Politics

By Jarrett Renshaw

WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) -President Joe Biden on Sunday headed to a Texas town to comfort families ripped apart by the largest U.S. school shooting in a decade amid lingering questions about whether law enforcement’s failure to act swiftly contributed to the death toll.

Biden’s familiar role as consoler-in-chief will be complicated by local anger over a decision by law enforcement in Uvalde, Texas, to allow the shooter to remain in a classroom for nearly an hour while officers waited in the hallway and children in the room made panicked 911 calls for help.

Investigators on Saturday were seeking to determine how critical mistakes were made in the response to the shooting that left 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School dead, and some are calling on the FBI to look into police actions.

Biden is scheduled to visit a memorial erected at the school, and meet with victims’ families, survivors and first responders.

“He has to stay focused on the pain and grief of the families and the community and understand that all of this has been compounded by the fact that we still don’t know exactly what happened. The more we learn, the more it seems the children were poorly served,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist and a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The Democratic president also confronts the stark reality that he has been relatively powerless to stop American mass shootings or convince Republicans that stronger gun controls could stem the carnage.

The Texas visit will be his third presidential trip to a mass shooting site, including earlier this month when he visited Buffalo, New York, after a shooting that left 10 Black people at a supermarket dead.

“Too much violence, too much fear, too much grief,” Biden told graduates in a commencement speech Saturday at the University of Delaware. “We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of the people and of our children.”

The Uvalde shooting has once again put gun control at the top of the nation’s agenda, months ahead of the November midterm elections, with supporters of stronger gun laws arguing that the latest bloodshed represents a tipping point.

“The president has a real opportunity. The country is desperately asking for a leader to stop the slaughter from gun violence,” said Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America.

He urged Biden to immediately enlist a senior official to tackle the country’s gun problem and crisscross the United States to pressure Congress to pass meaningful gun reform, saying Biden promised to be a deal maker and to tackle guns.

Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ban on assault-style weapons during a trip to Buffalo on Saturday, saying that in the wake of two back-to-back mass shootings such arms are “a weapon of war” with “no place in a civil society.”

White House aides and close allies say Biden is unlikely to wade into specific policy proposals to avoid disrupting delicate gun control negotiations in the Senate. He is also unlikely to immediately take executive action to crack down on firearms, sending Republican lawmakers otherwise open to negotiating back to their corners, aides say.

Meanwhile, leading Republicans like U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former President Donald Trump rejected calls for new gun control measures and instead suggested investing in mental health care or tightening security at the nation’s schools.

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott denied that newly enacted Texas gun laws, including a controversial measure removing licensing requirements for carrying a concealed weapon, had “any relevancy” to Tuesday’s bloodshed. He suggested state lawmakers focus renewed attention on addressing mental illness.

(Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw and Heather Timmons; additional writing by Susan Heavey; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Hugh Lawson)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges that he stormed the U.S. Capitol last year to disrupt Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote, court filings show.

Matthew Mark Wood pleaded guilty on Friday to all six counts in his March 2021 indictment, including a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding. The other five counts are all misdemeanors.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is scheduled to sentence Wood on Sept. 23.

A day before the riot, Wood drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., with his grandmother and another relative. Less than a week earlier, Wood sent a text message to another person that said, “If they want to raid Congress, sign me up,” according to a court filing accompanying his guilty plea.

After the riot erupted, Wood entered the Capitol by climbing through a window. He followed others on a path toward the Senate chamber but left the area without entering it.

After rioters breached a police line in the Capitol Crypt, Wood followed others up a staircase and into the House Speaker’s office suite. He left the Capitol through a door more than an hour after he entered the building, the filing says.

In a text message to somebody a day after the riot, Wood said he “took a stand” but called it “extremely inappropriate.”

“I can’t believe I participated in such chaos,” he added.

The riot disrupted the joint session of Congress for certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

Wood was arrested in Winston Salem, North Carolina, last year.

