State Legislatures

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Gloria Johnson Announces Bid for Marsha Blackburn’s Senate Seat

      by

      Gloria Johnson, who barely avoided expulsion for her role in a gun control rally in the State Legislature, is hoping to unseat Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Gloria Johnson, a Democratic state representative from Tennessee who narrowly avoided being expelled from the Legislature in April after taking part in a gun control protest on the statehouse floor, announced plans on Tuesday to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Ms. Johnson, 61, received a flood of national attention after she joined two other Democrats, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, to interrupt debate on the floor of the Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives and rally for stricter gun control measures in late March, just days after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville that killed six people.In retribution, Republicans moved to expel the three Democrats — sometimes called the Tennessee Three — from the Legislature. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were both ousted. Ms. Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments but avoided expulsion by just one vote. (Both men were later voted back into their positions.)Last week, the State Legislature held an emotional and chaotic special session meant to be devoted to public safety that ended without agreement on any significant new restrictions on firearm access.In a video announcing her Senate campaign, Ms. Johnson led with that issue, playing clips of news coverage of the Nashville shooting and highlighting her involvement in the gun control protest.“When my friends and I believed mothers and fathers who lost children at Covenant deserved a voice, and we fought for it, they expelled them,” she says in the video.Ms. Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville, was first elected to the Tennessee House in 2012, then lost subsequent elections in 2014 and 2016 before again winning in 2018. For the 2024 Senate race, she is running in a contested Democratic primary against Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice activist who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2020.Both hope to unseat Ms. Blackburn, 71, who in 2018 became the first woman elected to represent Tennessee in the Senate.In her video, Ms. Johnson suggested that Ms. Blackburn was beholden to “extremists and billionaires,” criticizing her views on abortion.Senator Blackburn’s campaign spokeswoman, Abigail Sigler, accused Ms. Johnson in a statement of being a “radical socialist” who “would be a puppet” for President Biden and progressive Democrats. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Federal Court Again Strikes Down Alabama’s Congressional Map

      by

      Republicans failed to comply with a court order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it,” the judicial panel said.A panel of federal judges rejected Alabama’s latest congressional map on Tuesday, ruling that a new map needed to be drawn because Republican lawmakers had failed to comply with orders to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”In a sharp rebuke, the judges ordered that the new map be independently drawn, taking the responsibility away from the Republican-controlled legislature while chastising state officials who “ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”The legislature had hastily pushed through a revised map in July after a surprise Supreme Court ruling found that Alabama’s existing map violated a landmark civil rights law by undercutting the power of the state’s Black voters. The revised map, approved over the objections of Democrats, increased the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent.In its new ruling, the district court panel in Alabama found that the legislature had flouted its mandate.“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote. Responsibility for a new map now falls to a special master, Richard Allen, a longtime Alabama lawyer who has worked under several Republican attorneys general, and a cartographer, David Ely, a demographer based in California. Both were appointed by the court. The decision — or the independent map to be produced — can be appealed. State officials have said that a new congressional map needs to be in place by early October, in order to prepare for the 2024 elections.The litigation has been closely watched in Washington and across the country, as several other states in the South face similar voting rights challenges, and control of the U.S. House of Representatives rests on a thin margin. Prominent lawmakers in Washington — including Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus — have kept careful tabs on the redistricting effort.At least one nonpartisan political analysis has predicted that at least one Alabama district could become an election tossup with a new map, given that Black voters in Alabama tend to vote for Democratic candidates.The decision was joined by Judge Stanley Marcus, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton; and by Judges Anna M. Manasco and Terry F. Moorer, both named to their posts by former President Donald J. Trump. (Judge Marcus typically sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.)For Alabama, the ruling caps off nearly two years of litigation, marking yet another instance in the state’s tumultuous history where a court has forced officials to follow federal civil rights and voting laws.Two decades ago, a lawsuit forced the creation of the Seventh Congressional District, the state’s sole majority-Black district, in southwest Alabama. (Under the Republican-drawn map rejected on Tuesday, the share of Black voters in that district dropped to about 51 percent from about 55 percent.)“It’s really making sure that people who have consistently been kept at the margins or excluded as a matter of law from politics have a chance — not a guarantee — but a realistic chance of electing candidates of choice,” said Kareem Crayton, the senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center for Justice and a Montgomery, Ala., native. “The fact that we’re having to fight over that principle is really sad in 2023.”After the 2020 census, which began the process of setting district lines for the next decade across the country, the Alabama legislature maintained six congressional districts with a white Republican incumbent. A group of Black voters challenged the map under a landmark voting rights law, given that more than one in four residents of Alabama is Black.The Birmingham court said the map would need to be redrawn, but the Supreme Court intervened and said a new map could not be put in place so close to the primary races ahead of the 2022 election. In doing so, the Supreme Court unexpectedly affirmed the key remaining tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” The court had gutted much of that landmark civil rights law a decade earlier, and many had expected a similar result with the Alabama case.But in a weeklong special session, Republicans refused to create a second majority-Black district, and shielded their six incumbents from a potentially brutal primary at a moment when the party has only a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.Republicans defended their revised map, calling it a fair attempt to keep counties and communities with similar economic and geographic issues together, while adhering to the Constitution. Democrats and the Black voters who brought the challenge called it a squandered opportunity to provide equal representation to a historically disenfranchised bloc of voters.At a hearing in August, the panel of judges sharply pressed the state’s attorneys on whether the revised map had done enough to adhere to their guidance on how to address the voting rights violation, making their skepticism clear.“What I hear you saying is that the state of Alabama deliberately disregarded our instructions,” Judge Moorer said at one point. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      What Happens if Mitch McConnell Resigns Before His Senate Term Ends?

