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      US supreme court allows delay in redrawing Louisiana map that dilutes Black voters’ power

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      The US supreme court said on Thursday it would not immediately lift a lower court’s order blocking a judge from holding a hearing to consider a new congressional map for Louisiana that increases the power of Black voters. The decision could mean that Black voters in Louisiana will have to vote under a map that has been found to illegally weaken their votes for a second time.The decision, which had no noted dissents, is the latest step in an increasingly complex legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional maps. A federal judge last year ordered the state to redraw its six districts to add a second district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice. Black voters currently represent about a third of Louisiana’s population but have a majority in just one district.The US supreme court put that decision on hold while it considered a similar case from Alabama. After the court upheld a ruling requiring Alabama to redraw its maps in June, it allowed the Louisiana case to move forward.In a highly unusual move, a split three-judge panel from the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit issued an order in late September blocking a judge from holding a hearing on a remedial map. The two highly conservative judges in the majority, Edith Jones and James Ho, said the lower judge had not given Louisiana Republicans enough of a chance to defend themselves or prepare a legally compliant map.The challengers in the case immediately appealed to the US supreme court, warning that putting off the hearing could mean that Louisiana might not get a new congressional map until after the 2024 election. Such a ruling would mean that Black voters in the state would have to be subject to two federal elections under maps that illegally weakened their votes.“The writ issued by the panel risks injecting chaos into the 2024 election cycle by leaving in place a preliminary injunction barring use of the map the legislature adopted in 2022, while casting doubt on whether or when a lawful remedial map can be promptly developed and implemented,” lawyers for the challengers wrote.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, part of the liberal wing on the US supreme court, wrote a concurring opinion saying that the court’s decision not to get involved should not be seen as condoning the decision from the fifth circuit panel “in these or similar circumstances”.She also noted that she understood the panel’s ruling to halt proceedings until Louisiana had had an opportunity to draw its own maps. The state, she noted, had conceded in a court filing that it would not draw maps while the case was pending, clearing the lower court to “presumably resume the remedial process” while the full fifth circuit considered an appeal of the case.Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted that Louisiana won’t hold its congressional primaries until November 2024, so there should still be plenty of time to hold a full trial on the maps and get new ones in place before then. “The real question is whether any appeals after that trial mean that the redrawing gets put on hold pending appeals,” he wrote in an email.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the supreme court’s ruling made it “somewhat less likely” there would be a new map before 2024, but added: “It’s still a real possibility that there’ll be a new map in time.”In addition to Alabama and Louisiana, observers are closely watching Georgia and Florida, where lawsuits seek to give Black voters a chance to elect their preferred candidate. Because voting in the US south is often racially polarized, any districts designed to give Black voters an opportunity to elect their preferred candidate is likely to benefit Democrats. More

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      The US supreme court is facing a crisis of legitimacy | Steven Greenhouse

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      Donald Trump’s rightwing appointees to the US supreme court have insisted that they’re neither “politicians in robes” nor “partisan hacks”, but many Americans strongly disagree about that, and that’s a major factor behind the court’s extraordinary crisis of legitimacy. With the court lurching to the right in recent years, three in four Americans say it has become “too politicized”, according to a recent poll, while just 49% say they have “trust and confidence” in the court, a sharp decline from 80% when Bill Clinton was president.As the supreme court’s new term begins this week, it should be no surprise that many Americans are questioning the court’s legitimacy considering all of the following. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have taken lavish favors from rightwing billionaires with business before the court and then failed to disclose those favors. The court’s conservative majority has often served as a partisan battering ram to advance the Republican party’s electoral fortunes. Mitch McConnell brazenly stole a supreme court seat from Merrick Garland to preserve the court’s rightwing majority. Not stopping there, McConnell and the Republican-led Senate raced to ram through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation even after voting had started for the 2020 election.Many ethics experts say Thomas and Alito – supposed guardians of the law – violated ethics laws by failing to disclose the luxurious favors they took from billionaires. Adding to the overall stench, the court still hasn’t adopted an ethics code and acts as if the extravagant favors Thomas and Alito received are in no way a problem. Dismayed by the court’s ethical lapses, 40 watchdog groups have called on Chief Justice Roberts to require Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves in cases with links to