Politics
Supreme Court appears wary of blocking Trump from Colorado ballot
The Supreme Court justices gave a favorable hearing to former President Trump on Thursday, suggesting they will clear the way for him to seek election this year despite the mob attack on the Capitol that followed his loss in 2020.
The justices, both conservative and liberal, said they were skeptical of giving individual states the constitutional authority to disqualify candidates for a national office like the presidency.
“Why should a single state make this determination for the rest of the nation?” Justice Elena Kagan said. “It sounds awfully national.”
“It just doesn’t seem like a state call,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett added.
In December, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first and so far only state or federal court to rule that Trump must be removed from the primary ballot because he is not qualified to hold office again.
By a 4-3 vote, the state judges said Trump had violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says no person may “hold any office, civil or military” after having taken an oath to support the Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection” against the United States.
“We are here because, for the first time since the War of 1812, our nation’s Capitol came under violent assault. For the first time in history, the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power,” said Denver attorney Jason Murray, who represented the Colorado voters who sued to disqualify Trump.
But he quickly ran into steadily skeptical questions from the justices. They spent little time on whether Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6 amounted to engaging in an insurrection.
Instead, they took turns disputing the notion that state judges in Colorado or elsewhere may decide whether a presidential candidate is qualified.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the 14th Amendment was adopted by the Reconstruction Congress to limit the authority of the states. “Wouldn’t that be the last place that you’d look for authorization for the states, including the Confederate states, to enforce the presidential election process?” he asked.
He predicted that if the high court were to endorse the Colorado ruling, other states “in very quick order” would make their own decisions on who can run for president, and some of them may seek to disqualify Democrats.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh repeatedly cited an 1869 decision holding that Congress had to pass a law to enforce the 14th Amendment’s disqualification rule. It was not up to each state, he said.
He also noted that while federal law makes it a crime to “incite an insurrection,” Trump had not been charged under that law.
The tenor of Thursday’s argument suggests a solid majority of the court, and perhaps all nine justices, will rule for Trump and reverse the Colorado court’s decision.
Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded as though she may vote against Trump.
The court with Roberts taking the lead is likely to turn out an opinion in a few weeks. March is the prime time for primary elections in much of the nation.
By next week, however, the justices will have before them another Trump appeal that could decide whether he goes on trial this spring for the Jan. 6 attack.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Trump’s claim that former presidents are immune from being prosecuted for their actions while in office. The appellate judges said they would keep the criminal case on hold until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear Trump’s appeal of that ruling.
If the justices quickly reject Trump’s appeal, his trial may be scheduled to begin in April or May. But if the justices decide to hear the appeal, the trial is likely to be postponed until late summer or fall.
Leading up to Thursday’s argument, some legal experts portrayed the disqualification issue as a test of the conservative court’s devotion to originalism.
Legal scholars and historians told the justices in friend-of-the-court briefs that the words and history of the 14th Amendment call for disqualifying Trump. They said the members of the Reconstruction Congress were determined to prevent insurrectionists from gaining power and subverting American democracy.
But the six conservatives are also GOP appointees, and Trump’s lawyers said it would be anti-democratic to remove the Republican presidential front-runner from the ballot.
And that argument appeared to resonate with most of the justices, including its three Democratic appointees.
The former president is “the presumptive Republican nominee and the leading candidate for president of the United States,” Trump’s lawyers said in their closing brief filed on Monday. “The American people — not courts or election officials — should choose the next president of the United States. Yet at a time when the United States is threatening sanctions against the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela for excluding the leading opposition candidate for president from the ballot … [the Colorado lawsuit] asks this court to impose that same anti-democratic measure at home.”
Much of Thursday’s argument was devoted to procedural and technical objections to the Colorado ruling.
In his legal argument for Trump, Texas attorney Jonathan Mitchell said the president is not “an officer of the United States” and is therefore not covered by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. He said that officers are appointed, not elected, and that the 14th Amendment does not mention the president or vice president.
Many historians and legal scholars call this claim absurd.
It would mean the Reconstruction Congress sought to block former Confederates from holding “any office” across the nation except the presidency.
But by the argument’s end, it appeared the justices will decide the case without ruling on whether the former president was covered by the 14th Amendment or whether he led an insurrection before leaving office.
Politics
Fetterman unleashes on ‘dirtbag’ wing of Dems after far-left victories: ‘Orgy of socialism’
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Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., unloaded on his own party on Sunday evening, blasting a series of victories for progressives he called “anti-America.”
“Big night for the dirtbag left,” Fetterman said, referring to New York’s recent primaries, where two members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won primaries.
“I’ve said the party is becoming an orgy of socialism. Clearly anti-America, anti-Western Civilization,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman’s striking calls give a rare look at how some moderates may view the developments on their far-left flank that have dominated the party’s momentum in recent months, sparking concern that their high visibility is dragging the party further and further left.
