0:08
Colorado primary polls close, Phil Weiser leads in Democratic gubernatorial race
Phil Weiser is sitting at the top of the Democratic field in Colorado’s governor primary, and the numbers are nudging the race into a new shape. The latest poll shows his lead widening just enough that the party’s strategists are already re‑thinking how they’ll allocate resources for the general election. It’s not a landslide, but the margin feels solid enough to give his campaign a breathing room they didn’t have a few weeks ago.
What’s interesting under the hood is how the other contenders are reacting. Some of the lesser‑known candidates are seeing their support dip, which is prompting a scramble for endorsements and a tighter focus on niche issues that could still sway undecided voters. The Democratic establishment, meanwhile, is quietly lining up a coalition that could help Weiser lock in key constituencies before the November showdown.
All of this means the general election in Colorado could look quite different from what we expected a month ago. If Weiser keeps this momentum, the party’s playbook will likely shift toward a more unified front, while the Republicans will have to adjust their messaging to counter a candidate who’s now got a clearer path forward. It’s a subtle but telling pivot that could set the tone for the rest of the race.
1:23
[Video] Can a buyer buy a home with bad credit? 🤔
Hey Realtors 👋
There are a lot of people sitting on your sidelines right now who desperately want to buy a home, but they’re completely paralyzed by one thing: their credit score.
They think that because they have less-than-perfect credit, they are automatically locked out of homeownership. So instead of reaching out to you, they stay quiet, keep renting, and put their plans on hold.
This video gives those nervous buyers the encouragement they need - showing them bad credit isn't an automatic “no.”
Post this on your feed, drop it in your local Facebook groups, or send it to your cold leads.
2:01
FiveStack: SCOTUS Hands Trump the Government
In forty-eight hours the Supreme Court closed its term and rewrote who runs the government. Six to three, again and again — a number that tells you how fixed this Court has become. It gave Donald Trump the agencies, opened the money spigot, and let the states decide who counts as a girl. Then it drew exactly two lines it would not let him cross: it would not erase the Fourteenth Amendment, and it would not hand him the Federal Reserve.
On Tuesday’s Fivestack, Zev counted the five rulings down — least significant to most — with guest Anne P.
2:36
Mirror, Mirror On The Mall
I’ll get to the Supreme Court rulings today in the next item, but first, as we approach July 4, I need to get something off my mind. Yesterday when I saw the news that the Court declined to hear President Trump’s appeal in the E. Jean Carroll civil suit ruling, I was surprised by my gut reaction. My view of that case is that Trump was likely railroaded. But what got to me was my gut reaction to the news: Don’t care. I’m sick of him. Just tired of all the crap.
Wait, what? This is new.
3:06
What the Supreme Court Decisions About Trump’s Firings Mean
Our chief legal affairs correspondent, Adam Liptak, explains how two Supreme Court rulings on the firings of independent regulators first expand the power of the president, and then carve out an exception.
3:23
whatever you seek from the world can only be found in you.
There were nights when I stood beneath a sky so crowded with stars that I found myself praying even though I wasn’t religious. It seemed like the most naturally human thing to do when confronted with that level of beauty. I prayed — to whichever deities residing in the stars, to whatever entities listening from the dark — for love, for success and abundance, for an exciting life that’s also peaceful.
And sometimes, life would be kind enough to answer. It would lead me to meet my husband in Australia. It would offer me opportunities that randomly fall into my lap. Bless me with amazing friends and supportive family.
By all visible measures, I had been given much of what I once asked the stars for.
So why, even now, does some part of me still feel unfulfilled?
Why, after receiving so much, do I still carry the shameful suspicion that something is missing?
For a long time, I mistook that feeling for greed, ungratefulness, and an insatiable hunger for more when life had already been so generous.
Hadn’t I asked for love and received it?
Hadn’t I wished for abundance and now live in it?
Hadn’t I been granted everything I craved for?
But lately I have begun to wonder if that emptiness is simply the consequence of asking the world to provide what I have never learned to create within myself.
