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      Judge rules Trump can downsize federal government with worker buyouts

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      Donald Trump’s buyout program for federal employees can proceed, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. The move paves a path forward for the 65,000 government workers who have volunteered to resign under the president’s plan to shrink the federal workforce.The US district judge George O’Toole Jr in Boston – who halted the so-called “Fork in the Road” program last week, before its 6 February deadline, to assess whether it was legal – found that the unions who had sued on behalf of their employees did not have legal standing to challenge the resignation offer because it would not directly affect them. O’Toole did not rule on the legality of the program itself.It was a significant legal victory for the Republican president after a string of courtroom setbacks.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told the Associated Press: “This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities.”Everett Kelly, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal workers, told Reuters: “Today’s ruling is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants. But it’s not the end of that fight.”In a statement, Kelley added that the union’s lawyers were evaluating the decision and assessing next steps.The union maintains that requiring US citizens to make a decision about “whether to uproot their families and leave their careers for what amounts to an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk” is illegal.The deferred resignation program has been spearheaded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is serving as Trump’s top adviser for reducing federal spending. Under the plan, employees can stop working and get paid until 30 September.Officials have been told to prepare staff cuts of up to 70% at some agencies, sources told Reuters. The 65,000 federal employees who have signed up for the buyouts, according to a White House official, equal about 3% of the total civilian workforce.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLabor unions argued the plan is illegal and asked for O’Toole to keep it on hold and prevent the office of personnel management, or OPM, from soliciting more workers to sign up. The administration said the program is now closed to new applicants.The resignation offer is one of several tactics Trump and Musk have taken to gut the federal workforce in recent weeks, alongside massive cuts to foreign aid and the Department of Education. After Musk spent $250m to re-elect Trump, the president named the tech billionaire head of a newly minted, so-called “department of government efficiency”, designed to slash federal spending. More

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      Elon Musk’s gutting of US agencies is illegal, experts say. How do you muzzle Doge?

