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  • CNN projects Republican Carolyn Carluccio will advance to fall Pennsylvania Supreme Court race against Democrat Daniel McCaffery | CNN Politics

    CNN projects Republican Carolyn Carluccio will advance to fall Pennsylvania Supreme Court race against Democrat Daniel McCaffery | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Republican voters in Pennsylvania made a candidate supported by the GOP establishment their nominee for an open state Supreme Court seat, rejecting another Republican contender more closely aligned with former President Donald Trump’s wing of the party.

    CNN projected the victory of Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Carluccio in Tuesday’s primary, which marks a rebound for the more traditional elements of the GOP in this presidential battleground state. She will defeat Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, who briefly halted the certification of the state’s election results in 2020, and had the backing of a key Trump ally, Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano in this election.

    Mastriano had pushed the falsehood in his failed 2022 bid for governor that election fraud led to Trump’s 2020 loss in the state. Last year, the Trump-endorsed Mastriano bested the Republican field to win his party’s nomination in the governor’s race, only to suffer a double-digit defeat to Democrat Josh Shapiro in the general election.

    Carluccio now will face Democrat Superior Court Judge Daniel McCaffery in the fall.

    The Republican and Democratic nominees are vying for an open seat on Pennsylvania’s high court, following the death of former Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat, last year.

    The outcome of November’s election will not tip the partisan balance on the high court, where Democrats currently hold a 4-2 majority on the seven-member body, but it could narrow the gap and start to lay the foundation for a shift in power in future election cycles, experts say.

    “It could create a situation where, very shortly, the partisan balance on this court could be up for grabs,” said Douglas Keith, who researches judicial elections at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.

    State supreme courts are the final arbiters on key issues, ranging from election ground rules to abortion policies. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has upheld the state’s no-excuse mail voting law, and last year selected the state’s congressional map, breaking an impasse between the then-Republican controlled legislature and the state’s Democratic governor.

    Justices on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court serve 10-year terms. After the first election, they run in so-called retention elections without opponents.

    Much of the attention in the Pennsylvania contest centered on the GOP primary between Carluccio and McCullough, who halted certification of the 2020 results – including Joe Biden’s victory in the state – in a ruling that was swiftly overturned by the state Supreme Court.

    McCullough, who lost a 2021 bid for the Supreme Court, calls herself “a strict constitutionalist judge,” and touted her rulings against pandemic restrictions and the state’s mail-in voting law in the campaign.

    But Carluccio had the backing of the state Republican Party and a national GOP group that’s active in judicial elections, the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Judicial Fairness Initiative, which has weighed in with $600,000 in advertising to boost Carluccio.

    In a statement to CNN this week, Carluccio said she would leave “personal and political opinions at the door and look at each case without bias and only determine the constitutionality of what’s before me.”

    Carluccio said she hasn’t questioned the outcome of any election, but she said she is concerned by what she called the “conflicting, and sometimes unclear,” decisions on the state’s mail-in voting law in recent years by the state Supreme Court.

    In 2019, the state legislatures passed a no-excuse mail-in voting law, known as Act 77, with bipartisan support. But it has become the target of criticism from some Republicans after it was employed in the contentious 2020 election that saw Biden flip the state. The high court has weighed in on aspects of the law multiple times. In 2020, for instance, the court ruled that ballots in two counties with missing dates on the outside of the ballot return envelope could be counted. In the 2022 election, however, the court ordered that mail ballots with missing or improper dates on the return envelopes should be kept out of the count and deadlocked on the underlying legal questions.

    “Our election laws must be applied consistently across all counties, regardless of the election year,” Carluccio said in her statement. “And, when part of our electorate has concerns about the integrity of our elections, rather than dismiss their concerns, the response should be bold transparency in the administration of our elections.”

    The modest spending in the under-the-radar Pennsylvania high court race stood sharp contrast to the record-setting spending that candidates and outside groups plowed into a Wisconsin Supreme Court election last month that, in the end, flipped control of that state’s high court to liberals. (A Kantar Media/CMAG analysis for the Brennan Center found that the ad spending for the Wisconsin high court seat hit $28.8 million as of early April, and some estimates put the likely final tally of all spending in that election even higher.)

