WASHINGTON (AP) — Another group of Republican-led states is suing to block the Biden administration’s new student loan repayment plan, which offers a faster path to cancellation and has already been used to forgive loans for more than 150,000 borrowers.

Seven states led by Missouri filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging Biden’s SAVE Plan, which has become a new legal target for conservative opponents after the Supreme Court toppled the Democratic president’s first attempt at student loan cancellation. It largely mirrors another suit filed last month by Republican attorneys general in 11 states, led by Kansas.

“Yet again, the President is unilaterally trying to impose an extraordinarily expensive and controversial policy that he could not get through Congress,” according to the new suit.

Filed just a day after Biden trumpeted a new proposal to cancel student loans for millions of borrowers, the lawsuit sets the stage for one legal battle and foreshadows another. The suit doesn’t directly challenge Biden’s newest plan for cancellation, but its architect, Missouri’s attorney general, separately threatened to bring action against that plan, too.

A statement from the Education Department says Congress gave the agency power to define terms of certain repayment plans in 1993, and that authority has been used before.

The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments.

In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.

Thirty-three states have elections for their high courts this year; some have as many as five or six seats on the ballot. In total, 82 seats are up for voters to decide.

These races to decide the composition of state courts could potentially shift the outcome in high-stakes cases that are already in the legal pipeline on everything from the rules of direct democracy to the fate of reproductive rights.

Michigan and Ohio are the two states where a supreme court’s partisan majority could flip outright. Democrats are defending a narrow edge in Michigan; the GOP is doing the same in Ohio.

But the 2024 elections may also affect the ideological balance of other supreme courts, starting with Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, and Texas. Some of these states hold nonpartisan races where judicial candidates are not affiliated to political parties; but those courts still tend to have liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, and parties and other groups often get involved in their elections, sometimes pouring in huge amounts of money.

Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC

Here is the Arizona Supreme Court's decision reviving a 160-year-old total abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Remember that Arizona Republicans expanded their state Supreme Court to entrench today's hard-right conservative majority. https://azcourts.gov/Portals/0/OpinionFiles/Supreme/2024/CV230005PR.pdf

The Arizona Supreme Court makes it clear that rape victims may no longer terminate their pregnancies within the state at any point, even at the very outset of pregnancy. Any Arizona doctor who helps a rape victim obtain an abortion may now be imprisoned. https://azcourts.gov/Portals/0/OpinionFiles/Supreme/2024/CV230005PR.pdf

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) – The Biden campaign will launch a multi-state tour this week beginning in North Carolina, featuring two women impacted by restrictions on abortion in southern states, CBS 17 has learned.

Amanda Zurawski and Kaitlyn Joshua will travel to Durham, Charlotte and Winston-Salem sharing their personal experiences about medical complications they faced in their home states when they say they were denied care while pregnant.

The tour comes as former President Donald Trump faces questions about what restrictions he would pursue if elected and said he would be making an announcement this week on abortion policy following a court decision in Florida that will allow a six-week ban on abortion to take effect next month.

Trump called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “a miracle” while campaigning in Iowa in January as he talked about how his three U.S. Supreme Court picks helped make that happen.

“Abortion is on the ballot in November and we’re making it clear to voters the threat Donald Trump poses if re-elected,” said Dory MacMillan, North Carolina communications director for the Biden campaign, in a statement. “Women across the South, including here in North Carolina, have made it clear we want our rights protected, and we’re grateful to Amanda and Kaitlyn for sharing their stories and reminding us what’s at stake in this election.”

Mathew D. Staver, a lawyer for two anti-abortion groups, said he was considering options for challenging the proposed abortion rights amendment.Credit...Brendan Farrington/Associated Press


Abortion-rights supporters celebrated last week when the Florida Supreme Court said voters could decide this fall whether to approve a state constitutional amendment protecting and expanding abortion rights in Florida. But the court also laid out a road map for anti-abortion groups to challenge any expansion, by raising the prospect of “fetal personhood.”

In concurring and dissenting opinions that accompanied the ruling, four of the seven justices on the conservative court indicated that they may interpret the State Constitution to grant fetuses the same legal rights as people, foretelling the next likely court fight over abortion. The proposed state constitutional amendment would guarantee access to abortion “before viability,” or before about 24 weeks of pregnancy.

“If this does pass — but even if it doesn’t pass — I think that there is an open door to go to the Florida Supreme Court,” said Mathew D. Staver, a lawyer for two anti-abortion groups that oppose the ballot measure, the Liberty Counsel and Florida Voters Against Extremism.

Anti-abortion activists have promoted the fetal personhood legal strategy since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion in 2022. What has been perhaps their biggest success came in February, when the Alabama Supreme Court held that a frozen embryo should be considered a person, opening a new front in the legal debate over abortion.

What was striking in Florida was that the argument was not raised by one of the lawyers opposing the abortion ballot measure, but rather by the court.

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade, this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade, this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A crusading Brazilian Supreme Court justice included Elon Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation late Sunday into the executive for alleged obstruction.

In his decision, Justice Alexandre de Moraes noted that Musk on Saturday began waging a public “disinformation campaign” regarding the top court’s actions, and that Musk continued the following day — most notably with comments that his social media company X would cease to comply with the court’s orders to block certain accounts.

“The flagrant conduct of obstruction of Brazilian justice, incitement of crime, the public threat of disobedience of court orders and future lack of cooperation from the platform are facts that disrespect the sovereignty of Brazil,” de Moraes wrote.

Musk will be investigated for alleged intentional criminal instrumentalization of X as part of an investigation into a network of people known as digital militias who allegedly spread defamatory fake news and threats against Supreme Court justices, according to the text of the decision. The new investigation will look into whether Musk engaged in obstruction, criminal organization and incitement.

A Tennessee court on Thursday heard the first arguments in a case concerning the state’s abortion ban from both the state and lawyers for the women whose lives and health were endangered by the law. The women, represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, sued the state in 2023 to clarify what the ban’s narrow and confusing medical exceptions actually include.

Joined by physicians who say they’ve been constrained and threatened by the abortion ban, the lawsuit argues that the exception—which only states that it be used for medical emergencies that pose “serious and substantial risk”—is too vague to actually help anyone. Doctors say they’re turning away women facing severe pregnancy complications, fearing prosecution and imprisonment. Meanwhile, lawyers for Tennessee argue the law is clear, along with the typical bullshit about protecting “unborn life” over pregnant women.

In court on Thursday, CRR attorneys including Linda Goldstein and Marc Hearron argued against the state’s motion to dismiss the suit and also called for an injunction to stop the abortion ban from being enforced until there’s clarity in its medical exception. After the state argued that the ban doesn’t harm patients because it’s meant to criminalize abortion providers, Hearron said he didn’t “really know how [the state] can make that argument with a straight face.”

“A few doctors saying as a matter of fact that they are unclear about what serious risk might entail in an edge case does not show vagueness as a matter of law,” Whitney Hermandorfer, a lawyer with the Tennessee attorney general’s office, said in court on Thursday. She also claimed that the women don’t have standing to sue because they aren’t currently undergoing medical emergencies that relate to the ban. “So while we can all agree the past health circumstances are incredibly unfortunate, I submit here that they do not provide a legal reason to invalidate the medical exception at issue in this case,” Hermandorfer said.