Politics

UTICA, Mich. (AP) — At a wine bar in suburban Detroit, about a dozen women strategized about how to preserve the right to abortion in their state.

This was not a typical political event; there were no microphones, no literature to hand out and few who would consider themselves activists. Among them was a mother of four whose only previous political experience was pushing for later school start times, a busy medical student and a retired teacher who, at 75, has never felt comfortable knocking on doors or cold calling for a candidate.

“But I feel strongly about abortion,” said Mary Ann Messano-Gadula. “Women should be able to take care of their own bodies.”

Messano-Gadula, who attended the late September “Vino the Vote” event with two friends, described herself as the most shy of the bunch. But she said she planned to do what organizers asked of attendees — post some Facebook messages and text some friends to try to get them to support an amendment to the state constitution guaranteeing abortion rights.

“I’m going to give it a shot,” she said.

Across Michigan this year, similar, more intimate events are playing out alongside the larger, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, with major stakes for both abortion rights and the candidates — mostly Democrats — who support them.

Michigan is one of a handful of places where abortion rights will be on the ballot in November, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and left the issue to states to decide. A ban approved in 1931 was suspended, then struck down by state court rulings, but it is no guarantee that the procedure won’t one day be outlawed.

That has mobilized people in Michigan, as it has done in previous elections this cycle, including in Kansas and New York. And it could have major implications beyond the state.

Michigan is one of the country’s most competitive presidential battlegrounds. It was also among the states where former President Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, falsely claiming the election was stolen. Voters this fall also will decide statewide offices, including governor and secretary of state, who will be in place for the 2024 election.

The race for governor already has centered around abortion. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer filed a lawsuit prior to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling seeking to overturn the 1931 ban and said she “will continue using every tool in my toolbox to fight like hell for women and health care providers.” Republican Tudor Dixon, who opposes abortion except to save the life of the mother, has criticized Whitmer for supporting abortion without limits, and suggested voters who support the constitutional amendment could vote in favor of it and still support her campaign for governor.

The issue already has generated intense interest among voters and pushback from Republicans and abortion opponents. Reproductive Freedom for All, the coalition supporting the abortion-rights amendment, collected over 750,000 signatures on petitions to put the question on the ballot — more than any other ballot initiative in Michigan history.

Opponents turned out in force for a meeting of the Board of State Canvassers, the once-staid panel that decides what questions and candidates qualify for the ballot. With anti-abortion protesters outside the building audible inside the hearing room, the board split along party lines, with two Republicans voting no and two Democrats voting yes. That meant the measure didn’t qualify for the ballot, but Reproductive Freedom for All appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court, where justices — a majority of whom were appointed by Democrats — ordered it be put on.

Red, Wine & Blue, the organization that held the wine bar gathering, is among the members of the RFFA coalition in Michigan. Their strategy is to ask suburban women — a key swing demographic in recent elections — to reach out to and talk with friends, family members and other acquaintances and ask them to vote.

The model, known as relational organizing, was used successfully by candidates such as Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who won a runoff election to help Democrats win control of the U.S. Senate, and Pete Buttigieg, who went from little-known mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to a top candidate for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

Greta Carnes, who led the effort for Buttigieg’s campaign, said it is particularly effective in turning out suburban women and on the often sensitive and personal issue of abortion. The approach is also more efficient and effective, because people can contact dozens of people in a matter of minutes via text, and a voter receiving a message from someone they know is more likely to read and consider, rather than delete it.

“Especially on an issue like abortion, we can’t just have activists” knocking on doors, Carnes said.

Lakshmi Vadlamudi, a medical student from Franklin, Michigan, saw firsthand the power of using her personal network when she helped gather signatures to put the abortion question on the ballot this summer. She told a few friends she would be in a parking lot one day collecting signatures, and word spread like wildfire, she said.

Vadlamudi started getting text messages from people wanting her to come to their house so they could sign. Her Indian “aunties” — women with whom she is close but not related — wanted to circulate their own petitions. Some had family members in the medical profession and feared legal repercussions of performing an abortion if the 1931 ban takes effect, while others worried for their daughters or granddaughters. They ended up with 20 filled petitions.

“We got as many as we could get our hands on,” Vadlamudi recalled. “People kept asking,” she said, and interest in the issue hasn’t stopped.

Red, Wine & Blue’s Michigan group is aiming to reach 157,000 voters in the state through these “relational” contacts, according to Katie Paris, the organization’s national director. The group’s leader in Michigan, Kelly Dillaha, said they are recruiting 5,000 women to contact their networks and report back to the group on their progress via an app.

Kathy Nitz, a mother of four from Rochester Hills, started working with Red, Wine & Blue after volunteering at her kids’ schools, leading the PTA and spearheading an effort to start schools later in the morning. Those issues always felt like “safe” topics, she said. Talking about abortion, on the other hand, was a bit like saying the word “Voldemort” — the name that characters in the “Harry Potter” books fear would bring great danger if uttered.

But Nitz has grown more comfortable with the topic, even discussing the nuances with her very Catholic and anti-abortion mother. And she believes these small conversations among women like herself could add up.

“What I’ve come to realize as a suburban woman and mother myself is that we’re undervalued. We are underappreciated and under estimated, but we’re also strong,” Nitz said. “We build communities, we make networks. That’s what we’ve always done.”

