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      ‘Bad for democracy’: North Carolina could throw out valid ballots in tight election

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      More than five months after the 2024 election, a swath of voters in North Carolina are still unsure whether their votes will count in an unprecedented effort to overturn a valid US election.Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin in a contest for the state supreme court. But after the election, Griffin challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters. A ruling from the North Carolina supreme court on Friday paved the way for as many as 1,675 voters to have their ballots thrown out in the election – more than double Riggs’s margin of victory.The challenged voters include someone who grew up in the state, a professor who was there for two decades, a lifelong resident studying abroad, and someone who still owns a home there and plans to move back, according to Guardian interviews.But Griffin claims they are “never-residents”, people who voted in North Carolina who had no previous residency in or attachments to the state.The Guardian spoke with several voters, first identified by the publication Anderson Alerts with their list later expanded upon by Popular Information, who were all living overseas when they cast their ballots in the North Carolina state supreme court race.At risk are two groups: 1,409 overseas voters from Guilford county, a Democratic-leaning area, who voted without showing photo ID – something that the law allows. Then, there are 266 overseas voters whom Griffin alleges have never lived in North Carolina, according to the North Carolina state board of elections.View image in fullscreenThe court gave 30 days for elections officials to get more information from the overseas voters. It said that the 266 voters suspected of never being residents in the state should have their ballots thrown out.That would mean that the vote cast by Josey Wright, a 25-year-old PhD student studying in the UK, wouldn’t count.Wright lived in North Carolina from early childhood until age 18. Her parents still live there, and she visits most years, typically spending summers there. She voted from abroad using a web portal available to US citizens who now live overseas, as she has done in several local and national elections since she moved to the UK to study.She found out her vote may not be counted after a reporter contacted her in recent days.“It’s a bit frustrating because it’s already a bit more difficult, I think, to vote as an overseas voter,” Wright said. “You have to be paying attention to US elections and also submit quite a bit of paperwork in order to get your ballot and to sign up for the portal. It’s a bit disheartening that, after all that effort, my vote actually might not be counted.”The legal battle has drawn attention nationwide and protests locally because the courts could potentially overturn Riggs’s victory by changing the rules of election procedure after the election happened. It’s a road map that election challengers in other states, and in much bigger contests, could use in the future, if it’s successful. If Trump had lost North Carolina, he was expected to make similar arguments.The ruling also set off a scramble to figure out next steps for the unprecedented election challenge. There’s confusion over how to find these voters, how to cure their ballots, and what next steps will look like.The state board of elections said in a court filing yesterday that these voters would be reviewed by elections officials to see whether they have claims of residency in North Carolina, and whether, if they were found to be one-time residents and otherwise valid, their ballots would count.Multiple lawsuits have been filed in federal court to stop the ruling from taking effect. Plaintiffs in one of the cases include a military spouse living in Italy who was born and raised in North Carolina; a lifelong resident who moved to Switzerland for her husband’s PhD program who is in the process of moving back to the state; a North Carolinian teaching English abroad on a one-year contract and a teacher at an air force base in Japan who lived in the state until last year.A federal court in North Carolina said elections officials should begin the ballot curing process but otherwise hold off on certifying any results pending the court process. The judge in that case, a Trump appointee, would not issue a stay of the case.State law has long allowed overseas voters who claim North Carolina residency to vote in the state.But in interviews, several of those voters said they actually had lived in the US and were confused about the challenge to their eligibility and unsure how, or whether, they could fix it.Josiah Young, 20, was studying abroad in Spain when he cast an absentee ballot online, voting in his first presidential election. He is a freshman at American University in Washington DC, but a lifelong North Carolinian. He voted in his home state, which he still has listed as his permanent residence.Young found out his vote had been challenged a couple of months ago, after one of his father’s colleagues shared a PDF that included voters challenged by Jefferson Griffin in a lawsuit. “Lo and behold, at the bottom of the list is a couple pages dedicated just to me. I was definitely surprised,” he said.“It’s pretty disappointing. As a first-time voter, I feel like I pretty much did everything that I was supposed to do. I cast my ballot legally, and then just to find out that someone, or anyone, is challenging my vote is pretty disappointing,” Young said.He believes he accidentally checked a box that said he had never lived in the US and didn’t plan on returning. He’s not sure there’s any way to remedy the situation and get his vote counted. He has not been notified about his inclusion on the list by any elections officials or challengers, he said. He could have remedied the problem quickly, as he voted early, so he wishes he had known.One North Carolina voter who requested to speak anonymously said they believed they had accidentally checked the wrong box on the form to request a ballot. Instead of saying that they intended to return to the US or were uncertain whether they would return, the voter said they had never lived in the US.The voter, who was abroad for six years but has since returned to the US, first learned about the challenge last fall and tried to notify their local election office, but never heard back. “I’m really upset that he would try to change the rules after losing the election,” the voter said. “I think that’s just very bad form for democracy.”Another challenged voter, Neil McWilliam, taught at Duke University for two decades before moving to France with his family in 2023. Originally from the UK, McWilliam, his wife and his son were naturalized in 2013, and he has voted in every state and federal election since. He is a Democrat, and his wife is registered as an independent. His vote was challenged, and hers was not.“Political operatives like Griffin hope to instill cynicism and hopelessness in those who oppose them,” McWilliam said. “The answer is not to reject voting as a waste of time, but to redouble efforts to ensure that everybody who is eligible can and does vote in fair elections free from partisan manipulation.”David Eberhard, also challenged by Griffin, is a former North Carolina resident who moved to Italy for his son’s education but still owns his home in the state and intends to return. He voted while living in Italy in 2024 using the online forms provided by local officials, he said. He found out he had been challenged in January, has no idea why, and updated his information with North Carolina local officials. He’s unsure of exactly what he’s supposed to do.“If I am supposed to present my credentials to a local official in person, I will have to travel at considerable expense and inconvenience, just because Griffin couldn’t bother with the inconvenience of ensuring that the names on his list were in fact improperly registered,” he said. More