      by

      The longtime Republican leader froze up during a news conference on Wednesday in Kentucky. The second such episode in recent weeks, it stirred speculation about his future in the Senate.For the second time in a little over a month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longtime Republican leader, froze up during a news conference on Wednesday, elevating concerns about his health and his ability to complete his term that ends in January 2027.At an event hosted by the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Mr. McConnell, 81, who was elected to his seventh term in 2020, paused for about 30 seconds while responding to a reporter’s question about his re-election plans.The abrupt spell — like one at the U.S. Capitol in July — happened in front of the cameras. In March, a fall left him with a concussion. He suffered at least two other falls that were not disclosed by his office.Mr. McConnell has brushed off past questions about his health, but speculation is swirling again about what would happen in the unlikely event that he retired in the middle of his term.How would the vacancy be filled?For decades in Kentucky, the power to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate was reserved exclusively for the governor, regardless of whether an incumbent stepped down, died in office or was expelled from Congress.But with Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, in the state’s highest office, Republican lawmakers used their legislative supermajorities to change the state law in 2021.Under the new law, a state executive committee consisting of members of the same political party as the departing incumbent senator will name three candidates the governor can choose from to fill the vacancy on a temporary basis. Then a special election would be set, and its timing would depend on when the vacancy occurs.At the time that G.O.P. lawmakers introduced the change, Mr. McConnell supported the measure. Mr. Beshear, who is up for re-election this November, vetoed the bill, but was overridden by the Legislature.Who might follow McConnell in the Senate?Several Republicans could be in the mix to fill the seat in the unlikely scenario that Mr. McConnell, the longest-serving leader in the Senate, stepped down including Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general; Ryan Quarles, the agricultural commissioner; Kelly Craft, a former U.N. ambassador under former President Donald Trump and Representative Andy Barr.Photographs by Jon Cherry for The New York Times; Grace Ramey/Daily News, via Associated Press and Alex Brandon/Associated Press.In a state won handily by former President Donald J. Trump, several Republicans could be in the mix should Mr. McConnell, the longest-serving leader in the Senate, step down.But replacing him with a unflagging ally of the former president could rankle Mr. McConnell, who has become a fairly sharp, if cautious, critic of Mr. Trump after the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.One name to watch could be Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general, who is challenging Mr. Beshear in the governor’s race and has been considered at times an heir apparent to Mr. McConnell.Should he lose his bid for governor — which drew an early endorsement from Mr. Trump — talk of succession could be inevitable despite his connection to the former president.Ryan Quarles, the well-liked agricultural commissioner, might also be a contender. He lost this year’s primary to Mr. Cameron in the governor’s race.Kelly Craft, a former U.N. ambassador under Mr. Trump, who finished third in that primary, has the political connections to seemingly be part of the conversation. She is married to a coal-industry billionaire, who spent millions on advertising for her primary campaign.And then there is Representative Andy Barr, who has drawn comparisons to Mr. McConnell and who described Mr. Trump’s conduct as “regrettable and irresponsible,” but voted against impeachment after the riot at the Capitol.What have McConnell and his aides said about his health?Both times that Mr. McConnell froze up in front of the cameras, his aides have said that he felt lightheaded.But his office has shared few details about what caused the episodes or about his overall health. He missed several weeks from the Senate this year while recovering from the concussion in March, which required his hospitalization.Mr. McConnell, who had polio as a child, has repeatedly played down concerns about his health and at-times frail appearance.“I’m not going anywhere,” he told reporters earlier this year.How is Congress dealing with other lawmakers’ health issues?For the current Congress, the average age in the Senate is 64 years, the second oldest in history, according to the Congressional Research Service.Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who is the chamber’s oldest member at 90, has faced health problems this year that have prompted growing calls for her to step down.In February, she was hospitalized with a severe case of shingles, causing encephalitis and other complications that were not publicly disclosed. She did not return to the Senate until May, when she appeared frailer than ever and disoriented.This month, she was hospitalized after a fall in her San Francisco home.Longtime senators are not the only ones in the chamber grappling with health concerns.John Fetterman, a Democrat who was Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, suffered a near-fatal stroke last May and went on to win one of the most competitive Senate seats in November’s midterm elections.Nick Corasaniti More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Mississippi Primary Runoff Election 2023: Live Results

      by

      Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Charlie Smart and Isaac White. Editing by Wilson Andrews, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Wisconsin Elections Official Targeted in Partisan Clash Over Voting

