Thomas Stevenson has a great explainer to get you caught up on all the details.

Hope you have a great weekend!