The Supreme Court is falling off the pedestal it built for itself, down into the muck of normal politics, Axios' Sam Baker writes.

• Why it matters: That's increasingly how the public sees it. That's how the rest of the political system treats it. And it's getting harder and harder to believe the justices aren't interested in wielding that power.

🖼️ The big picture: The justices tried very hard, for a very long time, to cultivate a perception that they existed on an elevated, erudite plane far above the petty concerns that occupy elected politicians.

• They said the court's work was wholly separate from considerations like public opinion. Even when they had to take up a case with political implications, they approached it only as a question of legal scholarship, not sullied by ideology or policy preferences.

That image is all but dead.

• When history looks back on the term that just ended, what stands out the most may not be any one ruling, but rather its place in the trend — long-simmering, but quickly accelerating — toward seeing the court for what it is: the single most powerful weapon in U.S. politics.

At every turn, the court looks more like run-of-the-mill, outcomes-driven, raw-power politics.

• The unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in last year's abortion case was very much the type of leak that has historically only happened in other parts of the government.
• For that matter, so were the leaks about Chief Justice John Roberts switching his vote to save Obamacare in 2012.

ProPublica uncovered ethics issues this year that would be a real controversy for anyone who had to get reelected to their powerful job:

• Wealthy GOP donors with interests before the court paid for luxury vacations for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who didn't disclose those gifts, ProPublica reported. Thomas also reportedly sold a family home to GOP donor Harlan Crow.
• The justices' reaction hasn't helped. Alito, borrowing a page from any decent political operative's playbook, tried to get ahead of the story, prebutting ProPublica's investigation with a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

🎪 Confirmation hearings are a circus. Start the clock on that trend wherever you want — Robert Bork, Thomas, Merrick Garland. But we've ended up in a place where the Senate treats the process like the prize fight it is — not neutral intellectual pursuit, as it was once framed.

• As recently as the Obama administration, Supreme Court nominees got broad bipartisan support. Democrats put an end to that under President Trump, and it's not coming back.

🔎 Between the lines: You can even see it, sometimes, in the court's writing.

• This past week's affirmative action rulings were highly charged and highly personal — a far cry from dispassionate legal interpretation.

🧮 By the numbers: Public confidence in the Supreme Court was at its lowest in 50 years of polling, Gallup found last year. An analysis out this spring showed confidence was the lowest ever in a dataset that began in 1973.

🥊 Reality check: The court hasn't become political. An institution with this much power to decide inherently political issues — from voting rights to campaign finance law to matters of life and death, what the federal government can and can't do, limits of the First Amendment, even who gets to be president — is, and has always been, a political institution.

• But perception is catching up to that reality.

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As of yesterday, the swanky enclave of West Hollywood (population: 35,000) has the nation's highest minimum wage — $19.08 an hour.

• "Employers facing financial hardships can apply for a one-year delay via a waiver with the city," the L.A. Times reports. "Still, many small-business owners in West Hollywood [say] they are reaching a breaking point and need relief to avoid closing."

The hourly minimum also went up in other cities yesterday:

• San Francisco went up more than $1 to $18.07.
• L.A. is now $16.78 an hour.
• D.C. is $17, up from $16.10 an hour.

"Rate limit exceeded ... Please wait a few moments then try again."

• Without prior warning, Elon Musk imposed limits yesterday on how many tweets a user can view.
• Then he boasted: "In yet another exercise in irony, this post achieved a record view count!"

Why it matters: Musk's continued experimentation with Twitter's basic functions introduced new chaos to the chaotic platform, Axios' Hope King and Sara Fischer report.

Between the lines: This looks like part of Musk's attempt to boost subscriptions to Twitter Blue, his paid verification program.

• But Axios power-tweeter Sam Baker, after discovering he was out of tweets, Slacked me: "The whole point of Twitter is the tweets. Like a restaurant refusing to serve me food."

🔎 The day before, Twitter began requiring you to log in to view tweets. Before, you could lurk without logging in.

• "Temporary emergency measure," Musk tweeted. "We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!

Fittingly for the Twitter hall of mirrors, the real Elon Musk retweeted this tweet from an Elon Musk parody account.

The bottom line: Musk is discouraging use of a platform that depends on people viewing ads. Amid complaints about the limits, he tweeted:

you awake from a deep trance,

step away from the phone

to see your friends & family

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Taylor Swift is selling more than $13 million in tickets per night, putting her on pace to bring in $1.3 billion from her Eras Tour — making it the highest-grossing tour in music history, Bloomberg writes from Pollstar estimates:

• "Most of the money goes toward the cost of production, and that sum doesn't include the additional millions of dollars in merchandise sales."

Former President Trump drew thousands to a packed rally yesterday in the small city of Pickens in South Carolina's conservative Upstate.

• The heavily Republican area is popular with GOP hopefuls as they aim to attract support for South Carolina's first-in-the-South presidential primary, AP's Meg Kinnard reports.

In recent months, other GOP candidates including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have held Upstate events, as well as the two South Carolinians in the race — former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott.

• But none drew a crowd like Trump, whose appearance effectively shuttered Pickens' quintessential Southern downtown.

As Axios reported yesterday, Trump has mostly eschewed huge rallies this cycle.

• Pickens was Trump's second big rally of the '24 campaign. In March, he rallied in Waco, Texas.

The July 4 weekend box office record set last year by a group of walking and talking Twinkies ("Minions: The Rise of Gru") is likely safe, Axios' Hope King reports.

• "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," which opened Thursday, is expected to bring in $100 million — well short of the Minions' $125 million, according to Box Office Pro.

What's happening: About 15% of movie watchers still haven't returned to theaters post-pandemic, amid growing competition from streaming platforms, according to Hollywood Reporter.

• That percentage is higher for family genres and films targeting older moviegoers.

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New technology is allowing researchers to decipher noise inaudible to the human ear — and discover that animals and plants can communicate in complex and sophisticated "languages," Axios' John Frank reports.

• Artificial intelligence is opening new ways to understand those sounds — and possibly even translating them into a language we can understand.

🥊 Reality check: This isn't about being able to talk to your dog — though the human yearning to speak to animals is rooted in centuries of mythology.

• Instead, scientists believe acoustics will reveal secrets about the biological world order that could inform efforts to save vulnerable species from the impacts of climate change.

💭 "The point is not really to talk to animals," Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the Earth Species Project, said this past week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "The point is to understand them."

How it works: AI can build shapes — like a word cloud — that represent a given animal's "language."

• 🐝 Scientists have learned that flowers can "hear" an oncoming bee that leads them to make sweeter nectar.
• 🐋 Orca whales speak in dialects unique to their pods, but can communicate in different dialects with other species.
• 🐬 Dolphins have names given by their mother, which they use in communication, similar to beluga whales and bats.
• 🐘 Elephants have a signal for the herd to help them deflect approaching honeybees, which can be dangerous if they get in their trunk or ears.

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