      by

      Meagan Wolfe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator since 2018, has been demonized by former President Donald J. Trump’s allies in the battleground state.Republicans in Wisconsin pushing to oust the state’s nonpartisan head of elections clashed on Tuesday with voting rights advocates and some local clerks during a rancorous public hearing in Madison, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.With their new supermajority in the State Senate, Republicans fought over the reappointment of Meagan Wolfe as the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator.The agency’s head since 2018, Ms. Wolfe has become a steady target of right-wing attacks, fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s grievances about his defeat in the battleground state in 2020. Many of them hinge on his falsehoods about election fraud and the use of electronic voting machines and ballot drop boxes.Ms. Wolfe did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be ousted. Among them was Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice whom Republicans tasked with leading a 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results in the state. The review, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million, found no evidence of significant fraud.“A majority of people in Wisconsin have doubts about the honesty of elections in this state,” he said at the hearing. “That’s disgraceful.”On Tuesday, Ms. Wolfe declined to comment through a spokesman for the elections commission, who shared a copy of a letter that she sent to legislators in June that had sought to dispel election misinformation.“I believe it is fair to say that no election in Wisconsin history has been as scrutinized, reviewed, investigated and reinvestigated as much as the November 2020 general election,” her letter said. “The outcome of all those 2020 probes produced essentially the same results: the identification of a relatively small number of suggestions for procedural improvements, with no findings of wrongdoing or significant fraud.”Meagan Wolfe, the administrator, did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be removed.Ruthie Hauge/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the hearing, Ms. Wolfe’s supporters described her as a model of competency who guided a network of state, county and local election officials through the pandemic and has done so in an impartial manner. They warned that her removal would result in chaos.“Considering what happened after the 2020 elections and since, we are in a world of crazy for next year,” said Lisa Tollefson, the clerk of Rock County, in the southern part of the state. “With the actions and accusations that have been made toward election officials, we are certainly seeing the highest turnover in county clerks and municipal clerks in our history.”Dan Knodl, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate committee, challenged her “world of crazy” remark.“Are you predicting something, or you have information that something is on the horizon?” he said.Ms. Tollefson answered that the political climate was only likely to intensify in Wisconsin and pointed to the hard-fought election in April that flipped Wisconsin’s Supreme Court from conservative to liberal.Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, Democrats argued that the Legislature did not have the authority to vote on Ms. Wolfe’s reappointment, noting that state law requires her renomination to come from the commission.A June vote by the commission on whether to appoint her to another four-year term ended in an impasse, with three Democrats abstaining over concerns that Republicans would use their supermajority in the Senate to remove her. By doing nothing — declining to renominate or take any other action — the commission can effectively keep Ms. Wolfe in her current role under state law.Republicans have challenged the statute, and the issue is expected to end up being decided by the courts.Ann S. Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, referred to the move by G.O.P. lawmakers to oust Ms. Wolfe as a “circus.”Mr. Knodl bristled at her language and said he was not about to abdicate oversight.“Whether it’s circuslike or not, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Thank you for attending the circus.”Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, a government watchdog group, said Ms. Wolfe’s removal would be a major blow to the state, which is likely to once again be a crucial battleground for the presidential race.“The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voters and citizens can and will lose confidence and trust in our elections,” he said. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      What Fani Willis Got Wrong in Her Trump Indictment

