Elena Kagan Torches Supreme Court’s Terrible Logic in Porn Ruling

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan ripped the court’s majority decision Friday upholding age-verification requirements for pornography websites.

In a scathing dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson, Kagan accused the majority decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton of diluting First Amendment protections for sexually explicit speech.

“The majority’s opinion concluding to the contrary is, to be frank, confused. The opinion, to start with, is at war with itself,” she wrote, because the majority opinion initially claims that age verification had nothing to do with the First Amendment, before ultimately it “gives up that ghost.”

Kagan argued that the Texas law requiring websites that host pornography or other sexually explicit materials to verify their users’ ages before allowing them access had restricted the access adults have to protected speech. While the rule was designed to prohibit minors from accessing explicit materials, many adults would likely be unwilling to hand over their personal information, such as a passport, to websites hosting pornography.

Kagan explained that the rule called for a higher level of scrutiny because it was not simply “incidentally” restrictive, as Justice Clarence Thomas—who wrote the majority opinion—claimed.

“Texas’s law defines speech by content and tells people entitled to view that speech that they must incur a cost to do so. That is, under our First Amendment law, a direct (not incidental) regulation of speech based on its content—which demands strict scrutiny,” she wrote.

Under intermediate scrutiny, Texas was not required to demonstrate that it had selected the option that was least restrictive for free speech. Kagan argued that this was not sufficient.

“A State may not care much about safeguarding adults’ access to sexually explicit speech; a State may even prefer to curtail those materials for everyone. Many reasonable people, after all, view the speech at issue here as ugly and harmful for any audience. But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a State cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children,” she wrote.

“That is what we have held in cases indistinguishable from this one. And that is what foundational First Amendment principles demand.”

In dissenting opinions, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated the Supreme Court’s Friday ruling on birthright citizenship, which restricts courts’ ability to keep the Trump White House from carrying out its lawless orders.

At issue was whether lower courts can issue “nationwide injunctions” halting Trump’s anti–birthright citizenship order from being enforced against anyone, and not just those challenging the order in court or living in a jurisdiction where it’s being challenged.

While not acknowledging the constitutionality of the executive order, which denies automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and those with temporary status, the majority opinion stated that such injunctions “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”

Justice Sotomayor had choice words for this ruling, which seemingly provides Trump powerful ammunition in his attacks on civil liberties. She was joined by Justices Elena Kagan as well as Jackson, who also wrote a dissenting opinion.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor’s dissent read. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from lawabiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”

Sotomayor used an analogy to illustrate the absurdity of granting the government’s request to strike down nationwide freezes on plainly unlawful orders: “Suppose an executive order barred women from receiving unemployment benefits or black citizens from voting. Is the Government irreparably harmed, and entitled to emergency relief, by a district court order universally enjoining such policies? The majority, apparently, would say yes.”

Sotomayor torched her conservative colleagues for caving to Trump: “With the stroke of a pen, the President has made a ‘solemn mockery’ of our Constitution,” she wrote. “Rather than stand firm, the Court gives way. Because such complicity should know no place in our system of law, I dissent.”

Jackson began her dissent by noting she agrees “with every word of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent,” and decided to file hers to emphasize that the court’s ruling poses “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Trump’s request to do away with universal injunctions, Jackson wrote, “is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior” and “to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution.”

In granting that wish, Jackson wrote, the majority has permitted Trump to act not unlike a monarch, giving “the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”

By placing “the onus on the victims to invoke the law’s protection,” the court has created circumstances in which “a Martian arriving here from another planet would … surely wonder: ‘what good is the Constitution, then?’”

The court’s decision marks “a sad day for America,” Jackson said, requiring judges, faced with Trump’s lawlessness, “to look the other way” and permit “unlawful conduct to continue unabated.”

“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,” she wrote. “But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated the nation’s highest judiciary Friday for ruling 6–3 to permit a group of Maryland parents to withdraw their children from LGBTQ+ exposure in the public school curriculum on the basis of religious freedom.

The progressive justice railed against the majority opinion, writing that the result of the decision will be “chaos” as school administrators are forced either to overextend themselves to accommodate parents’ newly constitutionalized authority or strip LGBTQ+ material from the curriculum entirely.

In a dissenting opinion, Sotomayor argued that the decision would “impose impossible administrative burdens on schools” by requiring them to provide advance notice to parents before they utilized or taught LGBTQ-related content, in order to give parents ample time to “opt out” of the lesson plan.

“The harm will not be borne by educators alone: Children will suffer too,” she said. “Classroom disruptions and absences may well inflict long-lasting harm on students’ learning and development.”

But worse still, according to Sotomayor, is the opening that the nation’s highest judiciary has handed to a vocal minority of parents to disrupt local democracies, allowing them to legally challenge the decisions of publicly elected school officials, sparking educational ramifications for all families whether they agree with the curricula or not.

