Latest news with #AndrewChung
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
US Supreme Court rejects Republican election-rule challenge in Pennsylvania
By Andrew Chung (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court passed up a chance to give politicians more power over how federal elections are conducted, declining on Friday to hear a Republican challenge to a Pennsylvania judicial decision requiring the counting of provisional ballots cast by voters who make mistakes on their mail-in ballots. The justices turned away an appeal by the Republican National Committee and Republican Party of Pennsylvania of a decision by Pennsylvania's top court on provisional ballots that the plaintiffs said ran afoul of legislature-crafted voting rules, violating the U.S. Constitution's election-related provisions. The dispute returned to the Supreme Court after the justices, on the eve of the November 2024 presidential election, rejected the emergency bid by the Republicans to block tallying the provisional ballots. The Republicans objected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's October ruling in favor of two Butler County voters who sought to have their provisional ballots counted after their mail-in ballots were rejected during that state's 2024 presidential primary election for lacking secrecy envelopes. Election rules in states like Pennsylvania that often play a pivotal role in determining the outcome of U.S. presidential elections are a particularly sensitive issue. Republican President Donald Trump prevailed in Pennsylvania last November, but lost the state in 2020 to his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, who won the presidency that year. The case follows a major 2023 Supreme Court ruling that allows the justices to second-guess state courts if they undermine the power that the Constitution gives state legislatures to craft election rules. That 6-3 ruling, which upheld a North Carolina state court's decision that invalidated a Republican-drawn congressional map as unlawfully disadvantaging Democrats, also rejected a more extreme theory advanced by many Republicans and conservatives that would have removed any role of state courts and state constitutions in regulating federal elections. The ruling, however, stopped short of announcing a legal test for determining when state courts have ventured too far in "arrogating to themselves" a legislature's power. In the Pennsylvania case, Republicans asked the Supreme Court to answer that question, contending that the state supreme court's ruling violated the Constitution's elections provisions, including that the "times, places and manner" of federal elections "shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof." Provisional ballots generally protect voters from being excluded from the voting process if their eligibility is uncertain on Election Day. The vote is counted once officials confirm eligibility. Republicans intervened to defend Butler County's decision not to count the ballots from these voters, saying Pennsylvania's election law does not allow provisional ballots to be counted if a mail-in ballot was received on time by a county board of elections. Democrats intervened on the side of the voters, contending that if a mail-in ballot is defective and cannot be counted, that person has not yet voted and a provisional ballot must be counted. A divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court last October sided with the voters, saying that provisional ballots prevent double voting while protecting voters' right to have one vote counted. Friday's action by the court was unexpected. The court had planned to release it on Monday along with its other regularly scheduled orders, but a software glitch on Friday prematurely sent email notifications concerning the court's decision in the case. "As a result, the court is issuing that order list now," said court spokesperson Patricia McCabe. It is not the first time the court has inadvertently disclosed action in sensitive cases. Last year, an apparent draft of a ruling in a case involving emergency abortion access in Idaho was briefly uploaded to the court's website before being taken down. That disclosure represented an embarrassment for the top U.S. judicial body, coming two years after the draft of a blockbuster ruling rolling back abortion rights was leaked in advance.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Supreme Court spares US gun companies from Mexico's lawsuit
By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday spared two American gun companies from a lawsuit by Mexico's government accusing them of aiding illegal firearms trafficking to drug cartels and fueling gun violence in the southern neighbor of the United States. The justices in a 9-0 ruling overturned a lower court's ruling that had allowed the lawsuit to proceed against firearms maker Smith & Wesson and distributor Interstate Arms. The lower court had found that Mexico plausibly alleged that the companies aided and abetted illegal gun sales, harming its government. The companies had argued for the dismissal of Mexico's suit, filed in Boston in 2021, under a 2005 U.S. law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that broadly shields gun companies from liability for crimes committed with their products. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided in 2024 that the alleged conduct by the companies fell outside these protections. "Mexico alleges that the companies aided and abetted unlawful sales routing guns to Mexican drug cartels. The question presented is whether Mexico's complaint plausibly pleads that conduct. We conclude it does not," liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court. The case came to the Supreme Court at a complicated time for U.S.-Mexican relations as President Donald Trump pursues on-again, off-again tariffs on Mexican goods. Trump has also accused Mexico of doing too little to stop the flow of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and migrant arrivals at the border. Mexico's lawsuit, filed in Boston in 2021, accused the two companies of violating various U.S. and Mexican laws. Mexico claims that the companies have deliberately maintained a distribution system that included firearms dealers who knowingly sell weapons to third-party, or "straw," purchasers who then traffic guns to cartels in Mexico. The suit also accused the companies of unlawfully designing and marketing their guns as military-grade weapons to drive up demand among the cartels, including by associating their products with the American military and law enforcement. The gun companies said they make and sell lawful products. To avoid its lawsuit being dismissed under the 2005 law, Mexico was required to plausibly allege that the companies aided and abetted illegal gun sales and that such conduct was the "proximate cause" - a legal principle involving who is responsible for causing an injury - of the harms claimed by Mexico. Mexico in the lawsuit sought monetary damages of an unspecified amount and a court order requiring Smith & Wesson and Interstate Arms to take steps to "abate and remedy the public nuisance they have created in Mexico." Gun violence fueled by trafficked U.S.-made firearms has contributed to a decline in business investment and economic activity in Mexico and forced its government to incur unusually high costs on services including healthcare, law enforcement and the military, according to the lawsuit. Mexico, a country with strict firearms laws, has said most of its gun homicides are committed with weapons trafficked from the United States and valued at more than $250 million annually. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on March 4.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
