Politics

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Brian Dahle, the Republican Party’s longshot hope to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom in California, knows that to win in his progressive home state he can’t allow Democrats to label him as an election denying, abortion-hating, gun-loving, bombastic right-winger.

It’s why Dahle, an affable farmer and state senator from the sparsely populated northeast corner of the state, goes out of his way to make one thing clear: “I’m not a crazy Republican. I’m a reasonable person.”

Whether voters believe he is what he says and not how Democrats portray him will determine how Dahle does against Newsom, a first-term Democrat who is an overwhelming favorite in November.

Republicans haven’t won a statewide office in California since 2006 because their candidates generally are little-known, little-funded and identified — rightly or wrongly — as strong social conservatives in a state that’s socially liberal. The GOP has seen its share of registered voters shrink to the point where Democrats now have a roughly 2-to-1 advantage and there are nearly as many independents as Republicans.

Under California’s primary system, all candidates compete against each other and the two with the most votes advance to the general election. Newsom won last month with 56%, while Dahle received just 17% in a field of more than two dozen candidates.

With Dahle locked in as their opponent, Newsom’s campaign moved quickly to identify him as the antithesis to what most Californians want.

“Dahle is a Trump Republican who wants to abolish abortion rights, repeal California’s gun safety laws and is searching for any shred of relevance after getting absolutely crushed by Governor Newsom in (the) primary vote,” said Newsom campaign spokesperson Nathan Click.

Dahle acknowledges voting for Trump, calls himself “pro-life” and says he is a strong defender of the Second Amendment. But he says his record is more nuanced than Newsom’s campaign claims.

While he voted for Trump, he has not publicly amplified Trump’s lie that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. He voted against a proposal to make abortion a constitutional right in California but went against his party and voted for a 2021 bill that would have made contraceptives — including the morning-after pill — much cheaper.

On guns, Dahle voted against a Newsom-backed bill to let private citizens sue people who sell illegal firearms and a bill that would ban the marketing of guns to children. Dahle’s office would not comment on a new bill aimed at limiting where people can carry concealed firearms, a response to the U.S. Supreme Court last month overturning the state’s law.

He wants to make it a felony to steal a gun, supports enhancements for gang members and others jailed previously who commit new crimes using guns. And he voted for a bill to strengthen a unique California program that confiscates guns from convicted felons who aren’t supposed to have them.

His plan to beat Newsom is to focus on what he thinks are the real problems people care about — record high gas prices, rising crime and the state’s high cost-of-living — while portraying Newsom, a millionaire businessman and former San Francisco mayor, as an out-of-touch elitist.

“The facts are (Newsom) is a failure. Show me something he is succeeding at. And that’s what we’re going to talk about,” Dahle said.

As governor, Dahle said he would push to suspend the state’s gas tax, which at 53.9 cents per gallon is the second-highest in the country. He says he would remove Newsom’s appointments to the state Parole Board, which he says often lets “violent criminals out before their sentences are up.”

And Dahle said he would push through hundreds of new permits for oil and gas drilling in the state at a time when California regulators are working on Newsom’s plan to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and lawn equipment.

Newsom won in 2018 with nearly 62% of the vote. He defeated a recall last year by about the same margin. He has $23 million in his campaign account and a record state budget surplus of nearly $100 billion, of which about $9.5 billion will be returned to most taxpayers in rebates to help offset high gas prices.

Dahle has just under $400,000 in his campaign account. He’s asking supporters to donate $1 a day to his campaign. He needs about 200,000 people to do this to catch up with Newsom’s fundraising — which isn’t likely to happen.

“The key to his success would be in drawing the earned media attention necessary in order to define himself beyond the party label,” said Rob Nehring, former chair of the California Republican Party and the 2014 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. “If this is only a party preference vote even in a strong Republican year, he’s likely to come up short.”

Dahle was raised in Bieber, a tiny community of a few hundred people in the northeast corner of the state. His grandfather, a World War I veteran, came to California during the Great Depression and got a land grant in Siskiyou County that, according to family legend, he won when his name was pulled from a pickle jar. The deed is signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dahle said.

Dahle didn’t go to college. He tried farming out of high school, but quickly lost money. To pay his creditors, he packed a lunch and stood outside of a lumber mill every morning for three days until the owner hired him. He worked construction for a few years, including some long hours in a gold mine, before starting a seed business that he still owns.

He won his first race for the Lassen County Board of Supervisors by beating a popular teacher from the town of Susanville where most of the voters lived. He won a seat in the state Assembly by beating Rick Bossetti, a former professional baseball player and mayor of Redding, the largest city in the region with about 90,000 people.

And he was elected to the state Senate by beating Kevin Kiley, a fellow Republican in the Assembly who lived in a much more populated area.

“He did the things that you need to do and he surprised his opponents,” said Jim Chapman, a Democrat-turned-independent who served on the board of supervisors with Dahle. “ He’s got a very charismatic demeanor and right off the bat, from the moment I met him, I knew this guy was going to go somewhere.”

Government life has seemed to suit Dahle and his family. He proposed to his wife, Megan, during a supervisors meeting. Now, Megan is a Republican in the state Assembly. They’re like most married couples, except when they disagree it can be part of a public record.

“I just tease him and tell him, well, he was probably wrong,” Megan Dahle said of the times they voted differently on legislation. “He’s a farmer, so he works hard and he has great relationships with people. They can trust him.”

When he arrived in Sacramento, Dahle endeared himself to legislative colleagues in both parties by hosting tours of his district, which includes picturesque farmland in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. In 2016, he worked with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to pass a law aimed at stopping patients from receiving surprise bills from health care providers outside their insurance network.

Last year’s recall election essentially cleared the field of Republicans this year, as none of the top candidates opted to challenge Newsom again. That created an opportunity for Dahle, who will be termed out of the Senate in 2024. He realizes his success rests on a sudden political reversal in a state that’s been moving more left with each election.

“I’ve seen the pendulum swing, and when it swings, it swings fast,” Dahle said. “So my message is, ‘Hey, do you want what you’ve been getting? How about try something different?’”

