Democratic US Senator Padilla forced to ground, handcuffed at Noem news conference in LA
Democratic U.S. Senator Alex Padilla was shoved out of a room, forced to the ground and handcuffed by security after attempting to ask a question at a Thursday press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. "I am Senator Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary," Padilla said during the press conference where Noem was discussing protests in Los Angeles over President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.
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Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
'No specific power for President over election': Federal judge blocks Trump's executive order on voting laws; says it oversteps presidential powers
A federal judge on Friday blocked President Donald Trump's controversial executive order aimed at reshaping US election procedures, ruling that it likely violates the Constitution and infringes on states' authority over elections. US District Judge Denise J. Casper in Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction against the March 25 directive, siding with a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general who argued that the order was an unconstitutional attempt to override state election laws. 'The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,' Judge Casper wrote in her ruling. Trump's order sought to enforce several sweeping changes to federal elections, including mandating documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, rejecting mail-in ballots not received by Election Day, and linking federal election grants to states' compliance with the new rules. The states challenging the order said it 'usurps the States' constitutional power and seeks to amend election law by fiat.' The Biden administration, which inherited the litigation, did not support Trump's order. However, Trump and his allies have maintained the directive is necessary to secure elections, with the White House at the time defending it as 'standing up for free, fair and honest elections.' Casper said the states had shown a 'likelihood of success' in their legal challenges and acknowledged their concerns about the administrative and financial burden the order would impose. She also noted that federal registration forms already require voters to affirm their US citizenship and that noncitizen voting is already illegal under federal law. This marks the second judicial blow to Trump's order. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., had earlier blocked parts of the directive, including the proof-of-citizenship mandate. The order was rooted in Trump's long-standing claims of voter fraud — assertions that have repeatedly been debunked by independent reviews and multiple state-led investigations. After losing the 2020 election, Trump has continued to promote baseless allegations about election integrity, including false claims about voting machines and illegal ballots. Critics argue the executive order threatens to disenfranchise voters, particularly in states like Oregon and Washington that rely heavily on mail-in voting. In a separate legal challenge, these states pointed out that the order would bar the counting of hundreds of thousands of ballots postmarked on time but received after Election Day. In Washington alone, more than 300,000 such ballots arrived late in 2024. Trump's order had found support among Republican election officials in some states, who said it could help prevent voter fraud and provide access to federal data for purging outdated voter rolls. But constitutional experts have warned that the president lacks the authority to impose such nationwide election rules — a power reserved for states, with Congress able to intervene only in federal elections. During a court hearing earlier this month, Department of Justice attorney Bridget O'Hickey argued the order aimed to create consistent standards across states and dismissed concerns about cost or feasibility as speculative. She also suggested that late-arriving ballots might be tampered with, although Judge Casper noted that such ballots already require a postmark before or on Election Day, and any received afterward with later postmarks are not counted. Friday's ruling leaves the future of Trump's order uncertain and bolsters state officials' efforts to maintain control over their own election procedures.
