US NATIONAL NEWS
Stymied by the Supreme Court, Biden wants voters to have the final say on his agenda
Published
3 years agoon
WASHINGTON (AP) — After major blows to his agenda by the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden is intent on making sure voters will have the final say.
When the court’s conservative majority effectively killed his plan to cancel or reduce federal student loan debts for millions of people, Biden said, “Republicans snatched away the hope that they were given.” When the justices ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, he said, “This is not a normal court.” When they overturned Roe v. Wade and a national right to abortion last year, the president said, “Voters need to make their voices heard.”
As Biden heads into the 2024 election, he is running not only against the Republicans who control one-half of Congress but also against the conservative bloc that dominates the nation’s highest court. It’s a subtle but significant shift in approach toward the Supreme Court, treating it more like a political entity even as Biden stops short of calling for an overhaul.
That shift is becoming apparent in everything from the White House’s messaging to its legal strategy.
“The president respects the court’s authority, but if its judgments are going to be political and there are members of the court who are saying that, he owes it to voters to make it clear what his positions are and what he’s doing to address it,” said Ron Klain, his former chief of staff.
“Many members of the current court testified that Roe is settled law and still overturned it,” he added, referring to the court’s ruling on abortion. “That has its consequences.”
Biden, who once led the Senate Judiciary Committee, is focusing on the politicization of the court as a way to encourage voters to back him. Yet he has not embraced any effort to make big changes to the court.
Instead, Biden is increasingly vocal about his belief that the court is abandoning mainstream constitutional interpretation. He tells voters they need more Democrats in Congress and a Democrat in the White House to counter the impact of the conservative-leaning court.
Biden has won his share of cases, including on immigration, before a court where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. But the student loan defeat capped a term when justices imposed significant roadblocks.
White House officials say Biden is keen to explore other ways to pursue the same priorities and explain to the American people about the obstacles.
“There’s only upside in running against the court as an institution because the court is doing things that are wildly unpopular and they’re preventing the president from implementing his agenda,” said Chris Kang, chief counsel of the progressive group Demand Justice and a onetime deputy counsel to President Barack Obama.
“I think that it’s important to make clear that the Supreme Court is making it impossible to implement and advance policies that should not have any controversy attached to them,” he added.
Republicans are working to portray Biden as overstepping his legal authority in pursuit of his agenda. They say the high court’s policies are in step with much of the country and they are trying to motivate their own voters by highlighting what the GOP has achieved through court rulings.
Former President Donald Trump, at the recent Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, praised the three justices he had nominated to the Supreme Court. “Exactly one year ago today, those justices were the pivotal votes in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision ending the constitutional atrocity known as Roe v. Wade,” Trump said.
He drew a standing ovation by noting that “conservatives had been trying for 50 years,” to overturn that ruling. “But I got it done and nobody ever thought it was a possibility.”
Other administration officials said the court’s conservative dominance has lowered the political cost to Biden when the justices scuttle some of his legally suspect actions such as on student loans and coronavirus mandates. On the latter, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s attempt to require employees of large companies to get shots but left the requirement in place for health care workers, though by that time the pandemic had started to wane.
Klain insisted that everything Biden has put forward had a solid legal basis and was approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
“There was no sense of taking the legal issues lightly or just ‘do it and take whatever the court says,’’ he said.
Confidence in the Supreme Court fell to its lowest point in at least 50 years after the leaked draft opinion in the abortion case in 2022. Those who view the current court favorably are largely Republican.
According to the Pew Research Center’s September 2022 report, only 28% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents now view the court favorably, down nearly 40 percentage points since 2020. And people in the United States increasingly favor term limits.
Positive views of the court among Republicans and those who lean Republican has increased to 73%. As a result, the partisan gap is larger than at any other point in the 35 years of polling that Pew has done on the court.
Republicans have focused for years on remaking the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. When Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-K.Y., was the majority leader, he refused to even meet in 2016 with Obama’s pick for the high court — current Attorney General Merrick Garland, a federal judge at that time. The nomination stalled until a Republican president, Trump, took over.