“The majority closes its eyes to the inevitable chilling effects of its ruling,” she wrote. “Many school districts, and particularly the most resource strapped, cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences.

“Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections,” Sotomayor continued. “The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards. Because I cannot countenance the Court’s contortion of our precedent and the untold harms that will follow, I dissent.”

The court’s decision Friday was the culmination of a three-year legal battle. In 2022, the Montgomery County school board approved the use of LGBTQ+ themed storybooks for elementary school–age children, including Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, in which a kid goes to her uncle’s same-sex wedding, as well as a book where a puppy gets lost in a Pride Parade. At the crux of Friday’s case was a decision made the following year by the Montgomery County school board, preventing parents from opting their kids out of the coursework.

The ruling is most likely to result in a reduction in LGBTQ-adjacent education across the country, as cash-strapped educators attempt to avoid ruinous lawsuits.

Legal experts analyzing the case were quick to point out other flaws riddled in the decision, arguing that the “level of subtlety” permitted by the court to constitute a religious liberty violation could cook up more lawsuits along other theologically contested lines.

“Case in point: arguably this would permit Christian Scientists to opt out of any book where a doctor heals someone,” posted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.

Cue the book bans.

The Supreme Court sided Friday with a group of Maryland parents in Mahmoud v. Taylor, ruling 6–3 to allow them to pull their children from instruction that involves LGBTQ+ themes.

In 2022, the Montgomery County school board approved the use of LGBTQ+ themed storybooks for elementary school–age children, including a book in which a kid goes to her uncle’s same-sex wedding and a book where a puppy gets lost in a Pride Parade. At the crux of Friday’s case was a decision made the following year by the Montgomery County school board preventing parents from opting their kids out of the coursework.

The plaintiffs, who included a Muslim couple, two Roman Catholics, and a Ukrainian Orthodox individual, argued that the curriculum was violating their religious freedoms under the First Amendment and had stripped them of their right to teach gender and sexuality to their children under their own belief systems.

The majority of the justices viewed the issue as a relatively straightforward one, questioning if there would be any harm at all if the parents were allowed to keep their children away from the texts.

In a 135-page opinion, Justice Samuel Alito outlined that “the Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion.”

“We have long recognized,” Alito wrote, “the rights of parents to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children. And we have held that those rights are violated by government policies that substantially interfere with the religious development of children.”

But not everyone was aligned.

“Today’s ruling threatens the very essence of public education,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion, chastizing the court’s decision to constitutionalize a parent’s veto power over decisions historically left to local administrators. “The reverberations of the Court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations.”

The decision comes at an especially volatile time for the LGBTQ+ community, as conservatives place a target on transgender athletes and fearmonger over bathroom access, all while book bans surge around the country. The ruling and chipping away of LGBTQ+ freedoms also come on the heels of another Supreme Court decision.

Last week, the nation’s highest judiciary ruled along ideological lines in U.S. v. Skrmetti that states may ban minors from receiving gender-affirming care, such as hormone treatments and puberty blockers—ironically, denying parents the right to choose that Alito vaunted in Friday’s decision.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted Friday morning that Donald Trump’s trade negotiations will likely continue into September.

During an appearance on Fox Business’s Mornings With Maria, Bessent moved the goalposts for Trump’s flailing trade negotiations yet again, as he struggled to answer simple questions about progress with other countries.

“What is the next country we should expect a trade deal to do with the United States?” asked host Maria Bartiromo. “Are you gonna be able to get some deal announcements beyond just the U.K. before this August deadline, when we’re gonna hear from the Court of the International Appeals?”

It’s not entirely clear what August deadline Bartiromo is citing, but she may have been referring to early August, when an appeals decision is expected of the U.S. International Court of Trade’s decision to block Trump’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Trump announced two weeks ago that he and the U.K. had finally signed a trade deal. Trump also claimed Thursday that China had signed a trade deal just the day before, although Bessent notably did not mention the Asian nation in his mealymouthed defense.

“Maria, you know with all things, they get done at the end. You have to put on a deadline. As you and I know, nothing gets done in Washington well in advance. So, I think a lot of the countries are feeling pressure,” Bessent replied.

Bessent insisted that Trump was ready to go back to the original “Liberation Day” tariff levels, if satisfactory agreements weren’t reached. Bessent said that there were only 18 truly important trading partners, and referred to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s claim that the U.S. had 10 imminent deals coming.

“So, you know, if we can ink 10 or 12 of the important 18, then there are another important 20 relationships, then I think we can have trade wrapped up by Labor Day,” Bessent said.

Even if the Trump administration did succeed in getting 10 new trade agreements by Labor Day, that wouldn’t constitute failing to complete deals “in advance”—it would be months after the initial July 8 deadline. It also falls far short of the administration’s “90 deals in 90 days” promise.

Bessent’s waffling comes just hours after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the July 9 deadline for reimposing steep global tariffs was “not critical.”