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, has made a campaign staple out of the allegation that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s policy of readmitting COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes caused thousands of deaths — a baseless claim for which no investigator or researcher has provided any evidence.

In fact, layers of inspections by researchers have pointed to entirely something different — nursing home employees ushering in the virus every day — while investigators found administrators flouting staffing requirements or infection-control procedures.

Further, no Pennsylvania nursing home has leveled any such claim like Mastriano’s, and a national nursing home trade association has agreed with the findings of researchers who say the spread of the virus in nursing homes directly correlated to community spread.

Regardless, Mastriano has repeated the unfounded claim in front of friendly audiences, weaponizing COVID-19 in an effort to hurt Democrats in one of the nation’s most important governor’s races in this midterm election cycle.

Mastriano, a state senator and retired U.S. Army colonel who won the Republican nomination while trafficking in conspiracy theories, seemingly came out of nowhere to become a rising force in right-wing politics primarily by leading anti-shutdown rallies in the pandemic’s early days.

Opposition to the shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates are a central plank in Mastriano’s campaign.

It is also a key line of attack for Mastriano against Democrats, including the party’s gubernatorial nominee, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office helped defend Wolf’s pandemic policies against court challenges.

In the past two years, new research has piled up on how COVID-19 penetrated nursing homes.

The virus was largely introduced by asymptomatic workers in areas where the virus was heavily transmitted, researchers say.

“Our research has been pretty definitive that the most important factor in determining whether there’s an outbreak in the building is community prevalence, by far,” said Vincent Mor, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown University. “Nothing else comes close.”

David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, echoed that, saying, “I pretty strongly feel that staff were the dominant pathway to COVID entering these buildings.”

In the early days of the pandemic, nursing homes lacked the trained staff, testing supplies and personal protective equipment that could have helped them slow the spread, researchers say.

Nursing home administrators did not know if staff members were asymptomatic. But, they knew that staff had to handle residents returning from hospitals according to infection-control protocols, said R. Tamara Konetzka, a professor of health economics and health services research at the University of Chicago.

In addition, the number of employees coming and going every day from nursing homes — hundreds daily at some facilities — dwarfed the number of readmitted hospital patients, which may have been no more than a handful at each facility in the pandemic’s first months, Konetzka and other researchers said.

Some of Konetzka’s research included using cell phone data to track the movements of workers to compare it to the location of outbreaks.

Still, the unproven theory about hospital readmissions came up prominently in Mastriano’s May 17 primary victory speech.

Mastriano made it his prime example that Democrats are “extreme” — an attempt to counter criticism, including from some in his own party, that he is too extreme to win the fall general election.

“Only a Democrat could get away with failed policies, sending the sick into the homes killing thousands and get away with it,” Mastriano said.

Mastriano went on, saying, “they’re the ones that sent the sick back into the homes. Their policies, Democrat policies, and killed so many. That’s extreme.”

Wolf’s office shot back, saying Mastriano’s claims are “patently false.”

Mastriano, Wolf’s office said, is a “science denier” who “put lives in danger throughout the pandemic by openly downplaying the crisis and opposing vaccines and other mitigation efforts.”

Mastriano has seized on a couple aspects of Pennsylvania’s handling of the pandemic.

One, Pennsylvania has reported more nursing home COVID-19 deaths than any other state, according to federal data — although researchers have raised questions about whether states counted COVID-19 deaths the same way and Pennsylvania has a disproportionately large nursing home population.

Two, Wolf’s administration — like those of several other Democratic governors in hard-hit states — issued orders requiring nursing homes to continue accepting residents returning from hospitals to guard against overwhelmed hospitals.

Last week, Mastriano posted a meme on social media that accuses Wolf and other governors whose administrations issued a similar order of “premeditated murder” — another baseless claim.

Wolf’s administration argued that the order also required nursing homes to be able to protect other residents and that it worked with nursing homes that had concerns, it said.

In any case, readmissions were routine in every state and nursing homes were given guidance early on by the federal government and trade associations on how to handle hospital readmissions.

That’s because, in every state, hospitals had to off-load recovering patients to ensure they had beds for incoming patients, researchers say.

A Department of Justice inquiry begun in 2020 into those orders — during the final stretch of the presidential campaign under former President Donald Trump — ended quietly under President Joe Biden last summer.

Researchers pointed out that states that got hit by the pandemic after Pennsylvania were still unable to protect their nursing home populations, even though they’d had more warning and didn’t have a policy of ordering nursing homes to accept readmissions.

COVID-19’s spread in nursing homes “was much a bigger problem than any policy could have caused,” Konetzka said.

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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter.

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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas voters have said no to Kris Kobach twice over the past four years. But he is nonetheless betting that this can be the year he makes a political comeback.

His losses, including a 2018 defeat that handed the governor’s office in this Republican-leaning state to a Democrat, might end other political careers. But Kobach, who built a national reputation as an immigration hard-liner while Kansas secretary of state, is now aiming for the state attorney general’s office.

He faces two Republican opponents who lack his star power. If he wins the Aug. 2 primary, an anticipated GOP tide in November may be enough to lift even wobbly candidates.

So far, the primary race against state Sen. Kellie Warren and former federal prosecutor Tony Mattivi has been mostly about the candidates’ backgrounds, their personal styles and whether they have the courtroom chops to win lawsuits against President Joe Biden’s policies on issues such as guns, abortion and regulating businesses.

“I decided to run for attorney general the day that President Biden was sworn into office,” Kobach said in the candidates’ most recent debate, having promised to set up a special unit focused on suing the federal government.

But Warren, Mattivi and their supporters want to make the race about electability, too — even if it seems as though any Democrat would be a weak match for any Republican, given inflation, gas prices and anger over COVID-19 restrictions. The Democrats are running first-time candidate Chris Mann, an attorney, former police officer and former local prosecutor.

“Why take a risk?” said Alan Cobb, president and CEO of the influential Kansas Chamber of Commerce, which has endorsed Warren in the attorney general’s race. “There are exceptions to waves all the time.”

Kobach’s years of pushing tough immigration and voter ID policies, coupled with a brash persona, turned off independent and moderate GOP voters in the 2018 governor’s race. Prominent Republicans then tagged him as too risky a bet in 2020, and he lost the Senate primary by 14 percentage points to U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall, who then won the general election.