FETTERMAN WARNS DEMOCRATS ‘DRIFTING FIRMLY INTO COMMUNISM’ AFTER SOCIALIST PRIMARY WINS
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., speaks to reporters outside the Senate Chamber during votes on Nov. 10, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
His comments come on the heels of a handful of key progressive victories.
In Maine, Graham Platner, a controversial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, has attracted controversy for denying knowledge of the meaning behind a Nazi-linked tattoo, for off-color comments about race and calling himself a “communist” in a deleted Reddit post.
In New York, one DSA member, Claire Valdez, won a primary on a platform of abolishing ICE and a Green New Deal-style approach to climate change. Similarly, Darializa Avila-Chevalier, another DSA candidate, beat out incumbent Rep. Adriano Espillat, D-N.Y., a high-ranking Democrat and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
WINNERS AND LOSERS EMERGE AFTER SOCIALIST EARTHQUAKE ROCKS NYC PRIMARIES
Graham Platner, Democratic Senate candidate for Maine, speaks at a primary election night event at the Blue Hill YMCA in Blue Hill, Maine, on June 9, 2026. Platner won the party’s Senate primary after a campaign marked by accusations of past misbehavior and voter concerns. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Both Chevalier and Valdez had the backing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a socialist.
The wins have captured national attention and drawn criticisms from Republicans who have pointed to their success as emblematic of the direction of the Democratic Party.
Fetterman, who has not shied away from confrontations, has been one of the few Democrats to express alarm about the kind of candidates carrying the party’s banner.
“I mean, you look at some of the things that people have said. Abolish prison, abolish the border, abolish ICE, I mean these crazy people — I have colleagues in my caucus that refuse to even call this out,” Fetterman said.
FETTERMAN REACTS TO MAMDANI’S REFUSAL TO ACCEPT SUPREME COURT’S IMMIGRATION RULING
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., walks through the Senate Subway during the Senate War Powers vote on April 22, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
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“Between P-hustle in Maine and some of the other winners in New York, they should form their own party and run on all the things that they’ve had to delete on social media,” Fetterman said, referring to Platner.
“That’s where our party has moved,” he added.
Politics
Supreme Court limits police use of cellphone data to find crime suspects
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on whether police may obtain cellphone data to find crime suspects.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices said this location information showing where a cellphone user has traveled is personal and private and subject to the protection of the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.
Justice Elena Kagan said these “records serve as a personal journal of a user’s movements.”
She said the information “resembles other private materials — think of emails, documents, photographs, or calendars—that even if stored on Google’s servers, a user reasonably views as his own…and reasonably expects to be shielded from the inquisitive eyes of the government.”
Because an “individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy in his cellphone location data,” she said police investigators need a valid search warrant from a magistrate.
The court stopped short of deciding the proper basis for a search warrant in such cases. Instead, the justices sent the case back to judges in Virginia.
But the outcome casts doubt on “geofence warrants.”
In recent years, police have gone to Google and cellphone companies seeking tracking data on cellphones that were at a crime scene. Sometimes, they have had a warrant from a magistrate.
Civil libertarians say the use of this tracking data raises the specter of mass surveillance on innocent people.
Police and government lawyers say no one has a reasonable right to privacy when they are walking on a sidewalk or driving down the street.
The case before the court arose from the armed robbery conviction of a Virginia man who stole $195,000 from a credit union in a small town near Richmond.
By the time police arrived, the robber had fled. But surveillance cameras showed he was carrying a gun and a cellphone.
Lacking other leads, detective Joshua Hilton asked a judge to issue a special type of warrant seeking information from Google.
Referred to as a “geofence warrant,” it seeks data from phones in a particular area at a particular time.
The detective sought data on phones that were within 150 yards of the credit union within one hour of the late afternoon robbery.
After examining and paring down the data, the detective asked for the phone records of Okello Chatrie. Then, with a search warrant of his home, investigators found two robbery-style demand notes, a semi-automatic pistol and about $100,000 in cash.
A judge refused to suppress the evidence from an allegedly unconstitutional search, and Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea.
The full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals split evenly on the legality of the geofence warrant, and the Supreme Court agreed to decide the issue in Chatrie vs. U.S.
Usually investigators obtain warrants to search the home or vehicle of a known crime suspect.
The new and disputed geofence warrants seek to find a suspect by examining data on the cellphones that were at the scene of a crime.
The FBI used this cellphone data in 2021 to identify suspects who broke through police barricades on Jan. 6, 2021, and pushed their way into the Capitol to disrupt the official counting of electoral votes.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed on the outcome in Chatrie vs. U.S.
In a 21-page dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court had “carefully set the stage for its planned performance: striking a pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age. I cannot support this irresponsible escapade.”
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed in a one-paragraph dissent. “Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in data about his public movements that he voluntarily disclosed to Google,” she said.
Politics
Supreme Court Expands Presidential Powers to Fire Independent Regulators
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump could fire independent regulators for any reason. But the justices carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve, preventing the immediate removal of Lisa D. Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.
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