It’s June again—that time of year when Americans wake up each morning and wait for the Supreme Court to resolve our deepest political disagreements. To decide what the Constitution says about our bodily autonomy, our power to avert climate change, and our ability to protect children from guns, the nation turns not to members of Congress—elected by us—but to five oracles in robes. This annual observance of judicial supremacy—the idea that the Supreme Court has the final say about what our Constitution allows—is an odd affliction for a nation that will close the month ready to celebrate our independence from an unelected monarch. From one perspective, our acceptance of this supremacy reflects a sense that our political system is simply too broken to address the most urgent questions that we confront. But it would be a mistake to see judicial supremacy as a mere symptom of our politics and not a cause. Contrary to what many people have come to believe, judicial supremacy is not in the Constitution, and does not date from the founding era. It took hold of American politics only after the Civil War, when the Court overruled Congress’s judgment that the Constitution demanded civil-rights and voting laws. The Court has spent the 150 years since sapping our national representatives of the power to issue national rules. These judicial decisions have destroyed guardrails that national majorities deemed vital to a functional, multiracial democracy—including protecting the right to vote and curbing the influence of money in politics. Even worse, the Court’s assertion of the power to invalidate federal laws has stripped Americans of the expectation, once widely shared, that the most important interpretations of the Constitution are expressed not by judicial decree but by the participation of “We, the People,” in enacting national legislation. In the decades before the Civil War, when national parties violently contested the constitutionality of slavery west of the Mississippi, the center of gravity was Congress. As the historian James Oakes recounts, when a border-state senator proposed asking the Supreme Court to decide the issue in 1848, other senators ridiculed his idea as implausible. “The Constitution was interpreted as variously as the Bible,” Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire responded. White southerners believed “the Constitution carries slavery with it,” while northerners construed the Constitution “to secure freedom.” As Hale and his contemporaries appreciated, resolving such a fundamental national disagreement could never turn on a court’s answer to which interpretation was more correct. Rather, the winning interpretation would depend on whether adherents could build sufficient political majorities to control the national government.

Following Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his supporters have pushed baseless accusations of fraud in the election process. The reviews those claims prompted have failed to unearth malfeasance. But Trump’s claims succeeded in two key ways: providing rhetorical support for sympathizers who doubt the U.S. election process, and encouraging targeted harassment against the poll workers and local officials who make U.S. elections work. Those people are mostly civil servants, minor officials and volunteers. Virtually all of them are strangers to the spotlight and unfamiliar with notoriety. The attention that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort has focused on these workers has been relentless and ugly, said Shauna Dillavou, a security expert and founder of Brightlines, an anti-doxxing service for elections workers. And, she said, it’s getting worse. “People would come and wait for them to get out of their precinct and get in their cars,” she said. “They’d follow them. They’d leave notes on cars. They’d copy down license plate numbers. They would sit outside and threaten people.”

A Mexican city in the border state of Nuevo Leon is limiting daily water access to residents to just a six-hour window in response to a historic drought in the region, authorities said Friday. The city of Monterrey, a major business hub whose metropolitan area is home to 5.3 million, will allow water use from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. daily. Its previous policy restricted water for one day per week based on location. The move is the latest by authorities to tackle water shortages in the region. Demand currently outpaces supply by about 2.5 cubic meters per second, city water director Juan Ignacio Barragan said in a press conference.

If the polls are onto something, Californians will veer right on Tuesday. San Francisco will likely recall the progressive prosecutor it elected district attorney in 2019, and Los Angeles will send a billionaire shopping-mall magnate promising to “clean up L.A.” into a November runoff election for mayor. Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco D.A., is facing near-certain defeat in an up-or-down recall vote. Mall man Rick Caruso—a former Republican who became a Democrat for this campaign—has spent $34 million blanketing Angelenos’ phones, computers, and televisions with his face, and is polling at 32 percent in a wide field. If these results play out, the voting will be seen as part of the same backlash against progressive urban policy—and in particular, the “Defund the Police” slogan—that began with last year’s election of the ex-cop Eric Adams in New York City. Fair enough. In all three cities, the race was run on a single issue, urban disorder, its two components so closely linked in the public imagination they are often part of the same breath: crime and homelessness. “Can you imagine running a small business and you’re worried about crime, and you also have an encampment in front of your business?” Caruso said in an interview with the Associated Press. “How do we fix this crime and homeless problem?” a Wall Street Journal opinion column asks of San Francisco, beneath an image of a homeless man on a bench. (The answer, according to the columnist: Replacing the district attorney.) Crime and homelessness are not, in fact, the same issue at all. They are not meaningfully correlated; they do not share causes; they do not share solutions. But in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, Democrats’ inability to address the homelessness crisis is going to cost them generational progress on criminal justice, as the forces for reforming the police go into retreat. It’s tough to watch. Reformers like Boudin (and the left wing of the Democratic Party generally) are right on principle and in practice to dismantle the system of unaccountable police, cash bail, and long prison terms for petty offenses. But they’re going to lose their chance to make it happen, because Democratic leaders have proved themselves so inept in confronting an issue that can easily be conflated with crime.