Brittany Jones, policy director for Kansas Family Voice, called Kobach “a good man” who undoubtedly would side with the conservative group on issues. But the group endorsed Warren over Kobach.

“He has proven time and time again that he can’t win,” Jones said. Kobach also lost a congressional race in 2004.

Mattivi handled high-profile terrorism cases as a federal prosecutor and has endorsements from dozens of sheriffs and prosecutors, including the district attorney in the state’s most populous county. During the recent debate, he said, “Electability is absolutely an issue.”

But Kobach argued in the most recent debate that he showed he can defeat Democrats in statewide races by winning terms as secretary of state in 2010 and 2014. Republican state Sen. J.R. Claeys, a consultant for Kobach, said the coming “big red wave” washes away any lingering questions about Kobach’s electability.

On primary day, Kansans will vote on adding anti-abortion language to the state Constitution, and Kobach argues the measure’s supporters are most likely to vote for him. But Warren was visible in the legislative push to get it on the ballot.

In Kobach’s first race for secretary of state in 2010, he was better known than his two opponents, thanks to his national profile as a law professor who had ghostwritten tough state and local immigration rules outside Kansas. That November, he unseated a Democratic incumbent appointed to the state’s top elections office only months before.

In his second term, Kobach’s star kept rising. He was the earliest prominent Kansas supporter of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, advised Trump on immigration issues, served as vice chair of a short-lived Trump commission on election fraud and was mentioned as a possible Cabinet appointee. He was a regular Fox News Channel guest and a Breitbart columnist.

He promoted the idea that fraud distorts U.S. elections long before much of the GOP embraced Trump’s false claims about his 2020 presidential election loss to Biden.

Kobach argued in the recent debate that his 2018 bid for governor fell victim to a national midterm “bloodbath” for the GOP.

In Kansas that year, Democrat Sharice Davids ousted a four-term incumbent Republican in a Kansas City-area congressional district, and Gov. Laura Kelly was among seven new Democratic governors who replaced Republicans. Democrats won back a U.S. House majority.

But Kelly Arnold, the state GOP chair at the time, contends that Kobach’s 2018 fundraising was lackluster. In the attorney general’s race, Kobach lent his campaign $200,000 last year, which was nearly half of the $425,000 he raised.

Arnold also argues that Kobach’s candidacy energized the Democratic political base.

“The one thing that could unify Democrats to come out and vote is Kobach,” Arnold said.

Some Kobach critics still talk about the Jeep lent to him by a supporter in 2018 with a replica machine gun on back. Mandi Hunter, a 46-year-old moderate Republican and Kansas City-area real estate attorney, mentioned it in describing Kobach as “incredibly divisive.”

Kobach rode the Jeep in parades and mocked what he called the resulting “snowflake meltdown.”

“Kobach has chutzpah — extreme self-confidence through all situations,” said Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist. “Many GOP primary voters love that, unless, like in the Senate race, he faces a well-financed opponent who can inform them about his negatives.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and James Dobson, the evangelical author, broadcaster and Focus on the Family founder, have endorsed Kobach, as has former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, described by Kobach as a mentor.

GOP voters also might sense that the attorney general’s office suits Kobach better than the other offices he’s sought. Kris Van Meteren, head of a Republican consulting and direct mail firm in the Kansas City area, said Kobach’s campaigns for secretary of state had a “law and order” tone by emphasizing election fraud as an issue.

And, with GOP voters looking for someone to aggressively challenge the Biden administration, Kobach is better known than the other candidates for “being a fighter,” Van Meteren added.

“He’s got the most-established reputation of being somebody who’s willing to take on the left,” Van Meteren said.

Leonard Hall, a 69-year-old Kansas City-area attorney, said he hasn’t decided which candidate to support but thinks Kobach’s past losses are “a nonissue.”

“I don’t look at him in the past tense,” Hall said after the recent debate. “The mere fact Kobach lost, I don’t think that can be held against him.”

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Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth in Overland Park, Kan., contributed to this report.

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Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna.

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

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — More than halfway through a tumultuous primary season, voters have rendered verdicts in a number of contests, many of which featured candidates arguing they best represented a continuation of policies favored by former President Donald Trump.

While not on the ballot himself, Trump has played a role in several races, with candidates bearing his endorsement meeting a variety of electoral outcomes. There have also been tumbles by several incumbents, some taken out by Trump-backed challengers and others bested by fellow representatives in faceoffs forced by redistricting.

Here’s what’s happened so far in primary races across the country:

FALLEN INCUMBENTS

Eight incumbents — three Democrats and five Republicans — lost their U.S. House seats already this year after being defeated in their primary elections.

Four of those losses came in incumbent-on-incumbent races, a result of the once-a-decade redistricting process. But the other four were defeated by insurgent challengers after finding themselves vulnerable as a result of scandal, investigation, irritating progressives or crossing Trump.

Seven-term centrist Democratic U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon fell to progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner in his May 17 primary. Schrader had angered many Democrats by opposing some of President Joe Biden’s priorities, including a $1.9 trillion coronavirus pandemic relief bill because he didn’t support a minimum wage increase.

Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina was defeated by state Sen. Chuck Edwards after a whirlwind of scandals that included Cawthorn saying he’d been invited to orgies and had seen opponents of drug addiction use cocaine, getting caught twice with guns at airports and appearing in videos showing him in sexually suggestive poses.

On June 14, five-term GOP Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina lost his reelection bid to state Rep. Russell Fry after voting to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. And on June 28, six-term Mississippi Republican Rep. Steven Palazzo lost a runoff to Sheriff Mike Ezell after being accused in a congressional ethics report of misspending campaign funds.

MEMBER-ON-MEMBER FACEOFFS

Redistricting guaranteed that some U.S. House incumbents would be ousted.

The first to fall was Republican Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia, who voted with Democrats in support of Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, betting that West Virginians would reward him for prioritizing such funding in one of the nation’s poorest states. Instead, they dumped him for Rep. Alex Mooney, who opposed the infrastructure bill. Mooney won Trump’s endorsement the day Biden signed the measure into law.