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Associated Press reporters Aaron Kessler in Washington and Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, contributed to this report.

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For AP’s full coverage of abortion, go to https://apnews.com/hub/abortion

Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics

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ATLANTA (AP) — When Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race to Republican Brian Kemp four years ago, she didn’t go quietly.

She ended her campaign with a nonconcession that acknowledged she wouldn’t be governor, but claimed that Kemp had used his post as secretary of state to improperly purge likely Democratic voters. Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, a group focused on fair elections, which within weeks filed a wide-ranging federal lawsuit alleging “gross mismanagement” of Georgia’s elections.

That lawsuit sputtered out Friday with Fair Fight losing its last remaining arguments, more than a year after the judge had tossed most earlier claims.

People are already voting by mail in a Georgia governor’s race that again pits Abrams and Kemp against each other, with fewer than 40 days remaining before voting ends on Nov. 8.

And Republicans are now using the loss to attack what they see as the “big lie” that underlies Abrams’ career. They label her claims that Georgia’s election system has been discriminatory as a fraud she used to enrich herself and aggrandize her political career after her 2018 loss.

“This is existential to who Stacey Abrams has become as a public and political figure,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican who defended the case, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “She put herself in the political spotlight nationally, potentially globally, all over the narrative that she lost the governor’s race because of voter suppression. And here you have a federal judge saying, it’s all untrue. It didn’t happen.”

Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are among a faction of Georgia Republicans who say that Democratic President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump fair and square in 2020 for Georgia’s 16 electoral votes and that Kemp also beat Abrams fairly in 2018. They argue that Trump’s claims about voter fraud in 2020 and Abrams’ claims about voter suppression in 2018 both corrode faith in democracy.

“Stolen election and voter suppression claims by Stacey Abrams were nothing but poll-tested rhetoric not supported by facts and evidence,” Raffensperger said Friday in a statement.

She is far from backing down from her position, and says she won a number of victories that made elections fairer.

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PITTSBURGH (AP) — Max Baer, the chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, has died only months before he was set to retire, the court confirmed Saturday. He was 74.

Baer died overnight at his home near Pittsburgh, the court said in a news release. The court didn’t give a reason for his death but called his “sudden passing” a “tremendous loss for the court and all of Pennsylvania.”

The court said Justice Debra Todd now becomes chief justice “as the justice of longest and continuous service on the court.” She is the first female chief justice in the commonwealth’s history, a court spokesperson confirmed.

“Chief Justice Baer was an influential and intellectual jurist whose unwavering focus was on administering fair and balanced justice,” Todd said in the release. “He was a tireless champion for children, devoted to protecting and providing for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.”

Gov. Tom Wolf ordered state flags at commonwealth facilities, public buildings and grounds lowered to half-staff, saying he was “extremely saddened” by the death of such a “respected and esteemed jurist with decades of service to our courts and our commonwealth.”

Baer, a Duquesne Law graduate, was an Allegheny County family court judge and an administrative judge in family court before he was elected to the high court in 2003 and became its chief justice last year. Baer also served as deputy attorney general for Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1980 and was in private practice before entering the judiciary.

Earlier this year, Baer was part of the 5-2 majority as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld a wide expansion of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania.

Baer was set to retire at the end of 2022 after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75. The court said the seat had already been slated to be on the 2023 ballot, and “in the interim the governor may choose to make an appointment, subject to confirmation by the Senate.” Baer was elected as a Democrat and his death leaves a 4-2 Democratic majority on the high court.

Duquesne’s president, Ken Gormley, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Baer believed justices shouldn’t be public figures and that he therefore shied away from the limelight, using his position to uplift others in the profession.

“He was collegial, he worked really hard to have the court function as a family, and he led by example,” Gormley said. “He was the most caring person imaginable — always put others first and celebrated their successes. He hated pettiness. He had no time for pettiness.”

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The Supreme Court opens its new term Monday, hearing arguments for the first time after a summer break and with new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Already the court has said it will decide cases on a range of major issues including affirmative action, voting rights and the rights of LGBTQ people. The justices will add more cases to their docket in coming months.

A look at some of the cases the court has already agreed to hear. The justices are expected to decide each of the cases before taking a summer break at the end of June:

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

In cases from Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the court could end any consideration of race in college admissions. If this seems familiar, it’s because the high court has been asked repeatedly over the past 20 years to end affirmative action in higher education. In previous cases from Michigan and Texas, the court reaffirmed the validity of considering college applicants’ race among many factors. But this court is more conservative than those were.

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VOTING RIGHTS

The court could further reduce protections for minority voters in its third major consideration in 10 years of the landmark Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to combat enduring racial discrimination in voting. The case the justices are hearing involves Alabama, where just one of the state’s seven congressional districts has a Black majority. That’s even though 27% of the state’s residents are Black. A three-judge panel that included two appointees of President Donald Trump agreed that the state should have to create a second district with a Black majority, but the Supreme Court stopped any changes and said it would hear the case. A ruling for the state could wipe away all but the most obvious cases of intentional discrimination on the basis of race.

