In mid-May, two Republicans on a federal appeals court declared that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the landmark law that a Senate report once described as “the most successful civil rights statute in the history of the Nation” — is effectively null and void.

The Voting Rights Act was one of the Black civil rights movement’s signature accomplishments, and is widely considered one of the most consequential laws in American history because it was extraordinarily successful in ending Jim Crow restrictions on voting. Just two years after it became law, for example, Black voter registration rates in the former Jim Crow stronghold of Mississippi rose from 6.7 percent to nearly 60 percent.

The two Republicans’ decision in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe attempts to strip private litigants of their ability to enforce the law, which bans race discrimination in elections. If the lower court’s decision in Turtle Mountain is ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, the Justice Department could still bring suits to enforce the law, but the Justice Department is currently controlled by President Donald Trump.

As federal Judge Lavenski Smith noted in a 2023 opinion, over the past 40 years various plaintiffs have brought 182 successful lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act. Only 15 of these suits were brought solely by the DOJ. So, even if the United States still had a Justice Department committed to voting rights, the premise of the two Republicans’ decision in Turtle Mountain is that the overwhelming majority of successful Voting Rights Act suits should have ended in failure.

Turtle Mountain arises on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices decide on an expedited basis. So the Court could reveal whether it intends to nuke the Voting Rights Act within weeks.

A federal judge sentenced former Louisville Police detective Brett Hankison to 33 months in prison for the shots he fired during the fatal 2020 raid on Breonna Taylor's apartment.

The July 21 sentence was in defiance of a last-minute request from federal prosecutors that Hankison receive only a one-day sentence.

Western District of Kentucky Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings said she was “troubled” by the prosecutors' July 16 sentencing memorandum, as well as their arguments towards leniency in court on Monday.

“The seriousness of this crime is obvious,” she said at one point.

JUST IN: A federal judge rules that the Trump administration must reinstate a policy to provide lawyers to people who are deemed mentally incompetent in deportation proceedings.

It was terminated without a legally persuasive reason, Judge Ali finds. https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/doc1/045111516055?caseid=280289&de_seq_num=209&magic_num=

July 20 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to interfere with a deal to build a new football stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the local NFL team, now known as the Commanders, changes its name back to Redskins.

The American football team dropped the name Redskins in 2020 after decades of criticism that it was a racial slur with links to the U.S. genocide of the Indigenous population.

Trump had called for a return to the name Redskins - and for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to once again adopt the name Indians - on other occasions, but on Sunday he added that he may take official action.

"I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original 'Washington Redskins,' and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, 'Washington Commanders,' I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington," Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The Chinese government is preventing a Chinese American banker for Wells Fargo and, separately, an employee of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from leaving the country, reports said Sunday.

The identity of the detained U.S. government employee was not known to the Washington Post, which first reported the news. Mao Chenyue, the managing director of Wells Fargo Credit Solutions, was confirmed as the bank employee facing the exit ban by the company in statements to The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

People familiar with the Patent and Trademark Office employee's case told the Washington Post that he traveled to China to visit family but allegedly failed to disclose on his visa application that he worked for the government.

Wells Fargo has since reportedly suspended travel by its executives to China, noting in its statement to The New York Times that the company is tracking the situation and working "through the appropriate channels" to ensure their employee is returned.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she feels “cheated” after she won a concession in the recently passed tax and spending law to protect wind and solar projects, only to see the president and his administration issue recent orders that she said seem designed to quickly quash such projects.

“I feel cheated,” she said in an interview Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”

Murkowski said there were plenty of wins for Alaska in the megabill signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4. Those include a new royalty sharing mechanism that in eight years is meant to start giving Alaska lots of revenue from oil production on federal lands.

While the megabill took steps to cut support for solar and wind projects, Murkowski managed to negotiate a measure to protect a 12-month window for the projects to receive tax credits, despite efforts by some Republicans to immediately eliminate them.

It was several years less than the tax-credit window allowed under the Inflation Reduction Act, approved by Democrats under former President Joe Biden in 2022.