In Georgia, Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, a gun safety advocate, went district shopping after a GOP-dominated Legislature turned her home area into a Republican stronghold. She defeated fellow Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, who said she’d considered McBath like a “sister.”

Two Illinois incumbents lost their seats this past week when Republican Rep. Mary Miller defeated five-term Republican Rep. Rodney Davis, and Democratic Rep. Sean Casten beat one-term Democratic Rep. Marie Newman.

Miller won days after she called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade a “historic victory for white life” during a rally with Trump. Calling it “a mix-up of words,” Miller’s spokesman told The Associated Press that she had intended to say the decision was a victory for a “right to life.”

TRUMP’S TARGETS

Still stinging from his 2020 presidential election loss to Biden, Trump vowed revenge on Republicans who defied him.

He zeroed in on Georgia, recruiting challengers to Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who had rebuffed his efforts to overturn his narrow defeat in the state. But he fell short, with Kemp easily turning back former Sen. David Perdue, and Raffensperger defeating Rep. Jody Hice.

Trump also directed his rage toward the 10 House Republicans who voted with Democrats to impeach him for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Four decided against seeking reelection.

But of those who stayed to fight, Rice became first to lose, a result he acknowledged was possible over a vote he said his conscience forced him to take. Another, Rep. David Valadao of California, finished second in his primary, meaning he advanced to the November general election as one of the top two finishers.

Four of the House Republicans still await their primaries.

In South Carolina, Trump targeted another GOP incumbent, Rep. Nancy Mace, following her criticism of his role in the Jan. 6 attack and her vote to certify Biden’s win. Mace withstood her challenge from Katie Arrington, a Trump-backed opponent.

TRUMP: KEEPING SCORE

Trump helped lift some U.S. Senate candidates to victory. In Ohio, he backed “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance after a furious push by Vance’s opponents to win Trump’s favor. The endorsement just three weeks before the election propelled Vance to a win.

Dr. Mehmet Oz got Trump’s seal of approval about five weeks before Pennsylvania’s primary, a blow to former hedge fund CEO David McCormick, whose wife, Dina Powell, served in Trump’s administration. Oz eked out a slim victory over McCormick after a recount.

In North Carolina, Trump endorsed Rep. Ted Budd a year before his primary, elevating the little-known congressman from a 14-candidate field to win the GOP Senate nomination.

Trump also waded into statewide races, backing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against primary challenger George P. Bush. Trump was rewarding Paxton for petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election — an effort the state bar termed “dishonest” as it sought to punish him for it.

Katie Britt nearly won a GOP primary outright to replace her boss, retiring Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, but ended up in a runoff with longtime Rep. Mo Brooks, whom Trump initially supported before pulling his endorsement as Brooks’ polling languished. Trump endorsed Britt only after she finished first in the primary.

Republican voters in Nebraska rejected Trump’s gubernatorial pick, businessman Charles Herbster, who was accused late in the campaign of having groped multiple women, going instead with University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen as their nominee. In a U.S. House race in Georgia, GOP voters picked trucking company owner Mike Collins over Vernon Jones, a Trump-backed Democrat-turned-Republican.

ELECTION DENIERS

Voters handed primary wins to some candidates who supported Trump’s assertions that Biden’s election victory was illegitimate. Those false claims have been roundly rejected by elections officials, Trump’s own attorney general and the courts, including by judges he appointed.

Nonetheless, state Sen. Doug Mastriano won Pennsylvania’s crowded Republican gubernatorial primary. He has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol for his role in a plan to arrange for an “alternate” slate of electors from Pennsylvania for Trump after the 2020 election.

Trump’s pick for Nevada secretary of state, former state lawmaker Jim Marchant, won his primary after spending months arguing that there hadn’t been a legitimate Nevada election for years and that Trump’s victory had been stolen.

In Idaho, Trump’s insurgent candidate Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin lost her bid to oust Gov. Brad Little. McGeachin had said she would “bring integrity to Idaho’s elections,” without citing any inconsistencies. She also said she’d push for a 50-state forensic audit of the 2020 election.

In Colorado, GOP voters chose Pam Anderson as their nominee for secretary of state over Tina Peters, an indicted county clerk who gained national prominence by promoting conspiracy theories about voting machines. Anderson had pledged to keep politics out of running elections, while Peters was indicted on seven felony counts accusing her of taking part in a “deceptive scheme” to breach voting system technology.

LOOK AHEAD

Primary season resumes in earnest in August, with a number of high-profile races still to be decided.

Rep. Liz Cheney faces a stiff primary challenge in Wyoming on Aug. 16 after voting to impeach Trump and becoming vice chair of the House committee investigating the Capitol insurrection. Trump has endorsed Harriet Hageman in the race.

In Arizona, one of five battleground states Biden flipped, the former president endorsed a slate of loyalists who promote his false election claims. In the governor’s race, he backed former TV news anchor Kari Lake over developer Karrin Taylor Robson for the GOP nomination to replace Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who resisted Trump’s election year pressure and is barred from another term.

In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Trump supports investor Blake Masters for the GOP nomination to face Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly in November. Masters has said “I think Trump won in 2020″ and espoused the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory, a racist ideology that says white people and their influence are being replaced by people of color.

And in Arizona’s secretary of state race, Trump backed state Rep. Mark Finchem, who was photographed outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.

In Michigan, one of the country’s top battleground states, Republicans have faced setbacks in their bid to defeat Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November. Five GOP candidates failed to qualify for the Aug. 2 primary after submitting fake signatures collected by paid petition circulators. Another candidate, Republican Ryan Kelley, was charged last month with misdemeanors related to the Jan. 6 attack.

Establishment Republicans are worried about the Aug. 2 GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Missouri, where former Gov. Eric Greitens is trying to make a political comeback, following his resignation four years ago amid investigations into possible campaign finance issues and into whether he blackmailed a woman against speaking about their extramarital affair. Some Republicans fear Greitens would be a weak general election candidate who could cede a safe seat to Democrats.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

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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.

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In overturning a half-century of nationwide legal protection for abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Roe v. Wade had been wrongly decided and that it was time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives” in the states.

