Chris Taylor, a liberal Wisconsin judge, won a seat on the state Supreme Court on Tuesday in the latest strong election for liberals since President Donald Trump’s return to office.

Taylor, a former Democratic state representative and current state appellate judge, defeated conservative appeals court judge Maria Lazar in the race for the ten-year term. Her win expands liberals’ majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to a 5-2 split.

Her win comes amid a string of special election victories for Democrats that suggests a difficult political environment for the GOP heading into November’s midterms.

Conservatives haven’t notched a Wisconsin Supreme Court victory since a narrow 6,000-vote win in 2019. In the years since, liberal judges Jill Karofsky, Janet Protasiewicz, Susan Crawford — and now Taylor — have romped to easy wins in a Wisconsin spring electorate trending firmly to the left.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on April 6 paved the way for the Trump administration to wipe out longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress conviction.

At the request of the Justice Department, the court effectively erased lower court rulings upholding the conviction and sent the case back to the district court where the department has asked for the case to be dismissed.

Bannon, now a host of a popular MAGA podcast, was convicted in 2022 for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

Bannon has already served his four-month prison sentence, after the Supreme Court in 2024 rejected his bid to remain free while he appealed.

But Bannon continued to dispute the conviction. And, after Donald Trump became president, the Justice Department stopped defending it.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year was supposed to decide the fate of “Western civilization.” Tuesday’s contest has been a decidedly muted affair.

Voters will choose between liberal Chris Taylor and conservative Maria Lazar in the state’s third spring high court election in just four years. But unlike the last election — which drew more than $100 million in spending and attracted major national attention — this year’s contest is barely even resonating with voters inside Wisconsin.

“I’m a big college basketball fan, and you couldn’t watch a game a year ago without seeing a Supreme Court ad,” said Alec Zimmerman, a longtime GOP operative in the state. “Watching tournament games right now, it feels like there are significantly fewer. It’s been really quiet.”

A packed November election, and the general sense that Tuesday’s contest may well be a foregone conclusion, is part of the reason why.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to pause construction on its White House ballroom absent “express authorization from Congress” on Tuesday, throwing the $400 million project’s future into question.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” granting the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s request for a preliminary injunction blocking further work on the project.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Leon wrote in his opinion.

The order will go into effect in 14 days, which gives the Trump administration time to appeal.

Iran attacked and set ablaze a fully loaded crude oil tanker off Dubai on early on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump warned the United States would obliterate Iran's energy plants and oil wells if it does not open the Strait of Hormuz.

The strike on the Kuwait-flagged Al-Salmi is ‌the latest attack on merchant vessels by missiles or explosive air and sea drones in the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

The month-long conflict has ‌spread across the Middle East, killing thousands, disrupting energy supplies and threatening to send the global economy into a tailspin

Crude oil prices briefly spiked again after the attack on the tanker, which can carry around 2 million barrels of oil worth more than $200 million ​at current prices.

Kuwait Petroleum Corp, the ship's owner, said the attack happened early on Tuesday, causing a fire and hull damage.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (CBS12) — For three years, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office produced its own crack cocaine, so it could sell it to people that deputies would then arrest for buying crack cocaine.

It was a practice the Florida state Supreme Court repeatedly described as “outrageous” in its 1993 ruling that such reverse-stings violated an individual’s right to due process. More than 30 years later, though, a routine audit of documents found hundreds of those arrests and convictions are still on the books and part of people’s criminal records.

On Friday, the State Attorney for Broward County Harold Pryor announced his office planned to do something about that, declaring, “it is never too late to do the right thing.”

“These records may be a dim memory or an unfortunate part of history to many, but they have had a long-lasting and severe impact on the lives of the people who were arrested – as well as their families and the wider community,” Pryor added.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump nominated Kara Westercamp, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, for a life-tenured judgeship on the U.S. Court of International Trade. On Truth Social, Trump called Westercamp a “very experienced Trade Lawyer” who “knows the Wisdom and Courage to protect the American People,” and “will always put America First.”

Westercamp would indeed appear to bring some practical experience to the job: Prior to joining the White House Counsel’s office, she spent a decade at the Commercial Litigation Branch of the Department of Justice, where she regularly tried cases before the Court of International Trade, according to her LinkedIn profile. The fact that Trump now hopes to place Westercamp, currently serving as one of his in-house attorneys, on a body that is deeply involved in adjudicating the legal challenges to his tariffs agenda is, I am sure, a coincidence.

For my money, the bullet points on Westercamp’s résumé are less interesting than her Twitter/X account, which is now protected. To be fair, “protect my old tweets” is also what I would do if I were chasing a job that required me to swear an oath to faithfully and impartially enforce the law, and archived versions of my timeline suggested that I am the sort of aggressively online Trump loyalist who takes breathless #tcot selfies with Fox News talking heads, and enjoys Jim Halpert memes about how Critical Race Theory is racist.