At a separate hearing on Friday, a Maryland man pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge stemming from the Capitol riot. Matthew Joseph Buckler is scheduled to be sentenced on July 21 after pleading guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. Buckler, of La Plata, Maryland, entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 by climbing through a broken window.

More than 800 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot. At least 300 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors, and nearly 200 of them have been sentenced. Approximately 100 others have trial dates.

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By Arathy Somasekhar and Kanishka Singh

HOUSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Former President Donald Trump on Friday argued the United States should make it easier to confine “deranged” people and eliminate gun-free school zones after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers this week at a Texas school.

“Clearly, we need to make it far easier to confine the violent and mentally deranged into mental institutions,” Trump said in a speech at a convention in Houston of the National Rifle Association, a gun rights advocacy group.

Tuesday’s fatal shooting of 19 pupils and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old gunman equipped with an AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle again focused attention on the NRA, a major donor to Congress members, mostly Republicans.

On suggestions to improve the security of schools, Trump said every school should have a single point of entry, strong fencing and metal detectors, adding there should also be a police official or an armed guard at all times in every school.

“This is not a matter of money. This is a matter of will. If the United States has $40 billion to send to Ukraine, we can do this,” he said, referring to Washington’s financial and military support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February.

The former U.S. president also called for eliminating gun-free school zones, adding that such zones leave victims with no means to defend themselves in case of an attack by an armed person.

“As the age-old saying goes, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Trump added.

“The existence of evil is one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens.”

Video images of the main auditorium in Houston, which holds about 3,600 people, showed it to be about half-full as Trump took the stage on Friday afternoon.

(Reporting by Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston; additional reporting by Steve Holland in Washington; writing by Kanishka Singh; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)

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COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) — Wayne Black was one of the few African Americans in the crowd as about 100 people gathered recently at the Republican Party headquarters near Columbus, Georgia, to hear from U.S. Senate candidate and football legend Herschel Walker.

A member of the Muscogee County Republican Executive Committee, Black said he found a certain promise in Walker’s candidacy, a GOP voice who could appeal to African Americans and others in Georgia who have traditionally voted Democratic.

“They identify with him from the standpoint of the American dream,” Black said. “You can start from nothing and if you work hard, you can achieve the American dream.”

But that optimism ran into headwinds about 100 miles to the north. As she left an Atlanta polling site, Wyvonia Carter said her choice in what might be the most competitive Senate race this year was not particularly complicated.

“You know I’m Black, right?” the 84 year-old said. “I’m a Democrat. That’s it.”

In this Deep South state where the painful history of slavery, segregation and racial injustice is ever-present, voters for the first time have selected two Black candidates to represent the major parties in a Senate race. After handily winning their respective primaries on Tuesday, Walker will take on Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in a general election campaign that could help decide control of the Senate.

The race will test whether Democratic gains in 2020 were a blip or the start of a political realignment in a rapidly changing state. In November 2020, Joe Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in 28 years, and just two months later, Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff flipped two longtime Republican Senate seats, handing their party a narrow majority in the Senate.

Black voters were crucial in helping Democrats secure those victories and will likely be decisive again this year.

The issue is less about whether Walker will break the bond that Black voters have had with Democratic candidates. It is more about whether Black voters, frustrated by a lack of progress in Washington on issues ranging from a policing overhaul to voting rights, simply sit this election out. In a close election, even a small change in voting patterns could be decisive.

Republicans hope Walker’s candidacy can at least neutralize the issue of race in the campaign.

“In this race, Black Georgians will not have to contend with the race issue,” said Camilla Moore, chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council. “And I really do believe by culture, we’re socially conservative. I think Herschel just has to be Herschel and tell his conservative message.”

But in interviews in recent weeks, many Black voters said they would not give Walker a second look because of his race. They said they were driven by policy considerations, and Walker, who was backed by former President Donald Trump and is generally in line with GOP orthodoxy, does not address their needs.

Louis Harden, a 58-year-old Black voter in Atlanta, said he is backing Warnock because of the senator’s support for Medicaid expansion.

“It doesn’t matter about the color,” he said. “It’s just the issues, who’s going to get the job done.”

