Democrats welcome temporary supreme court ruling that restores access to abortion pills, but note ‘fight is just beginning’
In response to the supreme court’s decision to restore mail access to mifepristone, one of the two-drug regimen needed for medication abortion, Democrats welcomed the news, but noted this is part of a wider fight to further undermine safe and effective access to reproductive healthcare.
“This fight is just beginning,” said Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat. “We will stop at nothing to prevent the Republicans from putting a national abortion ban into effect.”
Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, anti-abortion groups have attempted to limit access to abortion pills, mifepristone and misoprostol, now the most common method to terminate pregnancies in the US.
“I urge the Court to move swiftly to permanently protect access to this critical medication for women,” said Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada.
“As this case proceeds, we must continue to fight back against Republican efforts to try to ban abortion nationwide,” said Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. We’ll be back on Tuesday. Here are the latest developments:
-
Donald Trump has threatened that Iran will be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacks US vessels trying to reopen a route through the strait of Hormuz. The US launched an operation to help hundreds of ships trapped with their crews in the Gulf, dragging the region back to the brink of full-scale war. While the US military claimed to have destroyed six Iranian small boats and intercepted both Iranian cruise missiles and drones, this was denied by Iran. More here.
-
The Trump administration moved to block a lawsuit Minnesota officials filed almost six years ago alleging oil companies and a petroleum trade group deceived state residents about climate change. The justice department, the administration’s law enforcement arm, filed an action in federal court in Minneapolis arguing that the federal government has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, not states, and that Minnesota officials are trying to improperly impose their policy preferences on the rest of the country.
-
The US supreme court went out of its way to help Louisiana Republicans redraw their congressional maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The procedural move comes less than a week after the court’s landmark decision striking down Louisiana’s congressional map and gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
-
The Trump administration is continuing to pressure the United Nations and the international aid sector more broadly to adopt trade-focused policies to benefit US firms – or face the threat of further budget cuts. Donald Trump’s second term has already seen USAID suffer mass layoffs and have its remaining operations folded into the state department, with a ripple effect across the globe that has many experts warning will cost thousands of lives as vital programs are cut. More here.
-
The Trump administration’s attack on the 87-year-old food aid program that supports tens of millions of low-income Americans escalated last week as the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, claimed that 14,000 Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (Snap) recipients included owners of luxury vehicles such as Ferraris, Bentleys and Teslas. More here.
More on climate news: California energy officials launched an investigation into the Trump administration’s agreement with the offshore wind company Golden State Wind to cancel a planned project off the state’s central coast.
The state is investigating whether a $120m payout from the Department of the Interior, granted in exchange for voluntarily abandoning an offshore wind lease, violated the law.
The project would have helped California meet its climate goals, which include installing 25 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2045.
“Californians deserve immediate answers about the nature of this payout,” said David Hochschild, chair of the California energy commission, which issued the subpoena. “Taxpayer dollars should be used to build a sustainable energy future, not to pay to make projects disappear.”
The move is part of the Trump administration’s broader multimillion-dollar push to incentivize companies to abandon offshore wind projects and refocus on fossil fuels.
Representative Nancy Mace said the federal government paid out more than $338,000 to settle allegations of sexual harassment on behalf of House members or their offices since 2004.
On social media, Mace posted a picture of two binders with the information on the payouts captioned “The results of my subpoena of Congress’s sexual harassment slush fund are in”.
“Nine members. One thousand pages. All records prior to 2004 were destroyed – which tells you everything you need to know about how long this has been buried,” she added.
In a separate post, she goes over the details of the amounts paid by the offices implicated in the settlements, including former representatives Eric Massa, John Conyers, Blake Farenthold and Patrick Meehan, as well as the late representative Carolyn McCarthy and former representative Rodney Alexander.
“We will release the full 1,000 pages – once we confirm that personally identifiable information of victims and witnesses has been properly redacted,” Mace said in the post on Monday.
Lauren Gambino
Kamala Harris endorsed LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, for re-election, stepping into an unexpectedly dramatic mayoral contest to see who will lead the city as it hosts the 2028 Olympics.
