Politics

By Richard Cowan and Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of his presidential limousine on Jan. 6, 2021, when his security detail declined to take him to the U.S. Capitol where his supporters were rioting, a former aide testified on Tuesday.

The then-president dismissed concerns that some supporters gathered for his fiery speech outside the White House that day carried AR-15-style rifles, instead asking security to stop screening attendees with metal-detecting magnetometers so the crowd would look larger, the aide testified.

“Take the effing mags away; they’re not here to hurt me,” Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a top aide to Trump’s then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, quoted Trump as saying that morning.

Hutchinson, in testimony on the sixth day of House of Representatives hearings into the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol assault by Trump’s followers, said the conversation was relayed to her by Tony Ornato, a senior Secret Service official who was Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations.

The New York Times and NBC, citing sources in the Secret Service, said the head of Trump’s security detail, Robert Engel, and the limousine driver were prepared to testify under oath that Trump never lunged for the steering wheel. Engel was in the room when Ornato relayed the story, Hutchinson said.

The New York Times and CNN, citing unnamed sources, said Ornato also denied the story and was willing to testify.

Citing her conversation with Ornato, Hutchinson testified that Trump struggled with Secret Service agents who insisted he return to the White House rather than join supporters storming the Capitol where Congress was meeting to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over him in the presidential election.

Trump’s supporters were roused by his false claims that his 2020 election defeat was the result of fraud

“‘I’m the effing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,’” Hutchinson quoted an enraged Trump as saying. She said Trump tried from the back seat to grab the steering wheel of the heavily armored presidential vehicle and lunged in anger at a Secret Service official.

Trump, a Republican, denied her account of his actions.

“Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is ‘sick’ and fraudulent,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media app.

In a statement, the Secret Service said it was cooperating fully with the committee and would continue to do so.

“We learned of the new information shared at today’s hearing and plan on responding formally and on the record as soon as they can accommodate us,” it added.

Hutchinson’s lawyer Jody Hunt wrote on Twitter that she had “testified, under oath, and recounted what she was told. Those with knowledge of the episode also should testify under oath.”

Dozens of courts, election officials and reviews by Trump’s own administration rejected his fraud claims, including outlandish stories about an Italian security firm and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s tampering with U.S. ballots.

Four people died the day of the attack, one fatally shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, and one died the next day. Four officers later died by suicide.

WITNESS TAMPERING?

At the end of about two hours of testimony, Representative Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the nine-member House panel, presented possible evidence of witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

Cheney showed messages to unidentified witnesses advising them that an unidentified person would be watching their testimony closely and expecting loyalty.

Republican Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s chief of staff before Meadows, tweeted: “There is an old maxim: it’s never the crime, it’s always the cover-up. Things went very badly for the former President today. My guess is that it will get worse from here.”

Hutchinson told the committee that Meadows and Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani had sought pardons from Trump.

Giuliani told WSYR radio in Syracuse, New York, on Tuesday that he had not sought a pardon.

Tuesday’s hastily called hearing marked the first time this month, in six hearings, that a former White House official appeared for live testimony.

Speaking in soft but assured tones, Hutchinson, 26, painted a picture of panicked White House officials bristling at the possibility of Trump’s joining what was to become a violent mob pushing its way into the Capitol, hunting for his vice president, Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers who were certifying the victory of Biden over Trump.

‘EVERY CRIME IMAGINABLE’

The White House officials’ worries focused on the potential criminal charges Trump and others could face.

“We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Hutchinson said White House counselor Pat Cipollone told her if Trump were to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“‘We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen, this would be a really terrible idea for us. We have serious legal concerns if we go up to the Capitol that day,’” Cipollone said, Hutchinson testified.

Hutchinson, who sat doors away from Trump’s Oval Office, testified that days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Meadows knew of the looming violence that could unfold.

“‘Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6,’” she quoted him as saying inside the White House on Jan. 2 with her boss.

She testified that Giuliani had said of Jan. 6: “‘We’re going to the Capitol, it’s going to be great. The president’s going to be there; he’s going to look powerful.’”