      by

      By assembling a sprawling, 19-defendant RICO indictment with 41 counts, District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County has brought the sort of charging instrument that has typically led to monthslong trials, complicated appeals and exhaustion for the participating attorneys. Now, as some co-defendants seek federal removal while others demand speedy trials in state court, we are starting to see the costs of complexity.In federal and state cases, Donald Trump’s legal game plan has always been the same: delay often and everywhere with the goal of winning the 2024 election and hoping the charges go away. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference indictment — just four counts brought solely against Mr. Trump — makes that difficult. On Monday, the judge set the trial for March 4, 2024.By contrast, the Georgia indictment is a sprawling account of a conspiracy among the former president, his closest advisers and state and local Republican officials to change the outcome of the 2020 Georgia election through an escalating series of falsehoods. For many, it is a satisfying political document. But as a legal instrument, its ambitious scope will provide the co-defendants with many opportunities for delay, appeals, and constitutional challenges.And even though Fulton might very will win in the end, a simpler, more direct approach would likely lead to a better result, faster, here’s why.Much of the Georgia indictment is about how Mr. Trump and others tried to get public officials to do implausible things to hand him the election — things like asking state senators to appoint an alternate slate of electors, calling a special session of the General Assembly or asking the secretary of state to “find” the votes Mr. Trump needed to win.The state chose to charge this conduct in two ways. One of them is strong and simple: Team Trump lied to elected officials and tried to forge documents.The other — that they were aware of the officials’ oaths of office and were hoping specifically to get them to violate it — is unusual and hard to prove.Solicitation requires you to ask someone else to commit a felony intentionally. In this case, the oath of office the defendants were being asked to violate was a promise to follow the Constitution and do what’s best for their constituents. It is indeed a crime in Georgia for a public officer to “willfully and intentionally” violate the terms of his oath.Here’s the problem: It’s hard enough to prove that Mr. Trump’s request violates the Constitution, since the Constitution allows states to figure out how to select electors. But then the state must also prove that Mr. Trump knew this would violate the electors’ oath of office.It seems possible that Mr. Trump had no idea what these officials’ oath of office was, maybe even no idea that they swore an oath at all. Under Georgia’s “mistake of fact” affirmative defense, if Mr. Trump has some evidence that he was operating under a “misapprehension of fact” that would justify his actions, the state must disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt.There are a few reasons this could be a strong defense. First, Mr. Trump surrounded himself with individuals who told him what he was doing was legal. Georgia does not normally have an “advice of counsel” defense, but in this context it seems relevant that people he apparently trusted were not telling him this would violate any oath of office.And to put it gently, Mr. Trump is plausibly ignorant on a variety of subjects, ranging from how hurricanes are formed to whether it’s a good idea to use or inject disinfectants as a possible Covid cure. Even if prosecutors can meet the burden of showing that what he requested was unconstitutional — not necessarily an easy thing to establish with a jury of non-lawyers — it may be difficult to prove that Donald Trump knew, or cared, what the Constitution had to say on the subject.Then there’s the Hawaii precedent. Mr. Trump’s advisers were relying on an incident from the 1960 presidential election, when Richard Nixon looked as though he had won the state of Hawaii by a few dozen votes. But the results were so uncertain that three Democrats submitted their Electoral College votes just in case, and when, after a recount, it looked like John F. Kennedy was the actual winner, the Senate (headed by Nixon) unanimously agreed to the alternate slate.Even though no court ever blessed this procedure, or even held that it wasn’t criminal, Mr. Trump’s team could argue with a straight face that they believed their request was legally possible.There’s also the possibility of a First Amendment defense. Typically, people