Bass faces two challengers: former reality TV star Spencer Pratt and ally turned rival LA city council member Nithya Raman. Bass has faced continued scrutiny of her leadership since her handling of the 2025 LA fires drew wide criticism.
“Mayor Karen Bass is the leader Los Angeles needs right now,” Harris said. “She has done what so many said couldn’t be done – the first ever two-year decline in homelessness, reducing crime to levels this city hasn’t seen since the 1960s and refusing to back down when the federal government came after our neighbors.”
“She has my full support for re-election,” said Harris, who has a home in Brentwood, an affluent neighborhood located on the west side of Los Angeles. Ballots have already been mailed to voters ahead of the state’s 2 June nonpartisan primary in which the top two vote getters advance to the November general election, regardless of party. Polls show Bass with a steady lead, though many Democrats have expressed frustration with her leadership.
Notably, Harris did not endorse a Democrat in the messy contest for governor – a race many Democrats had hoped she would enter after her devastating loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Instead, Harris, the nation’s first Black and Asian American vice-president, has said she’s exploring a third presidential bid. As part of that effort, Harris has worked to retain strong political bond with Black voters, especially women. Bass is the first woman and first Black woman elected to serve as LA mayor.
Earlier this year, Harris endorsed congressman Jasmine Crockett in a closely contested Senate primary, another trailblazing Black woman.
In the governor’s race, Democrat Tom Steyer cast Harris’s lack of an endorsement as a snub of rival Xavier Becerra, who served with her as HHS secretary in Joe Biden’s cabinet. “Becerra’s colleagues in the Biden administration had a front row seat to his incompetence, so it’s no surprise that they are sitting this one out,” said Steyer spokesperson Kevin Liao. Becerra on Monday surpassed Steyer for the first time in a polling survey conducted by the California Democratic party.
Sam Levine
The US supreme court went out of its way on Monday to help Louisiana Republicans redraw their congressional maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
The procedural move comes less than a week after the court’s landmark decision striking down Louisiana’s congressional map and gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Usually, the court waits 32 days to formally issue its judgment to the lower court. Last week, Louisiana asked the court to speed up that process, citing the urgency with which it needed to redraw its congressional maps. On Monday, the court agreed to do so.
“The date scheduled for the beginning of early voting in the primary election has already passed. The congressional districting map enacted by the legislature has been held to be unconstitutional, and the general election will be held in just six months,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.
The decision is likely to offer more legal cover to Louisiana Republicans, who took the extraordinary step of cancelling the 16 May primary for Congress after mail-in ballots had already gone out to overseas voters. There is ongoing litigation challenging that decision and the supreme court expediting its judgment could bolster Louisiana’s legal arguments for the need to hold new elections.
Dissenting from the court’s decision on Monday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ripped the court for departing from its usual procedure. There were only two times in the last 25 years, she wrote, when the court had expedited its ruling.
“To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures. But, today, the Court chooses the opposite. Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” she wrote. “The Court’s decision to buck our usual practice under Rule 45.3 and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”
In searing language, she said the court’s majority “unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray. And just like that, those principles give way to power.”
That accusation prompted a forceful response from Alito, who wrote an opinion joined by fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Jackson’s language was “baseless and insulting”, he wrote.
“The dissent goes on to claim that our decision represents an unprincipled use of power. That is a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge,” he wrote. “What principle has the Court violated? The principle that Rule 45.3’s 32-day default period should never be shortened even when there is good reason to do so? The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?”
Following its recent ruling to gut a major section of the Voting Rights Act, the supreme court announced the decision will take effect ahead of schedule, Reuters reports.
The move boosts Louisiana Republicans as they push for a new congressional map before the November midterms. The court’s decision gives lawmakers permission to draw districting plans that weaken the influence of Black and other minority voters.
The supreme court typically waits 32 days before its formal judgment is issued, but the prevailing party, the “non-African American” voters in this case, can ask the court to issue its judgment more quickly.