At that point, she told the committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans: “It was the first moment that I remembered feeling scared and nervous of what could happen on Jan. 6.”

This month’s hearings featured videotaped testimony from figures including Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his former attorney general Bill Barr. They and other witnesses testified that they did not believe Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and tried to dissuade him of them.

Before resigning, Barr told the Associated Press in an interview there was no evidence of fraud. That angered Trump so much that he threw his lunch at a White House wall, breaking a porcelain dish and leaving ketchup dripping down the wall, according to video testimony to the committee from Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s White House press secretary at the time.

Hutchinson told the committee it was not unusual for Trump to throw food when he was angry: “There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.”

(This story corrects paragraph 12 to drop typographical error)

(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Moira Warburton; additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Rose Horowitch, Costas Pitas, Rami Ayyub and Shivam Patel; Editing by Scott Malone, Howard Goller, Leslie Adler and Tim Ahmann)

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By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated a Republican-drawn map of Louisiana’s six U.S. House of Representatives districts that had been blocked by a judge who found that it likely discriminates against Black voters, a setback for Democrats as they try to retain control of Congress in November’s elections.

The justices granted a request by Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state to put on hold U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick’s injunction requiring a new map that has a second district where Black voters represent the majority of voters rather than just one in the version adopted by the Republican-led state legislature.

The conservative-majority nine-member court’s three liberal justices dissented from the decision.

Democrats control the U.S. House by a slim margin, making every seat vital in Republican efforts to wrest control from President Joe Biden’s party one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections.

The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on June 12 had refused to reinstate the Republican-drawn Louisiana districts, calling evidence presented by Black voters who challenged the map “stronger” than evidence presented in defense of the map.

The plaintiffs said in their lawsuit that the Republican-drawn map maximizes “political power for white citizens” by packing large numbers of Black voters into a single district and dispersing the rest into the five others where they are too few to elect their preferred candidates.

The Louisiana legislature passed the map in February. Democratic Governor Jon Bel Edwards then vetoed it https://gov.louisiana.gov/index.cfm/newsroom/detail/3585 – criticizing it for failing to include a second Black-majority district considering that Black voters comprise almost a third of the state’s population – but the legislature overrode the veto.

Democrats have accused Republicans of exploiting state legislature majorities to draw electoral maps that dilute the clout of Black and other minority voters, who tend to support Democratic candidates. Republicans have said the consideration of race in drawing electoral maps must be limited.

After the map was challenged by groups of Black voters – one alongside civil rights groups including the Louisiana NAACP – the judge ruled that the way it was drawn likely violated the Voting Rights Act. That landmark 1965 federal law for decades has been used to counter racially biased actions in voting and drawing electoral districts.

The plaintiffs said that in Louisiana, “stark racially polarized voting almost universally leads to the electoral defeat of Black-preferred candidates.”

Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin said in his legal filing that the judge’s order to adopt a second majority-Black district requires race to predominate in the map-making process, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The Louisiana dispute mirrors one from Alabama that the Supreme Court has already agreed to hear that could further weaken the Voting Rights Act. Arguments in the Alabama case are scheduled for Oct. 4. The eventual ruling, due by the end of June 2023, could make it harder for courts to consider race when determining whether an electoral district map violates the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which bars voting practices that result in racial discrimination.

The Supreme Court’s order on Tuesday said they justices would take up the Louisiana case and hold it until it decides the Alabama case.

The Louisiana case is among dozens of legal challenges nationwide over the composition of electoral districts, which are redrawn each decade to reflect population changes as measured by a national census, last taken in 2020.

In most states, such redistricting is done by the party in power, which can lead to map manipulation for partisan gain.

In a ruling last July in favor of Republican-backed voting restrictions in Arizona, the Supreme Court made it harder to prove violations under Section 2.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

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By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at the wall separating church and state in a series of new rulings, eroding American legal traditions intended to prevent government officials from promoting any particular faith.

In three decisions in the past eight weeks, the court has ruled against government officials whose policies and actions were taken to avoid violating the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on governmental endorsement of religion – known as the “establishment clause.”

