Facebook posts – No, ABC didn’t say it was cutting ‘View’ co-hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg
“ABC issued an official statement confirming that Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg’s contracts will not be renewed.”
Threads posts – Proposed bill banning stock trading wouldn’t bar Trump from White House
“The U.S Senate accidentally passed a bill banning Trump from becoming President, and Biden is planning to sign it.”
Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to Alaska campaign finance laws
For the second week in a row, the Supreme Court did not add any new cases to its docket for the 2024-25 term. In a list of orders released on Monday morning, the justices turned down several dozen petitions for review that they had considered at their private conference on Friday, including petitions asking them to weigh in on the constitutionality of state campaign finance laws and an Alabama man’s death sentence.
The justices once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review, involving issues such as the constitutionality of the admissions program for three of Boston’s elite public high schools and a challenge to a Wisconsin school district’s plan to provide support to transgender and nonbinary students. The justices will meet again for another private conference on Friday, Nov. 22.
More than 14 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which removed limits on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, the justices declined to weigh in on a challenge to the constitutionality of two campaign-finance laws enacted by Alaska voters in 2020.
The laws were put in place to target the role of “dark money” – money spent to influence elections, but without the public knowing the source of the funds. One regulation requires anyone who gives more than $2,000 in a calendar year to groups that spend money to influence the elections of candidates to report the donation within 24 hours. A second regulation requires election ads to disclose when a majority of the donations that fund it come from outside Alaska.
Five voters and two groups that spend money on elections went to federal court in Alaska, arguing that the regulations violate the First Amendment. A federal district judge rejected their request to block the regulations before the 2022 elections, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld that decision.
The challengers came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to take up their case. They contended that the regulations are an “outlier among all state and federal campaign finance rules” that place “unprecedented burdens on citizens’ right to speak about matters of public concern.” But after considering the appeal at five consecutive conferences, the justices ultimately denied review on Monday without comment.
The Supreme Court on Monday also refused to overturn the death sentence of Michael Iervolino , who was convicted of the 2019 shooting death of 20-year-old Sloan Harmon. Iervolino argued that his trial should have been moved to another venue, but Alabama’s highest court for criminal cases rejected that argument and upheld his sentence.
Prosecutors described Harmon’s murder as the result of a road rage incident. The case received widespread publicity because the victim was the son of the local district attorney. News articles discussed Iervolino’s history of criminal convictions and his recent release from jail; the coverage also contained comments from law enforcement officials describing the victim as a “great citizen” and a “great serviceman” and lamenting the impact of his loss on the community.
At Iervolino’s trial, both the district attorney and the judges in St. Clair County recused themselves from the proceeding. Iervolino argued that he could not receive a fair trial because of the victim’s relationship to the local district attorney and because of the news coverage that the case had received. But the trial judge twice denied Iervolino’s request to move the trial elsewhere, and he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the trial court’s denial of Iervolino’s motion to move the trial, as well as his conviction and death sentence. The Alabama Supreme Court declined to review his case.
Iervolino came to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to take up his case and reverse. He contended that the “failure to provide a fair hearing by a panel of impartial, indifferent jurors violates the most basic requirement of due process.”
The state countered that Iervolino had not shown that he could not receive a fair trial in St. Clair County. Most of the news coverage of the murder was published nearly two years before the trial began, it observed. Only 18 of the 70 prospective jurors said that they had heard about the case, the state emphasized. Of those 18 prospective jurors, the state wrote, six were excused from the jury pool, while the other 12 said they had not prejudged the case based on their knowledge of it.
The justices requested the record in Iervolino’s case from the lower court – a sign that at least some justices were giving the case a close look – but ultimately denied review without comment.
The justices also declined to weigh in on a technical question arising from the challenge to a West Virginia law that bans transgender girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports at the middle school, high school, and college levels. The justices did not act, however, on West Virginia’s petition for review of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that allowed a 13-year-old transgender girl to remain on her school’s track and cross-country teams.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court .
The post Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to Alaska campaign finance laws appeared first on SCOTUSblog .
Western Apache group calls on court to block approval of copper mine on sacred site
The Petitions of the Week column highlights some of the cert petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we’re watching is available here.
Federal law limits the government’s ability to place a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion. Yet as long as Congress does not intentionally discriminate against a particular faith, the Supreme Court has permitted the legislative branch to manage internal government operations — for example, by allowing private development on public lands — even when it affects religious worship. This week, we highlight petitions that ask the court to consider, among other things, whether Congress can hand over part of a national forest in Arizona that is sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe to a private company seeking to mine the land for copper.
Located about 100 miles east of Phoenix, the San Carlos Apache Reservation is home to a number of bands of the Western Apache people. Between Phoenix and the reservation is the Tonto National Forest, the largest national forest in Arizona. As it does with many federal lands, the U.S. Forest Service has long sold or leased portions of the forest to mining, timber, and other companies.
Roughly halfway along the drive from Phoenix sits the Oak Flat campground, a 760-acre section of the forest that Congress cordoned off from private development in the 1950s. To the Western Apache, Oak Flat, called Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, is the corridor to the Creator and the site of sacred ceremonies that cannot be conducted elsewhere. The land has been used by various tribes and their ancestors for religious rituals for a thousand years.
In the 1990s, prospectors discovered the third-largest underground copper deposit in the world below the Tonto National Forest. Resolution Mining, a private mining company, negotiated for rights to mine that copper from the Forest Service.
