Supreme Courts (State)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Mark Meadows Ordered to Testify in Trump Investigation

      by

      The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected an effort by the former White House chief of staff to avoid testifying in an investigation of election meddling.ATLANTA — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff under Donald J. Trump, to testify in the criminal investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia.In a three-paragraph written opinion, the court pointedly said Mr. Meadows’s legal efforts to avoid participating in the investigation were “manifestly without merit.”Mr. Meadows, 63, is one of three well-known Trump allies — in addition to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former national security adviser Michael Flynn — who have been trying to fend off subpoenas ordering them to testify before a special grand jury in Atlanta. Those efforts are part of a broader endeavor by a number of Trump’s allies to avoid cooperating in the Georgia investigation. That attempt has been met with mixed results. Last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina testified after a protracted legal fight that was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.The special grand jury is considering whether Mr. Trump and others broke state laws by, among other actions, spreading falsehoods about election fraud and pressuring state officials to consider changing the results of Georgia’s presidential election, which Mr. Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes.Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Flynn were ordered to travel to Atlanta to testify by judges in their respective home states of Virginia and Florida, and they have appealed those decisions.Mr. Meadows, a former Republican representative from North Carolina, was deeply involved in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol showed that he repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to conduct investigations based on Mr. Trump’s unfounded theories about election improprieties around the country.Prosecutors say the special grand jury has evidence that Mr. Meadows set up and participated in the now infamous recorded phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump can be heard telling Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he wanted to “find” the 11,780 votes that would allow him to win in Georgia. In December 2020, Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to try to view an election audit that was in progress there. He was told by local officials that he was not authorized to see it.Like Mr. Flynn and Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Meadows has argued that he does not have to testify on the grounds that the Georgia special grand jury should be considered civil, not criminal, in nature. That, he argues, makes the subpoena unenforceable under an agreement among states that allows them to secure the attendance of out-of-state witnesses for criminal investigations.This legal strategy was successfully employed in Texas, where it found favor with a majority of members of that state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, and that most likely explains why a number of Texas-based witnesses who received subpoenas in the Georgia case have not appeared in court.In South Carolina, however, a lower court judge rejected Mr. Meadows’s argument in late October. Later, a group of current and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief arguing that if the state’s Supreme Court accepted Mr. Meadows’s argument it would “undermine interstate comity and the effectiveness of law enforcement across state borders, not just between South Carolina and its neighbor Georgia, but nationwide.”Mr. Meadows was originally scheduled to testify on Wednesday, but that appointment will most likely be pushed back. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows’s lawyer declined to comment on Tuesday, as did a spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is heading up the investigation.Danny Hakim More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      As Stakes Rise, State Supreme Courts Become Crucial Election Battlegrounds

      by

      Pivotal issues like abortion, gerrymandering and voting have been tossed into state justices’ laps. Politicians, ideological PACs and big money are following.WASHINGTON — State supreme court races, traditionally Election Day afterthoughts, have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy, attracting a torrent of last-minute money and partisan advertising.In Ohio, an arm of the national Democratic Party funneled a half-million dollars last month into a super PAC backing three Democratic candidates for the high court. In North Carolina, a state political action committee with ties to national Republicans gave $850,000 last week to a group running attack ads against Democratic state supreme court candidates.On another level entirely, Fair Courts America, a political action committee largely bankrolled by the Schlitz brewing heir and shipping supplies billionaire Richard E. Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, has pledged to spend $22 million supporting deeply conservative judicial candidates in seven states.The motivation behind the money is no mystery: In states like Ohio, North Carolina and Michigan, partisan control of supreme courts is up for grabs, offering a chance for progressives to seize the majority in Ohio and for conservatives to take power in North Carolina and Michigan. In Illinois, competing billionaires are fueling court races that offer Republicans their first chance at a Supreme Court majority in 53 years.The implications of victory are profound. As the U.S. Supreme Court continues to offload crucial legal questions to the states, state courts have abruptly become final arbiters of some of America’s most divisive issues — gun rights, gerrymandering, voting rights, abortion. In heavily gerrymandered states, justices have the potential to be the only brake on one-party rule.And as Republican politicians continue to embrace election denialism, high courts could end up playing decisive roles in settling election disputes in 2024.Undertones of politics are hardly new in state court campaigns. But the rise of big money and hyperpartisan rhetoric worries some experts.Once, it was businesses that sought to elect judges whose rulings would fatten their bottom lines, said Michael J. Klarman, a constitutional scholar at Harvard University.