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      In 2022, the Pentagon proudly announced a committee on diversity and inclusion, with a marine veteran and senior director at Tesla, serving as a member. The same person, who spent nearly six years at Tesla, also helped push Elon Musk to make Juneteenth a company-wide holiday. But Musk is a notorious recipient of lucrative government contracts and changes with the winds of presidential administrations.Now in 2025, as a “special government employee” heading up the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is going to war with those kinds of government diversity and inclusion programs and slashing whatever he sees as a “waste” of public coffers.But legal resistance is mounting, as Doge faces countless lawsuits alleging everything from privacy concerns to free speech violations, which all leads to one important question: is any of this even legal?Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading and preeminent constitutional scholars and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, has already argued that much of Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders on the day of his inauguration disregards the US constitution. He told the Guardian he saw Musk’s actions as furthering that culture.On whether Doge and Musk can legally have this much power over an array of government departments, Tribe was emphatic: “NO.”Musk has applied a buckshot method across the government, offering CIA agents walking papers while appraising the Department of Education – all at the same time.Tribe said the lack of guardrails being placed on Doge’s maverick initiatives, raises “both” questions of illegality and ethical wrongdoing that can be challenged in court. As for Musk’s status as a federal contractor (such as his StarLink work with the Pentagon) and now a government employee, Tribe sees it as “absolutely” a legal conflict of interest.Musk is certainly facing roadblocks: protests at the buildings of USAid – another target of Doge he called a “radical-left political psy op” on X – have brought in hundreds and attracted broader Democratic backlash. But Doge continues unabated, honoring Trump’s campaign promise to rid the federal government of the “woke” Biden era.On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders went further, telling CNN: “What Musk is doing is illegal and unconstitutional.”Sanders explained how outright deleting an agency like USAid, which was itself a creation of Congress, requires congressional approval.“You can’t do it unilaterally,” he said.But with a Republican supreme court supermajority that almost always sides with the Trump administration, any of these lawsuits that do end up being tested in the highest US court risks rulings in favor of Musk and Doge. Many of these Doge-related lawsuits will go on for months and be heard by benches stacked with Trump appointees from his first presidency. Musk has also begun publicly chastising lower court judges who go against the spirit of the administration.Doge, nonetheless, will continue to be sued.It took only minutes after Trump was sworn in for a Maryland-based public interest law firm to file a 30-page lawsuit alleging Musk’s Doge should be considered a “federal advisory committee”, which makes it subject to government transparency laws and public scrutiny, which includes note keeping and meeting records, as required by law. So far, Musk has reportedly employed a team of very young programmers who brazenly took control of the treasury department payment system, which gave them access to the addresses, social security numbers and bank account information of Americans.Tribe says that act alone raises, “serious issues of privacy”. Doge is indeed already facing legal action for that treasury fiasco, with a judge approving a temporary hold on Doge from fully accessing the payment system, while another judge ordered a freeze on the deadline for federal workers to accept a buyout.Ultimately, the only real guardrails on Musk and Doge will be in the hands of the courts. Even if Doge is found to be violating labor laws, national security statutes or constitutional rights – cases will inevitably be gummed up in the legal process, which could allow enough time for some of these federal workers to relent and take buyouts.“Obviously what Musk is doing is illegal,” said Ed Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And on some level it boils down to the world’s richest man – a child of apartheid who surrounds himself with sycophantic phrenologists – trying to consolidate control over as much of the state apparatus as possible.”Ongweso has been following the rise of the tech-bro class and its cozying up to presidential administrations. Musk’s Doge takeover is the latest iteration.“For years, both parties have fetishized Silicon Valley to varying degrees, eagerly swallowing the sector’s gibberish about making governance efficient via algorithmic rule via privatization,” he said.Ongweso pointed out that Musk is a veteran of the mass layoff and knows they come with lawsuits. But it hasn’t stopped him before.At Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant a Black former employee was awarded $3.2m in a racial harassment case, while the plant itself has been sued multiple times on racial discrimination and labor law grounds.“Learning that a key Doge staffer was a skull measuring eugenicist should come as no surprise given the rampant racism (slurs, swastikas, a hanging noose, etc) at Musk’s Fremont Tesla factory,” he said.And when it comes to laying off workers, Musk has the same recycled playbook.“He’s been sued for failing to provide advance notice for 2024 mass layoffs at Tesla and for 2022 Twitter layoffs that were a transparent attempt to get out of severance pay,” explained Ongweso.“It’s obvious lawsuits aren’t a deterrent for the world’s richest man – why would he stop mass layoffs, slashing and burning operations, or recruiting racists when it’s worked out so well for him that he’s now in firm control of America’s administrative state?” More

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      Trump’s sanctions against the ICC are disgraceful | Kenneth Roth