There are only a few modern instances in which two Black people have emerged as the nominees in a Senate race.

Democrat Barack Obama faced Republican radio host and former diplomat Alan Keyes in his 2004 Senate campaign in Illinois. More recently, South Carolina’s Tim Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican, was unsuccessfully challenged in 2016 by Thomas Dixon, a North Charleston pastor.

But the Warnock-Walker matchup is unique because it is playing out in a far more competitive state than Illinois, a Democratic stronghold, or South Carolina, where Republicans are dominant. Also, the candidates in Georgia are already well known, representing two institutions that are revered in the South: church and football.

Walker, among Georgia’s most well-known sports figures, won a championship and the Heisman Trophy while at the University of Georgia in the 1980s. Warnock is the senior pastor at the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached.

“This is going to be a historic matchup,” said Stan Deaton, a scholar at the Georgia Historical Society.

But to make a dent in Warnock’s support among Black voters, Walker will need to do more to appeal to the Black community, said Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University who has written about efforts by Black Republicans to broaden the party’s largely white base.

Republican candidates who do well among African American voters have the ability to craft a political identity that is independent from the party, something she said Walker has not done so far. Black voters also consider how a candidate treats his or her community and may view African American candidates who stick to Republican talking points more harshly than their white counterparts, Wright Rigueur said.

“And the reason why is because it’s viewed as a betrayal,” she said. “It’s viewed as community betrayal.”

Walker has largely hewed to Republican messaging about race. He has defended Trump against criticism that Trump was racist, he has accused Black Lives Matter of wanting to destroy the country and he has said “Black-on-Black crime” is far worse than violence by police. Walker has come under scrutiny over allegations that he threatened his ex-wife’s life and dramatically inflated his record as a businessman.

Warnock, the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, has embraced King’s legacy of racial justice and equal rights. After the killing of George Floyd by police in May 2020, Warnock expounded on the country’s struggle with a “virus” he called “COVID-1619” for the year when some of the first slaves arrived in what is now the United States. On Capitol Hill, he has attacked Republicans’ push for tighter voting rules as “Jim Crow in new clothes.”

Warnock “has a record of fighting to improve the lives of all Georgians,” Warnock campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement, citing as examples Warnock’s efforts to forgive student loan debt and address the high rates of maternal mortality.

“The people of Georgia, no matter their race, will make the decision about who is up for the job and best able to represent the people of Georgia,” he said.

A spokesperson for Walker’s campaign, Mallory Blount, said all Georgians, regardless of race, are facing problems created by Democrats and that Walker is “sick and tired of politicians constantly dividing people based on the color of their skin.”

Walker told a House subcommittee last year while testifying against reparations for slavery that “Black power” is used to “create white guilt.”

In his memoir, “Breaking Free,” Walker said his mother taught him that “color was invisible” and doing right or wrong was what mattered.

“I never really liked the idea that I was to represent my people,” he wrote. “My parents raised me to believe that I represented humanity — people — and not black people, white people, yellow people, or any other color or type of person.”

Still, Black Republicans in Georgia expect Walker to try hard to woo the African American community during the general election. They also believe his personal story about overcoming obstacles to reach the top ranks of college football and then the NFL will find an audience among Black voters.

“Self-determination has always been a big thing in the Black community since we got out of slavery,” said Leonard Massey, who is Black and is chairman of the Chatham County Republican Party in eastern Georgia. “He actually shows how to get to the next level.”

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Associated Press writer Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this report.

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

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By Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Gun safety advocates are pushing U.S. President Joe Biden to take stronger measures on his own to curb gun violence after the Texas elementary school shooting, but the White House is putting responsibility on Congress to pass laws that would have more impact.

The White House has spoken with gun safety groups since Tuesday’s rampage in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed – the deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade – activists said.

The groups are urging Biden to make an emergency declaration on gun violence, name a gun violence czar, advocate lifting the Senate filibuster if necessary and issue an executive order on background checks for firearms purchases if lawmakers do not pass legislation tightening loopholes in current law.

