"We have entered a period when the legal recognition and legal protections for trans and intersex people are at an all-time low," said the Center for Constitutional Rights. |
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In a ruling that defenders of LGBTQ+ rights say clears the way for discrimination, the US Supreme Court upheld state laws banning transgender girls and women from participating on school and college athletic teams.
In a decision that will likely supercharge attacks on transgender people by red states and the Trump administration, the court said that state-level bans on transgender athletes did not violate either the 14th Amendment of the Constitution or Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.
The court’s six conservatives ruled that Idaho and West Virginia did not violate the equal protection clause because the laws were made in the interest of athletic fairness.
“Biological males generally possess inherent physical advantages in sports,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the majority, describing it as a topic where there is still “medical and scientific uncertainty.”
He dismissed equal protection claims from two athletes: 16-year-old shot put champion Becky Pepper-Jackson of West Virginia and 25-year-old Boise State student Lindsey Hecox, who failed to make her school’s cross-country team because she was “too slow” but played in club-level sports.
The athletes argued that they took puberty-blocking medication that would have blunted their advantages, but Kavanaugh wrote that states were under no obligation to “grant individualized exemptions to specific athletes or subclasses.”
The court ruled unanimously that West Virginia’s state ban did not violate Title IX. But the court’s three liberals disagreed on the question of equal protection.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the scientific uncertainty surrounding the question was precisely why states should proceed with caution rather than enact categorical bans.
“In the end, to the court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious,” she wrote in her dissent.
She added that state bans will be harmful to trans people seeking friendship and community through sports. She said because of the court’s decision, a state can deny young people “these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
Sasha Buchert, senior attorney and director of the Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal—which represented Pepper-Jackson—said the ruling was “deeply harmful for transgender women and girls who only asked for the ability to participate in sports with their peers.”
“Countless studies have demonstrated the myriad benefits that come with participation in team sports,” she added. “Now, one population, transgender youth and collegians, are targeted for specific and baseless discrimination.”
The decision effectively legitimizes efforts in more than two dozen Republican-led states that have adopted bans on transgender athletes. However, Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights (NCLR), noted that the decision did not go as far as it could have, allowing other states to leave intact policies that let trans students participate.
“This is a disappointing decision, but also a narrow one that leaves the door open for the many states and schools that have adopted reasonable policies that protect both fairness and inclusion with respect to transgender students,” Minter said. “Today’s limited decision means that states and schools across the country still have the power to make reasonable rules to ensure fairness without banning all transgender girls.”
NCLR staff attorney Rachel Berg said that the ruling still “ignores clear discrimination and political attacks against transgender girls” and invites “invasive policing of young people’s bodies.”
“Blanket bans on transgender girls playing school sports invite anyone to call for a ‘gender check’ on any girl who wants to play sports if they think she is ‘too tall’ or ‘too strong,’” she warned.
Lambda Legal listed several cases in which young people in states with bans have been singled out and targeted with aggressive physical scrutiny by state officials:
In Florida, a 15-year-old junior varsity volleyball player was the subject of a police investigation after an anonymous accusation, prompting local officials to draft a 500-page report investigating her medical history, body weight, and anatomy. In Utah, a teenage basketball player was accused of being transgender by a member of the state board of education, leading to threats of violence against her and her family, and a teenager in Maine faced a similar attack from a state senator. In May, President Donald Trump similarly targeted a 16-year-old transgender girl for participating in a high school track meet. Under an Arizona ban, a cisgender male student was prohibited from participating on the boys’ team at his high school because of a clerical error that listed him as female on his original birth certificate.
Tuesday’s decision comes amid an onslaught of other state-level legislation attacking transgender people, including bans on gender-affirming care for youth, bathroom bans, restrictions and invalidations of legal documents, and laws prohibiting schools from respecting students’ preferred gender identities.
Karla Gonzales Garcia, the gender, sexuality, and identity director at Amnesty International USA, said the decision also “comes at a time of rising authoritarian practices under the Trump administration, which use gender and sexuality as a cultural battle for political gain.”
The administration has threatened to investigate, sue, and strip funding from schools that accept trans athletes; attempted to throttle medical funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming care; banned transgender people from the military; and pushed to force transgender women into men’s prisons where they are at severe risk of sexual assault.
The Center for Constitutional Rights said that Tuesday’s ruling “confirms what trans and intersex advocates have known for some time: we are in the Plessy v. Ferguson/Bowers v. Hardwick era of trans rights,” referring to Supreme Court cases that upheld Jim Crow segregation and state bans on homosexuality.
