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      Florida’s Abortion Rights Ballot Measure Fails, Keeping Six-Week Ban in Place

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      A ballot measure that would have enshrined abortion rights in the Florida Constitution failed, according to The Associated Press, delivering a major defeat to proponents who had hoped to restore broad access to the procedure in the nation’s third-largest state.The measure, known as Amendment 4, won 57 percent of the vote, falling short of the 60 percent required for passage. It would have allowed abortions “before viability,” usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Florida bans most abortions after six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant.The defeat, while not unexpected, halted what had been an unbroken winning streak for abortion rights groups on ballot measures since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Voters sided with abortion rights in all seven states that had ballot questions on the issue before this year, in states as different as Kansas and California. But the highest vote that any of those earlier measures won in red states was 59 percent, just under what Florida, with its higher threshold, needed to pass.The Florida measure’s failure is a political victory for Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who had become the face of a well-funded and well-organized opposition campaign. He spent much of his political capital, and considerable state resources, to defeat it. Another ballot measure that Mr. DeSantis and his allies strongly opposed, which would have legalized marijuana in the state, was also defeated.Mr. DeSantis and Republican lawmakers enacted a 15-week abortion ban in 2022 and the six-week ban in 2023. Florida had previously allowed abortions up to 24 weeks and had been a destination for women in other Southern states with stricter laws.Organizers of the Yes on 4 campaign raised more than $100 million to get the measure on the ballot and campaign for it, knowing it would be a difficult battle. Though similar measures have passed in other conservative states, Florida’s 60 percent threshold is higher. Going into Election Day, polls showed support hovering around 60 percent.The nonpartisan Yes on 4 campaign knew that it would need support from Democrats, Republicans and voters with no party affiliation. Organizers hoped that enough Republican-leaning voters would vote yes even if they also supported anti-abortion candidates.Former President Donald J. Trump, a Florida resident, had opposed Amendment 4, after initially suggesting that he might support it.Eric Adelson More

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      Giuliani shows up to vote in Mercedes he was supposed to give to poll workers

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      Rudy Giuliani turned up to vote in Florida for Tuesday’s presidential election in a Mercedes Benz convertible that a court had ordered him to surrender more than a week ago as part of a $148m settlement to two Georgia poll workers he defamed.The 1980s car, once owned by the actor Lauren Bacall, is among the assets of the disgraced former New York mayor and vocal Donald Trump acolyte that Giuliani is deliberately hiding from their reach, according to a letter their attorney, Aaron Nathan, sent to the judge in the case.Additionally, Nathan said, the contents of Giuliani’s $5m Manhattan apartment to which the pair are also entitled were stripped out some weeks ago in contravention of the judge Lewis Liman’s receivership order. Nathan said Giuliani had deliberately ignored the court’s deadline for handing over the assets.“[Giuliani] has yet to reveal where the vast majority of the receivership property is actually located, despite repeated requests to his counsel,” said the letter, sent on behalf of the poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss.“That silence is especially outrageous given the revelation that the defendant apparently took affirmative steps to move his property out of the New York apartment in recent weeks, while a restraining notice was in effect. Furthermore, despite the cooperative pose [he] put on in his letter of October 29, the receivers’ inquiries since that time have been met predominantly with evasion or silence.”In addition to the Upper East Side apartment, Giuliani was ordered to turn over several items of New York Yankees memorabilia and about two dozen luxury watches.In response to the letter, Liman has ordered Giuliani to appear at a hearing in New York on Thursday. Giuliani’s attorney, Kenneth Caruso, has requested a delay so his client can fulfill an obligation to host a radio broadcast from Florida that evening.Giuliani, wearing a New York fire department hat and stars-and-stripes shirt, was pictured arriving at the polling site in Palm Beach on Tuesday in the passenger seat of the Mercedes SL500. He spoke to reporters but had no comment about the settlement.Caruso, in a court filing last week, denied Giuliani was being obstructive. “[He] is, and will remain, ready to comply” with Liman’s order, Caruso said – but claimed that Giuliani, who filed for bankruptcy last year, had not received information about how to deliver it, the Hill reported.Nathan said that claim was “misleading”.Giuliani’s spokesperson Ted Goodman, meanwhile, told the Hill in a statement that he “has made available his property and possessions as ordered” and that he had put a “few items” into storage over the past year.Anything else that was removed was related to Giuliani’s nightly livestreams, Goodman claimed, asserting it was therefore outside the settlement. A separate lawsuit over Giuliani’s Palm Beach apartment is ongoing.In a subsequent statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Goodman said Giuliani had made efforts to hand over the car.“Our lawyers have requested documentation to transfer over the title of the vehicle, and haven’t heard back from opposing counsel,” he said.“This is yet another attempt to render Mayor Rudy Giuliani – a man who has improved the lives of more people than almost any other living American – penniless and homeless. The weaponization of our once-sacred justice system should concern every American, regardless of partisan political affiliation.”Separately Michael Ragusa, Giuliani’s head of security, appeared to defend the disbarred lawyer’s retention of the Mercedes Benz in his own statement.“Mayor Giuliani is an 80-year-old man with a bad knee and 9/11-related lung disease, relies on this vehicle as his primary means of transportation in Florida, where there is no mass transit system like New York City’s,” he said.“He currently holds an active Florida driver’s license. The way he is being pushed toward poverty by those targeting him, after all he has done for this country, is appalling and it is clearly politically motivated.”In July, a judge dismissed Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, clearing the way for Freeman and Moss to begin collecting the settlement. But Nathan said in the letter dated Monday that Giuliani had “refused or been unable to answer basic questions about the location of most of the property”.He wrote: “The visit to the apartment, which all parties understood to be for the purposes of assessing the transportation and storage needs for the receivership property contained therein, instead revealed that the apartment was substantially empty.”Freeman and Moss said they received death threats and constant intimidation following the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden when Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused them of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night.The pair were formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing, and a jury ruled Giuliani owed them $148m for spreading lies about them.The pair subsequently settled similar defamation lawsuits with far-right media outlets the Gateway Pundit and One America News.Giuliani has sometimes been an attorney for Trump, who is running for the presidency again on Tuesday in a contest pitting him against Kamala Harris. 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      In Florida, the future of abortion might come down to men