their billionaire donor friends.Among many Americans, there’s a growing sense that the Roberts court, with its 6-3 hard-right supermajority, is irrevocably broken. Prominent critics say the conservative justices too often act like partisan activists eager to impose their personal preferences, whether by banning affirmative action at universities, overturning gun regulations or torpedoing President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loans.Concerns about the court’s legitimacy multiplied after it issued the blockbuster Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and women’s right to choose. With nearly two-thirds of voters believing that Roe was correctly decided, many Americans complained that the court’s conservatives, in toppling Roe, were imposing their personal religious views on society.On one hand, the justices can assert they have legitimacy – they were duly nominated by a president and confirmed by the Senate. But on the other hand, using other democratic measures, the court seems squarely illegitimate. One might say the conservative supermajority is the product of counter-majoritarianism cubed. First, four of the six right-wing justices were nominated by presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote, and second, they were confirmed by Senators who represented a minority of the nation’s population. Third, these hard-right justices are often deeply out of synch with a majority of the public. They’re far more opposed to abortion rights, business regulations, labor unions and government measures that advance economic and social justice.Back in 1982 when I graduated from law school, many people thought the Rehnquist court was too conservative, but no one questioned its legitimacy. But then came the Bush v Gore ruling in which the conservative majority exerted its muscle in an extraordinary partisan fashion to deliver victory in the 2000 election to George W Bush – and thereby assure continued conservative control of the court.At his confirmation hearing, John Roberts famously said he would merely call balls and strikes as chief justice. But that statement has proven to be flatly untrue, an unfortunate curveball. As chief justice, Roberts has repeatedly gone far beyond calling balls and strikes, often in rulings that increased the Republican’s chances of winning elections. In Citizens United, Roberts engineered an atom bomb of a decision that blew up our campaign finance system and overturned century-old rules that sought to prevent corporations and the mega-rich from having undue sway over our politics and government. In Citizens United, the Roberts court did grievous damage to our democracy, helping transform our nation into a plutocracy where billionaires’ money dwarfs the voices of average Americans.Roberts also led the way in overturning a pivotal part of the Voting Rights Act that required Alabama, South Carolina and other states with a dismal history of racial discrimination to obtain pre-clearance from the federal government before they changed voting rules. Showing how out of touch he was with political realities, Roberts wrote a majority decision that essentially said that racial discrimination on voting matters was a thing of the past and that pre-clearance unduly interfered in those states’ internal affairs, despite their disturbing legacy of racism. That decision was one of supreme judicial arrogance, overturning a law that the Senate passed 98 to 0 and the House passed 390 to 33 to extend the Voting Rights Act for 25 years.Roberts handed the Republicans another huge victory when he led the court in turning a blind eye to egregious gerrymandering. In doing so, Roberts gave a green light to brazen gerrymanders and minority rule, like that in Wisconsin where in a recent election, the Republican party won nearly two-thirds of state assembly seats even though its candidates received just 46% of the vote. The supreme court is supposed to safeguard America’s democracy for the ages, and we should all question the legitimacy of a court that in decision after decision has eroded our democracy in a way that favors one political party. (I should note that Roberts, embarrassed by the court’s headlong lurch to the right, recently sought to shore up the court’s flagging legitimacy by mustering a 5-4 majority to overturn an Alabama voting map that diluted Blacks’ voting power.)Clarence Thomas’s corrupt behavior has raised concerns about the court’s legitimacy to new heights. As ProPublica reported, not only did rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow provide Thomas with a free nine-day yacht vacation in Indonesia, but Crow has ferried him around on private jets, purchased properties belonging to Thomas and his relatives and paid private school tuition for a grandnephew Thomas was raising. Separately, Thomas was flown to California to be the star attraction at a far-right Koch network fundraising weekend. Flouting ethics laws, Thomas disclosed none of this.Thomas seems to see a judge’s lifetime tenure as a license to skirt ethics and disclosure laws as well as a lifetime pass to take lavish favors from whomever he wants, even people with cases before the supreme court. As for Alito, he didn’t disclose that billionaire Paul Singer, who later had cases before the supreme court, paid for his luxury fishing trip to Alaska.For decades, the nation’s law schools have taught aspiring lawyers about the importance of judicial restraint and humility, of not overreaching. At a time when so many Americans are questioning the court’s legitimacy, the court should try all the harder to act with restrain and humility – and caution. Instead, the conservative supermajority, enamored with its power, seems intent on acting boldly and overreaching to stamp its rightwing vision on our constitutional order. These unelected justices seem happy to hobble our democratically elected president, in ways large and small, and in doing so, to dangerously undermine our democracy.
