Judicial Benchmarks

• SCOTUS punts on free speech: Late this morning, the Supreme Court “ruled” on the hugely consequential Murthy v. Missouri case, which was brought by state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana who accused the Biden administration of colluding with social media giants like Facebook under the guise of “combating misinformation.” Ultimately, this allowed the government to censor speech on topics from Hunter Biden’s laptop to the lab origins of COVID-19 and the pointlessness of face masks. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley notes, this is a very frustrating decision for the free-speech community because it allows the Biden administration to continue to engage in “censorship by surrogate” — meaning that Team Brandon can continue to “make a mockery of the First Amendment” by telling Big Tech and social media companies to do what the administration itself is expressly forbidden from doing. So we waited all this time and spent all this energy just to find out that the Roberts Court doesn’t think the states are the proper litigants. Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett opined that the plaintiffs were “without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct,” concluding, “We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.” Thus, SCOTUS meekly and frustratingly punted. The vote was 6-3, with Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissenting and with Alito opining that the dispute was “one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years” and that the government’s actions were “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Politics

• Squadster Bowman gets the electoral firing squad: We’ve got to hand it to the headline writers at the New York Post. Here we have a fire-alarm-pulling Squad member who gets trounced by his more moderate Democrat primary challenger, and they slap it together as the firing squad. We previewed these good tidings in yesterday’s Executive Summary, and sure enough, the people of New York’s 16th Congressional District — which includes a small portion of what Jamaal Bowman called the “the motherf***ing South Bronx” and which covers southern Westchester County in suburban New York City — have spoken. As Fox News reports, Bowman thus “becomes the first member of the Squad, a progressive group of diverse House Democrats, to be ousted from Congress.” Bowman, a Jew-hater who was nonetheless supported by socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was targeted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which put $14 million behind his opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, making this the most expensive congressional primary in the nation’s history. As former Congressman Trey Gowdy put it, “You can be an extremist, but you can’t be an embarrassment.”

Lauren Boebert defeats five challengers in GOP primary for Ken Buck seat (Washington Examiner)

• No SSN or driver’s license needed to vote in CA: What constitutes a valid ID? Well, when it comes to the issue of voting in California, it seems that almost anything will do. Don’t have a Social Security Number or a driver’s license? No problem. The Golden State will now accept a credit card, a utility bill, or even a gym membership as valid identification for registering to vote. If an individual in California shows up to the polling station and doesn’t have a valid ID, like an SSN or a driver’s license, which the state law requires in order to vote, then the secretary of state’s office says they are permitted to use a “health club identification card” or other “identification card provided by a commercial establishment,” or student ID, credit card, bank statement, utility bill, insurance care, or even a sample ballot as their identifier. The office further noted that “there are documents that can be used to verify California residence identity, not citizenship.” Residency does not confer citizenship, despite conflation by California’s secretary of state — much like Democrats do with legal and illegal aliens. Examples like this reveal why voter integrity is such a hot-button issue.

• Merchan partially lifts Trump gag order: The show trial is over, and now, two weeks before the sentencing, he softens his constitutionally dubious gag order? That’s what deeply conflicted Trump-hating judge Juan Merchan has done. Thus, Trump can now unload about witnesses and jurors, but he’s still forbidden from saying anything about court staff or his prosecutors. As Fox News reports: “Trump and his legal team have been fighting the gag order since it was imposed upon him at the start of the trial, but had ramped up their efforts when it concluded last month. The former president and presumptive Republican nominee’s legal team had argued the gag order should be lifted before the June 27 presidential debate.” As campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Tuesday: “Today’s order by Acting Justice Merchan leaves in place portions of the unconstitutional Gag Order, preventing President Trump from speaking freely about Judge Merchan’s disqualifying conflicts and the overwhelming evidence exposing this whole Crooked Joe Biden-directed Witch Hunt.” In other words: Thanks for nothing.

