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      Texas officials agree to release hallway video from Uvalde school shooting

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      Texas officials agree to release hallway video from Uvalde school shootingLocal district attorney accused of blocking release of footage, taken from surveillance video at Robb elementary school Texas officials have agreed to make public video footage from inside Uvalde’s Robb elementary school during the deadly mass shooting there, an official said on Monday, though the district attorney in the local county is being accused of blocking the video’s release.State representative Dustin Burrows, the chairperson of a special legislative committee investigating the shooting, said Texas’ department of public safety had agreed to release surveillance footage from inside the hallway at the school.Biden calls again for US assault rifles ban: ‘We are living in a country awash in weapons of war’ – liveRead more“This video would be of the hallway footage from Robb elementary school – it would contain no graphic images or depictions of violence,” Burrows said.The video would “begin after the shooter enters the room, and end before a breach of that room”, giving stark insight into what officers did for more than an hour before confronting the gunman that day.An 18-year-old man fleeing the scene of another shooting killed 19 children and two teachers inside a classroom on 24 May. It took 77 minutes from the first 911 call reporting the shooter’s arrival at the campus for law enforcement officers to kill the gunman, spending much of that time in a hallway outside the classroom where the killings occurred.Elected officials have pushed for surveillance footage from the hallway to be made public as part of their investigation into the response to the shooting.Burrows had previously said publication of the footage was dependent on agreement from the state public safety department, but on Friday an official with that agency said the Uvalde district attorney, Christina Mitchell Busbee, was responsible for the delay.“We do not believe [the video’s] public release would harm our investigative efforts,” the public safety department’s deputy director of homeland security operations, Martin Freeman, wrote in a letter to Burrows. “In fact, releasing this video would assist us in providing as much transparency as possible to the public.“However, we have communicated your request to Uvalde County district attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee. She has objected to releasing the video and has instructed us not to do so.”A group of Texas legislators has since written to Busbee requesting the release of the video. It is unclear if they have received a response. Busbee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.In Monday’s hearing, Burrows said the committee investigating the shooting would look to publish a report “sooner than later: so that people can start getting some information and seeing what it is that we are discovering”.The video, if released, would be an important part of that report, Burrows said.“I can tell people all day long what it is I saw, the committee can tell people all day long what we saw, but it’s very different to see it for yourself,” he said.“And we think that’s very important and we will continue to put pressure on the situation and consider all options in making sure that video gets out for the public to view.”TopicsTexas school shootingUS politicsTexasnewsReuse this content More

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      Texas woman given traffic ticket says unborn child counts as second passenger

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      Texas woman given traffic ticket says unborn child counts as second passengerBrandy Bottone, who is 34 weeks pregnant, pulled over by police for driving in high-occupancy vehicle lane for two or more people A pregnant woman in Texas told police that her unborn child counted as an additional passenger after being cited for driving alone in a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane, offering up a potentially clever defense for motorists navigating the legal landscape following the supreme court’s striking down of nationwide abortion rights last month.Joe Biden signs executive order protecting access to abortionRead moreBrandy Bottone of Plano, Texas, tried to fight a ticket for driving with only one passenger in an HOV lane – which requires at least two people in the car – by arguing that her unborn baby should count as her second passenger.“[The officer] starts peeking around. He’s like, ‘Is it just you?’ And I said, ‘No there’s two of us?’” Bottone recounted to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. “And he said, ‘Well where’s the other person?’ And I went, ‘Right here,’” pointing to her stomach.On 29 June, Bottone, who is 34 weeks pregnant, was driving on US Highway 75 to go pick up her son.To avoid being late to get him, Bottone took an HOV lane, but a patrol officer pulled her over while trying to exit the expressway, the Dallas Morning News first reported.An officer approached Bottone’s car, asking where her second required passenger was. When Bottone tried to argue that her unborn baby should count as the additional rider given Texas’s abortion ban after the overturning of federal abortion protections, officers did not agree.“One officer kind of brushed me off when I mentioned this is a living child, according to everything that’s going on with the overturning of Roe v Wade,” Bottone told the officer, referring to the landmark 1973 supreme court case that granted federal abortion rights. “‘So I don’t know why you’re not seeing that,’ I said.”The officer told Bottone that to drive in the HOV lane, she needed her additional passenger to be outside her body.The officer ultimately gave Bottone a $275 ticket, telling her that if she fought the citation in court, it would probably be dropped.“This has my blood boiling. How could this be fair? According to the new law, this is a life,” Bottone said to the Morning News. “I know this may fall on deaf ears, but as a woman, this was shocking.”Bottone was pulled over by a deputy with the Dallas county sheriff’s department, who is employed by the Texas department of transportation to enforce HOV rules on the US 75, the Morning News reported.While the Texas penal code recognizes an unborn baby as a person, current transportation law in the state does not.Legal experts have argued that Bottone’s argument brings up a unique, legal gray area that the courts are getting acquainted with following the rollback of Roe v wade.“Different judges might treat this differently,” Dallas appellate lawyer Chad Ruback told the local NBC affiliate. “This is uncharted territory we’re in now.“There is no Texas statute that says what to do in this situation. The Texas transportation code has not been amended recently to address this particular situation. Who knows? Maybe the legislature will in the next session.”But Bottone said that the state should not be able to have it both ways.“I really don’t think it’s right because one law is saying it one way but another law is saying it another way,” Bottone said to the NBC station.TopicsTexasUS politicsRoe v WadeAbortionnewsReuse this content More

