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

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

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

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      Beyoncé brings star power to Harris rally in Texas with abortion law in the spotlight

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      Beyoncé on Friday lent her star power to Kamala Harris at a high-octane rally in her native Texas, declaring that the country was on the “brink of history” as the vice-president warned the state’s near-total abortion ban could become the law of the land if Donald Trump is elected.“For all the men and women in this room, and watching around the country, we need you,” Beyoncé told a crowd of 30,000 people at the open-air Shell Energy stadium in Houston.With the presidential race effectively deadlocked, Harris detoured from her frenetic race across the seven battleground states to appear in reliably Republican Texas, where she sought to highlight the state’s abortion restrictions for voters who have yet to make up their minds or cast a ballot.“Let us be clear: If Donald Trump wins again, he will ban abortion nationwide,” Harris told the audience, her largest to date. Harris walked on to the stage, as she has ever since she became the presumptive nominee roughly 100 days ago, to Beyoncé’s hard-charging anthem, Freedom.Harris has centered her campaign on the theme of freedom. In the closing days of the campaign, she has painted Trump as posing a threat to hard-won progress, eroding access to reproductive care, seeking to walk back LGBTQ rights and targeting American democracy itself. Earlier this week, Harris agreed that Trump was a “fascist”.Harris spoke to an exuberant crowd, thousands of whom had waited hours in the sticky Houston heat to attend. Rally-goers were given flashing wristbands in all different colors. They danced and sang as a DJ spun pop ballads before the event began.But the message Harris came to deliver was sobering. She listed the sprawling impacts of abortion bans like the one in Texas, which she called “ground zero for the right for reproductive freedom.”“All that to say, elections matter,” Harris said.View image in fullscreenDespite the speculation, the megastar did not perform. “I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said. “We are at the precipice of an incredible shift, the brink of history,” Beyoncé told the roaring crowd.In the final days before the election, the Harris campaign is tapping the star power of the party’s most popular figures and celebrity supporters. On Friday night, Willie Nelson, the country music star and Texas resident, performed his best-known songs, including On the Road Again and actor Jessica Alba urged women to vote. Beyoncé was joined by her mother, Tina Knowles, and her former bandmate Kelly Rowland.“We are grabbing back the pen from those who are trying to write an American story that would deny the right for women to make our own decisions about our bodies,” Rowland said. “Today that means grabbing that pen and casting my vote for Kamala Harris.”The night before, Harris held her first campaign event with Barack Obama. They were joined onstage in Atlanta by rocker Bruce Springsteen, who played a three-song set and branded Trump an “American tyrant.” On Saturday, Harris will rally with Michelle Obama in Michigan.Harris does not expect to win Texas. But Democrats here are suddenly hopeful after polls suggest an unexpectedly close senate race between the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz, and the Democrat, Dallas-area congressman Colin Allred.Democrats face a daunting senate map this cycle. With a loss in West Virginia all but certain, and Montana slipping out of reach, their hopes of maintaining narrow-control of the Senate may rest on an upset in the Lone Star state.“Everything is bigger in Texas,” Allred said on Friday night. “But Ted Cruz is too small for Texas.”The emotional heart of the evening was the personal stories of Texas women who had nearly died from pregnancy-related complications because they did not receive proper care.Ondrea, a Texas woman who appeared in a new Harris campaign, became emotional as she shared her harrowing experience after a miscarriage at 16 weeks and needing an emergency abortion that she was denied under the state’s law. A video played before her remarks showed her with a wound and scars that stretched down her body, from her breast to her pelvis, after a six-hour surgery in which she said doctors had to cut open her torso in order to save her life.Texas residents Amanda and Josh Zurawski, who have become powerful surrogates for Harris on the campaign trail, also shared their story. At 18 weeks pregnant, Amanda Zurawski began to suffer complications and needed an abortion. There was no chance the foetus would survive, but doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy until she eventually developed sepsis, days later.“I was finally close enough to death to deserve healthcare in Texas,” Amanda Zurawski said.Todd Ivey, a reproductive health specialist in Houston, addressed the crowd surrounded by a team of doctors and medical professionals in white lab coats. He emphasized the challenges of administering care to patients when it could mean risking arrest. Since the Texas law took effect the state’s infant mortality has risen.“This is a healthcare crisis,” he said. This is unacceptable and it is cruel.”Among those in the crowd was Sara Gonzales, 32, of Splendora, Texas, who drove to the stadium straight from an early-morning shift at Starbucks. Gonzales said she considers herself an independent and in 2020, wrote in a candidate for president. But the political stakes changed, Gonzales said, the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, and Texas enacted its near-total ban on abortion.“Being a woman in Texas right now, it’s not OK,” she said. “I should have freedom over my own body.” More

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      Beyoncé to appear with Kamala Harris in Houston to highlight abortion rights – reports