Amid the recent ruling, GOP lawmakers in several southern states are meeting this week to consider plans that could upend their congressional primaries and redraw US House districts ahead of the November elections.
Trump administration sues Minnesota to try to stop a climate lawsuit waged by the state
Dharna Noor
In 2020, Minnesota sued Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries, and the Minnesota-based Koch Industries subsidiary Flint Hills Resources. The lawsuit, which is ongoing, claims that the defendants breached state consumer protection laws by deceiving the public about the climate dangers of their products and seeks an end to allegedly deceptive practices, monetary damages for climate impacts to the state, the creation of a public education campaign on climate issues funded by the industry players.
On Monday, Trump’s justice department filed its own suit, accusing Minnesota officials of trying to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions — something it says only the federal government should be able to do. It names the state itself and its attorney general, Keith Ellison, as defendants, and seeks an injunction to prevent the state’s lawsuit from proceeding as well as a declaration that the climate lawsuit is “pre-empted and unlawful.”
“President Trump promised to unleash American energy dominance, and Minnesota officials cannot undermine his directive by mandating that their woke climate preferences become the uniform policy of our nation,” associate attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a Monday press release about the lawsuit.
The Trump administration’s suit comes less than three weeks after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the state’s lawsuit could advance toward trial. It marks the latest in a series of cases brought by the Trump administration attempting to undermine states’ attempts at climate accountability. In May 2025, the DOJ took the unusual step of filing pre-emptive lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan over their plans to file climate lawsuits. Both states still filed their litigation; judges in both cases dismissed the department’s cases.
Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which tracks and backs climate litigation, called the DOJ’s latest lawsuit a “desperate effort to shield the architects of big oil’s decades-long climate deception from facing accountability.”
In recent years, more than 70 state and local governments have sued oil companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis.
The New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is considering introducing government oversight of new models of artificial intelligence, marking a reversal for the US president, who has previously maintained a hands-off approach to the industry.
US officials told the news outlet that the administration is discussing an executive order to create an AI working group that would convene tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures.
White House officials told leaders from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI about some of those plans during meetings last week, the Times reports.
The newspaper said the change could be prompted by concerns about Anthropic’s new AI model called Mythos, which cybersecurity experts warn could supercharge complex cyber-attacks.
A US judge on Monday apologized to the man accused of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump for the “legally deficient” treatment he has faced in a Washington DC jail, including being placed on suicide watch, separated from other inmates and denied a Bible.
The US magistrate judge Zia Faruqui said he was disturbed by the conditions for Cole Allen, who allegedly fired a shotgun during a foiled attack on Trump and senior officials in his administration at a 25 April press gala. The judge said the conditions were inappropriate for a person with no criminal history.
“Whatever you’ve been through, I apologize,” Faruqui said during a court hearing.
Faruqui said he has an obligation to make sure the 31-year-old Los Angeles-area man is “treated with the basic decency of a human being”. Allen last week agreed to remain detained in the local jail in Washington after his lawyers said they would not contest arguments from prosecutors that he posed a danger. He has been charged with attempted assassination and firearms offenses. He has not yet entered a plea.
Read the full report coming from Reuters:
At the Small Business Summit, Trump accused China of decimating American manufacturing sectors over the decades. He said: “China’s coming in and they’re ripping us, and we have a tariff, it’s 25% but it’s not enough, because, you know, they have certain advantages that you’re not going to have.
“I’m going to put tremendous tariffs… the process has already started. It takes me longer now because of the supreme court decision. I have to go through a process. It’s ridiculous”, Trump said.
Trump once again boasted about his ability to pass cognitive tests designed to detect dementia and mental deterioration. A couple of days ago, he repeated these comments in a speech at a retirement community in Florida. He also went on to insult Gavin Newsom, calling him “stupid”.
His remarks come after calls from lawmakers, including Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, for him to take another cognitive test and publicly release the results.
In an interview with journalist Jim Acosta, former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb called the president “clearly insane” in late March.