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      I want a voice in Texas’s political future – but will my state even let us vote? | Alexandra Villarreal

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      I want a voice in Texas’s political future – but will my state even let us vote?Alexandra VillarrealWhen my partner and I moved to Austin in 2020, I faced numerous obstacles in registering to vote. There is no state where it’s harder to cast a ballot than Texas My partner and I moved to Austin from New York in the summer of 2020, when the US was in the throes of what felt like the highest-stakes election of our lifetime. As a freelance reporter for the Guardian, I wrote about voting rights and how Texas’s byzantine laws disproportionately disenfranchised Black, Latino and young voters, even as I – a Latina in my mid-20s – was registering to vote.As experts walked me through Texas’s complex web of voting restrictions for articles, I simultaneously took note of exactly what I needed to do to participate in the upcoming election. I had to be registered roughly a month before election day. Texas had no real online registration, so I would need to send my application through the US Postal Service. Well before the early October deadline, I carefully filled out and posted my voter application. Then, I waited.For weeks, my name never popped up on Texas’s searchable database of registered voters, but when I grew worried and contacted my local election office, they assured me I was good to go. I was surprised when, well after the registration deadline for the general election had passed, I received an intimidating notice signed by my county’s voter registrar saying my application had been marked incomplete because of some nebulous problem with my social security number. Distraught, I called different election authorities in Austin until someone finally told me to disregard the letter, which they said had been sent by mistake.I felt anxious. Part of me already expected more issues even before I went to the polls and a worker flagged my registration. She told me I could vote provisionally, but I wanted to be certain my vote would count, so my partner and I drove around town until we secured a printed document that irrefutably proved I was registered. Finally, after months of wading through antiquated voter registration requirements, weeks of stressful troubleshooting, and hours running around Austin, I cast my ballot.My privilege – a car, a flexible work schedule, knowledge of Texas voting laws – made it so that I could wedge my way into the democratic process. But I wondered how many other people had faced similar obstacles without the luxury to keep fighting. I also wondered why my white male partner’s experience voting in Texas for the first time had been so seamless and mine so fraught. I do not doubt that the chronic inefficiencies of the state’s electoral system may be reason enough to explain those discrepancies. But after months poring over the state’s history of racialized voter suppression, I could not dismiss a sneaking suspicion that on our application forms, the harsh, Anglo-European consonants of his surname may have attracted less scrutiny than the Spanish rolling “Rs” and soft double “Ls” in mine.Nearly two years later, I will probably never get the satisfaction of definitive answers. What I do know is that there is no other state in the country where it’s harder to cast a ballot than in Texas, and that even in 2020 – when Texans visited the polls in record numbers – we still ranked seventh lowest for voter turnout nationwide. Anyone who assumes that this lack of participation reflects a larger ambivalence among Texans commits a grave injustice; I have personally witnessed legions of us standing in hours-long lines to vote on local propositions, or marching 27 miles across central Texas in the summer heat to protest voter suppression. But because having a say here requires these herculean sacrifices of time and energy, the state has successfully bullied millions of other eligible voters into silence through lost absentee ballot applications, rejected signatures, poorly informed poll workers and any number of other hurdles inherent to the system’s design.The end result is a toxic reality where Texas politics are so far afield of the political will of most Texans that it’s hard to consider the state a democracy. A comfortable majority of registered voters in Texas oppose banning all abortions, yet that is effectively what state politicians have done in the aftermath of the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Polling shows overwhelming support from both Texas Democrats and Republicans for common sense gun safety measures such as universal background checks and red flag laws (a whopping 59% of Texans even want a nationwide ban on semi-automatic weapons), yet counterintuitively, state lawmakers have continually passed legislation making it easier to have a gun on hand, without training or a permit.If anything, Texas politics are trending further to the far right – and farther away from us, the people. Last month, the Republican party of Texas boggled the nation with its