      Steven Greenhouse is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      Blame the US supreme court for the Bob Menendez scandal | David Sirota

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      Gold bars, guns, cash stuffed into a coat and favors for a foreign government – the new indictment of Bob Menendez, the Democratic US senator from New Jersey, reads like the plot of a cheap pulp novel satirizing political graft. But the allegations against the longtime lawmaker are all too real – and the purported scheme all too predictable – in a country whose judiciary has been effectively telling politicians that corruption is perfectly legal.Evoking memories of Abscam and the Keating Five scandals, the details of the Menendez indictment are certainly anomalous for their cartoonish color. Indeed, this affair goes way beyond the donation-for-legislation culture that has been normalized in Washington. Federal prosecutors allege an elaborate plot in which Menendez and his wife accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menendez’s power and influence as a senator to seek to protect and enrich” a trio of businessmen “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt”.In particular, Menendez and his wife stand accused of accepting “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value”. The indictment alleges that in exchange, Menendez passed non-public US government information to Egyptian officials; used his position as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to facilitate and “sign off on” weapons sales to that country; plotted to disrupt a criminal investigation into one of the businessmen; and persuaded the Biden administration to install a new prosecutor whom he believed he could influence on behalf of another businessman.Menendez has denied the charges against him, depicting himself as a victim of a “smear campaign” by those who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a US senator and serve with honor and distinction”.But if the alleged facts in the indictment prove true, the big question is: why would any politician think he could get away with something so brazen?Perhaps it’s because Menendez knows that to secure a conviction, prosecutors will have to prove that it was illegal for him to accept the gifts in exchange for a “performance of an official act”. And like every US politician, Menendez almost certainly knows that while that may seem straightforward, the corruption-plagued supreme court has deliberately made it anything but.Less than a decade ago, justices reviewed a case that echoed today’s Menedez scandal. This one involved Bob McDonnell, a former Virginia governor and Republican, whom a federal jury found guilty on 11 counts of conspiracy for accepting lavish gifts from a businessman in exchange for gubernatorial favors. However, supreme court justices unanimously overturned McDonnell’s conviction in 2016 on the grounds that those favors were permissible.“Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes and ball gowns,” wrote chief justice John Roberts at the time. “It is instead with the broader legal implications of the government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute … Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act’.”The landmark decision tightened the legal definition of public corruption, increasing the difficulty for prosecutors to establish a bribery case against a political official.Menendez has already once tried to use that precedent to halt a previous corruption indictment in a similarly grotesque case that he successfully fought to a mistrial. Recent developments may make it even easier for the New Jersey lawmaker to once again avoid jail.In 2020, disgraced New York politicians convinced courts to use the McDonnell precedent to overturn parts of their high-profile corruption convictions.Two years later, the supreme court struck again, overturning two additional Albany corruption convictions. In one of the latter cases, the court declared that bribery charges cannot apply to government officials who – during brief hiatuses from their jobs – accept payments to elicit favors from their public-sector cronies just before they return to government employment.Then came all the news of supreme court justices and their family members secretly accepting luxury gifts from billionaires and payments from law firms and conservative groups with business before the court. Taken together, those revelations suggested a self-protection motive in the court’s ongoing crusade to complicate, reduce and ultimately halt the prosecution of corruption in every level of government.In this era of Super Pacs buying elections, lawmakers legislating for their biggest donors and judges ruling for their benefactors, the Menendez case could be a moment for the government to finally re-establish some basic, minimum commitment to the “law and order” notions that politicians love to tout. No doubt, that’s what federal prosecutors are trying to do here.The problem is that supreme court justices have for years been legalizing – and personally engaging in – similar kinds of corruption. At the same time, top Democrats are constantly assuring justices that no matter how repugnant their behavior, there will be no serious challenge to their power.Considering that, the high court may feel emboldened to use the Menendez case not to counter Americans’ perception that the government is hopelessly rotted through with corruption, but to instead make the rot even worse.Justices could use the case to further whittle down the definitions of terms such as “bribery” and “official act” to almost nothing – thereby making corruption not a crime, but the legal, court-approved ethos of American governance.
