“President Trump’s administration on Monday filed its 41st application to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, a milestone that matches the total number of petitions it filed during his entire first term — in less than two years,” Axios reports.
“The record highlights how often the president has turned to SCOTUS to secure authority to temporarily revive policies blocked by lower courts.”
“The Trump administration can resume rapidly deporting immigrants to countries other than their own, the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday,” the New York Times reports.
“The one-page emergency ruling was unsigned and gave no vote count, as is typical in such cases. Although the justices cleared the way, for now, for the swift removals to continue, the court also announced that it would fast-track the case and hear oral arguments about it in December, setting up a final ruling on the issue next year.”
“Sen. Darline Graham sought to take up her brother’s mantle Tuesday, going after former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining the late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s phone data,” Politico reports.
Said Graham: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“A federal judge on Monday blocked the authority of President Donald Trump’s administration to withhold some federal counterterrorism funding from states that don’t meet its election administration demands,” the Associated Press reports.
“Courts have largely rejected the administration’s previous efforts, which reflect untrue claims about widespread voting fraud and come ahead of November’s midterm elections where Democrats seek to take control of one or both chambers of Congress and check Trump’s power.”
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat. The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence.”
— Former special counsel Jack Smith, quoted by Mediaite. in testimony before the U.S. Senate.
“The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to allow its policy limiting gender-affirming treatment for federal inmates to take effect while a legal challenge plays out in court,” the Washington Sun reports.
“For the third time this month, the Supreme Court rejected Missouri’s bid for one more Republican-leaning congressional district,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“With no dissents, the justices upheld a state court order requiring the use of a 2022 election map, which favors Republicans in six of the eight districts.”
NBC News: Supreme Court for the third time rejects Republican redistricting push in Missouri.
“The seashells-based prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey has been delayed until early 2027, as a judge makes her way through a number of pending motions, including a request by Comey to dismiss the case on grounds it was driven by Donald Trump’s animus,” NBC News reports.
“The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for states to use the federal government’s overhauled immigration database to purge noncitizens from voter rolls ahead of the midterms,” the Washington Sun reports.
“The unsigned decision sided with the Department of Homeland Security, which sought to revive the modified system — which contained Social Security information and other individual data — after U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered it shut down in June. Three justices dissented from the decision.”
New York Times: Supreme Court allows federal voter identification tool ahead of midterms.
“Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday slammed the Supreme Court’s use of its ’emergency docket,’ suggesting the court has misused the process in allowing the Trump administration to move forward with a host of controversial policies while challenges play out in lower court,” the Washington Post reports.
”The high court’s emergency docket has been criticized by a range of legal experts who say the justices can make consequential decisions while offering little or no explanation for their reasoning.”
New York Times: Justice Jackson calls emergency docket “potentially corrosive.”
“Three federal appeals courts have rejected President Trump’s go-to move in trying to install allies as United States attorneys, the officials who lead the prosecutors’ offices in the nation’s 94 judicial districts. In each case, the courts said Trump had violated a law that limits who can run the offices when there are vacancies,” the New York Times reports.
“Those decisions have complicated Trump’s efforts to investigate and prosecute his political foes.”
“The administration this month asked the Supreme Court to review two of the decisions, warning that they ‘risk chaos’ and threaten ‘to inject mass confusion’ into thousands of ordinary cases.”
“The fight over Missouri’s congressional map returned to the U.S. Supreme Court for a third time late Tuesday, after an appeals court ordered the revival of new districts backed by President Donald Trump,” the Associated Press reports.
“The new map was drawn to help Republicans gain a U.S. House seat in the pivotal midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress. The Supreme Court has twice blocked efforts to use it in November.”
New York Times: Dispute over Missouri’s congressional map again returns to Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a custody dispute between a California couple and surrogate who gave birth to a child last month with a rare and serious heart defect,” CBS News reports.
“The Trump administration’s policy on deporting immigrants to third countries is unlawful, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, a decision that could halt a program that has already sent thousands of people to countries that are not their own,” the Washington Post reports.
Adam Liptak: “Supreme Court justices work for the government but treat their official papers as private property. As my frequent reporting partner Jodi Kantor wrote this month, that means they can withhold them from the public until long after they have died, or destroy them entirely.”
“In a brief filed last week in a federal appeals court, the Trump administration twice cited Jodi’s article to argue that presidents should have the same power. A 1978 law requires White House documents to be preserved and disclosed relatively soon after the president leaves office. The brief says that law violates the Constitution.”
“The Supreme Court’s recent patchwork of election-related decisions gives the public scant clues of how the justices would act if faced with a crucial dispute this fall that would definitively settle which party controls Congress or what to expect in 2028,” CNN reports.
“The justices’ unsigned order Monday rejecting President Donald Trump’s plan to let the U.S. Postal Service possibly refuse to deliver ballots was cryptic. And an earlier June decision, similarly rejecting an attempt to foist new rules on mail-in ballots, came down to a single vote.”
“A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could not honor President Trump with an inscription on the institution’s exterior, blocking an effort by the center’s board to restore the president’s name to the building,” the New York Times reports.
Rolling Stone: Trump is ready to close the Kennedy Center because he can’t put his name on it.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves. This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”
— President Trump, quoted by the New York Post.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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