are allowed to petition the government to do things, even unconstitutional things. That a court might, down the line, find those things to be unconstitutional seems like a dangerous basis to criminalize that petitioning.I’d understand bringing these charges to get at some obviously bad and immoral conduct by the president if there were nothing else available. But there are other, much stronger charges in the same indictment without the same constitutional concerns. Take the false statement counts: The very best case that Mr. Trump and his team could cite is United States v. Alvarez, where the Supreme Court held that there is a First Amendment right to lie about having received the Medal of Honor. But the Supreme Court also specifically said that this protection vanishes when lying for material gain, or to the government.Rudy Giuliani told state legislators that election workers were passing around flash drives like “vials of heroin” and that thousands of dead and felonious voters participated, but he can’t claim those statements have constitutional protection. All Mr. Giuliani can do is show the court what evidence supported those statements. There is none. And what’s more, Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil filing that his claims against two Fulton County election workers had been false. Despite claiming that it was for “this litigation only,” that’s an admission.Similarly, the forgery charges simply need to establish a conspiracy to create fake elector votes that could potentially be counted on Jan. 6. It’s irrelevant whether the parties thought it was legal to do this, so long as they knew they were not, in fact, the duly appointed electors.So it is an odd legal choice to drag a jury through weak, disputed counts in a monthslong trial when you could just focus on the counts that are hard to challenge and easy to explain, saving weeks in the process. The RICO count will already require dozens of witnesses and some complicated instructions, so tossing in these oath of office charges seems like a recipe for confusion and delay.And it’s not just the charges that complicate things, but the sheer number of defendants. A judge granted one co-defendant, Ken Chesebro, a speedy trial, which will require Fulton County to bring this case to trial by Nov. 3 or acquit him as a matter of law. (Sidney Powell has also requested a speedy trial.)Ms. Willis reacted by requesting an October date for the entire case, but at least for the moment, a judge has declined her request. This puts the prosecutors in a bind. Mr. Chesebro’s trial would give Mr. Trump a useful preview of the entire case, from voir dire to closing arguments, which could weaken the effectiveness of Ms. Willis’s prosecution of Mr. Trump and the other defendants. It would allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dig into witness testimony and perhaps encourage Georgia Republicans to step in.Additionally, it might be very difficult for Fulton County to actually grant these parties the speedy trial they’ve requested. There is some Georgia authority to suggest that a trial does not “begin” under the statutory speedy trial act until a jury is empaneled and sworn. What happens if Fulton County needs a month, or two months, to actually select the jury that will be sworn?And for all the talk of potentially flipping co-defendants, many of the people in this case don’t have all that much criminal exposure. With no mandatory minimums for prison time and no criminal history, many of the participants could reasonably expect probation, and maybe even a first-offender sentence that would not count as a felony. A simpler case, with fewer co-defendants, would go more swiftly, with less legal uncertainty.As a general, George Washington was known for unworkable battle plans. Where an ordinary commander might send all his troops to one location at one time, Washington would split them into three columns, expecting them to arrive all at one spot with precision timing. It rarely worked out. Despite those mistakes, he’s now best known for winning.For all the potential problems with this indictment, I would still expect Ms. Willis to secure a conviction against Mr. Trump on one or more counts if this case goes to trial as it intends.But there are a dozen ways that things can go sideways, and it is very possible that history will remember the two years that Fulton County took to bring these charges as a wasted opportunity to make a simpler case.Andrew Fleischman is an attorney at Sessions & Fleischman in Atlanta.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Supporters’ Calls for Georgia to Stymie Prosecution Fall Flat