The court on Monday backed a Washington state public high school football coach who was suspended by a local school district for refusing to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games.

On June 21, it endorsed taxpayer money paying for students to attend religious schools under a Maine tuition assistance program in rural areas lacking nearby public high schools.

On May 2, it ruled in favor of a Christian group that sought to fly a flag emblazoned with a cross at Boston city hall under a program aimed at promoting diversity and tolerance among the city’s different communities.

The court’s conservative justices, who hold a 6-3 majority, in particular have taken a broad view of religious rights. They also delivered a decision on Friday that was hailed by religious conservatives – overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide – though that case did not involve the establishment clause.

Cornell Law School professor Michael Dorf said the court’s majority appears skeptical of government decision-making premised on secularism.

“They regard secularism, which for centuries has been the liberal world’s understanding of what it means to be neutral, as itself a form of discrimination against religion,” Dorf said of the conservative justices.

In Monday’s ruling, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court’s aim was to prevent public officials from being hostile to religion as they navigate the establishment clause. Gorsuch said that “in no world may a government entity’s concerns about phantom violations justify actual violations of an individuals First Amendment rights.”

‘WALL OF SEPARATION’

It was President Thomas Jefferson who famously said in an 1802 letter that the establishment clause should represent a “wall of separation” between church and state. The provision prevents the government from establishing a state religion and prohibits it from favoring one faith over another.

In the three recent rulings, the court decided that government actions intended to maintain a separation of church and state had instead infringed separate rights to free speech or the free exercise of religion also protected by the First Amendment.

But, as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the Maine case, such an approach “leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”

Opinions vary over to how much flexibility government officials have in allowing religious expression, whether by public employees, on public land or by people during an official proceeding. Those who favor a strict separation of church and state are concerned that landmark Supreme Court precedents, including a 1962 ruling that prohibited prayer in public schools, could be imperiled.

“It’s a whole new door that (the court) has opened to what teachers, coaches and government employees can do when it comes to proselytizing to children,” said Nick Little, legal director for the Center for Inquiry, a group promoting secularism and science.

Lori Windham, a lawyer with the religious liberty legal group Becket, said the court’s decisions will allow for greater religious expression by individuals without undermining the establishment clause.

“Separation of church and state continues in a way that protects church and state. It stops the government from interfering with churches but it also protects diverse religious expression,” Windham added.

Most of the religious-rights rulings in recent years involved Christian plaintiffs. But the court also has backed followers of other religions including a Muslim woman in 2015 who was denied a retail sales job because she wore a head scarf for religious reasons and a Buddhist death row inmate in 2019 who wanted a spiritual adviser present at his execution in Texas.

The court also sided with both Christian and Jewish congregations in challenges based on religious rights to governmental restrictions such as limits on public gatherings imposed as public safety measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nicole Stelle Garnett, a Notre Dame Law School professor who joined a brief filed with the justices backing the football coach, said the court was merely making clear that governments must treat religious people the same as everyone else.

Following Monday’s ruling, many issues relating to religious conduct in schools may be litigated anew under the court’s rationale that the conduct must be “coercive” in order to raise establishment clause concerns.

“Every classroom,” Garnett said, “is a courtroom.”

(For a related graphic, click https://tmsnrt.rs/3njwtCD)

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

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By Richard Cowan and Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Then-President Donald Trump did not care that supporters at his Jan. 6, 2021, rally preceding the assault on the U.S. Capitol were armed, including with AR-15-style rifles, a White House aide at the time testified on Tuesday.

Instead, Trump expressed anger that the Secret Service, which is charged with protecting the president, was using magnetometers to keep armed people out of the fenced-off area where he gave a fiery speech in which he repeated his false claims that his defeat was the result of fraud, Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff, told the House of Representatives select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.

“Take the effing mags away; they’re not here to hurt me,” Hutchinson quoted Trump as saying that morning.

The hastily called hearing marked the first time this month, during six hearings, that a White House official appeared for live testimony.

The House of Representatives committee over more than a year has been investigating the first attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in U.S. history.

