In a Thursday tweet, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-KY) appears to panic and crash out over the idea that progressive candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—collectively known as the Mamdani slate—will win.

“The House Democrat leadership team needs to be asked a simple yes-or-no question: Do they intend to put anti-American, USA-hating leftist radicals on House committees if they are elected next Congress? These radicals who have ties to terrorist groups and have OPENLY SAID they want to:-Abolish borders and immigration enforcement -Grant mass amnesty, even to criminals and terrorists -Decriminalize trans-prostitution -Use taxpayer dollars for transgender surgeries -Abolish prisons and defund the police -Impose Medicare for All -Abolish the Senate and replace the President and Supreme Court -Eradicate America and Western civilization The American people deserve to know,” Johnson wrote, attaching a 11-and-a-half minute clip of Fox News reporting on his weekly press conference.

READ MORE: ‘No Moral Compass’: Cuomo Condemned for ‘Odious’ and ‘Racist’ Remarks on Mamdani

The House Democrat leadership team needs to be asked a simple yes-or-no question:

Do they intend to put anti-American, USA-hating leftist radicals on House committees if they are elected next Congress?

These radicals who have ties to terrorist groups and have OPENLY SAID they… pic.twitter.com/YGqrkrSIOP

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) June 25, 2026

The Mamdani slate—Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez—all triumphed in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in New York. The three candidates overtook two incumbents, Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, as well as the candidate endorsed by the retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez. The three defeated Democrats were aligned with the establishment, centrist wing of the Democratic party.

Most of Johnson’s complaints come from reporting on Chevalier’s deleted X account, resurfaced by CNN reporting. CNN reported that Chevalier’s retweets included a call for a “world without borders … prisons or police.”

“A world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward,” read a retweet from September 2021. She also reportedly retweeted messages saying “Yes, literally, abolish the border” and that “all deportation is wrong.” In her own tweets on this deleted account, mostly dating from around 2020 and 2021, she called for the end of “policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”

Some of the things Johnson warns about, like Medicare for All, are widely popular, according to surveys. One Data for Progress survey found that nearly 50% of Republicans at least “somewhat support” Medicare for All.

Other claims Johnson makes, like that the Mamdani slate want to  abolish the Senate or “eradicate America and Western civilization” are baffling and appear to be based on nothing. And some—like the desire to replace the president—are just called being a Democrat.

Image via Reuters

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out the conservative members of the Supreme Court for a “sudden aversion” to history in striking down a Hawaiian gun control law.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines on Wolford v. Lopez Thursday morning. Prior to the ruling, Hawaii state law banned carrying a firearm into private property accessible by the public—like a gas station or supermarket, for example—unless explicitly given permission by the property owner.

Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion. In it, the Court ruled that Hawaii’s law did not pass a test laid out in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen. Bruen is a two-part test for Second Amendment cases. First, it asks whether the law before the Court “applies to ‘the people’ and restricts the ‘keeping’ or ‘bearing’ of ‘Arms.'” Next it must also look at whether the law infringes upon “the historical understanding of the codified right.”

READ MORE: ‘Gun Grabbers’: Trump DOJ Blasted for Weighing ‘Legally Illiterate’ Trans Gun Ban

Hawaii has had prohibitions on firearms since before it became a state. However, when the Court decided Bruen, which repealed a number of state laws prohibiting carrying firearms outside the home, Hawaii passed this version of the law. Under the law, while Hawaiians could carry firearms in public, they were assumed to be barred from most businesses.

“When these permit holders leave home in the morning, not only must they take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats,” Alito wrote. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives. We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

Justice Jackson had harsh words for this line of argument. She wrote that while she disagreed with the original Bruen ruling, she accepts it as precedent—but says the majority got the test wrong, as the law is fundamentally not a Second Amendment case but a property law case.

“To hear the majority tell it, Hawaii’s law is a blatant attempt to end-run our Second Amendment precedents. But the statute at issue does no such thing. Instead, it fairly applies a first principle of property law—the right to exclude—and does no harm to the Second Amendment,” she wrote.

She also points out Hawaii’s historical relationship with gun laws, dating back to pre-colonial rule in 1833. In that year, King Kamehameha III banned weapon ownership generally, including knives, swords and firearms. The king’s law continued even after U.S. annexation in 1898. In 1927, some people in Hawaii were allowed to carry firearms, but it was tightly controlled.

Even after being granted statehood in 1959, Hawaii kept strong regulations on firearms. A 1961 law adjusted the regulations to allow gun ownership if a potential owner could prove an “exceptional case,” Jackson wrote.

