Episode Details

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In forty-eight hours the Supreme Court closed its term and rewrote who runs the government. Six to three, again and again — a number that tells you how fixed this Court has become. It gave Donald Trump the agencies, opened the money spigot, and let the states decide who counts as a girl. Then it drew exactly two lines it would not let him cross: it would not erase the Fourteenth Amendment, and it would not hand him the Federal Reserve.

On Tuesday’s Fivestack, Zev counted the five rulings down — least significant to most — with guest Anne P. Mitchell, the Stanford Law professor and federal-law author who writes Notes from the Front. (Dean Blundell was out sick; Mitchell stepped in at short notice.) What follows is the countdown, the words the justices actually wrote, and the impact measured in numbers.

5️⃣ The Court Lets the States Decide Who’s a Girl

For three years Lindsey Hecox fought Idaho’s law to try out for the Boise State women’s track team, and a West Virginia middle-schooler, Becky Pepper-Jackson, fought to stay on her school squad. On June 30 the Court ended both fights at once, upholding state bans on transgender girls in girls’ and women’s sports. Kavanaugh wrote it. The vote was 6–3.

Mitchell put her finger on the move that should trouble even people who welcome the result: the Court resurrected “separate but equal.” A century of race cases held that separate is inherently unequal. Here the majority says the opposite — that limiting girls’ teams to “biological females” is “substantially related” to an important government interest, and so it stands. The ruling leans on the meaning of “sex” when Title IX passed in 1972, before the country was having any conversation about gender identity. “It’s funny,” Mitchell noted, “how they only do that when it’s to their ideological advantage.”

The reach is total. This is the Supreme Court, not a circuit — it is now the law of the land. Twenty-seven states already ban trans girls from school sports; every public school and university in them, K-12 through the NCAA, now operates on solid constitutional ground. Sotomayor, in dissent: “to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” The majority, she wrote, lets states bar every transgender athlete “even if the facts show” no competitive advantage — moving the goalposts to answer the constitutional question without the record to support it.

🎯 THE GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT — The Next Fight Is Already Here

This week’s GroundNews.com’s Blindspot is the sequel the Court already greenlit: it granted review of the assault-weapons bans in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois — the first direct ruling on AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, with about a dozen state bans hanging on it. Arguments come this fall. Mitchell, who says she hasn’t missed a call yet this term, expects the bans struck. Power, then money, now the guns — the same six justices, one case at a time.

Sign up for the blindspot at groundnews.com/fivestack and get 40% off of their vantage plan.

4️⃣ Trump Tried to End Birthright Citizenship — and Lost

On day one of his second term Trump signed an order stripping citizenship from babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented and temporary residents. Eighteen months later Chief Justice Roberts told him no, 6–3: children born here to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and “are citizens at birth.” The challengers’ reading, Roberts wrote, “commanded only a dissent in 1898, and neither time nor circumstance has changed the fact it is not the law.”

Mitchell traced