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson opened the hearing saying new evidence was being presented on Tuesday “dealing with what was going on in the White House on Jan. 6 and the days prior” to the riot at the Capitol.

Thompson praised Hutchinson’s “courage” in coming forth to testify to the committee.

In video testimony during the last hearing last week, Hutchinson told the committee that Republican allies of Trump had sought White House pardons after supporting his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

Testimony at the committee’s five prior hearings has shown how Trump, a Republican, riled thousands of supporters with false claims that he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden because of massive voter fraud.

The committee had said last week it would only reconvene publicly in July but announced a change of plans on Monday, a mere 24 hours before the start of Tuesday’s hearing.

This month’s hearings featured videotaped testimony from figures including Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his former attorney general, Bill Barr. They and other witnesses testified that they did not believe Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and tried to dissuade him of them.

Dozens of courts, election officials and reviews by Trump’s own administration rejected his claims of fraud, including outlandish stories about an Italian security firm and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tampering with U.S. ballots.

Trump, who is publicly flirting with another White House run in 2024, denies wrongdoing and accuses the committee of engaging in a political witch hunt. He has leveled harsh criticism particularly at Representative Liz Cheney, one of just two Republicans on the nine-member committee.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll early this month found that about two-thirds of U.S. Republicans believed Trump’s false election fraud claims.

The committee, sometime next month, is expected to hold one or two hearings on possible coordination of the Jan. 6 attack by right-wing extremist groups.

During the assault on the Capitol, thousands of Trump supporters smashed windows, fought with police and sent lawmakers, including Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, fleeing for their lives.

Four people died the day of the attack, one fatally shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, and one died the next day. Four officers later died by suicide.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Moira Warburton, additional reporting by Doinad Chiacu and Rose Horowitch; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)

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By Richard Cowan and Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. congressional committee began a hastily called hearing into the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by then- President Donald Trump’s supporters, summoning a former White House aide to testify and promising new evidence.

The House of Representatives committee, investigating the first attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in U.S. history, was set to take testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff.

In video testimony during the last hearing last week, Hutchinson told the committee that Republican allies of Trump had sought White House pardons after supporting his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

Testimony at the committee’s five prior hearings has shown how Trump, a Republican, riled thousands of supporters with false claims that he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden because of massive voter fraud.

The committee had said last week it would only reconvene publicly in July but announced a change of plans on Monday, a mere 24 hours before the start of Tuesday’s hearing.

British filmmaker Alex Holder, who spent time filming Trump and his family in the weeks after the election, has in recent days testified before the committee behind closed doors and shared video of interviews he did with Trump and his family.

The committee has said it intends at some point to interview Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, following reports she may have been involved in efforts to stop Biden’s victory certification at the Capitol on Jan. 6. She has said she intends to speak to the panel.

U.S. law enforcement last week raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump’s false fraud claims.

This month’s hearings featured videotaped testimony from figures including Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his former attorney general, Bill Barr. They and other witnesses testified that they did not believe Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and tried to dissuade him of them.

Dozens of courts, election officials and reviews by Trump’s own administration rejected his claims of fraud, including outlandish stories about an Italian security firm and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tampering with U.S. ballots.

Trump, who is publicly flirting with another White House run in 2024, denies wrongdoing and accuses the committee of engaging in a political witch hunt. He has leveled harsh criticism particularly at Representative Liz Cheney, one of just two Republicans on the nine-member committee.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll early this month found that about two-thirds of U.S. Republicans believed Trump’s false election fraud claims.

The committee, sometime next month, is expected to hold one or two hearings on possible coordination of the Jan. 6 attack by right-wing extremist groups.

During the assault on the Capitol, thousands of Trump supporters smashed windows, fought with police and sent lawmakers, including Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, fleeing for their lives.

Four people died the day of the attack, one fatally shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, and one died the next day. Four officers later died by suicide.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)

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By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The sixth day of congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol featured Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Hutchinson’s testimony focused on what Meadows and Trump knew about the attack in the days before and on Jan. 6, informed by her close working proximity to both men. Here are some takeaways from the hearing.