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      Wisconsin supreme court race: liberal Susan Crawford beats Musk-backed candidate

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      Susan Crawford won the race for a seat on the Wisconsin supreme court on Tuesday, a major win for Democrats who had framed the race as a referendum on Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s popularity.Crawford, a liberal judge from Dane county, defeated Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general and conservative judge from Waukesha county, after Musk and groups associated with the tech billionaire spent millions to boost his candidacy in what became the most expensive judicial contest in American history.“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy,” Crawford said in a speech at her victory night event in Madison. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”With more than 84% of the vote tallied, Crawford led Schimel by nearly 10 percentage points.In remarks on Tuesday night, Schimel said he and his team “didn’t leave anything on the field” and announced that he had conceded the race in a call to his opponent before taking the stage. When his supporters began to boo, Schimel stopped them. “No, you gotta accept the results,” he said, adding: “The numbers aren’t gonna turn around. They’re too bad, and we’re not gonna pull this off.”Musk said hours after the result that “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary” and that the most important thing was that a vote on the addition of voter ID requirements passed.The result means that liberals will keep a 4-3 ideological majority on the state supreme court. That majority is hugely significant because the court will hear major cases on abortion and collective bargaining rights. The court could also potentially consider cases that could cause the state to redraw its eight congressional districts, which are currently drawn to advantage Republicans.View image in fullscreenMilwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, reported “historic turnout” for a spring election, with election officials saying in a statement Tuesday evening that due to the “unprecedented high turnout,” seven polling places ran out of ballots. The city’s elections commission said it was working to replenish resources to voters during the evening rush.A combined more than $80m was spent on the race, topping the previous record of some $51m that was spent in the 2023 Wisconsin state supreme court race. Elon Musk and affiliated groups spent more than $20m alone. Musk reprised some of the tactics that he used last fall to help Trump win, including offering $100 to people who signed a petition opposing “activist judges” and offering $1 million checks to voters.Pointing to the potential to redraw House districts, Musk had said the race “might decide the future of America and western civilization”.Democrats seized on Musk’s involvement in the race to energize voters who were upset about the wrecking ball he and his unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, have taken to federal agencies. They raised the stakes of an already high-stakes contest by holding out Wisconsin as a test case for Musk, saying that if he succeeded, he would take his model across the country.“Growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, I never thought I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice,” Crawford said on Tuesday night. “And we won.”After Musk’s involvement became public, Democrats saw an explosion in grassroots donations and people “coming out of the woodwork” to get involved in the race, Ben Wikler, the state’s Democratic party chair, said last month. When the party tested its messaging, Wikler said, messages that highlighted Musk’s involvement in the race motivated voters who were otherwise disengaged from politics.Jeannine Ramsey, 65, voted in Madison on Tuesday for Crawford because she said the “Elon Musk-supported Brad Schimel” wouldn’t rule fairly on the issues most important to her.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think it’s shameful that Elon Musk can come here and spend millions of dollars and try to bribe the citizens,” Ramsey said. “I don’t think it should be allowed. He doesn’t live in our state, and I don’t think he should be able to buy this election. It makes me angry.”Trump won Wisconsin in the presidential election in November by less than 1 percentage point – the closest margin of any battleground state.Because turnout in a state supreme court election is lower than that of a typical election and those who vote tend to be highly-engaged, experts have cautioned against trying to read too much into the election results for national political sentiment. Still, there were encouraging signs for Democrats.“The hard work of reaching the voters who pay the least attention to politics is going to take years for Democrats to build that kind of communications strength that can puncture the Republican propaganda bubble,” Wikler said in March. “But for laying the groundwork for flipping the House and the Senate in 2026 and winning governorships and state legislative majorities, the supreme court race can really point the way.”Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, also celebrated the result.“Tonight, the people of Wisconsin squarely rejected the influence of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and billionaire special interests. And their message? Stay out of our elections and stay away from our courts,” he said in a statement.In Madison, Crawford said she was ready to turn from the campaign trail, which she described as a “life-altering experience,” to the bench, where she promised to “deliver fair and impartial decisions”. Concluding her remarks, Crawford wished her mother, watching from home, a happy birthday and quipped: “I know how glad you are to see the TV ads end.”Jenny Peek contributed reporting from Madison, Wisconsin More

