‘I will follow the law,’ Bondi says after Democrats storm out of Epstein files briefing

(WASHINGTON) — Nearly two years after the Supreme Court’s monumental 2024 decision granting President Donald Trump sweeping immunity from prosecution, the ruling’s broader impact on American government is beginning to come into focus as Trump and his lawyers repeatedly invoke the case in an effort to get the justices to endorse expansive presidential power.

“That’s not a coincidence, it’s a strategy,” said James Sample, a constitutional scholar at Hofstra Law and ABC News legal contributor. “They’re not just invoking a precedent, they’re building an architecture.”

An ABC News review of the unprecedented 29 Trump emergency applications to the Supreme Court in his second term found that nearly a third directly cited Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in the immunity case, Trump v. U.S.

Trump attorneys reference portions of the court’s immunity decision at least 21 times to argue for “unrestricted” presidential power to fire executive branch employees; unreviewable control over “matters related to terrorism, trade and immigration;” and absolute authority as commander-in-chief to deploy troops to aid domestic law enforcement.

The Constitution “creates an ‘energetic, independent executive,’ not a subservient executive,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote the court, quoting Roberts, in a September request to allow Trump to remove Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook.

“These aren’t random citations,” Sample said. “The White House Counsel’s Office has read that opinion very carefully, and they are using it methodically.”

The court is still crafting a decision in the Cook case but has generally embraced the administration’s broad view of presidential authority to remove federal employees and supervise agencies.

Since January 2025, however, the justices have not referenced Trump v. U.S. to justify any of its decisions in favor of the Trump administration, leading some court analysts to question why the conservative majority has avoided explicitly invoking its own precedent.

“We just don’t know yet what this case means, and it will be up to a future Supreme Court to define it,” said Sarah Isgur, SCOTUS blog editor and ABC News legal contributor.

On several occasions, Trump appeals relying on the immunity decision have been rejected.

The court declined to embrace Trump administration claims in April 2025 that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was interwoven with the president’s “important foreign relations responsibilities,” which Roberts had indicated in the immunity decision were off limits for judicial review.

A majority of justices also rejected Trump’s argument that a lower court block on his National Guard deployment in Chicago infringed on core constitutional powers as commander-in-chief, which were detailed in Roberts’ opinion in the immunity case.

“They have been making a more powerful president — with more complete control over the executive branch and its employees,” said Isgur of the high court’s conservative majority, “but also a weaker presidency that has to go back to Congress if it wants to move the law in any meaningful way.”

Some legal scholars note the Trump v. U.S. decision also broke new ground by putting in writing the idea that the president has exclusive authority to enforce federal law and unchecked prosecutorial discretion — an endorsement that some say has had at the very least a psychological impact on the president and his team.

Roberts’ opinion enshrines the idea that “investigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function” and that the president has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute.”

“The Justice Department will likely use [the ruling’s] discussion of the exclusive power over prosecution and investigation to push the bounds of this discretion,” wrote Harvard Law professor and former assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration Jack Goldsmith in a recent law review article.

Trump has asserted himself as the nation’s top law enforcer in his second term, personally directing the attorney general and other top officials on whom to investigate and whom to prosecute.

Trump has pushed indictments of many of his perceived opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, California Sen. Adam Schiff, and former special counsel Jack Smith.

When six Democratic members of Congress posted a video telling military service members that they had the right not to carry out unlawful orders, Trump said the “traitors” should be “arrested and put on trial.” Efforts to secure an indictment subsequently failed.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in the Trump immunity case explicitly enshrines the president’s right to active involvement in the cases and others like them.

“The president may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with the Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'” Roberts wrote, quoting Article II of the Constitution. Later, Roberts adds on behalf of the court, a president has “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials, and the president cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority.”

“Those quotes are also just true as a matter of the Constitution,” Isgur said. “That’s what a president is supposed to do. What’s new is using criminal prosecutors for partisan purposes — and there’s no quotes about that in the case.”

A majority of Americans, 55%, believe Trump is using the Justice Department to file unjustified criminal charges against his opponents, according to a November 2025 Marquette Law School poll; 45% think the charges have been justified.

At the same time, most Americans — 56% — disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job, compared with 44% who approve, the Marquette poll found.

