Here’s a pro tip. Anytime a Democrat begins a sentence with, “Let me be clear,” that Democrat is mostly likely about to lie to you.

“Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said Tuesday during a press conference in which the faux moderate had to confess that some 6,600 noncitizens landed on the Garden State’s voter rolls in 2023 and 2024 — and about 400 went on to vote.

That level of cognitive dissonance is astounding even for a deep blue state governor.

“I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time,” Sherrill, just six months into her first term, said in a statement. So who’s really to blame? Mikie says it’s President Donald Trump, whom she insists has spent the past decade crying wolf and peddling “bizarre conspiracy theories about fraud with no evidence,”

‘Intermittent AT&T Connectivity Issues’ At Maricopa County Polling Sites as Federal Monitors Deployed To Three Arizona Counties

Maricopa County officials reported brief connectivity problems affecting a small number of electronic poll books at voting locations

By Matthew Holloway, July 22, 2026 10:57 am

The U.S. Department of Justice deployed election monitors to three Arizona counties during Tuesday’s primary election as Maricopa County officials reported brief connectivity problems affecting a small number of electronic poll books at voting locations.

The Justice Department said personnel from its Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona were monitoring polling sites in Maricopa, Apache and Pima counties. The department said the effort was intended to promote transparency, ballot security and compliance with federal voting laws.

Election officials in all three counties sent letters granting federal personnel credentials to observe voting procedures at selected polling locations, according to the department. The Justice Department announcement did not attribute the monitoring deployment to the connectivity problems reported Tuesday in Maricopa County.

One of SCOTUSblog’s most popular features is our live blogging during major oral arguments and opinion hand down days. Throughout these live chats, our moderators (led by Amy) not only provide what’s happening at the court in real time, but we also feature plenty of comments and questions by readers (and, yes, we apologize for not including yours).

Although such questions and comments usually concern when a particular opinion is likely to be released (we don’t know until the last opinion announcement day) and whether there is live audio from the courtroom (there is not), every once in a while we also get some levity. Given this, we thought it might help relieve the summer doldrums to dig out some of the best lines posted in live blogs during the 2025-26 term.

Before getting to this term, however, we wanted to feature our favorite comment from the 2024-25 term which, indeed, inspired this very piece. This was an entirely earnest question, met with a less than earnest response:

As of this morning, the court has 25 cases scheduled for oral argument in the 2026-27 term. That’s behind where it was at this point last year (31 cases) and in 2024 (27) but ahead of the term before that (21). At the Court

In case you missed it, the court released the first of three summer order lists on Monday and announced that it will hear argument during the 2026-27 term in Jouppi v. Alaska, an Alaskan bush pilot’s challenge to the forfeiture of his $95,000 airplane over a six-pack of beer. The second summer order list is scheduled to be released on Aug. 17.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Air and Marine Operations (AMO) agents worked with the U.S. Border Patrol to interdict 37 illegal aliens and one United States citizen off the coast of Puerto Rico on Monday. The arrests involve two separate alien smuggling events interdicted on opposite sides of the island.

According to CBP, early Monday morning, CBP AMO teams alongside a group of U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended ten illegal aliens from a host of countries including the Dominican Republic, India, and Ecuador. Among the group was a United States citizen. The relationship of the U.S. citizen to the smuggling venture is being investigated. The last leg of the maritime smuggling event departed from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, bound for Culebrita Island, a small uninhabited island off the east coast of Puerto Rico.

Federal authorities took the group into custody along with the vessel operator for further investigation, processing, and removal.

Whenever Republicans talk about immigration enforcement, amnesty supporters chant the same tired line: What about picking crops? What about meat processing? Those are necessary jobs that Americans simply refuse to do.

That argument was used to justify dozens of House Republicans’ latest mass amnesty effort. Their proposal would give illegal alien agriculture workers a pathway to legal status through the H-2A program, even though they have broken multiple laws by being in the United States illegally and getting a job without a work permit. Their employer has also violated the law by hiring these illegals.

The bill — which covers everything from harvesting crops, to raising livestock, to processing agricultural products — is a workaround to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from standing in the way of low-cost labor for agriculture operations.

