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Two supreme court justices appear before House lawmakers
Supreme court justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett are now sitting before House lawmakers to discuss the court’s budget request, particularly the need for increased security for the judiciary.
Democrat Steny Hoyer, the ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee holding today’s hearing, welcomed the justices and noted that appearances by supreme court justices used to be more common. As I noted earlier, the last time a sitting justice answered questions on Capitol Hill was 2019.
“With a deeply divided country and increasingly violent rhetoric being directed at judges, Congress must provide sufficient funding to ensure the safety of all judicial personnel,” Hoyer added in his opening statement. “At the same time, while we take measures to protect the physical safety of judges and court staff, Congress also has a responsibility to safeguard the independence of our judiciary and its ability to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans. Part of that is making certain that there is adequate funding for the public defenders.”
Key events
Cate Brown
Konstantin Sokolov, a Russian-born private equity investor in Chicago, will serve as chairman of a new state department enterprise fund overseeing more than $200m designated for a central Asia trade corridor, including investments in transportation, energy infrastructure and critical minerals, the Guardian has learned.
The state department confirmed his appointment on Friday.
Sokolov was one of 36 donors, including 21 corporations and 15 individuals and family foundations, who Donald Trump said contributed over $350m to his ballroom project.
Two-thirds of the corporate donors have since received government contracts, according to research by Public Citizen, a government watchdog group. And several individual donors have received top advisory roles or political appointments, including Benjamin Leon Jr, a Cuban American healthcare magnate who was appointed US ambassador to Spain after his ballroom contribution, and Harold Hamm, an 80-year-old Oklahoma oil executive who successfully secured tax breaks for his company and has helped shape Trump’s energy policy.
Sokolov is the latest ballroom donor to receive a government position. The sum of his gift has not been disclosed. He has not held a previous government job.
Campaign finance records show that Sokolov has given more than $12m to Republican campaigns and political groups during Trump’s second term, including $11m to the president’s Super Pac Maga Inc, and $443,000 to the Republican National Committee. He was previously a modest Obama donor and contributed $3,600 to the former president’s 2008 campaign.
Sokolov declined a Guardian interview request and did not respond to a detailed list of questions about his appointment. The White House referred questions to the state department.
Darline Graham Nordone, sister of late Republican senator Lindsey Graham, to be sworn in as replacement
The sister of the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham will be sworn in as his replacement today, to finish out the remainder of his term. The ceremony will take place at 2:30pm ET
Darline Graham Nordone was appointed by Henry McMaster, South Carolina’s governor.
“Lindsey took care of his little sister in years long departed. It’s my honor to ask his little sister, Darline Graham, to finish his work for him now,” the Republican governor said at a press conference convened at South Carolina’s state capital in Columbia.
After Lindsey Graham won South Carolina’s Republican primary, the state GOP will hold a special contest on 11 August to choose a new Senate nominee, who will face off against Democrat Annie Andrews in the November midterms.
Following today’s latest CPI figures, Kevin Warsh – the new Federal Reserve chair – will face House lawmakers on the financial services committee at 10am ET. This comes ahead of the central bank’s policy meeting at the end of July, where we can expect an interest-rate cut decision.
At the same time, supreme court justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barratt will appear at a House appropriations committee hearing to discuss the budget request for the court in the upcoming fiscal year. This will be the first time sitting members of the bench have sat before Congress since 2019.
Latest data shows inflation cools to 3.5%
Inflation cooled to an annual rate of 3.5% in June as the brief US-Iran ceasefire, which has since ended, brought energy prices down, according to the latest consumer price index (CPI) data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices dropped by 0.4% from May to June.
A reminder that in May, inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2%, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.
Inflation now remains higher than when Joe Biden left office, despite Donald Trump’s platform that touted lowering costs for everyday Americans.
Donald Trump is in Washington today. We can expect to hear from him at 11am ET when he welcomes the prime minister of Iraq, Ali al-Zaidi, to the White House.
We’ll bring you the latest lines from their bilateral meeting, particularly if Trump has any more information on the latest strikes on Iran and the ensuing backlash from Democratic lawmakers in Congress.
US refunds $81bn in Trump tariffs after supreme court ruled them illegal
Lauren Almeida
The US government has already paid back tens of billions of dollars in tariffs it collected before the supreme court ruled them illegal, according to budget figures released on Monday.
Tariffs – taxes on imported goods – have been a key part of Donald Trump’s economic plan since he took office again last year.
In February the supreme court shut down a big chunk of the extra tariffs Trump had ordered, forcing the government to return money to the companies that had paid them.
According to the budget data, the US has paid out $81bn (£61bn) in tariff refunds so far this fiscal year, which started in October 2025, compared with $5bn during the same period last year.
A Treasury department official said the spike was almost entirely because of the supreme court decision, with most of the refunds happening in May and June.
Trump had pitched the tariffs as a catch-all fix for the economy, bringing factories back to the US, getting better trade deals and closing the deficit in the federal budget.
But the deficit, which had become a little smaller last year thanks to the tariff income, is now growing again. It hit $1.367tn in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 2%.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Hunter Biden says he is “grateful that the rule of law prevailed” in a defamation lawsuit that recently netted him a judgment of $1.7m in punitive damages from former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.
Biden made that comment in a social media post that served as his first comments about the judgment, which a federal judge in California handed down on Friday.