For the moment, the Biden administration is pressing Congress to pass tighter gun laws that can have more lasting impact than executive action. The White House has been in touch with top Democrats in Congress regarding next steps on firearms laws.

Bills backed by Democrats requiring background checks, banning semi-automatic rifles and strengthening gun safety measures have failed for a decade in Congress in the face of stalwart Republican opposition and objections from some moderate Democrats and independents. Gun-rights advocates believe in a broad interpretation of U.S. constitutional protections for keeping and bearing arms.

Democrats in Congress said Wednesday they would try again on legislation.

“The plan is to work hard at a compromise for the next 10 days,” said Senator Chris Murphy. “Hopefully, we succeed and the Senate can vote on a bipartisan bill that saves lives.”

After the Texas gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to kill students and teachers before being killed, many gun safety activists demanded more urgency from the White House.

“President Biden is not doing enough,” David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, high school massacre, said on Wednesday.

The White House has said it was looking at every tool at its disposal to stop gun violence, including executive action, but stressed that Biden needed help from the legislature.

“It is time for Congress to act,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who was grilled by reporters about what the administration was doing on the issue. “The president cannot do this alone.”

PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY

Since taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration has taken several steps without Congress. They include requiring that “ghost guns,” which are often assembled from kits, be regulated the same way as traditional firearms, and launching a strike force aimed at cracking down on illegal firearms trafficking in major cities, including New York and Los Angeles.

Gun safety advocates say there is more the president can do alone.

“He should declare gun violence a public health emergency,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady, a gun violence protection group. “We need to tackle this in a way that prevents the violence from happening in the first place and not walk away from it because it’s a public health emergency that happens to involve guns.”

A national emergency declaration gives the president additional statutory powers to address a crisis. The White House says Biden has already called it an emergency and a legal invocation would not lead to the authorities needed to address gun violence.

Brown said if the Senate did not pass gun safety measures under consideration, Democrats should lift the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member body to approve legislation. Biden, a former U.S. senator, has been largely reluctant to advocate such a change to pass his policy agenda.

Po Murray, who chairs the grassroots group Newtown Action Alliance, said the White House needs an office of gun violence prevention. “We appreciate that (domestic policy council director) Susan Rice is tasked with addressing this issue, but we believe we need somebody that could spend 100% of his or her time doing this work,” Murray said.

“Since we elected a gun safety president, he could certainly do more,” she said.

Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, a gun violence protection group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said the White House should write an executive order on background checks if a bill does not pass.

It could be used to mandate that anyone who sells as few as two guns per year would need to become a federal firearms licensee and conduct background checks, he said.

“The administration needs to make gun violence protection a governing – not just a political – priority,” Ambler said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal; additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Joey Roulette; editing by Heather Timmons, Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)

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OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Voters in an Oregon county where a ballot-printing error has delayed primary results for nearly two weeks have elected the same county clerk five times in the past 20 years despite missteps that impacted two previous elections and cost taxpayers at least $100,000.

Opponents have repeatedly tried to unseat Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall, who was first elected in 2002, following elections errors in 2004, 2010 and 2011 and a state vote-tampering investigation in 2012. Hall makes $112,600 a year in the nonpartisan position overseeing elections, recording property transactions, keeping public records and issuing marriage licenses. She is running for a sixth four-year term in November in the suburban county south of Portland.

The latest scandal in Oregon comes against the backdrop of a polarized political landscape in which vote counts are increasingly scrutinized. Races for local elections clerks — who until recently toiled in obscurity and relative anonymity — are getting new attention, particularly from right-wing voters who deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Local elections chiefs are the first line of defense for elections integrity, but most voters don’t know who their county clerk is, or even what they do, and are likely to skip over the nonpartisan race on Election Day, or simply pick the incumbent. Some county clerks are appointed, but in many counties in Oregon and elsewhere they are beholden to the whims of voters who may not be paying attention, said Christopher McKnight Nichols, an associate professor of history at Oregon State University.

