Scott Pruitt has won his first trophy since becoming Environmental Protection Agency administrator. It is not for protecting the environment.

Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit that seeks to improve the quality of investigative reporting, awarded Pruitt its so-called “Golden Padlock Award” on Monday. Journalists from BuzzFeed News, Politico, and the Center for Investigative Reporting were among the judges. Pruitt beat out four other finalists. 

Why is Pruitt considered so sketchy? As I’ve previously reported, Pruitt has a long history of evading public records requests and keeping his schedule secret, a tradition that started while he was Oklahoma attorney general and has continued at the EPA. E&E News recently released copies of Pruitt’s daily schedule from the first few weeks on the job, and it showed he held meetings with “an array” of energy, chemical, and other industry figures, including representatives from Duke Energy, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, Murray Energy, and BMW. Pruitt did not meet with any environmental interests during those weeks, according to the emails, though he has met with a few since then.  

The Washington Post also reported earlier this month that Pruitt “appears to have used two government email addresses while serving as attorney general of Oklahoma—despite telling the Senate that he used only one government email address during his time in that office.” And Pruitt’s email practices were already under scrutiny. In March, it was discovered that he had also used a personal email for business while Oklahoma attorney general, even though he previously denied it. That’s important because in 2014, emails from Pruitt’s attorney general account showed an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with the fossil fuel company Devon Energy. That alliance was revealed by emails the New York Times obtained through an open-records request.

All that, plus Pruitt’s media aversion and history of industry favors, led to his award on Monday. It’s a win for the fossil-fuel industry, and a big loss for the public.

American Medical Association CEO James Madara sent a letter to Senate leaders on Monday expressing his group’s opposition to the Republican health care bill. “Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm,’” he wrote. “The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels.” With more than 200,000 members, the AMA is a major lobbying group for physicians and medical students.

Madara warned that the likely combination of reduced subsidies and increased waivers of coverage protections “will expose low and middle income patients to higher costs and greater difficulty in affording care.” The AMA also opposes the Senate bill’s provisions to limit the growth of Medicaid—a concern shared by the AARP, which released a strong statement last Thursday pledging to “hold all 100 Senators accountable for their votes on this harmful health care bill.” Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond said Trumpcare would impose an “age tax” and “allow insurance companies to charge older Americans five times more for coverage than everyone else while reducing tax credits that help make insurance more affordable.” By cutting funding for Medicare and Medicaid, the legislation threatens to “strip health coverage from millions of low-income and vulnerable Americans who depend on the coverage, including 17 million poor seniors and children and adults with disabilities.”

If the GOP moves forward with this bill, it’ll be over the objection of a host of other health groups—including the American Hospital Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Cancer Association—who will be the first to remind their members that it was the Republicans who gutted their health care coverage or stripped them of it entirely.

On Monday, researchers at the University of Washington released a much-anticipated study that looked at the effects of the first stages of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage increase, which has been phasing in since 2015. The paper found that Seattle’s second wage bump to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by 9 percent. These findings sharply diverge from what has been previously reported—only last week, a study by researchers at Berkeley found that Seattle’s minimum wage increase had only a negligible impact on jobs.

The UW study, which is partly commissioned by the city of Seattle, is sure to garner a lot of attention since the authors had exclusive access to detailed state data on hours and earnings of workers. Republicans are already using the study to excoriate “liberal policies”:

But researchers at the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute have found some major issues with the UW paper. First off, because of data limitations, the study excludes businesses with multiple locations, such as fast-food chains—that means that 40 percent of Seattle’s workforce is not included at all. Ben Zipperer, an economist at EPI, says that it is “a serious data problem” that “potentially biases their estimates toward finding job loss even when there may have been none.” Take, for example, if employment had shifted in this time period from single establishment firms to multi-location firms (a likely scenario)—the UW study would only count these changes as job losses, without including the job gains at multi-location firms.

EPI researchers also criticize the UW paper on another major count: that low-wage job loss might be a reflection of Seattle’s booming labor market, which has shifted employment from low-paying to high-paying jobs. To separate out the two, researchers usually look at a control group, or a city that is experiencing a similar job boom but did not increase its minimum wage. However, Zipperer claims that the study’s control group—which splices together other areas in Washington state—is questionable, since “their numbers makes it look like Seattle is growing much faster around the time of the minimum wage increases than their control group.” To be an accurate control, the two places need to be growing the same way, so the effects of the minimum wage increase can be isolated.