platform, where members called for a change to the 14th amendment that would end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, likened being gay to “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and opposed “all efforts to validate transgender identity”. Also on the platform, Republicans rejected the 2020 presidential election results as illegitimate, embraced a slew of voting restrictions, and advocated for repealing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, legislation that protects voters of color.In fact, Texas has long been infamous for disenfranchising its own people, so much so that for decades it was one of only nine states in their entirety – most of them former members of the Confederacy – required by the federal government to receive administrative or judicial preclearance before implementing any voting changes. Texas’s membership in this less than illustrious club of voter suppression states is thanks to the pioneering actions of former representative Barbara Jordan, Houston’s native daughter and the first Black congresswoman to represent the deep south, who in the 1970s advocated for expanding the 1965 Voting Rights Act to protect Latino and Black voters from not only racist but also linguistic discrimination.With Jordan’s institution of preclearance came an era of forced détente for Texas’s war against its people. But even with the attorney general and DC’s district court acting as watchdogs, the state’s Republican majority continued to advocate for racial gerrymandering and provisions tainted by discrimination. Then, in 2013, the supreme court’s decision in Shelby county v Holder effectively struck down preclearance across the country, allowing newly emboldened Texas politicians to declare open season on their disfavored constituents through legislation such as voter identification laws that honor handgun licenses but not student IDs.Even after Texas’s population ballooned by more than 8 million residents in the last two decades, and even though 91% of that growth was attributable to people of color, the state’s ruling party has done everything in its control to shore up white electoral power. Last year, Texas lawmakers agreed upon political maps that discriminate against Latino and Black voters to dilute their influence, rig elections for Republican incumbents and redraw districts that were becoming competitive so that Trump enthusiasts now have the upper hand. These gerrymandered maps so clearly disadvantage Texas’s majority-minority population that the US Department of Justice has sued, claiming Texas lawmakers have “refused to recognize the state’s growing minority electorate”.Meanwhile, Texas’s Republican leadership has also capitalized on the “big lie”, a conspiracy theory of mass voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, to enact even more voting restrictions based on specious talking points around “election integrity”. Amid this latest assault on voting rights, belligerently advanced during both regular and special sessions of the Texas legislature last year, I walked the halls of my state capitol wondering how much harder it could get to cast a ballot here. Young Texans drove across the state and pulled all-nighters so they could join public testimony decrying the unconscionable damage further barriers to the polls would do. But Texas’s representatives refused to listen and instead deployed shifty procedural moves and behind-closed-door dealings to bypass public scrutiny.Even after democratic lawmakers made the bold decision to break quorum and derail last year’s voting legislation, Republicans eventually bulldozed over them to pass a new flurry of restrictions around voting hours, drive-thru voting and mail-in voting – innovations famously used by left-leaning Texas counties to more safely promote participation in the last presidential election, amid a global pandemic. With those new restrictions in effect during this year’s primaries, an Associated Press analysis revealed that more than one in eight mail-in ballots across 187 Texas counties were categorically rejected, a bleak referendum on Texas’s state of democracy.Every two to four years, national publications and pundits have made a tradition out of speculating whether this will finally be the election when Texas turns blue, or at least purple. Their perennial questions will undoubtedly re-emerge this general election, with Beto O’Rourke at the top of the Democratic ticket and with so many fundamental rights at stake.But what these buzzy analyses so often miss is the lack of agency Texans feel in regard to our own political future. We desperately want a voice in what happens to us, so much so that we willingly sacrifice sleep to testify, wear down our soles marching, and drive around town scrambling for paperwork to finally prove our equal citizenship. But as we nervously approach the front of the line at the polls, we feel a different, more visceral question tugging at our hearts and minds:Will our state even let us vote?TopicsUS voting rightsTexasUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Migrant deaths show Biden needs to change immigration policy: Politics Weekly America

