From 6h ago
The impacts of the supreme court’s ruling in Moore v Harper extend to redistricting, and beyond.
Its most immediate effect is to preserve longstanding norms over state courts’ ability to weigh in on legislatures’ actions when it comes to federal elections, as the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
The 6-3 decision in Moore v Harper is a blow to North Carolina Republicans who had asked the court to embrace the so-called independent state legislature theory – the idea that the US constitution does not allow state courts to limit the power of state legislatures when it comes to federal elections. Such a decision in the case would have been a major win for Republicans, who control more state legislatures than Democrats do. Some of the conservative justices on the court had urged the bench to embrace the idea.
“We will have to resolve this question sooner or later, and the sooner we do so, the better,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissent at an earlier stage in the case that was joined by Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. “If the language of the elections clause is taken seriously, there must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections.”
The court’s decision means that state courts can continue to weigh in on disputes over federal election rules. State courts have become increasingly popular forums for hearing those disputes, especially after the US supreme court said in 2019 that federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering.
But Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor focusing on American elections, sees broader implications in the justices’ rejection of the fringe independent state legislature (ISL) theory, which Republican lawmakers from North Carolina has asked them to endorse in the case:
Here’s more from Sam on the case:
A New York appeals court has ordered that Ivanka Trump be dismissed from a civil fraud case filed by New York attorney general Letitia James against Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and three of his adult children.
James’ lawsuit, filed last September, accused Trump of lying from 2011 to 2021 about the value of his properties, including his Mar-a-Lago estate and Trump Tower penthouse, as well as his own net worth, to receive favorable loans. The lawsuit alleged that Trump’s children were involved in a conspiracy to commit the crimes.
The lawsuit seeks at least $250m in damages from the former president, his sons Donald Jr and Eric, his daughter Ivanka, the Trump Organization and to stop the Trumps from running businesses in New York.
The appellate division in Manhattan, in today’s unanimous ruling, dismissed the claims brought against Ivanka Trump by James, noting that those claims were barred by New York’s statute of limitation. It said:
The allegations against defendant Ivanka Trump do not support any claims that accrued after February 6, 2016. Thus, all claims against her should have been dismissed as untimely.
The appeals court has returned the case to the state supreme court judge presiding over the case to determine whether the claims against the other defendants should be limited.
A trial is scheduled to begin 2 October.
Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has said “what’s happening with the Uyghurs is disgusting” after her rival, Francis Suarez, appeared not to have heard of the persecuted Chinese minority group.
Haley, during a foreign policy speech about China in Washington, said:
We promised never again to look away from genocide, and it’s happening right now in China. And no one is saying anything because they’re too scared of China.
Part of American foreign policy should always be that we fight for human rights for all people. And what’s happening with the Uyghurs is disgusting. And the fact that the whole world is ignoring it is shameful.
Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy has insisted that Donald Trump is “stronger today than he was in 2016”, hours after he appeared to question whether the former president was the strongest GOP nominee to win the 2024 election.
McCarthy, in an interview with Breitbart News, said:
As usual, the media is attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans as our committees are holding Biden’s DoJ accountable for their two-tiered levels of justice.
He pointed to a Morning Poll published today that showed Trump with a three-point lead over Joe Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head match. McCarthy said:
Just look at the numbers this morning – Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016.
It comes after he was asked, in an interview earlier today with CNBC, whether Trump could win an election despite all his legal troubles. McCarthy replied:
Yeah he can … the question is, is he strongest to win the election? I don’t know that answer.
Investigators from special counsel Jack Smith’s office are set to interview Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in Atlanta, as part of the federal investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his advisers to overturn the 2020 election results.
Raffensperger’s interview, first reported by the Washington Post, will be his first with US justice department investigators.
Smith’s office subpoenaed Raffensperger back in December, but NBC News reports that the move was for documents and not for him to appear or testify in person.
In a phone call after the 2020 election, Trump demanded Raffensperger “find” the votes needed for him to win Georgia – a state Joe Biden won by nearly 12,000 votes.
Trump told Raffensperger:
All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.
A new federal law that requires employers to provide accommodations to pregnant and postpartum employees took effect on Tuesday, providing protections to millions of eligible people.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act requires that employers with more than 15 workers provide “reasonable accommodations” to people who are pregnant, postpartum or have a related medical condition, NBC News reported.
The legislation covers accommodations for a myriad of pregnancy-related conditions including morning sickness, pregnancy loss and postpartum depression.
Examples of possible accommodations include being able to sit and drink water, having flexible hours and having uniforms that fit properly, according to information from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Accommodations could also include time off for childbirth recovery and time to access an abortion, the 19th News reported.
Under the act, a pregnant employee can request accommodations from their employer, with both parties having a discussion on if the accommodation can be granted.
Read the full story here.
Kamala Harris is out with a statement cheering the supreme court’s decision in the Moore v Harper case out of North Carolina, but acknowledging that more must be done to safeguard voting rights across the United States.
Here are the vice-president’s thoughts:
Voting is the bedrock of our democracy. Today’s decision preserves state courts’ critical role in safeguarding elections and protecting the voice and the will of the American people. We know that more work must to (sic) be done to protect the fundamental right to vote and to draw fair maps that reflect the diversity of our communities and our nation. The President and I will keep fighting to secure access to the ballot box, but we cannot do this alone. We continue to call on Congress to do their part to protect voters and our democracy and pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
If the supreme court had ruled in favor of Republicans in a major election law case decided today, it would have represented a “truly horrible” blow to American democracy, a congressman from North Carolina, the state at the heart of the decision, said in an interview.