“The contest now is over democracy,” he said, “over gerrymandering, over easing restrictions on the ballot, over efforts to re-enfranchise felons.” “It’s not a stretch to say the results affect the status of our democracy as much as what the Supreme Court does,” he said.An abortion rights demonstrator in Detroit in June after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a constitutional right to abortion.Emily Elconin/Getty ImagesMany judicial candidates shy away from being perceived as politicians. Even candidates in hotly fought races tend to follow legal ethics guidelines limiting statements on issues they might have to decide.But others can be increasingly nonchalant about such perceptions.State Representative Joe Fischer is openly running for the nonpartisan Kentucky Supreme Court as an anti-abortion Republican, with $375,000 in backing from a national G.O.P. committee whose ads cast him as a firewall against the “socialist agenda” of President Biden. Fair Courts America is pouring $1.6 million into backing him and two others seeking judicial seats.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.The three Republicans on the Ohio Supreme Court ballot — all sitting justices — raised eyebrows by appearing at a rally in Youngstown on Sept. 17 for former President Donald J. Trump, who repeated the lie that the 2020 election “was rigged and stolen and now our country is being destroyed.”Mr. Trump singled out the three for praise, saying, “Get out and vote for them, right? Vote. Great job you’re doing.” Later, two of the three declined to confirm to The Columbus Dispatch that the 2020 election results were legitimate, saying judicial ethics forbade them from commenting on issues under litigation. (The state ethics code indeed bars comments on pending legal issues in any state, though its scope is unclear. A spokesman for the candidates said a challenge to the election had recently been filed in Michigan.)Three weeks later, Cleveland television station WEWS reported that the three had stated on candidate surveys compiled by Cincinnati Right to Life that there is no constitutional right to abortion — an issue under review, or sure to be reviewed, in state courts nationwide.“People are starting to feel like judges are nothing more than politicians in robes,” said William K. Weisenberg, a former assistant executive director of the Ohio State Bar Association. “What we see evolving now — and it’s very, very dangerous for our society — is a loss of public trust and confidence in our justice system and our courts.”The battles reflect the rising stakes in rulings over voting and electoral maps that conceivably could determine control of Congress in close elections.The Ohio Supreme Court voted 4-3 this year — several times — to invalidate Republican gerrymanders of state legislative and congressional districts. Those maps remain in effect, under federal court order, but the court chosen this month will decide whether new maps that must be drawn for the 2024 election are valid.In North Carolina, another 4-3 vote struck down Republican-drawn gerrymanders in January, changing a map that guaranteed Republicans as many as 11 of 14 congressional seats into one that split the seats roughly equally.Michigan’s court ordered an abortion-rights referendum onto the November ballot after a canvassing board deadlocked along party lines on Aug. 31 over whether to do so. The next Supreme Court in Illinois is likely to decide disputes over abortion and gun rights.The courts’ role has also been amplified as political norms have lost sway and some legislatures have moved to expand their power.In Wisconsin, the Republican-gerrymandered State Senate has given itself broad authority over the composition of state boards and commissions simply by refusing to confirm new board members nominated by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. The state court upheld the tactic by a 4-3 vote along ideological lines in June, allowing Republican board members to keep their seats even though Governor Evers has statutory power to nominate replacements.Not all states elect members of their highest courts. Governors fill most of the 344 posts, usually with help from nominating commissions, though that hardly takes politics out of the selection.In the 22 states that elect judges — some others require periodic voter approval of judges in retention elections — most races are fairly free of mudslinging and big-ticket intervention by outside groups.But rising politicization nevertheless has had a measurable and growing impact.Since in the late 1980s, voters’ choices in state supreme court races have aligned ever more consistently with their political preferences in county elections, the University of Minnesota political scientist and legal scholar Herbert M. Kritzer found in a 2021 study.“At this stage,” he said, “identification with the parties has become so strong in terms of what it means for people that I don’t know if you’ve got to say another thing other than ‘I’m a Republican’ or ‘I’m a Democrat.’”An analysis of social science studies by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University also suggested that campaign pressures influence how judges rule. The analysis found that judges facing re-election or retention campaigns tended to issue harsher rulings in criminal cases.One telling statistic: Over a 15-year span, appointed judges reversed roughly one in four death sentences, while judges facing competitive elections — which frequently are clotted with ads accusing them of being soft on crime — reversed roughly one in 10.If past elections are any guide, the final days of midterm campaigning will see a deluge of spending on advertising aimed at drawing voters’ attention to contests they frequently overlook.Many ads will be negative. Indeed, ads financed by outside groups — virtually all focused on abortion rights or crime — markedly resemble ones for congressional or statewide offices.Ohio is typical. In one commercial run by a PAC representing the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, a young girl with a backpack strolls down a neighborhood street. An announcer warns: “There’s danger among us. Jennifer Brunner made it easier for accused murderers, rapists, child molesters to return to our streets.”Ohio Supreme Court justice Pat Fischer speaks during the Fairfield County Lincoln Republican Club banquet in