Most previous research shows limited-to-no job loss due to increases in minimum wages across the country. According to Zipperer, the UW study raises red flags because it is “well beyond the upper end of what has been previously published,” even for consistent minimum wage critics.

The Court today partially lifted an injunction on the administration’s 90-day ban of all travelers from six predominantly Muslim nations and its 120-day ban on all refugees. It also agreed to consider the constitutional merits of Trump’s executive order in October. Going in, we know that three justices appear ready to side with the administration. In an opinion concurring with the Court’s order, Clarence Thomas wrote that the injunction should have been lifted in full and that the administration has “made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits”—that is, that the rulings by two appellate courts blocking the ban will be reversed. Thomas was joined by Samuel Alito and Trump appointment Neil Gorsuch.

The appellate courts—the 9th and 4th Circuits—ruled that the ban discriminated against Muslims, citing Donald Trump’s own words and that of his advisers. During his campaign, Trump had called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” As Chief Judge Roger Gregory of the 9th Circuit wrote in May, “Then-candidate Trump’s campaign statements reveal that on numerous occasions, he expressed anti-Muslim sentiment, as well as his intent, if elected, to ban Muslims from the United States.” The travel ban was thus deemed to be a violation of religious freedom.

The Supreme Court, however, felt that the blanket injunction went too far. Citing the claims made by the original plaintiffs in the two cases—which included an Iranian permanent resident seeking to reunite with his wife and a Hawaiian university that had extended admissions to students from the affected countries—the Court ruled that the ban cannot be enforced “against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.” But for everyone else, including refugees fleeing war-torn areas, tough luck.

This is because, the Court said, the judiciary must defer to the executive’s judgements on issues related to national security. As the Trump administration noted in its legal brief, statute holds that the president can “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” to this country “[w]henever [he] finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens ... would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” This is the power invested in the presidency, and the Court has long upheld that power. The order itself does not have the words “Muslim ban” scrawled all over it, and it is well within the executive’s right to bar entry to foreign nationals, a right it exercises on a daily basis. As the Court notes, “the Government’s interest in enforcing [the order], and the Executive’s authority to do so, are undoubtedly at their peak when there is no tie between the foreign national and the United States”—such as a spouse or a university or an employer.

There are several other issues at play, including whether the order is already moot (it had a sell-by date of June 14) and whether it’s temporary nature makes it more legally palatable. But at bottom is a separation-of-powers issue that has traditionally swung toward the executive, and that is unlikely to change with a conservative Supreme Court.

The nation’s highest court ruled today that a Lutheran preschool in Missouri has a religious freedom right to receive public funds. The case, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, has significant implications for the separation of church and state: As Stephanie Russell-Kraft previously reported for the New Republic, a positive ruling for the church could lead to further attacks on state constitutional provisions blocking state aid to religious institutions. It’s great news for the likes of Betsy DeVos, who has long sought public funding for private religious schools.

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the court’s opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts:

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has not subjected anyone to chains or torture on account of religion. And the result of the State’s policy is nothing so dramatic as the denial of political office. The consequence is, in all likelihood, a few extra scraped knees. But the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.

Perhaps most odious is Roberts’s decision to compare the case to an old Maryland law barring Jews from holding public office. It’s almost verbatim the argument the religious right used to defend Trinity Lutheran. Roberts, like the church itself or its fundamentalist defenders, never acknowledges the consequences of his reasoning: Taxpayers will be forced to subsidize churches.

This is a drastic redefinition of religious freedom, twisting the principle of separation of church and state into a kind of discrimination against the church. Churches will be able to use public funds to support their educational missions, and in many cases that means teaching children that LGBT people are abominations and that women do not deserve the right to control their bodies.

Considering the implications of today’s ruling, it’s disturbing that only two justices dissented from the majority opinion. This also spells trouble for another upcoming case: The court announced today that it will hear Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Masterpiece centers on a baker’s assertion that he deserves an exemption from a local anti-discrimination ordinance that requires him to serve LGBT people. The baker, Jack Phillips, has yet to persuade a court that his argument has merit.

His attorneys, from the Alliance Defending Freedom, have framed the case as a matter of “artistic freedom,” or free speech. Forcing Phillips to serve LGBT people not only violates his religious freedom, they argue; it also requires him to express beliefs he does not hold. That’s tempting bait for Justice Anthony Kennedy, who tends to favor a generous interpretation of free speech, even if he authored the landmark 2015 ruling legalizing gay marriage.

