Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

This was taken from The Dispatch. 

• Katie Britt—the former chief of staff to retiring Sen. Richard Shelby—defeated Rep. Mo Brooks in a runoff election on Tuesday after neither secured more than 50 percent of the vote in Alabama’s Republican U.S. Senate primary last month. And after a runoff and a recount, Rep. Henry Cuellar—the last pro-life Democrat in the House—narrowly edged out progressive attorney Jessica Cisneros to win the Democratic primary in Texas’ 28th District.
• The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that Maine violated the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause when it excluded religious private schools from a tuition voucher program for parents who live in school districts without a public secondary school. “A State need not subsidize private education,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, citing a previous opinion. “But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
• Bipartisan Senate negotiators on Tuesday released the legislative text of a bill aimed at reducing gun violence that, if enacted, would block domestic abusers in dating relationships—not just married, cohabitating, or co-parenting ones—from owning or buying guns until five years pass without further disqualifying convictions. The legislation also includes stricter background checks for gun purchasers under age 21, incentives for states to adopt “red flag” laws, and funding for mental health and school safety measures. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell endorsed the proposal on Tuesday as a “commonsense package of popular steps,” likely ensuring its passage despite some Republican opposition. 
• The National Association of Realtors reported Tuesday that the median existing-home sales price in the U.S. reached a record $407,600 in May—up 14.8 percent from a year earlier—while sales of previously owned homes declined for the fourth straight month due to rising interest rates and those higher prices.
• Louisiana’s Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a bill into law on Tuesday, that, in the event the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, would prohibit all abortions in the state except in cases of ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage, or the procedure is deemed medically necessary to save the life of the mother. Pregnant women would not be criminally prosecuted under the law, but abortion providers would face up to 15 years in prison and a $200,000 fine depending on the timing of the procedure.
• Meta reached a settlement with the Justice Department on Tuesday to resolve a lawsuit filed in 2019 that alleged the social media company’s advertising algorithms illegally discriminated against Facebook users by targeting housing ads based on their race, gender, religion, disability status, and ZIP code. Meta has since eliminated many of those targeting options, and under the terms of yesterday’s agreement, it will pay a $115,054 fine and introduce a new technology for housing, employment, and credit ads to ensure they are distributed equitably.
• The White House announced Tuesday the United States will recommit to an Obama-era initiative limiting the use of anti-personnel landmines (APL), which it said have a “disproportionate impact on civilians, including children, long after fighting has stopped.” The decision does not apply to the Korean Peninsula due to “unique circumstances,” but Bureau of Political-Military Affairs official Stanley Brown told reporters APLs haven’t been used by American forces in “any significant way” since the Gulf War.

• Is the U.S. getting more red vs. blue, or us vs. you? Academics Verlan Lewis and Hyram Lewis argue in the Wall Street Journal that debating whether Democrats have moved farther left than Republicans have right flattens myriad shifts in policy stances onto an inappropriately two dimensional spectrum. “Yes, partisans are increasingly angry, tribal and isolated in media echo chambers,” they write. “But to attribute this to positions on a mythical left-right spectrum misunderstands our politics entirely.” Further, they contend that when it comes to polarization, tribalism is a much stronger force than policy commitments. “True, politicians are increasingly breaking the norms of decency, ideologues are increasingly uncivil, protesters are increasingly militant, and increasing numbers of Americans are unwilling to accept the outcomes of elections. But these extreme behaviors aren’t the product of extreme commitment to ideas so much as to political tribes.”
• Meet Jenny Cudd, who entered the Capitol Jan. 6 and is now back home in Texas, managing her flower shop, committed as ever to fighting what she sees as voter fraud. “Cudd is serving no jail time after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge,” Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic. “Her life is back to normal. She wakes up in a modest old house and has two cups of coffee with her dogs, Freedom and Justice. Then she heads to her shop, Becky’s Flowers, where customers are greeted with pastel-hued hydrangeas alongside pocket Constitutions, a Donald Trump bobblehead doll, and a painting of Trump holding a vase of flowers. … Though she swears she won’t unlawfully enter any government buildings again, she still thinks the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And she has become an organizer of the MAGA right in her area, bringing together people from all over West Texas.