There’s a “myopia and invisibility about this sort of office in American public life,” he said.

The situation in Oregon’s third-largest county underscores the importance of such contests.

In the current election, tens of thousands of ballots sent out with blurry barcodes were rejected by a vote-counting machine. The issue affected Democratic and nonpartisan ballots more than Republican ones, state officials have said. The fiasco forced the county to shift nearly 200 county employees to vote tabulation duties; county officials don’t yet know the full cost of the cleanup job.

For days, workers have been transferring each voter’s intent from spoiled ballots to fresh ones, by hand using purple markers, in a painstaking process that might not be complete for more than two more weeks. More than 81,000 ballots out of more than 116,000 had been counted by early Friday, and nearly 35,000 spoiled ballots remained to be duplicated, according to county tallies.

“This affects all of us. This is voter integrity,” said Janet Bailey, a Republican voter who protested outside the Clackamas County election offices Thursday with about a dozen others. “We, in Oregon, a week ago we had our primary, and we still don’t know the results.”

Hall knew of the problem with the ballots on May 3, but did not take significant action until after the election on May 17, when it became clear the vote tally was substantially delayed. The Oregon Secretary of State has said Hall refused offers of help from the state; at least one Democratic state lawmaker has demanded a legislative inquiry into the ballot blunder.

Meanwhile, the results of several contests, including the much-watched Democratic primary for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, remain undecided. And some voters are seizing on the county’s problems to demand an end to Oregon’s trailblazing vote-by-mail system and the use of electronic machinery to count votes.

“Our votes have to count,” said Cindy Hise, a Clackamas County voter who wants the entire primary redone. “This has been going on for days. We’re past all hope of it being a true vote.”

Hall declined a phone or in-person interview with The Associated Press for this story but said in response to emailed questions Thursday that she would cooperate with any investigation. She said she has no comment on calls from some for her resignation.

She also addressed numerous 2020 contributions she made to national Republican causes, saying in a brief email that she “maintains neutrality.” The donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and to WINRED, a Republican Party fundraising platform, were all $100 or less.

“I have the right as a private citizen to exercise free speech and association. I do give small contributions to a large number of organizations,” she wrote. “I do not accept endorsements of any kind.”

Controversy isn’t new to Hall, who has overseen the county’s elections since she took office in 2003.

— In 2004, the county excluded three annexation questions on ballots mailed to 300 voters and didn’t alert the public for 10 days.

— In 2010, a county commission race was listed on the primary ballot when it should not have been. The ballots were reprinted at a cost of more than $100,000. Hall later filed a complaint with state elections officials saying the episode, including press “leaks” and public criticisms of her by county officials, cost her primary votes and forced her into a November runoff.

— In 2012, an elections worker was caught tampering with two ballots and was sentenced to 90 days in jail.

— In 2018, Hall placed her name and the county clerk title on the ballot return envelopes and on voter information pamphlets while also seeking reelection to the post, a decision critics called egregious self-promotion in a tight race.

Hall said in her email that all the elections incidents “did happen under my watch” and that she or those in her office “took appropriate steps as needed.”

Pamela White, who challenged Hall in 2018 and lost by fewer than 6,000 votes, said even with such missteps it seemed impossible to defeat Hall. In that election, more than 52,000 voters skipped the county clerk race altogether despite persistent criticisms of Hall’s elections oversight and White’s endorsement by Hall’s recently retired elections manager.

White spent $100,000 on the race, including $25,000 of her own money, and campaigned for two years, she said.

“I worked very hard,” she said. “I knew what I was doing, but that down-ballot thing is an issue even in your own party. It just takes all the air out of the room.”

Steve Kindred, the former elections manager who endorsed White, said his relationship with Hall soured after a 2014 incident in which she asked him to do work on her reelection campaign during office hours without telling him what it was for. She was later fined $100 by state elections officials for the lapse. Kindred retired early.

Kindred said seeing the ballot fiasco now after experiencing the ballot-tampering probe in 2012 was like a “punch to the gut.”