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ELECTIONS

Republicans are asking the justices to embrace a novel legal concept that would limit state courts’ oversight of elections for Congress. North Carolina’s top court threw out the state’s congressional map that gave Republicans a lopsided advantage in a closely divided state and eventually came up with a map that basically evenly divided the state’s 14 congressional districts between Democrats and Republicans. The state GOP argues that state courts have no role to play in congressional elections, including redistricting, because the U.S. Constitution gives that power to state legislatures alone. Four conservative justices have expressed varying levels of openness to the “independent state legislature” theory.

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CLEAN WATER

This is yet another case in which the court is being asked to discard an earlier ruling and loosen the regulation of property under the nation’s chief law to combat water pollution. The case involves an Idaho couple who won an earlier high court round in their bid to build a house on property near a lake without getting a permit under the Clean Water Act. The outcome could change the rules for millions of acres of property that contain wetlands.

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IMMIGRATION

The Biden administration is back at the Supreme Court to argue for a change in immigration policy from the Trump administration. It’s is appealing a ruling against a Biden policy prioritizing deportation of people in the country illegally who pose the greatest public safety risk. Last term, the justices by a 5-4 vote paved the way for the administration to end the Trump policy that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their court hearing. In July, also by a 5-4 vote, the high court refused to allow the administration to implement policy guidance for deportations. A Trump-era policy favored deporting people in the country illegally regardless of criminal history or community ties.

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LGBTQ RIGHTS

A new clash involving religion, free speech and the rights of LGBTQ people will also be before the justices. The case involves Colorado graphic and website designer Lorie Smith who wants to expand her business and offer wedding website services. She says her Christian beliefs would lead her to decline any request from a same-sex couple to design a wedding website, however, and that puts her in conflict with a Colorado anti-discrimination law.

The case is a new chance for the justices to confront issues the court skirted five years ago in a case about a baker objected to making cakes for same-sex weddings. The court has grown more conservative since that time.

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NATIVE AMERICAN ADOPTION

In November, the court will review a federal law that gives Native Americans preference in adoptions of Native children. The case presents the most significant legal challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act since its 1978 passage. The law has long been championed by Native American leaders as a means of preserving their families and culture. A federal appeals court in April upheld the law and Congress’ authority to enact it. But the judges also found some of the law’s provisions unconstitutional, including preferences for placing Native American children with Native adoptive families and in Native foster homes.

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BACON LAW BACKLASH

Also on the menu for the justices: a California animal rights law. The case stems from a 2018 ballot measure where California voters barred the sale of pork in the state if the pig it came from or the pig’s mother was raised in confined conditions preventing them from laying down or turning around. Two agricultural associations challenging the law say almost no farms satisfy those conditions. They say the “massive costs of complying” with the law will “fall almost exclusively on out-of-state farmers” and that the costs will be passed on to consumers nationwide.

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ART WORLD

The court’s resolution of a dispute involving pieces by artist Andy Warhol could have big consequences in the art world and beyond. If the Warhol side loses a copyright dispute involving an image Warhol made of the musician Prince, other artworks could be in peril, lawyers say. But the other side says if Warhol wins, it would be a license for other artists to blatantly copy.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court

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By Andrew R.C. Marshall, Joseph Tanfani and Peter Eisler

(Reuters) – Two far-right U.S. politicians who want to upend the way votes are cast and counted are tied or leading in races to become the top election administrators in their states, according to recent polls.

Republicans Jim Marchant of Nevada and Mark Finchem of Arizona promote wild conspiracy theories about how the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. A victory in November could allow them, as secretaries of state, to restrict voting access or seek to block certification of results in these two critical battlegrounds for presidential elections.

Marchant and Finchem want to curtail or abolish early voting, mail-in voting and ballot drop-boxes, claiming without evidence that they breed fraud. Both advocate banning electronic voting machines and returning to hand-counted paper ballots to secure elections. Election experts and officials of both major parties have said such changes would actually make elections more prone to fraud and error, while making it harder for citizens to vote.

Finchem and Marchant are among the strongest of 13 secretary-of-state candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was rigged. Two, in the Republican strongholds of Wyoming and Alabama, are expected to win easily. Four others are running competitive campaigns in Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana and New Mexico. The remainder are long shots.

The movement to seize control of election administration is part of a broader phenomenon that makes November’s midterm elections unique in American history. Election deniers are campaigning in every state, according to politics website FiveThirtyEight. Out of 552 Republican nominees for Congress, governor, secretary of state and attorney general, 262 — nearly half — have rejected or questioned the 2020 result.

The prospect of controlling state voting offices is bringing national money into once-sleepy secretary-of-state races and drawing support from some of Trump’s most prominent allies. Right-wing provocateur and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon declared last week on his podcast that Democrats “are not going to be winning anymore” because the likes of Marchant and Finchem will be “in the counting room,” rooting out ballots they deem illegal or illegitimate.

At a recent Florida conference featuring right-wing secretary-of-state candidates, Marchant cast himself as an outsider and claimed that “vicious” elements of his own party are scheming to help his Democratic rival. He has claimed Nevada elections have been rigged for the last decade by a “deep state cabal” bent on establishing “a socialist, communist, tyrannical government.”

Marchant vowed to “simplify” the election system. “It’s way too complicated,” he told Reuters.