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      Beyoncé will appear with Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday, according to media reports.The star turn will confirm that, following Harris’s endorsement by Taylor Swift last month, the Democratic vice-president and US presidential candidate has the support of the two most popular musicians in the world – a potentially invaluable asset for galvanising young voters.Harris is rallying in Texas, a Republican stronghold, to highlight abortion rights and support Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, who trails Republican Ted Cruz in opinion polls.Beyoncé, 43, will appear in her home city along with her mother, Tina Knowles, and 91-year-old country music giant Willie Nelson, according to sources cited by the Washington Post newspaper.The event presents an opportunity for Beyoncé to give a live performance of Freedom, a song from her 2016 album Lemonade, which the vice-president has been using as walk-on music at rallies while making freedom a central theme of her campaign.Beyoncé, who has hundreds of millions of followers on social media, sang a cover of Etta James’s At Last at one of President Barack Obama’s inaugural balls in 2009, before singing the national anthem at Obama’s second inauguration ceremony in 2013.She performed Formation at a rally for Democrat Hillary Clinton three days before the presidential election in 2016 and told the crowd: “I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman leading the country. That’s why I’m with her.”Her backing of Harris is therefore no surprise and fed fevered speculation – and inaccurate reporting – that she would make a dramatic entrance at this summer’s Democratic national convention in Philadelphia.Beyoncé becomes the latest celebrity to bring star power to the Harris campaign. On Thursday, the Democrat is holding a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, with musician Bruce Springsteen, film director Spike Lee, actor Samuel L Jackson and actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry as well as Obama.Other musicians supporting the Democrat include Eminem, Cher, Billie Eilish, Barbra Streisand, Carole King, John Legend and Stevie Wonder. Trump has the backing of Jason Aldean, Lee Greenwood, Kanye West and Kid Rock, while the Republican national convention was shown a video featuring rapper Forgiato Blow and reality TV star Amber Rose. More

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      Harris Will Campaign in Texas to Call Attention to Abortion Rights

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      Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Texas on Friday to campaign on abortion rights, an issue that has energized Democrats and that she hopes she can use to peel moderate voters away from former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Harris plans to hold a rally in Houston and also sit for an interview with the popular podcaster Brené Brown, a researcher who studies vulnerability. The interview will give the vice president access to a broad, nonpolitical audience that most likely includes many undecided voters.Mr. Trump is almost certain to win Texas, which bans abortion in almost all circumstances, making the state among the most restrictive in the nation. In Houston, Ms. Harris will have a ready-made platform to castigate Mr. Trump — who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade — and to warn that a second Trump administration could threaten abortion access nationwide. She also has the chance to amplify the campaign of Representative Colin Allred, a Democrat challenging Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, in a race that has shown signs of being competitive.“We think this will obviously be a setting and a message that will reach a national audience,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign. Her goal, he said, would be to “paint the picture of what could happen in this country — in the rest of the states — if Donald Trump is elected president.”Ms. Harris’s decision to spend a day outside one of the top battleground states this close to Election Day reflects just how important reproductive rights have become in the race, which is breaking down along gender lines. Ms. Harris is receiving substantial support from women, while men favor Mr. Trump. She has campaigned hard on the issue in an effort to win over moderate Republican and independent women, especially in the suburbs. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has tied himself in knots trying to avoid taking a firm position on the degree to which abortion should be restricted.The Harris campaign has shared the stories of several Texas women who were denied medical care because of their state’s abortion ban, including Amanda Zurawski and Kate Cox.On Friday, Ms. Harris will be joined by Mr. Allred. The race represents perhaps the Democrats’ best opportunity to pick up a Senate seat on a challenging map. But Mr. Allred is four points behind Mr. Cruz in the reliably Republican state, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, and he is being outspent, both worrying signs for his prospects. More

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      Death Row Inmate in Shaken Baby Case Set to Testify in Texas House

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      Robert Roberson, whose execution was postponed last week, has been subpoenaed to appear on Monday before a committee of the State House.Robert Roberson, the Texas death row inmate whose execution in a strongly disputed shaken baby murder case was postponed last week, is scheduled to testify on Monday before a committee of the State House.A subpoena for his testimony, issued in a novel last-minute legal maneuver, halted his execution just before it was set to be carried out on Thursday evening. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that by issuing the subpoena, a bipartisan group of Texas House members had raised legal questions about the separation of powers that needed to be resolved.The Texas House and Mr. Roberson’s lawyers had hoped he would appear in person before the Legislature’s committee on jurisprudence. But over the weekend, the office of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, representing the Department of Criminal Justice, stepped in and said that, “in the interest of public safety,” Mr. Roberson would only be made available by video conference from prison.The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that as long as Mr. Roberson was able to give testimony in response to the subpoena, it would not involve itself in the dispute over how he would testify. So Mr. Roberson’s appearance seemed likely to take place by video conference, aides to the Texas House said, though negotiations over the matter were continuing.Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that his autism, which was diagnosed after the murder conviction, would make any attempt to judge his credibility by video conference “profoundly limited.” And they said that having him appear remotely without his lawyers by his side would deprive Mr. Roberson of access to counsel during the questioning.Mr. Roberson’s case has drawn extensive national attention. A broad range of supporters — including a majority of the Republican-controlled Texas House, the novelist John Grisham and the detective who helped convict Mr. Roberson — have raised questions about the conviction, which relied in part on a finding of shaken baby syndrome.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas Man Drops Suit Against Women Who Helped Ex-Wife Get Abortion Pills