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly voted to remove District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office on Tuesday, favoring a recall effort that argued his progressive reforms were too lenient and made the city less safe. Boudin trailed by about 20 percentage points Tuesday evening, according to the latest figures from city elections officials. Around 60% of San Franciscans who cast ballots voted to recall him. Boudin will be removed from office 10 days after the Board of Supervisors formally accepts the election results. The city’s more moderate mayor, London Breed, will choose his immediate replacement, and voters will elect a new district attorney in November. The result comes as little surprise to residents following numerous polls, almost all of which predicted a decisive defeat for Boudin. The results capped off a furious debate over crime and criminal justice in San Francisco, with the two sides fighting over Boudin’s approach to incarceration and rehabilitation and his leadership. As his supporters lauded his efforts to find alternatives to jails and prisons — which he said had failed the public for decades — his detractors slammed him as too permissive. Boudin will depart the office after serving two and a half years of his four-year term.

We know Republicans are disingenuous. They don’t care. Now what?

Four major complications are responsible for 75% of maternal deaths: severe bleeding (typically after birth), infections, high blood pressure during pregnancy, and complications from delivery. Other common issues include unsafe abortions and chronic conditions such as cardiac diseases and diabetes.

When protected wetlands like Toondah Harbour are ‘open for business’ it reveals how broken our nature laws really are.

“American Airlines could have provided its entire manifest for the flight or a list of all individuals who matched a certain description (ex: all white males over eighteen and under 65). American Airlines also could have performed an adequate search to identify the correct suspect and provide his information to law enforcement. Instead, American Airlines affirmatively and wrongfully identified Mr. Lowe as the single suspect of the DFW Airport PD’s felony investigation which foreseeably led to Mr. Lowe being arrested and imprisoned for a crime he was innocent of,” the lawsuit reads in part.

A Des Moines environmental activist imprisoned for sabotaging construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline has failed to convince an appellate court it should cut her eight-year sentence because a lower court erred in applying a terrorism enhancement. Jessica Reznicek, an activist connected to the Catholic Worker Movement, and fellow Iowan Ruby Montoya repeatedly vandalized construction sites connected to the 1,172-mile pipeline in 2016 and 2017, setting a bulldozer on fire and using oxy-acetylene torches to damage pipeline valves across Iowa. The total cost of the damage is not known, but in one incident in Buena Vista County alone it was estimated at $2.5 million. The two women took credit for the attacks and were both charged in 2019 with multiple felonies. Reznicek pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility and in June 2021 was sentenced to eight years in prison. She appealed that sentence, but on Monday, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a short, unsigned opinion that her sentence will stand.

CO2 has not been so high since before hominids walked upright – and are not dropping fast enough to avert catastrophe The level of carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere is now more than 50% higher than during the pre-industrial era, further pushing the planet into conditions not experienced for millions of years, well before the emergence of humans, US government data shows. The latest measurements showing the relentless upward march of CO2 follows scientists’ new warning that the world may still barrel into disastrous climate change even if planet-heating emissions are drastically cut, which governments are still failing to achieve. “It’s depressing that we’ve lacked the collective will power to slow the relentless rise in CO2,” said Ralph Keeling, a geochemist who runs CO2 measurements for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in Hawaii. “Fossil-fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speed towards a global catastrophe.” In May, the Mauna Loa Observatory, perched high on the slopes of a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, measured a CO2 concentration of 421 parts per million, just the latest escalation in an inexorable rise in CO2 due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues?

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer isn't placing any limits on gun negotiations, a sign that his caucus is willing to accept any piecemeal deal it can get — for now.

The looming barrage of organized attacks on the LGBTQ community at this year’s Pride events by homophobic right-wing extremists tipped off last weekend in Dallas, where a notorious white nationalist led a crew of protesters who attempted to invade a family-friendly drag show held as part of the city’s Pride Week on Saturday. Chanting “Groomers! Groomers!” while antifascist activists prevented them from entering, the crowd of about 40 protesters stood outside and hurled abuse at participants while carrying signs reading “Stop exploiting our kids” and “Confuse a child, abuse a child.” It had been organized on Facebook by an anti-LGBT outfit called Protect Texas Kids, but the crowd’s leader on Saturday was John Doyle, a leading figure in the white-nationalist American Populist Union (APU) and a popular YouTuber who specializes in racist, misogynist, and homophobic rants.

In his own words, the actor and advocate talks about his childhood, his career, his transition, and his life, though not necessarily in that order.

Ernest Matton, head of the Aboriginal Healing Program at Michael Garron Hospital, has abruptly retired after members of Toronto's Indigenous community questioned his Indigenous identity. The celebrated healer, known as Elder Little Brown Bear, is among 5,300 people who face possible expulsion from the Métis Nation of Ontario over 'incomplete' profiles.

Support groups aren’t always so supportive.

I made mapo tofu using tofu-based kitty litter

Beloved by Edna Lewis, this plum-based favorite deserves a resurgence.

IT WAS CHET! HE WAS IN CHARGE! HE’S THE ONE YOU WANT!