Billionaire Democratic donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman said in interviews this week they hope Kamala Harris will replace Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she becomes U.S. president, openly rejecting a pillar of President Joe Biden's antitrust policy.

Khan has been at the forefront of the Biden administration's push to use U.S. antitrust law to boost competition and address high prices and low wages. Khan, who oversaw the FTC's ban on noncompete agreements, has drawn the ire of corporate groups, but won fans including Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, for her skepticism towards big business.

Now, big money Democratic donors this week publicly said Khan should not be part of a potential Harris administration.

Diller, chairman of travel site Expedia, said in a recent Bloomberg interview that he would donate the maximum allowed to Harris' campaign. He said in an interview on CNBC on Friday that he would lobby Harris to replace Khan, saying Khan was against "almost anything" business wants to do to grow efficiently.

Leonard Leo, board cochair for the Federalist Society, a far-right group, was one of the major funders of the move to boycott Bud Light over its marketing campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Right-wing extremists took offense at Bud Light’s partnership with Mulvaney last year, for which the influencer made one post on Instagram where she unveiled personalized Bud Light cans with her face on them. They were only promotional items and were not produced widely.

Many on the right said they’d boycott Bud Light and other Anheuser-Busch InBev products. Conservative celebrities embraced the effort. Singer Kid Rock went so far as to shoot up cases of Bud Light with an assault rifle, a video of which he posted online. Mulvaney endured many insults and threats, and there were threats against Anheuser-Busch facilities as well.

Now tax documents viewed by The Guardian provide evidence of Leo’s role in the boycott. “Uncovered by the watchdog group Accountable.US, the filings for 2022 show the Concord Fund, a group linked to Leo, gave $350,000 to Consumers Defense, an arm of Consumers’ Research, not long before that group played a central role in the Bud Light boycott,” the publication reports.

“But Leo’s fundraising work ranges wider,” it continues. Another group to which Leo has ties, Donors Trust, gave millions to Consumers’ Research in 2021 and 2022. Consumers’ Research was founded in 1929 to advocate for consumer protection, but it was inactive for several years before becoming a far-right activist organization.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is using the legal shield provided by a recent Supreme Court decision to formally grant legal authorities the right to clear homeless encampments from public spaces, The New York Times reported Thursday.

In an executive order, Newsom instructed California officials to begin dismantling thousands of such homeless encampments, according to officials in his administration, instructing state and local authorities to act on the recent Supreme Court decision.

“We must act with urgency to address dangerous encampments, which subject unsheltered individuals living in them to extreme weather, fires, predatory and criminal activity, and widespread substance use, harming their health, safety, and well-being, and which also threaten the safety and viability of nearby businesses and neighborhoods, and undermine the cleanliness and usability of parks, water supplies, and other public resources," Newsome wrote.

In June, the Supreme Court considered whether authorities can criminalize people without homes from sleeping and camping in public places, NPR News reported. In a 6-3 ruling, the court's right-wing majority decided that homelessness can indeed be defined as a crime and people punished for sleeping outside, even when there are no available alternatives for those experiencing extreme poverty.

A little more than a year ago, in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), the Supreme Court struck down one of the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plans. The Court’s decision took extraordinary liberties with the law, misreading a statute that clearly authorized the plan and relying on a doctrine known as “major questions.”

The major questions doctrine, as I’ve previously explained at length, has no basis in any federal statute or constitutional provision, and appears to be entirely made up by the Court’s right flank. Some defenders of the doctrine claim that it traces back to a 2000 Supreme Court decision, but the very strong version of the major questions doctrine that the Republican justices often invoke to block President Joe Biden’s policies did not emerge until he became president.

In applying the doctrine in Nebraska, however, the Court struck down just one of multiple programs the Biden administration created to reduce student loan burdens. Now, in a case known as Alaska v. Cardona, a trio of red-state attorneys general are asking the Supreme Court to neutralize much of a separate student loans plan which relies on an entirely different statute to justify its existence. (The “Cardona” in this case is Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.)

The plan at issue in the Alaska case is known as the Saving on a Valuable Education or “SAVE” plan. Estimates of its costs vary, and they range from $137.9 billion over the course of a decade to about three times that amount. Republicans object to the cost of the SAVE plan. The plaintiffs challenging the plan rely heavily on Nebraska, and on the major questions doctrine at the heart of that case, in their brief to the justices.