NDTV
3 hours ago
- NDTV
Trump Finds Victories At The Supreme Court In Rush Of Emergency Cases
Washington: Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, his administration has bombarded the U.S. Supreme Court with emergency requests seeking immediate intervention to free up his initiatives stymied by lower courts. The strategy is paying off. Once a rarely used pathway to the nation's top judicial body, its emergency docket now bulges with an unprecedented volume of requests for rapid attention by the justices in clashes over Mr Trump's far-reaching executive actions. As the Republican president tests the limits of executive power under the U.S. Constitution, Mr Trump's administration has made 19 emergency applications to the court in less than five months, with one other such application filed by lawyers for migrants held in Texas who were on the verge of deportation. The court already has acted in 13 of these cases. It has ruled in Mr Trump's favor nine times, partially in his favor once, against him twice and postponed action in one case that ultimately was declared moot. Mr Trump's wins have given him the green light to implement contentious policies while litigation challenging their legality continues in lower courts. The court, for instance, let Mr Trump revoke the temporary legal status granted for humanitarian reasons to hundreds of thousands of migrants, implement his ban on transgender people in the U.S. military and take actions to downsize the federal workforce, among other policies. The court's 6-3 conservative majority includes three justice who Mr Trump appointed during his 2017-2021 first presidential term. Six more emergency requests by the administration remain pending at the court and one other emergency request was withdrawn. Among the requests still to be acted upon are Mr Trump's bid to broadly enforce his order to restrict birthright citizenship, to deport migrants to countries other than their own including politically unstable South Sudan and to proceed with mass federal layoffs called "reductions in force." Emergency applications to the court involving Mr Trump policies have averaged about one per week since he began his second term. His administration's applications this year match the total brought during Mr Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden's four years as president. "The Trump administration uses every legal basis at its disposal to implement the agenda the American people voted for," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Reuters. "The Supreme Court will continue to have to step in to correct erroneous legal rulings that district court judges enter solely to block the president's policies." Strong Cases The administration has "not sought Supreme Court review in all the cases it could, and part of the story may be that the government is appealing what it thinks are strong cases for it," said Sarah Konsky, director of the University of Chicago Law School's Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic. Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck, who wrote a book about the court's emergency docket, said in a blog post on Thursday that the results favoring Mr Trump should not be attributed only to the court's ideological makeup. At a time when Mr Trump and his allies have verbally attacked judges who have impeded aspects of his sweeping agenda, there is a "very real possibility that at least some of the justices ... are worried about how much capital they have to expend in confrontations with President Trump," Vladeck wrote. The onslaught of emergency applications has diverted the attention of the justices as they near the end of the court's current term. June is usually their busiest month as they rush to finish writing opinions in major cases. For instance, they have yet to decide the fate of Tennessee's Republican-backed ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Among the emergency-docket cases, the court most recently on June 6 allowed Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, a key player in his drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to personal data on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration systems and blocked a watchdog group from receiving records on DOGE operations. The court also has allowed Mr Trump to cut millions of dollars in teacher training grants and to fire thousands of probationary federal employees. On the other side of the ledger, the court has expressed reservations about whether the administration is treating migrants fairly, as required under the Constitution's guarantee of due process. On May 16, it said procedures used by the administration to deport migrants from a Texas detention center under Mr Trump's invocation of a 1798 law historically used only in wartime failed basic constitutional requirements. The justices also declined to let the administration withhold payment to foreign aid organizations for work already performed for the government. Questions Of Transparency Mr Trump turned to the emergency docket during his first term as well. His prior administration filed 41 such applications to the court. During the 16 years prior, the presidential administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama filed just eight combined, according to Vladeck. The court has quickly decided weighty matters using the emergency docket in a way often at odds with its traditional practice of considering full case records from lower courts, receiving at least two rounds of written briefings and then holding oral arguments before rendering a detailed written ruling. It is sometimes called the "shadow docket" because cases often are acted upon without the usual level of transparency or consideration. Some recent decisions on the emergency docket have come with brief opinions explaining the court's reasoning. But typically they are issued as bare and unsigned orders offering no rationale. Konsky noted that the justices sometimes designate emergency cases for regular review with arguments and full briefing. "But in any event, the emergency docket raises complicated questions that are likely to continue to play out in the coming years," Konsky said. Among Mr Trump's emergency applications this year, oral arguments were held only in the birthright citizenship dispute. The liberal justices, often findings themselves on the losing side, have expressed dismay. Once again "this court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent in the Social Security data case. "The risk of error increases when this court decides cases -as here - with barebones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the teacher grants case. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito defended the emergency docket in 2021, saying there is "nothing new or shadowy" about the process and that it has wrongly been portrayed as sinister.
Deccan Herald
3 hours ago
- Deccan Herald
US judge blocks Trump administration from overhauling federal elections
US District Judge Denise Casper in Boston issued a preliminary injunction at the behest of 19 Democratic-led states who argued the president lacked the authority to mandate changes to federal elections and the states' voting procedures.