March.Paul Vernon/Associated PressAnother ad, by the progressive PAC Forward Justice, reprises the recent story of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had to leave the state to obtain an abortion after being raped. An announcer adds: “Pat DeWine said women have no constitutional right to abortion. Pat Fischer even compared abortion to slavery and segregation.”Ms. Brunner, a Democrat and an associate justice of the Supreme Court, is running to be chief justice. Mr. Fischer and Mr. DeWine, both Republican associate justices, are seeking re-election.Candidates and interest groups spent at least $97 million on state supreme court races in the 2020 election cycle, according to the Brennan Center. Spending records are all but certain to be set this year in some states, said Douglas Keith, the Brennan Center’s counsel for democracy programs.Conservatives have long outspent liberals on state court races. Besides Fair Courts America’s $22 million commitment, the Republican State Leadership Committee, an arm of the national party long involved in state court races, plans to spend a record $5 million or more on the contests.Supreme Court races in Illinois are legendary for being matches of billionaire contributors — on the left, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose family owns the Hyatt hotel chain, and on the right, Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge-fund manager.But outsiders are rivaling their contributions. An Illinois group backed by trial lawyers and labor unions, All for Justice, said it will spend at least $8 million to back Democratic candidates.Outside spending has been exceedingly rare in states like Kentucky and Montana, but even there, things are becoming more politicized. In Montana, where a 1999 State Supreme Court ruling recognized abortion as a constitutional right, conservative groups are seeking to unseat a justice appointed by a Democratic governor in 2017. The state’s trial attorneys and Planned Parenthood have rallied to her defense.In northern Kentucky, the Republican anti-abortion candidate, Joseph Fischer, is opposing Justice Michelle M. Keller, a registered independent.Mr. Fischer did not respond to a telephone call seeking an interview. Ms. Keller said the partisan attacks from independent groups swirling around her race were “new ground.”“This will have a chilling effect on the quality of judges if we’re not careful,” she said. “Good lawyers, the kind of people you want to aspire to the bench, won’t do it. You can make much more money in private practice.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Forbidden From Getting Help Returning Absentee Ballots, Disabled Voters Sue Wisconsin

      by

      Several disabled voters are suing Wisconsin’s Elections Commission in federal court after learning that they can no longer get help returning absentee ballots, a reversal that they argue is unconstitutional.The lawsuit, filed on Friday in United States District Court in Madison, seeks to restore a decades-old precedent that allowed people with disabilities to receive assistance from family members and caregivers with the return of absentee ballots.The accommodation was struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on July 8 in a 4-to-3 ruling by the court’s conservative majority, which concluded that only voters themselves could return their absentee ballots in person. The ruling did not address the handling of ballots that are returned by mail.It also prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voting in Wisconsin.The lawsuit filed on Friday concerns only the issue of who is authorized to return absentee ballots, something that Republicans have sought to clamp down on in Wisconsin and other states, falsely claiming that Democrats engaged in fraudulent ballot harvesting during the 2020 election.Timothy Carey, 49, who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy and lives in Appleton, Wis., is one of four plaintiffs listed in the lawsuit. He said in an interview on Tuesday that he had voted absentee for 30 years, enlisting the help of a nurse or his parents to return his ballot. As someone who relies on a ventilator and cannot use his hands, he said a mandate that he return his own ballot presented a particular hardship.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Next Front Line in the Abortion Wars: State Supreme Courts

      by

      Court challenges to sweeping rollbacks of abortion rights must go through state supreme courts, many of which have been shaped by years of conservative activism.WASHINGTON — Fresh from the political thicket of the United States Supreme Court, the struggle over abortion is now moving to venues that are poised to become the next front line in the country’s partisan warfare: state supreme courts.In Florida, seven justices appointed by Republican governors will decide whether the State Constitution’s explicit right to privacy, which protected abortion rights in past rulings, remains a precedent. In Michigan, a court with a 4-3 majority of Democratic nominees has been asked to conclude whether a 91-year-old law banning abortions is constitutional. In Kentucky, a decision on a ban on almost all abortions appears bound to a Supreme Court composed largely of nonpartisan elected justices.In those states and others, the federal reversal of Roe v. Wade tosses one of the nation’s most politically explosive issues into courtrooms that, until recently, had operated mostly beneath the radar of national politics.The increasing political pressure on justices — and the rightward drift of some courts — suggests that options for abortion rights advocates to soften the impact of the federal abortion ruling may be limited. It also reflects how partisan politics is emerging as a driving force in how some justices rule.Abortion rights protesters gathered at the Florida Supreme Court in May.Kenny Hill/USA TODAY NETWORKOver the past decade or so, the national Republican Party and other conservative groups have spent heavily to move both state legislatures and courts rightward. The party’s Judicial Fairness Initiative says it has spent more than $21 million since its formation in 2014 to elect conservatives to state courts, and will spend more than $5 million this year. The Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative advocacy group that has been a principal backer of recent Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court, also has invested money in state