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      Pro-Palestinian British Cornell student says he will leave US citing fear of detention

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      A Cornell University student who participated in pro-Palestinian protests and was asked to surrender by United States immigration officials has said he is leaving the US, citing fear of detention and threats to his personal safety.Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate in Africana studies and dual citizen of the UK and the Gambia, has participated in pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza after the October 2023 Hamas attack. His attorneys said last month that he was asked to turn himself in and that his student visa was being revoked.President Donald Trump has pledged to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protesters and accused them of supporting militant group Hamas, being antisemitic and posing foreign policy hurdles.Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the Trump administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for Hamas.Last year, Taal was in a group of activists who disrupted a career fair on campus that featured weapons manufacturers and the university thereafter ordered him to study remotely. He previously posted online that “colonised peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary”.Taal filed a lawsuit in mid-March to block deportations of protesters, a bid that was denied by a judge last week.“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” Taal said on X on Monday.Trump’s administration has attempted to crack down on pro-Palestinian voices. Rights advocates condemn the moves.Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in early March and is legally challenging his detention. Trump, without evidence, accused Khalil of supporting Hamas. Khalil denies links to the militant group that Washington considers a “foreign terrorist organisation”.Badar Khan Suri, an Indian studying at Georgetown University, was detained earlier in March. Suri’s lawyer denies he supported Hamas. A federal judge barred Suri’s deportation.The legal team of Yunseo Chung, a Korean American student of Columbia University, said last week her lawful permanent resident status was being revoked. A judge ruled she could not be detained for now.A judge on Friday temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University named Rumeysa Ozturk, who was taken into custody by immigration officials and who, a year ago, co-authored an opinion piece calling to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.The Trump administration says it may have revoked more than 300 visas. More

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      Elon Musk hands out $1m checks to voters amid Wisconsin supreme court election race