“That custom continued until very recently. Prior to this Court’s decision in Bruen, Hawaii issued concealed-carry permits only in ‘exceptional case[s],’ which required ‘an applicant [to] sho[w] reason to fear injury to the applicant’s person or property.’ … The result? Hawaiians have rarely carried (or encountered others carrying) guns,” Jackson wrote.

The conservative wing of the Court claims to follow the “originalist” philosophy of jurisprudence—attempting to not just follow the letter of the law but how it would have been interpreted when originally written. But Jackson poked fun at that side of the court for its “sudden aversion” to this interpretation of the Constitution and the existing Hawaii state laws.

“The Court’s sudden aversion to consulting history to inform the scope of the Second Amendment right at Bruen’s step one is strange, to say the least. Several Members of the majority have elsewhere opined that interpreting the Second Amendment requires understanding the original meaning of its text. Yet the majority’s newfound understanding of the first step of Bruen obliterates any need for reference back to original meaning. All that step one now requires is a 21st-century judge to read the text of the Second Amendment and ask herself what she thinks the words mean,” Jackson wrote.

“Worse, the majority’s new methodology is a one-way ratchet: It inevitably works only to the benefit of armed carry by removing any real burden of proof on gun owners at step one. The majority simply equates the ability to carry a gun with the right to carry anywhere and everywhere. … Because of that, it then assumes that any impediment to carrying qualifies as a burden on the right. … The upshot of the majority’s view of Bruen’s first step is thus that any law that regulates the carrying of firearms is presumptively unconstitutional. But under this Court’s precedents, assessing whether conduct falls within the right protected by the Second Amendment requires more than breezily asserting that the restricted conduct involves carrying a firearm,” she added.

In closing, she calls out the majority for changing the Bruen test, but also stripping property interests from citizens being “protected against unauthorized armed entry.”

“From this day forward, it will be difficult to view Bruen as anything more than a fig leaf,” She wrote. “Of course, the real irony is that the Court’s effort to rein in judicial discretion has resulted in an arbitrary rule that unleashes judges to thwart gun regulation at every turn.”

Justice Samuel Alito claimed that comments from President Donald Trump and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were not “overtly racial” in a ruling stripping protections from Haitian and Syrian refugees.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines Thursday morning in Mullin v. Doe that the Trump administration could revoke Temporary Protected Status from Haitian and Syrian refugees. The reasoning was that the decision to revoke TPS was not “motivated by race,” but a general objection to the TPS program.

“Citing statements made by President Trump and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, one set of respondents advances an equal protection claim that Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated because of the racial makeup of that country’s population. But, ironically, one of respondents’ other arguments undermines the equal protection claim by offering a strong, race-neutral explanation for Haiti’s termination: namely, that the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past,” Alito wrote.

READ MORE: No, Haitian Immigrants Aren’t Eating Cats in Ohio

TPS has been the law of the land since 1990. The law allowed refugees from war-torn countries or countries that suffered devastating natural disasters to live in the United States. Though TPS was always intended to be temporary, as the name suggests, history moves slowly and many people would have to stay in the United States lest they be hurt or killed in their homelands.

In the case of Haiti, Alito said that while “it is a very poor country, and living conditions there are unquestionably difficult… poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character, and there is no justification for denigrating the character of Haitians who suffer from and bear no responsibility for their country’s ills.”

But Alito dismissed claims that the Trump administration’s decision to revoke TPS designations were based on race.

“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.

“Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago, and the statements cited by Miot respondents—especially those concerning Haiti and Haitian immigrants to this country—exemplify this development. But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people. Ironically, both Doe and Miot respondents identify a strong, race-neutral explanation of these officials’ statements: the present administration’s general stance on immigration and its obvious antipathy toward past administrations’ TPS policies,” he continued.

As cited in the dissent by Justice Elena Kagan, the comments that are not “overtly racial” include—using her framing language:

• Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].”
• Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.”
• Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.”
• Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.”
• And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.”
• Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country.
• “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”

“The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not ‘overtly racial,’. .. but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community,” Kagan wrote. “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”

She added that it is not an “either/or” decision that either TPS was revoked from Haiti and Syria due to antipathy for the program or it was racially motivated, but that both can be true.

“If in addition to race-neutral reasons, race entered into the picture—even as a subsidiary factor—the Haiti TPS decision is irretrievably tainted. And here, the President’s own statements show that race did enter in— that, within what was surely a multi-cause decision, it was a motivating factor. Because that is all the Haiti plaintiffs need to show on their equal protection claim, the District Court was right to find that it is likely to succeed,” Kagan wrote.

This is the second win the SCOTUS has handed Trump Thursday on immigration issues. In another ruling, Alito wrote the decision to allow border police to block asylum seekers from entering the United States. In that case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared the majority’s decision to turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

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