      by

      Appeals by the former president’s supporters to change the state’s rules on pardons, and to investigate or even impeach the prosecutor in the case, will likely go nowhere, at least for now.The racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia has ignited outrage among staunch supporters of the former president, pushing some to urge the Republican-controlled state legislature to find a way to intervene.Change the state’s rules on pardons to empower the governor to absolve Mr. Trump and his associates should they be convicted — that has been one suggestion making the rounds on social media and conservative talk shows this week.And on Thursday, a state senator from rural northwest Georgia sent a letter to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, demanding an emergency special session for “the review and response to the actions of Fani Willis,” the Fulton County district attorney who is leading the case.The odds of any of that coming to fruition anytime soon: slim to nonexistent.“It ain’t going to happen,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, who is considered a leading scholar on politics in Georgia and the South, which he has studied for more than five decades.There are not only procedural hurdles standing in the way but the political reality in Georgia. Mr. Kemp, who would have to call a special session, has signaled he has no interest in doing so. He and Mr. Trump parted ways in 2020 after he refuted Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud in the state; this week, he once again pushed back on such claims.And while Republicans control the legislature, they do not appear to have the votes needed to achieve what Mr. Trump’s supporters are seeking. For one thing, they lack a two-thirds majority in the State Senate.State Senator Colton Moore, who wrote the letter calling for the special session, has argued that the prosecution of Mr. Trump was politically motivated, and that the Legislature should investigate Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, and possibly impeach her.In interviews with conservative commentators on Thursday, Mr. Moore asserted that Ms. Willis was “using taxpayer money, using her government authority, to persecute her political opponent.”The Fulton County district attorney’s office declined to comment on Mr. Moore’s letter.Separately, some Trump supporters have pushed for changes in how pardons are given in the state. In Georgia, the power to pardon rests with a state board appointed by the governor, not with the governor himself. A pardon is a possibility only for an individual who has completed the sentence and “lived a law-abiding life” for five years before applying.Changing the law would require amending the state Constitution, which would require the approval of two-thirds of the Legislature.Cody Hall, a senior adviser to the governor, strongly suggested to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday that Mr. Kemp was opposed to challenging the Trump prosecution. “Where have I heard special session, changing decades-old law and overturning constitutional precedent before?” Mr. Hall asked, referring to unsuccessful calls from Mr. Trump and others for a special session to overturn President Biden’s win in the state. “Oh right, prior to Republicans losing two Senate runoffs in January of 2021.”He was referring to the runoff races that Republican incumbents lost that month to Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, as Mr. Trump clung to claims of election fraud in Georgia.“What are people hoping to learn in the second kick of the election-losing mule?” Mr. Hall added.Asked on Thursday about the new call for a special session, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp referred a reporter to Mr. Hall’s comments to the Journal-Constitution.Representative Jon Burns, the Republican speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, declined through a spokesman to comment.Still, the state’s Republican leadership was not completely averse to the idea of challenging local prosecutors. Legislation signed this year by Mr. Kemp establishes a state commission that could investigate local prosecutors or remove them from office.Ms. Willis was a principal critic. More