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      Elon Musk gave out $1m checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group, ahead of a Wisconsin supreme court election that the tech billionaire cast as critical to Donald Trump’s agenda and “the future of civilization”.“It’s a super big deal,” he told a roughly 2,000-person crowd in Green Bay on Sunday night, taking the stage in a yellow cheesehead hat. “I’m not phoning it in. I’m here in person.”Musk and groups he supports have spent more than $20m to help conservative favourite Brad Schimel in Tuesday’s race, which will determine the ideological makeup of a court likely to decide key issues in a perennial battleground state. Musk has increasingly become the center of the contest, with liberal favourite Susan Crawford and her allies protesting Musk and what they say is the influence he wants to have on the court.“I think this will be important for the future of civilization,” he said. “It’s that’s significant.”He noted that the state high court may well take up redistricting of congressional districts, which could ultimately affect which party controls the US House.“And if the [Wisconsin] supreme court is able to redraw the districts, they will gerrymander the district and deprive Wisconsin of two seats on the Republican side,” Musk claimed. “Then they will try to stop all the government reforms we are getting done for you, the American people.”A unanimous state supreme court on Sunday refused to hear a last-minute attempt by the state’s Democratic attorney general to stop Musk from handing over the checks to two voters, a ruling that came just minutes before the planned start of the rally.Two lower courts had already rejected the legal challenge by Democrat Josh Kaul, who argues that Musk’s offer violates a state law. “Wisconsin law prohibits offering anything of value to induce anyone to vote,” Kaul argued in his filing. “Yet, Elon Musk did just that.”But the state supreme court, which is now controlled four-to-three by liberal justices, declined to take the case as an original action. The court gave no rationale for its decision. All four liberal justices have endorsed Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the Democratic-backed candidate.Kaul had no immediate comment on the court’s order.Musk’s attorneys argued in filings with the court that Musk was exercising his free speech rights with the giveaways and any attempt to restrict that would violate both the Wisconsin and US constitutions.The payments are “intended to generate a grassroots movement in opposition to activist judges, not to expressly advocate for or against any candidate,” Musk’s attorneys argued in court filings.Musk’s political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the presidential election last year, offering to pay $1m a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second amendments. A judge in Pennsylvania said prosecutors failed to show the effort was an illegal lottery and allowed it to continue through Election Day.Musk’s attorneys, about four hours before the rally was to begin, asked that two liberal justices who have campaigned for Crawford – Jill Karofsky and Rebecca Dallet – recuse themselves from the case. His attorneys argued their work for Crawford creates “the spectre of inappropriate bias.” If they did recuse, that would leave the court with a three-two conservative majority.Both justices rejected the request and said they would spell out their reasons why at a later date.One of the court’s conservative justices has endorsed Schimel, who wore a “Make America Great Again” hat while campaigning Sunday.Schimel said in a national television interview that he does not control “any of the spending from any outside group, whether it’s Elon Musk or anyone else” and that all Trump asked was whether he would “reject activist judges” and follow the law.“That’s exactly what I’ve committed to anybody, whether it’s President Trump, Elon Musk or any donors and donors or supporters or voters in Wisconsin. That’s my commitment,” Schimel told Fox News Sunday.The contest has shattered national spending records for a judicial election, with more than $81m in spending.It comes as Wisconsin’s highest court is expected to rule on abortion rights, congressional redistricting, union power and voting rules that could affect the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election in the state. More

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      The Guardian view on attacks on lawyers: democracies must stand up for justice | Editorial

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      What the law says on paper is irrelevant if it cannot be upheld, or even stated clearly. That is why lawyers are targeted – with harassment, disbarment from the profession or even jail – by repressive regimes.Russia’s attempts to suppress the voice of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny did not end with his death in an Arctic prison colony. In a bleak coda, three of his lawyers have been jailed for several years. Vadim  Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organisation” for relaying his messages to the outside world.The Center for Human Rights in Iran warned earlier this year that Iranian lawyers were being kicked out of the profession, arrested and jailed for representing protesters and dissidents. As its executive director, Hadi Ghaemi, noted: “Every lawyer imprisoned or disbarred represents many defendants whose rights have been trampled and now lack legal defence.”In China, where more than 300 human rights lawyers who had dared to take on sensitive cases were detained in 2015’s “709” crackdown, the pressure continues. As a grim joke had it at the height of the campaign, “even lawyers’ lawyers need lawyers” – those who represented arrested friends were then seized themselves.The unrelenting nature of the clampdown is particularly striking when, as one Chinese lawyer, Liang Xiaojun, observed: “We know we can’t win.” When the verdict is clear before a case has started, lawyers can only offer solidarity, spread their clients’ stories, and highlight the gulf between legal theory and reality. But in doing so, they challenge the official narrative. Targeting these lawyers didn’t just signal that resistance only invites further trouble. It attacked the concept of the rule of law itself, which lawyers had attempted to assert, hammering home the message that the party’s power was unassailable.The Council of Europe warned earlier this month that there are increasing reports of harassment, threats and other attacks on the practice of law internationally. The human rights body has adopted the first international treaty aiming to protect the profession of lawyer. Member states should now ratify this. Lawyers must be defended, as they defend others and the concepts of rules and justice.That message is more important than ever as the Trump administration turns on lawyers and judges as part of its broader assault on the institutions of US democracy and the principles that underpin them. The sanctioning of staff at the international criminal court is only the most flagrant example. William R Bay, president of the American Bar Association, told members in a recent letter: “Government actions evidence a clear and disconcerting pattern. If a court issues a decision this administration does not agree with, the judge is targeted. If a lawyer represents parties in a dispute with the administration, or … represents parties the administration does not like, lawyers are targeted.” Government lawyers too have faced “personal attacks, intimidation, firings and demotions for simply fulfilling their professional responsibilities”.Democratic governments and civil society must speak up for the law wherever it is threatened. Mr Bay is right to urge those in the profession to stand up and be counted. “If we don’t speak now, when will we speak?” he asks. The law still counts – both materially and culturally – in the US. Those who practise it need some of the courage in resisting abuses that their counterparts have shown elsewhere.  More