Finchem, an Arizona state representative since 2015, appeared at the same conference, sporting a cowboy hat and Old West mustache. In an interview with Reuters, he dismissed accounts that he’s a “far-right fringe” politician as “propaganda crap.” Finchem has been linked to the Oath Keepers, the far-right extremist group, and once accused “a whole lot of elected officials” of being sex-trafficking pedophiles, an apparent reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Trump has endorsed Finchem’s campaign, but not Marchant’s. In an interview at the Florida conference, Marchant said Trump has been influenced by the “uniparty,” a derisive right-wing term describing a hostile political bloc of Democrats and mainstream Republicans.

“He’s not really helping us,” Marchant said of Trump. “We have decided that we’re just going to do this on our own. . . We don’t need him!”

A spokesperson for Trump didn’t respond to requests for comment on Finchem, Marchant or other secretary-of-state candidates echoing his false voter-fraud claims.

Recent polls show Marchant and Finchem doing well. An August Reno Gazette/Suffolk University poll put Marchant ahead by nearly five points, with 31.6% compared to 26.6% for Democrat Cisco Aguilar, and 26% undecided. A mid-September survey by the Trafalgar Group has Finchem leading Democrat Adrian Fontes by six points – 47.5% to 41.1%, with 11% undecided.

NATIONAL SUPPORT

The Florida conference was organized by America First Secretaries of State, a group created by Marchant, and sponsored by a Marchant-led political action committee (PAC) largely funded by The America Project, which was co-founded by millionaire Patrick Byrne.

Byrne resigned as CEO of internet retailer Overstock.com in 2019 and has since become one of the top financiers of the election-denial movement. Byrne’s America Project has donated $155,000 to Marchant’s PAC, Conservatives for Election Integrity.

Before the conference, Byrne met with Marchant and Finchem at a $500-a-head fundraiser at the same hotel. Byrne took the conference stage the next day and said the 2020 election “heist” was part of a decades-old plot by communist China to turn the United States into a food-producing colony.

Byrne didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In Arizona, Finchem has raised more than $1.2 million, far exceeding the totals in previous Arizona secretary-of-state races and nearly doubling that of his Democratic opponent, according to his most recent campaign finance disclosure. More than half of that sum came from out-of-state donors.

“Secretaries of state have suddenly become the subject of great interest,” Finchem told Reuters.

Marchant, who built a fortune in the internet and telecoms industry, has financed much of his campaign himself. As of June 30, he had donated nearly $200,000 in personal funds, leftover funds from a previous congressional campaign and money from his PAC, campaign finance records show.

The unusual level of media attention on the controversial campaigns of Finchem and Marchant may help their chances in these typically low-profile races, said Robert Cahaly, chief pollster and strategist for Trafalgar Group.

“It may be the only name some voters have ever heard of,” he said.

The money and notoriety heaped on those candidates has also galvanized their opponents, who have generated substantial donations by casting themselves as alternatives to extremists.

Aguilar, Marchant’s opponent, said his campaign has raised more than $2 million with help from national groups sounding alarms about election deniers. One such group, MoveOn, said it will spend more than $1 million to help Democratic secretary-of-state candidates this year.

Semedrian Smith of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, a political organization working to defeat election deniers, said her organization and an affiliated nonprofit have raised a total of $16 million.

“If one election denier wins in November, that could easily put us in a constitutional crisis,” Smith said.

‘THE GOLDEN THREAD’

Finchem effectively launched the post-2020 election-denial movement in Arizona by organizing a meeting where Trump’s allies gathered to plan an attempt to overturn the results.

During the Nov. 30, 2020 event – held in a Phoenix hotel because Arizona’s legislative leaders wouldn’t allow it in their chambers – Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, among others, aired conspiracy theories about machines switching votes and trucks carrying fraudulent ballots. Trump called in to say he had won.

Finchem drew a standing ovation for denouncing “tyranny” and urging attendees to “put on the armor of God” to fight Satan.

The Arizona lawmaker was outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot and was subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating it. Finchem denies participating in the violence and has said the committee called him as a witness.

Finchem’s Democratic opponent, Fontes, is the former election administrator in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest and the target of an expensive vote audit, approved by state senators, that found no fraud evidence.

Fontes, in an interview, called Finchem a “wide-eyed conspiracy theorist.”

“Elections in America are basically the golden thread that holds the whole fabric together,” he said. “We’re in some really, really unpredictable, scary ground.”

Finchem moved to Arizona in 1999 after retiring from the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he worked for 21 years as a firefighter and a police officer. He identified himself as a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group, on a candidate questionnaire in 2014, according to a news report. Finchem also appears on a leaked membership list for the group, which shows he signed up for an annual membership, according to a spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League, which reviewed the database.

Finchem told Reuters he was “not aligned” with the Oath Keepers but did not respond to further questions.

On a financial disclosure form required of state legislators, Finchem lists his Kalamazoo pension as his only source of outside income. “I’m a pauper,” Finchem told Reuters at the Florida conference. Then, cradling a bourbon at the hotel bar, he quoted the book of Exodus, urging voters to choose “Godly men disinterested in personal gain.”