“We have entered a period when the legal recognition and legal protections for trans and intersex people are at an all-time low,” the group continued. “Anti-trans policymakers and activists have, through their actions and rhetoric, made their goal clear: to terrorize trans people and remove them from public life.”
Several Democratic members of Congress expressed solidarity with the transgender community following the ruling.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling to allow states to ban trans kids from playing in sports is discriminatory and opens the door to incredibly invasive examinations of children to determine who can play on what team,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose adult daughter is trans. “This decision targets a tiny population of athletes and further emboldens Republicans’ anti-trans crusade.”
Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) warned that the decision “hands Trump yet another weapon to strip protections and funding from schools across our nation,” and said Republicans were “weaponizing our most vulnerable kids as pawns in a fight they did not choose.”
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said: “We will keep fighting. Discrimination and hate will not win.”
"The intense escalation of corporate spending we are now seeing shows that it is well past time for salvaging American democracy to be treated with the urgency that it deserves." |
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As the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court on Tuesday handed down a 6-3 ruling that campaign finance reform advocates warned would give special interest groups and rich donors yet another way to curry favor with politicians, a new report from government watchdog Public Citizen revealed how “corporate supremacist” groups have already set records for spending in this year’s midterm elections.
There are still more than four months to go until the general election, but according to “The Rise of Corporate Supremacist Super PACs,” by research director Rick Claypool, this campaign cycle accounts for nearly one-third of all corporate political spending since the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruling.
That decision has enabled corporations and groups including super political action committees (PACs) to spend unlimited money on elections, and in the 2026 cycle alone, they have already spent $517 million—“a figure sure to soar as the November general election approaches,” said Public Citizen.
“These totals reference disclosed political spending, not any contributions from dark money organizations that keep donors secret,” the group emphasized.
The amount spent this year by Big Tech, fossil fuel companies, the cryptocurrency industry, and other sectors whose bottom lines could benefit from lax government regulations represents a sizable chunk of the $1.58 billion that corporations have spent on federal elections since 2010.
The 2024 election cycle saw $461 million poured into campaigns by corporations, a sum that dwarfed previous corporate political spending.
Public Citizen released its report as the Supreme Court ruled in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, striking down regulations that for decades have restricted political parties from coordinating campaign spending with candidates.
The report offered more evidence that the high court “has reorganized America for the worse,” said law professor Zephyr Teachout.
Four industries—crypto, artificial intelligence, Big Tech, and online betting companies—have spent $294 million collectively to influence the elections, said Public Citizen, accounting for 57% of the corporate spending.
In 2024, the crypto sector pioneered the playbook corporations are using this year—“prioritizing corporate priorities over parties or candidates and using their financial power to discipline sitting lawmakers and candidates.”
PACs including the pro-AI Leading the Future and the sports betting industry-backed Win for America PAC are some of the top recipients of the corporate case, taking $50.1 million and $43 million, respectively.
A Win for America spokesperson told Axios in April that the super PAC’s backers “seek candidates who will thoughtfully approach regulation and ensure legal sports betting can continue to support communities through billions in tax revenue and jobs across America,” while Josh Vlasto of the pro-crypto PAC Fairshake said in 2025 that the committee is “building an aggressive, targeted strategy for next year to ensure that pro-crypto voices are heard in key races across the country.”
Claypool said the report shows that “a decade and a half after Citizens United, corporations are starting to spend on politics like never before.”
“This corporate spending is a disaster for democracy,” he said. “If the current, broken campaign finance system remains unchallenged—and corporate spending is allowed to drown out the voices of real voters and real people—these corporate campaigns will keep multiplying, even as voting rights for individual Americans face escalating attacks.”
Behind the “corporate supremacist super PACs,” reads the report, the biggest beneficiary of corporate spending is the President Donald Trump-supporting MAGA Inc., which has received $120.6 million in direct contributions from companies including Crypto.com, UnitedHealthcare, and Energy Transfer Partners.
The report comes two weeks after campaigners in Montana announced they had collected signatures that far exceeded the minimum requirement to force a statewide vote on a ballot measure that, if passed, would block corporations from pouring money into elections.
“Time and time again, Americans have demonstrated they want elected officials who are willing to stand up for them against the powerful and predatory corporations that attempt to dominate our daily lives,” reads the Public Citizen report. “Lawmakers can demonstrate their fearlessness and independence from corporate influence by passing legislation that empowers the public while reducing the influence of Big Business demands to prioritize profit-maximization over Americans’ health, safety, and democracy.”
