SCOTUS splits the difference before blockbuster finale
Plus: Congress gets its first Iran briefing since Trump’s MOU, the House prepares to approve the KIDS Act, Pelosi launches a new institute and Maine’s Senate race tightens.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome to Congress Nerd Daily, Once Upon a Hill’s reported evening briefing chronicling the strategic decisions, procedural fights and campaign dynamics that determine how power is exercised, challenged and won on Capitol Hill.
In this evening’s edition: The justices preserve mail voting, curb one of Trump’s attempts to control the Federal Reserve, expand his power over independent agencies and set the stage for Tuesday’s birthright citizenship ruling. Plus, Congress gets its first Iran briefing since Trump’s MOU, the House prepares to approve the KIDS Act, Pelosi launches a new institute and Maine’s Senate race tightens.
First Things First
Lawmakers get Iran update: House and Senate lawmakers received their first member-wide briefing this afternoon on President Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran, as the administration races to keep a fragile diplomatic opening from collapsing into a broader regional conflict.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff briefed members during an unclassified call, offering lawmakers their first formal update since Trump signed the agreement following talks earlier this month in Switzerland.
“It’s BS,” a Democratic lawmaker who was on the call said of the briefing. “And so unprofessional.”
The briefing comes at a precarious moment. The memorandum was intended to create a pathway toward a 60-day ceasefire and broader negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and regional security. Instead, both sides remain locked in a tense holding pattern marked by recurring military exchanges and an increasingly dangerous dispute over the Strait of Hormuz.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Rubio confirmed to him that Iran will earn billions in revenue while retaining leverage of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Today’s briefing was delayed, deficient, and devoid of details. After dragging America into a costly war, the Trump administration still can’t name a single thing Americans got in return,” Schumer added. “If this is the administration’s defense behind closed doors, Secretary Rubio should make it under oath, in public, before the Foreign Relations Committee. Americans are paying the price for Trump’s war. They deserve answers, not this Administration’s nonstop excuses.”
The Trump administration insists technical talks remain on track and says diplomatic channels established during the Lake Lucerne summit are still being used to prevent accidental escalation. Iranian officials, however, have suggested negotiations cannot fully resume until unspecified conditions are met.
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to insist on free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz while Iran has sought to impose greater control over commercial shipping, a flashpoint that has already triggered retaliatory strikes and renewed fears that the ceasefire could unravel before broader negotiations can take hold.
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House set to vote on KIDS Act: The House will soon vote on the bipartisan KIDS Act in the first congressional test of a compromise child online safety package that has already drawn sharp criticism from some of the Senate’s leading supporters of stronger tech regulation.
House leaders are bringing the measure up within the hour under suspension of the rules, a procedure reserved for legislation expected to attract broad bipartisan support and requiring a two-thirds majority for passage.
The package combines more than a dozen online child safety bills, including versions of the Kids Online Safety Act and COPPA 2.0, into a single measure intended to strengthen privacy protections for minors, expand parental controls and establish new safeguards for social media, gaming platforms, artificial intelligence and data brokers.
As I reported in Sunday’s edition, the House vote comes just days after Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) urged lawmakers to reject the package, arguing it weakens the Senate-passed KOSA by eliminating its signature duty-of-care requirement and narrowing key accountability provisions for technology companies.
Passage would send the measure to the Senate, where its prospects remain uncertain as the chamber’s original KOSA architects push to preserve what they consider the legislation’s strongest consumer protections.
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Collins outruns GOP brand: The first major public poll of Maine’s Senate race suggests Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) faces the most competitive reelection campaign of her career, even as she continues to outperform the Republican brand in a state that remains skeptical of President Trump.
A New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena College poll of 608 likely voters found Democratic nominee Graham Platner leading Collins 49% to 47%, a statistical tie that nonetheless underscores Democrats’ opportunity to flip one of the few Republican-held seats they must win to reclaim the Senate majority.
The poll also highlights Collins’ unique political position. While she trails Platner by two points, the generic congressional ballot favors Democrats by 11 points, 53% to 42%, suggesting Collins is still attracting crossover support despite a difficult environment for Republicans.
The coalition divides are stark. Platner dominates among college-educated voters (66%-32%), voters under 45 and the Greater Portland region, while Collins maintains sizable advantages with seniors, non-college voters and rural Maine. Women back Platner by eight points, while men favor Collins by seven.
The broader political climate remains challenging for Republicans. Just 33% of likely voters say the country is headed in the right direction, while Trump’s job approval stands at 38%, with particularly poor ratings on the economy, inflation and tariffs. Even so, nearly half of Maine voters retain a favorable view of Collins, underscoring why Democrats still view defeating the five-term incumbent as one of their toughest pickup opportunities this cycle.
Pelosi’s next act takes shape: After nearly four decades in Congress, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is beginning a new chapter in academia.
The University of California, Berkeley announced today that it will launch the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy next January, creating a new academic center dedicated to studying Congress, democratic institutions and civic engagement.
The institute will be housed in Berkeley’s political science department and will focus on research, teaching and public programming aimed at strengthening representative democracy. University officials say it will operate as a nonpartisan center despite bearing the name of one of the country’s most influential Democratic leaders.
