NY Times: “Two Trump-backed Republicans won special congressional elections in Florida on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, shoring up their party’s slim majority in the House at a crucial moment for President Trump’s domestic agenda. Jimmy Patronis, the state’s chief financial officer, won the race to replace Matt Gaetz in the First Congressional District,…

El Paso Matters: “Patrick Crusius believed he was acting at the direction of President Donald Trump when he  murdered 23 people and wounded 22 others at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, his defense lawyer told El Paso Matters. “He thought he had to stop the invasion because that’s what his president was telling him,…

AP: ” A judge challenging the outcome of his North Carolina Supreme Court race was photographed wearing Confederate military garb and posing before a Confederate battle flag when he was a member of a college fraternity that glorified the pre-Civil War South. The emergence of the photographs comes at a delicate time for Jefferson Griffin, a…

NY Times: “Alabama cannot prosecute doctors and reproductive health organizations for helping patients travel out of the state to obtain abortions, a federal judge ruled on Monday. Alabama has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, and in 2022 its attorney general, Steve Marshall, a Republican, raised the possibility of charging doctors with…

NY Times: “Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic House leader, on Monday accused Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas of deliberately delaying a special election in a solidly Democratic district in Houston in order to cushion the House Republicans’ slim majority. Mr. Jeffries said in an interview that Mr. Abbott had been “feverishly working…

Yahoo!: “U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams is stepping down as head of the Democratic Party of Georgia. Williams announced her resignation as the party chair in a statement on Monday. …Williams cited the new bylaws passed that would make chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia a full-time role as a reason for her stepping down….

AP: “U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday instructed the Justice Department to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a sweeping election overhaul that Georgia Republican lawmakers passed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. The lawsuit, filed in June 2021 under former President Joe Biden, alleged that the Georgia law was intended to deny…

NY Times: “J. Bennett Johnston Jr., a Louisiana Democrat who as a four-term United States senator helped shape America’s energy and science policies in an era of rising concerns over the perils of nuclear power and the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, died on Tuesday in Arlington, Va. He was 92. His death, in a…

Political Wire: “Louisiana voters soundly rejected all four proposed amendments to the state constitution on Saturday, shutting the door on changes to courts, government finances, teacher pay increases, juvenile crime, and elections for judicial seats,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. “The defeat of Amendment 2, a sprawling revision of the section of the constitution that deals with…

NY Times: “A majority of the Supreme Court appeared ready on Monday to allow Louisiana to continue using a congressional voting map that includes two majority-Black districts in the state. The question before the court: Did Louisiana lawmakers improperly rely on race when they drafted the map? The case could not only shift the boundaries…