At stake are the rights of LGBT people. Because LGBT people are not a federally protected class, they are not guaranteed discrimination protections. Some states and municipalities have passed anti-discrimination ordinances that expressly protect LGBT people, and those laws are subject to frequent challenge by conservative Christians.

The conservative argument necessarily downplays the pain and humiliation an LGBT person experiences as a result of discrimination and exaggerates the consequences of asking a Christian to adhere to secular law. Groups like the ADF argue that LGBT people can simply get service elsewhere. And in large cities like New York, this is technically true. But it doesn’t ameliorate the pain discrimination inflicts, and it also isn’t universally accurate. In smaller, more conservative communities, the stakes are different. A right exists only on paper if individuals cannot meaningfully access it.

The president is notorious for his habit of projection. In his latest tweets from yesterday and this morning, he took this predilection to an extreme, angrily accusing both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of “collusion.”

In the case of Clinton, she’s apparently guilty of colluding with her own party:

With Obama, there is the murky suggestion that he colluded with the Russians by not doing to enough to stop Russian interference in the 2016 election:

Saying that Obama “colluded or obstructed” is almost too transparent in its desire to throw back at Democrats the same critiques that Trump is facing. At the risk of being banal, it has to be said that the DNC might have had their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton, but that is not collusion—it is favoritism. Similarly, Obama failing to prevent Russian interference in the election is not collusion.

It’s a sign of Trump’s desperation that he is waging war with the common meaning of words. To re-work an old saying: If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pick a fight with the dictionary.

With Sean Spicer transitioning to an off-camera role, the title is anyone’s for the taking. But Tillerson, the secretary of state who has been very adamant about not wanting to be secretary of state, is the clear frontrunner.

Tillerson was tapped for the job—reportedly after being recommended by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—for his deep managerial experience as well as his numerous foreign contacts, both of which he acquired while running Exxon. But Tillerson’s first six months have instead been defined by incompetence—hundreds of positions at the State Department remain unfilled—and by repeatedly finding himself out of step with President Trump. This has been most notable in the United States’s attempts to diffuse the ongoing crisis between Qatar and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia. While Tillerson has tried to establish the United States as a broker to resolve the conflict without taking sides, Trump has repeatedly and loudly taken the side of the Saudis, proclaiming that Qatar is a “funder of terrorism at a very high level” in a recent news conference.

According to The New York Times, this is partly the result of the dysfunction that has ruled the White House since day one: “Some in the White House say that the discord in the Qatar dispute is part of a broader struggle over who is in charge of Middle East policy—Mr. Tillerson or Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior adviser—and that the secretary of state has a tin ear about the political realities of the Trump administration.” But Tillerson himself is also at fault, and seems to have been ill-prepared for the rigors of the job, or the whims of the president he’s serving: “Others say it is merely symptomatic of a dysfunctional State Department that, under Mr. Tillerson’s uncertain leadership, does not yet have in place the senior political appointees who make the wheels of diplomacy turn.”

This is the Trump White House in a nutshell. Trump creates problems for everyone on an hourly basis, but the team he has in place also seems uniquely unprepared to perform even basic tasks. Still, no one has been steamrolled like Tillerson has and no one seems to be more miserable. Tillerson, the Times writes, “has remained publicly stoic, proceeding at his own pace, though colleagues from his Exxon days say they have seen little evidence he is finding much joy in the job.”

On Friday, Sean Spicer gave his off-camera press briefing that the White House press corps is still too cowardly to film. He told reporters that Trump likes the Senate’s health care bill (yesterday Trump tweeted that he was “very supportive” of the bill and that he can’t wait to make it “really special”), but also that he wants to make sure that Medicaid recipients won’t get hurt.

This, of course, is a ridiculous statement, akin to saying that one supports murder as long as nobody gets killed. Over the long term, the Senate bill would cut Medicaid even more severely than the House bill would, threatening the insurance coverage of literally tens of millions of people who are poor, disabled, and/or elderly.

Trump apparently wants to have it both ways. He wants to gut Obamacare but he also wants to keep everything the same, which means his only recourse is to blatantly lie about what’s in the bill. It’s the same strategy he’s used over and over again, promising better, cheaper health care by taking insurance away from millions of people.