“The Court has traditionally proceeded cautiously and carefully when marking out exclusive presidential power because the president is known to run hard when the Court recognizes such power. But it did the opposite in Trump v U.S.,” Goldsmith argues.

“The Court issued an incautious and overly broad ruling on exclusive presidential powers that presidents will use to their advantage against the other branches,” Goldsmith wrote, “until the Court, in more considered reflection, acknowledges its imprudence and alters course.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday will for the first time wade into the heated national debate over whether transgender girls should be allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports.

The justices will hear arguments in a pair of cases from Idaho and West Virginia, where federal courts have blocked state laws that would prohibit trans girls from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.

The outcome of the cases will determine the fate of those laws and similar measures in 27 other states. There are an estimated 122,000 transgender American teens who participate in high school sports nationwide, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School.

Lower courts have concluded separately that the bans discriminate “on the basis of sex” in violation of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that has promoted equal opportunities for women and girls in athletics, and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The states are asking the justices to overturn those decisions and reinstate their laws, arguing that sex and gender identity are not synonymous when it comes to women’s athletics and that allowing transgender girls to compete against cisgender girls is unfair and unsafe.

“It really comes down to one simple question,” said West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey in an interview with ABC News. “Is it legal and constitutional for states to delineate their athletic playing fields based on the immutable physical characteristics that people have that are associated with their sex that’s assigned at birth?”

Becky Pepper Jackson, a high school sophomore from Bridgeport, West Virginia, who competes in discus and shot put on the track and field team, brought the legal challenge to her state’s law in 2021. She is the only known openly trans athlete in West Virginia in any sport.

“Someone has to do it. Someone has to do this for all of us,” Becky, 15, told ABC News in an exclusive interview. “Otherwise these laws and bills are just going to stand.”

Transgender athletes make up just over 1% of the more than 8 million teenage student athletes nationwide, according to the Williams Institute.

Idaho college student Lindsay Hecox, a former track and cross-country runner who was barred from trying out for her school teams, sued over her state’s ban in 2020. Last year, she asked the court to drop her case because she no longer wished to compete in sports and didn’t want to be in the spotlight. However, Idaho fought to keep the case alive.

“Everyone has had the experience of being told, look, you can’t play. You have to sit on the bench, or you can’t make the team. And everyone knows how that feels,” said Sasha Jean Buchert, an attorney with Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ advocacy group involved with the cases.

“That’s what’s happening to transgender kids right now,” Buchert said. “And the scope of [these bans] is absolutely absurd.”

Becky, who has openly identified as a girl since third grade, said she has never undergone male puberty, thanks to puberty-blocking medication, and has no physiological advantage over her peers.

“She has testosterone from her adrenal glands just like every female out there, but that’s the only testosterone she has,” said her mother, Heather Jackson. “She’s actually not the biggest person on her team. There’s people taller than her; there’s people shorter than her. She’s just an average female teenager.”

As a young cross-country runner, Becky was consistently at the back of the pack. More recently, she earned a spot in the state championship for discus and shot put, where she placed third and eighth, respectively.

“I put in time over the summer and after practices just trying to improve my technique and get better,” she said.

Her performance at an eighth grade track meet in 2024 drew protests from other athletes who claimed she made them uncomfortable in the locker room and on the field.

“I just didn’t think it was right,” said Sabrina Shriver, 16, a former discus thrower who refused to compete against Becky at the meet and later quit the sport because of her participation in the league. “It was just, I don’t know, we all just felt uncomfortable and we’re just, we didn’t want any part of it.”

The competitive advantage boys and men have physically over girls and women has been well established in physically demanding sports by medical research and serves as a primary basis for distinctions between the sexes in athletics.

Studies have shown testosterone produced during male puberty does lead to more muscle mass, larger hearts and lungs, greater body height and longer limbs on average for boys and men, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.

Before puberty, however, “sex differences in athletic performance are minimal,” the group says research shows.

A key issue in the West Virginia case is a dispute over whether Becky, 15, possesses an advantage at all, given she has not undergone male puberty, takes estrogen supplements and does not produce high levels of testosterone.

“If [sports leagues] look at the medical records of individuals like the Olympic committee does, testing people — they test for performance enhancing medications or drugs that their athletes take — so if we can look at those levels, let’s look at her levels,” Heather Jackson said.