Pelosi, who represented San Francisco in the House for nearly four decades and twice served as speaker, will co-teach a course on Congress beginning in the spring 2027 semester alongside Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler.
The university hopes to raise $50 million for the institute and says roughly $35 million has already been committed, including a personal contribution from Pelosi.
The institute plans to serve about 500 students each year through coursework and a public leadership certificate program while hosting visiting fellows, faculty research and an annual democracy forum. Its research agenda will span Congress and democratic institutions, political polarization, artificial intelligence, climate change, economic inequality, criminal justice and civil rights.
The institute marks the latest step in Pelosi shaping her post-congressional legacy, shifting from legislative leadership to preparing the next generation of students to study and strengthen American democracy.
Trump scores wins, takes losses as Supreme Court term nears finish
The Supreme Court handed down a split-screen set of decisions Monday that gave Democrats one clear voting-rights win, President Trump a major victory over independent agencies and the Federal Reserve a rare reprieve from his push to expand presidential power.
The rulings landed on the eve of the court’s final opinion day of the term, when the justices are expected to decide four remaining cases.
The court was not as uniformly friendly to Trump as Democrats feared. But it still left them with plenty of reasons to worry about where the conservative majority is taking the country.
A win for mail voting: In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the court ruled 5–4 that states may count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive afterward. The decision preserved state authority over mail voting and rejected a Republican legal theory that would have required ballots to be physically received by Election Day to count.
Democrats quickly cast the ruling as a victory for voters and a setback for Trump’s effort to undermine mail voting ahead of the midterms.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters the court “did the right thing” by preserving each state’s ability to manage voting by mail, which he said was never a partisan issue until Trump made it one after losing in 2020.
“Donald Trump has decided that they’re going to try to cheat to win,” Jeffries said. “And the Supreme Court dealt a big blow to Donald Trump’s scheme to rig the midterm election.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the court upheld the principle that “if you cast your ballot on time, your vote will count.” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) called the decision a rejection of the RNC’s “shameful” attempt to disenfranchise voters. Senate Rules Committee Ranking Member Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the ruling preserved the ability of states to accept eligible ballots postmarked by Election Day.
Trump responded by using the decision to renew his pressure campaign for the SAVE America Act, falsely claiming the House has passed a version of the bill that requires photo ID, proof of citizenship and bans most mail ballots. He also singled out five Republican senators—Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.)—as the holdouts standing in the way of his top legislative priorities.
Even if all five flipped, the bill would still lack the 60 votes to clear the Senate. And there are still not enough votes to eliminate the filibuster.
Trump wins at the FTC: The sharper Democratic alarm came in Trump v. Slaughter, where the court’s conservative majority ruled that Trump could fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause, overturning nearly a century of precedent protecting some independent agencies from direct presidential control.
Democrats described the ruling as a major transfer of power from Congress to the White House.
Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Trump had “seized control of formerly independent agencies so they serve him and his billionaire friends instead of the American public.” Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said the ruling “throws the door open for politics—not the public interest—to be the guiding star” at agencies Congress designed to be insulated from short-term partisan pressure.
Schumer was even blunter, calling it a “permission slip” for Trump to turn independent agencies into “members-only clubs for his golf buddies and cronies.”
The practical concern for Democrats is straightforward: If presidents can fire independent regulators for policy disagreements, consumer protection, competition policy, telecom regulation, labor enforcement and other areas of federal oversight become more vulnerable to White House pressure.
The Fed exception: But the court drew a different line in Trump v. Cook, denying Trump’s request to remove Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook while litigation continues.
The court emphasized the Fed’s unique history and role in monetary policy, signaling that its independence rests on a different constitutional and statutory footing than that of agencies like the FTC—a distinction that mattered to Democrats.
Warren said even a court “stacked by Donald Trump” agreed his attempt to fire Cook was illegal and renewed her demand that Bill Pulte be removed as acting Director of National Intelligence and head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) said the ruling confirmed Trump’s attempted firing was “plainly illegal” and a threat to Americans’ pocketbooks.
Jeffries tied the decision directly to Pulte, again saying the court “did the right thing” by preserving the Fed’s independence while arguing that Pulte’s role in the Cook episode underscored why Democrats have concerns about surveillance reauthorization while he remains acting DNI.
The court also ruled in Chatrie v. United States that geofence warrants constitute Fourth Amendment searches, a major digital privacy decision that will compel lower courts to scrutinize how law enforcement uses location data obtained from companies like Google.
One more day: The term now comes down to four cases: Trump v. Barbara on birthright citizenship; West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox on transgender athletes; and NRSC v. FEC on campaign finance.
The birthright citizenship case is the giant on the board.
Trump has tried to end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to certain noncitizen parents, a direct challenge to the long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment. A ruling for Trump would mark one of the most consequential immigration and constitutional decisions in modern history.
Jeffries said Monday there is only one acceptable constitutional answer.
“There’s no circumstances where this Supreme Court, applying the law and being guided by the Constitution, should do anything other than affirm the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which goes all the way back to Reconstruction, and the efforts to ensure that newly free enslaved Africans wouldn’t have their citizenship questioned on the basis of their race,” Jeffries said. “And from that moment forward, there’s been no doubt about the constitutionality and ironclad nature of the birthright citizenship clause to the United States Constitution, and that should be affirmed.”