(Reporting by Andrew R.C. Marshall, Joseph Tanfani and Peter Eisler; editing by Jason Szep and Brian Thevenot)

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By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House of Representatives is expected on Friday to pass a bill funding the federal government through Dec. 16, avoiding an embarrassing partial shutdown less than six weeks before the midterm elections when control of Congress is at stake.

With government funding for federal agencies due to expire at midnight, House lawmakers were set to hold an afternoon vote to pass the stopgap measure and send it on to the White House for President Joe Biden’s signature.

The legislation, which includes an additional $12.3 billion for Ukraine’s war effort against the Russian invasion, passed the 100-seat Senate on Thursday on a bipartisan vote of 72-25. But it faces opposition in the House from Republicans including party leader Kevin McCarthy.

In addition to Ukraine aid and funding for government agencies, the bill authorizes Biden to direct the drawdown of up to $3.7 billion for the transfer to Ukraine of excess weapons from U.S. stocks.

Amid reports of Russian forces threatening the safety of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and Russian President Vladimir Putin hinting he might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the legislation would appropriate $35 million “to prepare for and respond to potential nuclear and radiological incidents in Ukraine,” according to a bill summary.

The stopgap bill also includes a five-year renewal of Food and Drug Administration user fees being collected from drug and medical device companies to review their products and determine whether they are safe and effective, the bill summary showed.

The law authorizing the collection of fees expires on Friday.

Congress has resorted to this kind of last-minute temporary spending bill in 43 out of the past 46 years due to its failure to approve full-year appropriations in time for the Oct. 1 start of a fiscal year, according to a government study.

The last time Congress allowed funding to lapse was in December 2018, when Democrats balked at paying for then-President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall, leading to a record, 35-day impasse and partial government shutdown.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton, David Morgan and Richard Cowan in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)

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By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – President Joe Biden’s liberal appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson, set to hear arguments for the first time on Monday as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, joins the nation’s top judicial body at a consequential time when its conservative majority has shown an increasing willingness to exert its power on a range of issues.

Jackson, the first Black woman on the court, and her eight new colleagues will consider over the next nine months a slate of important cases. These involve race-conscious admissions policies used by colleges and universities to foster student diversity, voting rights, environmental regulation, LGBT and religious rights, the power of federal agencies – and even a dispute over Andy Warhol paintings.

“Given how the docket is shaping up, there’s no indication this is going to be a quiet term for Justice Jackson to join,” said law professor Allison Orr Larsen of the College of William & Mary in Virginia.

The court has a 6-3 conservative majority, with Jackson joining a liberal bloc that has been relegated to issuing strongly worded dissents in the most important decisions. For example, the court’s conservative majority powered rulings on back-to-back days in June overturning its 1973 precedent that had legalized abortion nationwide and expanding gun rights by declaring that the U.S. Constitution protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted after those rulings showed a majority of Americans holding unfavorable views of the court.

Jackson’s two fellow liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, during public appearances this summer raised concerns that the court was gambling with its hard-earned legitimacy among the public by appearing political.

“I do not think those sorts of concerns will be enough to persuade five of the right-wing justices in many of these cases to not simply leverage their raw power to obtain the ends that they are looking for,” Boston University School of Law professor Jonathan Feingold said.

Chief Justice John Roberts broke from the other conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – by opposing formally overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision even though he voted to uphold the restrictive Mississippi abortion law at issue.

When the court begins its new term on Monday, Jackson will take her seat on the bench for the first time since being appointed by Biden, a Democrat, to succeed now-retired liberal Justice Stephen Breyer. The Senate in April confirmed Jackson, who was serving as a federal appellate judge, despite broad opposition among Republicans. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, called Jackson the choice of the “radical left.”

“I decide cases from a neutral posture. I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor, consistent with my judicial oath,” Jackson told the Senate Judiciary Committee during her March confirmation hearing.

Jackson is set to appear for a ceremonial swearing-in ceremony on Friday with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris due to attend, though the justice was formally sworn in on June 30.

The new term’s first month includes arguments in cases that present the conservative justices opportunities to limit the scope of a major environmental law, cripple a major civil rights law’s protections against racial discrimination in voting and end affirmative action admissions policies used by colleges and universities to increase their numbers of Black and Hispanic students.

The affirmative action litigation involves challenges to policies used by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Jackson, who earned undergraduate and law school degrees from Harvard and has served on its Board of Overseers, recused herself from the Harvard case but is set to participate in the North Carolina one.

While the liberal justices may play merely the role of dissenters in some major cases, Jackson could help shape some decisions, particularly when her expertise comes to the fore. Her perspective on criminal justice issues is informed by past service both as a trial judge and as a public defender – a job none of the other sitting justices ever performed. Jackson also served on a commission that addressed sentencing guidelines for the federal judiciary.

“Those are all issues I suspect Justice Jackson would care about,” Larsen said.

Jackson joins the court amidst an investigation ordered by Roberts into the May leak of a draft version of the abortion ruling, a disclosure he called a betrayal.

“That’s not a wound that’s going to heal quickly. The reality is that she’s stepping into a court that has endured a particularly difficult circumstance in the leak,” said Megan Wold, a former Alito law clerk now at the law firm Cooper & Kirk.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)

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GATESVILLE, Texas (AP) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s staff this month quietly dropped a series of human trafficking and child sexual assault cases after losing track of one of the victims, a stumble in open court emblematic of broader dysfunction inside one of America’s most prominent law offices.