The group called on Congress to pass the “Abolish Super PACs Act, the DISCLOSE Act, and, ultimately, a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.”
“The intense escalation of corporate spending we are now seeing,” concludes the report, “shows that it is well past time for salvaging American democracy to be treated with the urgency that it deserves.”
"They're not even giving us a vote on the amendment," said Rep. Ro Khanna, who vowed to "continue to fight to make sure we don't compromise American sovereignty." |
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A Republican-controlled House panel on Monday refused to allow a floor vote on a bipartisan amendment to prevent closer integration of the American and Israeli militaries, which human rights organizations say would deepen US complicity in Israeli war crimes.
“This is unconscionable,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who led the proposed amendment alongside Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), said in a video posted to social media on Tuesday. “They’re not even giving us a vote on the amendment.”
Khanna vowed that “Thomas and I will continue to fight to make sure we don’t compromise American sovereignty.”
Watch:
The Khanna-Massie amendment would have removed the US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative from annual military policy legislation currently moving through Congress. The initiative, laid out in Section 219 of the House’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), instructs the Pentagon to “designate an executive agent... responsible for synchronizing cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.”
On Monday, the House Rules Committee unveiled a list of NDAA amendments that it decided would get a full House vote, and the Khanna-Massie proposal was absent. Ben Freeman noted at Responsible Statecraft that the rules panel made its decision “after no debate” on the amendment.
“By rejecting the Khanna and Massie amendment, the Rules Committee on Monday ensured the American public would not even get to see how their representatives would vote on this pivotal issue,” Freeman wrote. “This is despite unprecedented levels of public distrust in the Israeli government and widespread public outrage directed at these proposals.”
The fight to block the US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative—which is enthusiastically backed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC—is not necessarily over.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said earlier this month that lawmakers “must” strip the initiative from the NDAA, signaling a possible fight over the provision in the upper chamber. A summary of the Senate version of the NDAA states that the legislation would establish “the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, coordination, and industrial cooperation between the US and
Israel.”
Leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch (HRW), have urged lawmakers to reject the cooperation initiative, with the latter group warning that the proposal would “deepen US military cooperation with Israel while walling that cooperation off from further congressional oversight.”
“Israeli forces’ widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and its ongoing acts of genocide in Gaza should give the United States pause about closer military association,” said Akshaya Kumar, HRW’s director of crisis advocacy. “Instead, Section 219 proposes to deepen entanglement, in a way that makes the risks of complicity ongoing. Legislators still have a chance to strip this damaging proposal out.”
"This is the most corrupt administration in American history," said one House Democrat. "It is not close." |
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A bombshell New York Times report detailing how President Donald Trump’s eldest sons stand to profit from a tungsten mining deal negotiated by their billionaire father sparked outraged calls for accountability on Monday, with Democratic lawmakers characterizing the taxpayer-funded project as yet another example of the administration’s unchecked and unprecedented corruption.
“You will not believe it until you see it laid out,” US Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) wrote in response to the Times story published over the weekend. According to the newspaper, Trump and his team—including billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—“won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips, and other critical goods.”
Ahead of the deal’s completion last September, according to the Times, the Trump administration “approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.”
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., along with Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are poised to benefit from the project. “Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons... joined with other partners to take a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported.
“We’ve seen 300,000 Georgians lose health coverage in the last six months because they couldn’t find room in the budget for health insurance. But they’ve got room in the budget for a tungsten mine overseas, controlled in part by Prince Don and Prince Eric,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) said in an MS NOW appearance late Monday.
Lutnick’s sons, meanwhile, “helped one of the lead investors... on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity,” potentially resulting in a multimillion-dollar boon for Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm overseen by Brandon and Kyle Lutnick.
“They’re not even trying to hide their brazen corruption anymore,” wrote US Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “President Trump and Secretary Lutnick used your tax dollars to further enrich their families from a major mining deal with Kazakhstan.”
Beyer stressed that “this isn’t an isolated incident.” The Times found that at least “14 companies working on critical mining deals with the US government that have ties to Cantor Fitzgerald or the Trump family,” including Kaz Resources, Perpetua Resources, and USA Rare Earth.
Trump’s family has profited massively from his return to the White House, thanks in a large part to a crypto scheme spearheaded by the president’s eldest sons. A “Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker” maintained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee estimates that crypto projects have netted the president and his family over $2.4 billion in profits so far.
“This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close,” Levin said Monday, accusing Trump’s Republican allies—including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—of enabling the president as he loots federal coffers to further enrich himself and his family.