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      When Maxwell Frost bounded on stage at a Saturday morning rally in support of Florida abortion rights, the 27-year-old congressman was quick to explain why he had shown up.“I’m so proud to be here as an ally and partner in this fight!” he yelled to the roughly hundred-strong crowd who had gathered in an Orlando church courtyard, clutching handwritten sings with messages like “abortion bans are killing us” and “womb-tang clan ain’t nothing to fuck with”.His biological mother had given him up for adoption, said Frost, who wore a black T-shirt that read “Abortion is Health Care”. “The thing that made it sacred was the fact that she had a choice,” Frost said. “I’ve had enough of people trying to use parts of all of our identities to take away freedoms from other people.”The crowd – mostly women – roared in response.In an election where women’s access to abortion has become a top issue, activists are now rushing to convince men that they also have a stake in the fight – and that, come Tuesday, they should vote accordingly.Although men support abortion rights at similar rates as women, they seem to be far less driven by the issue. Less than half of men identify as “pro-choice”, according to Gallup, and are far more likely to see the economy or immigration as their top issue. One poll of men of color found that, although more than 80% believe abortion should be legal, less than half prioritized candidates who supported abortion rights.“It’s that common misconception that abortion is a woman’s issue,” said Zach Rivera, a 24-year-old activist with Men4Choice, a national group dedicated to energizing men who support abortion rights.View image in fullscreenOver the last several weeks, Rivera has spent countless hours knocking on doors in Florida neighborhoods in support of amendment 4, a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights into the Florida constitution and overturn the state’s ban on the procedure past six weeks of pregnancy. Nine other states are also set to vote on similar ballot measures on election day, but amendment 4 may face the steepest odds. In order to pass, the measure must secure 60% of the vote in a state that has veered sharply to the right in recent years and whose state government has repeatedly tried to kneecap the campaign behind the amendment.Recent polling has found that support for measure hovers somewhere in the 50% range: while one poll found that 58% of Florida voters support it, another closer to 54%. In the latter poll, 55% of women supported the measure, compared to 53% of men. In an election as tight as Florida’s, nudging more men to vote yes could mean the difference between victory and defeat.As Saturday morning gave way to a humid afternoon punctuated by bursts of rain, Rivera trudged from house to house in a wealthy, blue area of Orlando, dropping off Men4Choice stickers and attempting to talk to voters about amendment 4. Numerous houses had blue “Harris/Walz” signs in their front lawns – but not a single one had a purple “Yes on 4” sign. Voters were reluctant to talk about it. “I’m friends with everyone,” one woman said.Rivera has had better luck, he said, with phone banking. In one recent conversation, Rivera described urging one reluctant man to think about his future wife and children: what if, 10 years down the line, his wife died because an abortion ban blocked her from accessing medical care? How would he reveal to his kids that he didn’t vote?“The whole point of this movement is to think about future you,” Rivera recalled telling him. The man, Rivera said, decided to vote in favor of amendment 4.At an early voting site in Tampa, 24-year-old Brandon McCray cited women’s rights as one of his greatest concerns in the 2024 elections. It helped convince him to vote for Kamala Harris. “Amendment 4 would just protect a lot of women,” he said. Banning abortion, he said, “is the biggest violation to a human right”.McCray may be a relative anomaly among his peers. Appalled by the triple-punch of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, the sexual violence exposed by the #MeToo movement in late 2017 and the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, young women have become the most progressive cohort ever measured in US history – but young men have inched towards the right. While 62% of young women now support Harris, 55% of young men back Donald Trump, according to recent New York Times polling. Moreover, young men’s participation in politics is falling, with young women now on track to vote, rally and donate more frequently.For many young women, the trend is so obvious that its unremarkable. “The right-leaning has more traditional values and more traditional values tends to benefit men more than it benefits women,” said Briana Valle, 22. “For obvious reasons, people are always gonna go for what benefits them.”Leila Wotruba, 22, added: “There’s a lot more at stake for women.”As a gay man, Rivera knows that he may appear to not have much at stake in the fight over abortion rights. But Rivera sees the future of the issue, especially in Florida, as a “litmus test” for other rights.“That’s what I tell people: Even if this might not be a personal issue to you overall … you are definitely next,” he said. “They are just waiting until there’s nobody left to defend you.” More