The Republican has elevated his national profile in recent years, energizing the right by rushing into contentious court battles that have affected people far beyond Texas. He has fought access to abortion, Democratic immigration policy and the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

But as Paxton seeks to fend off legal troubles and win a third term as Texas’ top law enforcement official, his agency has come unmoored by disarray behind the scenes, with seasoned lawyers quitting over practices they say aim to slant legal work, reward loyalists and drum out dissent.

An Associated Press investigation found Paxton and his deputies have sought to turn cases to political advantage or push a broader political agenda, including staff screenings of a debunked film questioning the 2020 election. Adding to the unrest was the secretive firing of a Paxton supporter less than two months into his job as an agency advisor after he tried to make a point by displaying child pornography in a meeting.

The AP’s account is based on hundreds of pages of records and interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation or because they were not authorized to talk publicly.

In the small town of Gatesville, the fallout was felt this month with the collapse of cases dubbed “Operation Fallen Angel.” Six of the people indicted last year on allegations that they were involved in a scheme to force teenage girls to “exchange sexual contact for crystal methamphetamine” are now free. One is being held in the central Texas community on other charges. An eighth died in jail.

“It’s absolutely broken. It’s just broken. You don’t do it this way,” Republican District Attorney Dusty Boyd said of the attorney general’s office, which took over the cases from his five-lawyer team. “I made the mistake of trusting them that they would come in and do a good job.”

Paxton and his staff did not respond to voicemails, text messages and email questions sent Tuesday.

For years, Paxton has weathered a storm of troubles like few other elected officials in the U.S., including felony securities fraud charges and a federal investigation into accusations of corruption . He has broadly denied wrongdoing and remained popular with GOP voters, even while losing staff.

One prosecutor said he quit in January after supervisors pressured him to withhold evidence in a murder case. Another attorney signed a resignation letter in March that warned of growing hostility toward LGBTQ employees. By August, records show the division over human trafficking cases — a major emphasis in Texas, where more than 50 migrants died in the back of a trailer in June — had a job vacancy rate of 40%.

“When you’re experiencing the type of climactic upheaval in an office, which affects agency-client relationships and trust, there’s naturally going to be a lot of movement among staff,” said Ron Del Vento, who served as a division chief under Paxton and four previous Texas attorneys general before retiring in 2019.

“Collateral damage is inevitable,” he said.

The latest departures are aftershocks of an extraordinary revolt in autumn 2020, when eight of Paxton’s top deputies accused the attorney general of using the office to help a political donor who employed a woman with whom Paxton acknowledged having had an extramarital affair. The deputies all quit or were fired after going to the FBI, which opened an investigation that remains ongoing.

In America’s largest red state, the accusations have not given GOP voters pause about Paxton, who carried Donald Trump’s endorsement into again winning his party’s nomination. Paxton faces Democratic challenger Rochelle Garza, a first-time candidate and former ACLU attorney, in the November election.

“He’s been one of the greatest attorneys general for the state of Texas and one of the most conservative ones in the entire country,” said Abraham George, chairman of the Collin County Republican Party, adding that Paxton deserves the same presumption of innocence as any other American.

After the dramatic exit of Paxton’s top staff in 2020, those brought into senior roles included a California attorney who donated $10,000 to help Paxton fight his 2015 securities fraud indictment and Tom Kelly Gleason, a former ice cream company owner whose father gave $50,000 to the attorney general’s legal defense fund.

Gleason was fired less than two months into his new job as a law enforcement adviser. Paxton’s office has not disclosed why, but three people with knowledge of the matter said Gleason included child pornography in a work presentation at the agency’s Austin headquarters.

The people said Gleason displayed the video — which one of them described as showing a man raping a small child — in a misguided effort to underscore agency investigators difficult work. It was met with outrage and caused the meeting to quickly dissolve.

Afterward, Paxton’s top deputy, Brent Webster, told staff not to talk about what happened, according to one of the people.

Gleason, who began his career as a police officer in the late 1970s, did not respond to voicemails, text messages, emails and letters left at this home and business. A lawyer who has represented him also did not respond to an email seeking comment.

As of August, payroll data show the number of assistant attorneys general — the line lawyers who handle daily case and litigation work — in the criminal prosecutions division was down more than 25% from two years ago. The data, which was obtained under public records law, show the group that handles financial and white-collar cases was cut by more than half and merged with another division.

“This is scary to me for the people of Texas,” said Linda Eads, who served as a deputy attorney general in the early 2000s, when she said it was rare for any division to have more than two or three vacancies.

Boyd said staff turnover in Paxton’s human trafficking unit contributed to the collapse of the cases in Gatesville. In the last two years, Republican lawmakers have doubled the division’s budget to $3 million, but Boyd questioned whether it was well spent.

On Sept. 13, the attorney general’s staff wrote in court papers that they were dismissing three trafficking cases because a witness had recanted and dropping the other four because they were “unable to locate victim.”

“For Pete’s sake, you’re the AG’s office. You can’t find the victim?” Boyd said. “The culture is broken.”