TRUMP RALLY ATTENDEES WERE ARMED

Many Republicans – including Trump and Republican Representative Louie Gohmert – have said the rioters were not armed, but Hutchinson’s testimony contradicted this claim. She testified that both Meadows and Trump knew many in the crowd were armed with AR-15s, handguns, brass knuckles and batons and equipped with body armor.

Trump was irate that many rally attendees were having to go through metal detectors, a standard security procedure for people near the president, because it gave the appearance of fewer people attending the rally.

“They’re not here to hurt me,” Hutchinson recalled Trump saying. “Let them in, let my people in. They can march to the Capitol after the rally’s over.”

WHITE HOUSE LAWYERS HAD LEGAL CONCERNS ABOUT JAN. 6

Hutchinson testified that White House lawyer Pat Cipollone told her on Jan. 3, 2021, that it would be “legally a terrible idea” for Trump to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“He said to me, ‘We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen,” Hutchinson testified. “‘We have serious legal concerns if we go up to the Capitol that day.’”

(Reporting by Moira Warburton, Richard Cowan, Rose Horowitch and Doina Chiacu in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)

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By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York state judge struck down a new law on Monday that gave hundreds of thousands of non-citizen residents of New York City the right to vote in municipal elections.

Judge Ralph Porzio, of New York State Supreme Court for Staten Island, ruled the law violated the state constitution, which says that “[e]very citizen” is entitled to vote.

The City Council, which is controlled by Democrats, passed the law last December, and it went into effect after both Mayor Bill de Blasio and his successor, Eric Adams, declined to either sign it or veto it.

The law allowed an estimated 800,000 to 1 million non-citizens living in the city as lawful permanent residents of the United States or with U.S. authorization to work here to vote in elections for city-wide office, but not in state-wide or federal elections. There are currently about 6.7 million people of voting age in New York City.

The law required that a person must have been a resident of the city for at least 30 days prior to the election they wished to vote in, which critics of the law said was too short. Republicans opposed the law in part on the belief that a majority of immigrants are more likely to vote Democrat.

Proponents of the law said it enfranchised the city’s huge population of non-citizens who pay taxes and contribute to the life and culture of a city that has long been a beacon for immigrants, as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Opponents, including the Republican Party and New York lawmakers who sued the city, said the law unfairly and unconstitutionally diluted the power of citizens’ votes and would harm politicians by forcing them to restructure their election strategies.

There was no immediate comment from the City Council or the mayor’s office, who could challenge the ruling in a higher court.

Michael Tannousis, a Republican who represents parts of Staten Island and Brooklyn in the New York State Assembly, was one of the plaintiffs who accused the council of trying to manipulate the electoral system.

“As the son of immigrants that came to this country legally and worked tirelessly to become citizens, I consider voting to be a sacred right bestowed on American citizens,” he said in a statement. “The idea that a person can move to New York City and register to vote after 30 days is preposterous and ripe for fraud.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The House of Representatives committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold a hearing on Tuesday to present recently obtained evidence, the panel said in a statement.

The hearing will be held at 1 p.m. (1700 GMT), the committee said on Monday. Details on witnesses or the topic were not immediately provided.

Congress is on recess until early July before the upcoming July 4 Independence Day holiday, and the panel had not been expected to hold further hearings until next month.

The committee has held five hearings on the deadly attack last year when former President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed Congress as it sought to formalize Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over the Republican in the 2020 presidential election.

Panel chairman Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson said the panel would hold additional hearings after the first five. “Those hearings have spurred an influx of new information that the committee and our investigators are working to assess,” he said on Thursday.

Many of Trump’s fellow Republicans have testified as the committee laid out what it said was Trump’s seven-part plan to overturn the election. Multiple aides or officials close to Trump, however, have refused to cooperate.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — During Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, then-California Sen. Kamala Harris asked the judge if he thought women’s privacy rights extended to choosing to have an abortion. Kavanaugh declined to answer.