I have spent much of my life looking outward.
I looked for love from the world, from other people, yet I never learned how to create that love from within. I look in the mirror and see only deficiencies, recommendations for improvement — always a project that must be monitored and fixed, never a person who deserves respect.
I craved validation, obsessively replaying old scenes of praise, of teachers patting my head, of friends offering compliments – moments in which I had proof to see myself as good, worthy, enough. And still, I could not produce a single kind sentence about myself without feeling fraudulent.
Everything I asked for, I received. But all is meaningless if I can’t create the same for myself. And perhaps that’s the real tragedy.
Hi, I’m Janelle☆ Whoever you are, I hope today has been kind to you.
You’ve reached the paywall for this article. To continue reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to One Cup of Tea for exclusive access to all articles, podcasts, and materials. I’ve prepared a gift to welcome you to the community~
You can also help me by buying me a coffee ;) Your support means the world and helps me keep doing what I love. Thanks for walking this path with me, one step at a time ──★
5:45
NPR reporter explains retracted story on Alito’s retirement
The journalist walked us through how a report about Justice Samuel Alito’s retirement slipped out and then got pulled back. That story, which appeared on the same day it was announced, suggested Alito was leaving the bench, but the court never confirmed it and the piece was quickly retracted.
She explained that the mistake traced back to a mis‑directed tip and a rush to publish before the details were fully verified. The outlet issued an editor’s note acknowledging the error and clarified that neither Alito nor the court had announced a retirement.
Going forward, she said the newsroom is tightening its fact‑checking steps and reviewing how sources are vetted, hoping to avoid a repeat of this kind of slip.
6:29
In rebuke to Trump, Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, emphasizing the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence
The Supreme Court on June 30, 2026, declared that universal birthright citizenship is protected by the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, meaning that nearly all babies born in the United States automatically become American citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
The ruling rejects President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed the first day of his second administration, which sought to end birthright citizenship for the children of parents present in the country illegally and for tourists visiting only temporarily.
The high court ruled that “under the Constitution, they are citizens by birth.”
The ruling was split 5-4 on the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, ruled against the Trump order on the grounds that it violates federal law – which Congress could alter – but not the Constitution itself, making the ruling 6-3 against Trump.
Supreme Court watchers, including myself, expected the three liberal justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – to rule in favor of universal birthright citizenship, but imagined that the six conservatives would divide.
Two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined the liberals to form a narrow majority.
Four of the justices appointed by Republican presidents see the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment as quite different, primarily recognizing the citizenship of former slaves and their descendants after the Civil War. But they don’t see it applying to anyone born in the United States regardless of parentage.
In their view, birthright citizenship was only promised to those whose parents were legal residents with sole allegiance to the United States. As they see it, the American people can expand federal law to grant citizenship to others if they choose, but the Constitution does not demand it.
The timing of the landmark ruling is meaningful, coming a few days before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
As a longtime observer of the Supreme Court, I believe the best way to understand the dispute is that it reflects a deep conflict over how we see the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and how it frames the meaning of the Constitution.
Roberts concludes the ruling with the statement that “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community.”
This is a reference to a famous quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren dissenting in a 1958 ruling recognizing congressional power to strip a native-born American of their citizenship for voting in a foreign election. Warren, the chief justice who authored Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and many other landmark rulings expanding constitutional rights, wrote that “Citizenship is man’s basic right for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”
In Warren’s – and Roberts’ – view, the Declaration of Independence established not only the importance of individual rights, but also the equality of all in holding those rights. Citizenship must be equal and open, defined as broadly as the Constitution allows, rather than narrow in its scope.
When the 14th Amendment expanded citizenship after the Civil War, it did so with universal language, addressing race but also something broader: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the majority’s view, this must be read broadly to achieve the declaration’s insistence on rights and equality.
The dissenters believe that the declaration did something else: It established a new sovereign people who control their own definition of citizenship. In this view, the Declaration of Independence established a distinct kind of equality — an equal share in control over the government through political representation and elections.
