Friday, June 25 — two courts, one message

0:00 Good evening. Two federal judges told the White House today that the president does not run elections. That is the single biggest news of the day — and it is only part of the story. Let's start with those rulings.

0:14 On June 25, Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking key parts of President Trump's March 31 executive order on mail voting. The order would have forced the U.S.

0:29 Postal Service to refuse mail ballots unless states handed over their voter registration databases — creating a federal list of who could vote by mail and who could not.

0:41 Judge Talwani said the order likely exceeds executive authority, because the Constitution gives states and Congress — not the president — control over election rules.

0:53 Separate from that, the day before, Judge Denise Casper permanently blocked a different 2025 anti-voting order on similar grounds.

1:03 Together, the two rulings are a one-two punch: the administration cannot use executive orders to run the country's elections. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court made two rulings of its own. First, in a case called Mullin v.

1:20 Doe, the Court ruled 6 to 3 that federal courts cannot hear most challenges to the president's decision to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 450,000 Haitians and an unknown number of Syrians.

1:36 The Court said the TPS statute bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims — so immigrants can't argue that the administration ignored evidence of danger in their home countries.

1:50 The majority did say constitutional claims, like racial discrimination, can still be filed.

1:57 But it also said those claims are unlikely to succeed, because the administration's opposition to the TPS program itself is a race-neutral reason.

2:08 That leaves half a million people without the legal tools they used to have. The second Supreme Court ruling came in a case called Wolford v. Lopez.

2:19 The Court struck down a Hawaii law that made it illegal to carry a concealed firearm on private property open to the public — like a shopping mall or restaurant — unless the owner explicitly said yes.

2:33 The ruling forces states to treat all such property as presumptively open to guns, shifting the burden to property owners, especially small businesses in lower-income communities, to explicitly ban firearms.

2:48 The Court's reasoning relied on its Bruen decision from 2022, which created a historical-tradition test for gun laws. The other big legal story is still ongoing.

2:59 A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund is alive and kicking.

3:09 A federal judge refused to dismiss the case on June 25, even though Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the fund was not moving forward.

3:20 The problem, the judge said, is that the DOJ has not provided a sworn, signed statement from Blanche actually saying the fund is dead.

3:30 So the case will proceed, examining whether the whole settlement — which used the federal Judgment Fund to pay Trump's tax return lawsuit — was lawful in the first place.

3:41 On the economic front, inflation hit 4.1 percent in May — the highest in over three years. The main cause is the Iran war: energy prices are up sharply, costing the average household nearly 450 dollars more this year.

4:00 Tariffs add pressure but they are not the primary driver. The new Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, held rates steady at the June meeting but signaled the possibility of a rate hike ahead.

4:13 That is not a sign of political loyalty — it is a hawkish Fed trying to contain the damage. Then there's the Meta story.

4:23 The company paused its keystroke-tracking program for employee laptops after an internal leak exposed private chats and performance reviews across the company.

4:35 The program, called the Model Capability Initiative, collected keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screen content from company laptops with no opt-out.

4:46 Over 1,600 employees signed a petition, but the program only paused after the data breach made it politically impossible to continue.

4:56 There are no federal rules requiring companies to disclose this kind of monitoring or get genuine consent. Finally, a quick set of other stories.

5:07 A man in North Carolina pleaded guilty in a $60 million health care fraud that primarily targeted California's Medicaid program — not Medicare, as many headlines said.

5:20 Two Honduran nationals were sentenced for running a $38 million off-the-books payroll scheme, but the employers who used their services face no accountability.

5:31 DHS is weaponizing the case of an undocumented immigrant convicted of abusing a corpse to pressure sanctuary cities to comply with civil immigration detainers.

5:43 And President Trump turned the Great American State Fair — meant to be a nonpartisan 250th birthday celebration — into a partisan rally, prompting six states to pull out and an ethics complaint over the use of public funds.

5:59 And here is the bigger picture: we track all of this against Project 2025 — the document that laid out a roadmap for exactly this kind of executive power grab.

6:12 We have read, reframed, and logged 147 of its actions so far. The full arc: 937 actions are on the record and mapped. The watch is constant. What is coming next?

6:26 The DOJ will have to either submit a sworn declaration that the anti-weaponization fund is truly dead or defend the case in court. The administration may appeal the mail-voting injunction.

6:39 The CFPB cannot issue a new digital payment app rule after Congress repealed it through the Congressional Review Act.

6:47 The Supreme Court's TPS ruling means that next termination decisions will face almost no administrative challenge. And the OSHA heat standard rulemaking continues, but slowly — no final standard yet.

7:02 That is it for Friday, June 25. The courts are drawing lines. The administration keeps pushing. We keep watching. Stay safe.