US Supreme Court won't review assault weapon, high-capacity magazine bans
By Andrew Chung (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a challenge to the legality of state restrictions on assault-style rifles and large-capacity ammunition magazines, passing up for now cases that offered the justices a chance to further expand gun rights. The justices turned away two appeals after lower courts upheld a ban in Maryland on powerful semi-automatic rifles such as AR-15s and one in Rhode Island restricting the possession of ammunition feeding devices holding more than 10 rounds. The lower courts rejected arguments that the measures violate the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms." Three conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the court's decision not to hear the cases. A fourth, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a statement accompanying the Maryland case expressed sympathy for the argument made by the challengers that semiautomatic AR-15s are in common use by "law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment." Kavanaugh said the issue will return to the Supreme Court, which "presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon." In a nation bitterly divided over how to address firearms violence including numerous mass shootings, the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, often has taken an expansive view of the Second Amendment. The court broadened gun rights in landmark rulings in 2008, 2010 and in a 2022 case that made it harder to defend gun restrictions under the Second Amendment, requiring them to be "consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." The challengers in the two cases turned away on Monday by the Supreme Court contended that states and courts are flouting precedents that make clear that the Second Amendment protects weapons that are in "common use." Maryland in 2013 enacted its ban on military-style "assault weapons" such as the AR-15 and AK-47 after a shooter used such a firearm in the 2012 mass killing of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The law carries a penalty of up to three years in prison. A Maryland resident who is seeking to purchase one of the banned guns, as well as three gun rights organizations including the Firearms Policy Coalition, sued in 2020, claiming the ban violates the Second Amendment. The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 rejected the challenge because it said assault weapons "are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense." As such, the "excessively dangerous" firearms are not protected by the Second Amendment, the 4th Circuit decided. The 4th Circuit said it refused "to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States are beyond the reach of our nation's democratic processes." The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that the term "assault weapon" is a political term that is designed to exploit public confusion over machine guns and semi-automatic firearms. The banned weapons, they said, are "identical to any other semiautomatic firearm - arms that are exceedingly common and fully protected by the Second Amendment." Rhode Island's law, passed in 2022 as a response to mass shootings, bars most "large-capacity feeding" devices such as a magazine or drum that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The state calls it a "mild restriction on a particularly dangerous weapons accessory" and that in mass shooting situations, "any pause in fire, such as the pause to switch magazines, allows for precious seconds in which to escape or take defensive action." The law applied retroactively, meaning residents had to surrender or alter any banned magazine that they owned, and carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Four gun owners and a registered firearms dealer sued, claiming the ban violated their Second Amendment rights, and that having to forfeit the magazines they owned violated the Constitution's prohibition on the government taking property without compensation. In 2024 the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claims and refused to block the law. The Rhode Island plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that instead of abiding by the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling, the state's law "can only be understood as protest legislation imposing more restrictive bans on long-common arms." The Supreme Court has been buffeted in recent years by challenges to gun restrictions. On March 26, the court upheld a regulation targeting largely untraceable "ghost guns" imposed by Democratic former President Joe Biden's administration. The court last year struck down a federal ban on "bump stock" devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US Supreme Court limits environmental reviews in Utah railway ruling
By Andrew Chung (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a setback to environmentalists on Thursday by allowing federal agencies to limit the scope of their review of the environmental impact of projects they regulate, as the justices bolstered a Utah railway project intended to transport crude oil. The 8-0 ruling overturned a lower court's decision that had halted the project and had faulted an environmental impact statement issued by a federal agency called the Surface Transportation Board in approving the railway as too limited in scope. The project was challenged by environmentalists and a Colorado county. The ruling, authored by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was joined by four other conservative justices. The court's three liberal justices filed a separate opinion concurring in the outcome. A coalition of seven Utah counties and an infrastructure investment group are seeking to construct an 88-mile (142-km) railway line in northeastern Utah to connect the sparsely populated Uinta Basin region to an existing freight rail network that would be used primarily to transport waxy crude oil. The case tested the scope of environmental impact studies that federal agencies must conduct under a U.S. law called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), enacted in 1970 to prevent environmental harms that might result from major projects. The law mandates that agencies examine the "reasonably foreseeable" effects of a project. Kavanaugh wrote that agencies need only consider environmental effects of a project at hand and not the "effects from potential future projects or from geographically separate projects," and that courts must offer agencies "substantial deference" regarding the scope of these assessments. "NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it," Kavanaugh wrote. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Dec. 10 in the case, which has been closely watched by companies and environmental groups for how the ruling might affect a wider range of infrastructure and energy projects. Environmental reviews that are too broad in scope can add years to the regulatory timeline, risking a project's viability and future infrastructure development, according to companies and business trade groups. The Surface Transportation Board, which has regulatory authority over new railroad lines, issued an environmental impact statement and approved the railway proposal in 2021. The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups sued over approval, as did Colorado's Eagle County, which noted that the project would increase train traffic in its region and double traffic on an existing rail line along the Colorado River. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of the challengers in 2023, concluding that the environmental review inadequately analyzed the effects of increased oil production in the basin as well as downstream, where the oil would be refined. Democratic former President Joe Biden's administration had backed the railway coalition in the case, as did the state of Utah. Fifteen other states supported the challengers. Colorado said its economy relies on outdoor recreation, and that the project raises the risk of leaks, spills or rail car accidents near the Colorado River's headwaters. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case after some Democratic lawmakers urged his withdrawal because businessman Philip Anschutz, his former legal client, has a financial interest in its outcome.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US Supreme Court maintains block on Trump deportations under wartime law
By Andrew Chung (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday kept in place its block on President Donald Trump's deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime after their lawyers said the government was set to remove the men without judicial review in violation of a prior order by the justices. The justices, after ordering on April 19 a temporary stop to the administration's deportations of dozens of migrants being held at a detention center in Texas, granted a request by American Civil Liberties Union attorneys representing the migrants to maintain the halt on the removals for now. The Supreme Court also clarified that the administration was free to pursue deportations under other provisions of U.S. immigration law. Trump's deportations are part of the Republican president's immigration crackdown since he returned to office in January. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented from Friday's decision. This was the second time that Trump's actions concerning Venezuelan migrants had come before the Supreme Court in a legal dispute that has raised questions about his administration's willingness to comply with limits set by the nation's highest judicial body. ACLU lawyers had asked the Supreme Court to intervene after reporting that migrants held at the Bluebonnet immigration detention center were at imminent risk of removal. The lawyers said that administration officials had not provided the migrants the required notice or opportunity to contest the removals to a prison in El Salvador before many were loaded on buses headed to the airport. The Supreme Court on April 7 placed limits on how deportations under the Alien Enemies Act may occur even as the legality of that law's use for this purpose is being contested. The justices required that detainees receive notice "within a reasonable time and in such a manner" to challenge the legality of their removal. The administration accuses the migrants of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang originating in Venezuelan prisons that the State Department has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in a bid to swiftly deport them. Relatives of many of the hundreds of deported Venezuelans and their lawyers have denied that they are Tren de Aragua members and have said they were never given the chance to contest the administration's allegations of gang affiliation. The Alien Enemies Act authorizes the president to deport, detain or place restrictions on individuals whose primary allegiance is to a foreign power and who might pose a national security risk in wartime. The U.S. government last invoked the Alien Enemies Act during World War Two to intern and deport people of Japanese, German and Italian descent. The Justice Department had told the justices that the request by the migrants to the Supreme Court was premature because "they improperly skipped over the lower courts before asking this one for relief." In a filing, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said detainees are receiving advance notice of their removals and have had "adequate time" to file claims for judicial review. ACLU lawyers pushed back on this assertion, saying that a lower court judge had not acted despite evidence that the migrants were being readied for imminent removal and "would almost certainly have been removed" had the Supreme Court not intervened. The migrants were loaded on to buses that left the Bluebonnet facility in Texas, only later to be turned around "presumably because of applicants' filing in this court," the lawyers said. The Trump administration has sent deportees to El Salvador, where they are being detained in the country's maximum-security anti-terrorism prison under a deal in which the United States is paying President Nayib Bukele's government $6 million. Transferring "large numbers of individuals it intends to remove under the AEA (Alien Enemies Act) between judicial districts and providing English-only AEA notices less than 24 hours before removal and without any explanation as to how the individual may seek judicial review cannot by any stretch be said to comply with this court's order that notice must be sufficient to permit individuals actually to seek habeas review," the ACLU said in a written filing. Habeas corpus relief refers to the right of detainees to challenge the legality of their detention. It is considered a bedrock right under U.S. law.
