Wiretap: Deporting the border kids; ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby

 
There’s a crisis on the border. Unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, are being smuggled into southern Texas. As the New York Times reported, the Obama administration is asking Congress for $2 billion to control the surge and also for new rules making it easier to deport the children. At Vox, they detail that the children will be given one interview with a Border Patrol agent – probably without access to a lawyer — to prove that they are refugees fleeing persecution in their home country.

The corporate-friendly U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the Affordable Care Act mandate requiring employers to provide health care where “closely held corporations” are concerned is unconstitutional. Here’s the decision. ScotusBlog lightning summary of the opinion: “In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby the Court holds that the government can’t require closely held corporations with religious owners to provide contraception coverage, though the government may provide that coverage itself.” We’ll all hear more about this aspect of the opinion: The three women on the court dissented.

We’re reaching the endgame in climate change. Are we really not going to do anything about it? As Bill McKibben writes in the New York Review of Books, it’s possible to do something. In Germany, they set a record recently when it generated 74 percent of its electrical needs from renewable sources.

If Republicans can’t win the big races in Colorado in 2014, the question is when they ever will. Via the National Journal.

The story of why we can’t talk about gun control. It happened in Guns & Ammo, and they talked about it in Aspen. Via the Atlantic.

Dick Cheney is up to his old tricks on Iraq. And none of those tricks are magical. Via Trudy Rubin in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Inequality is not inevitable. It’s political. And the economic dynamic can change if the politics do. Via Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times.