“We had a couple of hell elections, not nearly as bad as this one,” he said. “It’s almost like she’s frozen, like a deer in the headlights.”

For now, the county is focused on getting the votes counted by June 13, the state’s election certification deadline.

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Cline reported from Portland. Associated Press writer Andrew Selsky in Salem and AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Many voters in heavily Democratic Los Angeles are seething over rising crime and homelessness and that could prompt the city to take a turn to the political right for the first time in decades.

One of the leading candidates for mayor is Rick Caruso, a pro-business billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat who sits on the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and is promising to expand spending on police, not defund them.

At another time, the high-end mall and resort developer would seem an unlikely choice to potentially lead the nation’s second-most populous city, where democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was the runaway winner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A progressive City Hall has embraced so-called sanctuary city protections for people who entered the U.S. illegally and “Green New Deal” climate policies.

But these are fraught times in LA, with more than 40,000 people living in trash-strewn homeless encampments and rusty RVs, distress over brazen smash-and-grab robberies and home invasions while inflation and taxes are gouging wallets — gas in a region built on car travel has cracked $6 a gallon. Rents and home prices have soared.

Caruso is spending millions of his estimated $4.3 billion fortune to finance a seemingly nonstop display of TV and online ads to tap into voter angst. At issue is whether enough people will embrace his plans to add 1,500 police officers and promises to get unhoused people off the streets, while not recoiling from his vast wealth.

Twelve names are on the ballot for the primary election that ends June 7, though several candidates have dropped out and the race is shaping up as a fight between Caruso and Democratic U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, who was on then-President elect Joe Biden’s shortlist for vice president.

If no candidate clears 50% – which is likely with a crowded ballot — the top two finishers advance to a November runoff. Bass could become the first woman to hold the office and the second Black person.

Bass and Caruso are not well known in a city that can be notoriously indifferent to local politics.

“Part of this is going to be how people feel about them as they get to know them better. We don’t know the answer to that,” said veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick, who thinks voters are looking for solutions for homelessness and crime, not obsessing with past political affiliations. The contest is technically nonpartisan.

Bass, 68, is a favorite of the party’s progressive wing, while Caruso, 63, is a political shape-shifter who calls himself a “centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.”

According to government records, he was a Republican for over two decades before becoming an independent in 2011. Caruso changed back to Republican in 2016 — a year when he served as California campaign co-chair for Republican John Kasich’s presidential bid — then to independent again in 2019. He became a Democrat shortly before entering the mayor’s race in February.

He’s donated to candidates in both parties, which has led to criticism from Democrats who point to his financial support for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, among others. And he’s been routinely attacked for an opulent lifestyle, including owning a 9-bedroom yacht.

The mayor’s race is one of several competitive contests in the state’s primary where political loyalties are being tested by questions about the direction of California’s dominant Democratic Party, which holds every statewide office and commanding margins in the Legislature and congressional delegation.

Voters in San Francisco are considering whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a Democrat who critics say has failed to prosecute repeat offenders, while Democratic state Attorney General Rob Bonta is facing several challengers who assert he favors criminal justice reform over crime victims, which he disputes.

A looming question in LA is who will show up. About 80% of voters didn’t cast ballots when outgoing Mayor Eric Garcetti was reelected in 2017.

There is a deep dismay with government across L.A. A major challenge for Caruso, Bass and other rivals — including city Councilman Kevin de Leon, a former Democratic leader in the state Senate — will be convincing voters change is possible.

A case in point: Gas station owner Wignesh Kandavel. He says his complaints have gone unheard for years about homeless people setting up campsites around a freeway overpass just steps from his pumps and convenience market.

Sagging tents and trash are cleared from time to time, only to have homeless people return again. He says drug use is rampant, shoplifting a constant problem and panhandling at the freeway exits a daily routine.

The Nigerian immigrant and registered Republican who came to the U.S. in search of a better life has lost interest in the election and doesn’t see any candidate as credible.

“The whole system is gone,” Kandavel said.

