AoSHQ The Morning Report
June 30, 2026
A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.
Casper rejected the administration’s argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be implemented. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump’s requirements violated the separation of powers.
For many supporters of the Second Amendment, it’s been easy in recent weeks to despair over the ways in which gun control advocates are successfully undermining the right to keep and bear arms. Virginia’s ban on future sales of standard-capacity magazines and so-called assault weapons is set to take effect on July 1, with state courts thus far appearing reluctant to intervene. New York and Connecticut became the latest states to pass “Glock bans,” which prohibit residents from buying one of the nation’s most widely available handgun brands.In Other News
But not everything has been doom and gloom for lawful gun owners in other parts of the United States. The last few weeks have also featured some bright spots. In West Virginia, for example, law-abiding 18-to-20-year-olds may now enjoy their right to bear arms on equal footing with all other adults after legislation passed in April to expand the state’s permitless-carry protections finally went into effect. Down in Florida, meanwhile, state Attorney General James Uthmeier joined forces with Second Amendment advocacy groups, agreeing with them that the state’s mandatory three-day waiting period on gun purchases is unconstitutional and asking a federal court to strike down the law. And the Second Circuit struck down New York’s “vampire rule” in what is almost certainly a precursor to the Supreme Court’s imminent decision in Wolford v. Lopez regarding Hawaii’s version of the rule.
All of these are victories for the right to keep and bear arms, which Americans rely on to defend themselves and others far more often than many people realize. Even the notoriously anti-gun Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged that most studies on the issue find that between 500,000 and several million defensive gun uses occur every year in the United States. An extensive 2021 national survey conducted by a Georgetown professor further substantiated this reality, concluding that Americans used their firearms defensively an average of 1.2 million times a year.
Watching Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters take turns dismantling Jessica Tarlov's talking points on The Five is one of my not-so-guilty pleasures. But Tuesday delivered something even better: Vice President JD Vance stepped into the ring himself, and within seconds, he exposed a glaring blind spot in how the left thinks about loving your own country.In Other News
Tarlov tried to explain away a brutal new NBC News poll on American patriotism by chalking it up to simple political math. "Some of it is obviously partisan," she said, arguing that pride in the country naturally dips "when your party's out of power."
"I don't think that's right," Vance said. "Why does that need to be true? That if your party's out of power, you should have less pride in your country?"
He didn't stop there. Vance pointed out that Republicans never operated this way, even when they hated who was in the White House. "I guarantee that when Barack Obama was president or Joe Biden was pretending to be president, that you had Republicans who still said they're proud of America, they're proud of our military, they're proud of the great people of our country, they're proud of our natural beauty," he said.
Then came the gut punch. Vance cited the new NBC News polls, which found that only 29% of Democrats currently say they're proud of their country, and he wasn't shy about where he thinks the blame belongs.
"What seems to me so bizarre about this is that we've allowed a culture to develop where people feel like the country is the country's politics," he said. He went further, tying that mindset to something darker: "I think that's actually connected to the violent rhetoric where if you disagree with somebody, you can justify killing them. It's really, really a bad thing."
He added, "I wish Democrats, all of them, were proud of our country. We should be proud of our country."