Billionaires, SCOTUS & America's 250th

After a jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, the president appealed the case all the way up to the Supreme Court, which let the original verdict against Trump stand. Carroll and her lawyer are still pushing for the money Trump owes her from that verdict, since Trump keeps on trying to not pay it.

The court also ruled that if police want location data from Google, they need a warrant. This case stemmed from Google handing over a robbery suspect’s location history. The justices ruled that this was unconstitutional, which will save me some embarrassment if the cops ever want to know how often I’m going to Taco Bell at 2 a.m.

Another ruling lets the Trump administration fire people at independent agencies without cause. All six conservative justices sided with Trump on this one, allowing the president to fire the only Democratic commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that by handing Trump this much control over the executive branch, the court’s conservative majority “gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted.” Happy 250th, America.

But the court also blocked Trump from firing the only Democratic appointee to the Federal Reserve Board while a lawsuit challenging the dismissal makes its way through lower courts.

In what looks like a departure from the court’s recent attacks on voting, the justices ruled that states can keep counting mail-in ballots after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship and rejected Trump’s executive order trying to limit it. Brett Kavanaugh, conservative justice and subject of an FBI report sparse enough to have been written by a sixth grader who didn’t do the assigned reading, joined the majority in rejecting Trump’s executive order. But even though Kavanaugh wrote that federal law protects birthright citizenship, he disagreed that the Constitution protects it. (It does, by the way. The 14th Amendment says “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”)

The 14th Amendment is, at the risk of sounding too much like Leslie Knope, one of the sexiest amendments. It was ratified not long after the Civil War to extend citizenship to formerly enslaved people, its equal protection clause guarantees US citizens equal protection under the law, and its due process clause has been interpreted to protect a bunch of our rights. The 14th Amendment has been used in Supreme Court cases that found racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional, established rights to privacy and abortion, protected interracial and same-sex marriage, and a whole lot more. (I went on for much longer about substantive due process in a script for LNI’s previous long form iteration that never aired, so please humor me as I nerd out about it here.)

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a US citizen. He was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents. The reasoning behind the court’s decision? Yet another part of the amendment that keeps on giving: the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. You know, the one that reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Trump’s push against birthright citizenship has extended to exaggerated right-wing claims of so-called “birth tourism.” The Justice Department has even told federal prosecutors to prioritize going after birthing tourists who come to the US with the goal of making their children citizens. But researchers have found that only 26,000 of the 3.5 million babies born in the US each year “could be attributed to birth tourism.” I won’t tell you what percentage that is because the one time I tried to do long division in this newsletter, we had to issue a correction. But it’s a really small percentage.

The app, called Arena, will use “play money,” which is also what I call it when I spend too much in cash but don’t feel any consequences because I can’t see my bank account going down. Meta’s play money is actually fake, though, which sets Arena apart from other prediction market apps like Kalshi or Polymarket that let users bet real-life money. But fear not, prospective insider traders! Meta hasn’t ruled out using real money in the future.

Not only is Meta replicating platforms that monetize and gamify controversial events like the US and Israel’s war on Iran or the US kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro; they’re also trying to get away with not paying people. See, Meta previously tried to make a prediction market app in 2020, then scrapped it in 2022 because of “the operational cost of manual question curation.” (Read: It costs money to pay people to run this thing, and you can’t just give them play money.)

But now, you can’t spell “prediction market” without “AI.” (The “A” and the “I” aren’t next to each other, but don’t tell Mark Zuckerberg.) NPR reports that Meta plans to use AI to drive Arena. That doesn’t require the same pesky operational costs as paying people a fraction of a fraction of your CEO’s net worth so they can survive.

So let’s say a user spends their play money on — oh, I don’t know — whether Madelyne Pryor will reappear on “X-Men '97” Season 2. AI would determine whether or not Madelyne was there. But AI is wrong all the time. So it raises serious questions that Meta is using it to determine whether the thing you bet would happen, actually happened.

This brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise! Here are things to keep in mind when you see stories about flashy new AI products.

Last week, following a sound check from this reportedly and tragically straight audio engineer, Keir Starmer became Britain’s sixth prime minister to announce his resignation within 10 years. Starmer’s own party has been pressing him to step down for a few reasons: his appointment of a former Jeffrey Epstein associate as the UK’s ambassador to the US, a set of poor election results, and one challenger’s rising popularity, to name a few.

Unlike in the US, where we would get stuck with JD Vance as president if Donald Trump falls asleep during another meeting and never wakes up, Starmer’s resignation doesn’t hand power over to his deputy prime minister. Instead, Starmer said he asked his party’s governing body to set up a timetable for picking his replacement. Members of parliament would nominate potential replacements before their mid-July recess, thousands of party members and affiliated groups would then vote, and the new PM would be in place before parliament comes back in September.

But it’s looking pretty likely that there won’t be a contest at all. Remember that one popular challenger? His name is Andy Burnham. He won a special election before Starmer announced his resignation, and he’s currently the only member of parliament in the Labour Party trying to replace the Prime Minister.

Two years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced Apple Intelligence, an AI system that was almost immediately unpopular with users who were also overwhelmingly unwilling to pay for it. Welcome to our latest installment of Tech CEOs Can’t Stop Making Stuff That Nobody Wants To Buy.

That’s tough news for Apple, considering that the AI boom fueled by things like Apple Intelligence is leading to exorbitant storage costs. Chips are getting more expensive because as AI data centers demand more and more of them, they’re in shorter and shorter supply.

So, guess who gets to face the consequences? No, not the tech executives pushing AI, silly! It’s you and me! Apple announced it’s raising prices on some products by around $200, citing the rising costs of memory chips. The CEO, whose net worth is $3 billion, called the price increases "unavoidable."

In fairness to Apple, they’re not the only ones sticking us with the bill. Samsung, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have all announced price hikes. And rising electronics prices are just one example of AI impacting affordability. A lawsuit alleges that gas companies used AI to raise prices, and a Forbes article (as well as the AI summary of it at the top of the webpage, lol) say AI costs companies more than the humans it replaced.

Since pointing out people’s net worth has become my new favorite hobby over the course of this newsletter edition, it’s worth pointing out that Trump added $2.2 billion to his net worth last year. To put that in context, I passed on buying a bagel sandwich this morning because retiring one day instead would be nice.

The president has also threatened to give a “really long speech” on July 4 even though DC is set to see extreme heat. The speech is set to begin at 9:45pm ET, which will coincidentally be my bedtime. Rising nighttime temperatures are a marker of climate change, and climate scientists say the atmosphere holding onto more heat at night also means hotter days.

Speaking of hot places and awkward segues, Texas is requiring public school students to read passages from the Bible. It’s part of their new mandatory reading list, which the state implemented alongside a new social studies curriculum that emphasizes Christian figures and downplays the history of racism in the US. The Texas Tribune reported that critics condemned the lack of racial, ethnic and gender representation in the list’s books, and they criticized the emphasis on Christianity over other religions.