u/Annisty

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Thursday to let the Trump administration use a federal citizenship database to help verify voters ahead of the midterm elections, lifting a lower court order that had blocked the Department of Homeland Security from expanding the 40-year-old Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system for that purpose. The unsigned majority opinion found that blocking the database’s use “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” concluding that “under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”

Despite the headline outcome, the court’s conservative majority itself acknowledged the ruling’s practical effect will be limited, since a separate federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, prohibits states from purging voters within 90 days of an election. That restriction means the Trump administration can only conduct “individualized inquiries” to verify specific voters rather than perform the sweeping bulk searches the modernized SAVE system was originally designed to enable. President Trump has repeatedly framed noncitizen voting as a serious threat to election integrity, though audits of voter rolls have consistently found that voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare. On the core legal question, the majority rejected arguments that federal law barred the administration from expanding the database, writing that Congress, through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, had already authorized “an information-sharing regime like the modified SAVE program,” and found the administration would suffer irreparable harm if barred from using the database during the election cycle.

The court’s three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, dissented sharply, disputing that Congress had ever authorized this kind of database expansion. They argued the majority misread the underlying immigration law to override “the limits that privacy laws impose on the sharing of citizenship information with DHS.” Justice Jackson wrote directly, “there is no reason to believe that Congress meant to repeal laws that would otherwise prohibit federal agencies from disclosing citizenship information.” She also challenged the majority’s irreparable-harm reasoning, arguing the real risk falls on voters rather than the government: “in my view, however, the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.” Because of the Voter Registration Act’s timing restrictions, the dissenting justices characterized the ruling’s near-term consequences as likely “minimal” and “short-term,” even while raising alarm about what it signals for the underlying legal question.

The White House launched its own round-the-clock video channel Monday, dubbed “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” just days after President Trump barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House access. The service went live at 7 p.m. ET, with the White House promoting it as a way to watch the administration’s “biggest moments all in one place,” though its inaugural piece of content was a two-month-old speech Trump gave at Mount Rushmore back on July 3. Kaelan Dorr, deputy assistant to the president, described the channel on X as a “livestream of the Administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered.” The White House says the service is part of a broader push to communicate directly with the public through its own platforms, bypassing traditional news organizations entirely.

The launch lands amid an extraordinary breakdown in relations between the White House and the television press pool. CNN, MS NOW, and Politico filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging their exclusion as a First Amendment violation, and hours later, the traditional five-network television pool, which normally rotates coverage among ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, announced it would suspend covering presidential events entirely rather than simply replace CNN for its scheduled rotation, since CNN had been slated to handle pool coverage of Trump’s UN trip to New York. That meant there was no independent network camera covering Trump’s departure for New York, and the consequences became visible that same afternoon during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new White House helipad, where, with the traditional pool suspended, the administration relied on its own video feed; Trump’s remarks were largely inaudible over the noise of Marine One’s engines, illustrating both the gap left by the pool’s absence and the limitations of the White House’s in-house alternative filling it.

The new channel drew swift, sharply worded criticism from figures across the political spectrum, many explicitly framing it as state-controlled media comparable to systems in China or Russia. Breck Worsham, a right-wing social media personality and former Trump supporter turned critic, wrote on X, “Trump is literally getting ready to launch a state run media called Trump TV. Didn’t another dictator have a state run media or was I imagining that?” Aquilino Gonell, a former US Capitol Police sergeant who defended the Capitol during the January 6 attack, called it “official state-run media,” while HuffPost deputy editor Philip Lewis described it as the administration’s “state-run propaganda network.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump loyalist, pointed to the inaudible helipad remarks as evidence the policy had backfired: “crazy how when you violate the 1st amendment, free speech, it backfires on you and now no one can hear your speech! Supporting free speech means supporting speech, even speech you don’t like.” Sen. Mark Kelly went further, listing the channel alongside a series of other administration actions he called abnormal: “state run media, state owned enterprises, prosecuting political opponents, gifts from foreign countries, selling pardons, massive amounts of money flowing into the President’s bank account, and banners with his head plastered on government buildings. NONE OF THIS IS NORMAL.”

Trump has defended the underlying media ban directly, writing on Truth Social that “Fake News” constitutes “a threat to democracy” and that “Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World.” He also criticized U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, his own appointee, who is presiding over the outlets’ lawsuit because Kelly previously ruled in favor of CNN’s Jim Acosta during an earlier press access dispute. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to White House Communications Director Steven Cheung demanding answers by October 5th, including how and when Cheung learned of the ban and who was consulted, writing, “it is shockingly hypocritical that a White House that describes President Trump ‘the most transparent and accessible president in American history’ would hide the President from reporters and make the President inaccessible to representatives from three major media outlets and all readers of their news coverage.” Republican reactions were more mixed: Rep. Thomas Massie pointedly questioned Trump’s “fake news” framing on X, while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise defended the ban by pointing to the Biden administration’s own press credential revocations, though when directly asked whether the ban violated the First Amendment, Scalise admitted, “well, I don’t know why he did it. I don’t know what the background is.”

Did somebody say COP-OUT?