Vice President Vance is rallying voters in Iowa on Friday, as GOP candidates in the Hawkeye State navigate a complicated political landscape ahead of November. The visit marks Vance’s second trip to the state this election cycle and as Republicans hope to maintain control of the House and Senate next year. GOP gubernatorial nominee Zach…
The Hill•The Hill staff18 Sept
Supreme Court justices are not (yet) using artificial intelligence in their work, apparently due to security concerns , but, in recent months, they’ve shown a growing interest in talking – and joking – about the rise of AI. Unknown block type "paywallDivider", specify a component for it in the `components.types` option Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she’s “sure” AI will be at the court “at some point in the future” while testifying before a House subcommittee in July. Justice Sonia Sotomayor urged law students “to master AI as a tool” during an April event in Alabama. And in March, Justice Samuel Alito teased an attorney known for his embrace of AI about whether the court should have a chatbot produce the court’s ruling. “Well, just out of curiosity, do you think we should ask Claude to decide this case?” Alito asked Adam Unikowsky during the March 30 oral argument in Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties . (Unikowsky responded “no” and that he “adhere[d] to the wise judgment” of the court.) Even before the justices made these comments, AI was playing a growing role in conversations about the Supreme Court, as attorneys increasingly publicly discussed their use of AI tools to prepare for argument and court watchers made AI-informed predictions of high-profile rulings. Indeed, in March, the topic of AI and the Supreme Court went somewhat viral, when prominent advocate Neal Katyal praised “Harvey,” the “bespoke AI” he used to prepare for oral argument in the tariffs case , and released a TED Talk about, among other things, Harvey’s support. “Harvey predicted many of the questions the Justices asked — sometimes almost word for word. Brilliant. Tireless. Occasionally insufferable,” Katyal wrote on X . While we shouldn’t expect the Supreme Court to unveil its own Harvey anytime soon, some justices have noted that the court is at least exploring various forms of AI assistance. “I know a lot of corporations – and maybe Congress too – are turning to AI to gain efficiencies. And we’re not there yet, because of the risks that AI could present, but it is something that we’re studying,” Barrett said during her congressional testimony in July. Justice Elena Kagan, who testified alongside Barrett, offered a similar assessment of the court’s efforts. “I think that this is a question that we’re looking at very closely in terms of what our rules should be going forward, what the best practices in this area are in terms of how justices, how their clerks, how their assistants use AI and make sure that it’s used appropriately but not used where it’s likely to create more dangers than anything else,” she said. Predicting the court As the court studies AI, AI systems will continue studying the court as users attempt to refine how products such as Chat GPT and Claude process – and predict – Supreme Court cases. A study released in July revealed that further refinement is needed, because top AI tools, such as Chat GPT and Claude, struggle to anticipate the nuances of the court’s rulings. “The models often recognized the broader controversy surrounding the litigation, but less consistently identified the narrower legal question that ultimately determined the Court’s alignment,” wrote researchers Hayley Stillwell of the University of Oklahoma College of Law and Sean Harrington of Arizona State University College of Law. They also “systematically overpredicted ideological division, revealing an important limitation in contemporary AI legal prediction.” As Stillwell and Harrington noted near the beginning of their study, there is already a history of using AI systems to predict what the Supreme Court will do. In this earlier research, AI tools were typically trained to apply a broad swath of data from the past – such as the justices’ historical voting patterns and the content of previous rulings – to current disputes. But in their study, Stillwell and Harrington wanted AI tools to act more like lawyers than historians or statisticians. They provided four large language models – Chat GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok 4 – with key documents associated with cases on the 2025-26 oral argument docket, including the parties’ briefs, the oral argument transcript, and the opinion below, and then “instructed the models to adopt the role of an ‘expert Supreme Court analyst.’” Using the case documents, as well as “general legal knowledge about constitutional doctrine, judicial behavior, and Supreme Court decision-making,” the AI systems were tasked with predicting, among other things, the court’s likely holding, the overall vote count, and the vote of each justice. After comparing the AI tools’ predictions to the court’s actual rulings, the researchers identified two notable issues with the tools’ understanding of the court’s work. First, as noted above, the AI systems overemphasized ideological division, predicting far more decisions pitting the six Republican-appointed justices against the three Democratic-appointed justices than was actually the case. “Although nearly forty-three percent of the Court’s merits decisions were unanimous, the models overwhelmingly anticipated 6-3 decisions,” Stillwell and Harrington wrote. They observed that the AI systems may have been misled by media coverage of the Supreme Court, from which the systems drew when building up their general legal knowledge. “Supreme Court decisions that receive the greatest public attention are often those framed as ideological confrontations between conservative and liberal Justices. By contrast, the Court’s many unanimous statutory, procedural, and technical decisions typically receive comparatively little sustained media coverage,” the researchers wrote. The second issue was that, while the AI systems “often recognized the broader controversy surrounding” a case, they “less consistently identified the narrower legal question that ultimately determined the Court’s alignment.” In other words, they struggled to predict which of the issues presented in a case would “drive the Court’s decision,” and, in turn, failed to recognize opportunities for a narrow holding to unite a broader coalition of justices. “Predicting judicial behavior requires more than identifying the legal questions presented by a case; it requires identifying the legal question the Court will ultimately regard as dispositive. That predictive judgment remains one of the most difficult aspects of Supreme Court advocacy—and, at least for now, one in which experienced lawyers continue to provide meaningful value” compared to AI tools, the researchers concluded. Defying expectations At least one Supreme Court justice would likely celebrate these results: Sotomayor, who, during her April 9 visit to the University of Alabama School of Law, described successful AI predictions as a problem for the Supreme Court. “It shows we’re way too predictable,” Sotomayor said, according to The Hill . “And we may not be stepping out of our normal thinking and opening our minds to new ideas enough if something like an AI system can actually predict with that high a level of success what the outcome will be.” Perhaps Sotomayor and other justices are hoping for a future in which AI systems support their work even as that work continues to defy expectations.
