NH Supreme Court rejects Dover and Rochester's 2020 redistricting complaint
Dover, Rochester, and 10 residents filed a lawsuit against the State of New Hampshire and Secretary of State David Scanlan alleging that the state's maps violated the New Hampshire Constitution. (Photo by Dave Cummings/New Hampshire Bulletin)
The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the House district maps created by the Republican-controlled state Legislature in 2020 are not illegal, despite allegations made by the cities of Dover and Rochester and a number of residents from throughout New Hampshire.
In 2022, Dover, Rochester, and 10 residents filed a lawsuit against the State of New Hampshire and Secretary of State David Scanlan alleging that the state's maps violated the New Hampshire Constitution. They argued that the constitution requires Dover Ward 4, Rochester Ward 5, New Ipswich, Wilton, Hooksett, Lee, Barrington, and several other towns to have their own state House districts because their populations are large enough to warrant them. The maps currently in use do not give those wards and towns their own districts. They also alleged the map's population configuration deviates more than 10%, which is a violation of the 14th Amendment's one-person-one-vote requirement. They ask the court to forbid the state from using the maps and to ostensibly fix them. They provided a map they deemed to be more legal.
In 2024, a trial court in Strafford County ruled against Dover and Rochester, agreeing with the state and Scanlan that creating maps where every city, town, or ward with the necessary population had their own districts would be impossible to accomplish. It also ruled previous case law determined that presumptive violations of the one-person-one-vote requirement may be justified by efforts to make districts compact, respect municipal boundaries, preserve the cores of prior districts, and avoid contests between incumbent representatives. Citing a previous court decision, the court declared that 'a legislatively enacted redistricting plan 'is not unconstitutional simply because some 'resourceful mind' has come up with a better one.''
Dover, Rochester, and the rest of the plaintiffs promptly appealed the ruling and the state Supreme Court considered the case. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that because they did not sufficiently show that the Legislature had 'no rational or legitimate basis' to enact the map, they denied the appeal.
'We are pleased that the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state's redistricting plan for the State House of Representatives,' Attorney General John Formella, who represented the state, said in a statement Wednesday. 'Today's decision reaffirms the Court's prior precedent recognizing the Legislature's broad discretion in the area of redistricting and recognizes that the Legislature must balance complex constitutional requirements when determining the most appropriate map. We are delighted that the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's finding that the Legislature acted within its constitutional authority, and I thank our litigation and appeals teams for their excellent work in achieving this important outcome.'
Jennifer Perez, Dover's deputy city attorney wrote in an email to the Bulletin, 'We are disappointed in the result but respect the Court's determination.' Officials from Rochester did not immediately respond to the Bulletin's requests for comment.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Who would want to have babies under a Trump administration? Not me.
Despite declarations that something needs to be done about the declining birth rate in the United States, neither President Donald Trump nor the Republican Party has the desire to protect pregnant people. If they did, the Trump administration wouldn't have made its latest move to restrict abortion nationwide. On Tuesday, June 3, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rescinded a Biden-era policy that directed hospitals to provide emergency abortions if it was needed to stabilize a pregnant patient. The guidance and communications on it apparently 'do not reflect the policy of this Administration.' I, like many people who support abortion rights, know what this will lead to. It means more pregnant people will die. Does that reflect the policy of the administration? The Biden policy was implemented in 2022, following the fall of Roe v. Wade, and argued that hospitals receiving Medicare funding had to comply with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The former administration argued that this included providing emergency abortions when they were needed to stabilize a patient, even in states that had severe abortion restrictions. Opinion: A brain dead pregnant Georgia woman is a horror story. It's Republicans' fault. This wasn't entirely a surprise. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could ban virtually all abortions in the state, including abortions that would have occurred under the old EMTALA guidelines. Still, it's terrifying to see this crucial policy eliminated. It's already dangerous to be pregnant in the United States. Our maternal mortality rate is much higher than in other wealthy countries. Same with our infant mortality rate. This will only exacerbate these tragedies. In states with abortion bans, the risks are even greater. A study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that people living in states with abortion bans were twice as likely to die during or shortly after childbirth. This is also backed by anecdotal evidence, including the 2022 deaths of two women in Georgia after the state passed a six-week ban. A different study found that infant mortality rates increased in states with severe restrictions on abortion, including an increase in deaths due to congenital anomalies. The Trump administration does not care about what is medically necessary to save someone's life. They don't care about whether the children supposedly saved by rescinding this policy will grow up without their mother. They care about their perceived moral superiority. They care about controlling women. Why would anybody want to have a child under that Republican way of thinking? Opinion: We're worrying about the wrong thing. Low birth rate isn't the crisis: Child care is. I want to say I'm surprised that the Trump administration would allow women in need of emergency care to die. Yet this is clearly aligned with the Republican stance on abortion, just like it's aligned with the actions that the party has taken to make it harder for women to access necessary care. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Whether you like it or not, abortion is a necessary part of health care. It saves lives. Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, laid it out plainly. 'Women have died because they couldn't get the lifesaving abortion care they needed,' she said in a statement. 'The Trump administration is willing to let pregnant people die, and that is exactly what we can expect." Again, this is the administration that wants young women like me to have children and improve the country's birth rate. This is an administration that claims to care about women and children. I know I wouldn't want to have a child while Trump continues to make it unsafe to be pregnant and give birth. I hate that this is the reality. Follow USA TODAY columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter, @sara__pequeno You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump just made healthcare more dangerous for pregnant women | Opinion
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Musk goes scorched earth: Trump will cause recession, implies he should be impeached
Elon Musk and Donald Trump's alliance continues to publicly implode, with the world's richest man taking aim at the president's signature economic policy — tariffs — and implying he should be removed from office. 'The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year,' Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. It marks Musk's biggest criticism yet of one of Trump's most beloved policies. Musk also took aim at one of the president's most-hated political maneuvers: impeachment. Responding to another post about who would win in a fight between Musk and Trump — which also calls for Trump to be impeached and for Vice President JD Vance to replace him — Musk simply responded: 'Yes.' Trump was impeached twice by a Democratic-controlled House during his first term, but was acquitted both times by the Senate. Musk — who's been launching back and forth attacks with Trump all day Thursday — has never been a big fan of Trump's sweeping tariff plans, and publicly ridiculed Peter Navarro, one of the public faces of Trump's trade war, while he was still a government employee. The tariffs are set to have huge implications for Musk's car company Tesla, because of the rising costs of materials and manufacturing abroad. The car company's stocks took a dive following the tariff announcements, and were also impacted by Musk's growing absence from the company during his time as Trump's special adviser while leading the Department of Government Efficiency. That said, Musk has called Tesla the 'least affected' car company from the tariffs, due to supply chains being split between Europe, China and North America. But the Tesla CEO hasn't shied away from bashing Trump's trade advisers in the past — even labeling Navarro a 'moron.' In addition to railing against the tariffs, Musk has spent the last three days rallying against the administration's "big beautiful bill," which he called "disgusting" and "pork-filled" in a flood of X posts — urging Senate Republicans to reject the mega-funding legislation. Trump hit back early Thursday, saying he was 'disappointed' by Musk's comments. 'Elon and I had a great relationship,' Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. 'I don't know if we will anymore.' Upon return to their respective social media sites, the two turned up the heat. What has since ensued has been a barrage of X posts from the billionaire and corresponding Truth Social posts from the president that have widened a chasm between the two — who just last Friday stood side by side at the Oval Office on Musk's last day in the White House, as Trump thanked him for his service. Now, Trump said Musk has a case of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' a taunt usually reserved for his political opponents. He's also floating ending all of Musk's federal government contracts including with his company SpaceX — one of NASA's biggest contractors. The attacks escalated when Musk suggested that Trump would not have won the 2024 election without his help, and that Republicans would have been outnumbered in Congress. 'Such ingratitude,' Musk wrote on X, referencing the hundreds of millions he poured into Trump's and other GOP campaigns. Musk had a poll running at the top of his X feed asking people about forming a third party. He had suggested on Tuesday, when he took his first big shot at the Republican megabill, that he could fund campaigns to primary and potentially unseat Republicans that backed the legislation. The SpaceX founder then dropped what he described as the 'really big bomb.' Musk suggested that Trump's name appears in records of the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and said the records 'have not been made public' to conceal that fact. In February, the Department of Justice released what it called the 'first phase' of documents related to the Epstein investigation, which has been a fixation of some of the president's supporters. It has long been public that Trump — along with other prominent figures, like Bill Clinton — are referenced in documents released in court cases surrounding Epstein. But Trump is not accused of any wrongdoing linked to Epstein. Trump has tied Musk's criticism of the 'big beautiful bill' to the looming end of a tax credit for electric vehicles, which will also deal a blow to Tesla. 'Suddenly he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out we're going to cut the EV mandate that's billions and billions of dollars,' Trump said Thursday. Musk denied Trump's framing, reaffirming his larger criticism of the bill's spending and the potential for it to add trillions to the national deficit over the next 10 years. The former DOGE adviser also shut down the idea that he was familiar with the 'inner workings' of the bill from his time in the White House, calling that a lie.