    In an interview ahead of Tuesday’s election, Penn State political scientist Michael Nelson said the GOP primary represented a “good opportunity to get a sense of where the energy in the party is, what segment of the party is able to get their people to go on the polls on a random Tuesday in May when there hasn’t been wall-to-wall television advertising.”

    “Given that the Mastriano wing of the Republican Party was so dominant in the elections last fall, it will be interesting to see whether they can keep up that momentum or whether the standard-issue conservative wing of the party is able to rebound,” he added.

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  • Judge gives US government one week to handle request for Prince Harry’s visa records | CNN Politics

    Judge gives US government one week to handle request for Prince Harry’s visa records | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge has given the Department of Homeland Security until next Tuesday to decide how it will handle a conservative think tank’s request for Prince Harry’s US immigration records.

    The Heritage Foundation has asked the US government via the Freedom of Information Act to see his visa application, citing his admission of past recreational drug use in his memoir. The group is questioning whether immigration officials properly granted Prince Harry’s application, since admission of past drug use can be grounds to reject a visa application.

    At a hearing Tuesday in Washington, DC, federal judge Carl Nichols gave DHS until June 13 to determine whether or not it will expedite or respond to a request for the records.

    Several agencies within the department, including US Border Patrol, have denied the FOIA requests, but the agency’s headquarters has not yet made a determination.

    In court filings, DHS has noted that the US Customs and Border Protection agency originally denied the requests from Heritage because the group did not have Prince Harry’s authorization or consent to release the information.

    “A person’s visa … is confidential,” DHS attorney John Bardo said in court Tuesday.

    DHS attorneys have also said that an injunction to expedite the FOIA requests is not appropriate in the case since Heritage has, among other things, not shown how they will suffer irreparable harm if the information is not quickly released.

    Attorneys for the Heritage Foundation see the case as part of a larger effort to uncover non-compliance with the law by DHS in different areas – including accusations from Republican lawmakers that DHS is “deliberately refusing to enforce the Country’s immigration laws and is responsible for the current crisis at the border,” court filings read.

    When asked about the privacy aspect of their records request, attorney Samuel Dewey, who represents Heritage, said Prince Harry’s privacy on the issue of past drug use has been “extraordinarily diminished” given his public remarks on the subject.

    “We’re only focused on the specific issue that’s drawn all the press attention: the drug use,” Dewey said. “He’s talked about, he’s written about it extensively. He has waved any privacy interest he has in his drug use. He has bragged about it (in his memoir) and sold that.”

    To CNN, Dewey added: “This is a case that concerns Prince Harry, but what it’s focused on is DHS’s conduct.”

    Separately on Tuesday, Prince Harry testified in a case in London against the publisher of a UK tabloid, alleging the media organization used illegal methods in their reporting, namely by hacking his phone.

    It was the first time in over a century that a member of the British royal family has testified in court.

    This story and headline have been updated.

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  • Voting rights advocates in the South emboldened by Supreme Court win | CNN Politics

    Voting rights advocates in the South emboldened by Supreme Court win | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    With a sense of relief that the conservative Supreme Court did not use a major Alabama redistricting case to further gut the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates and election attorneys are preparing for a new flood of redistricting litigation lawsuits challenging political maps – especially in the South – they say discriminate against minorities.

    In the 5-4 case decided Thursday, Alabama must now draw a second majority-Black US congressional district after Republicans were sued by African American voters over a redistricting plan for the 27% percent Black state that made White voters the majority in six of the seven districts.

    The six White majority districts are represented by Republicans; the Black majority district is represented by a Democrat.

    “I don’t think it’s going to stop Republicans from drawing racist maps,” Aunna Dennis, executive director of the voting rights group Common Cause, told CNN. “But I think that this empowers those of us pushing back and fighting that.”

    The majority opinion – written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by the court’s three liberals and, in most parts, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh – effectively maintained the status quo around how courts should approach Voting Rights Act lawsuits that allege a legislative map discriminates by race.

    By letting old precedent around the Voting Rights Act to stand in the case, called Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court has likely emboldened voting rights advocates to bring cases they previously thought would have been doomed.

    Several election law attorneys and voting rights advocates have suggested to CNN they believe the decision could have a ripple effect across the South, in states like Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas where cases claiming Section 2 violations are already working through the courts.