Bill Turner, who spent five years in the office under Paxton, said he quit in January after senior leaders tried to prevent him from turning over evidence to the defense in a murder prosecution. He would not discuss specifics, saying that could affect ongoing work related to the case.

“We had a difference of opinion on the ethical obligations of a prosecutor and I didn’t feel like I could continue working in that environment,” said Turner, who was previously an elected Democratic district attorney in Texas.

Two months later, assistant attorney general Jason Scully-Clemmons left the same division, accusing a new wave of executives in his resignation letter of “directing prosecutors to prioritize political considerations.” He also said the environment had grown hostile to LGBTQ employees around the time Paxton issued a legal opinion that set in motion child abuse investigations into the parents of transgender youth in Texas.

Several other employees told AP that before Texas’ March primary elections, Amber Platt, a deputy over criminal justice cases, convened a meeting to ask about upcoming cases that would help Paxton’s reelection prospects. Scully-Clemmons, who declined to comment, referred to the meeting in his letter.

In May, the head of Paxton’s election integrity division invited his team to a movie theater for a screening of “2000 Mules,” the debunked film that falsely claims to prove the 2020 election was stolen.

“General Paxton will be present, among others, and I think they would love to have a good showing from our office,” assistant attorney general Jonathan White wrote in an email.

As senior lawyers have been leaving the attorney general’s office, newcomers who’ve stuck by Paxton have seen their careers and compensation skyrocket.

Aaron Reitz, who finished law school in 2017, was hired as an aide to Paxton’s top deputy at a salary of $135,000 in October 2020. The next month, after the deputy reported Paxton to the FBI and quit, Reitz was promoted to oversee agency legal strategy, a senior job making $205,000.

In June, Reitz’s assistant sent out invitations to a “2000 Mules viewing party,” complete with barbecue. More than 90 staff and interns were later told to bring their own lunch.

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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York and writers Paul J. Weber in Austin and Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report.

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Surrounded by states with abortion bans that took effect after Roe v. Wade fell, Illinois is one of the few places where the procedure remains legal in the Midwest.

Abortion-rights supporters are worried that might not last. Their concern is shared in at least a half-dozen states, and this year it’s not just about state legislatures. In Illinois, Democrats hold a supermajority, and the governor, a Democrat, is expected to win reelection.

Instead, Republicans could be on the verge of winning control of the Illinois Supreme Court, where Democrats currently hold a 4-3 majority. Two seats are up for election in November, prompting groups that have normally set their sights on other offices to concentrate attention and money on the judicial campaigns.

“Those are the only things we’re focused on, because whoever wins control of the court will decide whether abortion remains legal in Illinois,” said Terry Cosgrove, president and CEO of Personal PAC, an abortion rights group that has endorsed the two Democrats running for the high court.

The same scene is playing out in other states with contentious high court races on the ballot this year. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe, state judicial races have become even more important for Democratic groups working to protect abortion rights.

“It’s increasingly clear that the way access is playing out is at the state level, which puts the role of the court in stark relief,” said Sarah Standiford, national campaigns director for Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

The groups’ involvement in states such as Illinois, Michigan and Ohio is a preview of how high-stakes normally sleepy court races are becoming.

In Illinois, Appellate Court Justice Mary Kay O’Brien is raising concerns about abortion rights as she runs against Republican Justice Michael Burke in a redrawn district for a seat currently held by a retiring Democratic justice.

“Now with Roe v. Wade being overturned, women’s freedom to choose in Illinois is at risk,” a recently launched ad for O’Brien says.

Meanwhile, the race for a court seat currently held by a Republican and covering counties northwest of Chicago pits Republican former Sheriff Mark Curran against Democrat Liz Rochford, a judge. Curran touted his opposition to abortion rights when he ran unsuccessfully for Senate two years ago.

About $97 million was spent on state supreme court elections during the 2019-2020 election cycle, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. Spending records could be shattered this year in states targeted by the right and left.

One group is Alliance for Justice Action Campaign, which supports abortion access. It plans to reach voters in Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio.

“We were already planning to be involved in these states, but Dobbs has heightened our interest and heightened our sense of purpose and sense of mission on it,” said Jake Faleschini, the group’s legal director for state courts, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

The races’ importance was underscored recently when the Michigan Supreme Court, where Democratic appointees hold a slim majority, overruled a decision by a state certification board and allowed a constitutional amendment ensuring abortion rights on the November ballot.

While Michigan’s races are officially nonpartisan, the state’s political parties nominate candidates. Democratic-backed Justice Richard Bernstein, who voted with the court’s majority to keep the abortion rights amendment on the ballot, is seeking reelection against Republican Paul Hudson. Democratic Rep. Kyra Bolden hopes to unseat incumbent Republican Justice Brian Zahra, who voted against allowing the initiative on the ballot.

“Folks here in Michigan are angry about the Roe decision. And I think that when they’re looking for places to exercise their freedom to vote, they’re going to look to the Supreme Court,” state Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes said.

Still, the candidates insist they aren’t politicians and the role of the court is to be nonpartisan.

Zahra, who has served since 2011, described a justice’s role as saying “what the law is and not what they think it ought to be.”