The Alaska case arises on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters which the Court can decide on an expedited basis. So a decision in the Alaska case will probably be handed down soon.

The Trumpist justices on the Supreme Court had a very serious problem: They needed to keep their guy out of prison for trying to overthrow the government. The right-wing justices had to do this while still attempting to maintain at least a pretense of having ruled on the basis of the law and the Constitution rather than mere partisan instincts.

So they settled on what they thought was a very clever solution: They would grant the presidency the near-unlimited immunity Donald Trump was asking for, while writing the decision so as to keep the power to decide which presidential acts would be “official” and immune to criminal prosecution, and which would be “unofficial” and therefore not. The president is immune, but only when the justices say he is. The president might seem like a king, but the justices can withhold the crown.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity combines with its regulatory decisions this term to remake the executive branch into the ideal right-wing combination of impotence and power: too weak to regulate, restrain, or punish private industry for infractions, but strong enough for the president to order his political opponents murdered or imprisoned. To ordinary people, the president is a king; to titans of industry, he is a pawn. Given the work the Trump justices have done here, the billionaire class’s affection for Trump, often presented as counterintuitive, is not difficult to understand.

Yet when it comes to the justices’ decision on immunity, they were too clever by half. They seem to believe that when a president goes too far for their taste, they can declare that he’s not immune and constrain him. But there is danger in a ruling that invites presidents to test the limits of their power. By the time a rogue president goes too far, he is unlikely to care what the Supreme Court says. A president unbound by the law is shackled only by the dictates of his own conscience, and a president without a conscience faces no restraint at all. And because the Court ruled as it did, when it did, and on behalf of a man lawless enough to try to overturn an election, Americans may pay for the justices’ hubris sooner rather than later.

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Montana's Supreme Court on Tuesday said it would allow the signatures of inactive voters to count on petitions seeking to qualify constitutional initiatives for the November ballot, including one to protect abortion rights.

District Court Judge Mike Menahan ruled last Tuesday that Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen's office wrongly changed election rules to reject inactive voter signatures from three ballot initiatives after the signatures had been turned in to counties and after some of the signatures had been verified. The change to longstanding practices included reprogramming the state's election software.

Jacobsen's office last Thursday asked the Montana Supreme Court for an emergency order to block Menahan's ruling that gave counties until this Wednesday to verify the signatures of inactive voters that had been rejected. Lawyers for organizations supporting the ballot initiatives and the Secretary of State's Office agreed to the terms of the temporary restraining order blocking the secretary's changes.

Justices said Jacobsen's office failed to meet the requirement for an emergency order, saying she had not persuaded them that Menahan was proceeding under a mistake of law.

The Arkansas Supreme Court has granted the motion to expedite a court case over the rejection of abortion amendment ballot petitions and ordered the Secretary of State to do an initial count of signatures collected by volunteer canvassers.

According to the order released late Tuesday night, Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston must finish the initial count by July 29. Once the initial count has been done, the court case will continue.

This comes one day after Attorney General Tim Griffin filed a request to dismiss the case on behalf of Thurston.

The group behind the abortion amendment, Arkansans for Limited Government, filed the lawsuit after the Secretary of State's office threw out the ballot petitions over not identifying paid canvassers or a signed statement confirming they provided canvassers with documents outlining rules before they began collecting signatures.

Here’s a big middle-finger salute to President Joe Biden, who, by stepping aside as the Democratic presidential nominee, has singlehandedly ruined my “F--- Joe Biden” flag-making business.

When Biden got “elected” in 2020, I was patriotically disgusted, so I did what I could to help former President Donald Trump and my country by designing and manufacturing flags and signs that profanely attack the commander in chief. As one does.

I’ve been proud to run the only non-woke Midwestern “F— Joe Biden” flag-making company that also manufactures “Say Good Night, Sleepy Joe” fleece blankets and “It’s All Joever This November! MAGA 2024!” wind socks. And now I come to find out Sleepy Joe is standing down and Vice President Kamala Harris will likely be Trump’s opponent?

WHAT THE HECK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THE 20,000 “F— JOE BIDEN” FLAGS I ALREADY HAD PRINTED?!?