Comment on Supreme Court: Lifetime GPS monitoring not punishment

The most discussed topic following the first 2024 presidential debate on Thursday was not the return of former President Donald Trump to the debate stage, but rather the questionable-at-best performance of President Joe Biden. But it seems that attention, or lack thereof, has not been well received by Trump. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The presumptive Republican nominee spoke out on Saturday, posting on Truth Social, his very own social media platform owned by the Trump Media & Technology Group.

On Friday, the Supreme Court upended the convictions of a group of January 6 defendants, ruling that the Justice Department had improperly prosecuted them under a statute that prohibits obstruction of an official proceeding. The justices found that the provision—which carries an extremely punitive sentence of up to 20 years in prison—applies to people who did things like alter or destroy documents or other evidence, not to people who disrupted a session of Congress by storming the Capitol. As a result, a relatively small subset of people convicted for their role in the insurrection could be retried or resentenced and might spend less time in prison. Many liberals were no doubt alarmed to learn that the conservative-dominated court had imposed new limits on January 6 prosecutions.

Coming off what was widely regarded as a disastrous debate performance, President Joe Biden, 81, faces a growing chorus of calls for him to step aside. Biden typically recoils from any criticism related to his age, but the urgent crisis he faces has become too pressing for him to ignore.

When the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that members of the Sackler family can’t be shielded from future lawsuits related to the opioid crisis, the justices threw into question a massive, carefully crafted settlement involving the states, local governments, tribes, and individuals that had sued flagship opioid maker Purdue Pharma. The the 5-4 ruling jeopardizes a bankruptcy plan for Purdue that would have released billions of dollars to combat the ongoing opioid crisis in exchange for the Sackler family’s immunity from all current and future opioid liability. In 2019, facing thousands of lawsuits, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy—but not before the Sacklers had moved roughly $11 billion from the company to their personal accounts.

Fourteen trillion dollars. That’s the total amount of money that the federal government owes to Black people in America for the legacy of slavery, according to economist William Darity and his colleagues. It’s not an abstract figure. As Darity explains in the final episode of our “40 Acres and a Lie” series—a groundbreaking collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, Reveal, and Mother Jones—that number is based on a series of calculations, beginning with the broken promise that newly freed people would receive 40 acres of land.

The National Republican Congressional Committee finally joined its peers when it announced its first batch of fall TV ad reservations on Tuesday, making it the last of the four largest outside groups involved in House races to do so. The NRCC's bookings total $42.2 million across 29 different media markets, which the committee says is intended to target 22 districts.