supreme court races.The Democratic Party has also poured growing sums of money into court elections, as have allies like labor unions — but not as much, and not for as long, as have Republicans. But the rightward lurch of federal courts increasingly is leading progressives to see state courts as potential bulwarks against more conservative gains, said Joshua A. Douglas, an elections and voting rights scholar at the University of Kentucky.The right’s focus on the courts could pay off handsomely in legal battles over abortion, according to Douglas Keith, an expert on state judicial issues at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.Consider Iowa, whose Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the due process clause in the State Constitution guaranteed a right to abortion. Aided by an advertising campaign financed by the Judicial Crisis Network, the General Assembly then revised the judicial nominee process, handing more control to the governor, Kim Reynolds.Gov. Kim Reynolds has turned the Iowa Supreme Court into a conservative bastion.Nick Rohlman/The Gazette, via Associated PressMs. Reynolds, a Republican, turned the court into a conservative bastion. Last month, a week before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its ruling in Roe v. Wade, the Iowa justices reversed their own 2018 ruling on abortion.Montana also recognizes a constitutional right to abortion. In the nonpartisan primary election last month for one of its Supreme Court’s seven seats, both the Judicial Fairness Initiative and the state Republican Party spent money to ensure that a candidate endorsed by abortion opponents, James Brown, would oppose an incumbent judge, Ingrid Gustafson, in November. Ms. Gustafson was nominated to the bench in 2017 by the governor at the time, Steve Bullock, a Democrat.The reversal of abortion rights in Iowa “is not the last one we might see,” Mr. Keith said. “The lack of attention that these courts have gotten from the left, comparatively, is going to come home to roost.”From Opinion: The End of Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end ​​the constitutional right to abortion.David N. Hackney, maternal-fetal medicine specialist: The end of Roe “is a tragedy for our patients, many of whom will suffer and some of whom could very well die.”Mara Gay: “Sex is fun. For the puritanical tyrants seeking to control our bodies, that’s a problem.”Elizabeth Spiers: “The notion that rich women will be fine, regardless of what the law says, is probably comforting to some. But it is simply not true.”Katherine Stewart, writer: “​​Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.”A major test looms in Florida, where the State Constitution’s Bill of Rights declares that “every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life.”The Florida Supreme Court previously cited that explicit guarantee of privacy in striking down laws that restricted access to abortion. That precedent now appears endangered.In 2019, the last three justices who had been nominated by a Democratic governor retired. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has made opposition to abortion a centerpiece of a possible presidential campaign, replaced them with conservatives.From voting rights to redistricting, the State Supreme Court has ruled reliably in support of conservatives in recent years. Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist who watches the court, said he believed that was unlikely to change.“I think the U.S. Supreme Court is sending a signal to justices in state high courts that precedent no longer matters,” he said. Dr. Smith predicted that the constitutional guarantee of privacy “will be whittled away” when the state court makes its abortion ruling.Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky, a Republican, on Sunday asked the State Supreme Court to issue an emergency order suspending a lower court decision allowing the state’s only abortion provider to remain open. The court denied the request on Tuesday.In elections to the State Supreme Court this fall, State Representative Joseph Fischer, perhaps the Legislature’s leading opponent of abortion, is running to unseat Michelle M. Keller, who was appointed to the court in 2013 by Steve Beshear, a Democrat who was then the governor.State Representative Randy Bridges gave a thumbs down as protesters chanted “bans off our bodies” at the Kentucky State Capitol in April.Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader, via Associated PressNational political parties and interest groups will focus their money and attention this fall on state supreme courts in four states — Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio — where elections could flip the courts’ majority from Democratic to Republican or vice versa. But other states could be in play.Six of seven justices on the Democratic-led Supreme Court in Kansas must stand for retention elections, and some are likely to become targets of Republicans infuriated by the court’s ruling in 2019 that abortion is a constitutional right. Arkansas Republicans are backing a former chairman of the state party against a Democratic incumbent justice in an effort to scrub remaining moderates from the already conservative court.Even more than abortion, the focus on state courts has reflected the politics of redistricting, particularly after a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that left oversight of partisan gerrymanders to state legislatures and courts. National Republicans say changing state supreme courts is the only way to stop Democrats from gaining power by successfully suing to overturn gerrymandered Republican political maps, a strategy they mockingly call “sue till it’s blue.”“If Republicans and conservatives want to control the redistricting process, then winning control of state legislatures is not enough. You also need to control the supreme courts,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee.Kelly Burton, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which has backed many of those suits, said the battle was more about stopping a creeping autocracy than about changing political boundaries.“It’s about voting rights cases,” she said. “It’s about fights over access to abortion. And fundamentally, we’re trying to protect these courts as neutral arbiters, while Republicans want to make them less independent and more partisan.”Some justices say they feel caught in the middle as partisan pressures surge.Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who is chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, was threatened with impeachment by some in her party this spring after she voted with Democratic justices to strike down political maps gerrymandered by Republicans.To some people, she said, her vote on redistricting “shows integrity and independence and respect for the rule of law and the Constitution. To others, I am a traitor.”Chief Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court has campaigned for years to scrap the state’s system of partisan elections for judicial positions.Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty ImagesNathan Hecht, the chief justice of the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, has campaigned for years to scrap the state’s system of partisan elections for judicial positions. “Texas has one of the stupidest systems in the world,” he said, and he worries that growing partisanship will make it even worse.Still, he said he thought there was a good chance that as divisive issues like abortion “devolve down to the states, the states will find ways to reach a middle ground that federal lawmakers have not been able to find.” But he added, “I’m not going to bet on that.”On Friday, the Texas court lifted a lower-court freeze on a 1925 law that bans abortions and holds out the prospect of imprisonment for those who provide them. A full hearing on the law will be held later.Sheelagh McNeill More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The Long Path to Reclaim Abortion Rights

      by

      The Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe, far from settling the matter, instead has launched court and political battles across the states likely to go on for years.Attempting to recover from their staggering loss in the Supreme Court, abortion rights groups have mounted a multilevel legal and political attack aimed at blocking and reversing abortion bans in courts and at ballot boxes across the country.In the week since the court overturned Roe v. Wade, litigators for abortion rights groups have rolled out a wave of lawsuits in nearly a dozen states to hold off bans triggered by the court’s decision, with the promise of more suits to come. They are aiming to prove that provisions in state constitutions establish a right to abortion that the Supreme Court’s decision said did not exist in the U.S. Constitution.Advocates of abortion rights are also working to defeat ballot initiatives that would strip away a constitutional right to abortion, and to pass those that would establish one, in states where abortion access is contingent on who controls the governor’s mansion or the state house.And after years of complaints that Democrats neglected state and local elections, Democratic-aligned groups are campaigning to reverse slim Republican majorities in some state legislatures, and to elect abortion rights supporters to positions from county commissioner to state supreme court justices that can have influence over the enforcement of abortion restrictions.“You want all the belt and suspenders that you can have,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which litigated Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe. While the Supreme Court said it wanted to end five decades of bitter debate on abortion, its decision has set up a new fight, one that promises to be long and equally bitter.Although abortion rights supporters say their strategy is promising, the path ahead is slow and not at all certain. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly say that the decision to have an abortion should be made by women and their doctors rather than state legislatures. But Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed hundreds of restrictions on abortion over the last decade, and legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered to protect Republican incumbents. Litigation in state courts will be decided by judges who in many cases have been appointed by anti-abortion governors.Although abortion rights supporters say their strategy is promising, the path ahead is not at all certain.Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesAbortion rights groups say their cases relying on state constitutions offer a viable path forward to establish Roe-like protections in states. Even in conservative states such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, they see an opportunity to overturn abortion bans and establish a constitutional backstop against further restriction.But in other places, the goal of the litigation is to at least temporarily restore or preserve abortion access, now that the court’s decision stands to make it illegal or effectively so in more than half the states, which include 33.5 million women of childbearing age.In Louisiana, for example, though the state constitution expressly says there is no right to abortion, the legal challenge has allowed three clinics to continue serving women whose plans to end their pregnancies were thrown into disarray by the court’s decision.From Opinion: The End of Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end ​​the constitutional right to abortion.Michelle Goldberg: “The end of Roe v. Wade was foreseen, but in wide swaths of the country, it has still created wrenching and potentially tragic uncertainties.”Spencer Bokat-Lindell: “What exactly does it mean for the Supreme Court to experience a crisis of legitimacy, and is it really in one?”Bonnie Kristian, journalist: “For many backers of former President Donald Trump, Friday’s Supreme Court decision was a long-awaited vindication.” It might also mark the end of his political career.Erika Bachiochi, legal scholar: “It is precisely the unborn child’s state of existential dependence upon its mother, not its autonomy, that makes it especially entitled to care, nurture and legal protection.”