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Federal vs. state power at issue in a hearing over Trump's election overhaul executive order
BOSTON (AP) — Democratic state attorneys general on Friday will seek to block President Donald Trump's proposal for a sweeping overhaul of U.S. elections in a case that tests a constitutional bedrock — the separation of powers. The top law enforcement officials from 19 states filed a federal lawsuit after the Republican president signed the executive order in March, arguing that its provisions would step on states' power to set their own election rules and that the executive branch had no such authority. In a filing supporting that argument, a bipartisan group of former secretaries of state said Trump's directive would upend the system established by the Constitution's Elections Clause, which gives states and Congress control over how elections are run. They said the order seeks to 'unilaterally coronate the President as the country's chief election policymaker and administrator.' If the court does not halt the order, they argued, 'the snowball of executive overreach will grow swiftly and exponentially." Trump's election directive was part of a flurry of executive orders he has issued in the opening months of his second term, many of which have drawn swift legal challenges. It follows years of him falsely claiming that his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election was due to widespread fraud and an election year in which he and other Republicans promoted the notion that large numbers of noncitizens threatened the integrity of U.S. elections. In fact, voting by noncitizens is rare and, when caught, can lead to felony charges and deportation. Trump's executive order would require voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, prohibit mail or absentee ballots from being counted if they are received after Election Day, set new rules for voting equipment and prohibit non-U.S. citizens from being able to donate in certain elections. It also would condition federal election grant funding on states adhering to the strict ballot deadline. The hearing Friday in U.S. District Court in Boston comes in one of three lawsuits filed against the executive order. One is from Oregon and Washington, where elections are conducted almost entirely by mail and ballots received after Election Day are counted as long as they are postmarked by then. The provision that would create a proof-of-citizenship requirement for federal elections already has been halted in a lawsuit filed by voting and civil rights groups and national Democratic organizations. In that case, filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, the judge said the president's attempt to use a federal agency to enact a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voting usurped the power of states and Congress, which at the time was considering legislation that would do just that. That bill, called the SAVE Act, passed the U.S. House but faces an uncertain future in the Senate. Trump's executive order said its intent was to ensure 'free, fair and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion.' The Justice Department, in arguing against the motion by the attorneys general for a preliminary injunction, said the president is within his rights to direct agencies to carry out federal voting laws. The order tasks the U.S. Election Assistance Commission with updating the federal voter registration form to require people to submit documentation proving they are U.S. citizens. Similar provisions enacted previously in a handful of states have raised concerns about disenfranchising otherwise eligible voters who can't readily access those documents. That includes married women, who would need both a birth certificate and a marriage license if they had changed their last name. A state proof-of-citizenship law enacted in Kansas more than a decade ago blocked the registrations of 31,000 people later found to be eligible to vote. The two sides will argue over whether the president has the authority to direct the election commission, which was created by Congress as an independent agency after the Florida ballot debacle during the 2000 presidential election. In its filing, the Justice Department said Trump's executive order falls within his authority to direct officials 'to carry out their statutory duties,' adding that 'the only potential voters it disenfranchises are noncitizens who are ineligible to vote anyway.'
