July 1, 2026

Photo credit: Win McNamee / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that a law prohibiting the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission except for cause was unconstitutional. In other words, the president must be able to remove a federal officer that exercises executive power.

“This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability,” Ilya Shapiro explains. “Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law.”

Read more about the case.

Last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced new standards for the federal government’s homelessness program. Grant recipients will now have to integrate behavioral-health treatment for the homeless and work with law enforcement to ensure community safety. As Paul Webster observes, “HUD’s new standards and criteria make clear the Trump administration’s position that homelessness is less of a housing problem than a complex entanglement of addiction, mental illness, crime, and social instability.”

Even so, “Housing First” advocates are digging in their heels, turning to federal courts to try to block the changes or using other methods to undermine the HUD’s directives.

Read more.

Education is the first step to success in American society, but the vast majority of black students are falling behind. According to the latest federal data, not even 17 percent of black fourth-graders are proficient in reading. Just 9 percent of black eighth-graders are proficient in math.

“Educational freedom is the civil rights issue of the twenty-first century, just as the original civil rights movement was the twentieth-century incarnation of nineteenth-century abolitionism,” Joshua C. Robertson writes. “If the black student is ever going to get an equal shot at the American Dream, the black family deserves the freedom to choose the school that’s best for their children—whether public, private, religious, or home.”

Read more.

This September, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) will host its 2026 Clinical Congress in Washington, D.C. It has invited Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to deliver the Olga M. Jonasson Lecture.

By doing so, Richard T. Bosshardt argues, the ACS leadership has signaled its continuing commitment to DEI.

Jackson views the world through a racialized lens. “In her rulings and dissenting opinions,” Bosshardt writes, “she has consistently advanced the view that racism remains systemic in America, and that no measure to deal with it should be off the table.” During her confirmation hearing, she refused to say what a woman is. And she dissented in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state restrictions on puberty blockers for minors.

“My suggestion to my fellow surgeons: boycott the Clinical Congress in September and make it the least attended in ACS history,” Bosshardt writes. “Perhaps then, the leadership will get the message that we are not racists, that surgery is not racist, and that surgeons treat patients with the same care and competence, regardless of race or other immutable characteristics.”