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      The suit had accused the three women of wrongful death. It was part of a heated battle over the use of such pills in states with abortion bans.A Texas man has dropped his lawsuit against three women who helped his ex-wife obtain abortion pills, a case widely seen as designed to discourage private citizens from aiding women in using the pills in states where abortion is all but banned.The move on Thursday by the plaintiff, Marcus Silva, was part of a settlement with the defendants, Jackie Noyola, Amy Carpenter and Aracely Garcia. The exact details of the settlement were not made public, but they did not involve any financial terms, according to lawyers for both sides. Ms. Noyola and Ms. Carpenter also dropped counterclaims they had filed.Mr. Silva filed his suit shortly after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and one year after Texas essentially banned most abortions with a law that also deputized private individuals to sue anyone who “aids or abets” a woman seeking an abortion.One of Mr. Silva’s lawyers is Jonathan Mitchell, a former solicitor general of Texas. The architect of the state abortion ban, he is considered a pioneer in using private lawsuits to deter the procedure. Abortion rights groups accuse him of filing the suits to attract publicity and intimidate people.Elizabeth Myers, a lawyer for Ms. Noyola and Ms. Carpenter, said the fact that Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Silva did not want to move forward with the case was “very telling.”“They live on the creation of fear,” she said. “They need the fear to ultimately lead to something real and it didn’t.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      California Rejects Bid for More Frequent SpaceX Launches

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      A commission denied a request to increase the number of rocket launches on the state’s central coast, citing environmental concerns.A California state commission this week rejected the U.S. Space Force’s bid to increase the number of SpaceX rocket launches on the state’s central coast, citing concerns about the environmental impacts of the launches.The Space Force had sought to increase the number of launches of SpaceX’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket from 36 to 50 per year out of California. But on Thursday, the California Coastal Commission denied the bid in a 6-4 vote, pointing to its previous requests for the military and SpaceX to mitigate the disruptive sonic booms caused by the rockets and to keep a closer eye on the operations’ effects on the state’s wildlife.The commission also rejected the military and SpaceX’s argument that the launches should be considered a federal activity, saying they mostly benefit SpaceX and its private business operations, as opposed to the government.The move came just a couple of months after the commission had approved increasing the number of SpaceX launches to 36, contingent on the military’s commitment to adopting such measures. The board, which is tasked with protecting the state’s coastal resources, previously expressed its reservation for approving more launches without understanding the effects of the sonic booms and launch debris on wildlife.SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk, has grown to dominate the space launch business, serving as the primary provider to both NASA and the Pentagon. It has blasted its own commercial satellites into space out of bases across the country at a rapid clip, and it is set to test its new Starship rocket on Sunday in Texas. In California, SpaceX carries out many of its missions at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.But the sonic booms have been startling residents in Southern California, whose homes have been shaken by powerful, confusing jolts, The Los Angeles Times reported. And several environmental groups submitted letters urging the commission to take more time to study the impact on wildlife ahead of this week’s meeting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas jury clears ‘Trump Train’ for surrounding 2020 Biden-Harris bus

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      A federal jury in Texas on Monday cleared a group of Donald Trump’s supporters and found one driver liable in a civil trial over a so-called “Trump Train” that surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a busy highway days before the 2020 election.The two-week trial in a federal courthouse in Austin centered on whether the actions of the “Trump Train” participants amounted to political intimidation. Among those onboard the bus was Wendy Davis, the former Democratic lawmaker, who testified she feared for her life while a convoy of Trump supporters boxed in the bus along Interstate 35.The jury awarded $10,000 to the bus driver.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit had alleged they were terrorised and intimidated for more than 90 minutes on 20 October 2020, as they took a bus tour canvassing for the Democratic ticket in the final days of the election in Texas as they travelled from San Antonio to Austin.About 40 vehicles flying Make America Great Again flags encircled the bus, trying to run it off the road and playing what the suit claims was a “madcap game of highway ‘chicken’”.No criminal charges were filed against the six Trump supporters who were sued by Davis and two others onboard the bus. Civil rights advocates hoped a guilty verdict would send a clear message about what constitutes political violence and intimidation.Video that Davis recorded from the bus shows pickup trucks with large Trump flags slowing down to box in the bus as it tried to move away from the group of Trump supporters. One of the defendants hit a campaign volunteer’s car while the trucks occupied all lanes of traffic, forcing the bus and everyone around it to a 15mph crawl.The event was canceled after Davis and others on the bus – a campaign staffer and the driver – made repeated calls to 911 asking for a police escort through San Marcos and no help arrived.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDavis, who is best known for the 11-hour speech she made in the Texas senate in 2013 to filibuster an anti-abortion bill, said she suffered “substantial emotional distress” form the experience.Associated press contributed to this report More