The Latest: Supreme Court rejects Trump mail ballot restrictions ahead of midterms

The Supreme Court has rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway. The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years. Nearly a third of U.S. voters cast their ballots by mail.

A federal whistleblower says a last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November’s elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws .

And the Federal Reserve is widely expected to lift its short-term interest rate Wednesday for the first time in three years to fight stubbornly high inflation , despite Trump's lobbying for a cut.

Here’s the Latest:

The technology industry’s increasingly urgent warnings about the potential harm of artificial intelligence are slamming into political intransigence in Washington, offering a fresh test of the federal government’s willingness and ability to confront what may become a defining issue of the era .

Trump is leading the opposition to recent calls by tech leaders seeking greater government oversight.

The president dismissed efforts to limit the technology on Monday as a “conspiracy.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has largely deferred to the White House.

Democrats, meanwhile, are pressing for a more robust response, convening in private on Tuesday in the House to discuss AI. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is hosting his colleagues for a briefing with experts on Wednesday.

The contrasting responses illustrate a yawning disconnect emerging between a tech sector warning of AI’s existential threats to humanity and a federal government often struggling to accomplish basic functions under the weight of intense partisanship and election-year pressure.

▶ Read more

A last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November’s elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws, according to a federal whistleblower’s statement released Monday.

The Department of Homeland Security probe known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” also asks employees to create federal law enforcement records about voters based on unreliable data, the account warns. That could potentially wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official documentation that could spur further investigation.

The anonymous, nearly 30-page disclosure was published Monday by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections.

Padilla and Schumer said Monday the initiative was an example of Trump attempting to interfere in elections and the short timelines would impede officials from conducting proper investigations. They noted that the data DHS has on voters can be unreliable and differ from state records, making any federal findings based on that data potentially problematic.

▶ Read more

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to lift its short-term interest rate Wednesday for the first time in three years to fight stubbornly high inflation , a move that would put the central bank at odds with President Donald Trump’s support for a cut.

An increase in the Fed’s rate, currently about 3.6%, isn’t guaranteed because Fed Chair Kevin Warsh doesn’t provide the signals about next moves that his predecessors did. Still, most analysts and economists expect a hike after a speech two weeks ago at the Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in which Warsh argued that the Fed had not yet achieved its goal of putting inflation in check.

A rate hike would throw another sharp shift into a volatile period for the economy and financial markets. As recently as March, the Fed had forecast it would cut its rate once this year. But with the Iran war flaring up again and causing sharp increases in oil and gas prices, inflation is likely to remain higher than the Fed’s 2% target for even longer.

▶ Read more

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway.

The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years and have accounted for nearly a third of votes cast.

It represented a stark defeat for Trump on an issue he consistently has emphasized as vital to ensuring election integrity even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots.

The Supreme Court majority wrote that the administration’s push to implement the restrictions this year is likely to lose in court, though the brief emergency order didn’t detail its reasoning. Two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented.

The Trump administration had asked the justices, once again at the center of a roiling political controversy, to clear the way for restrictions before the pivotal November contests for control of Congress.

▶ Read more