Establishment GOP operatives backed Trump because of his pledge to name as many judges to the bench as possible. Their gamble worked. Trump ended up with three Supreme Court nominees and 54 federal appeals court judges, reshaping the courts for a generation.
Democrats are now finally understanding the power of judges as a voting tool, and Biden has made judicial nominations a priority, appointing a record number of judges for a president at this point in his first term, including some of the most diverse picks yet to the judiciary. Biden aides plan on highlighting those accomplishments during the reelection campaign, but acknowledge it’s only a small salve to their troubles at the high court.
Biden has taken to warning voters about what else the Supreme Court might do in the future, whether rolling back same-sex marriage rights or access to contraception.
“President Biden is being direct with the American people about the stakes these extreme decisions that jettison decades of longstanding precedent have for their fundamental freedoms and their daily lives,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.
Part of Biden’s unwillingness to go further to reshape the Supreme Court comes from a sense of history. Those pushing social change stood by the court after Brown v. Board of Education, a major civil rights case, and even Roe v. Wade, holding up its autonomy as a way to push forward. Backing away from that, particularly for an establishment Democrat like Biden, is not easy.
As Biden said in an interview with MSNBC, “I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy,”
Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and co-host of “Strict Scrutiny” podcast about the Supreme Court, said that while Biden was unlikely to go that far, “there are a variety of things that Democratic politicians could run on that would actually allow them to more explicitly push back against the court.”
Besides expanding the size of the Supreme Court and or the lower courts, she said, other options include stripping the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over certain cases, setting term limits and implementing ethics changes.
All of them, she said, are things the party could embrace “as part of their recognition that the court has politicized itself.”
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Tech
NASA Rolls Out Massive SLS Rocket Stage for Artemis III Mission to Kennedy Space Center
Published
1 month agoon
April 13, 2026By
Willie David
NEW ORLEANS (FNN) — NASA will roll out the largest section of its Space Launch System rocket on Monday, April 20, marking a major milestone for the Artemis III mission.
The section, representing the top four-fifths of the SLS core stage, is being moved from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. It includes the liquid hydrogen tank, liquid oxygen tank, intertank and forward skirt. The structure will be loaded onto NASA’s Pegasus barge for transport to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
CORE STAGE DELIVERY AND INTEGRATION
Once the core stage arrives at Kennedy Space Center, teams will complete final outfitting and vertical integration. The hardware will then be transferred to NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program for stacking and launch preparation.
The Artemis III engine section and boat-tail, which protects the engines during launch, were previously moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building in July 2025. The four RS-25 engines are scheduled to arrive from Stennis Space Center in Mississippi no later than July 2026 for integration.
POWERING THE ARTEMIS III MISSION
Equipped with four RS-25 engines, the SLS core stage will generate more than 2 million pounds of thrust, enabling the launch of astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft.
Artemis III is currently targeted for launch in 2027, following the successful Artemis II mission, which completed a crewed flight around the Moon on April 10.
NASA’S MOON-TO-MARS STRATEGY
The Artemis III mission is part of NASA’s broader Artemis program, aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon and establishing a sustained human presence.
The mission will test critical capabilities, including rendezvous and docking between the Orion spacecraft and commercial systems needed for future lunar landings, currently planned for 2028.
NASA is working in partnership with Boeing, the SLS core stage lead contractor, and L3Harris Technologies, the lead contractor for the RS-25 engines. The core stage remains the backbone of the SLS rocket and is manufactured at the Michoud Assembly Facilit
Tech
NASA’s Artemis II Astronauts Begin Historic Journey Around the Moon After Key Orion Engine Burn
Published
1 month agoon
April 3, 2026By
Willie David
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (FNN) — For the first time in more than 50 years, astronauts on a NASA mission are headed around the Moon after successfully completing a critical burn of the Orion spacecraft’s main engine.
The approximately six-minute firing of Orion’s service module engine Thursday — known as the translunar injection burn — accelerated the spacecraft and its crew beyond Earth’s orbit, placing them on a trajectory toward the Moon.