With Justice Kavanaugh now part of the court majority that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and the senator now the vice president, Harris is warning that the court’s decision could trigger some of the same far-reaching privacy limitations she warned of during those hearings.

Taking to the issue with a passion linked both to her personal and professional background, Harris has spent recent weeks sounding the alarm that upending Roe could create precedent for new restrictions on everything from contraception and in vitro fertilization to gay marriage and the right to vote.

Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to validate such concerns, writing in a concurring opinion to the larger ruling on Roe that the high court “should reconsider” past decisions on access to contraception and same-sex marriage.

Harris has been a leading Biden administration voice on abortion rights since early May, when a leaked draft opinion previewed Roe v. Wade’s nullification. She was flying to Illinois for a maternal health event when the final decision was announced last week, and read it while still in the air — quickly shifting the focus of her planned remarks to the ruling.

The decision “calls into question other rights that we thought were settled, such as the right to use birth control, the right to same sex marriage, the right to interracial message,” Harris told her audience Friday at a suburban YMCA, adding that it would spark a “health care crisis.”

Becoming a leading voice on abortion access could be a better fit for Harris after President Joe Biden tasked her with overseeing other thorny issues that haven’t gone well: immigration and expanding voting rights. Sweeping legislation on both issues has stalled in Congress, prompting some advocates to say the vice president and the White House should’ve done more.

Harris symbolically presiding over the Senate didn’t stop Republicans from blocking efforts to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law before the court’s ruling overturning it. But Democrats are hoping anger around the issue will energize their base for the November midterm elections, when the party faces steep headwinds.

Getting straight to the politics of the matter after the ruling was announced, Harris said, “You have the power to elect leaders who will defend and protect your rights. With your vote, you can act. And you have the final word.”

After a Texas law effectively banned abortion in the state in the fall, Harris met providers and patients, which her office believes is the first time abortion providers have visited the White House. She stressed then that gender discrimination persists, saying that “women’s full participation in our nation” was still only a goal, not a reality.

After the draft Supreme Court opinion leaked, the vice president convened a virtual discussion with doctors and nurses providing abortion care in states with strict restrictions and met with Democratic attorneys general from states supportive of reproductive rights.

Biden has also forcefully defended abortion rights and warned that other rights are now at risk. But as a observant Catholic, he hasn’t always had a strong record on the issue.

Harris, the first female vice president and California’s former top prosecutor, brings unique personal perspective and legal expertise to the issue.

“Seeing women fight on behalf of other women is just very true to the core of who she is,” said Jacqueline Ayers, senior vice president of policy, organizing, and campaigns at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

She added that Harris has framed the issue to underscore “the disparity that it creates on Black and brown communities, and for people who are living with low income.”

Ayers said the high court’s action has allowed the vice president to highlight how she’s used her office to listen to women and advocate for improving their health care — perhaps even in ways Biden can’t.

“It’s not necessarily a wedge, it’s just a continuation of someone who has really staked their career around the issues that are key and drivers for them,” Ayers said of differences between Harris and Biden.

Rev. John Dorhauer, the general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, attended a recent virtual meeting on abortion rights that Harris hosted, and suggested she’s been less afraid than some top Democrats to advocate forcefully on the issue.

“To hear that from one of the highest offices in the land is incredibly encouraging,” Dorhauer said.

But some abortion opponents argue that Harris has hurt her cause by equating abortion access with other, more routine medical care.

“She has become emblematic of the abortion absolutism on the other side,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which advocates for women who oppose abortion in politics.

As a senator, Harris introduced legislation to improve maternal health. During a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, then-candidate Harris said it was “outrageous” that abortion had been overshadowed by other issues, despite a woman’s right to the procedure being “under full-on attack” even then.

The vice president most forcefully signaled the outspoken role when she declared a day after the draft opinion leaked in May: “Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women, well, we say, how dare they?”

She then used subsequent weeks to argue that undermining Roe v. Wade could soon wipe out other key privacy rights — the same theme she raised during Kavanaugh’s hearing.