Speaking to the Guardian’s US politics live blog, Wiley Nickel, a first-term Democratic House representative from the Raleigh area, said that while the decision handed down might represent a victory in the battle against partisan gerrymandering, he still expects Republicans who control North Carolina’s state legislature to proceed with redrawing congressional maps to their advantage.
“We had something truly horrible that didn’t happen and it would have been the beginning of the end of democracy in America if the court had sided with Tim Moore in the Moore v Harper case,” Nickel said, referring to the Republican speaker of the state’s House of Representatives whose name was on the supreme court case.
But because the US supreme court has now ruled against North Carolina’s Republicans and declined to endorse a fringe theory that could have prevented state courts from weighing in on federal election rules, “It’ll mean that we have a check with the courts and with our constitution … it just moves us on to the next stage of the fight to make sure that we get fair maps in this next election.”
Nickel was elected last year after North Carolina’s supreme court struck down a GOP-drawn congressional map and replaced it with one that produced a 7-7 split between Republicans and Democrats in the state’s delegation following the midterm election. While Democrats still lost control of the US House, that ruling was one of many factors that helped the party’s lawmakers across the country perform better than expected.
In North Carolina, the GOP has since taken the majority on its top court, which, together with the party’s control of the House and Senate, will allow it to move forward with a partisan gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts.
Nickel expects that the boundaries of his district, which leans slightly Republican, will remain pretty much the same, but other Democratic congressional representatives may be at risk.
“It goes back to our state legislature and they’re going to draw maps and it’s going to be, I think, bad overall for Democrats,” he said. How bad it is will be yet another factor determining whether Joe Biden’s allies are able to retake control of the House in the next election, set for November 2024.
In the long run, Nickel supports federal legislation to end partisan gerrymandering, but acknowledges that among the current crop of Republicans in the House, “The majority of them right now, if anything, they’re going in the opposite direction.”
He takes some solace from another supreme court ruling released earlier this month that maintains parts of the Voting Rights Act and could help Democrats hang onto some districts in North Carolina and elsewhere in the south. Nickel also noted that if the Tar Heel State’s Republicans push too hard to make maps that disadvantage Democrats, it raises the chances a legal challenge against them will succeed.
“Every single time we talk about maps in North Carolina, the real question is, how greedy are they going to get? And if they get too greedy, the state courts, federal courts are going to get involved,” he said.
The third “Florida Man” in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Miami’s mayor Francis Suarez, suffered an embarrassment during an interview with a conservative radio host when he was asked about the plight of the oppressed Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China.
“The what?” Suarez replied when asked by the presenter Hugh Hewitt if he would be talking about them during his campaign, reported by the Miami Herald.
“The Uyghurs,” Hewitt repeated.
“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked.
“OK, we’ll come back to that. You gotta get smart on that,” Hewitt said.
“What did you call it, a Weeble?” Suarez asked at the conclusion of the 15-minute conversation.
In a later tweet, Hewitt called Suarez’s interview “pretty good for a first conversation”, apart from the “huge blind spot” on the Uyghurs.
In a statement, Suarez claimed he had merely misheard. “Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uyghurs in China,” he claimed.
“China has a deplorable record on human rights and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used. That’s on me.”
You can listen to the interview here.
Speaking of Donald Trump and 2024, Kevin McCarthy made a curious comment this morning in an interview with CNBC.
Asked if he thought Trump could win an election despite all his legal troubles, the Republican House speaker replied, “Yeah he can … the question is, is he strongest to win the election? I don’t know that answer. But can … anybody beat Biden? Yeah, anybody can beat Biden. Can Biden beat other people? Yes, Biden can beat them.”
Make of that what you will. Here’s the full clip:
During his campaign swing through New Hampshire, Ron DeSantis was asked about his views on the January 6 insurrection.
Donald Trump has repeatedly insulted DeSantis, who is his closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination next year, but that apparently isn’t enough to earn the Florida’s governor’s condemnation of the former president’s involvement in the attack on the Capitol:
Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, has also praised the supreme court’s ruling in Moore v Harper.
Posting to Twitter, Pelosi said:
Today, the Supreme Court rejected a fringe, far-right assault on a sacred pillar of American Democracy: the right to vote.
With its ruling in Moore v. Harper, the Court refused the MAGA Republicans’ radical theory and reaffirmed our Founders’ vision of checks and balances.
The White House has responded to the supreme court’s ruling in Moore v Harper, calling it a “critical” move for voting rights.
White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton said the “extreme” legal theory would have let politicians undermine the will of the people.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, at a campaign event in Hollis, New Hampshire, also vowed to tear down Washington’s traditional political power centers, AP reports.
Asked about people who had voted twice for Donald Trump because of promises to “drain the swamp” in the nation’s capital, DeSantis replied:
He didn’t drain it. It’s worse today than it’s ever been.
He said he would take power out of Washington by instructing cabinet agencies to halve the number of employees there, adding:
I want to break the swamp.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to succeed where Donald Trump failed and to “actually” build the wall between the US and Mexico, as the two held dueling campaign events in New Hampshire.
DeSantis, at a town hall in Hollis, spoke about his new immigration policy proposal which includes calling for ending birthright citizenship, finishing the border wall and sending US forces into Mexico to combat drug cartels, AP reports.
He said:
We’re actually going to build the wall. A lot of politicians chirp. They make grandiose promises and then fail to deliver the actual results. The time for excuses is over. Now is the time to deliver results and finally get the job done.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
