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The Florida Supreme Court has declined to suspend the Florida law license of Kenneth Chesebro, convicted in Georgia of filing a false list of electors there to undermine Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Instead, the justices issued a reprimand over the objection of Justice Jorge Labarga, the sole member of the court not appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Former Gov. Charlie Crist placed him on the Supreme Court in January 2009.) “In my view, the intentional commission of fraud upon the court is one of the most egregious ethical transgressions a lawyer can commit, and such serious misconduct necessitates the imposition of severe professional sanctions,” Labarga wrote. Labarga said a written reprimand is “disproportionate to the severity of Chesebro’s grave ethical violations” and called Chesebro’s actions “an intolerable breach of professional ethics.” Chesebro was a key figure in the plot to submit fraudulent certificates claiming that Trump won the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, instead of Biden. He was among 77 people pardoned by Trump for any federal crimes shortly after Trump resumed office. The pardon would not preclude any state charges. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October 2023 in Fulton County, Ga., Superior Court to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents for his role in the fake electors plan, Phoenix affiliate Georgia Recorder has reported. He was sentenced to five years’ probation. “However, because the conviction was entered pursuant to Georgia’s First Offender Act, and Chesebro’s probation was later terminated early, he was ultimately ‘exonerated of guilt’ and now ‘stand[s] discharged as a matter of law.’ Indeed, upon entering a consent order terminating probation, the Georgia trial court declared that Chesebro ‘shall not be considered to have ever had a criminal conviction,’” Florida’s high court noted. ‘Unique’ The unsigned majority opinion said the court was “bound to respect the judgments of sister states under principles of comity.” However, “we must fashion a remedy appropriate to the unique facts of this case and, after careful deliberation, find that a reprimand is appropriate,” the opinion says. “Suspension or a more serious sanction would have been fitting had Chesebro not been exonerated under the distinct circumstance presented here; Chesebro’s full discharge under the Georgia First Offender Act, however, is a fact we do not ignore.” Florida’s attorney ethics standards hold a reprimand appropriate “when a lawyer negligently engages in conduct that is a violation of a duty owed as a professional and causes injury or potential injury to a client, the public, or the legal system,” Labarga wrote. “Because the discharge of Chesebro’s conviction pursuant to Georgia’s First Offender Act does not undo his admitted act of misconduct, I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that suspension is inappropriate,” he concluded.

Pamela Carlin, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery professor of Public Interest Law and a founder and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law school, has argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court. And during that time, she’s come to an assessment about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: the man is a partisan hack — and he makes no bones about it. They don’t care if they make the court “look nakedly, openly political,” said Carlin speaking on Slate’s Amicus podcast with host Dalia Lithwick. “They have just decided they have the power right now to undo the second Reconstruction, and they’re happy to do that,” said Carlin. “And they don’t care that it’s obvious that that aligns with a particular wing of the Republican Party … When you now have a Republican Party, especially in the south, that has no interest whatsoever in attracting Black votes. … [I]t’s a party that is not interested in being a multiracial, multiethnic party.” Carlin took particular issue with the court’s recent move to “eviscerate the Voting Rights act of 1965,” which is a statute that President Johnson called the “most monumental act in the history of American freedom” when he signed it and which Carlin said President Ronald Reagan referred to as “a crown jewel” when he signed the reauthorization of the act in 1982. Consider the court’s recent 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, wherein the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map drawn to include a second majority-Black district. The ruling found that intentionally creating districts to satisfy Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But that’s the character of someone like Alito, said Carlin. “[W]hen Justice Alito applied for a job in the Reagan Justice Department, he said that the thing that inspired him to go to law school and to care about constitutional law was his dislike of … the decision to apply one person, one vote to legislative elections and say, ‘you can’t have one district that has 100,000 people in it and another district that has 700,000 people in it,’ the way some states did prior to one person, one vote,” said Carlin. “So this is a guy who from very outset of his career has disliked the Supreme Court’s democracy protecting decisions and has decided to do something about it.” And they did. With abandonment of precedent, the Roberts court with Alito in lead has “completely reversed” what the Supreme Court did 40 years ago, she said. “What he has said is, essentially, as long as the Republican Party is willing to screw over white Democrats, it’s free to screw over Black people as well, because Black people vote overwhelmingly in the south, in particular for candidates who are Democrats,” said Carlin, adding that Alito has warped the court to thoroughly that now it is proclaiming “not only aren’t we gonna protect you, but we’re not gonna let Congress protect you either” with response laws. “[What] Justice Thomas and Justice Alito and the chief learned is you’ve got the power now, but you may not have the power five or ten years from now. You’ve got justices, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito, in particular, who really dislike the second Reconstruction,” she said. “I mean, they really, really dislike it. And they have the power to get rid of something they really, really dislike. Why not take it? Especially if your view of American institutions is as cynical as theirs seems to be.”