“We have to take these things in steps,” said Joanna Wright, a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner who, with the Center for Reproductive Rights, is leading the Louisiana case. “A lot can change in a day, a month and six months. Time will tell the rest, but this is the fight right now.”The Supreme Court’s decision has flipped the dynamic of abortion strategy that has prevailed for the half-century since Roe, when anti-abortion groups chipped away at legal access by electing like-minded state legislators and passing increasingly strict laws, and abortion rights groups could rely on Roe to prevent the most severe bans from taking effect.Now, anti-abortion groups and congressional Republicans discuss federal legislation that would ban abortion across the country after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and abortion rights groups have begun climbing the steeper and narrower path state by state. “Democracy is a collective action,” said Ms. Wright, “and what we’ve seen from the anti-abortion movement is an ability to mobilize all the pieces of that,” which culminated, she added, with the overturning of Roe.By Friday, the groups had temporarily blocked bans from taking effect in Utah, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida; judges have set hearings over the next several weeks to consider permanent injunctions. But they lost bids to hold off bans in Ohio and Texas.Anti-abortion groups had argued for decades that the question of abortion should be left up to states, not to unelected judges in Washington. Within hours of the court’s decision, Republican politicians and law enforcement officials announced that bans, once held up in court, were now in effect, and would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.They decried their opponents’ strategy in the courts.“To say that the State Constitution mandates things like dismemberment abortions, I just don’t think that’s the proper interpretation,” Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said after Florida’s ruling temporarily blocking a law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks.The legal challenges argue that the Supreme Court’s decision has thrown abortion providers and patients into chaos, subjecting them to state laws that are often unclear, contradictory or confusing. Women have shown up for appointments only to be told that their pregnancies have now progressed too far to be eligible for abortion under new laws banning abortion after six weeks. In Montana, Planned Parenthood clinics said recently that they would require proof of residency for women seeking abortion pills, because of fears that prosecutors in other states might prosecute anyone who helped their residents get abortions.Abortion rights groups have not given up on hopes of federal action to protect abortion: They are pushing President Biden to use a declaration of a public health emergency to allow the Department of Health and Human Services to authorize out-of-state providers to prescribe and provide abortion pills to women in states where abortion bans have made them illegal.They are also pushing the Senate to suspend its filibuster and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a right to abortion before viability, as was provided in Roe. Mr. Biden reversed himself on Thursday to say that he supported lifting the filibuster, though he also told a group of Democratic governors that there were not enough votes in the Senate to do so.Abortion rights groups have not given up on hopes of federal action to protect abortion, but they have begun pursuing legal and legislative action state by state. Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesBut by necessity, the groups are focused first on state action.While the Supreme Court’s opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, declared that it was returning the regulation of abortion regulation “to the people and their elected representatives,” its decision has delivered the issue to other courts, those in the states.“If the Supreme Court and Justice Alito and the anti-abortion advocates thought this was going to settle the question, they are going to see just how wrong they are,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a news conference Friday alongside lawyers and leaders from the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood. “The proliferation of litigation that will embroil the states in our country for years to come is going to underscore that this is not settled in the public’s mind.”The lawsuits argue that state constitutions offer more protection for abortion than the federal constitution, either by quirk of state tradition or history. Some, such as Florida’s, include an explicit right to privacy. In Kentucky, lawyers argue their constitution provides a right to “bodily autonomy” as well as privacy. The Roe decision in 1973 declared that the U.S. Constitution afforded a right to privacy that included a woman’s right to abortion; while the Supreme Court overturned that decision, it generally cannot overturn what states say in their own constitutions.The suit in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country, seeks to protect abortion under a provision of the state constitution — adopted in 1896 — that provides that “both males and female citizens of this state shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges.”Largely because of the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the constitution also ensures that state residents have the right to plan their own families; the lawsuit argues this includes the right to choose abortion.Even in states where lawsuits have been successful, abortion rights groups say they are playing Whack-a-Mole. In Utah, as soon as the court put a temporary injunction on the state’s trigger law banning abortion, a legislator declared that the state’s law against abortion after 18 weeks, which courts had upheld while Roe was in effect, was now the operative law.“We’re in a chess game and we haven’t gotten checkmate,” said Karrie Galloway, the chief executive of Planned Parenthood in Utah. “We’re doing check, check, check, check. Unfortunately, we’re doing check, check, check with pregnant people and their families’ lives.”In Kansas, a state Supreme Court decision in 2019 found a right to abortion under the constitutional provisions for “equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But anti-abortion groups put an initiative on the primary ballot this August that seeks to amend the constitution to explicitly say that it does not include a right to abortion, and that the Legislature has the authority to pass further restrictions.That vote will be the first indication of how much the outrage seen in response to the Supreme Court’s decision translates into support for abortion rights in elections.Historically, voters who oppose abortion have been more driven to vote on the issue than those who support a right to abortion. But polls taken since the leak of a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in May and the final decision in late June show that those who support abortion rights — largely Democrats — now cite it as one of their top concerns, and that the court’s decision has motivated them more to vote in elections this fall.Vote Pro Choice is attempting to turn out women, especially Black and Latina women, to vote in races including county commissioners, judges and sheriffs, particularly in states such as Texas and Georgia with restrictive abortion laws — positions responsible for enforcing anti-harassment laws outside abortion clinics, and deciding whether to give government money to crisis pregnancy centers, which anti-abortion groups have used to steer women away from abortions.Democrats need to learn from the successes of the anti-abortion groups and Republicans, said Sara Tabatabaie, the group’s chief political officer.