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      Florida may enshrine hunting and fishing by ‘traditional methods’ – but what are they?

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      On election day, Florida voters will decide whether to enshrine a constitutional right to hunt and fish in their state.Amendment 2, proposed by Republican state lawmaker Lauren Melo, seeks to “preserve traditional methods, as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife”.Much is at stake. If the amendment succeeds, hunting and fishing would be considered the primary – and legally protected – conservation methods in Florida. Both activities are a huge part of the state’s multibillion-dollar recreational tourism economy. As of 30 October, backers of amendment 2 had raised nearly $1.3m for the measure, far out-fundraising the amendment’s opponents.Lawyers, scientists and conservationists worry amendment 2’s vague language, particularly the passage about “traditional methods”, could supersede science-based wildlife management in unprecedented ways.“That language is open to applying chicanery,” said David Guest, a retired Earthjustice lawyer based in Florida. “Does that mean that you can use explosives [in the destructive practice called “blast fishing”]? I mean, what in the world is this?”Pushed by conservative-leaning organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF), these “sportsmen’s bills of rights” view hunting as a cultural tradition and are meant to counter proposals to limit hunting and fishing.View image in fullscreen“It’s a pre-emptive safeguard against the anti-sportsman agenda,” said Mark Lance, CSF’s south-eastern states senior director. The CSF and the the NRA apply that term to what they consider extremist animal-rights campaigns to end all hunting, epitomized by former Humane Society CEO Wayne Pacelle’s leadership.The CSF drafted language for many of the measures nationwide, including Florida’s, along with the International Order of T Roosevelt, a hunting advocacy group named after the former president and hunting enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt. The CSF is also fighting a Colorado proposal that would eliminate hunting for mountain lions.These campaigns to change constitutions have been effective at ballot boxes around the nation. Florida could become the 24th state and the last in the south-east to add hunting and fishing rights to its constitution. While Vermont was long the only state to constitutionally protect hunting and fishing rights – it did so for more than 200 years – these measures proliferated after Alabama residents approved one in 1996. To date, only one has failed, in Arizona. But in Guest’s analysis, “this is the one that’s the sloppiest” of other recent measures in states like North Carolina and Utah.Guest and Sierra Club Florida chapter director Susannah Randolph both told the Guardian that the amendment’s nebulous language, particularly the “traditional methods” part, could harm wildlife populations and conservation efforts. There is no legal definition of traditional methods in court, Guest said. Nor is it defined in the amendment.Advocates say this vagueness might enable worst-case-scenario possibilities, including use of steel-jaw leghold traps, which are considered cruel and outlawed in more than 100 countries; using hounds to hunt bears and other game, which is banned or restricted in several states; and more relaxed killing limits. A Florida Bar analysis also suggests that organized hunts are likely to become more common if the amendment passes. Others worry amendment 2 would backpedal on Florida’s 1995 gillnet ban, a constitutional amendment that outlawed commercial fishing nets that entangle marine mammals such as dolphins. Despite this concern, amendment 2 cannot repeal or impede the gillnet ban, Guest said, because both amendments can be applied in tandem.But it’s unclear how courts could interpret such language. Guest pointed out that, in Wisconsin, the constitutional right to hunt and fish was upheld to support wolf hunting after the species was delisted from the Endangered Species Act. Florida wildlife advocates fear the same reasoning would apply to the black bear. On the other hand, Ryan Byrne, a managing editor at the nonpartisan website Ballotpedia, noted that courts have decided states can still regulate hunting and fishing in previous lawsuits.Still, some Florida conservationists and activists think that amendment 2 could empower individuals to do what they please and ignore existing regulations. While the amendment does reiterate the authority of the state wildlife-management agency, the Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (FWC), the constitutional preference for hunting and fishing would mean there was no guarantee FWC’s authority would win out, said Devki Pancholi, a third-year University of Florida law student and vice-president of the local Animal Legal Defense Fund chapter. Courts will typically refer to the most recent amendment when resolving constitutional disputes.The amendment’s vagueness is strategic. A CSF document distributed at a National Rifle Association convention and obtained by the NoTo 2.org campaign suggested that “by using a vague term like ‘traditional methods,’ it will be up to state agencies to determine what they include in their season as ‘traditional methods’”, such as trapping. The NRA’s lobbying arm has also published recommended language for state constitutional amendments to protect the right to hunt and fish.Florida law already codifies hunting and fishing as statutory rights, which proponents of the constitutional measure argue can be easily reversed. Yet there have not been any significant attempts to outlaw hunting and fishing in the state.