Harris says many states moving to fully ban abortion could restrict in vitro fertilization if legislatures argue that human life begins at fertilization. They could prohibit contraception methods, including intrauterine devices and the “morning after” pill, she argued.

Law enforcement might scrutinize data collected from millions of women who use menstrual cycle tracking apps, or those doing internet searches on getting abortions in other states, the vice president said.

Also ultimately at stake, Harris maintains, is the legalization of gay marriage, noting that states with the strictest abortion laws often also have past LGBTQ prohibitions that the Supreme Court could revive. Once those rights have fallen, the argument goes, voting rights could be next. She convened a recent meeting with privacy experts to discuss the matter.

“That slippery slope is really slippery,” said one of the meeting’s participants, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, the women and democracy fellow at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice in New York. “We’re barreling right down it right now.”

Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told attendees to be prepared for “the coming of a new Jane Crow,” as efforts to limit abortion begin to emulate antiquated laws that once sanctioned open discrimination against Black people.

Dannenfelser countered that Harris and others are exaggerating, saying the current Supreme Court is “the least likely to do what she’s saying. They believe in the rule of law.”

“It’s intended to scare people and to build a coalition on the other side outside of the abortion issue,” Dannenfelser said.

Harris’ office says she is indeed building a coalition, but it will be one of people who believe that Roe v. Wade’s effects far exceeded abortion, and not just for women. To help drive home that point, Harris met recently in Los Angeles with religious leaders, noting that “to support Roe v. Wade, and all it stands for, does not mean giving up your beliefs.”

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For AP’s full coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, go to https://apnews.com/hub/abortion

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(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday issued another significant ruling broadening religious rights, siding with a Christian former public high school football coach in Washington state who sued after being suspended from his job for refusing to stop leading prayers with players on the field after games.

The court, especially its conservative bloc, has taken a wide view of religious liberty in numerous cases in recent years. Here is a look at some of the cases involving religious rights decided during its current term, which began in October.

KENNEDY V. BREMERTON SCHOOL DISTRICT

In the case decided on Monday, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of Joseph Kennedy, who until 2015 served as a part-time assistant football coach in the city of Bremerton. The justices rejected the local school district’s concerns that in a public school setting Kennedy’s prayers and Christian-infused speeches could be seen as coercive to students or a governmental endorsement of a particular religion in violation of the First Amendment’s so-called establishment clause. The justices overturned a lower court’s ruling siding with the school district.

CARSON V. MAKIN

In a 6-3 decision on June 21, the court endorsed more public funding of religious entities as it sided with two Christian families who challenged a Maine tuition assistance program that excluded private religious schools. The justices overturned a lower court ruling that had rejected the families’ claims of religious discrimination in violation of the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment protection of the free exercise of religion. Maine’s program provides public funds for tuition at private high schools of a family’s choice in sparsely populated areas lacking public secondary schools. Maine required eligible schools to be “nonsectarian,” excluding those promoting a particular religion and presenting material “through the lens of that faith.”

SHURTLEFF V. BOSTON

The court ruled 9-0 on May 2 that Boston violated the free speech rights of a Christian group by refusing to fly a flag bearing the image of a cross at City Hall as part of a program that let private groups use the flagpole while holding events in the plaza below. The justices decided that the city violated free speech rights protected under the First Amendment of the Christian group Camp Constitution and its director Harold Shurtleff. Boston had argued that raising the cross flag as Camp Constitution requested under a flag-raising program aimed at promoting diversity and tolerance in the city could appear to violate another part of the First Amendment that bars governmental endorsement of a particular religion. The justices overturned a lower court ruling in favor of Boston.

RAMIREZ V. COLLIER

The court ruled 8-1 on March 24 that Texas must grant a convicted murderer on death row his request to have his Christian pastor lay hands on him and audibly pray during his execution, bolstering the religious rights of condemned inmates. The justices overturned a lower court’s decision against John Henry Ramirez, who appealed the state’s rejection of his request for pastoral touch and prayer while he dies from lethal injection. Ramirez was sentenced to death for a fatal 2004 stabbing outside a convenience store.

(Compiled by Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

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