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      Trump’s imperial plan is now eroding the rights of people who thought they were safe | Nesrine Malik

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      The imperial boomerang effect is the theory that techniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a case study in how systems built for those whose rights have been diluted or taken away eventually devour those who were assumed to be safe from such violations. There are three ways in which this process of rebounding happens. The first is through the creation of a domestic caste system that mirrors the one outside a country’s borders, as demonstrated in the recent treatment of those foreigners with permanent US residency and valid work visas who expressed dissenting views on Gaza.Under Trump, their actions meet a threshold of insubordination that justifies their arrest, detention and deportation. The human rights of those individuals, such as due process, are cancelled. In allying themselves with Palestinians and against US foreign policy, they are demoted to the level of those Palestinians in their treatment by the US government. The tenuousness of permanent residency, valid work visas, green cards, marriage to US citizens and parenthood to American children starts to become clear. These are all conditional rights that can be stripped away if, in your alliances and solidarities, you identify yourself as a subject of American power. You mark yourself out as a citizen of the periphery daring to ask for the rights of the citizens of the core.Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is an almost too-on-the-nose demonstration of that two-tier system. Laws that were designed centuries ago, and have only been used to create legal vacuums on US soil in order to detain foreigners, create a second class of human. Franklin Roosevelt relied on the act to create domestic internment camps during the second world war, in which more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were detained. Another order that he issued, and that mandated the internment of US citizens, was only overturned in 2018. If it had not been, Trump would no doubt be using the law to extend arrests and detentions to US citizens for their political opinions as well.That legal infrastructure, no matter how dormant, is always open to reactivation and capture. A similar process unfolds within the workings of an immigration complex that is already opaque and reflexively punitive. The second rebound mechanism is via this sort of infrastructure. The US immigration system is a vast enterprise of bureaucracy, employment, detention centres and private companies that channels and imprisons immigrants. It is also a system that, even before Trump, was one of legal sinkholes and almost infinite licence. Border guards have the final decision-making authority on whether you enter the US, no matter what visa you are issued from an embassy abroad; customs agents have the right to search devices; and, if you are detained and deported, that whole process can happen without you being given access to a lawyer or standing before a judge. Detention for many is a state of extended limbo.Combine a system so large with a regime that enables it while weakening the judicial and legal proceedings that act as a check on its worst impulses, and you have a recipe for overreach and impunity. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that gave even more power to border officials to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”. With increased deportations of undocumented migrants being a flagship policy of Trump’s campaign, and the empowerment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to achieve that end, a practical and political dragnet has been cast so wide that it’s catching a lot more than intended. It is no longer only those whose skin colour, paperwork or political opinions throw them into uncertainty.Over the past few weeks, German tourists were arrested when they tried to enter the US entirely legally through the southern border, and detained for weeks before being deported. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen with a work visa, was arrested and detained for two weeks but told to “mentally prepare” herself for “months”. A French scientist was denied entry to the US when his phone was searched and messages critical of Trump were found. Those who have been added to the immigration detention prison population, from Mooney to Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and recent graduate of Columbia University, testify to the state of detainees they met there. “Justice,” Khalil wrote from detention, “escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.”Which brings us to the third way in which the boomerang effect takes place – through the erosion of norms and standards, a cannibalisation of the very political systems meant to govern and protect those at the centre. On 18 March, Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who issued a temporary ban on deportations as ordered by the administration. The confrontation between Trump and the judiciary has precipitated a constitutional crisis that is shaking the foundations of US politics. The system of checks and balances – the equality of the legislative, executive and judicial branches under the constitution – is threatened by Trump’s open defiance and desired subjugation of all to the executive office. This is against a backdrop of the limiting of academic freedom, the violation of the first amendment, and a disregard for the US constitution described by experts as a “blitzkrieg on the law”.In this, there is something that can be seen everywhere in regimes that either have or crave absolute power. In order to seize authority and run a whole country according to the interests of a sovereign, more and more parties must be disenfranchised and repressed. The imperial form of governance is the prototype of what is required to exert control in the presence of mass dissent. But all political systems with large components that subdue a significant portion of the population cannot continue without those components overtaking the entire machine. It is a simple, almost elegant fact; something like a law of nature. But a nation that withholds its best ideals from some will end up losing them for all.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump’s defiance of court orders is ‘testing the fences’ of the rule of law

