Clarence Thomas’s Most Terrifying Wish Is About to Come True

Same-sex marriage could soon be back on the Supreme Court docket.

Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed in 2015 for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, is appealing her case. Davis is appealing a $100,000 jury verdict for emotional damages plus $260,000 for attorneys’ fees, reported ABC News Monday.

In a petition filed last month, Davis claimed that her First Amendment rights protecting her religious freedom effectively immunized her from repercussions for denying the licenses.

“The mistake must be corrected,” Davis’s attorney Mathew Staver argued in the petition, further condemning Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges as “legal fiction.”

“This court should revisit and reverse Obergefell for the same reasons articulated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center,” reads one titled portion, under which Staver claims that “Obergefell was wrong when it was decided and it is wrong today because it was grounded entirely on the legal fiction of substantive due process.”

Staver’s argument alluded to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, which overturned the nationwide right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade. In his 2022 opinion, Thomas argued that the court “should reconsider” its substantive due process precedents, including contraception, same-sex marriage, and even same-sex relationships.

Davis served six days in jail for refusing to issue the licenses. Her appeal marks the first time that the nation’s highest judiciary has been formally asked to reconsider the landmark decision.

“If there ever was a case of exceptional importance,” Staver wrote, “the first individual in the Republic’s history who was jailed for following her religious convictions regarding the historic definition of marriage, this should be it.”

Gay marriage was effectively legalized in 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell that keeping marriage licenses from same-sex couples was discriminatory. The decision mandated that all states issue licenses to gay and lesbian couples, and required states to recognize marriages performed in other jurisdictions, as well.

Marriage equality was further protected at the federal level in 2022, when the Respect for Marriage Act became law, requiring all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. It did not, however, formally legalize gay marriage, so if the Supreme Court were to take up Davis’s case and overturn Obergefell, gay marriage rights would fall with it.

Roughly 69 percent of Americans support same-sex marriages, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Republican support for gay couples’ equal rights has dipped in recent years, however, from a record high of 55 percent in favor of it in 2021 to 46 percent in 2024.

President Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., was directly inspired by the homeless people he saw from his motorcade window on the way to his golf course.

“We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social, attaching four pictures to his post.

Two of the photos showed a total of about 10 tents on the side of the road near a highway ramp The Guardian identified as about a mile from the White House. One picture showed a person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. And another was a picture of some trash in the E Street Expressway by the Kennedy Center.

This is the route the president takes to his frequent outings to his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

On Monday, Trump unfortunately made good on his threat, announcing that he plans to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and invoke Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, a rare move granting him temporary control over the nation’s capital.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” Trump told a packed room of reporters. “This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back. Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740, of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, you know what that is, and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control, and you’ll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that.”

While Trump spent much of the press conference focusing on what he thinks is a crime epidemic, he also emphasized his plans for D.C.’s “beautification.”

“We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve been very, very dirty, very, a lot of problems, but we’ve already started that. We’re moving the encampments away, trying to take care of people, some of those people, we don’t know how they even got there, some of those people from different countries, different parts of the world,” Trump opined. “Nobody knows who they are. They have no idea. But they’re there getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces from all over the city.”

While every city in America could be cleaner, Trump’s version of “beautification” is forcibly removing homeless people so he doesn’t have to see them on his way to go play golf.

Donald Trump on Monday seemed to forget the location of his upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—once again raising concerns about the cognitive ability of the 79-year-old president.

The president had announced the summit, which will take place in Alaska, in a Truth Social post Friday. “The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote.

But on Monday, the president, twice, erroneously claimed the summit would take place in Russia. The mistake came during a press conference where Trump discussed a nonexistent crime wave in Washington, D.C. The fictitious scourge, he said, harms America’s reputation on the world stage.

“It’s embarrassing for me to be up here, you know,” the president said. “I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia,” he continued, putting particular emphasis, amid otherwise soft-spoken and listless remarks, on the name of the incorrect country.

Trump repeated the error later, suggesting it wasn’t just a misstatement but a memory lapse. “It’s going to be a big thing,” the president said. “We’re going to Russia. It’s going to be a big deal.”

As Trump has grown older, he’s shown an increasing propensity for such gaffes, be that forgetting names of people, forgetting where is, or, recently, forgetting actions he took during his first term, such as appointing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell or signing a 2020 trade deal.

When Trump first announced his meeting with Putin in Alaska, critics spoke out against the choice of location, with some observing that hardline Russian nationalists have long called for Russia to retake Alaska, which the U.S. purchased in 1867.

Criticizing Trump last week for his perceived tendency to cave to Putin, commentator David Frum wrote on X, “Let’s all hope that Putin doesn’t ask to take Alaska home with him as a souvenir, or Trump might give that away too.” With Trump’s Monday slip-up, many on social media were quick to joke that the president had, in a way, accidentally done just that.

The Trump administration is deploying the National Guard to Washington over a supposed “public safety emergency”—but it can’t seem to iron out its reason for doing so.

Mere moments after the president claimed Monday that federalization of Washington’s law enforcement was warranted on the basis that the city was a crime-riddled hellscape, FBI Director Kash Patel said that wasn’t the case.

Instead, Patel boasted that the country’s homicide rate had hit an all-time low, effectively unraveling the administration’s rationale for forcing the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital.

“The murder rates are plummeting,” Patel said. “We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history.”

Violent crime has been on the decline in D.C. since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, reported The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

But instead of relying on that data to inform whether to strip Washington of its autonomy, Trump referred Monday to outdated 2023 statistics, claiming that the city was crime-riddled and needed to be under the thumb of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“If our capital is dirty our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us,” Trump said.

Trump also suggested that the same fate could befall other cities around the country, though he only specified liberal hubs.

“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them anymore, they’re so far gone,” Trump said, before promising that Washington would be cleaned up “very quick.”

Later, when asked explicitly if other cities were next on his list, Trump said, “We’re just going to see what happens. We’re going to have tremendous success with what we’re doing.”

But what is happening in Washington should serve as a dire warning to the rest of the country that the administration will advance its agenda with or without legitimate, fact-founded reason.

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that caused the problem,” Trump said.

Donald Trump’s usurpation of law enforcement in the nation’s capital carried a warning for America’s liberal bastions.

Speaking at a White House press briefing Monday morning, Trump declared a “public safety emergency,” emphasizing Washington’s supposedly startling rise in crime while citing statistics from 2023 instead of 2025.

In reaction to the outdated numbers, he announced that his administration would deploy the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard, handing control of police over to Attorney General Pam Bondi and leveraging the D.C. Home Rule Act to federalize the district’s law enforcement.

“We will deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence, and you will have more police. And you will be so happy,” Trump said. “We will bring in the military if it’s needed, by the way.”

But Trump also suggested that cities far beyond Washington’s region could experience the same fate.

“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them anymore, they’re so far gone,” Trump said, before promising that Washington would be cleaned up “very quick.”

Later, when asked explicitly if other cities were next on his list, Trump said, “We’re just going to see what happens. We’re going to have tremendous success with what we’re doing.

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that caused the problem,” he continued.

“We’re going to look at New York in a little while. Let’s do this together.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Trump has stepped on states’ rights while deploying the National Guard. In June, while Los Angelenos protested the administration’s ICE raids, Trump ushered in 4,000 National Guard members, ignoring myriad objections by the state and local government.

The trial to determine whether the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law dating back to 1878 that forbids the government from using the military for law enforcement purposes, and the Tenth Amendment is scheduled to kick off Monday in a California courtroom.

This story has been updated.