The post by Joe Biden’s son cited a portion of the ruling which said Byrne “is not credible, fabricates awesome and farfetched narratives to garner attention in the media, and fabricated the defamatory story at issue in this case to damage the plaintiff’s reputation”.
US district judge Stephen Wilson’s “order … speaks for itself,” Biden wrote, along with a hyperlink to the decision.
Biden sued Byrne in 2023, maintaining that Byrne lied in an interview that Biden had solicited a bribe from Iran’s government in 2021.
Biden’s father was the US president at the time. Byrne for his part is a Donald Trump ally who funded efforts to overturn the president’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Hunter Biden’s lawsuit recounted how Byrne in an interview lied that Hunter Biden – in exchange for an $800m bribe – had offered Iran to go to his father, have him “unfreeze” $8bn in frozen Iranian assets and ensure that the US would “go easy” on Iran during “nuclear talks” between the two countries.
Michael Sainato
Federal officials fired by the Trump administration are calling the recent supreme court decision a “dagger in the heart” of the civil service that will open independent federal government agencies to corruption and manipulation at the whim of the president.
Since Donald Trump took office again in January 2025, he has fired more than 50 officials from federal agencies as the Trump administration openly sought to have the supreme court overturn a landmark 1935 ruling that limited the president’s power over independent agencies, known as Humphrey’s Executor.
The ruling in the decision, Trump v Slaughter, which effectively gives the president free rein to fire members of independent agencies, was based on the firing of Rebecca Slaughter, appointed to serve as a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by Trump in 2018.
Slaughter said she received the email notifying her that she was fired by Trump in March 2025 as she was helping with rehearsal for her child’s elementary school play, a performance of Beauty and the Beast.
“My stomach just dropped,” she said, noting she wasn’t surprised given similar firings were occurring at other agencies with statutory protections. “I was really hoping that it would avoid us, both because I love my job, but really more because I love the agency. I just knew this was going to be a big fight and pretty unpleasant and pretty destructive to this institution that I really valued.”
She called Alvaro Bedoya, the other Democratic commissioner at the agency, who was at his daughter’s gymnastics practice. He had been fired as well.
They both filed a lawsuit challenging their terminations a few days later, though Bedoya resigned from the FTC as he was not being compensated and he could not afford to be without income, while Slaughter’s husband’s income made it possible for her to continue pursuing the litigation.
‘Misuse’ of crowd control weapons on ICE protesters led to blindings and traumatic brain injuries, report finds
José Olivares
It’s been a brutal tactic deployed by local and federal law enforcement officials time and again over the past year: using teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to control protests outside ICE detention centers or during enforcement operations.
Now, a new report lays bare the scale of the use of these crowd control weapons during anti-immigration demonstrations across the US, including hundreds of incidents that resulted in lasting and traumatic injuries.
The report and an interactive map was created by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley (HRC) and released this week. Doctors and human rights experts with PHR and HRC documented 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of these crowd control weapons, also known as “less-lethal weapons”, from June 2025 through May 2026.
“This is a concerning story,” said Dr Rohini Haar, the lead author of the report and a PHR medical expert, in an interview with the Guardian.
The report documented 203 injuries stemming from the alleged misuse of the crowd control weapons. Some of the injuries included blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions.
The researchers struggled to confirm the full scale of the injuries, because “visual investigative techniques cannot adequately assess invisible injuries, such as chemical injury or chronic pain or hearing loss”.
“The true number of injuries is likely far greater,” the report adds.
ICE agent fatally shoots driver in Maine, six days after similar death in Texas
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
A US immigration officer shot and killed a man identified by rights groups as a 26-year-old Colombian on Monday, the second such killing by federal agents in less than a week.
The shooting happened in Biddeford, a town of 22,000 people in the northern state of Maine and is likely to fuel criticism of president Donald Trump’s deportation drive and its handling by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
US media identified the victim as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who reportedly worked as a delivery driver and lived in Biddeford with his wife and three-year-old daughter.
An ICE spokesperson said officers had tried to stop a vehicle at around 7.20am local time after conducting surveillance of the last known address of a person with a deportation order, AFP reported.
A vehicle “attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon. The driver of the vehicle was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. He passed away from his injuries,” they said.
Senator Angus King said he spoke with homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin following the fatal shooting. King urged state and local officials to remain involved in the FBI-led investigation and also raised concerns that ICE agents were not wearing body cameras.
Dozens of demonstrators were seen in Biddeford hours after the incident chanting “get ICE out” and called out Republican senator Susan Collins for her complicit votes supporting the DHS agency.
Monday’s ICE-involved killing in Maine, and the one last Tuesday in Texas, brings the number of people shot dead during immigration enforcement operations to at least seven since January 2025, when Trump returned to office and launched a campaign of mass deportations.
In other developments:
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Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has been named as her late brother’s temporary replacement in the US Senate after his unexpected death over the weekend. Nordone would serve the remaining months on Graham’s current term. More here.
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The US has launched its third consecutive night of strikes on Iran hours after Donald Trump said Washington would reinstate a maritime blockade on the country and, in an apparently policy reversal, charge ships for safe passage. More here.
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The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced that the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice have created a “joint taskforce to identify and prosecute” what he called the “unauthorized disclosure of sensitive” information to the press, marking the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s effort to crackdown on leaks. More here.
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Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, launched a campaign to dismantle the international criminal court (ICC), claiming the global tribunal was interfering with US military and law enforcement operations at the risk of American sovereignty. More here.
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