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of The Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      ‘You want to think America is better’: can the supreme court be saved?

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      When Dawn Porter studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, she would pass the US supreme court every day. “You walk by the marble columns, the frontage which has inspirational words, and you believe that,” she recalls. “You think because of this court Black people integrated schools, because of this court women have the right to choose, because of this court, because of this court, because of this court.”Its profound role in American life is chronicled in Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court, Porter’s four-part documentary series that traces the people, decisions and confirmation battles that have helped the court’s relationship with politics turn from a respectful dance into a toxic marriage.Porter, 57, an Emmy award winner who maintains her bar licence, remembers first year common law classes when she studied the court’s landmark decisions. “Like most lawyers I have a great admiration for not only what the court can do but its role in shaping American opinion as well as American society,” she says via Zoom from New York, a poster for her film John Lewis: Good Trouble behind her.“If there’s a criticism of the court in this series, it comes from a place of longing, a place of saying we can’t afford for this court to lose the respect of the American people. There’s going to be decisions over time that people disagree with. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is how cases are getting to the court, how they’re ignoring precedent and the procedures by which the decisions are getting made. That’s where I would love people to focus.”Deadlocked offers a visual montage of the court winding back in time: women and people of colour gradually disappear in favour of an all-white, all-male bench. They include Chief Justice Earl Warren, who heralded an era of progressive legal decisions such as Brown v Board of Education, a unanimous 1954 ruling that desegregated public schools.Porter says of the paradox: “One of the things we were thinking is, isn’t it ironic that this all-male, all-white court is responsible for Brown v Board and for Roe v Wade [which enshrined the right to abortion] and you have the right to an attorney, which is Gideon v Wainwright, and you have the right to have your rights read to you. Yet when we have the most diverse court we’ve ever had, we’re seeing a rollback of some of these civil rights.”In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black man to serve on the court. A group of southern senators, almost all Democrats, sought to exploit riots in the major cities and fears about crime to try to derail his nomination. Marshall endured five days of questioning spanning three weeks and was finally confirmed by the Senate in a 69-11 vote.There have only been two African American justices since: conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first woman to sit on the court was Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative appointed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan.“It takes a century of supreme court jurisprudence before we get a woman on the court. There’s an irony there that we have the current composition of the court and yet we have probably one of the most least hospitable courts to individual rights.”The court’s relationship with public opinion has been complex, leading at some times, following at others. In 2015, it ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The 5-4 decision removed same-sex marriage bans in 14 states – an acknowledgment of shifting attitudes and the rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.Porter observes: “The court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have PR or a media representative. The supreme court can’t change public opinion but what the court can do is either set an aspirational goal or it can reflect where the country is. For the gay marriage decision, that’s where the country was. The country was supportive of same-sex marriage and the court ratifies that public opinion and makes it law.”Opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have also consistently supported reproductive rights. In Roe v Wade in 1973, the court voted 7-2 that the constitution protects individual privacy, including the right to abortion. Porter observes: “It’s not that controversial a decision by that time. More than half the states had reproductive rights access so it was only going to affect some of the states.”At the time, Christian evangelicals were not opposed to abortion rights. “Evangelicals historically were pro-choice. This is where politics comes in and is on this collision course with the judiciary. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell realised, oh, wait, abortion is a wedge issue and there are all these Catholic voters. So they come together.“What the evangelicals want is tax exemption for religious schools. The Catholics don’t want abortion and together they’re a powerful voting bloc. They not only say we’re going to try and get the supreme court to change but we’re going to elect a president who is going to help us.”These religious groups duly turned against the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Sunday school teacher, in favour of the divorced former Hollywood actor Reagan. Porter continues: “What you see is kind of politics at work. How can we get power? How can we get what we want? How can we form alliances?“That alliance is very powerful because Reagan ends up having so many appointments to the court and you see the rightward shift of the court. These kinds of monumental changes don’t happen quickly but building blocks are constructed in these earlier years, like in the 80s, and they’ve continued to this day.”The court’s role as a political actor was never more stark than in 2000, when its ruling in Bush v Gore terminated the recount process in Florida in the presidential election, effectively handing the White House to George W Bush. Porter notes: “It’s 5-4 to step in and stop the voting to determine who would be the next president of the United States. Sandra Day O’Connor later said she regretted voting with the majority.