Aboard the spacecraft are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
“Today, for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, humans have departed Earth orbit,” said Dr. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. “Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy now are on a precise trajectory toward the Moon. Orion is operating with crew for the first time in space, and we are gathering critical data and learning from each step.”
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft lifted off from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1, beginning a planned 10-day test mission around the Moon and back.
Successful Launch and Spacecraft Activation
Shortly after reaching space, Orion deployed its four solar array wings, allowing the spacecraft to generate power from the Sun. The crew and mission controllers then began transitioning the spacecraft from launch to normal flight operations while checking critical onboard systems.
About 49 minutes into the flight, the rocket’s upper stage fired to place Orion into an elliptical orbit around Earth. A second burn propelled the spacecraft — named “Integrity” by the crew — into a high Earth orbit extending roughly 46,000 miles above the planet for nearly 24 hours of system testing.
Following the maneuver, Orion separated from the upper stage and began flying independently.
System Tests and Crew Operations in Space
During the early phase of the mission, the astronauts conducted a manual piloting demonstration to evaluate Orion’s handling capabilities using the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage as a docking target.
After the test, Orion executed an automated departure burn to safely move away from the stage. The propulsion stage later performed a disposal burn before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere over a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.
Before its re-entry, four small CubeSats were deployed from the rocket’s Orion stage adapter to conduct separate scientific missions.
Mission teams also transitioned communications to NASA’s Deep Space Network while the crew adjusted to the space environment. Astronauts completed their first rest periods, performed onboard exercise routines, restored the spacecraft’s toilet to normal operations and prepared the spacecraft for the translunar injection burn.
Lunar Flyby and Artemis Program Goals
The crew is scheduled to conduct a lunar flyby Monday, April 6, when astronauts will capture high-resolution images and make observations of the Moon’s surface — including portions of the lunar far side rarely seen directly by humans.
Although the far side will only be partially illuminated during the flyby, the lighting conditions are expected to cast long shadows across the terrain, highlighting ridges, slopes and crater rims that are difficult to observe under full sunlight.
After completing the flyby, the astronauts will return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.
The mission marks a major milestone for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts on increasingly ambitious missions to explore the Moon, advance scientific discovery, stimulate economic growth and prepare for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Politics
Donald Trump Marks Policy Shift on Gender Identity, Education, and Federal Programs
Published
1 month agoon
March 31, 2026By
Willie David
WASHINGTON (FNN) — The administration of Donald Trump announced a series of policy changes affecting federal positions on gender identity, education standards, health care funding, and military service. Officials say the actions are intended to redefine federal policy around biological sex and limit government involvement in gender-related medical and educational programs.
The policy changes follow criticism from Republicans of earlier initiatives introduced during the administration of Joe Biden that expanded federal recognition of transgender individuals in several areas of public policy.
Federal Policy Defines Sex as Male or Female
The Trump administration declared that the official policy of the federal government recognizes only two sexes — male and female — based on biological characteristics.
Administration officials say the policy affects federal documents, agency rules and programs across multiple departments. The move also ended the practice of gender self-identification on certain federal records, including passports, according to officials.
Supporters say the change restores clarity to federal policy, while critics argue it removes recognition for transgender Americans in official government documentation.
Funding and Health Care Policies Adjusted
Federal agencies were directed to halt funding, sponsorship or promotion of certain medical procedures related to gender transition for minors. Administration officials say the directive is intended to prevent what they describe as irreversible medical interventions involving children.
Following the policy shift, several major health systems announced reviews, suspensions or changes to pediatric gender-related medical programs. The administration also directed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to review existing medical evidence surrounding gender-related care for minors.
Changes in Education, Sports, and Military Policies
The administration also ended federal support for gender identity and equity curricula in public education programs receiving federal funds, stating the move reinforces parental rights and state oversight of school content.
Additional directives address athletic competition and military service. The administration announced policies intended to ensure that women’s sports competitions are limited to biological female athletes and reinstated standards for military service based on biological sex through the United States Department of Defense.
Officials say the changes are intended to focus federal programs on what they describe as fairness, safety and readiness across government institutions.