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      Donald Trump’s second administration has shown an “unprecedented degree of resistance” to adverse court rulings, experts say, part of a forceful attack on the American judiciary that threatens to undermine the rule of law, undercut a co-equal branch of government and weaken American democracy.The attacks, experts say, threaten one of the fundamental pillars of American government: that the judicial branch has the power to interpret the law and the other branches will abide by its rulings.The attack came to a head this week when the Trump administration ignored an order from US district judge James Boasberg to turn planes carrying deportees around. “I don’t care what the judges think,” Thomas Homan, charged with enforcing Trump’s deportation agenda, said in a Fox News television interview on Monday as the decision came under scrutiny. The next day, Trump called for Boasberg to be impeached, calling him a “radical left lunatic”.For months, the Trump administration has made it clear they believe they can ignore judicial orders. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” vice-president JD Vance tweeted on 9 February. Elon Musk, Trump’s top adviser, has repeatedly called for impeaching judges, and is donating to Republicans in Congress who have supported doing so. House Republicans have introduced resolutions to impeach Boasberg and four other judges who have ruled against Trump.Trump’s call for impeachment prompted a rare public rebuke from chief justice John Roberts, who said in a statement on Wednesday: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate process exists for that purpose.”Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who studies the federal courts, said there was no parallel situation in American history. Trump officials, he said, were trying to see what they could get away with in front of federal judges.“They’re testing the fences in ways in which they can claim plausible deniability when congressional Republicans say, you can’t defy the courts,” he said. “Whether you call it a crisis or not, this is certainly an unprecedented degree of resistance on the part of the executive branch to adverse court rulings.”J Michael Luttig, a well-respected former conservative federal judge, said on MSNBC on Tuesday that “America is in a constitutional crisis”. “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America,” he said.Luttig told the Guardian that he believed the US supreme court’s ruling last summer finding Trump had immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undergirded his attacks on the courts. “It is the reason for his emboldenment,” he said.During Trump’s first administration, the federal courts played a major role in constraining administration policies that violated the US constitution and federal law. Of the 246 cases litigated involving efforts to implement policies through federal agencies, the Trump administration won 54 cases and lost 192 cases or withdrew the actions, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.Since Trump’s second term began in January, more than a dozen judges have blocked his executive actions, including efforts to mass fire federal workers, freeze federal funding and end birthright citizenship.During the first Trump administration, Vladeck noted, officials appeared more willing to “go back to the drawing board” to rework policies after they had been halted by the courts to make them comply with the law, he said.“You saw a lot more effort to rationalize everything the administration was doing in law, as opposed to in power,” he said.The attack on the judiciary has not just included impeachment, but also has extended to personal attacks on judges, prompting concerns about their safety. Supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sister received a hoax bomb threat, the New York Times reported. Some of the attacks have included sending pizza orders to the homes of judges and family members as a way of threatening jurists that the public knows where they live.Another judge, John Coughenour of the western district court in Washington, told the Times he had been the victim of a “swatting” attempt in which law enforcement descended on his home after he blocked a Trump administration order ending birthright citizenship.Unlike politicians and public figures, judges are prohibited from speaking out on political matters and saying anything about a case that could give the impression they are biased. That leaves them unable to correct misinformation and respond to attacks against them.“It is difficult when you’re in a position where you can’t necessarily traditionally respond to what you think might be unfair and unwarranted attacks,” said Esther Salas, a federal district judge in New Jersey who has been outspoken about the need for protections for jurists after an unhappy litigant killed her son in 2020 and shot her husband at their home.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I will tell you that judges are human, just like everybody else. We have emotions, we have fears, we have concerns for our family members and for our own safety,” she said. “It does impact a judicial officer.”Judges have some tools at their disposal to force compliance with their orders. They can sanction attorneys, or if a party refuses to comply with a directive, a judge can issue civil or contempt orders. A civil contempt order, which could be something like a daily fine, punishes the non-compliant party until they adhere to a court ruling. Criminal contempt is more akin to a prosecution. In 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio after the former sheriff was found in criminal contempt of court.Federal courts also depend on US marshals, who are part of the justice department to enforce their rulings, prompting concerns Trump could interfere with their functioning.Indeed, Boasberg has already asked the Trump administration to “show cause” as to why the administration did not comply with his ruling to turn around the plane.But a motion of contempt and a finding of one often comes at the end of a long legal process and there can be long legal disputes about whether a party is actually complying with a court order.When a court blocked the Trump administration’s freeze of federal funds, for example, there was evidence the administration was not complying. The 22 states that sued filed a motion to enforce the court’s ruling, which they won, and were considering asking for a contempt order, but ultimately decided not to, Letitia James, the New York attorney general, one of the state attorneys general involved in the suit, said on Thursday.“We were considering a motion for contempt, but there was some explanations that they provided to us,” she said. They went ahead with the motion to enforce, which released the remaining funds, she told reporters at an event on Thursday.Vladeck speculated there were other actions courts could take if the Trump administration’s defiance reached a “break the glass moment”. The government, he said, relies on the federal courts for many things, including approving warrants and allowing criminal cases to proceed.“If noncompliance in case A led courts to be less likely to do the federal government’s bidding in case B, that’d be a real problem from the government’s perspective,” he said. The federal court in Washington , for example, could hypothetically dismiss all of the indictments the government brought out of hand. “That would be quite an escalation, but I think we’d be in response to quite a provocation.”But the larger point, Vladeck said, was that no one benefits from an unstable legal system in the United States. Economic markets depend on everyone being able to accept that the judgments of courts will be followed.“There’s no long-term political endgame that results from openly defying a judgment,” he said.Rachel Leingang contributed reporting More