McCuskey says a testing regimen is just not practicable and that Becky can still compete, but on a boys team. “We have to be able to draw a line here,” he said.

“Becky is bigger and stronger and faster than the females that she’s competing against,” said the attorney general.

He has urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the debate, arguing in a court brief that West Virginia’s law “implicates ‘fierce scientific and policy debates’ that elected legislators are best able to resolve.”

The U.S. Olympic Committee, the NCAA and 29 states ban transgender girls and women from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. The other 21 states do not have bans, including California and New York, which have laws explicitly allowing trans athletes to compete.

Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law banning some gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors, rejecting claims that the law discriminated “on the basis of sex” and saying that states should have leeway to regulate health care in an area of scientific uncertainty.

In 2020, however, the Court concluded in a landmark decision that a Michigan transgender woman fired by her employer for being transgender was discriminated against “on the basis of sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his majority opinion that her termination was “for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”

Becky, Lindsay, and their attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal say the same reasoning should be applied to sports bans.

“There’s been a number of setbacks that we’ve experienced over the last few years in the courts, but I do have a sense of optimism with this case in light of the fact that the legal issues at play here are some of the same issues at play five years ago,” said Buchert, the Lambda Legal attorney.

Notwithstanding the legal arguments, 69% of Americans say transgender girls should only be allowed to play on boys teams, according to a June 2025 Gallup survey.

The Trump administration also supports the exclusion of transgender athletes from sports teams. An executive order signed in February 2025 says “it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”

Becky says, while she understands public opinion, she is unable to “go against who I am.”

“I’ve been a girl forever,” she said, “and playing on the guys’ team is going backwards.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is bashing two of the Democrats who repeatedly interrupted his State of the Union speech by shouting at him, calling them “LUNATICS” who “look like they should be institutionalized” in a social media post on Wednesday.

During his Tuesday evening address, Trump attacked Democrats several times, with his comments on his immigration crackdown eliciting jeers from Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who repeatedly said the president was “killing Americans” — a reference to the fatal shootings of Minnesota residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal law enforcement earlier this year.

Their fatal shootings were amid the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which sent federal agents to Minnesota as part of its immigration enforcement. Border czar Tom Homan announced earlier this month that the effort was ending.

“When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” Trump said.

In his social media post, Trump also said “we should send them back from where they came — as fast as possible.”

Omar, who fled Somalia and came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was a child, has been living in the country since she was 12 years old and is a U.S. citizen. Tlaib was born and raised in Detroit; she is the daughter of Palestinian immigrant parents.

Trump’s social media post about Omar and Tlaib mark his first comments the day after his major address.

Omar has been the target of verbal attacks from Trump for years. Earlier this year, his attacks have come alongside escalated rhetoric describing the Somali community in Minnesota, the largest in the nation.

During Tuesday night’s speech, Democrats remained seated when Trump asked members of the chamber to stand if they supported the idea that the American government was “to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Trump said at the seated Democrats.

“You have killed Americans,” Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, repeatedly shouted as Trump continued talking.

Tlaib, who was seated next to Omar, also shouted at the president throughout his speech. She even appeared to repeatedly mouth “K-K-K” as Republicans chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A.”

Omar told CNN Wednesday morning that she had no regrets for calling out the president during the speech, especially since Trump did not mention the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti.

“It was really unavoidable. The president talked about protecting Americans, and I just had to remind him that his administration was responsible for killing two of my constituents,” she said.

The speech was punctuated at times by other interjections, including from Tlaib, a Democrat of Michigan and outspoken critic of the president, who at one point in the speech called Trump “the most corrupt president.”

After the president said that Democrats “are crazy,” Tlaib, who was wearing a pin that said, “F*** ICE,” stood briefly, then sat down again before again shouting at Trump from her seat.

“How’s those Epstein files?” she shouted as the president spoke.

Neither Omar nor Tlaib were asked to leave the chamber, but they were among the many Democrats who left before Trump finished his speech, which lasted one hour and 48 minutes — making it the longest speech before a joint session of Congress in history.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked after the speech if Omar or Talib would see any consequences for their actions.

“We’ll find out,” Johnson responded.

ABC News’ Sarah Beth Hensley and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.

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