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      At the end of June, authorities in San Antonio, Texas, opened the back of an abandoned truck to find the bodies of more than 50 migrants inside – people who had made the journey across the southern border in extreme heat. The news led to scrutiny, from all sides, of the Biden administration’s approach to immigration, with Republicans saying it was too weak and Democrats, too harsh.
      Jonathan Freedland speaks to Silvia Rodriguez Vega and Pedro Gerson about the steps the US government could take to prevent further deaths at the border

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      Follow Silvia’s work on her upcoming book here Buy tickets for a Guardian live event where John Harris and John Crace discusss the end of the Johnson era Subscribe to The Guardian’s Women’s Football Weekly podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Acast Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Mayra Flores and the Rise of the Far-Right Latina

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      Representative Mayra Flores is one of three Republican Latinas vying to transform South Texas politics by shunning moderates and often embracing the extreme.WASHINGTON — For years, Texas Republicans tried to win the Hispanic vote using a Bush-era brand of compassionate conservatism. The idea was that a moderate’s touch and a softer rhetoric on immigration were key to making inroads with Hispanic voters, particularly in Democratic strongholds along the southern border.Such was the Texas of old. The Trump age has given rise to a new brand of Texas Republicans, one of whom is already walking the halls of Congress: the far-right Latina.Representative Mayra Flores became only the second Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley after she won a special election last month and flipped the congressional seat from blue to red. She also became the first Latina Republican ever sent by Texas to Congress. Her abbreviated term lasts only through the end of the year, and she is seen as a long shot to win re-election to a full one.But what is most striking is that Ms. Flores won by shunning moderates, embracing the far right and wearing her support for Donald J. Trump on her sleeve — more Marjorie Taylor Greene than Kay Bailey Hutchison.Her campaign slogan — “God, family, country” — was meant to appeal to what she calls the “traditional values” of her majority-Hispanic district in the border city of Brownsville. She called for President Biden’s impeachment. She tweeted QAnon hashtags. And she called the Democratic Party the “greatest threat America faces.”In an interview in her still-barren office the day after her swearing-in ceremony, Ms. Flores was asked whether she considered Mr. Biden the legitimately elected president.Ms. Flores, the newest member of Congress, often speaks of working alongside her parents as a teenager in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle.Shuran Huang for The New York Times“He’s the worst president of the United States,” she said.When asked three more times whether Mr. Biden had been legitimately elected, she repeated the same nonanswer.Two other Latina Republicans, Monica De La Cruz in McAllen and Cassy Garcia in Laredo, are also on the ballot in congressional races along the Mexican border. All three — G.O.P. officials have taken to calling them a “triple threat” — share right-wing views on immigration, the 2020 election and abortion, among other issues.They share the same advisers, have held campaign rallies and fund-raisers together and have knocked on doors side by side. They accuse the Democratic Party of taking Hispanic voters for granted and view themselves, as do their supporters, as the embodiment of the American dream: Ms. Flores often speaks of working alongside her parents as a teenager in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle.Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz and Ms. Garcia grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, a working-class four-county region at the southernmost tip of Texas where Hispanics make up 93 percent of the population. All three are bilingual; Ms. Flores was born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and the other two in South Texas. Only Ms. De La Cruz has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, yet they all remain outspoken advocates for him, his movement and his tough talk on restricting immigration and building the border wall.Monica De La Cruz is running in the most competitive House race in Texas.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesThe Rio Grande Valley has long been a politically liberal yet culturally conservative place. Church pews are packed on Sundays, American flags wave from their poles on front lawns and law enforcement is revered. Ms. Flores’s husband is a Border Patrol agent, a note she often emphasized on the campaign trail.In 2020, the Valley’s conservative culture started to exert a greater influence on its politics. Mr. Trump flipped rural Zapata County and narrowed the Democratic margin of victory in the four Valley counties and in other border towns.