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      Hegseth suggests judge who blocked trans troops ban abused her power

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, joined the mounting criticism of federal judges by Donald Trump and others in his administration on Saturday, mocking the judge who blocked a ban on transgender troops in the US military and suggesting she had exceeded her authority.The US district judge Ana Reyes in Washington ruled that Trump’s 27 January executive order, one of several issued by the Republican president targeting legal rights for transgender Americans, likely violated the US constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.Hegseth in a post on social media mockingly called the judge “Commander Reyes” and suggested she was abusing her power by making decisions about warfare.“Since ‘Judge’ Reyes is now a top military planner, she/they can report to Fort Benning at 0600 to instruct our Army Rangers on how to execute High Value Target Raids,” Hegseth wrote. “After that, Commander Reyes can dispatch to Fort Bragg to train our Green Berets on counterinsurgency warfare.”Reyes was appointed by the Democratic former president Joe Biden. There have been rising tensions between Trump’s administration and members of the federal judiciary who have issued rulings impeding some of Trump’s actions since he returned to office in January, and rising concern about the safety of judges.Trump, his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, the attorney general Pam Bondi and other administration officials have assailed judges in recent weeks. For instance, Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of the judge presiding over a legal challenge to deportation flights, calling him a “Radical Left Lunatic” and a “troublemaker and agitator” – prompting the US supreme court chief justice to issue a rare rebuke of the president.Federal courts are hearing more than 100 lawsuits challenging various initiatives by Trump and his administration, with some judges imposing nationwide injunctions to block policies, such as his move to curtail automatic birthright citizenship.Hegseth, a military veteran and former Fox News television host, has made culture war issues such as banning transgender troops and abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the US military a top priority.After Hegseth took over the Pentagon, Trump also relieved the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown, who is Black, and the Navy’s top admiral, who was the first woman to hold the position. Hegseth had previously questioned whether Brown only got the job because he was Black.While Trump and Hegseth have broad authority to relieve US military officers, their efforts to ban transgender service members have triggered numerous lawsuits.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe military said on 11 February it would no longer allow transgender individuals to join the military and would stop performing or facilitating medical procedures associated with gender transition for service members. Later that month, the military said it would begin expelling transgender members.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit before Reyes argued the order was illegal, pointing to a 2020 US supreme court ruling that found that employment discrimination against transgender people is a form of illegal sex discrimination.Lawyers for the administration have argued in court that the military is entitled to bar people with certain conditions that make them unsuitable for service, also including bipolar disorder and eating disorders. At a 12 March hearing, they told Reyes she should defer to the judgment of the current administration that transgender people are not fit for service. More