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u.s. supreme court
Supreme Court Ruling on Foreign Aid Shows 'Trump Cannot Ignore the Law'
"To stop needless suffering and death, the government must now comply with the order issued three weeks ago to lift its unlawful termination of federal assistance."
Mar 05, 2025
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered at least a temporary blow to President Donald Trump on Wednesday by refusing to overrule a lower court order that said approximately $2 billion in U.S. foreign aid funding ordered frozen by the administration should be resumed.
The 5-4 ruling, issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, paves the way for organizations and programs worldwide working in conjunction or with grants from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to receive those funds already appropriated by Congress.
The legal team challenging the administration's move to block the funding celebrated the ruling.
“Today's ruling by the Supreme Court confirms that the administration cannot ignore the law," said Lauren Bateman, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel in this case, said in response to the decision. "To stop needless suffering and death, the government must now comply with the order issued three weeks ago to lift its unlawful termination of federal assistance."
The center of the case that was before the high court stems from a lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups and NGOs impacted by the funding freeze, who argued that results were "devastating" for programing that "improves—and, in many cases, literally saves—the lives of millions of people across the globe."
In the suit, as CNN reports, the groups argued the administration's freezing of funds "usurped the power of Congress to control government spending and violated a federal law that dictates how agencies make decisions."
On February 13, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, in a temporary restraining order, said the State Department and USAID must resume most of the funding while the case was under review, but the plaintiffs argued in a filing last week that little, if anything, had been done to comply with that order.
"The district court gave the government every opportunity to demonstrate what steps it was taking to release foreign-assistance funding, as the TRO required, and to explain any practical impediments it faced in pursuing compliance," the groups wrote in their filing. "But even by the time of the district court's February 25 hearing—nearly two weeks after the TRO had issued—government counsel could not identify a single action the government had taken in the twelve days since the TRO to release frozen funds."
Wednesday's ruling by the Supreme Court did not make any judgment on the overall merits of the case that remains under review by the lower District Court.
'Literally Eat Sh*t': Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Clean Water Rule
"This ruling undermines decades of progress in environmental protection and leaves communities vulnerable to unchecked pollution," said one critic.
Mar 04, 2025
The right-wing U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned federal rules regulating the discharge of water pollution, weakening the Clean Water Act in an unusual case in which one of the country's greenest cities found itself at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency.
The high court ruled 5-4 in San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency that EPA limitations banning discharges that cause or contribute to violations of water quality standards are an overreach of the agency's statutory authority. The California city joined polluter lobbyists including the National Mining Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in challenging the EPA's so-called "end-result" requirements.
The ruling severely limits the power of the EPA and states to safeguard water quality under the Clean Water Act (CWA) and undermines the landmark law's stated mission to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters."
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court weakened the Clean Water Act's limitations on raw sewage discharge into our water. This will hurt the health of Americans, especially working class people from all backgrounds. Americans deserve clean water.
— Nina Turner ( @ninaturner.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 8:57 AM
Writing for the majority—which also included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch—far-right Justice Samuel Alito asserted that the EPA "resorting to such requirements is not necessary to protect water quality," and that "if the EPA does its work, our holding should have no adverse effect on water quality."
Alito apparently did not take into account what the Sierra Club has called the Trump administration's " unprecedented" attacks on the EPA, one of numerous federal agencies targeted by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency for terminations and cutbacks.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—in dissent.
Tuesday's ruling follows Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 2023 decision in which the high court severely curtailed protections for "waters of the United States" by holding that the CWA only covers wetlands and permanent bodies of water with a "continuous surface connection" to "traditional interstate navigable waters."
Responding to Tuesday's ruling, Sanjay Narayan, chief appellate counsel of Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program, said in a statement that "SCOTUS' decision ignores the basic reality of how water bodies and water pollution work, and could stymie the ability of the EPA to implement the Clean Water Act, a bedrock environmental law that has kept water safe for the last 50 years."
"Because the EPA is not allowed to include health-based standards when regulating water pollution, it'll need to know everything about what might be discharged before a clean water permit can be issued—making the permitting process delayed and incredibly expensive," Narayan added. "The result is likely to be a new system where the public is regularly subjected to unsafe water quality."
Waterkeeper Alliance CEO Marc Yaggi said that "bit by bit, the power of the Clean Water Act is being undermined, weakening protections for our waters, and limiting EPA's ability to safeguard public health and the environment."
"The Supreme Court has set a dangerous precedent that could compromise the safety of our rivers, lakes, and drinking water sources," Yaggi added. "This ruling undermines decades of progress in environmental protection and leaves communities vulnerable to unchecked pollution."
Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D'Arrigo said on social media, "The five Supreme Court justices who voted to weaken the Clean Water Act should be forced to drink a nice tall glass of raw sewage discharge."
The Worst Existential Threat to American Democracy Is Already Here: Voter Suppression
If the present strategy of voter suppression by the Republican Party is not stopped, the results of the midterms in two years and the 2028 presidential election are already decided.
Mar 01, 2025
The past few weeks have seen a deluge of devastation from the second Trump administration, which in less than a month has broken many democratic norms and customs and even ignored the Constitution in several ways.
During these head-spinning times, it's more vital than ever to zero in on the threats to our democracy. Today, one of the worst challenges we're up against is increasingly widespread voter suppression—a peril accelerating under President. Donald Trump and easy to lose sight of amid the chaos.
As we write, Congress is trying to pass the SAVE Act, which would require all citizens to produce a document such as a passport or birth certificate when they register to vote. It would apply even when they re-register after a move or, as many do, between elections. This new and unprecedented national requirement would severely limit online, mail-in, and automatic registration and has the potential to block millions of eligible Americans from casting ballots.
Universal suffrage is the heart of democracy but deeply threatened today.
The now almost-official Trump doctrine, Project 2025, also promises potentially disastrous consequences related to suffrage. The Department of Justice's Criminal Division would become responsible for investigating voting offenses, likely leading to bogus prosecutions of voters and election officials. The government would also gain access to voter lists that could facilitate purges of minority voters. Project 2025 also proposes restricting or abolishing programs that encourage voter registration.
We need to acutely oppose these potential dangers. To do that, it's helpful to understand the history of suffrage in our country.
America began its democratic experiment in the 1700s with a small demographic of eligible voters: white, male landowners. Voting rights were not directly in the text of the Constitution, but instead left to the states to decide.
While Americans no doubt rightly lament that voting was so restricted, it's worth recognizing that the very idea of suffrage was an audacious departure in and of itself—a profoundly progressive advancement that pivoted away from predatory monarchy with aristocracy that dominated the European continent. Indeed, some of the Founders expressed remarkably enlightened views on voting. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 that "the influence over government must be shared among all the people."
Even though our democracy was—and still is—deeply flawed, suffrage has always been its bedrock. Throughout our history advocates have fought to expand and enshrine suffrage, and today most state constitutions protect the right to vote. After the Civil War, several constitutional amendments codified and extended voting rights and since then legislation, such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, has added further protections.
Sadly, however, voices from our country's Founders ring hollow when looking at our recent presidential election, which saw unprecedented organized voter suppression by the Republican Party.
Consider a report released this month by Greg Palast, acclaimed investigative reporter, forensic economist, and statistician. Using data from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, he found that voter suppression led to 14.1 million voters being deemed ineligible or having their ballots disqualified. Note that Trump won by a margin of only 2 million votes.
Almost 5 million voters were purged from voter rolls without credible evidence, and another 2 million mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors, e.g. postage due. Almost another 800,000 ballots were disqualified or rejected for other, non-credible reasons, and over 3.24 million new registrations were rejected without credible evidence.
Palast points out that historically organized voter suppression was overwhelmingly directed at Black and Latino voters such as Jim Crow Era literacy tests and poll taxes.
How did we get here?
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court changed course from its history of protecting voter rights when it debilitated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, removing the requirement that jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination obtain federal approval for new voting procedures. The result is a pernicious plethora of conservative state laws undermining or restricting voters.
A 2024 Brennan Center for Justice report found voter suppression has dramatically increased in the last 20 years. Many conservative states created obstacles by imposing unreasonable voter ID laws, and decreasing early voting times.
Unsurprisingly, voter suppression laws disproportionately impact communities of Black and Latino voters. For example, a 2022 Washington state audit reported that Black voters were 400% more likely than white voters to have their mail-in ballot rejected.
Universal suffrage is the heart of democracy but deeply threatened today.
What then is to be done to end this scourge of voter suppression by Mr. Trump's neofascist's advocates? Amid the chaos of the first hundred days of the second Trump administration, let us focus on defending these rights. If the present strategy of voter suppression by the Republican Party is not stopped, the results of the midterms in two years and the 2028 presidential election are already decided.
We are heading down a dark path reminiscent of a troublesome past. But we can be motivated by really great successes made possible by people's movements: The right of Blacks to vote was driven by inspiring and hard-won action, and women's suffrage struggles were also achieved through grassroots organizing.
The time is now. It will take all of us, joining in mass demonstrations and pushing our elected leaders to withstand the pressure and do everything in their power to block legislation and eliminate existing voter suppression regulation when—and wherever possible—before it's too late.
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