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How a conservative Supreme Court turned back decades of Civil Rights precedents in a single year

Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades. In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality. Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful. Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of...

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25 million women now live in states with abortion bans or tighter restrictions after fall of Roe

More than one year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded a five-decade-old right to abortion, prompting a seismic shift in debates about politics, values, freedom, and fairness. Twenty-five million women of childbearing age now live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before the ruling. Decisions about the law are largely in the hands of state lawmakers and courts. Most Republican-led states have restricted abortion. Fourteen ban abortion in most cases at any point in pregnancy. Twenty Democratic-leaning states have protected access to abortion. Here is a look at what’s changed since the...

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Constitutional revolution: Why a rightwing SCOTUS supermajority can rewrite our understanding of law

By Morgan Marietta, Professor of Political Science, University of Texas at Arlington In a 2006 episode of the television show “Boston Legal,” conservative lawyer Denny Crane asserted that he had a constitutional right to carry a concealed firearm: “And the Supreme Court is going to say so, just as soon as they overturn Roe v. Wade.” That was a joke, an unimaginable event, when the show aired 17 years ago. Then in 2022, the court announced both changes, shifting the butt of a joke to the law of the land in a brief span of years – and signaling...

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U.S. Supreme Court likely to decide DACA’s fate after federal judge again declares the program illegal

While a federal judge on September 13 declared illegal a revised version of a federal policy that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, he declined to order an immediate end to the program and the protections it offers to recipients. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen agreed with Texas and eight other states suing to stop the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. The judge’s ruling was ultimately expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, sending the program’s fate before the high court for a third time....

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Wisconsin Senate uses false claims by election deniers to justify illegal vote to fire nonpartisan official

The Republican-gerrymandered Wisconsin Senate voted on September 14 to fire the battleground state’s nonpartisan top elections official ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Democrats said the vote was held improperly and that lawmakers do not have the authority to oust Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe. The issue is expected to end in a legal battle. The fight over who will lead the elections agency stems from persistent lies about the 2020 election. The weaponized right-wing effort has created instability ahead of the 2024 presidential race for the state’s more than 1,800 local clerks who actually run elections. Wolfe...

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What Billionaires gain from funding waves of Anti-Trans and Anti-Black History political movements

There’s a popular internet meme going around that says: “Say you’re in a room with 400 people. Thirty-six of them don’t have health insurance. Forty-eight of them live in poverty. Eighty-five are illiterate. Ninety have untreated mental illnesses. And every day, at least one person is shot. But two of them are trans, so you decide ruining their lives is your top priority.” Consider some of the basic realities of life in modern America: Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1000 in co-pays...

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