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      Donald Trump’s executive order reauthorizing sanctions against international criminal court (ICC) personnel reflects a disgraceful effort to ensure that no American, or citizen of an ally such as Israel, is ever investigated or prosecuted. Quite apart from this warped sense of justice – that it is only for other people – the president’s limited view of the court’s powers was rejected in the treaty establishing the court and repudiated by the Joe Biden administration and even the Republican party. But that didn’t stop Trump.The US government traditionally has had no problem with two of the three ways that the court can obtain jurisdiction because it could control them. Washington is fine with the court prosecuting citizens of states that are members of the court because it has no intention of joining them. And it accepts that the United Nations security council can confer jurisdiction because it can exercise its veto to block prosecutions it doesn’t like.But the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute, allows a third route to jurisdiction. The court can investigate or prosecute crimes that occur on the territory of a member state, even if the perpetrator is the citizen of a non-member state. That was why Trump in his first term objected to an ICC preliminary examination in Afghanistan (and imposed sanctions – freezing assets and limiting travel – on the chief prosecutor at the time, Fatou Bensouda, and one of her deputies) because the investigation might have implicated CIA torturers in that country under George W Bush. Trump in his new executive order alludes to the prosecutor’s actions in Afghanistan, but it is a non-issue because the current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has made clear that those past crimes are not his priority.The real issue is Israel. That same territorial jurisdiction is how the ICC was able to charge Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for their starvation strategy targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Israel never joined the court, but Palestine did, conferring jurisdiction for crimes committed on Palestinian territory, including Gaza, regardless of the perpetrator’s citizenship.Referring to the United States and Israel, Trump’s executive order says: “Neither country has ever recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction, and both nations are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war.” These claims are legally irrelevant.The US opposition to territorial jurisdiction was rejected by the drafters of the ICC treaty by an overwhelming vote of 120-7. The only governments to join the United States in opposing it were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen.Moreover, there is no ICC exception for “thriving democracies” or governments that purport to respect the laws of war. As any justice institution should, its jurisdiction applies to governments regardless of their character or stated policy. The sole exception is under what is known as the “principle of complementarity”, in which the court defers to good-faith national investigations and prosecutions.But Israel has no history of prosecuting its leaders for war crimes, and despite the ICC charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, it has announced no investigation of their starvation strategy in Gaza. To the contrary, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency threatened Bensouda – the former ICC prosecutor – and her husband. That hardly reflects good-faith pursuit of possible war crimes.For two decades, the US government objected to territorial jurisdiction, but when the ICC charged Vladimir Putin, it abandoned that position. Putin was charged for kidnapping Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia. Russia has never joined the court, so the sole basis for the court acting was territorial jurisdiction – Putin’s alleged crime took place in Ukraine, which had conferred jurisdiction.That was a game-changer. Biden called the charges “justified”. Even prominent Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, one of the foreign policy leaders in the Senate, shifted. Joined by a long bipartisan list of sponsors, he secured unanimous adoption in March 2022 of a resolution endorsing the ICC’s prosecution of war crimes in Ukraine. Graham said that Putin’s “war crimes spree” had “rehabilitate[d] the ICC in the eyes of the Republican party and the American people”. Other Republicans visited the ICC prosecutor to support the prosecution of Putin.Yet this shift turned out to be only tactical. It did not survive the Israel exception to human rights principles. Now that senior Israeli officials have been charged, Trump has resurrected the objection to the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction.There is nothing the least bit radical about asserting jurisdiction over people who commit a crime on foreign territory. If I, an American citizen, murdered someone in London, Washington could hardly object if British authorities prosecuted me. By the same token, Britain would have every right to delegate that power to the ICC if, because of a crisis such as an occupation, it were unable to pursue the matter itself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is inviting trouble with his unprincipled stand. Article 70 of the Rome Statute authorizes prosecution for what Americans call “obstruction of justice” if anyone tries to impede or intimidate an official of the court because of their official duties. Bensouda essentially turned the other cheek when Trump sanctioned her. I would be surprised if Khan, the current prosecutor, were so understanding. The court would have jurisdiction over Trump because he is interfering with a pending prosecution.Trump might try to shrug off ICC charges, figuring that no one would dare to arrest him, but he would face other consequences. Because all 125 ICC member states would have a legal duty to arrest him were he to show up, they would probably tell him quietly that he is not welcome. Trump should ask Putin, who had to skip the August 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg for the same reason, what it feels like to be a global pariah.Israel has other options. It could open a genuine, independent investigation of the starvation strategy and let the chips fall where they may. Netanyahu and Gallant, if they have a defense, could show up in the Hague and contest the charges, the way former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta did. But Trump obstructing justice is not the answer.

      Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs, will be published by Knopf on February 25 More

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      Giuliani says he has settled defamation dispute and will keep Florida condo

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      Rudy Giuliani’s trial over whether he must turn over his Florida condo and other prized possessions to former Georgia election workers whom he defamed was delayed on Thursday after the former New York mayor failed to show up in court.Giuliani later shared on X that he had “reached a resolution of the litigation with the plaintiffs that will result in a satisfaction of the plaintiffs’ judgment”.“This resolution does not involve an admission of liability or wrongdoing by any of the parties. I am satisfied with and have no grievances relating to the result we have reached,” he wrote.“I have been able to retain my New York co-op and Florida condominium and all of my personal belongings. No one deserves to be subjected to threats, harassment, or intimidation. This litigation has taken its toll on all parties. This whole episode was unfortunate. I and the plaintiffs have agreed not to ever talk about each other in any defamatory manner, and I urge others to do the same.”A jury ordered Giuliani to pay $148.1m to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss in 2023 after he falsely accused the women of attempting to steal the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.Giuliani, who has shown little remorse for his actions, later turned over multiple watches as well as a 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 once owned by the movie star Lauren Bacall to Freeman and Moss.A federal judge in New York had been scheduled to weigh whether Giuliani must also turn over his condo in Palm Beach, which he claims to be his permanent residence. The non-jury civil trial was also set also determine whether Giuliani must hand over three New York Yankees World Series rings to the two women.Per Giuliani’s post on X, it appears that he was not forced to turn over his condo or World Series rings.Earlier this week, Judge Lewis Liman ordered that Giuliani’s son Andrew must hold on to the rings as the trial gets under way, saying, “The point was to ensure the security of the rings,” ABC reports.This month, Giuliani, who has been disbarred in New York and Washington DC, has so far been found in contempt of court twice.Last week, Liman issued his ruling after Giuliani failed to provide financial evidence surrounding his $148m judgment, saying: “The defendant has attempted to run the clock by stalling.” At the hearing, Giuliani acknowledged that he did not always comply with the requests for information, arguing that he regarded them as a “trap” set by lawyers.Later that week, Giuliani was once again found in contempt of court for continuing to spread false statements about Freeman and Moss. Federal judge Beryl Howell in Washington DC said Giuliani had violated court orders that prevented him from defaming the two women.Giuliani’s attorney, Ted Goodman, said in response: “This is an important point that many Americans still don’t realize due to biased coverage and a campaign to silence Mayor Giuliani. This contempt ruling is designed to prevent Mayor Giuliani from exercising his constitutional rights.”After the verdict in 2023, Freeman and Moss detailed their harrowing experiences as a result of Giuliani’s lies against them. Freeman said: “I want people to understand this: money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with … I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.” More

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      in Elections

      Five key takeaways from Jack Smith’s report on alleged Trump election crimes

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      A special counsel report detailing Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday and concluded that the president-elect would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020.However, Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election scuppered the investigation.Jack Smith was appointed as special counsel and his report was published after a fierce legal battle by Trump’s team to keep it under wraps. In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible to continue the prosecution into his attempts to stay in the Oval Office despite his electoral loss to Joe Biden in 2020.Here are some key findings:1. Trump did not cooperate fullySmith laid out the challenges he faced during the investigation, including Trump’s assertion of executive privilege to try to block witnesses from providing evidence, which forced prosecutors into sealed court battles before the case was charged.Another “significant challenge” was Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts, prosecutors”, which led prosecutors to seek a gag order to protect potential witnesses from harassment, Smith wrote.2. Smith calls allegations of political interference ‘laughable’Smith hit back at claims by the president-elect that he pursued the charges for political reasons.“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully,” wrote Smith, who resigned from the justice department on 10 January.He added that “nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making.“And to all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote.3. Trump knew his allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election were falseSmith wrote that Trump knew his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were false – but he continued to make them anyway.“Mr Trump’s false claims included dozens of specific claims regarding certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for Mr Trump to votes against him. These claims were demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false,” Smith said.4. Smith believed Trump should be charged despite supreme court immunity rulingDespite a supreme court ruling on presidential immunity, Smith wrote that he believed the charges he filed against Trump still held water.He notes that his team was able to secure a superseding indictment from a grand jury after the top court handed down its ruling, which gave Trump immunity for official acts taken as president.“The Supreme Court’s decision required the office to reanalyze the evidence it had collected. The original indictment alleged that Mr Trump, as the incumbent president, used all available tools and powers, both private and official, to overturn the legitimate results of the election despite notice, including from official advisors, that his fraud claims were false and he had lost the election.“Given the supreme court’s ruling, the office reevaluated the evidence and assessed whether Mr Trump’s non-immune conduct – either his private conduct as a candidate or official conduct for which the office could rebut the presumption of immunity – violated federal 33 laws. The office concluded that it did. After doing so, the office sought, and a new grand jury issued, a superseding indictment with identical charges but based only on conduct that was not immune because it was either unofficial or any presumptive immunity could be rebutted.”5. Trump is furiousIn a typically incoherent social media post put online in the early hours of Tuesday, Trump’s rage at the release of the report was clear.Trump, who returns to the presidency on 20 January, wrote: “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were. Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act