The last time President Donald Trump got stomped in a midterm election, in 2018, his unpopularity cost his Republican Party more than three dozen House seats. But the New York Times reports even that wasn’t a true stomping because “the bottom never truly fell out for the Republicans that year.” This year is gearing up to be the real stomp. “The party actually gained ground in the Senate — as working-class white voters largely kept their faith in Mr. Trump’s economic know-how,” reports NY Times national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher. “Today, that once-deep reservoir of good will has largely evaporated.” Trump’s crucial bloc of blue-collar white voters are, for the first time, extremely doubtful of Trump’s handling of the economy, and a NY Times review of polling is showing “an extraordinary swing on that issue among white voters without college degrees between his first midterm election and now.” In 2018, working-class white voters still approved of Trump’s management of the economy by margins of 30 percentage points or even more. Now, recent polls reveal them disapproving of him by 14 to more than 30 points, depending on the survey. To be sure, Trump’s approval on the economy has dropped across practically every group, but the Times reports his “cratering support” among his most loyal, most white demographic means a pivotal foundation of his political coalition for more than a decade is potentially “the most consequential developments of 2026,” according to interviews with strategists in both parties who are involved in the midterms. Trump’s people and GOP strategists see the yawning cavern where their floor used to be, and they’re freaking. But they have no lifesavers to grab, according to surveys. Trump’s advisers are trying to sell voters on the policies in last year’s tax cut package, but the American public does not appear to be biting. “It’s working-class voters who are not happy with the Republican Party, and they may not come out and vote,” John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who has worked for Trump for years, warned in an interview. He added that he’s also seeing backsliding of Trump’s gains in 2024 among working-class Black and Hispanic voters. At this point, one of the only groups that still support him on the economy in polls are hardcore Republicans, but that’s not nearly enough to salvage Republicans’ midterms — not when blue-collar white voters, who voted more than two to one for Trump in 2024 stay home or turn to Democrats. “It’s critical,” said McLaughlin, of mobilizing the white working class. “If they don’t, we lose the House and the Senate.”

CNN reports gas is currently at $4.11 a gallon, on average, in the U.S. But the nation is just one month away from gas pump devastation if President Donald Trump fails to reverse the damage he’s done to the pivotal international oil corridor in the Strait of Hormuz. America has become the supplier of last resort for nations who used to get their oil from the Middle East, reports CNN correspondent Ed Lavandera. And this has caused the oil supply here to get dangerously low, almost to the point of sending gas prices soaring even higher. “I'm afraid that it could be some difficult times coming,” said Steve Crowder, president of Little River Energy Company in Cushing, Okla. “If the conflict is resolved, the Strait is open, shipping resumes, we'll dodge a bullet and we'll avoid some real problems. And if it drags on, it could be really tough. Yeah, real tough.” Cushing lies between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, where a vast spiderweb of underground pipelines feed into one of the world's largest privately owned storage hubs for U.S. crude oil. “As far as the eye can see, dozens of massive storage tanks dot the landscape. Oil industry analysts closely monitor how much crude oil is in these tanks. And right now, alarm bells are ringing,” said Lavandera. Generally, the Cushing tanks can hold about 75 million barrels of oil, but the levels now have dropped to below 22 million because of Trump’s voluntary Iraq war and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. And analysts say that if these tanks are not replenished fast enough, in the weeks ahead Americans will be paying more for gas at the pump as international buyers and market forces price U.S. customers out of their own locally-produced oil. Worse, when these tanks reach the 20 million mark, Lavandera said “it's like scraping the bottom of the barrel. The crude oil becomes an unusable sludge.” From above, the ceilings of the tanks have dipped precariously. “In the last 20 years. Anytime oil inventories at Cushing have reached levels this low, it's triggered historically high oil prices,” Lavandera added. “Energy executives at companies like Exxon and Chevron are warning that the United States is less than a month away from seeing gas prices shoot up.” Lee Denny, a Cushing native and a former Oklahoma state representative, said she’s witnessed many oil booms and busts in Cushing. She only hopes Trump will end his war, open the Strait and allow oil producers to replenish inventories soon to prevent a price spike. When asked, Denny could not say $5 a gallon gasoline could be avoided, however. - YouTube youtu.be

