It’s Wednesday, July 1. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Olivia Reingold and Peter Savodnik on the latest win for the DSA and the fight for the future of the Democratic Party. Jill Schlesinger on why you shouldn’t take financial advice from Boomers. David Mamet’s entry in our Great Americans series. And much more.
But first: The justices tangle with girls’ sports and citizenship.
The Supreme Court closed out its term yesterday with a flurry of major rulings. The justices upheld birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s attempt to deny it to children of parents in the country illegally or on temporary visas. It also affirmed that states can bar biological male athletes from girls’ and women’s sports. Today, our writers dig into what these rulings mean.
By a 5–4 vote, the justices held that children born to illegal immigrants and people on temporary visas are American citizens at birth. Jed Rubenfeld calls it a victory not just for the Constitution but for the country—regardless of which side of the issue you’re on. He walks through why the dissenters’ arguments, while not as crazy as the caricatured version of them presented by the media, get the history wrong. Jed also zooms out and looks at the bigger lesson from the decisions made by the Court this term. Read Jed to understand the most anticipated ruling of the year—and the state of play in the fight between the executive and the judiciary.
The Court also ruled yesterday that states may keep biological males off female sports teams. Ilya Shapiro explains the law behind the decision: Title IX, the 1972 law guaranteeing equal athletic opportunity for women, was built from the start around the existence of separate sex categories. The majority, Shapiro argues, simply read the law as it was always written.
Meanwhile, Paula Scanlan lays out the ruling’s stakes. She knows what it’s like to share a locker room with a male athlete and be told to act like it’s normal. As a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, she was one of Lia Thomas’s teammates, and one of the girls who raised concerns to coaches about showering and undressing in front of a male athlete, only to be offered counseling to help her come to terms with it. Today, she celebrates the Court’s ruling and describes what it will mean for the next generation of women in sports.
—The Editors
Democratic Party Civil War: Victory for the DSA in Denver
Last week’s socialist sweep of New York City’s Democratic primaries sent a loud message, and the party is still figuring out what to do with it. Today, our writers describe what comes next—and whether anyone can stop the wave.
The clash between socialists and “establishment” Democrats continued in another race this week—and socialism keeps on rolling. Olivia Reingold profiles Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old first-time candidate who yesterday defeated the longest-serving member of Colorado’s congressional delegation. She’s a political newcomer who declined to call a firebomb attack on Jews “antisemitic” and justified the attacks of October 7 as “inevitable.” Read Olivia’s piece on Kiros and what her candidacy says about where the party is headed.
Not every Democrat is going along with the tide. Peter Savodnik talks to Tom Suozzi, the Long Island congressman who, days after last week’s primaries, unveiled the “Promise to America”—a pledge to fight back on behalf of capitalism, free speech, and what he sees as the party’s founding ideals. The left and the right, Suozzi tells Peter, want to “tear it all down.” Read his piece to see what Suozzi is seeking for the country.
The socialist wave didn’t come out of nowhere. Olivia has been covering the far left since she first started reporting for The Free Press in 2022—and none of what happened last week surprised her. Today, between 2 and 3 p.m. ET, she’ll answer all your questions in the Forum.
Jill Schlesinger says she graduated into a job market where the only requirements were a heartbeat and a clean drug test. She knows her generation got lucky, and that the tips that Baby Boomers are handing down to their kids don’t work in today’s economy. Jill’s advice: Ignore most of it. “Clinging to a model built for 1945,” she writes, “makes little sense in 2026.”
Great Americans
Walt Whitman isn’t America’s greatest poet, David Mamet argues. Paul Dresser is. Dresser was the author of “On the Banks of the Wabash,” a friend to prostitutes and, Mamet argues, the true bard of the American Songbook. Like Irving Berlin, he couldn’t read music. Like Yeats, he could write it in a way you’d never forget.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Qatar yesterday to talk with mediators about ending the war in Iran, as Tehran said it had no plans for direct meetings with the U.S. in the coming days. Iran and Oman still plan to collect fees from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, despite American objections.
National Public Radio quickly retracted an article on Tuesday that incorrectly reported Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the bench. NPR reporter Nina Totenberg apologized directly to Alito, saying, “It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism.”
Representative Tom Kean returned to the House floor after a four-month absence from the chamber, revealing he had been hospitalized with depression. The New Jersey Republican missed more than 100 consecutive votes in what was one of the longest absences by a sitting member of Congress.
Speaker Mike Johnson sent members on summer recess early after a group of House Republicans blocked a defense spending bill for a second straight week, demanding Trump’s election legislation be attached to it first. Neither chamber will return until July 13.
LeBron James told the Los Angeles Lakers that he will not return next season, ending his eight-year run with the team and setting off a free agency chase among championship contenders. Golden State, Miami, and Cleveland are all expected to make pitches as he prepares for a record 24th NBA season.
Actress Blake Lively is seeking $8 million in legal fees from director Justin Baldoni and his production company following the dismissal of his $400 million defamation suit, which her legal team called a “gross abuse of the legal system.”
The White House tapped Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to lead a new scientific advisory council focused on national security threats posed by UFOs. (Watch Will Rahn’s interview with Loeb about his search for alien life and what their presence might mean for humans.)
https://babylonbee.com/news/entire-democrat-party-placed-on-no-fly-list
In response to California Governor Newsome: The governor assures Californians that the recent Supreme Court decision changes nothing in his state, and that California remains committed to treating every citizen with dignity and respect. One hopes this is true, because dignity is owed to every person simply by virtue of being human. It is not, however, the same thing as agreement with every public policy advanced in its name.
Our political vocabulary has become impoverished by the habit of equating disagreement with disrespect. Constitutional government depends upon precisely the opposite assumption: that reasonable people, acting in good faith, will often disagree about profound moral and legal questions.
The Court’s function is not to ratify fashionable opinion but to determine the meaning of law. Governors are equally entitled to pursue policies consistent with state law. But neither branch should pretend that judicial disagreement constitutes an assault upon human worth.
California has chosen to place itself at the forefront of expanding transgender rights. That is its prerogative within constitutional limits. It is not, however, evidence of superior enlightenment. States have long served as laboratories of democracy, producing both notable successes and memorable mistakes. Confidence is not the same thing as wisdom.
The governor’s invocation of “the strongest record” reflects a modern tendency to measure virtue by the quantity of governmental action rather than the quality of constitutional reasoning. Rights deserve careful definition because genuine rights inevitably collide with other legitimate claims: parental authority, religious liberty, freedom of association, privacy, and the protection of women’s sports and spaces.
The republic is best served when these competing interests are debated soberly rather than resolved by slogans. The Constitution requires governments to respect persons. It does not require citizens to surrender their judgment whenever elected officials declare a debate concluded.