    According to the Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning voting rights media platform that tracks election litigation, there are 31 active federal cases involving Voting Rights Act redistricting claims similar to those in the Alabama case.

    “I suspect that there are a number of states with lawyers who were considering filing a lawsuit similar to the Milligan lawsuit, but they held off because the prospects of how everyone thought Milligan would go were so dim. But now, you’re going to have a whole range of suits filed,” said Alabama voting rights attorney J.S. “Chris” Christie, who filed one of the two lawsuits that were before the justices in the Milligan case.

    “Some of those will win, and some of them won’t. All redistricting suits are not the same,” Christie said, noting that Kavanaugh did not join an important part of Roberts’ opinion, depriving that section of a majority.

    Still, he said, “Lawyers who file these types of lawsuits are going to be encouraged and are going to pursue those cases aggressively, knowing that the Voting Rights Act precedents are there.”

    The ruling was a shock. The right-leaning high court, sometimes in decisions penned by Roberts himself, had been on a spree of landmark rulings over the last several years that had whittled down the scope of the Voting Rights Act. And in the flurry of emergency litigation last year ahead of the 2022 midterms, the Supreme Court repeatedly put on hold lower court rulings – including in the Alabama case – that would have ordered the redrawing of political maps ahead of last year’s elections, helping Republicans to narrowly reclaim the US House.

    That meant that, at least in Alabama, the election was carried out under a redistricting plan that the Supreme Court has now affirmed to be likely unlawful.

    “The fact remains that the Supreme Court previously allowed the same map that they just determined unconstitutionally, and systemically diluted Black votes be used in the 2022 election,” the Congressional Black Caucus said in a statement.

    In Alabama, lower courts said early last year that the state’s congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power. The courts ordered it redrawn in a way that was expected to produce a second majority-Black district, which would have shifted the partisan makeup of the state’s congressional delegation from 6-1 to 5-2.

    But, in February 2022, the Supreme Court put those decisions on hold until the justices could hear and decide the case themselves.

    At the heart of the dispute in the Alabama case was the way that, under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, race was used to determine if a map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting procedures “not equally open to participation by members” of a protected class, like racial minorities. Alabama was putting forward an argument for a supposedly “race-blind” approach to VRA redistricting compliance, that if endorsed, would have defanged the provision.

    Already, the Supreme Court led by Roberts had gutted a separate provision of the VRA that required certain jurisdictions (including Alabama and other states in the South) with a history of racially discriminatory voting policies to get federal approval for the maps that they drew.

    The Supreme Court’s emergency move last year to allow the Republican-drawn Alabama map to stay in place had cascading effects in lawsuits across the country.

    Some cases, like a challenge brought to Alabama’s state legislative redistricting plan, were put on hold.

    In a Georgia case that concerned both the congressional and state legislative redistricting plans, a federal judge said that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in at least some of the districts they were challenging, but he declined to grant the preliminary injunction, in part citing the Supreme Court’s emergency order.

    The Supreme Court, meanwhile, also froze a lower court order in a legal challenge brought against Louisiana’s congressional map that made similar arguments as the Milligan case, as Louisiana legislators had drawn just one majority-Black district of the six districts in the 33% percent Black state.

    The justices paused the case, where a federal judge was preparing to redraw the Louisiana map if the Republican lawmakers refused to do so, and said they were taking up the lawsuit but putting it on hold until the Milligan case was decided.

    Now the challengers’ lawyers in that case are anticipating that the Supreme Court will send it back to lower courts, where they were poised to prevail under the approach to VRA redistricting cases that the justices have now left undisturbed.

    Cases in Texas, Mississippi and elsewhere that inched ahead while the Milligan case was pending will go to trial without the threat that the challengers would need to prove their case under a drastically different Section 2 standard.

    “If anything, we no longer need to make adjustments that we had potentially been preparing for because the state of the law remains unchanged,” said Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Sarah Chen, whose group is involved in several challenges to Texas maps, including a lawsuit over Galveston County’s redistricting plan.

    “The Supreme Court did not endorse the radical changes proposed by Alabama in their arguments, the same changes that are also endorsed by opposing counsel in this Galveston redistricting matter,” Chen added.

    While challenges to statewide maps are what get the most national attention, the ruling’s effect on how the VRA is applied to local races like county commission elections and school board seats “is really going to impact voters’ everyday lives,” according to Christie, the Alabama voting rights attorney, who said that Thursday’s opinion will be “huge” in a newly filed challenge to a county commission map in the state.