Whether those elected officials are truly representative of the people is a matter of debate, thanks to another high court decision that has enabled control of state legislatures to be skewed to the right or left.

In June 2019, three years before its momentous abortion ruling, the Supreme Court decided that it has no role in restraining partisan gerrymandering, in which Republicans or Democrats manipulate the boundaries of voting districts to give their candidates an edge.

The result is that many legislatures are more heavily partisan than the state’s population as a whole. Gerrymandering again flourished as politicians used the 2020 census data to redraw districts that could benefit their party both for this year’s elections and the next decade.

In some swing states with Republican-led legislatures, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, “arguably gerrymandering really is the primary reason that abortion is likely to be illegal,” said Chris Warshaw, a political scientist at George Washington University who analyzes redistricting data.

Meanwhile, “in states where Democrats have gerrymandered, it’s going to help probably make abortion laws more liberal than people would like,” he added.

A majority of Americans support abortion access in general, though many say there should be some restrictions, according to public opinion polls.

States have sometimes been viewed as laboratories for democracy — institutions most closely connected to the people where public policies are tested, take root and potentially spread.

Writing for the Supreme Court’s majority in its June 24 abortion decision, Justice Samuel Alito noted that 30 states had prohibited abortion when the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling “short-circuited the democratic process,” usurped lawmakers and imposed abortion rights nationwide.

“Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office,” Alito wrote.

Abortion already is an issue in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial and legislative elections. A recent Wisconsin poll showed a majority supported legal abortion in most or all cases. But a fight is brewing over an 1849 state law — which had been unenforceable until Roe v. Wade was overruled — that bans abortion except to save the life of the woman.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is backing a court challenge to overturn the law, enacted just a year after Wisconsin gained statehood. He also called a special legislative session in June to repeal it. But the Republican-led Assembly and Senate adjourned in a matter of seconds without taking action.

Wisconsin’s legislative chambers had one of the nation’s strongest Republican advantages during the past decade and are projected to continue to do so under new districts in place for the 2022 elections, according to an analysis by PlanScore, a nonprofit that uses election data to rate the partisan tilt of legislative districts.

“Democracy is distorted in Wisconsin because of these maps,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer said.

In 2018, Democrats won every major statewide office, including governor and attorney general, races where gerrymandering isn’t in play. But they have not been able to overcome heavily gerrymandered state legislative districts since Republicans won control of the statehouse during the midterm elections in 2010.

“If we had a truly democratic system in Wisconsin, we would be in a different situation,” she said. “We would be overturning this criminal abortion ban right now”

Republican state Rep. Donna Rozar, a former cardiac nurse who backs abortion restrictions, said gerrymandering shouldn’t stop political parties from running good candidates to represent their districts. She expects a robust abortion debate during the campaign to carry into the 2023 legislative session.

“This is an issue that is so critical to come back to the states, because each state then can elect people that will represent their values.” Rozar said.

The 2010 midterms, two years after former President Barack Obama was elected, were a pivot point for control of statehouses across the country. Coming into that election, Democrats fully controlled 27 state legislatures and Republicans 14, with the rest split. But sweeping GOP victories put the party in charge of redistricting in many states. By 2015, after two elections under the new maps, Republicans fully controlled 30 legislatures and Democrats just 11.

That Republican legislative advantage largely persisted through the 2020 elections, including in states that otherwise are narrowly divided between Democrats and Republicans, such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In New Mexico, it’s Republicans who contend the Democratic-led Legislature has pushed beyond the will of many voters on abortion policies. The New Mexico House and Senate districts had a sizable pro-Democratic edge during the past decade that got even more pronounced after districts were redrawn based on the 2020 census, according to the PlanScore data.

Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation last year repealing a dormant 1969 law that banned most abortions. After Roe v. Wade was overruled, she signed an executive order making New Mexico a safe harbor for people seeking abortions. Unlike most states, New Mexico has no restrictions on late-term abortions.

“I don’t think that the majority of New Mexicans support New Mexico’s abortion policy at this time,” Republican state Sen. Gay Kernan said. “New Mexico is the late-term abortion capital of the United States, basically.”

The Republican nominee for governor, Mark Ronchetti, has proposed to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy with exceptions for rape, incest and when a woman’s life is at risk. But the legislative proposal has been described as dead on arrival by Democratic state Senate Whip Linda Lopez.

Michigan could provide one of the biggest tests of representative government in the nation’s new abortion battle.

Republicans drew Michigan legislative districts after the 2010 census and created such a sizable advantage for their party that it may have helped the GOP maintain control of the closely divided House, according to an Associated Press analysis. As in Wisconsin, Democrats in Michigan won the governor’s race and every other major statewide office in 2018 but could not overcome legislative districts tilted toward Republicans.

The dynamics have changed for this year’s elections. The GOP’s edge was cut in half under new legislative districts drawn by a voter-approved citizens’ redistricting commission, according to the PlanScore data. That could improve Democrats’ chances of winning a chamber and influencing abortion policy.

Michigan’s Republican gubernatorial challengers generally support a 1931 state law — temporarily placed on hold by a judge — that bans abortions unless a woman’s health is at risk. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is running for reelection, wants to repeal that law.

Republican state Rep. Steve Carra said lawmakers are looking to replace it with “something that would be enforceable in the 21st century.”

“It’s more important to protect life than it is a woman’s right to choose to take that life,” said Carra, who leads a coalition of 321 lawmakers from 35 states that had urged the Supreme Court to return abortion policy to the states.

Unsure about their legislative prospects, abortion rights advocates are gathering signatures for a November ballot initiative that would create a state constitutional right to abortion, allowing its regulation only “after fetal viability.”

“It’s the best shot that we have at securing abortion access,” Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky said. “I think if this is put in voters’ hands, they will want to see this ballot measure succeed.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Last Fourth of July, President Joe Biden gathered hundreds of people outside the White House for an event that would have been unthinkable for many Americans the previous year. With the coronavirus in retreat, they ate hamburgers and watched fireworks over the National Mall.

Although the pandemic wasn’t over yet, Biden said, “we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.” Across the country, indoor masking requirements were falling as the number of infections and deaths plummeted.

