Taniel
@Taniel

JUST IN: Three GOP county commissioners in Michigan's Delta County were just recalled.

One lost to a Democrat; 2 lost to indies.

Recalls were motivated by the firing of a county administrator, as well as incumbents' opposition to DEI, according to:

https://www.miningjournal.net/news/2024/05/22230-residents-eligible-to-vote-in-recall-election/

Idaho will urge a federal appeals court on Tuesday to revive a 2023 law making it a crime to help a minor cross state lines for an abortion without her parent's consent, which a judge blocked in November.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle will hear the case challenging the law brought by Lourdes Matsumoto, a lawyer and advocate who works with victims of sexual violence, and the Northwest Abortion Access Fund and Indigenous Idaho Alliance which helps people in Idaho access abortion.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Debora Grasham in Boise in a preliminary order found that the law signed by Republican Governor Brad Little just over a year ago violated the plaintiffs' rights to free speech and expression under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The judge also found that the law is unclear about what counts as illegal abortion trafficking.

Idaho has argued that the plaintiffs do not have legal standing to challenge the law because they have no concrete plans to violate it, and that the state "has every right to protect the rights of parents to be present at a critical moment for their children."

Former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan on Monday said he will vote for President Joe Biden in November, arguing former President Donald Trump “has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character.”

“Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass,” Duncan, a CNN contributor, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In the op-ed titled, “Why I’m voting for Biden and other Republicans should, too,” Duncan outlined why he has decided against backing the GOP nominee. While Duncan admitted Biden’s age is a concern for many and his “progressive policies aren’t to conservatives’ liking,” he said he was left with no alternative as he argued a second Trump term would hinder the Republican Party from moving forward.

“The GOP will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era, leaving conservative (but not angry) Republicans like me no choice but to pull the lever for Biden,” Duncan wrote. “The alternative is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star.”

New York state's top prosecutor on Monday sued Heartbeat International, an anti-abortion group, and 11 crisis pregnancy centers, accusing them of misleading and potentially endangering women by claiming that they can provide a treatment reversing the effect of the abortion pill mifepristone.

In the lawsuit, New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a state court in Manhattan to block Heartbeat International and the centers, located across New York state and whose mission is to discourage women from having abortions, from advertising abortion pill reversal on their websites or anywhere else and award an unspecified amount of money damages.

"Abortions cannot be reversed," James said in a statement. "Any treatments that claim to do so are made without scientific evidence and could be unsafe."

Heartbeat International in a statement called the lawsuit "a clear attempt to censor speech, leaving women who regret their chemical abortions in the dark, and ultimately forcing them to complete an abortion they no longer want."

ATLANTA (AP) — A former Democratic congressman running for Georgia State Supreme Court filed a federal lawsuit Monday claiming a state agency is unconstitutionally trying to block him from talking about abortion.

John Barrow sued hours ahead of a deadline to reply to a complaint that he is violating state judicial ethics rules and that he must bring his campaign ads into compliance with state rules. Among the rules the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission complaint alleges Barrow is violating is one that bars candidates from making commitments about how they will rule on issues that are likely to come before the high court.

Early voting is ongoing in the nonpartisan May 21 election between Barrow and Justice Andrew Pinson, who was appointed to the nine-justice court in 2022 by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Incumbent justices in Georgia almost never lose or face serious challenges. The three other justices seeking new six-year terms are unopposed.

Facing that uphill battle, Barrow has made abortion the centerpiece of his campaign, saying he believes Georgia's state constitution guarantees a right to abortion that is at least as strong as Roe v. Wade was before it was overturned in 2022. The decision cleared the way for a 2019 Georgia law to take effect banning most abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually in about the sixth week of pregnancy. That’s before many women know they are pregnant.

A federal judge on Monday rebuked Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s threatened prosecution of those who help people in Alabama obtain abortions out of state in a location where abortions are legal.

Although just a preliminary ruling in the case, U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson rejected Marshall’s request that the court toss out a pair of lawsuits brought by an abortion fund and health care providers challenging his threatened prosecutions.

“[T]he Constitution protects the right to cross state lines and engage in lawful conduct in other States, including receiving an abortion,” U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson wrote in the 98-page opinion. “The Attorney General’s characterization of the right to travel as merely a right to move physically between the States contravenes history, precedent, and common sense.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Alabama’s near-total abortion ban — with severe criminal penalties for providers — went into effect. Soon thereafter, Marshall made statements asserting what Thompson characterized as a “commitment to prosecuting those who help coordinate out-of-state abortions.”