    “Attorneys who file these types of lawsuits are going to be encouraged to pursue these cases knowing that the VRA precedent is there,” he said.

    Even before they get into a courtroom, voting rights advocates see the Milligan ruling as valuable for discouraging state and local map drawers from diminishing the political power of communities of color, as it squelched expectations that the Supreme Court was about to make VRA challenges more difficult to bring.

    “I am disappointed in today’s Supreme Court opinion but it remains the commitment of the Secretary of State’s Office to comply with all applicable election laws,” Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, the defendant in the Alabama case, said in a statement after the ruling.

    In North Carolina, voting rights advocates had been reeling from a major defeat with the state Supreme Court recently ruling that North Carolina courts couldn’t police partisan gerrymandering. (Litigation over the state’s congressional plan is also before the Supreme Court in a legal dispute that does not concern the Voting Rights Act). They are finding a silver lining in that, thanks to Thursday’s ruling, the GOP legislators will be redrawing North Carolina’s political maps knowing Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters remain in force.

    “We would hope that they would really take this decision to heart that they would make a genuine good faith effort to comply with Section 2,” said Hilary Harris Klein, the senior counsel for voting rights with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.

    Thursday’s ruling, said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “puts state legislatures and local redistricting bodies on notice that the Voting Rights Act is here to stay and if they deny communities of color the representation they deserve, that they will face lawsuits.”

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  • Microsoft faces off against US government over Activision deal, with top execs set to testify | CNN Business

    Microsoft faces off against US government over Activision deal, with top execs set to testify | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft

    (MSFT)     and the video game giant Activision Blizzard

    (ATVI)     will face off Thursday against the US government in a high-stakes battle over one of the largest technology acquisitions in history.

    The showdown in federal court will have the CEOs of both companies taking the stand to defend their $69 billion merger against claims that the combination could violate US antitrust law and harm millions of consumers.

    The outcome of the fight will shape the future of the multibillion-dollar games industry. It will also impact enormously popular gaming franchises such as “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft,” which Activision owns and would be transferred to Microsoft under the deal.

    Also testifying will be the top financial executives from both companies; senior leaders from Microsoft’s Xbox division; the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer; and a vocal critic of the deal, Sony gaming CEO Jim Ryan.

    The days-long affair begins Thursday and is scheduled to run through next week.

    In bringing the case, the Federal Trade Commission is asking a US district court judge for an injunction that would temporarily halt the deal. That would keep the companies from closing their merger, at least until the FTC’s in-house court rules in a separate proceeding on whether the acquisition is anticompetitive.

    But this week’s fight over a preliminary injunction may prove decisive for the deal as a whole. Microsoft has said that a victory for the FTC at this stage “will effectively block the transaction” overall.

    In this hearing, the FTC does not need to prove that the deal is anticompetitive. It just needs to show that the agency would be likely to succeed in doing so if the case moves ahead, and that otherwise its ability to enforce US antitrust law would be harmed.

    The clash comes as Microsoft and Activision face down a contractual July 18 deadline to consummate the deal. Failure to close, or any permanent court order to block the merger, could force Microsoft to pay a $3 billion breakup fee to Activision, according to the deal’s terms.

    The FTC lawsuit has put Microsoft under the harshest antitrust scrutiny in the US in more than two decades. It also could be a crucial test for the FTC at a time when it’s trying to rein in the tech industry broadly, with mixed success.

    In its initial challenge to the merger in its in-house court last year, the FTC alleged the deal would harm competition by turning Microsoft into the world’s third-largest video game publisher — allowing it to raise video game prices with impunity, restrict Activision titles from rival platforms and harm game quality and player experiences on consoles and gaming services.

    Some of those concerns have also been raised internationally. The UK government has challenged the acquisition, and the New Zealand government on Tuesday warned that the deal could be anticompetitive.

    Microsoft has sought to address the concerns by hammering out multi-year licensing agreements with competitors such as Nintendo and Nvidia to ensure that their platforms will continue to receive popular titles if the deal goes through.

    The company has also put forth an 11-point pledge to keep its platforms open, a commitment that applies not only to the Activision Blizzard deal but to virtually all of Microsoft’s gaming business going forward.