“In order to change the statutory right to fish and hunt in Florida, you would need 61 House reps and 21 state senators to vote … to make hunting and fishing illegal,” said Chuck O’Neal, chair of the NoTo2.org political action committee. “It’s never going to happen, not in this state.” Melo and the state senator Jason Brodeur, the Republican lawmakers who introduced the bill in 2023, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.Still, Lance, the CSF south-east regional senior director, argues that even without direct criminalization attempts in Florida, threats exist on a national scale. “We want to be ahead of attacks to hunting and fishing in Florida before it’s too late,” he said.The bill’s supporters point to a failed 2021 Oregon ballot proposal that sought to redefine hunting and fishing as animal abuse as a leading example of nationwide threats.View image in fullscreen“That’s a backhanded way to try to regulate hunting and fishing,” said Lane Stephens, a lobbyist who represents the Southeastern Dog Hunters Association, among others.Stephens added that the attempt was aligned with the mission of the Humane Society, which contributed nearly $10,000 to the NoTo2.org campaign.“We don’t want [animal-rights activists] trying to run something in our constitution or in state law that would limit our abilities to hunt and fish,” Stephens said, adding that many of Florida’s incoming urban residents don’t understand or agree with the hunting and fishing heritage Floridians enjoy.He continued: “It’s up to FWC to decide when we have a season and what that season looks like.”But Pancholi, the law student, and others question some of the procedures behind the measure getting on the ballot and FWC’s involvement with it. The bill was fast-tracked through the state legislature, O’Neal pointed out, with fewer hearings in the statehouse and senate than usual. And the FWC, which is responsible for regulating fish and wildlife, may be the measure’s most significant supporter.In September, the FWC sent out a memo on official letterhead, written by chair Rodney Barreto. It directed those with questions about the amendment to a Yes on 2 campaign communications director. Barreto is also vice-chair of the Yes on 2 campaign and sits on the board of the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, which contributed $250,000 to the Vote Yes on Amendment 2 political action committee. FWC commissioners Steven Hudson and Preston Farrior contributed $10,000 and $15,000, respectively, to the Yes on 2 campaign as well. Commissioners are gubernatorial appointees.According to Florida law, government agencies are required to provide public notice in a public meeting before formally endorsing a ballot measure, but FWC did not hold public discussions about its position before announcing its support.“From what I could tell, I wasn’t able to find any meeting notes,” Pancholi, the law student, said. Neither could the Guardian. If true, “that would be a violation of the law”, she added. FWC did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment by press time.Conservation and science at oddsYes on 2 supporters are united by a strong belief that hunters and anglers are the original conservationists.“Hunting is a means of conservation by which animal populations remain under control,” said Stephens. “We need to make decisions based on the science and the data, and not on emotions.”Yet scientists have argued that the amendment could do exactly the opposite, placing hunting and fishing higher than other management methods such as habitat restoration, raising vulnerable species in captivity for release, or “bag limits” that restrict the kind and number of animals people can kill or keep. Such an approach appears at odds with the basics of wildlife management, said Edward Camp, a professor of fisheries and aquaculture governance at the University of Florida.“Does it influence how the best management advice is selected?” Camp said. “That’s, I think, at the heart of the issue.”Amendment 2 may prioritize hunts as the solution to human-wildlife conflicts instead, pushing other scientific methods to the backseat. After a 2015 bear hunt killed nearly 300 bears over the span of just two days, for example, several Florida counties allocated money for bear-proof trash bins that helped reduce human-bear encounters.Guest, the environmental lawyer, predicts that “the focus will be more on consumption of wildlife and less on conservation”.Ballotpedia’s Byrne noted the widespread notion that ballot measures, regardless of topic, are sometimes “really just to stoke a cultural issue and try to affect turnout”.With a much-publicized abortion measure also on the ballot in Florida and increasingly politicized judiciaries, Guest said the sportsmen’s bills of right are part of a national movement to advance the political agenda of the far right.“The constitution is the social contract,” he said. “We should be more cautious in the way we write it.” More