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      Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January.The Press Act would ban secret government demands for journalists’ communications from tech giants such as Google or Verizon and protect reporters from jail for refusing to reveal sources. For investigative reporters to do their jobs – holding government officials to account for corruption and wrongdoing – they need to be able to protect the confidentiality of their sources. With courts recently weakening already-imperilled “reporter’s privilege” protections, this bill would finally give journalists in the US federal protections comparable to those afforded to other relationships where confidentiality is paramount, such as lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, and spouses.The bill has something for both Democrats and Republicans to like. The Press Act’s broad and nonpartisan definition of “journalist” takes into account the modern media landscape: you don’t have to work full-time for a mainstream media organisation to be covered. Freelancers, independent reporters writing Substack newsletters and even journalists posting primarily to social networks such as X would be included. It protects right-leaning journalists just as much as anyone at the New York Times or the Guardian.It also has commonsense national security exceptions (like preventing a terrorist attack or an imminent threat of violence) without diluting the bill’s strong protections. It’s worth remembering that Democratic administrations have abused their powers to go after the first amendment rights of journalists just as much as Republicans. The Obama administration brought a record number of prosecutions against whistleblowers, and was implicated in several government spying scandals, including secretly targeting journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News.Even the Biden administration, before reversing course after public outrage, continued pursuing at least some of the surveillance orders against news outlets that the first Trump administration initiated. That’s why, in an age of extreme political polarisation, the Press Act is about as bipartisan as it gets. The House passed the bill early in 2024 unanimously, with several prominent Republicans publicly touting its importance. The bill also has powerful co-sponsors in the Senate, ranging from Democrats such as Ron Wyden and Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee chair, to Trump-supporting Republicans like Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham.Even the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson supports the bill, as he made clear in a recent interview he did with the former Fox News and CBS reporter Catherine Herridge, who was subpoenaed to reveal a source for a story she wrote several years ago. She was recently in front of the DC court of appeals, where her lawyers argued that forcing reporters to reveal their sources in court sends a chilling effect to countless others around the country. For the bill to pass, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, must make it a priority. The lame-duck session is only a few weeks long; if senators don’t act now, we may not have this opportunity for another decade or more.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Biden pardons his son, Trump will absolve his criminal allies. America shouldn’t stand for this | Simon Jenkins