    Last month, Microsoft said the European Union would require it to license Activision games “automatically” to competing cloud gaming services as a condition of allowing the merger to proceed in the EU. That commitment, Microsoft said, “will apply globally and will empower millions of consumers worldwide to play these games on any device they choose.”

    Although EU regulators have said the concession addresses their concerns, officials in the US and the UK are continuing with their legal opposition to the deal.

    The standoff particularly focuses attention on FTC Chair Lina Khan, a tech industry critic who has argued for litigating difficult cases and for introducing novel legal theories to help adapt US antitrust law to the digital age.

    Khan won a significant victory last year when the FTC forced Nvidia to abandon its attempted acquisition of the chipmaker Arm. The deal would have combined two companies in adjacent industries in what is known as a vertical merger, a type of deal that is rarely blocked in the United States.

    But Khan also suffered a setback when the FTC unsuccessfully tried to block Facebook-parent Meta from acquiring Within Unlimited, a virtual reality startup. The FTC had argued that the acquisition was an attempt by Meta to quash competition in the nascent VR industry, but earlier this year, a federal judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction of the kind the FTC now seeks against Microsoft. The FTC dropped its case against Meta soon after.

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  • Plaintiffs in high-profile redistricting case urge judges to toss out Alabama’s controversial congressional map | CNN Politics

    Plaintiffs in high-profile redistricting case urge judges to toss out Alabama’s controversial congressional map | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Civil rights groups representing plaintiffs in a high-profile congressional redistricting case are urging a federal court in Alabama to reject a controversial new map crafted by the Republican-dominated legislature, saying it perpetuates a violation of the nation’s landmark voting rights law.

    In a late-night court filing Friday, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and multiple attorneys asked a three-judge panel to direct an official to devise a new map that complies with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

    The plaintiffs in the case said legislators who drew and approved the maps didn’t comply with a court mandate to create a second congressional district where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.

    Instead, they argued, lawmakers were “focused on pleasing national leaders whose objective is to maintain the Republican Party’s slim majority in the US House.”

    State officials, who have defended the map as fair, have until August 4 to respond to the new filings.

    The dispute has drawn national attention after critics accused Alabama legislators of openly defying the US Supreme Court and its directive to give Black voters more political power in the state.

    And the outcome of the legal battle in Alabama – along with court skirmishes in several other states over congressional redistricting – could help determine whether Republicans retain their slim majority in the House after next year’s elections.

    In this case, the Republican supermajority in the Alabama legislature approved a new map on July 21, weeks after the US Supreme Court said that an existing map – with just one majority-Black congressional district out of seven in a state where Black residents make up 27% of the population – likely violated the decades-old federal voting law by diluting the voting power of Black residents. The high court, by a 5-4 majority, affirmed a lower court decision that had ordered the state to redraw the congressional maps to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”

    But the map approved this month and signed into law by Alabama’s GOP Gov. Kay Ivey instead boosted the share of Black voters in the majority-White 2nd Congressional District from roughly 30% to nearly 40%. It also reduced the Black voting-age population in the state’s only majority-Black district to around 50% from about 55%.

    Voting rights experts say the state has a history of racially polarized voting, making it harder for candidates favored by Black voters to win in a district where Black residents account for less than 50% of the voting-age population.

    “The new CD2 … does not provide Black voters a realistic opportunity to election their preferred candidate in any but the most extreme situations,” the plaintiffs argued in the new filings.

    In Alabama, most Black voters have supported Democrats. If the federal judges approve a map with a second majority-Black district, that could result in two Democrats representing the state in the House.

    House Republicans hold just a narrow edge on Democrats, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alabama case has given Democrats fresh optimism that their side will prevail in legal fights aimed at increasing the share of Black voters in congressional districts in Louisiana, Georgia and several other states.

    In a sign of the high political stakes, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has weighed in on the debate and told reporters that he spoke to Alabama lawmakers as they met for the special session to redraw the map to comply with the court order.

    The Justice Department filed a so-called “statement of interest” on Friday but did not side with any party in the dispute. The agency outlined factors the judges should consider in its analysis and called on the court to impose its own map if it determines that the one drawn by lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act.

    A court hearing on objections to the legislature’s map is set for August 14.

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