The website designer who won her case at the Supreme Court, Lorie Smith, said Friday that the ruling means she can create custom designs that are consistent with her personal beliefs, including that she thinks that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

"This is a victory not just for me, but for all of us. Whether you share my beliefs or completely disagree with them. Free speech is for everyone," Smith said at a Zoom press conference hosted by Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented her in the case.

"The court's decision means that we are all more free today than we were yesterday. We can think create, imagine and speak consistent with the core of who we are," she continued.

Smith said that she loves "working with everyone" and that she has "clients who identify as LGBT."

"My case is about speech," she said. "And when speech is concerned, speech should be protected. Today's victory protects not just me, but protects the LGBT website designer. ... Nobody should be forced to create a message that goes against his or her convictions."

Biden expressed concern over the decision in the case of the web designer who refused to work on same-sex weddings.

"In America, no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love," the president said in a statement. "The Supreme Court’s disappointing decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis undermines that basic truth, and painfully it comes during Pride month when millions of Americans across the country join together to celebrate the contributions, resilience, and strength of the LGBTQI+ community."

Biden said he is "deeply concerned" that the decision could "invite more discrimination" against LGBTQ people.

He added that his administration will work with states to "fight back against attempts to roll back civil rights protections that could follow this ruling" and urged Congress to pass the Equality Act, a national LGBTQ rights bill.

"When one group’s dignity and equality are threatened, the promise of our democracy is threatened and we all suffer," he said.

President Biden learned of the Supreme Court decision blocking his student loan forgiveness plan from senior aides this morning and has been meeting with them since then to discuss next steps, according to a White House official.

The co-CEOs of Zola, a wedding website design service, are speaking out against the Supreme Court’s ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis.

"Love stories of LGBTQ+ couples are not only worthy of celebration, but they make our industry and world a better place," Shan-Lyn Ma and Rachel Jarrett said in a statement sent to its users Friday.

The two said they are deeply disappointed with the ruling and are renewing their "vows" to "stand up for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community loudly and proudly as we can."

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to weigh whether people accused of domestic violence have a right to own firearms in a case that will test the scope of recently expanded gun rights.

The justices agreed to hear a Biden administration appeal in defense of a federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns.

In doing so, the justices will examine how broadly they will interpret the landmark ruling a year ago, powered by the court’s conservative majority, that for the first time recognized that the Constitution’s Second Amendment includes a right to bear arms outside the home.

The case will be argued in the court’s next term, which begins in October and ends in June next year.

Read the full story here.

Minutes after the Supreme Court's student debt decision came down, the White House said Biden would announce "new actions to protect student loan borrowers."

The quick response stood in stark contrast to the White House's response to the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The abortion decision last summer was widely expected after Politico had leaked a draft of it months earlier.

Yet the White House seemed flat-footed, and it waited two weeks before it put out a robust response with a plan of action — frustrating many Democrats who were furious over the Supreme Court decision and wanted the president to take the lead.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion inside the Supreme Court this morning, saying that siding with the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness program would give the secretary of education “virtually unlimited power to rewrite federal law.”

Roberts even quoted former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said in July 2021 that the president did not have the authority to cancel student debt, in what appeared to be an effort to show this was bipartisan thinking.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the court did today “what courts should not" do — make national policy.

She suggested that the first overreach of the court was deciding the case at all, saying she believed the petitioners did not have legal standing in either case. (The majority agreed with her in one of the two cases.) “A court acting like a court will have stopped right there,” Kagan said. “The majority does not stop.”

Kagan was sarcastic at times when discussing the standing issue and whether Missouri had a case at all here, saying at one point, "In a case that is not a case ... "

At the end of Kagan’s dissent, Roberts took a few minutes to thank Supreme Court staff for their work over the term. He then adjourned the court until the first Monday in October. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in a statement reacting to the court's student loan forgiveness decision, referred to Biden's loan forgiveness program as a "socialism plan."

"The President of the United States cannot hijack twenty-year-old emergency powers to pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families who choose not to take on student debt," he wrote. "The Court’s decision today deals a heavy blow to Democrats’ distorted and outsized view of executive power."