On June 29, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 91-year-old precedent that has allowed Congress to shield independent agency leaders from removal except “for cause.” In a 6-3 ruling, the Court found that Trump’s 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts dismissed the precedent as “a result in search of a rationale” and declared that “subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him.”

The ruling’s reach extends far beyond the FTC. For decades, Humphrey’s Executor has protected roughly two dozen agencies designed to operate independently, and above partisan politics — including the FCC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Stripping their leaders of removal protections clears the way for a president to purge regulators who resist his agenda and replace them with loyalists, collapsing the independence that allows these institutions to police elections, markets, communications, and safety without fear of retaliation.

In a separate same-day ruling, the Court drew one line the administration didn’t get to cross: a 5-4 majority blocked Trump’s attempt to immediately remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over disputed mortgage-fraud allegations, finding the Fed uniquely insulated from at-will removal and that Cook hadn’t been afforded due process.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the Slaughter case, warning the decision “promises only chaos,” underscores what’s now at stake: the leaders of federal agencies, with the exception of the Fed, are now much more beholden to the president.

On June 23, Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at the Rochester, NY home of David Streever — a private citizen, not a public figure — over an email he’d sent five months earlier calling then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons a “monstrous human being” after ICE agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens during the Minneapolis surge. Agents left his wife a “WARNING NOTICE” citing federal threat statutes, then tracked him to a New York City hotel days later when he returned from a vacation abroad with his 7-year-old daughter. The same day, agents separately confronted a Syracuse woman at her polling-place job over an Instagram post.

On July 6, Streever sued DHS, arguing that the five-month gap between the email and the agents’ visit undercuts any claim he posed a real threat, and that the real purpose was to chill criticism of ICE. The lawsuit also describes a similar incident involving another critic who emailed an ICE attorney and was later hit with a DHS subpoena to Google for his email account before agents showed up at his home.

As these incidents demonstrate, the administration is now making efforts to quash the speech not only of its well-known political opponents, but also of regular people who speak against the administration or its policies online.

In the days and weeks after the California primary results were reported, President Trump and his allies repeatedly insisted that the results were “rigged.” This insistence that results the president didn’t like were invalid, even though it was not a uniformly bad night for Republicans in the state, is part of the same fundamental playbook that the White House has used since 2020. The difference this time is that those election lies are coming with the full weight of the federal government behind them. In the days after the initial claims were made, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the elections. That investigation is apparently still ongoing.

As Protect Democracy’s Executive Override report documents, the administration has made election denialism official federal policy — using investigative and enforcement powers to manufacture the appearance of fraud and flood the public with disinformation designed to erode confidence in the 2026 midterms. Trump and his allies’ claims about California being in some way rigged are perfectly in line with this broader playbook. The report warns that conspiracy theories and bogus investigations serve not only to deceive voters now, but to lay the groundwork for the administration’s final gambit: contesting or overturning 2026 election results that the administration doesn’t like. Lending the DOJ’s institutional credibility to election disinformation accelerates both goals simultaneously.

On June 23, just days after a Memorandum of Understanding ended the president’s unilateral war with Iran, the Senate adopted a resolution directing the president to remove military forces from the conflict. The resolution was adopted on a bipartisan basis, signaling both that the war does not have support in Congress, and that Congress is willing to reassert its constitutional authority of war powers — at least in this case.

A day later, though, after the president made his opposition to the resolution clear, the Senate reversed course, rejecting a similar motion. The Senate promptly left Washington for a two-week recess.

This fitful attempt to push back against the president is a stark reminder of both how much the Congressional war-powers muscle has atrophied, and how much control the president still has over his party. Now, as hostilities have resumed, it seems clear that Trump is intent on prosecuting this war without Congress’s authorization, and it seems that Congress is prepared to let him do exactly that.

On July 1, a federal judge in Fort Worth handed down the final wave of sentences in the Prairieland ICE detention center case — some as long as 50 to 100 years — for a July 4, 2025 protest outside an Alvarado, Texas immigration facility where one attendee shot and wounded a police officer. The officer survived. But prosecutors charged and convicted sixteen people under a “material support to terrorists” theory tied to Trump’s September 2025 designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization — a designation civil liberties groups note has no formal legal definition, meaning it functions less as a criminal statute than as a label prosecutors can attach to political protest.

Several of those sentenced weren’t accused of firing a weapon: one defendant received 30 years for moving a box of “antifascist zines,” and a married couple who said they arrived late and left when confronted by guards were each sentenced to 50 years. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor said he wanted the sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” while then-Acting AG Todd Blanche framed the case as proof that “Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement… will face swift and uncompromising justice.”

Violence is never an acceptable part of political discourse. In weaponizing this single act of violence, though, the Trump administration has worked to quash the dissent of more than a dozen political opponents, many of whom had nothing to do with the shooting, and potentially made other protesters more concerned about the harsh consequences they might face for opposing the administration.

Deployments of ICE agents to cities across the country began in earnest in the summer of 2025, and a year later, they are set to ramp up again. White House border czar Tom Homan has said that one of those surges will target New York City, explaining that the surge would happen because Governor Kathy Hochul is no longer allowing state and local law enforcement to double as immigration officials across the state.

While Homan acknowledged that he “had to” surge ICE into the city, he also made it clear that he doesn’t want to repeat what happened in Minnesota. “You will not see a Minnesota. I will not let Minnesota happen,” he said.

This comes as tensions have continued to escalate around the Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in New Jersey. The facility has been the site of protests over the conditions inside, and those protests have sometimes led to armored officers using tear gas and batons to beat back the protesters. More than 80 people have been arrested.

The Supreme Court on June 29 in a ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee that states may lawfully accept and count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received within a grace period. This ruling affirms a longstanding and lawful practice: counting ballots that were cast on time, even when they arrive shortly after Election Day. This practice is fully consistent with federal law, and the decision appropriately recognizes the authority of states to determine their own election rules so long as they do not conflict with federal law. 

The ruling is also a meaningful setback for the president’s strategy to disrupt the 2026 midterms, as it means that states will be allowed to count ballots as they have in previous cycles. Above all, the ruling is a reminder that mail voting is a secure, convenient option for tens of millions of Americans, including military service members, American citizens overseas, voters in rural areas and those with disabilities or health concerns. By upholding existing grace periods, the Supreme Court has preserved settled practices and avoided an outcome that could disenfranchise voters across the country due to delays outside their control.