“Growing up down there, you always have closeted Republicans,” said Ms. Garcia, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. “Now, the desire to embrace Republicans is really spreading. They feel a genuine sense of belonging.”Other pro-Trump Latinas are running for House seats in Virginia, Florida and New Mexico, among other places.Republican leaders and strategists say Ms. Flores’s win and the candidacies of other right-wing Hispanic women are proof that Latino voters are increasingly shifting to the right. More than 100 Republican House candidates are Hispanic, a record number, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee.Democrats view the situation much differently. Some Democratic leaders dismiss Ms. Flores’s victory as a fluke — the product of a low-turnout special election in which 28,990 people cast ballots — and a fleeting one.Ms. Flores, who was elected to serve the last six months of a retiring Democratic congressman’s term, is running in November for a full term. She faces a popular Democratic incumbent who is switching districts, Representative Vicente Gonzalez.Democratic leaders are optimistic that Mr. Gonzalez will defeat Ms. Flores, and that Ms. Garcia will lose her race against Representative Henry Cuellar, the conservative Democrat who narrowly beat a progressive challenger in a primary runoff.Ms. De La Cruz, however, is running in the most competitive House race in Texas and will face Michelle Vallejo, a progressive Democrat.Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who heads the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, dismissed Ms. Flores’s win as a “public relations coup” for Republicans.“It does not mean she represents mainstream Hispanic voters,” Mr. Gallego said.Republicans say the campaigns of Ms. Flores and other right-wing Hispanic women are proof that Latino voters are increasingly shifting to the right.Jason Garza for The New York TimesMr. Gonzalez, the Democratic congressman, nearly lost to Ms. De La Cruz two years ago when she challenged him in Texas’ 15th Congressional District. He won by 6,588 votes. Now, he is challenging Ms. Flores in the 34th District.“This was a profound message to the party,” he said of Ms. Flores’s victory. “It’s really woken up the Democratic base. I’ve never had so many people volunteer for free in all my years.”As she moved into her congressional office across from the Capitol, Ms. Flores, an evangelical Christian, eyed the bare walls. She planned to put up a large photo of the SpaceX launch site in her district as well as images of Jesus.She had campaigned with the support of evangelical churches; her pastor carried out a “Make America Godly Again” outreach effort and traveled to Washington for her swearing-in. “I do believe that pastors should be getting involved in politics and in guiding their congressmen,” Ms. Flores said. “Our pastors know our people better than we do.”Ms. Flores wasted no time displaying a combative style with Democrats. Minutes after her swearing-in, Speaker Nancy Pelosi posed with Ms. Flores and her family for a photo. What happened next is a matter of debate. To Democrats, it looked as if Ms. Pelosi had brushed her arm against Ms. Flores’s 8-year-old daughter as the two stood side by side. To Republicans, it looked as if Ms. Pelosi had shoved her aside.“No child should be pushed to the side for a photo op. PERIOD!!” Ms. Flores later wrote on Twitter.To hear Ms. Flores tell it, her switch to the G.O.P. was inevitable.Early on, she said, she had voted Democratic, primarily because everyone she knew did the same. The first time she cast a ballot for a Republican for president, she said, was for Mitt Romney in 2012.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, walks down the Capitol steps with Ms. Flores.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesAfter attending a Republican event for the spouses of Border Patrol agents, Ms. Flores began to volunteer for the Hidalgo County Republican Party in McAllen. By 2020, she was organizing pro-Trump caravans through the Rio Grande Valley.She was also posting tweets using the hashtag #QAnon.When asked about QAnon, Ms. Flores denied ever having supported the conspiracy theory, which claims that a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring is trying to control the government and the media. Hashtags have long been considered social media shorthand for expressing support for a cause or an idea, but Ms. Flores insisted her intention was to express opposition to QAnon.“It’s just to reach more people so more people can see like, hey, this needs to stop,” she said of using the QAnon hashtag. “This is only hurting our country.”Ms. Flores deleted the tweets about QAnon, but she did not refrain from expressing other right-wing views. After the 2020 election, she insisted on Twitter that Mr. Trump had won, writing in one post, “Ganamos y lo vamos a demostrar!” or “We won, and we will prove it!” Following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, she retweeted a post falsely calling it a “setup” by antifa. She has called Mr. Biden “president in name only” and has demanded his impeachment. And as her own oath of office coincided with the hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Flores largely dismissed the proceedings.“Honestly, my district doesn’t care about that,” she said of the hearings. “My district is struggling to pay their bills. That’s what we’re supposed to be focusing on.”Like Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz describes herself as a former Democrat who “walked away” from the party. She said she cast her first vote in a Republican primary for Mr. Trump in 2016.“I believe that the president was bringing to light the terrible things that we were doing to our country,” Ms. De La Cruz said.After she narrowly lost her challenge to Mr. Gonzalez in 2020, Ms. De La Cruz suggested, without evidence, that both she and Mr. Trump had been victims of voter fraud in the district.“Now, the desire to embrace Republicans is really spreading,” said Cassy Garcia, who is running to flip a Democratic House seat in South Texas.Christian K Lee for The New York TimesMs. Garcia, by contrast, said she has been a Republican her whole life. Raised conservative, she went to church three times a week and entered politics soon after college, working as the outreach director for Mr. Cruz in McAllen.As a candidate, she has focused on religious liberty, school choice and abortion bans — issues on which she said the region’s Hispanic voters were increasingly like-minded.“The red wave is here,” Ms. Garcia said. More