“We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked,” Levin added. “Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.”
"Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights," said one campaigner.The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents, preserving 150 years of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment and dealing a major blow to the administration’s xenophobic agenda. “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause,” the high court held in Trump v. Barbara. The 6-3 decision roundly rejected an executive order issued by Trump on the first day of his second term that sought to deny US citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents who are either unlawfully in the United States or legally living in the country on temporary visas. Every lower court rejected the order. Just three days after its issuance, US District Judge John Coughenour, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, blasted it as “blatantly unconstitutional.” A majority of the right-wing Supreme Court agreed. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “We keep that promise today.” Roberts was joined in the majority by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing a separate concurring opinion agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful but basing his reasoning on federal immigration law rather than the 14th Amendment. “As revealed by the court’s opinion with its detailed account of history and precedent, and by the weighty and thoughtful dissents, the constitutional issue is far more complicated than the statutory issue,” Kavanaugh wrote. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. “This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the court, and in my judgment, the court has made a serious mistake,” Alito wrote in his dissent. “As interpreted by the court today, the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home.” Alito further argued that the 14th Amendment “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” In a 91-page dissent more than three times longer than Roberts’ opinion, Thomas wrote that “the court adds to the sad history of the 14th Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed Blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.” Trump took to his Truth Social network to lament, “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process.” “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he added. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!” Stephen Miller, Trump’s xenophobic deputy chief of staff, seethed on X that Trump v. Barbara is “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.” “American citizenship is not the birthright of the world,” the white nationalist added. “It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.” Defenders of birthright citizenship and the Constitution welcomed the ruling. “The Supreme Court affirmed what we know in our hearts and in our communities: The 14th Amendment extends the promise of citizenship to everyone born in the US Immigrants belong,” Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.), a birthright citizen, said on Bluesky. “No one can deny that immigrants today are also the inheritors of the promise of America—just like so many of my colleagues’ ancestors were.” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a former refugee from Somalia, said on social media: “The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, blocking Trump’s attempt to dismantle the 14th Amendment and strip away a constitutional guarantee. If you were born here, you are an American citizen. The Constitution is clear. No one can change that.” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick called the decision “the easiest of layups possible.” Thomas Wolf, director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that “the court could not have defensibly ruled any differently.” “The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to everyone born here over 150 years ago,” he added. “The Supreme Court affirmed that 20 years later in Wong Kim Ark.” ACLU national legal director Cecilia Wang, a birthright citizen who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the decision “reaffirms a fundamental American promise—if you are born here, you are a citizen. A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat.” Neidi Dominguez, executive director of the multiracial advocacy group Organized Power in Numbers, said that “today the Supreme Court reaffirmed a constitutional right that should never have been in question.” “Birthright citizenship was guaranteed through the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, when formerly enslaved Africans and their allies fought to access equal rights and affirm that children born in the United States have citizenship regardless of where their parents come from,” she noted. “That right survives today.” “But let us be clear about what happened here,” Dominguez continued. “The Trump administration tried to narrow the definition of citizenship and the access to the rights that come with it, and even this Supreme Court disagreed. This is a real relief, and it is welcome. It is also the bare minimum.” “The same court that today defended birthright citizenship last week stripped legal protections from more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian workers with [temporary protected status] and opened the door to doing the same to up to 1.3 million people,” she said. “Earlier this term, it cleared the way for mass layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers. Working people are not safe because one constitutional right survived. They are fighting on every front.” “Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights,” Dominguez added. “Employers cannot stay silent while the workers they depend on are stripped of their rights one ruling at a time. We are not done fighting.” Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the pro-democracy group Common Cause, issued a statement saying, “While we welcome the court finally upholding a constitutional amendment ratified nearly two centuries ago, upholding the law is no cause for celebration, it is a requirement.” “Let today be a stark reminder that this court continues to systematically dismantle voting protections for Black and brown communities, tilting the scales of justice toward a dark era where a wealthy, privileged few dictate the rules for the rest of us,” she added. “Today may be a brief victory for the rule of law, but our fight to protect our multiracial democracy continues.” Wolf at the Brennan Center said that “today’s ruling is the right one amid an avalanche of Supreme Court opinions undermining our democracy.” “In just the past few weeks alone, the court further undermined the Voting Rights Act, encouraged more aggressive partisan gerrymandering, dangerously expanded presidential power over federal agencies, and further depleted protections for immigrants,” he noted. “This ruling does not make up for all the damage the court has done this term.” On Tuesday, the court also ruled that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at schools receiving public funding.
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