Republican Lawmakers Beg Supreme Court to Overturn Marriage Equality

Idaho’s House of Representatives is asking the Supreme Court to undo its decision on same-sex marriage.

The state legislature chamber voted 46–24 Monday in favor of passing House Joint Memorial 1, calling on the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges “and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”

State Representative Heather Scott, a Republican who sponsored the memorial, provided flimsy reasoning behind the measure, saying that the power to define marriage belonged to the states.

“I would ask you to substitute any other issue and ask yourself, ‘Do I want the federal government creating rights for us, for Idahoans?’” Scott said during debate on the floor of the state legislature, according to the Idaho Capitol Sun.

“So, what if the federal government redefined property rights or nationalized water rights?” Scott said. “What does that look like if they came up with some new fair use policy or came up with different ways to define property rights? That is not a decision for the judges; it is a decision for the states.”

But the memorial specifically urged the Supreme Court to define marriage, not what the states control.

Scott also claimed that Obergefell undermined religious freedoms and that Christians were being “targeted.”

Monday’s measure was developed by MassResistance, an anti-LGBTQ hate group that is sowing trans panic in state legislatures across the country.

Despite opposition on both sides of the aisle, including 15 Republicans who joined every House Democrat, the GOP was still able to pass the measure because it holds a supermajority in the legislature. The memorial will now head to the Republican-controlled state Senate, and, if it passes, it will become law without needing the governor’s signature.

But a memorial is more of a formal letter than a law, and it carries no enforcement power.

If the measure becomes law, it’s not clear that the Supreme Court would even be compelled to take up Idaho’s question—but it would certainly send a message to the LGBTQ residents of that state.

In 2006, Idaho voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that said that “marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.” That law was ruled unconstitutional in 2014, the year before Obergefell effectively legalized same-sex marriage by ruling that it was discriminatory to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses.

While the Respect for Marriage Act requires all states to recognize same-sex marriage performed in other states, the right to same-sex marriage was never formally legalized on the federal level. So if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, gay marriage rights would go with it.

Donald Trump’s administration has been hit with a lawsuit over allegedly collecting federal employee information and directing it to an employee of Elon Musk.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Monday, alleges that employee data is going to Amanda Scales, who, according to LinkedIn, works for xAI, a private corporation of which Musk is the CEO. This would violate federal laws on transparency and put the sensitive information of federal employees into the hands of a private corporation.

The lawsuit states that Trump administration officials created an email address, hr-at-opm-.gov, and directed federal employees, through the Office of Personnel Management, to treat it as legitimate. OPM is the agency tasked with managing the federal workforce and could be described as Human Resources for federal employees.

A Reddit post to r/fednews, a subreddit dedicated to the federal workforce, alleged on Monday that the address is based at an email server that was recently set up at the OPM offices. The post was later deleted, but a copy of its contents were cited in the lawsuit.

Last week, the new OPM email address sent out test emails to every single federal employee, catching many workers off-guard, some of whom even flagged the emails and address as spam.

The lawyer behind the lawsuit is Kel McClanahan, the executive director of National Security Counselors, which also brought legal challenges against Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last week. He told CNN that OPM has been hacked in recent years and a new email server without proper oversight would put employees’ personal data at risk.

“Plugging in a new email server for the sole purpose of sending messages directly to every federal employee is an invitation to be hacked, and every employee out there needs to know how much of their data is at risk,” McClanahan said. He added that it should be shut down “until OPM treats this data with the security it warrants.”

Nineteen Republican attorneys general have decided that now is the perfect time to declare war on Costco to convince the bulk retailer to abandon its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird are spearheading the effort. They wrote a letter Monday to Costco chief executive Ron Vachris, essentially accusing Costco of reverse racism and giving the company 30 days to repeal its DEI policies or explain why it hasn’t. The letter claims that Costco’s policies go against the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling repealing affirmative action.

Other major retailers, including Walmart, Amazon, and Target, have capitulated to the right-wing culture war on DEI. But even after Trump’s victory, a whopping 98 percent of Costco shareholders rejected an anti-DEI measure last week.

Donald Trump’s new names for Alaska’s Mount Denali and the Gulf of Mexico will soon be realized in Google Maps.

The massive, multinational corporation announced Monday that it would bend to an executive order, signed by Trump on his first day back in office, renaming the highest peak in the United States “Mount McKinley” and branding the ocean basin the “Gulf of America.”

“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company wrote in a statement on X. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

That means the intra-app change will be made whenever the United States Geological Survey, an agency within the Department of the Interior, officially reclasses the pair of landmarks in its geographic names information system, or GNIS.

“When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America,” Google wrote in a separate post.

The updated names will only be reflected for Google Maps users within the United States, according to the company. Users in Mexico will see their own local name for the gulf, while everyone in the rest of the world will see both names.

The continent’s highest mountain was called Denali—“the high one” or “the great one”—for centuries by the Koyukon Athabaskans, the original inhabitants of Alaska. The mountain’s native name existed centuries before a gold prospector unofficially named the peak after William McKinley during the Ohio politician’s 1896 run for president.

The federal government made “Mount McKinley” official in 1917, 16 years after McKinley’s assassination, but it hasn’t always been the preferred option for Alaskan locals. In 1975, the Alaskan legislature officially petitioned the federal government to have the mountain’s name reverted back to Denali, only to have the effort blocked by Ohio.

President Barack Obama pushed past that in 2015 during a sweep of landmark renamings intended to better reflect the names used by America’s Indigenous tribes, officially classing the mountain as “Denali” in federal documents.

In December, Trump suddenly revived the debate, telling a crowd of supporters in Arizona that he would “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it”—but the news was not received well by Alaska’s leadership.

“There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.

Donald Trump is claiming that he sent the U.S. military to turn on the water in California, even though it never happened.

Trump posted on Truth Social Monday night to receive credit for his supposed good deed.

“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” Trump wrote. “The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”

But despite what Trump says, he is not a river to his people. Within a few hours, California’s Department of Water Resources published a fact-check on the president’s false claim that the U.S. military had forcibly turned on the water.

“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” California’s DWR posted on X early Tuesday.

Mike McGuire, a state senator from California’s Northern coast, pulled apart the president’s post, baseless claim by baseless claim.

“BS Alert,” McGuire wrote in a post on X. “First off, shocker, water from the Pacific Northwest doesn’t flow to the Central Valley. Second, federal water pumps were down for repair and are now back on. Third, rest assured, the military has not invaded the delta. Facts are hard.”

Over the weekend, Trump signed an executive order in response to the wildfires affecting Los Angeles County directing federal officials to “immediately take actions to override existing activities that unduly burden efforts to maximize water deliveries” in an effort to fix California’s “disastrous” water policies.

In the order, Trump also threatened to cut off funding from the state’s land and water management and disaster response, thereby ending “the subsidization of California’s mismanagement.” California Governor Gavin Newsom told NBC News that the premise of this executive order was “false.”

Last week, Newsom torched Trump’s limp criticism of California’s water policies after he falsely claimed that “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn the valve.”

“Maybe the president doesn’t know that there’s not a spigot that can be turned that can solve all the water problems that he alleges exist, that don’t exist when it comes to the state water project here in California,” Newsom said.