SCOTUSblog•Kelsey Dallas18 Sept
Every actor with the power to end this war has instead spent September building permanent infrastructure to live around it. The House voted for a third time Tuesday to curb Trump's war powers, passing the latest resolution 220-204, but there is little confidence it will make it through the Senate, and if it does, Trump would likely veto it. The one Gulf-wide diplomatic track aimed at reopening the strait (the Iran-GCC-Iraq meeting scheduled for September 11 in Oman) was postponed, with no new date set. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (the…
The Hill’s fourth annual Notable Staffers project is a bipartisan list showcasing some of the most hard-working and influential Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill. More than 12,000 staffers in the House and Senate are the linchpins keeping Congress running year-in and year-out. They’re the unseen aides writing legislation on a host of policy matters, communicating…
The Hill18 Sept
This week, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in a bipartisan vote to renew funding for the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA), passing the measure 343-79 and extending federal funding for cleaner medium- and heavy-duty vehicles through 2029. more…
Electrek•Jo Borrás18 Sept
Republicans are heading into the final stretch of the midterm race recognizing a blunt message: Voters are frustrated, and acknowledging those frustrations might be key to keeping them in the GOP column. Republicans have been increasingly framing the election as a choice between “common sense” versus “communist crazy” — arguing that democratic socialist and progressive…
The Hill•Sudiksha Kochi18 Sept
Seven Democratic senators said Sept. 16 that CLARITY's failed Senate vote was not the end. The crypto market-structure bill fell short 49-50 the previous day on a procedural motion that needed 60 votes to advance. Getting from that statement to a law now depends on a compressed legislative calendar, still-unresolved policy disputes, and a House […]
CryptoSlate•Gino Matos18 Sept
To counter a difficult political environment, two Trump-aligned super PACs have reserved more than $150 million in ads — primarily in deep red House and Senate races that have now become competitive.
NPR•Tamara Keith18 Sept
In a rare move, a House Republican running in a competitive race in South Florida is publicly breaking with President Trump. Maria Elvira Salazar represents a majority Hispanic district.
NPR•Catherine Welch18 Sept
Lawmaker on oversight committee says he will probe Donald Trump’s sons and Elon Musk if his party takes control of the House
Detroit Lions 31-41 Buffalo Bills Bills QB throws three TDs and rushes for two Jared Goff excellent in defeat for Lions Josh Allen quickly put his stamp on the Buffalo Bills’ new stadium, which has been dubbed “The House that Allen built.” Allen threw three touchdown passes and ran for two scores, and the Bills beat the Detroit Lions 41-31 on Thursday night in the first regular-season game at Highmark Stadium. Continue reading...
The Guardian•Agencies18 Sept
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) blocked Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-Ohio) Thursday effort to unanimously pass a bill that seeks to force states to consider making tech companies cover their data centers’ electricity price impacts. The New Mexico Democrat blocked the Ohio Republican’s effort to pass the Ratepayer Protection Act through unanimous consent, arguing that the bill…
The Hill•Rachel Frazin17 Sept
The urgency with which Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI have sought to be regulated has not translated into action on Capitol Hill.
H.R. 10357 advances toward full House consideration with targeted fee and stablecoin relief alongside expanded anti-abuse rules.
CryptoSlate•Oluwapelumi Adejumo17 Sept
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is staying mum on the thorny question of whether Democratic defectors should face repercussions. “I’ll have more to say … about the situation when we have more to say about the situation,” Jeffries told reporters Thursday in the Capitol. A pair of centrist Democrats — Reps. Jared Golden (Maine)…
The Hill•Mike Lillis17 Sept
Democratic Reps. Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez faced criticism from party leadership after voting with Republicans to pass a special rule on Sept. 1.
The Hill•Don Wolfensberger, opinion contributor17 Sept
María Elvira Salazar says some enforcement has ‘gone too far’ as GOP seeks distance from Trump before midterms A Republican congresswoman has released a campaign ad criticizing Donald Trump ’s approach to immigration enforcement, in the latest sign that a key plank of the president’s 2024 re-election campaign has become a liability for his congressional allies ahead of November’s midterm elections . “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Florida ’s María Elvira Salazar says in a 30-second ad. “In July, 50% of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy.” Continue reading...
The Guardian•Chris Stein17 SeptHouse Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Democratic leaders will speak with reporters Thursday morning as the midterm cycle enters the final stretch. The press conference comes as Democrats wrestle with the GOP for control of Congress next year. The left has leaned heavily on messaging that counters President Trump’s agenda, from pushing back against…
The Hill•The Hill Staff17 Sept
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) argued Wednesday that House GOP leaders sent the lower chamber home early because they found other Republicans in support of his push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “The fact that they didn’t vote on it tells me that they did a whip check, and they probably found that there were…
The Hill•Max Rego17 Sept
Institutionalizing a Bitcoin reserve could enhance federal crypto legitimacy, influencing market dynamics and long-term asset valuation strategies.
CryptoBriefing•Estefano Gomez17 Sept