Monday, June 28 — the heat and the purge

0:00 Today, two stories set the tone for this summer: a Supreme Court ruling that strips protections from hundreds of thousands of people who have lived and worked here for years, and a Defense Secretary who is quietly purging the military's leadership for the wrong reasons.

0:19 Let's start with the heat, because it is literally killing people. France just recorded about 1,000 excess deaths in a single week of June heat, with over half the country's departments under red alerts.

0:35 That number – a thousand lives lost to a heat wave – is a forecast for the United States.

0:43 Because here, the federal heat standard that would require employers to provide water, shade, and rest breaks for workers in dangerous temperatures has been frozen since January 2025.

0:57 The regulatory freeze from day one of this administration has stalled OSHA's proposed rule, which would have kicked in at 80 degrees for basic protections and 90 degrees for mandatory paid rest breaks.

1:12 Heat kills more Americans every year than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined, but without a permanent standard, millions of farmworkers, construction workers, and warehouse employees – disproportionately Black and Brown – go into another summer with no enforceable protection.

1:32 The French tragedy is not a warning; it is a mirror. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on June 25 ruled 6-3 in Mullin v.

1:42 Doe that courts cannot hear most challenges to the government's decision to end Temporary Protected Status.

1:50 That greenlights the administration's cancellation of TPS for Haiti and Syria, affecting roughly 350,000 Haitians alone.

2:00 Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, publicly called it a mistake, warning it would hurt communities and jobs. Ohio is home to about 10,000 Haitians who work in healthcare, manufacturing, and agriculture.

2:16 The ruling leaves them without a clear path to relief, and Congress has no immediate plan to act.

2:23 And then there is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been blocking the promotions of senior officers – including striking two Black and two female officers from a one-star promotion list, and separately blocking a Black admiral who had fixed one of the Navy's worst problems.

2:42 The New York Times documented this pattern. Representative Lois Frankel posted that Hegseth has fired, sidelined, or blocked promotions for about three dozen senior military personnel.

2:56 This is not routine personnel management; it is a de facto purge of the officer corps, bypassing the merit-based system that has protected the military from partisan control since the post-Watergate era.

3:11 In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy lost his Republican primary, finishing third. Cassidy's defeat traces directly to his vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary – the deciding vote in a 52-48 Senate split.

3:29 His calculation that he could retain influence by confirming Kennedy and then police him from the HELP Committee collapsed when his own base abandoned him.

3:40 The anti-vaccine backlash that Kennedy helped fuel now leaves Cassidy a lame duck. The alternative path was always to vote no and force a credible nominee, but that path is now closed.

3:55 Across the country, North Carolina's GOP-led House overrode Governor Josh Stein's veto of a bill requiring local police to cooperate with ICE – a model straight from the Project 2025 playbook.

4:10 The override vote was 71-47, made possible by two Democratic absences, not any defection.

4:17 This law requires local police to receive ICE training and operate under federal immigration supervision, which the American Immigration Council has shown makes victims and witnesses in Latino communities less likely to come forward, reducing public safety for everyone.

4:36 And in Mississippi, the killing of one-year-old Kohen Wiley by a Senatobia police officer who fired into a moving vehicle during a shoplifting call renews the demand for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

4:52 The officer's body-camera footage has not been released. The family, represented by Ben Crump, had to demand an independent autopsy through public pressure alone.

5:04 No federal rule required automatic transparency or an outside investigation. That law remains stalled in Congress. This is not just today's news.

5:15 We are tracking the full arc of Project 2025, action by action – 147 of its proposals have been read, reframed, and logged, part of a running record of 1,016 distinct actions on the federal agenda.

5:32 The watch is constant, because the implementation is constant. Ahead this week: the Senate nomination hearing for Lance Schroyer, the former Oklahoma state trooper tapped to lead ICE.

5:48 Senators will question a man whose background is entirely in state-level policing, not federal immigration law, about his plans for an agency that has operated without permanent Senate-confirmed leadership since 2017.

6:03 Separately, the House Judiciary Committee still holds H.J.Res.80, the resolution to declare the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, with 219 Democratic cosponsors and no floor action.

6:17 And the SAVE Act, requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, remains stalled in the Senate, where its 60-vote threshold is insurmountable without changes.

6:29 Those are the headlines from a Monday in late June. The weather is hot, the courts are closing doors, and the machinery of this administration keeps turning. We will be here tomorrow, reading what it means. Good night.