“We have been out-raised, out-organized and out-funded for 50 years, and that is across the board,” she said. But she is encouraged by the number of people who say abortion will guide their votes in November: “In moments of tragedy, I am hopeful that there comes solidarity and increased clarity.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      A Broken Redistricting Process Winds Down, With No Repairs in Sight

      by

      WASHINGTON — The brutal once-a-decade process of drawing new boundaries for the nation’s 435 congressional districts is limping toward a close with the nation’s two political parties roughly at parity. But the lessons drawn from how they got there offer little cheer for those worried about the direction of the weary American experiment.The two parties each claimed redistricting went its way. But some frustrated Democrats in states like Texas, Florida and Ohio sounded unconvinced as Republicans, who have controlled the House in 10 of the last 15 elections despite losing the popular vote in seven of them, seemed to fare better than Democrats at tilting political maps decisively in their direction in key states they controlled.At the least, political analysts said, Republicans proved more relentless at shielding such maps from court challenges, through artful legal maneuvers and blunt-force political moves that in some cases challenged the authority of the judicial system.And, to many involved in efforts to replace gerrymanders with competitive districts, the vanishing number of truly contested House races indicated that whoever won, the voters lost. A redistricting cycle that began with efforts to demand fair maps instead saw the two parties in an arms race for a competitive advantage.“Once the fuel has been added to the fire, it’s very hard to back away from it,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for the advocacy group Common Cause. “Now it’s not just the operatives in the back room, which is where it started. It’s not just technology. It’s not just legislators being shameless about drawing lines. It’s governors and state officials and sometimes even courts leaning in to affirm these egregious gerrymanders.”Democrats pulled nearly even — in terms of the partisan lean of districts, if not the party’s prospects for success in the November midterms — largely by undoing some Republican gerrymanders through court battles and ballot initiatives, and by drawing their own partisan maps. But the strategy at times succeeded too well, as courts struck down Democratic maps in some states, and ballot measures kept party leaders from drawing new ones in others.New York is a particularly glaring example. In April, the seven Democratic justices on New York’s highest court blew up an aggressive gerrymander of the state’s 26 congressional districts that had been expected to net Democrats three new House seats. The court’s replacement map, drawn by an independent expert, pits Democratic incumbents against each other and creates new swing districts that could cost Democrats seats.Weeks later in Florida, where voters approved a ban on partisan maps in 2010, the State Supreme Court, comprising seven Republican justices, declined to stop the implementation of a gerrymander of the state’s 28 congressional districts. The ruling preserves the new map ordered by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, that could net his party four new House seats. The ruling cited procedural issues in allowing the map to take effect, but many experts said there was never much doubt about the result.In New York, Democrats ignored a voter-approved constitutional mandate that districts “not be drawn to discourage competition” or favor political parties. And in Republicans’ view, Democrats sabotaged a bipartisan commission that voters set up to draw fair maps.“The Democrats seriously overreached,” said John J. Faso, a Republican and former New York state assemblyman and U.S. representative. The bipartisan commission, he added, “is what people voted for.”What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.But in Ohio, Republicans who gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts this spring also ignored a voter-approved constitutional ban on partisan maps. They not only successfully defied repeated orders by the State Supreme Court to obey it, but suggested that the court’s chief justice, a Republican, be impeached for rejecting the maps drawn by the state’s Republican-dominated redistricting commission.State Representative Doug Richey of Missouri, a Republican, showed fellow lawmakers a proposed congressional redistricting map in May.David A. Lieb, Associated PressOf the approximately 35 states where politicians ultimately control congressional redistricting — the remainder either rely on independent commissions or have only one House seat — the first maps of House seats approved in some 14 states fit many statistical measures of gerrymandering used by political scientists.One of the most extreme congressional gerrymanders added as many as three new Democratic House seats in staunchly blue Illinois. Texas Republicans drew a new map that turned one new House seat and eight formerly competitive ones into G.O.P. bastions.Republicans carved up Kansas City, Kan.; Salt Lake City; Nashville; Tampa, Fla.; Little Rock, Ark.; Oklahoma City and more to weaken Democrats. Democrats moved boundaries in New Mexico and Oregon to dilute Republican votes.Most gerrymanders were drawn by Republicans, in part because Republicans control more state governments than Democrats do. But Democrats also began this redistricting cycle with a built-in handicap: The 2020 census markedly undercounted