Within weeks, even some of the president’s allies privately admitted that the speech had been premature. Soon the administration would learn that the delta variant could be transmitted by people who had already been vaccinated. Masks went back on, then came polarizing vaccination mandates. The even-more-contagious omicron variant would arrive months later, infecting millions and causing chaos during the holiday season.

“We were hoping to be free of the virus, and the virus had a lot more in store for us,” said Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The number of people in the United States who died from COVID-19 nearly doubled, from 605,000 to more than 1 million, over the past year.

That sunny speech one year ago marked a crossroads for Biden’s presidency. The pandemic appeared to be waning, the economy was growing, inflation wasn’t rising as quickly as today and public approval of his job performance was solid.

As Biden approaches his second Fourth of July in the White House, his standing couldn’t be more different. A series of miscalculations and challenges have Biden struggling for footing as he faces a potentially damaging verdict from voters in the upcoming midterm elections.

The pandemic’s resurgence was swiftly followed last summer by the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on President Biden’s watch, when the Taliban seized control of the country faster than the administration expected as the U.S.-backed regime collapsed. Then, negotiations over Biden’s broader domestic agenda stalled, only to collapse altogether in December.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February helped drive up already increasing  gas prices, exacerbating inflation that reached a 40-year high. Another blow came last month, when the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion under Roe v. Wade and curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Suddenly a reactive president, Biden has been left trying to reclaim the initiative at every step, often with mixed results. The coronavirus is less of a threat than before and infections are far less likely to lead to death, but Congress is refusing to supply more money to deal with the pandemic.

He signed new gun restrictions into law after massacres in New York and Texas, and he’s leading a reinvestment in European security as the war in Ukraine enters its fifth month. But he has limited tools at his disposal to deal with other challenges, such as rising costs and eroding access to abortion.

“People are grouchy,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian.

The latest poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that his approval rating remains at 39%, the lowest since taking office and a steep slide from 59% one year ago. Only 14% of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, down from 44%.

Douglas Brinkley, another historian, said Biden suffered from a case of presidential hubris after a largely successful run in his first five months in office, which included an overseas trip to meet with allies excited about welcoming a friendly face back to the international scene. He compared Biden’s Fourth of July speech last year to President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” moment during the second Iraq War.

“He was trying to deliver good news but it didn’t pan out for him,” Brinkley said. “Suddenly, Biden lost a lot of goodwill.”

White House officials reject the comparison, noting that Biden warned about the “powerful” delta variant in his 2021 speech. Chris Meagher, a spokesman, said deaths from the virus are at a record low now, reducing disruptions in workplaces and classrooms.

The promise to competently address the COVID-19 pandemic is what helped put Biden in the Oval Office and send President Donald Trump to defeat. From the start of Biden’s tenure, his public pronouncements were sober and cautious, wary of following his predecessor in predictions that went unfulfilled. The nation’s vaccination program found its stride under Biden, and by April 19, 2021, all adults were eligible to be vaccinated.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, was an adviser to Biden’s transition team. But as the Fourth of July approached last year, he was worried and felt that the administration wasn’t heeding his warnings.

“Everyone was in this position of wanting to believe it was over with, and not fully understanding or appreciating the potential of the variants,” he said.

Even now, a full year later, Osterholm is reluctant to say what the future holds.

“I want answers too,” he said. “But I don’t know what the variants are going to bring us. I don’t know what human immunity is going to look like.”

Biden said the virus “has not been vanquished” in his Fourth of July speech, and he held another event two days later to talk about the delta variant.

“It seems to me that it should cause everybody to think twice,” he said as he appealed to people who had not yet been vaccinated.

Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, said there’s more reason to be optimistic this year than last. Immunity from vaccines or previous infections is much more widespread, and antiviral treatments are effective at preventing hospitalization and death in vulnerable patients.

“It was premature to declare independence from COVID-19 last year,” she said. “But this year the country is in a totally different place, and in a much better place.”

But Wen said Biden might be wary, given how things went before.

President Bill Clinton stumbled through his first two years in office, then faced a wave of Republican victories in his first midterm elections. But he later became the first Democratic president to be reelected since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Chervinsky cautioned that today’s political polarization could make such a rebound more difficult for Biden.

A key question, she said: “Is our partisan system so inflexible that it won’t allow for him to go back?”

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(Reuters) – New York lawmakers revamped the state’s gun laws after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision established an individual right to carry handguns in public for self-defense.

The court ruled New York’s restrictive gun-license system was unconstitutional, as were similar regimes in California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and the District of Columbia.

Here are some key provisions in New York’s proposed gun-license law https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/s51001:

* NO MORE NEED TO PROVE “PROPER CAUSE” TO HAVE A GUN

The Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional to give government officials the discretion to deny a law-abiding person a permit to carry a concealed handgun in self-defense if they could not show “proper cause,” or cite some special reason. The bill removes the “proper cause” requirement, although it still requires an applicant show they are of “good moral character.”

* ‘SENSITIVE PLACES’ WHERE GUNS ARE BANNED

The court said lawmakers could restrict guns from “sensitive places,” giving as examples courthouses, schools and government buildings, but warned lawmakers against applying the label too broadly.

New York’s proposed list of such places includes: government buildings, medical facilities, places of worship, libraries, playgrounds, parks, zoos, schools, summer camps, addiction-support centers, homeless shelters, nursing homes, public transit including the New York City subway, places where alcohol or marijuana is consumed, museums, theaters, stadiums, polling places and New York City’s Times Square.

Private businesses will be presumed to be gun-free zones unless their owners say otherwise.

* SOCIAL MEDIA REVIEW

The bill would require applicants for concealed-carry permits to submit their current and former social media accounts from the last three years to review by the licensing officer, usually a judge or police official, to weigh the applicant’s “character and conduct.”

* INCREASED TRAINING

Applicants must complete at least 16 hours of in-person firearms safety training, and at least two hours of training at a firing range, where they must prove their shooting proficiency according to standards to be developed by state police.