Caruso’s ascendancy in the race – polls show him closely matched with Bass — has alarmed longtime Democrats who are attacking him as a poseur trying to buy the job. His campaign has raised about $30 million, most of it his money.

There is the expected competition over celebrity endorsements — Earvin “Magic” Johnson is backing Bass, while Caruso has Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow behind him. Already, the rivalry is taking on a nasty edge, particularly in ads from groups supporting the candidates.

Bass’ commercials recall her work as a physician’s assistant during the crack epidemic and her time in Congress and the Legislature. But the police union that endorsed Caruso is running ads that attempt to link Bass to a federal corruption case involving her longtime friend, suspended city Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. She calls the ads lies.

Caruso’s advertising touts his immigrant grandparents, philanthropic endeavors and promise to work for $1 a year. But ads being run by an independent group backing Bass and funded by unions and former Disney studios chief Jeffrey Katzenberg depict Caruso as an L.A. version of former President Donald Trump who is attempting to conceal an “extreme” record.

Retired public defender Paul Enright said he was undecided in the mayor’s race but turned off by Caruso’s spending spree that totals more than the other candidates combined. A Democrat who supports public financing for campaigns, he is leaning toward Bass or de Leon.

It’s a “classic example of how money talks,” Enright said.

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By Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) -Former U.S. President Donald Trump must testify under oath in the New York Attorney General’s civil investigation into his business practices, an intermediate state appeals court ruled on Thursday.

A four-judge panel unanimously upheld a trial court decision from February enforcing subpoenas for Trump and his two eldest children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, to provide deposition testimony in Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation.

“Once again, the courts have ruled that Donald Trump must comply with our lawful investigation into his financial dealings,” James said in a statement. “We will continue to follow the facts of this case and ensure that no one can evade the law.”

Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In January, James said her nearly three-year investigation into the Trump Organization had uncovered significant evidence of possible fraud https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ny-attorney-general-details-possible-fraud-donald-trumps-family-business-2022-01-19.

She described what she called misleading statements about the values of the Trump brand and six properties, saying the company may have inflated real estate values to obtain bank loans and reduced them to lower tax bills.

Trump issued a statement earlier this year calling the accusations false and accusing James of a political agenda in targeting him and his family.

Trump and his children have said testifying would violate their constitutional rights because their words could be used in a related criminal probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, which James joined last May.

Trump, a Republican, has also accused James of selectively prosecuting him because he is a political enemy. James and Bragg are Democrats.

The appeals court rejected those arguments, saying James reviewed “significant volumes of evidence” before issuing the subpoenas.

“Appellants have not identified any similarly implicated corporation that was not investigated or any executives of such a corporation who were not deposed,” the court said of the Trumps. “Therefore, appellants have failed to demonstrate that they were treated differently from any similarly situated persons.”

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Additional reporting by Luc Cohen; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Diane Craft and Bill Berkrot)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — With mass shootings in Texas, New York and California fresh in Americans’ mind, the Supreme Court will soon issue its biggest gun ruling in more than a decade, one expected to make it easier to carry guns in public in some of the largest cities.

Already in an uncomfortable spotlight over a leaked draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade’s nationwide right to abortion, the justices also are facing a possible backlash from the guns case. In both cases the court could issue decisions that polls say would be unpopular with the majority of people in the United States.

“I think the court is heading into uncharted waters. I can’t recall the last time the Supreme Court ruled in so many cases likely to spark a strong political backlash,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on the court and gun policy.

Winkler predicted the recent shootings would not do anything to change the outcome in the guns case, where the court’s conservative majority has been expected to strike down a New York gun law. “Pro-gun justices are pro-gun,” he said, adding it is not likely that recent mass shootings have done anything to change that.

The decisions in both the abortion and guns cases are expected to be released sometime in the next month before the justices take their summer break.

The reaction to the decisions could add to criticism the court has faced recently over the disclosure that conservative political activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, urged the White House and Republican politicians in Arizona to work to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory and keep Trump in office.