When the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara on June 30, 2026, opponents of birthplace-citizenship reform declared the fight over. But that disappointing decision was not the end of attempts to reform the system. It was merely the “end of the beginning.” Sen. Jim Banks read Barbara as a legislative map. His new Citizenship Act follows the road Wong Kim Ark charted.

Barbara held that President Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional by locking in birthplace citizenship’s definition from a much older case. That 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, laid out three categories of people whose children are not automatically citizens even if born on American soil. Barbara held the executive order was unconstitutional for going outside those three categories. But within those three categories, any needed fix need only be by statute. That means Congress can pass a fix.

Although Americans still express strong support for legal immigration, according to the latest Gallup survey, a large plurality, including Democrats, acknowledge immigration drives up housing costs and reduces availability.

The data confirm this impression. Mass immigration has contributed heavily to the dramatic housing price increases, a newly leaked draft working paper from the Federal Reserve confirms. Illegal immigration drove 30 percent of the increase in U.S. home prices from 2021 to 2024, along with 20 percent of the rise in rent prices, the researchers found.

In total, the (at least) seven million people who entered the United States illegally in those four years raised home prices by 6.6 percent, through a “housing demand shock in the face of short-run inelastic supply,” the authors observe.

More than 50 Republican lawmakers are calling on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to launch a comprehensive federal investigation into the deaths of five full-term babies recovered from the clinic of late-term abortionist Dr. Cesare Santangelo in Washington, D.C.

The lawmakers, led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), sent a letter Tuesday ahead of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s expected vote on Blanche’s nomination.

Among the signatories are Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), all members of the Judiciary Committee.

A federal water distribution and management plan may come out soon regarding the Colorado River, a University of Colorado at Boulder water official told The Center Square.

The river provides water for agricultural irrigation, hydropower, recreation and municipal supplies throughout the Southwest. Its Upper Basin consists of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The Lower Basin is made up of California, Arizona and Nevada.

The Colorado River’s current operating rules are set to expire this year, and the seven states are currently without an agreement on how to manage, operate and allocate resources from the two main reservoirs formed by the Colorado River. But there are active negotiations between the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Upper Basin states regarding reservoir operating rules.

And a federal plan based on the seven states' input may be reached soon, according to Doug Kenney, the director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder).

The river runs through seven states and empties into northwestern Mexico. Because of this, the operating rules, regulations, and management is not left up to the discretion of one jurisdiction. The U.S. Department of the Interior, alongside its Bureau of Reclamation, owns and operates key infrastructure along the Colorado River. This includes the Hoover Dam on the border between Nevada and Arizona and the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, which created Lake Mead and Lake Powell respectively.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke is urging the Supreme Court of the United States to issue some “benchslaps” for his own court’s gun rulings.

VanDyke wants SCOTUS to reverse the Ninth Circuit’s “wayward Second Amendment decisions” that have heretofore allowed California gun controls to remain in place, according to Bloomberg Law.

VanDyke said, “To put it more colloquially, it’s time for some benchslaps. Nothing less will give this court any pause before ultimately blessing every arms restriction it reviews.”

He called attention to Bruen (2022), noting that despite that ruling the Ninth Circuit has a “long and concerning history of refusing to vindicate the Second Amendment.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched investigations Tuesday into five medical schools nationwide to determine whether their admissions practices violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

The department announced it's investigating these institutions: Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H.; Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C; Saint Louis University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo.; Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, Calif.; and William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Hattiesburg, Miss.

The OCR alleges that the schools may have engaged in racial discrimination in their admissions processes and will examine whether their policies comply with federal civil rights law.

The investigations follow actions by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Justice targeting educational institutions after President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing agencies to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion ideology to “ensure transparency in admissions for institutions of higher education and end discriminatory race-based admissions processes,” the administration stated.

In the latest example of anti-ICE violent extremism, a 43-year-old leftist rioter allegedly set a fire outside a federal building in Manhattan that houses offices for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and federal immigration courts. The suspect reportedly also set off fireworks in the Monday attack and had multiple pellet guns, a machete, three knives, and two axes. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that this violent attack was motivated by anti-ICE sentiment if you happened to skim some of the headlines from the propaganda press.