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Won’t Stop at Banning Abortion

      by

      There is no way to regulate and control pregnancy without regulating and controlling people. States that have enacted abortion bans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health have also considered the establishment of new regimes for the surveillance and criminalization of anyone who dares to circumvent the state’s dictates for the acceptable use of one’s body.This is why the war on abortion rights is properly seen as a war on bodily autonomy and why the attack on reproductive freedom has moved hand in hand with a renewed attack on the gay, queer and transgender community. It’s all part of the same tapestry of reaction. And this reactionary impulse extends to the means of the anti-abortion political project as well as its ends.The same lawmakers who want to rob their constituents of the right to bodily autonomy have also begun to treat democracy as an obstacle to avoid, not a process to respect. If the people stand in the way of ending abortion, then it’s the people who have to go.We just witnessed, in fact, an attempt by anti-abortion lawmakers to do exactly that — to try to remove the public from the equation.A majority of Ohio voters support the right to an abortion. The Ohio Legislature — gerrymandered into an seemingly perpetual Republican majority — does not. In many states, this would be the end of the story, but in Ohio voters have the power to act directly on the state constitution at the ballot box. With a simple majority, they can protect abortion rights from a Legislature that has no interest in honoring the views of most Ohioans on this particular issue.Eager to pursue their unpopular agenda — and uninterested in trying to persuade Ohio voters of the wisdom of their views — Republican lawmakers tried to change the rules. Last week, in what its Republican sponsors hoped would be a low-turnout election, Ohioans voted on a ballot initiative that would have raised the threshold for change to the state constitution from a simple majority to a supermajority. They defeated the measure, clearing the path for a November vote on the future of abortion rights in the state.In his opinion for the court in Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito cast the decision to overturn Roe and Casey as a victory for democracy. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” he wrote. Reproductive rights, Alito continued, quoting Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1992 dissent in Casey, are “to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”Citizens can persuade each other, and they can vote. But our political system is not designed to turn the aggregate preferences of a majority into direct political power. (If that were true, neither Alito nor his Republican colleagues, save for Clarence Thomas, would be on the Supreme Court.) More important, Alito’s vision of voting and representation only works if that legislative majority, whoever it represents, is interested in fair play.But as the Ohio example illustrates, the assault on bodily autonomy often includes, even rests on, an assault on other rights and privileges. In Idaho, to give another example, the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, which passed before Dobbs was decided, would punish state employees with the termination of employment, require restitution of public funds and possible prison time for counseling in favor of an abortion or referring someone to an abortion clinic. Other legislatures, such as those in Texas and South Carolina, have pushed similar restrictions on speech in pursuit of near total abortion bans in their states.There’s something that feels inevitable in this anti-abortion turn toward political restriction. The attack on bodily autonomy is not general. It is aimed, specifically, at women. It subjects their bodies to state control and in the process degrades their citizenship. “Without the ability to decide whether and when to have children, women could not — in the way men took for granted — determine how they would live their lives, and how they would contribute to the society around them,” the dissenters in Dobbs wrote. For women to take their place as “full and equal citizens,” they “must have control over their reproductive decisions.”In other words, the attack on bodily autonomy is an assault on both political equality and reproductive freedom. It creates a class of citizens whose status is lower than that of another group. And once you are in the business of degrading the citizenship of one group of people, it’s easy to extend that pattern of action to the citizenship of other groups of people. The authoritarian habits of mind that you cultivate diminishing one form of freedom may lead you to view other forms of freedom with equal contempt.For now, the anti-abortion project is an assault on one form of freedom. But don’t be surprised if, to secure whatever victories it wins, it becomes an attack on all the others.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More