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      Next Front Line in the Abortion Wars: State Supreme Courts

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      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

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      in Elections

      Justice Dept. Sues Arizona Over Voting Restrictions

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      It is the third time the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has sued a state over its voting laws.The Justice Department sued Arizona on Tuesday over a new state law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in a presidential election, saying the Republican-imposed restrictions are a “textbook violation” of federal law.It is the third time the department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has challenged a state’s voting law and comes as Democratic leaders and voting rights groups have pressed Mr. Garland to act more decisively against measures that limit access to the ballot.Arizona’s law, which Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed in March, requires voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, like showing a birth certificate or passport. It also mandates that newly registered voters provide a proof of address, which could disproportionately affect people with limited access to government-issued identification cards. Those include immigrants, students, older people, low-income voters and Native Americans.“Arizona has passed a law that turns the clock back by imposing unlawful and unnecessary requirements that would block eligible voters from the registration rolls for certain federal elections,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told reporters on Tuesday.Ms. Clarke said that by imposing what she described as “onerous” requisites, the law “constitutes a textbook violation” of the National Voter Registration Act, which makes it easier to register to vote. The department said the law also ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in asking election officials to reject voter registration forms based on errors or omissions that are not relevant to a voter’s eligibility.As of March, 31,500 “federal only” voters could be prevented from voting in the next presidential election under the new requirements if state officials are unable to track down their information in time to validate their ballots.Some voting rights groups contend that the number of affected voters could be even greater. But even a few thousand fewer votes could be decisive in Arizona, one of the most closely contested battleground states: In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated President Donald J. Trump in Arizona by about 10,000 votes.A spokesperson for Mr. Ducey did not immediately respond to requests for comment. When he signed the bill in March, Mr. Ducey said the law, expected to take effect in January, was “a balanced approach that honors Arizona’s history of making voting accessible without sacrificing security in our elections.”Arizona has been at the center of some of the most contentious battles over the 2020 election. Six months after the election, its Republican-led Senate authorized an outside review of the election in Maricopa County, an abnormal step that quickly devolved into a hotbed for conspiracy theorists. The state has also passed multiple laws that impose new restrictions to voting.Even before the Republican-controlled Legislature passed the measure, existing state law required all voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote in state elections. Federal voting registration forms still required voters to attest that they were citizens, but not to provide documentary proof.In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld that law but added that Arizona must accept the federal voter registration form for federal elections. That essentially created a bifurcated system in Arizona that would require documented proof of citizenship to vote in state elections but allow those simply registering with the federal voter registration form the ability to vote in federal elections.The new law could threaten the registrations of those voters, preventing tens of thousands of them from casting a ballot in presidential elections, voting rights groups contend.“There’s certainly going to be some people in Arizona that are not going to be able to vote under the proof-of-citizenship requirement,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer.While the new law would have sprawling consequences for many groups, local election officials have noted that delivering documentary proof of citizenship can be especially hard among Native American populations, which were key to helping flip Arizona to Mr. Biden in 2020.“You may have folks who were born on reservations who may not have birth certificates, and therefore may find it very difficult to prove citizenship on paper somehow,” said Adrian Fontes, the former election administrator for Maricopa County and a current Democratic candidate for secretary of state. “Things of this nature have always been of great concern for election administrators in Arizona.”Shortly after taking office, Mr. Garland announced an expansion of the department’s civil rights division in response to a wave of laws introducing new voting restrictions after the 2020 election.In June 2021, the department sued Georgia over its sweeping new voting law that overhauled the state’s election administration and introduced a host of restrictions to voting in the state, especially voting by mail. In November, the department sued Texas over a provision limiting the assistance available to voters at the polls.Marc Elias, a Democratic elections lawyer who represented a group that filed a suit against Arizona earlier this year, said he was relieved to see the department follow through on Mr. Biden’s pledge last year to counter a threat from Republican-sponsored state laws he called the “most significant test to democracy” since the Civil War.“Adding the voice and authority of the United States is incredibly helpful to the fight for voting rights,” Mr. Elias said in an interview. More