Democratic-leaning constituencies, like Blacks and Hispanics.Because those missed residents were concentrated in predominantly blue cities, any additional new urban districts probably would have elected Democrats to both congressional and state legislative seats, said Kimball W. Brace, a demographer who has helped Democratic leaders draw political maps for decades.Undoing those gerrymanders has proved a hit-or-miss proposition.Lawsuits in state courts dismantled Republican partisan maps in North Carolina and Democratic ones in New York and Maryland. But elsewhere, Republicans seized on the Supreme Court’s embrace of a once-obscure legal doctrine to keep even blatant gerrymanders from being blocked. The doctrine, named the Purcell principle after a 2006 federal lawsuit, says courts should not change election laws or rules too close to an election — how close is unclear — for fear of confusing voters.Alabama’s congressional map, drawn by Republicans, will be used in the November election, even though a panel of federal judges ruled it a racial gerrymander. The reason, the Supreme Court said in February, is that the decision came too close to primary elections.The delay game played out most glaringly during the extended process in Ohio, where ballot initiatives approved by voters in 2015 established a bipartisan redistricting commission that Republicans have dominated. Federal judges ordered the gerrymandered G.O.P. maps of Ohio House and Senate districts to be used for this year’s elections, even though the state’s high court had rejected them.When a State Supreme Court deadline for the commission to submit maps of legislative districts for legal review came due last week, Republicans simply ignored it.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Florida Supreme Court Turns Down DeSantis Voting Map Challenge

      by

      WASHINGTON — The Florida Supreme Court refused on Thursday to step into a challenge to a new map of the state’s congressional districts that was approved by the Republican State Legislature. The ruling all but ensures that the November elections will be based on districts that a lower state court said diluted the voting power of Black residents, violating the State Constitution.The ruling, which preserves the new House map personally ordered by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, was a fitting coda to a once-a-decade redistricting process that began with efforts to reduce the raw political self-interest built into the exercise.But in the end, it devolved into a power struggle between Democrats intent on preserving their narrow majority in the House of Representatives and Republicans who feel confident about retaking control of the House in advance of the 2024 presidential race.The Democrats appear to have come out of the map-drawing battles in slightly better shape than before they began. But their gains were marginal in the face of President Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the historical pattern of losses by the party in power. The Florida court ruling appeared to extinguish their last hope of further bolstering their midterm prospects.In its two-sentence denial, the State Supreme Court said it was premature for the justices to intervene in a suit seeking to overturn the congressional map because the case had not yet wound its way through the state court system, which could take months or years.The new House map dismantles a congressional district held by Representative Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, and strongly boosts Republican odds of capturing other competitive House seats.Donald J. Trump carried Florida by 3.3 percentage points in the 2020 election. Yet in the new map, Mr. Trump was favored by a majority of voters in 20 of the 28 districts, while voters favoring Joseph R. Biden Jr. were a majority in eight.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Voting rights groups argued that the map ignored an amendment to the State Constitution approved by voters in 2010 that outlawed partisan mapmaking and specifically barred creating districts that diminished the likelihood that minority voters could elect their preferred candidates.Mr. DeSantis contended that Mr. Lawson’s district was itself unconstitutional because it was drawn specifically to permit the election of a Black representative, taking in African American voters from across northern Florida.A lower court blocked the Republican map from taking effect last month, substituting a map drawn by a Harvard University redistricting expert. The state’s First District Court of Appeal later lifted that stay, saying the judge had exceeded his authority. The Supreme Court ruling on Thursday rebuffed a request to overturn the appeals court’s decision.While the Florida lawsuit will grind on, as will a handful of other court challenges to political maps nationwide, the odds that they will produce further changes in maps before November are vanishingly small.“At this point, it seems hard to see congressional maps being upset for this November, especially given the Supreme Court’s repeated admonitions to federal courts to hold back on changes to election laws in the period close to the election,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.The Democrats’ comparative success in this year’s map drawing is a marked departure from the last redistricting in 2011, when Republicans’ dominance in state legislatures enabled the party to gerrymander its way to comfortable control of the House until the Democratic wave election of 2018. Even as President Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, Republicans maintained a 17-seat majority in the House.That edge slowly eroded as courts undid some gerrymanders and the political landscape shifted. Redistricting this year netted the Democratic Party further small gains: Mr. Biden carried 226 of the 435 new districts in 2020, two more than before the new maps were drawn, while Mr. Trump carried 209 districts, two fewer than before.Still, those numbers do not tell the whole story. According to an analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Biden performed better than his 2020 average in 215 of the new House districts — a big improvement from the current map, where he only outperformed in 207 districts. But Mr. Trump beat his average in 220 of the new districts, an indication that the House as a whole still tilts slightly Republican.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More