“Also, interestingly, Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all working with the Republicans on the side of soon-to-be President Bush. Is that illegal? No. Is it impermissible? No. Is it unethical? No. Is it interesting? Yes!” Porter says with a laugh.But the ever-growing politicisation of the court became turbocharged – perhaps irreversibly – by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, committed a professional foul by refusing to act on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace him, insisting that the seat remain vacant in an election year.Step forward Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president who released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees based on advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It was an unprecedented political masterstroke that comforted religious conservatives troubled by his unholy antics and past support for abortion rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcConnell is seen in Deadlocked asserting that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump … was the supreme court”. This clip is from an address he made in 2019 to the Federalist Society, which has played a critical role in tilting the court to the right.The group was founded in 1982 under the mentorship of Justice Antonin Scalia to challenge what conservatives perceived as liberal dominance of courts and law schools. Among its most prominent members was Leonard Leo, who oversaw the rise in its influence at the expense of the more liberal American Bar Association.Porter says: “Leonard Leo is one of the most fascinating and yet not widely known political actors in our contemporary history. The Federalist Society realises: we can have influence in grooming judges and who’s getting appointed to the lower courts. Leonard Leo takes that on steroids and eventually becomes the person who former president Trump looks to create his list of potential supreme court nominees.“In recent years Leo has secured a multibillion-dollar war chest in order to continue to groom and populate the lower courts with very conservative ideologues. Amy Coney Barrett is a product of that. Kavanaugh is a product of that. All the greatest hits are with Federalist Society influence.”Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, has called it “the scheme”: a decades-long plot by rightwing donor interests to capture the supreme court and use it to accomplish goals that they cannot achieve through elected officials. The Federalist Society is a receptacle for “dark money” – millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.Porter adds: “The problem with private entities like the Federalist Society having so much influence and power is that there’s no insight into the source of their funds. We certainly do know that it’s not a coincidence that some of the interests of some of the most conservative folks seem to be being served by these appointments.”Last year the rightwing forces achieved their greatest victory with a decision that once seemed unthinkable: the overturning of Roe v Wade after nearly half a century. Most Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion with 14 banning the procedure in most cases at any point in pregnancy. About 25 million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling.Porter had wanted to believe the court she admired as a student was a bulwark in defence of individual liberties. “Every pundit, every organisation, said Roe is going to be overturned and yet it was still hard to believe that 50 years later, when so many people rely on that decision, that it actually could be overturned.“I will say it really did personally impact my feeling about the court. Reading the decision, there’s ignoring of history. It’s not a well-written opinion, it’s not coherent, and that’s really hard. We all need to believe in things and we all need to believe that these are the smartest people and that they’re able to put aside their personal beliefs and that didn’t seem to be the case.“It was more than disappointing. It’s somewhat comforting that we have such a strong reaction to it but I see the cases of the women who have been so harmed by this decision. There are people have been forced to carry pregnancies to term that were not viable, people who just stay pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant. You want to think America is better than that.”As the final episode of Deadlocked acknowledges, the court faces a crisis of legitimacy. A series of extremist rulings out of whack with public opinion have come at the same time as ethics scandals involving the rightwing justices Thomas and Samuel Alito. The share of Americans with a favourable opinion of the court has declined to its lowest point in public opinion surveys since 1987: 44% favourable versus 54% unfavourable, according to the Pew Research Center.Porter adds: “Every single person we spoke to for this series regardless of their political background – and we have Scalia’s former clerk, who wrote the decision broadening access to guns; we have Ted Olson, who argued Bush v Gore for President Bush; we have Don Ayer, who was a Reagan justice department official – is concerned about the reputation of the court and what the future holds if the court continues to chart its own path and not realise the delicate balance of our tripartite system of government.“What if the court sides with a Trump who refuses to accept the results of the election next year? That’s what we’re talking about and a lot of the people who did the insurrection are still out there; we didn’t arrest them all. We’re in uncharted waters. It’s not a game and I don’t think anyone wants to actually put this to the test of: will our democracy survive?”
      Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court premieres on Showtime on 22 September with a UK date to be announced More

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      US federal judge rules revised Daca policy illegal and halts new applications

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      A federal judge on Wednesday declared illegal a revised version of a federal policy that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the US as children.US district judge Andrew Hanen agreed with Texas and eight other states suing to stop the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program. The judge’s ruling was ultimately expected to be appealed to the US supreme court, sending the program’s fate before the high court for a third time.“While sympathetic to the predicament of DACA recipients and their families, this Court has expressed its concerns about the legality of the program for some time,” Hanen wrote in his 40-page ruling. “The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation … The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution – even to fill a void.”Hanen barred the government from approving any new applications, but left the program intact for existing recipients during the expected appeals process. Hanen said his order does not require the federal government to take any actions against Daca recipients.Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing Daca recipients in the lawsuit, said it will ultimately be up to higher courts, including the supreme court, to rule on Daca’s legality and whether Texas proved it had been harmed by the program.“Judge Hanen has consistently erred in resolving both of these issues, and today’s ruling is more of the same flawed analysis. We look forward to continuing to defend the lawful and much-needed Daca program on review in higher courts,” Saenz said.The Texas attorney general’s office, which represented the states in the lawsuit, and the US Department of Justice, which represented the federal government, didn’t immediately return emails or calls seeking comment.The states have argued the Obama administration didn’t have the authority to first create the program in 2012 because it circumvented Congress.In 2021, Hanen had declared the program illegal, ruling it had not been subject to public notice and comment periods required under the federal Administrative Procedures Act.The Biden administration tried to satisfy Hanen’s concerns with a new version of Daca that took effect in October 2022 and was subject to public comments as part of a formal rule-making process.But Hanen, who was appointed by then-President George W Bush in 2002, ruled the updated version of Daca was still illegal. He had previously said Daca was unconstitutional and it would be up to Congress to enact legislation shielding people under the program, often known as “Dreamers”.Hanen also had previously ruled the states had standing to file their lawsuit because they had been harmed by the program.The states have claimed they incur hundreds of millions of dollars in health care, education and other costs when immigrants are allowed to remain in the country illegally. The states that sued are Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas and Mississippi.Those defending the program – the federal government, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the state of New Jersey – had argued the states failed to present evidence that any of the costs they allege they have incurred have been tied to Daca recipients. They also argued Congress has given the Department of Homeland Security the legal authority to set immigration enforcement policies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite previously declaring the Daca program illegal, Hanen had left the Obama-era program intact for those already benefiting from it. But he had ruled there could be no new applicants while appeals were pending.There were 578,680 people enrolled in Daca at the end of March, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services.The program has faced a roller coaster of court challenges over the years.In 2016, the supreme court deadlocked 4-4 over an expanded Daca and a version of the program for parents of Daca recipients. In 2020, the high court ruled 5-4 that the Trump administration improperly ended Daca, allowing it to stay in place.In 2022, the 5th US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans upheld Hanen’s earlier ruling declaring Daca illegal, but sent the case back to him to review changes made to the program by the Biden administration.President Joe Biden and advocacy groups have called on Congress to pass permanent protections for “dreamers”. Congress has failed multiple times to pass proposals called the Dream Act to protect Daca recipients. More

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      Christine Blasey Ford to release memoir detailing Kavanaugh testimony

