Today's five.

The Supreme Court just decided that political parties and their candidates should be able to spend as much money together as they want, which is exactly the kind of ruling that makes campaign finance lawyers update their fee schedules. The 6-3 decision strikes down a 1974 post-Watergate law that capped coordinated spending between parties and candidates. Axios noted what this really means: money that's been pooling in super PACs for fifteen years now has a more direct channel. The law outlasted Watergate, Nixon's resignation, and twenty-five years of precedent. It did not outlast this court.

For 116 days, New Jersey's 7th District had no one casting votes on its behalf — and nobody in Washington would say why. Tom Kean returned to the House floor Tuesday and explained it himself: he'd been hospitalized for depression, on his doctors' recommendation, longer than he expected. His floor speech was careful and honest about what depression actually is — not sadness, but something physical, consuming, hard to explain until you're in it. Axios noted his absence was among the longest by a sitting member in recent history. He's up for reelection. He came back anyway and said it out loud.

A 5-4 Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship managed to make Justice Alito call the Constitution "grotesque," which is a sentence that requires a moment to absorb. The Court ruled to insert birthright citizenship protections, with Alito writing in dissent that it's "one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court" — and that the majority got it wrong. The Atlantic focused on what the ruling means for presidential power going forward. National Review is already looking at what Congress can do next. The legal fight, in other words, is just getting started.

Birthright citizenship survived. Trans athletes in public schools didn't — at least not on girls' teams. The Court upheld the 14th Amendment's citizenship guarantee while also ruling 6-3 that states can bar transgender girls from competing in women's and girls' school sports, finding those bans don't violate Title IX. Idaho and West Virginia were the cases; 25 other states have similar laws on the books. The Hill and Straight Arrow News both led with the athlete ruling. The Dispatch was more interested in what the birthright case said about executive power. One term, two headlines, zero consensus on what to take away.

Auburn's Board of Trustees voted to dissolve the university's faculty senate while the history professor who'd represent it was literally getting home from a trip — which is one way to avoid a difficult conversation. The move is part of a broader pattern of state lawmakers and trustees reaching deeper into how public universities run themselves. Faculty governance, the slow-moving but real mechanism through which professors influence curriculum and policy, is the thing being quietly disassembled here. Auburn is the latest. It is probably not the last.