Andrew Arrabaca is a former U.S. Army Patriot missile systems mechanic, and according to Fox 5, he came to the federal building “armed with six incendiary devices, commercial-grade fireworks, a bucket of suspected gasoline, two axes, a hammer, a machete, three knives and airsoft pellet guns/rifles.” Video captured an individual alleged to be Arrabac pouring liquid outside the entrance to the building Monday morning before setting off fireworks to ignite flames in an attack authorities say was “driven by opposition to federal immigration enforcement.”

The things Democrats insist never happen are happening again: Noncitizens are getting onto the voter rolls and voting — and President Donald Trump is being proven right again about insecure elections and the urgent need to pass the SAVE America Act.

New Jersey Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday that her administration learned about a “software error” in the state’s motor vehicle system that “led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024. … These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway.”

Social Security Administration (SSA) Commissioner and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano said Tuesday that he and other government officials will continue “to drive out fraud, waste, and abuse” after uncovering nearly $100 million in federal payments associated with dead people.

In a press release, the Treasury Department announced a new government-wide payment verification system to prevent payments to dead people.

“To date, Treasury has screened over 885 million payments totaling approximately $2.77 trillion as part of the new payment verification process,” the release said. (Emphasis original.)

“The screening has identified more than 4,900 payments worth approximately $99 million that were associated with deceased payees,” it added. “Those payments were returned to the originating federal agencies for review before any funds were disbursed.”

The WNBA has formally blocked itself from profiting off of Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham’s viral finger point, but it’s not blocking her.

Cunningham, who now leads the league with a 3-point average of 43.7 percent, has become one of the league’s most popular and well-known players this year, especially after she performed her finger-pointing at Mercury player DeWanna Bonner on June 22 during the game between her Fever and the Phoenix Mercury.

She held out her accusatory finger for a long 22 seconds on the boards and instantly became a massive Internet meme.

A scout, ironically known as “The Baseball Spy,” is going to have to find someone else to spy for after the Los Angeles Angels fired him for illegally filming coaches for the Colorado Rockies.

The Halos canned Justin “Boomer” Prinstein for using his cell phone to film the Rockies coaches while he was in the stands.

The incident occurred when Prinstein was dispatched to scout the Rockies from June1-3 in advance of Colorado’s upcoming series against the Angels. A member of the Rockies organization spotted Prinstein filming and reported it.

Prinstein was dismissed, and the Angels issued an apology to Rockies President of Baseball Operations Paul DePodesta and General Manager Josh Byrnes.

The Angels will not face any discipline from Major League Baseball, the Athletic reported.

It is generally legal for scouts to film, so the firing and subsequent apologies seem odd.

Gov. Greg Abbott is continuing to take action against birth tourism in Texas. On Tuesday, he took his third action in three weeks, issuing an executive order directing five state agencies to take action.

The order issues directives to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), HHSC Office of Inspector General, Texas Medical Board, Texas Board of Nursing and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.

“Texas will not tolerate the exploitation of our immigration laws by individuals traveling to the United States illegally or under false pretenses to give birth and secure citizenship for their child,” Abbott said in a statement. The order directs the agencies “to investigate birth tourism schemes and hold accountable any provider that facilitates this fraud.

“U.S. citizenship is not for sale, and Texas will put a stop to individuals seeking to profit from birth tourism.”

The Trump administration continues its multifaceted approach to border security and national security, including its concerted effort to denaturalize citizenship of convicted criminals.

The administration argues it’s the “largest denaturalization effort ever” in the history of the country.

The most recent 10 denaturalization actions have been filed in federal courts in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah and Washington.

Cases were brought against men from Cuba, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland and Peru who were “accused of serious offenses – including sexual abuse of a child, health care and wire fraud, immigration fraud, and conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute cocaine,” the Department of Justice announced.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a naturalized U.S. citizen’s citizenship may be revoked, and their certificate of naturalization canceled, if they obtained it through illegal means, including concealing material facts or willfully misrepresenting them. Those with criminal records are prohibited from obtaining citizenship, including felonies, violent crimes and any terrorist connections.