The US and Iran stepped back from the brink of returning to all-out war on June 11. Hours after saying the US military would carry out strikes against Iran for a third consecutive night, Donald Trump postponed the attack. The Iranian military had said the US would “receive a more severe response than before” if it followed through on its threats. Trump claimed to have cancelled the strikes because of progress in negotiations between the two countries. In a statement posted on social media, Trump said: “Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved.” He later added that the deal is set to be signed over the “next few days”. Whether this will happen remains to be seen. Trump has declared that a deal between the US and Iran is imminent on numerous occasions only for no agreement to be signed. Iran’s foreign ministry has also called claims that an agreement has been reached speculative, insisting that “nothing has been finalised”. And, even if it is signed, the agreement Trump is talking about is far from a final peace deal. It appears to be a memorandum of understanding, establishing a framework for the two countries to talk about unresolved issues. These include Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and nuclear programme. Rather than the supposed diplomatic progress, perhaps more significant in persuading Trump to pull back from renewing an all-out war with Iran was that a return to conflict simply would not have been in the interests of the US. War, as Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed in his 1832 book, On War, is the continuation of politics by other means. Its enormous costs can be justified only when they are tied to a coherent strategy and when there is a clearly defined political objective that there is a reasonable prospect of achieving. Measured against this standard, there was no argument for returning to war with Iran. The difficulty begins with the absence of any discernible plan in Washington. Trump has articulated no strategy and no definition of victory beyond a vague aspiration to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. He was drawn into prosecuting a war based on intelligence about the fragility of the regime in Tehran that proved flawed and on scenarios that were overconfident and have not come to pass. These scenarios suggested the decapitation of Iran’s leadership would lead to sudden regime collapse and a popular uprising that would see the country transition to democracy. There is also very little a return to all-out war could have accomplished. The reason for this is that the Iranian regime is not a conventional state that can be brought down by overwhelming firepower. The regime, which is now dominated by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, can best be described as a militia with a state. It is operating through a dispersed network of forces across air, land and sea, which were designed as an asymmetric instrument of power capable of absorbing, scattering and outlasting precisely the kind of concentrated military pressure the US military was built to deliver. Weeks of intensive bombing earlier in the war did not shatter the regime’s centre of gravity. Rather, it consolidated the regime and has left it more cohesive and determined than it was before. In contrast to the more cautious regime of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which tended to wait and to respond, the new regime has become assertive. It has been quick to retaliate against US and Israel attacks with severity and to set the pace of escalation. On June 8, for example, Iran launched barrages of missiles towards Israel in protest at the Israeli military’s escalating campaign in Lebanon. Costs of war Iran also retains the capacity to impose intolerable costs on everyone while retaining a high threshold of pain itself. If an all-out war returned, there was a very real risk that Iran would have moved to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa by mobilising its ally, the Houthis. This threat is already on the table. The Houthis paused their attacks on shipping in the region after a ceasefire was signed in Gaza in October 2025, but have warned these will resume if the Iran war escalates. The Bab al-Mandab Strait serves as the principal bypass route for Saudi oil and for much of Gulf maritime trade, both of which are currently unable to transit the closed Strait of Hormuz. Iran is also likely to have resumed direct attacks on the Gulf states with greater scope and intensity than before, which could have converted an already severe global energy crisis into something far worse. Perhaps the most consequential impact of returning to all-out war, therefore, was the prospect that it would have cost the US its valuable Gulf partners. Every Iranian strike that American installations in the region attract reinforces a lesson the Gulf monarchies are increasingly inclined to draw, which is that the presence of American bases on their soil makes them targets rather than affording them protection. Faced with a closed Strait of Hormuz, the global economy in decline and a looming defeat for his Republican party in November’s US midterm elections, Trump is clinging to the hope that he can pressure Iran into accepting a deal. The chances of this strategy proving a success are slim. Andreas Krieg, Associate Professor, Defence Studies Department, King's College London This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.