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      in US Politics

      Driver of Texas migrant death truck ‘did not know air conditioning was broken’

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      Driver of Texas migrant death truck ‘did not know air conditioning was broken’Homero Zamorano Jr is in custody with three other suspects in case of deaths of at least 53 migrants near San Antonio The driver of the trailer truck in which at least 53 migrants died before being abandoned in San Antonio this week did not realize the vehicle’s air conditioning system was broken, federal court documents said.The detail was contained in records explaining why investigators arrested a man with whom the driver exchanged text messages, in what is believed to be the deadliest migrant smuggling episode on the US-Mexico border.Texas tragedy highlights migrants’ perilous journey to cross US borderRead moreThe alleged driver of the truck, Homero Zamorano Jr, 45, and his alleged correspondent, Christian Martinez, 28, are among four people charged in connection with the discovery of the bodies in an industrial area of south-west San Antonio on Monday night.Authorities allegedly spotted Zamorano hiding in brush near the truck, pretending to be a passenger. The resident of Pasadena, Texas, was arrested after officers recovered surveillance video of him driving the rig through an immigration checkpoint.Zamorano’s arrest prompted agents to comb through his texts, finding he had sent messages to Martinez before and after the discovery of the dead migrants.The texts included a message containing an abbreviation asking “where you at”, sent around the time authorities spotted the rig and the corpses, making authorities suspect Martinez was involved in trying to sneak the migrants across the border illicitly.A confidential informant told agents of an alleged conversation with Martinez, investigators wrote in court documents filed under oath. During that conversation, Martinez allegedly identified Zamorano as the driver and said he “was unaware the air conditioning unit stopped working and was the reason why the [passengers] died”.Agents determined that the informant’s cellphone placed him “within several meters” of Martinez during the time of that alleged conversation, investigators wrote.Both Zamorano and Martinez face charges of plotting to illegally smuggle migrants into the US, leading to their deaths. They could get life in prison or the death penalty.Two Mexican nationals, Juan Claudio D’Luna Mendez, 23, and Juan Francisco D’Luna Bilbao, 48, were arrested and charged with illegally possessing guns after investigators found them at an address linked to the trailer truck. They face up to 10 years in prison if eventually convicted of those charges.Authorities were holding all four suspects in custody without bond.Officials believe the rig at the center of the case was carrying at least 64 migrants from countries such as Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. At least 40 men and 13 women died and 11 were hospitalized with heat-related conditions. The trailer had traveled through temperatures approaching 100F (38C).TopicsTexasUS politicsUS immigrationMigrationnewsReuse this content More