* INCREASED SCRUTINY OF APPLICANTS

Applicants must meet for an in-person interview with the licensing officer and provide the names and contact information of their spouse or domestic partner, any other adults they live with and say whether children are in their home. They must provide four character references.

* REVIVING AMMUNITION SALES DATABASE

The bill revives a dormant effort to create a state database tracking ammunition sales to license-holders buying certain kinds of ammunition.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Donna Bryson and William Mallard)

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By Jeff Mason and Rami Ayyub

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden predicted on Friday that some U.S. states will try to arrest women for crossing state lines to get abortions after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedures nationwide.

Thirteen Republican-led states banned or severely restricted the procedure under so-called “trigger laws” after the court struck down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling last week. Women in those states seeking an abortion may have to travel to states where it remains legal.

Convening a virtual meeting on abortion rights with Democratic state governors on Friday, Biden said he thinks “people are gonna be shocked when the first state … tries to arrest a woman for crossing a state line to get health services.”

He added: “And I don’t think people believe that’s gonna happen. But it’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna telegraph to the whole country that this is a gigantic deal that goes beyond; I mean, it affects all your basic rights”.

Biden said the federal government will act to protect women who need to cross state lines to get an abortion and ensure their access to medication in states where it’s banned.

New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, told the meeting her state “will not cooperate” on any attempts to track down women who have had abortions to punish them. “We will not extradite,” she said.

Abortion rights groups have filed legislation in multiple states seeking to preserve the ability of women to terminate pregnancies.

Judges in Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Utah have since issued decisions preventing those states from enforcing new restrictive abortion laws, while Ohio’s top court on Friday declined to block the Republican-led state from enforcing an abortion ban. [L1N2YI1AD]

New York Governor Kathy Hochul told the group that “just a handful of states” are going to have to take care of health of women across the country.

“There is such stress out there,” Hochul said. “It is a matter of life and death for American women,” she added.

Biden also told the group there were not enough votes in the Senate to scrap a supermajority rule known as the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade’s protections into law.

He had proposed that senators remove the filibuster but the suggestion was shot down by aides to key Democratic lawmakers.

“(The) filibuster should not stand in the way of us being able to (codify Roe),” Biden said.

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub, Jeff Mason and Susan HeaveyEditing by Alistair Bell)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Abortion, guns and religion — a major change in the law in any one of these areas would have made for a fateful Supreme Court term. In its first full term together, the court’s conservative majority ruled in all three and issued other significant decisions limiting the government’s regulatory powers.

And it has signaled no plans to slow down.

With three appointees of former President Donald Trump in their 50s, the six-justice conservative majority seems poised to keep control of the court for years to come, if not decades.

“This has been a revolutionary term in so many respects,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas. “The court has massively changed constitutional law in really big ways.”

Its remaining opinions issued, the court began its summer recess Thursday, and the justices will next return to the courtroom in October.

Overturning Roe v. Wade and ending a nearly half-century guarantee of abortion rights had the most immediate impact, shutting down or severely restricting abortions in roughly a dozen states within days of the decision.

In expanding gun rights and finding religious discrimination in two cases, the justices also made it harder to sustain gun control laws and lowered barriers to religion in public life.

Setting important new limits on regulatory authority, they reined in the government’s ability to fight climate change and blocked a Biden administration effort to get workers at large companies vaccinated against COVID-19.

The remarkable week at the end of June in which the guns, abortion, religion and environmental cases were decided at least partially obscured other notable events, some of them troubling.

New Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in Thursday as the first Black woman on the court. She replaced the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, who served nearly 28 years, a switch that won’t change the balance between liberals and conservatives on the court.

In early May, the court had to deal with the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion in the abortion case. Chief Justice John Roberts almost immediately ordered an investigation, about which the court has been mum ever since. Soon after, workers encircled the court with 8-foot-high fencing in response to security concerns. In June, police made a late-night arrest of an armed man near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home, and charged him with attempted murder of the justice.

Kavanaugh is one of three Trump appointees along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett who fortified the right side of the court. Greg Garre, who served as former President George W. Bush’s top Supreme Court lawyer, said when the court began its term in October “the biggest question was not so much which direction the court was headed in, but how fast it was going. The term answers that question pretty resoundingly, which is fast.”

The speed also revealed that the chief justice no longer has the control over the court he held when he was one of five, not six, conservatives, Garre said.

Roberts, who favors a more incremental approach that might bolster perceptions of the court as a nonpolitical institution, broke most notably with the other conservatives in the abortion case, writing that it was unnecessary to overturn Roe, which he called a “serious jolt” to the legal system. On the other hand, he was part of every other ideologically divided majority.

If the past year revealed limits on the chief justice’s influence, it also showcased the sway of Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court. He wrote the decision expanding gun rights and the abortion case marked the culmination of his 30-year effort on the Supreme Court to get rid of Roe, which had stood since 1973.

Abortion is just one of several areas in which Thomas is prepared to jettison court precedents. The justices interred a second of their decisions, Lemon v. Kurtzman, in ruling for a high school football coach’s right pray on the 50-yard line following games. It’s not clear, though, that other justices are as comfortable as Thomas in overturning past decisions.

The abortion and guns cases also seemed contradictory to some critics in that the court handed states authority over the most personal decisions, but limited state power in regulating guns. One distinction the majorities in those cases drew, though, is that the Constitution explicitly mentions guns, but not abortion.

Those decisions do not seem especially popular with the public, according to opinion polls. Polls show a sharp drop in the court’s approval rating and in people’s confidence in the court as an institution.

Justices on courts past have acknowledged a concern about public perception. As recently as last September, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Barrett spoke in at a center named for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who engineered her rapid confirmation in 2020 and was sitting on the stage near the justice.

But the conservatives, minus Roberts, rejected any concern about perception in the abortion case, said Grove, the University of Texas professor.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion that “not only are we not going to focus on that, we should not focus on that,” she said. “I’m sympathetic as an academic, but I was surprised to see that coming from that many real-world justices.”

The liberal justices, though, wrote repeatedly that the court’s aggressiveness in this epic term was doing damage to the institution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor described her fellow justices as “a restless and newly constituted Court.” Justice Elena Kagan, in her abortion dissent, wrote: “The Court reverses course today for one reason and one reason only: because the composition of this Court has changed.”