Part of the deposit sits directly under Oak Flat. Starting in 2005, members of Arizona’s congressional delegation repeatedly introduced legislation to transfer Oak Flat and the surrounding land to Resolution Mining. Initial efforts to do so were unsuccessful, but in 2014, Congress attached a provision to a major spending bill — known as an appropriations rider — authorizing a land exchange between the Forest Service and the mining company. Included in the land Resolution Mining is set to receive is the Oak Flat campground.
The law authorizing the land exchange required (among other things) an environmental impact statement assessing the effects of the transfer. In 2021, the Forest Service published the impact statement, triggering a 60-day window for the transfer of the land.
Apache Stronghold, an advocacy group created by members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, went to federal court in an effort to stop the transfer. Because a copper mine would collapse the land under Oak Flat and destroy it as a sacred site, the group argued that the land exchange would infringe upon the tribe’s First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. Further, the group contended, the exchange would violate the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires courts to closely scrutinize federal actions that “substantially burden” religious free exercise.
A federal district court in Arizona rejected the group’s request to stop the land exchange, and the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed that ruling. The court of appeals held that the First Amendment challenge was foreclosed by a 1988 Supreme Court decision permitting Congress to sell off public lands that were sacred to an indigenous tribe for timber development. As in that case, the court of appeals explained, although the transfer here would “significantly interfere with” the tribe’s ability to practice their religion, the government’s actions did not violate the Constitution because they did not “coerce” members of the tribe “into acting contrary to their religious beliefs.”
And RFRA did not change the playing field, the 9th Circuit insisted, because Congress enacted the law against the backdrop of that decision — with an understanding that only restrictions on private places of worship can constitute a “substantial[] burden” on free exercise rights.
In Apache Stronghold v. United States , the group asks the justices to reverse the full 9th Circuit’s ruling. It insists that the plain meaning of a “substantial[] burden” on religious worship under RFRA includes an action that would, like destroying Oak Flat to mine for copper, effectively prohibit that worship altogether. In addition, RFRA overrides the Supreme Court’s prior decision on public lands, the group says, because that decision only applied to generally applicable laws that incidentally burden religion — a distinction Congress intentionally did away with when enacting the 1993 law.
The government and Resolution Mining urge the justices to leave the 9th Circuit’s ruling in place. In the government’s view, the text of RFRA and debates surrounding its enactment are clear evidence that Congress believed the law to respect, rather than displace, the primacy of federal land-use rights over tribal religious rights affirmed in the court’s 1988 ruling. But in any event, Resolution Mining argues, the 2014 appropriations bill impliedly exempted the Oak Flat exchange from RFRA, as future Congresses are not bound by the actions of those past. And the group’s First Amendment claim rises or falls with the RFRA analysis, the government adds.
A list of this week’s featured petitions is below:
Utah v. United States
22O160
Issue: Whether the federal policy embodied in 43 U.S.C. § 1701(a)(1)
of perpetual federal retention of unappropriated public lands in Utah is unconstitutional.
Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization
24-20
Issue: Whether the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act
violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America v. McClain
24-118
Issue: Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit erred in holding that a state may strip manufacturers of the ability preserved to them by the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program
to impose conditions on the use of contract pharmacies as part of the offer to provide 340B-priced drugs and intrude on 340B’s centralized enforcement scheme.
United States v. Palestine Liberation Organization
24-151
Issue: Whether the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act’s
means of establishing personal jurisdiction complies with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Apache Stronghold v. United States
24-291
Issue: Whether the government “substantially burdens” religious exercise under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
, or must satisfy heightened scrutiny under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, when it singles out a sacred site for complete physical destruction, ending specific religious rituals forever.
The post Western Apache group calls on court to block approval of copper mine on sacred site appeared first on SCOTUSblog .
Why Oz Is the Doctor Trump Ordered
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary . As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem .
Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman , who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.
In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA . Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.
Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare .
When asked about Oz’s nomination , Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.
The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill . Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:
“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”
“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”
“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”
Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.
He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine , an unproven treatment for COVID.
In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.
Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.
Related:
- Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January)
- Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Another theory of the Trump movement
- What the men of the internet are trying to prove
- Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel
Today’s News
- Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz.
- Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
- Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon , who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.
Dispatches
- The Weekly Planet : Drought is an immigration issue , and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Put Down the Vacuum
By Annie Lowrey
The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.
I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.
More From The Atlantic
- The cancer gene more men should test for
- We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines.
- Apple lost the plot on texting.
- What going “wild on health” looks like
Culture Break
Read. If you feel upset about the election, these seven books are a prescription for rage and despair, Ruth Madievsky writes.
Gather. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends , Mikala Jamison writes.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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A Good Country’s Bad Choice
Sign up for The Decision , a newsletter featuring coverage of the 2024 race and what comes next.
Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.
More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.
What did I get wrong?
My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.
Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024. Personal incomes rose faster than prices over the year. As interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed . When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a solid 46 percent , higher than in the year President Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national economy rated their local economy much more favorably.
None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and yet …
Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Almost one-third of Republicans were either unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular than Trump.
Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was …
Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect Governor Gretchen Whitmer and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent to reaffirm state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate, while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10 states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely to energize many Americans who would likely also cast an anti-Trump vote for president.
If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:
Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.
The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.
My mistake.
[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous cabinet pick ]
In one of the closest elections in modern American history, Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in 2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.
Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and preconceptions, starting with my own.
Through the first Trump administration, critics like me could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it. Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.
When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.
Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.
He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.
He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.
He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.
He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.
For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.
American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including, ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.
Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.
Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted, feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned , “to trust to the virtue of any people.”
The outcome of an election must be respected, but its wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be that Providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous 1930s novel about an imagined future in which the United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.
Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.
“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”
So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.
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