A poll released this week found public approval of the court has fallen to 44%, down from 54% in March. The poll was conducted after the leak of the draft abortion decision, which has sparked protests and round-the-clock security at justices’ homes, demonstrations at the court and concerns about violence following the court’s ultimate decision. The court itself has been ringed in a tall security fence for weeks in anticipation of the abortion ruling.

In 2020, AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate, showed 69% of voters in the presidential election said the Supreme Court should leave the Roe v. Wade decision as is, while 29% said the court should overturn the decision.

In the leaked decision overturning Roe, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court should not be swayed by public opinion. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision. … And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision,” he wrote.

Still, the justices do not live in a bubble, and New York University scholar Barry Friedman has argued that the court’s decisions are never too far out of step with public opinion.

“You know we don’t have an army. We don’t have any money. The only way we can get people to do what we think they should do is because people respect us,” Justice Elena Kagan said in 2018.

Eric Tirschwell, the legal director at Everytown for Gun Safety, said it is “hard not to think that what’s going on in the country doesn’t impact to some degree” how the justices go about their work. The recent violence, he said, underscores that “interpreting the Second Amendment is not an abstract exercise. It has life or death consequences.”

About half of voters in the 2020 presidential election said gun laws in the U.S. should be made more strict, according to AP VoteCast. An additional one-third said gun laws should be kept as they are, while about 1 in 10 said gun laws should be less strict.

The gun case the court is considering involves a New York law that makes it difficult for people to get a permit to carry a gun outside the home. To do so, a person has to show a particular need to carry the weapon.

When the case was argued in November, it sounded from the justices’ questions as though the justices were prepared to strike down the law as too restrictive. Similar laws exist in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island, and the Biden administration has said those states could be affected by a ruling against New York. Opponents have said that could lead to more guns on the streets and more resulting violence.

Just since the court heard arguments in the case, there have been 16 shootings where four or more people were killed, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.

One of two conservative justices, Thomas or Amy Coney Barrett, probably is writing the guns opinion, based on the court’s usual practice of giving each justice at least one opinion for each month the court hears cases. Neither has written yet in the cases heard early in November.

No matter how the court decides the New York case, other gun rights disputes are already at or nearing the court. The justices have been asked to hear cases challenging limits on ammunition magazine capacities in New Jersey and California as well as a challenge to Maryland’s assault weapons ban.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court struck down California’s ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21, holding it violated the Second Amendment. That case too could be headed to the court.

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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings

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By Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) -Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt on Wednesday signed into law the strictest abortion ban in the United States, one that prohibits abortions from fertilization and allows private citizens to sue those who help women terminate their pregnancies.

“I promised Oklahomans that as governor I would sign every piece of pro-life legislation that came across my desk and I am proud to keep that promise today,” Stitt said in a statement.

The Republican-backed legislation, which takes effect immediately, makes exceptions only in cases of medical emergency, rape or incest.

Oklahoma is among the country’s Republican-led states rushing to pass anti-abortion laws this year, anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established the constitutional right to abortion.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a global advocacy group based in New York, said it would “imminently file a challenge to the ban and seek to block it in court.”

“Oklahoma is now the only state in the United States to successfully outlaw abortion while Roe v. Wade still stands,” the center said in a statement.

A draft Supreme Court opinion leaked on May 2 showed the court’s conservative majority intends to overhaul federal abortion rights and send the issue of legalization back to individual states.

Oklahoma’s four abortion clinics have already stopped providing abortion services in anticipation of the ban.

Earlier this month, Oklahoma enacted another bill that banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, as opposed to fertilization. Like the latest measure, it relies on civil lawsuits for enforcement.

The enforcement provision in both bills was modeled after Texas legislation that took effect in September and stopped clinics from performing nearly all abortions in that state.

Before the passage of the Oklahoma laws, it had become a destination for Texas women seeking abortions after six weeks. The restrictions in Oklahoma have now expanded a region of the country where there is little to no legal abortion access, forcing patients to travel to states such as Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado to end their pregnancies.

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Sandra Maler and Tom Hogue)

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