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      Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, pitching the then conservative US supreme court nominee into huge controversy, will release a memoir next year that she sees as a call for people to speak out about wrongdoing.Publisher St Martin’s Press said Ford’s book would share “riveting new details about the lead-up” to her Senate testimony and “its overwhelming aftermath”, including receiving death threats and being unable to live in her home.The publisher also said Ford would discuss “how people unknown to her around the world restored her faith in humanity”. The book, to be called One Way Back, will be published in March.In a statement, Ford said: “I never thought of myself as a survivor, a whistleblower, or an activist before the events in 2018.“But now, what I and this book can offer is a call to all the other people who might not have chosen those roles for themselves, but who choose to do what’s right. Sometimes you don’t speak out because you are a natural disrupter. You do it to cause a ripple that might one day become a wave.”Kavanaugh, a former Republican operative, was the second of Donald Trump’s three nominees to the supreme court, tilting the court decisively in favor of conservatives and leading to rightwing rulings including the removal of the right to abortion.Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University and Stanford University School of Medicine.In September 2018, she told the Senate judiciary committee Kavanuagh sexually assaulted her at a high-school party in the 1980s.He pinned her on a bed, she said, pressing his hand over her mouth while trying to remove her clothes.In prepared testimony, Ford said: “I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help … I thought Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”Ford escaped when a friend of Kavanaugh jumped on the bed, she said, famously telling senators: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”The assault, Ford said, “drastically altered my life. For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details”. She told “very few friends” and her husband, she added.Kavanaugh angrily denied the accusation, and others about alleged drunken behaviour which roiled confirmation proceedings in a way not seen since the scandal over Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill, in 1991.Backed by Republicans on the committee vociferously including the then chair, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court by 50 votes to 48. Only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, declined to support him. More

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      Ginni Thomas and rightwing activists exploited supreme court ruling – report

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      In the months before the US supreme court handed down Citizens United, the 2010 ruling which unleashed a flood of dark money into American politics, the wife of a conservative justice worked with a prominent rightwing activist and a mega-donor closely linked to her husband to form a group to exploit the decision.So said a blockbuster report from Politico, detailing moves by Ginni Thomas – wife of Justice Clarence Thomas – and Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who has worked to stock the court with rightwingers, leading to a series of epochal decisions, including the removal of the federal right to abortion.Half a million dollars in seed money, Politico said, came from Harlan Crow, the Nazi memorabilia-collecting billionaire whose extensive and mostly undeclared gifts to Clarence Thomas have fueled a spiraling supreme court ethics scandal.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and champion of ethics reform, said the report laid out “the creepy intermingling of dark billionaire money, phoney front groups, far-right extremists and the United States supreme court”.Politico noted that the ruling in Citizens United was widely expected after justices “took the unusual step of asking for re-arguments based on a sweeping question – whether they should overrule prior decisions approving laws that limited spending on political campaigns”.Noting that conservative groups moved to capitalise faster than others, the site quoted an anonymous source as saying Ginni Thomas “really wanted to build an organisation and be a movement leader. Leonard was going to be the conduit of that.”It also published a timeline of Thomas and Leo’s moves.A nonprofit, Liberty Central, was incorporated with $500,000 from Crow on 31 December 2009, three and a half months after the close of oral arguments in Citizens United.The Citizens United decision was handed down on 21 January 2010, with Clarence Thomas objecting to disclosure rules.On 18 February 2010, Ginni Thomas told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) she had been “called to the frontlines”.Ginni Thomas’s work on the hard right of US politics has already contributed to controversy surrounding her husband, not least through her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself when investigations reached the supreme court.Politico also noted how a Leo-linked group, the Judicial Education Project, paid Ginni Thomas up to $100,000 before transforming into a generator of amicus briefs to the court and becoming involved in the push to overturn Trump’s defeat as he sought a second term as president in 2020.Connections between Leo and Ginni Thomas have made headlines before. The Washington Post reported how, in January 2012, Leo told the political strategist Kellyanne Conway – later White House counselor to Trump – to direct money to Ginni Thomas while urging: “No mention of Ginni, of course.”Politico also noted that Ginni Thomas’s current entity, Liberty Consulting, is “a focus of interest from congressional committees”, with Senate Democrats demanding “Leo and Crow provide a list of ‘gifts, payments, or other items of value’ they’ve given Thomas and her husband”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClarence Thomas has said he did not declare gifts from Crow, including holidays, travel, school fees and a property purchase, because he was advised he did not have to. Crow has said he did not discuss politics or business before the court with his friend.Leo and Crow have resisted congressional disclosure demands. The chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed requests to testify about ethics matters. Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics regulations as all federal judges but in practice govern themselves. Senate Democrats have advanced supreme court ethics reform but it has next to no chance of passing, given Republican opposition.Leo, Crow and Ginni Thomas did not comment to Politico. Lawyers for Leo have complained of harassment by Congress and dismissed a reported investigation of his work by the attorney general of Washington DC as politically biased.Receiving business and funds from groups connected to Leo would be legal if Ginni Thomas provided services commensurate with such payments. Laura Solomon, a tax attorney for charitable groups and donors, told Politico: “The real question then is, ‘What is Ginni Thomas qualified to do, what did they pay her to do, and was it fair market value?’”Politico’s report made a splash among court watchers.Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “This stinks to high heaven. We need the Internal Revenue Service and the justice department to investigate. It looks like tax offenses, criminal ones, not to mention the sheer corruption. Leonard Leo and Ginni Thomas are despicable.”The New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer – co-author of Strange Justice, a biography of Clarence Thomas, and author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right – simply posted a fire emoji. More

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      Pressure grows on Clarence Thomas after more gifts from rightwing donor

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      The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas faced further controversy on Thursday after the release of his financial disclosure form for 2022 provided evidence of more flights and stays with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and judiciary committee member, called the form a “late-come effort at ‘clean-up on aisle three’” which would not “deter us from fully investigating the massive, secret, rightwing billionaire influence in which this court is enmired”.A series of bombshell reports have detailed long relationships between Thomas, rich donors and influential rightwing figures. In the case of Crow, a real-estate baron and collector of Nazi memorabilia, ProPublica has reported gifts of luxury travel and resort stays, a property purchase involving Thomas’s mother and school fees paid for his great-nephew.Thomas is the senior conservative on a court dominated 6-3 by the right, a majority that has handed down epochal rulings including Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the right to abortion.From the left, calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached have proliferated. In the Senate, Democrats have advanced supreme court ethics reform. Given that Republicans have sufficient votes to prevent all such actions – and that the chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed calls to testify – chances of change seem slim.Thomas, 75, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was advised he did not need to disclose trips and gifts from rich donors as they were “hospitality from close personal friends”.His 2022 disclosure form was released on the last day of August after he – and another conservative beset by reporting about donor relationships, Samuel Alito – requested 90-day extensions to the usual deadline. In an unusual move, Thomas’s form included a lengthy defence of previous filings.In one striking contention, the justice claimed protests over the Dobbs decision, after it leaked in May 2022, justified his use of Crow’s private plane for a trip to Texas to speak at a rightwing conference.“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak,” the form said, “the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible.”Thomas’s lawyer, Elliot S Berke, said the justice had “always strived for full transparency and adherence to the law, including with respect to what personal travel needed to be reported”.Berke also criticised “ethics complaints filed against Justice Thomas by leftwing organisations … diametrically opposed to his judicial philosophy” and “leftwing ‘watchdog’ groups … attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy”.In his own statement, Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the watchdog Accountable.US, said: “It’s no surprise that Justice Thomas has kept up his decades-long cozy relationship with billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow with even more lavish jet rides and vacation reimbursements.“For years, Thomas has used his position on our nation’s highest court as a way to upgrade his own lifestyle – and that hasn’t stopped.“… Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas, Leonard Leo, and other key players … may believe they exist above the law, but they don’t. We need accountability and reform now.”Another court observer, Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, addressed the unusual statement appended to Thomas’s declarations form.“Justice Thomas’s lengthy explanation as to why he omitted various gifts and free trips on previous disclosures does not countermand his decades of willful obfuscation when it comes to his reporting requirements,” Roth said.“What’s more, he’s chosen not to update earlier reports with details about the tuition gift, the RV loan” – from Anthony Welters, a healthcare magnate, and first reported by the New York Times – “or his countless private plane fights, all of which were reportable.“It’s time for the Judicial Conference, as required by the disclosure law, to refer these issues to the [US] justice department for further investigation.” More