Abortion rights groups also are closely watching Kansas, where six of the seven Supreme Court justices face a statewide yes-or-no vote to stay on the bench for another six years.

Two of the six were in the 6-1 majority that in 2019 declared access to abortion a “fundamental” right under the state Constitution, while another three were appointed by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. The sixth justice on the ballot is considered the state’s most conservative member.

Democrats, moderate Republicans and others fear a quiet effort to remove justices after Kansas voters in August decisively rejected a proposed amendment that would have declared the state Constitution does not recognize a right to abortion. If it had passed, the Republican-controlled Legislature could have greatly restricted or banned the procedure.

The state supreme court races that abortion rights supporters say they are most concerned with are ones Republicans already have been targeting, but for other issues.

The Republican State Leadership Committee said it plans to spend more than $5 million — a record amount for the group — on supreme court races in Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio. Spokesman Andrew Romeo said the group’s focus is on redistricting.

In North Carolina, where abortion remains legal and Democrats hold a 4-3 majority on the high court, Republicans are trying to flip two seats.

Trey Allen, the Republican hoping to unseat Democratic Justice Sam Ervin IV — whose grandfather presided over the Watergate hearings in the U.S. Senate — has accused the court of becoming too partisan.

“We need justices who are going to follow the law in every case and leave their politics aside,” he said during a recent forum.

Democratic Appeals Court Judge Lucy Inman is vowing to keep the court “free of any political agenda” as she runs against Republican Appeals Court Judge Richard Dietz for a seat currently held by a retiring Democrat.

Abortion also is likely to play a major role in a technically nonpartisan Kentucky Supreme Court race this fall between longtime Republican state Rep. Joe Fischer and the incumbent, Michelle Keller. Republicans are pushing hard for Fischer, who sponsored the state’s “trigger law” ending abortion that took effect after Dobbs and also is behind a proposed anti-abortion constitutional amendment on the ballot.

In Ohio, Republicans are trying to keep their 4-3 majority on the court, with two GOP justices defending their seats. A third race pits two sitting justices — a Republican and a Democrat — against each other for chief justice.

Ohio’s court is likely to be another battleground over abortion after a county judge temporarily blocked a ban that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. Rhiannon Carnes, co-founder and co-executive director of Ohio Women’s Alliance Action Fund, said her group has been calling and texting voters, and will be sending direct mail about the court races.

“There has just been so much talk about the federal Supreme Court,” she said. “We have to do more in the states about the influence and power of our state supreme court.”

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Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan; John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Hannah Schoenbaum in Raleigh, North Carolina; Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Kentucky, and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics

Follow AP’s coverage about abortion at https://apnews.com/hub/abortion

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By Nandita Bose and Paul Grant

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration changed its guidance on who qualifies for federal student loan forgiveness on Thursday, as seven Republican-led states filed a challenge to its student debt cancellation program.

President Joe Biden said in August that the U.S. government will forgive $10,000 in student loans for millions of debt-saddled former college students, keeping a pledge he made in the 2020 campaign for the White House.

The decision from the U.S. Department of Education (ED) on Thursday affects Federal Family Education loan (FFEL) borrowers – whose loans were issued and managed by private banks but guaranteed by the federal government – and does not allow them to consolidate their loans and qualify for debt relief.

Earlier, the department’s website advised these borrowers that they could consolidate these loans into federal direct loans and qualify for relief.

On Thursday, the department changed the language to: “As of Sept. 29, 2022, borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED cannot obtain one-time debt relief by consolidating those loans into Direct Loans.”

According to federal data, more than 4 million borrowers still have commercially held FFEL loans. An administration official, who declined to be identified, said the change impacts 770,000 borrowers.

It was not immediately clear what led to the decision. A spokesman for the Education Department said “our goal is to provide relief to as many eligible borrowers as quickly and easily as possible, and this will allow us to achieve that goal while we continue to explore additional legally available options to provide relief to borrowers with privately owned FFEL loans.”

Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, said the updated guidance is “a gut punch, to say the least.”

Earlier on Thursday, in a lawsuit the states of Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina asked the court for an immediate temporary restraining order pausing the student debt relief program. The state of Arizona filed a separate lawsuit on Thursday evening.

White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said the Biden administration is offering families “breathing room” while Republican officials from these six states “are standing with special interests.”

The lawsuit argued that when FFEL borrowers consolidate their old loans into federal direct loans, private banks essentially lose business.

The lawsuit comes two days after conservative group Pacific Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit with the intent of stopping Biden’s student loan cancellation plan, which was dismissed on Thursday.

On Monday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Biden’s plan to cancel some student loan debt will cost $400 billion.

Critics of the plan raised concerns over its inflationary impact, while the White House said it was fiscally justified because the federal deficit was on track to shrink by $1.7 trillion in the current fiscal year compared with the prior year. The smaller deficit is largely due to the end of many COVID-19 aid programs and unexpectedly higher revenue.

As of June 30, 43 million borrowers held $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. About $430 billion of that debt will be canceled, the CBO estimated. The CBO previously projected that some of the funds canceled by Biden’s action would eventually have been forgiven anyway.

(Reporting by Paul Grant and Nandita Bose; Additional reporting by Kanishka Singh; Editing by Deepa Babington and Christopher Cushing)

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