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      in Elections

      Body of Tennessee Factory Worker Killed in Hurricane Helene Is Found

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      She is believed to be the last employee who was missing after the plastics plant flooded. Authorities are still investigating the circumstances around the deaths. The remains of a sixth factory worker in eastern Tennessee who was swept away in the flooding brought on by Hurricane Helene have been found, ending a search for what is believed to be the last missing employee more than a month after the storm tore through the Southeast.Officials on Friday disclosed the identity of the body as Rosa Andrade, 29, one of a half-dozen victims of the flood who worked at Impact Plastics, a factory in the close-knit town of Erwin, about 120 miles east of Knoxville.“These people were just reporting to work that morning,” Andrew Harris, a captain with Unicoi County Search and Rescue, said in an interview on Saturday. “We’re trying to provide closure for the families, and obviously grieving with them.”The deluge at the factory on Sept. 27 was part of a trail of devastation caused by Helene, the Category 4 hurricane that hit the coast of Florida on Sept. 26 and decimated neighboring states with landslides and flooding in the days that followed. Helene killed more than 200 people across the Southeast.In North Carolina alone, there were more than 100 storm-related deaths, with damages and recovery efforts projected to cost the state an estimated $53 billion.Although Ms. Andrade is thought to be the last missing person from the factory, Mr. Harris said that search and recovery efforts continue for victims from North Carolina, some of whom are believed to have been swept into Erwin and nearby counties. State officials from Tennessee and North Carolina have suggested that at least a dozen people overall remain unaccounted for in the two states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access

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      Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.

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      “For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More

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      Lil Durk Is Accused of Conspiring to Kill a Rival. What We Know About the Case.

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      The rapper Lil Durk was arrested at the airport in Miami this week after he had been booked on flights to three international destinations, federal prosecutors said.The Grammy-winning rapper Lil Durk was arrested on a federal charge near Miami International Airport on Thursday over accusations that he conspired to kill a rap rival, resulting in the fatal shooting of another person.Lil Durk put out a bounty on the life of another rapper, identified only as T.B. by prosecutors, as retaliation for the 2020 killing of the rapper King Von, a member of the hip-hop collective Only the Family, which Lil Durk founded, according to the federal criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.An F.B.I. affidavit also says that Lil Durk had been booked on at least three international flights that were leaving on Thursday — to Italy, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates — in an attempt to flee the United States.Lil Durk, 32, whose legal name is Durk Banks, appeared in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Friday. He remained in federal custody and was expected to be arraigned in Los Angeles in the coming weeks, according to prosecutors. He was charged with conspiracy to use interstate facilities to commit murder for hire resulting in death.The news of his arrest comes weeks before the scheduled release of his new album, “Deep Thoughts,” on Nov. 22. Earlier this year, he won a Grammy Award for Best Melodic Rap Performance for his song “All My Life,” featuring J. Cole.Representatives for Lil Durk had not responded to a request for comment.Here’s what we know about the case so far:Lil Durk is alleged to have co-conspirators.Lil Durk’s arrest comes on the heels of a recently unveiled federal indictment in Los Angeles charging five other men affiliated with Only the Family, or O.T.F., with the murder-for-hire plot, alleging that they conspired to “track, stalk, and attempt to kill” a rapper identified as T.B. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More