Photo Illustration by Ricardo Tomás


In November 2022, a group of L.G.B.T.Q. students at West Texas A&M University started planning a drag show for the following spring. They wanted to raise money for suicide prevention and stand up for queer self-expression at a time when conservatives in Texas, in the name of protecting children, were mobilizing to shut drag shows down.

The student group, Spectrum WT, set a few guidelines. The show would be “PG-13,” the students told the university. Kids under the age of 18 — the students had in mind the siblings of a performer — could come only if they were accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Despite this plan, the president of West Texas A&M, Walter Wendler, announced in March 2023 that he was barring the event from campus. In a statement on his personal website, Wendler called drag shows “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” Spectrum WT sued, arguing that Wendler’s decision to cancel the show was a “textbook” example of discriminating against speech based on viewpoint.

Legally speaking, Spectrum WT had a strong case. Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects speech on public university campuses, “no matter how offensive” and despite “conventions of decency,” as two decisions put it. Wendler acknowledged that he was refusing to allow the drag show to take place “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”

But the lawsuit landed on the docket of Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to the federal bench in Amarillo who is the author of several sweeping arch-conservative rulings. And in the drag-show case, Judge Kacsmaryk had a new tool, supplied by the Supreme Court. Known as the “history and tradition” test, the legal standard has been recently adopted by the court’s conservative majority to allow judges to set aside modern developments in the law to restore the precedents of the distant past.

The conservative justices applied the history-and-tradition test in three major rulings decided in the space of a week in June 2022. First, they struck down a New York restriction on gun ownership for being out of line with the nation’s “historical tradition” around regulating guns. Next, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a conservative majority ended the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade because it was not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Finally, the court held that a public high school’s decision to let go of a football coach for praying with a crowd he gathered at midfield was out of line with “historical practices and understandings” of religious freedom.

Florida Democrats have shown the donkey the door and have adopted as a new mascot the Florida panther – an endangered species.

The iconic panther, once reduced to fewer than two dozen in Florida and now numbering close to 300, was introduced Saturday as the new icon for Florida Democrats.

They too once ruled the state but have been out of power and in the wilderness since the 20th century.
Nikki Fried was elected FDP chair in February 2023

“The Florida panther won’t back down from a fight,” Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried said about the animal that nearly disappeared from Florida.

“We gave the donkey the boot. It is time to kick ass,” Fried added in a video produced at the Leadership Blue fundraiser in Orlando Saturday.

The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday receded from its 2018 ruling in Shelly v. State that requires investigators to “remind or readvise” suspects of their rights when the suspects “reinitiate contact” with their interrogators.

Justice Jamie Grosshans, writing for the majority, concluded that a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court case, Bradshaw, provides the proper standard.

“That standard asks two things: (1) did the suspect reinitiate contact with police and, if so, (2) did he knowingly and voluntarily waive his earlier-invoked Miranda rights.”

The May 2 ruling is from State of Florida v. Zachary Joseph Penna, Case No. SC2022-0458.

Penna was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for the 2015 slayings of two Palm Beach County men during a bizarre, one-man crime spree.

Penna was shot after attacking his arresting officers with a knife, but he was alert when police advised him of his Miranda rights at the hospital, court records show.

The investigators halted an initial interrogation when Penna requested a lawyer.

During his weeks-long hospital stay, Penna subsequently struck up conversations with an investigator who was guarding him on five separate occasions, and ultimately incriminated himself.

Election Day is six months away.

Donald Trump’s election to a second term would, at its least harmful, lead to the appointment of scores of more, younger, and potentially even more extreme judges. It would lead to the end of his federal prosecutions and arguments that remaining state prosecutions cannot proceed while he is president. And, Trump would, yet again, wield the powers of the executive branch.

If Trump does win, it’s important to realize that even the best-case scenarios are very bad — for Democrats and the left, certainly, but also for democracy.

This Sunday, I just want to quantify the danger for — and subsequently from — the courts.

The federal courts are already unbalanced. The U.S. Supreme Court consists of three Democratic appointees out of nine justices — appointed over the course of five Democratic administrations and four Republican administrations.

Several appeals courts are more unbalanced. The 11 active judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit include just one Democratic appointee. Other circuits are also substantially unbalanced: Only five of 17 judges on the Fifth Circuit, six of 16 judges on the Sixth Circuit, and four of 11 judges on the Seventh Circuit were appointed by Democratic presidents. In contrast, the First Circuit has no Republican appointees and four of the 11 judges on the DC Circuit were Republican appointees. The Second, Third, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth circuits are more closely divided. (Yes, the Ninth Circuit is more closely divided than you likely think because Trump confirmed 10 judges to the 29-judge court. At this point, while it still leans Democratic, 13 of the 29 judges are Republican appointees.)