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      The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Yes, any father might do the same for a son. Yes, the boy is reformed, forgiven, on the mend. Only nasty people are out to jail him. Live and let live. Yet there is something monumental in the pardon granted by the outgoing US president, Joe Biden. Six months ago, he scored political points by denying he would pardon his son Hunter Biden. Now, with the election over, he has done so.The easy response is: what is new? President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon; Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and other figures whose families had donated to the Democrats; Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father and dodgy aides galore. No one doubts that, as president, Trump will pardon a number of outrageous figures – perhaps even the Capitol Hill rioters of 2021. We wait to see if this includes trying to pardon himself from various pending prosecutions (though he cannot extend these powers to cases brought at state level).Biden can plead a measure of justice in that Hunter Biden’s relatively minor convictions – for tax evasion and lying about his drug use when buying a gun – were frantically pursued by his political foes. But then there was a similar grain of politics in the equally frantic prosecution of Trump’s business misdeeds by the Democratic authorities in New York. The front page of the New York Times went tabloid and gleefully shrieked: “GUILTY”.Cynics – or as they might say, realists – will reassure themselves that all this will be soon forgotten, as it was in the past. Across the landscape of US crime and punishment – aspects of which still border on frontier anarchy – these are peccadilloes. More important issues beckon from a new Trump presidency.But justice is a universal liberty, one that the US purports to champion around the world. That a nation’s executive claims the right – even constitutionally – to override justice must be wrong. The US constitution is built on explicit rights and freedoms, protected by a separation of powers. The ostensive purpose of article two, section two was to strengthen the president in handling the union’s army and state militias. It was not to condone crime. It has been grossly abused. During the election, the Democrats presented themselves as the guardians of morality, with Biden praising Kamala Harris for having the “moral compass of a saint”. In reneging on his promise, Biden has undermined this.The US constitution is a thing of wonder. It has held the union together – sometimes only just – for two and a half centuries, while global nations and empires have been upheaved and disintegrated. Its survival is rooted in two underlying principles. The first is respect for the rights of often very different states to order their local laws, such as on abortion and gun control. The second is a balanced separation of federal powers between the judiciary, executive and legislature. This separation, in what is today a deeply polarised American society, clearly needs strengthening.But how? The constitution’s final task was to make its own reform near impossible. Sometimes, just sometimes, such reforms have been achieved. Presidential pardon looks like a case for change.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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      Judge slaps down Florida effort to ban abortion ad: ‘It’s the first amendment, stupid’

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      Florida’s health department can’t block a TV advertisement in support of a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, after the department sent letters to local TV stations commanding them to stop airing the ad or risk criminal consequences.“The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false’,” US district judge Mark E Walker wrote in his ruling. “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”Florida is one of 10 states set to vote on abortion-related ballot measures in November. If enacted, Florida’s measure would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution and roll back the state’s six-week ban on the procedure, which took effect in May.Earlier this month, Florida’s health department sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations running an ad by Floridians Protecting Freedom, the campaign behind the measure. In the ad, a woman named Caroline speaks about being diagnosed with cancer while pregnant.“The doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline says in the ad. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine.”The letters said the claim that women can’t get life-saving abortions in Florida was “categorically false”, since Florida’s ban permits abortions in medical emergencies. “The fact is these ads are unequivocally false and detrimental to public health in Florida,” Jae Williams, the Florida department of health communications director, said in an email late on Thursday.However, doctors across the country have said abortion bans are worded so vaguely as to force them to deny people medically necessary abortions. A New York doctor recently said that she had treated a woman with an ectopic pregnancy – which is nonviable and potentially life-threatening if left untreated – who had been turned away from a Florida hospital.In response to the letters, Floridians Protecting Freedom sued the Florida surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, and John Wilson, the former general counsel for the state health department. At least one TV station stopped airing the ad, the coalition’s lawsuit alleged.On Thursday, Walker granted a temporary restraining order blocking Ladapo from taking any further action against broadcasters or other media outlets that might air ads by Floridians Protecting Freedom.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Of course, the surgeon general of Florida has the right to advocate for his own position on a ballot measure,” Walker wrote. “But it would subvert the rule of law to permit the state to transform its own advocacy into the direct suppression of protected political speech.”Over the last several weeks, Florida’s government, run by Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, has sent law enforcement officials to investigate people who signed a petition to get the measure on the ballot, set up a webpage urging people not to vote for it, and issued a report suggesting the measure got on the ballot due to “a large number of forged signatures or fraudulent petitions”. Floridians Protecting Freedom has denied wrongdoing.Anti-abortion activists have since filed a lawsuit to remove the measure from the ballot or nullify votes cast for it. More