In 18 decisions, at least five conservative justices joined to form a majority and all three liberals were in dissent, roughly 30% of all the cases the court heard in its term that began last October.

Among these, the court also:

— Made it harder for people to sue state and federal authorities for violations of constitutional rights.

— Raised the bar for defendants asserting their rights were violated, ruling against a Michigan man who was shackled at trial.

— Limited how some death row inmates and others sentenced to lengthy prison terms can pursue claims that their lawyers did a poor job representing them.

In emergency appeals, also called the court’s “shadow” docket because the justices often provide little or no explanation for their actions, the conservatives ordered the use of congressional districts for this year’s elections in Alabama and Louisiana even though lower federal courts have found they likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters.

The justices will hear arguments in the Alabama case in October, among several high-profile cases involving race or elections, or both.

Also when the justices resume hearing arguments the use of race as a factor in college admissions is on the table, just six years after the court reaffirmed its permissibility. And the court will consider a controversial Republican-led appeal that would vastly increase the power of state lawmakers over federal elections, at the expense of state courts.

These and cases on the intersection of LGBTQ and religious rights and another major environmental case involving development and water pollution also are likely to result in ideologically split decisions.

Khiara Bridges, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, law school, drew a link between the voting rights and abortion cases. In the latter, Alito wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that abortion should be decided by elected officials, not judges.

“I find it to be incredibly disingenuous for Alito to suggest that all that Dobbs is doing is returning this question to the states and that people can battle in the state about whether to protect fetal life or the interest of the pregnant person,” Bridges said. “But that same court is actively involved in insuring that states can disenfranchise people.”

Bridges also said the outcomes aligned almost perfectly with the political aims of Republicans. “Whatever the Republican party wants, the Republican party is going to get out of the currently constituted court,” she said.

Defenders of the court’s decisions said the criticism misses the mark because it confuses policy with law. “Supreme Court decisions are often not about what the policy should be, but rather about who (or which level of government, or which institution) should make the policy,” Princeton University political scientist Robert George wrote on Twitter.

For now, there is no sign that either the justices or Republican and conservative interests that have brought so many of the high-profile cases to the court intend to trim their sails, Grove said.

That’s in part because there’s no realistic prospect of court reforms that would limit the cases the justices could hear, impose term limits or increase the size of the Supreme Court, said Grove, who served on President Joe Biden’s bipartisan Supreme Court commission on court reforms.

___

Associated Press writer Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.

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By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has shown in its blockbuster abortion ruling and other high-profile decisions in recent days that it is fearless when it comes to overturning – and even ignoring – historic precedents.

And the conservative justices, with a 6-3 majority, may just be getting started, even as their current term came to a close on Thursday.

Among the cases the court already has taken up for its next term, starting in October, are two that give its conservative bloc an opportunity to end college and university policies considering race in admissions to achieve more student diversity – an approach the court upheld in a 2003 precedent and reaffirmed in 2016. Another case in the coming term involving federal protections for waterways will put a further precedent to the test.

The court in a flurry of recent rulings has overturned or undermined its own decades-old precedents.

“I think the most conservative justices dislike much of modern American law and are actively changing it. They aren’t going to let precedent get in their way,” University of Virginia Law School professor Douglas Laycock said.

The conservative justices have become increasingly assertive since the addition of former President Donald Trump’s third conservative appointee Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. Democratic President Joe Biden’s appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, sworn in to replace retiring fellow liberal Justice Stephen Breyer on Thursday, does not change the court’s ideological balance.

In the abortion ruling, called Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the procedure nationwide, as well as one from 1992 that reaffirmed it. The conservative majority also consigned to oblivion rulings from 2016 and 2020 that struck down Republican-backed state abortion restrictions.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas has been forthright about his willingness to ditch Supreme Court precedent.

“When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple: We should not follow it,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion in a 2019 case.

That Thomas opinion focused on “stare decisis,” a Latin term referring to the legal principle that courts should not overturn precedents without a special reason. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed to take the same view in the June 24 abortion ruling https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf, writing that the Roe landmark was “egregiously wrong.”

Thomas in the abortion case caused considerable alarm on the left by writing in his concurring opinion that the court should consider overturning other precedents protecting individual freedoms including the 2015 ruling that legalized gay marriage, the 2003 ruling that ended state bans on same-sex intimacy and the 1965 decision that protected access to birth control.

RELIGIOUS RIGHTS

In a June 27 religious rights ruling, the court took a slightly different approach to precedent when it further narrowed the separation of church and state in a decision in favor of a public high school football coach who was suspended by the local school district for leading prayers on the field with players after games.

The court effectively overruled a 1971 precedent that had outlined how to determine if a government has violated what is called the “establishment clause” of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which prohibits governmental endorsement of religion, although it did not explicitly say so.

Instead, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court “long ago abandoned” the prior ruling and subsequent decisions that had built upon it. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion that nothing in the court’s previous cases “support this court’s decision to dismiss that precedent entirely.”

David Gans, a lawyer at the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said the court did not appear to want to acknowledge a “sea change” in the law.

“It’s very flippant,” Gans added.

Conservatives have long complained about affirmative action policies used by many colleges and universities to increase their numbers of Black and Hispanic students. The cases the court will hear involve Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

The court also will consider limiting the scope of a landmark federal environmental law that regulates waterways in a case in which the challengers have asked the court to reconsider a 2006 precedent.

Among other major cases next term, the court will hear an appeal by North Carolina Republicans that could give state legislatures far more power over federal elections by limiting the ability of state courts to review their actions.

Another case could further weaken the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act enacted to protect Black and other minority voters in a dispute over Republican-drawn U.S. House of Representatives districts in Alabama.

The court throughout its history has occasionally explicitly overturned its precedents, starting in 1810 when it threw out a ruling from just two years earlier, according to a federal government database that lists 234 such cases.

In recent years, the court was most willing to overturn precedent in 2019, when it did so four times.

The court has found over time “lots of ways to evade, distinguish or overrule precedent,” Laycock said, adding that a liberal majority likely would do the same thing.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

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