This view means that the current citizens must agree to offer an equal share in governance to any new members of society, but there is no such thing as citizenship without consent: No one can demand citizenship in a democracy by violating its laws.
On the second page of the ruling, Roberts explains that “the story of citizenship in the United States begins with the English common law.”
Going back to the landmark Calvin’s Case in 1608, the British rule was that anyone born in the dominion of the king was a natural born subject.
Roberts writes that “This view crossed the Atlantic with the colonists — and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution, as ‘subjects’ of the sovereign became ‘citizens’ of the States.”
This British common law rule of broad citizenship shaped the discussion in the key case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898.
11:00
US imposes sanctions on Mexicans, entities tied to Mexican fuel smuggling network
MEXICO CITY, June 30 - The U.S. Treasury said on Tuesday it had imposed sanctions on two Mexican nationals and nine entities tied to a cartel-linked smuggling scheme that moves fuel from the United States into Mexico without paying a hefty tax on the imports.
11:20
Trump Lost on Birthright Citizenship. But He’s Winning the Immigration Wars.
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DEALT a major blow to Donald Trump’s mass deportation program Tuesday morning in Trump v. Barbara with a 6–3 decision striking down his executive order that purported to end birthright citizenship.
But how much of a blow was it really?
I’ve been grappling with that question ever since the ruling came out on Tuesday morning. And in my various conversations with legal scholars and immigrant advocates, it is clear that the fear they felt coming into decision day has been only partially alleviated.
Yes, the Supreme Court’s decision upheld that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and “are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”
And yes, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said “citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ . . . We keep that promise today.”
But step back from the prose and take note of the purpose. Roberts wasn’t making the case just to the public. He was making it to his colleagues.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh affirmed the judgment but dissented in part and did not join Roberts’s majority opinion.) In other words, four Supreme Court justices were willing to state that they do not believe birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution—a fact that would have shocked most legal scholars not too long ago.
So yes, the Court’s rejection of Trump’s order reveals the limits of his expansive and often illegal view of executive power that extends to modifying the Constitution via such orders. And yes, more than 250,000 babies born in the United States each year who would have been affected had the executive order been upheld, were not.
But opponents of Trump’s executive order still have future developments to fear. The door remains open to a future Congress restricting birthright citizenship through legislation, with only one justice needed to flip for that goal to be achieved.
THIS ISSUE BECAME the stuff of 72-point headlines when, among the many executive orders Trump approved in the hours after being sworn in for his second term, he signed one attempting to abolish birthright citizenship.
Ratified in 1868 to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved black Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment makes those born on U.S. soil full citizens entitled to all the associated rights and privileges thereof and ensuring “equality under the law, regardless of race, ancestry, or parentage,” as the American Immigration Council puts it. The amendment overrode the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”
Or as John Bingham, author of the amendment, once said, its purpose was to end the “horrid blasphemy . . . that this is a Government of white men.”
But that intention has been contested at times in history since. As Columbia University’s Mae Ngai, a historian specializing in immigration, told me, while the struggle over birthright citizenship is profoundly important, it is not new. She said today’s fight over the issue mirrors past episodes, such as the one in which Frederick Douglass challenged racialist and nativist positions in his famous 1867 lecture, “Our Composite Nation.” At the time, Douglass was speaking in opposition to attempts to restrict Chinese immigration and naturalization. He charged that post-Civil War American democracy must include all races.
This was the singular American identity the Trump administration sought to destroy.
“As the Trump administration lawyer said: We live in a different world today. And [Chief Justice] John Roberts said [during oral argument in April], ‘Yes it’s a different world, but it’s the same Constitution,’” Ngai noted.
WHICH RAISES ANOTHER reason that Tuesday’s ruling from the Court has not been so widely celebrated by immigrant rights activists. There simply has been too much damage done in other areas to celebrate a thin reaffirmation of the Constitution.
This certainly is a rebuke of the Trump administration, Ngai noted, but it is one amid so many large-scale political and legal abdications.
