Russia has rejected President Trump's "ultimatum" for Moscow to sign a ceasefire deal to end the war in Ukraine within 50 days on Tuesday as "unacceptable," calling for continued negotiations and insisting that the invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin would continue until its goals are achieved.

In response to President Trump's threat to impose 100% secondary tariffs on countries that do business with Russia if Putin's government does not agree to a deal to end the war in that timeframe, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Tuesday that "any attempts to make demands, especially ultimatums, are unacceptable to us," according to Russia's state-run TASS news agency.

"We need to focus on political and diplomatic work. The President of the Russian Federation has repeatedly said that we are ready to negotiate and the diplomatic path is preferable for us," Ryabkov was quoted as saying. "If we cannot achieve our goals through diplomacy, then the SVO (war in Ukraine) will continue… This is an unshakable position. We would like Washington and NATO as a whole to take it with the utmost seriousness."

On Monday, in an unsigned, one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives allowed President Donald Trump to functionally dismantle the Department of Education. The Court’s shadow docket decision in this case, McMahon v. New York, should not be confused with the Court’s other, similarly brief shadow docket decisions that allowed Trump to unilaterally fire tens of thousands of federal workers, ship noncitizens to dangerous countries without meaningful process, remove independent agency officials without cause, purge the military of trans people, and turn over your private data to a teenager named Big Balls. I want to stress that this is not an exhaustive list of recent cases in which the conservatives have given their favorite president permission to rewrite the law as he sees fit, but I have to end this paragraph sometime.

In her dissent for the three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded as if she still could not believe the hamfisted scheme the majority was sanctioning. By taking Secretary of Education Linda McMahon at her word that she is merely “reorganizing” the department by firing more than 2,000 of its employees, Sotomayor wrote, the Court had “handed the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.” She concluded: “The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”

Given how gleefully the Court has spent the first few months of the second Trump administration rolling over and showing its belly at his request, it is already challenging to remember that during the first Trump administration, the Court occasionally expressed unease with the White House’s ungainly attempts to translate contemptuous lawlessness into erudite legalese. At the time, the alliance between establishment conservatives, evangelical Christians, Make America Great Again sycophants, and terminally online racists was still new and relatively fragile. Both Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts viewed themselves as the true leaders of the American right, and the presence of the other as a sort of momentary inconvenience.

But to the extent that the Court was once reluctant to endorse every stupid, lazy legal argument the Trump White House coughed up, it is not anymore. The five-justice conservative majority of Trump’s first term is now a six-justice conservative supermajority whose members, like all Republicans who are still relevant in Republican politics, have spent the past eight years fully acclimating to their roles as obedient Trump supplicants. To them, every hour that Mister Trump cannot implement their shared policy agenda is a dire legal emergency, and no task is more urgent than giving him everything he asks for, and apologizing for whichever extremely rude district court judge had the temerity to temporarily rule otherwise.

Donald Trump’s first term was filled with scandals, failures and tragedies, but the president managed to complete one of his most important goals: Working with a Republican-led Senate, he successfully stacked the federal courts with young, far-right ideologues. By the time Trump left office, he’d installed 234 federal judges — including a third of the U.S. Supreme Court — which created a dynamic Americans will be forced to live with for a generation.

Looking back, however, the president and his team aren’t altogether satisfied. The problem, evidently, is that some conservative, Trump-appointed jurists — many of them handpicked by the conservative Federalist Society — are not quite radical enough.

It’s precisely why Team Trump decided that the Federalist Society simply wasn’t MAGA-aligned enough. In fact, a year before Election Day 2024, The New York Times reported that Team Trump had begun looking at Federalist Society members as “squishes.”

And this week, Senate Republicans, voting along party lines, confirmed Whitney Hermandorfer, who served as director of the strategic litigation unit in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, marking the first judicial confirmation of Trump’s second term. The Times reported:

She clerked for Justices Samuel A. Alito and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At age 38, she is part of an effort by both parties to place younger judges on the bench, where they can serve for decades given their lifetime tenure, as opposed to the previous tradition of choosing lawyers with more extensive careers. Her legal background drew criticism from Democrats.

It did, indeed. Hermandorfer, who rose to public prominence defending a Republican abortion ban and challenging a Biden administration prohibition on discrimination against transgender students, only has six years of actual legal practice — and as my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin recently explained, that’s “roughly half of what the American Bar Association considers necessary to be qualified for a federal judgeship.”

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld West Virginia's near-total ban on abortion, including limits it imposed on access to the medication abortion drug mifepristone.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, said the federal Food and Drug Administration's approval of mifepristone did not preempt the West Virginia law as it applied to medication abortions.

GenBioPro, which sells a generic version of the pill, claimed that FDA approval overrode West Virginia's 2022 abortion law, which banned most abortions in the state.

Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected.

Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the "whole number of persons in each state" must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state's share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade.

But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday.

Any attempt to carry out the unprecedented exclusion of millions of noncitizens from the apportionment counts of the 2030 census is likely to undermine the head count's accuracy and face legal challenges, as the first Trump administration did in its failed push for similar changes for the 2020 census.

The U.S. government said Monday it is immediately placing a 17% duty on most fresh Mexican tomatoes after negotiations ended without an agreement to avert the tariff.

Proponents said the import tax will help rebuild the shrinking U.S. tomato industry and ensure that produce eaten in the U.S. is also grown there. Mexico currently supplies around 70% of the U.S. tomato market, up from 30% two decades ago, according to the Florida Tomato Exchange.

Robert Guenther, the trade group's executive vice president, said the duty was “an enormous victory for American tomato farmers and American agriculture."

But opponents said the import tax will make tomatoes more expensive for U.S. consumers.

BRUSSELS — The European Union is looking at targeting €72 billion in U.S. goods in a second round of trade countermeasures, including aircraft, cars and car parts, according to a list seen by POLITICO on Monday.

The bulk of those exports targeted are industrial goods, totaling €65.7 billion, while €6.4 billion in agricultural products would also be hit if EU countries back the new retaliatory tariffs. The list includes bourbon whiskey, despite intense lobbying from France and Ireland to shield the drinks sector from U.S. President Donald Trump’s reprisals.

The biggest line item in the 200-page list is aircraft and aircraft parts, with tariffs set to target almost €11 billion of U.S. exports — potentially dealing a heavy blow to plane maker Boeing.

Then comes machinery, followed by cars and car parts; chemicals and plastics; medical devices and equipment; electrical equipment; and industrial goods — all of which fall into multibillion-euro categories.

The total figure is down from an earlier proposal to impose retaliatory tariffs on €95 billion of U.S. goods.

A county official in New York on Monday rejected for a second time efforts by Texas to enforce a $100,000 judgment against a New York doctor accused of violating Texas' ban on abortion by sending abortion pills to the state, further escalating an unprecedented interstate conflict.

Acting Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck in a letter to the office of Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doubled down on his March finding that New York's so-called shield law precludes the enforcement of other states' abortion bans against New Yorkers.

Paxton's office last week had asked Bruck to reconsider, arguing that he had a legal duty to enforce the judgment against New Paltz, New York-based doctor Margaret Carpenter. Bruck on Monday said Paxton's office had not presented any new information.

"While I’m not entirely sure how things work in Texas, here in New York, a rejection means the matter is closed," wrote Bruck, who is running for county clerk as a Democrat.