• Ex-intelligence officials who undermined Hunter Biden laptop story included active CIA contractors (Washington Examiner)

• MSM gaslighting on Biden’s drug cocktails: What’s in the drug cocktail Joe Biden receives prior to a major speaking engagement? The answer, according to the mainstream media, is: How dare you ask such a question! In an article titled “How Trump’s baseless claim that Biden is ‘jacked up’ on drugs spread,” The Washington Post concludes that “there’s still no evidence four years after Trump made the same claim against Biden in 2020.” Donald Trump isn’t the only one asking the question. Representative Ronny Jackson, former White House physician to both Trump and Barack Obama, believes that Biden is being given some “performance-enhancing” drug cocktail based upon drastic differences in his behavior. Jackson noted, “We have seen recently in his State of the Union address — that there was a Joe Biden that came out that was not similar at all to what we see on a day-to-day basis for the last 3.5 years. And there’s just really no way to explain that, other than he was on something, that they’d given him medications.” Everyone observing Biden’s obvious behavioral changes sees this reality. But instead of engaging in good investigative journalism and seeking an answer, the Leftmedia responds by attacking those who dare to raise the question.

• CNN could be forced to pay upwards of $1 billion from defamation suit from Tapper show (NewsBusters)

Culture

• Public funding of religious school nixed in Oklahoma: The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against including a Catholic school in the state’s school choice program that would have allowed a religious-based charter school to receive taxpayer funding. In a 7-1 decision, the court said that the law violated the Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Justice James Winchester noted, “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school. As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian.” The charter school in question is St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School, a Catholic school. Oklahoma Republican Attorney General Genter Drummond welcomed the court’s ruling, stating, “The framers of the U.S. Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the state from sponsoring any religion at all.”

• AP spins like crazy on abortion: Leave it to the Appropriated Press to carry the water for the abortion-on-demand crowd. In a headline that reads, “Infant mortality rate rose 8% in wake of Texas abortion ban,” the “news” organization is spinning wildly and dishonestly. As National Review’s Michael New writes: “On Monday the journal JAMA Pediatrics released a study that purportedly showed that the Texas Heartbeat Act led to a sharp increase in infant deaths in 2022. Unsurprisingly, this study was quickly and uncritically covered by several mainstream-media outlets.” But here’s the rub: Texas’s infant mortality rate in 2022 was 5.75 per 1,000 births, which, as New points out, “is well within historical norms and is nearly identical to the average infant mortality rate in the Lone Star State between 2007 and 2020.” He adds, “Furthermore, the Texas infant mortality rate in 2022 was only about three percentage points higher than the overall U.S. infant mortality rate. This difference can be likely explained by the fact Texas has an above average poverty rate and higher levels of illegal immigration than other states.” But the AP wants you to believe it’s all because of Dobbs. Oh, and babies’ mortality rate in abortions is 100%.

• Biden admin official pushed no age restrictions on gender mutilations: Joe Biden’s male “transgender” assistant secretary for heath, Dr. Richard “Rachel” Levine, whom USA Today ridiculously named on its list of Women of the Year in 2022, really wants to trans the kids. Recently unsealed documents related to Boe v. Marshall, a case against Alabama’s law that bans gender-bending medical treatments and procedures on minors, reveal that Levine pressured international medical professionals to eliminate the age-restriction guidelines for gender-bending procedures. One Canadian sex researcher, Dr. James Cantor, writes, “Levine strongly pressured WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) leadership to rush the development and issuance of SOC-8, in order to assist with Administration political strategy.” SOC-8 is the WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8, which Levine wanted to be changed to not include any age restrictions for gender-bending medical procedures. The documents reveal communications over SOC-8 wherein Levine’s “biggest concern is … the Adolescent Chapter that lists specific minimum ages for treatment.” The communication further observes, “The issue of ages and treatment has been quite controversial (mainly for surgery) and it has come up again. We sent the document to Admiral Levine. … She like [sic] the SOC-8 very much but she [sic] was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to health care for trans youth and maybe adults too.”

• Biden issues clemency for gay military service members despite voting for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 1993 (Fox News)

• Republican support for gay marriage plummeted over past two years (National Review)

Misc.

• Jocelyn Nungaray, 12, fought back with her dying breaths — leaving bite and scratch marks on illegal migrant (NY Post)

• DHS identifies over 400 migrants brought to the U.S. by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network (NBC News)

• Ilhan Omar failed to report assets stemming from husband’s shady wine and weed ventures, ethics complaint charges (Washington Free Beacon)

• Anti-tax protesters storm Kenya’s parliament, drawing police fire as president vows to quash unrest (AP)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.