Missouri Can't Use GOP Maps & Attack on Abortion Pill

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2:15It's a defining moment in the legal fight over the state's map that has spanned more than a year and spawned confusion for voters. The decision means that the state will have to use its congressional map from 2022, which will likely produce six Republican districts and two Democratic districts, a loss for Republicans trying to maintain control of the House in the midterm elections. No Supreme Court justice publicly dissented from the brief order, which didn't detail the court's legal reasoning, which is typical in emergency appeals. My guest is Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center.

2:58Jonathan, the legal fight over Missouri's congressional map has been going on for about a year. It reached the Supreme Court twice. Tell us about the sort of tortuous litigation. So, I mean, I think this is a perfect example of why mid-decade redistricting, especially during an election year, is such a problem and creates such a huge headache for voters and for election administrators. Because we are now, you know, less than 60 days out from Election Day. And until this morning, it was not clear what district map Missouri was going to use for their congressional elections. So, you know, there's been a lot of court maneuvering over the last few days, including multiple attempts to go up to the Supreme Court.

3:42But the bottom line is that Missouri's state Supreme Court ruled that the gerrymander that was imposed by the legislature earlier this year that shifted Missouri from a map with six Republican -leaning districts and two Democratic-leaning districts to a new map that was seven Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning district, that that map was unlawful. that violates the Missouri Constitution. And therefore, you know, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered the state election officials to revert to the previous map, the 6-2 map. Secretary of State didn't like that. You know, it is very last minute.

4:18He tried to go to federal court to, you know, reverse that decision. And the Supreme Court today said basically, you know, enough is enough. The state Supreme Court issued an order based on state law that you have to use the previous map. And the U.S. Supreme Court said we're not going to disturb that order and we're not going to allow lower federal courts to intervene at this point. So Missouri will use their previous congressional map this November. It'll go back to that kind of 6-2 split. That's where we are now, you know, 54 days out from Election Day. What map did they use for the primaries?

4:53So the primary was conducted using the 7-1 map, the new map. And so now the general will be held using the previous map. Isn't it going to cause a problem or at least a lot of confusion? Because the districts of candidates who won the primary could change shape now. I mean, I think the primary winners will remain on the ballot. It's just the district lines are different. So it will be all the same candidates who are elected in the primaries just, you know, using their old maps. And what they did with the new gerrymander was functionally eliminate a majority black district that's currently held by Congressman Emanuel Cleaver.

5:28And so, So, you know, he was still running for reelection, just on a much less favorable map. My understanding is that it is all the same candidates who won the primaries. They're just, you know, using the old district lines now. And this is it. The final from the Supreme Court. They can't go back to the Supreme Court anymore. Well, there's nowhere else for them to go. So this is it. They've gone up to the Supreme Court twice. The first time, you know, Justice Kavanaugh, who is the circuit justice for the circuit that covers Missouri, on his own, denied the secretary's request to stay the Missouri Supreme Court's decision.

5:59And then this time, the full Supreme Court, with no noted dissents, did stay the federal court decision that tried to bring us back to the new map again. So it's been a real seesaw back and forth between, you know, the old map, the new map, the old map, the new map. But at least for Missouri, this has been settled for these midterm elections. Let's turn now to the confusion over mail ballots, where there's litigation in several different federal courts. and we're waiting for a Supreme Court decision on whether the post office can enforce new rules for mail-in ballots? That is right. What's the state of play right now?

6:39Well, it has been a long and rather complicated saga around these new USPS regulations that the Postal Service formally published only a few weeks ago, but that have been kind of percolating since March. So to take us all the way back, you know, in March, 2026, President Trump issued an executive order that focused primarily on mail voting. That order directed the U.S. Postal Service to issue regulations that, you know, would mandate certain envelope requirements, certain barcode requirements, and new procedures that state and local election officials would have to follow in order for USPS to deliver ballots to voters in those states.

7:22There is no statutory authorization for any of this. The Postal Service is not, they're not election administrators. They deliver ballot mail just like they deliver all the other mail. And so this executive order and the regulations that USPS created to enforce it, you know, represent a huge shift in the way that mail voting would work in this country and would give USPS the authority to decline to deliver ballots to voters if the states or the counties who are sending those ballots don't meet every single new technical specification in these USPS regulations. There's been a flurry of litigation challenging both the executive order and the USPS regulations.

8:04Earlier this year, a district court in Massachusetts issued an injunction that found that the executive order was unconstitutional and enjoined USPS from issuing regulations to give effect to that order. That injunction was appealed. And a couple of months ago, the Supreme Court said that the injunction was issued too soon. They said that the issues were not yet ripe because the Postal Service hadn't actually issued any regulations. And so there was nothing really to challenge. And the district court acted too soon when it granted relief to the plaintiffs. But in that order, the Supreme Court said, if and when there is a final regulation that's in place, that might change things.

8:42So about two days after that Supreme Court order came down, USPS published their final regulation, and we all rushed back to court and started the process all over again. Judge Talwani in Massachusetts again issued an injunction blocking the USPS regulations from taking effect. She found that the regulations themselves are unlawful. They exceed the post office's statutory authority. They derive from an unconstitutional executive order. And critically, there is just no time to make these kind of huge changes before the midterm elections without disenfranchising millions of voters. And that, I think, is the really critical piece here.

9:21You know, state and local election officials from across the country, from red and blue and purple jurisdictions, have all told the courts, We cannot do this. You know, ballot envelopes have already been purchased. Barcodes have been placed on them. There is no time to redesign ballot mail in all of the 10 ,000 election jurisdictions across the country. And there's no money to do it. The vendors can't work fast enough. The counties have no more budget left. They've already spent the money that was appropriated to them to buy, you know, ballot mail and ballot paper and all of that. You know, in a state like Arizona, where 80 % of voters voted by mail in 2024, you know, if they don't get their ballots, that's a huge logistical and operational problem for election officials, you know, across the state and across the country who are in very similar situations.

10:09So the government has sought a stay of this injunction from the District Court of Massachusetts. Kind of unusually, they simultaneously asked both the First Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court to stay the district court order. Normally, you would go to the circuit court first, and then if they say no, then go to SCOTUS. But DOJ decided not to wait. Just mere minutes ago, as we're recording this, the First Circuit denied the government's request for a stay, leaving that injunction in place. And so now we await a decision from the US Supreme Court. They stayed the previous injunction on that jurisdictional ground, on ripeness, but now they're faced with a very different question.

10:47They have to address the merits of the government's position. The government says that these regulations are lawful, that they do have the authority to do this. The lower courts have disagreed so far. But I think that the Supreme Court really also has to consider the equities of the situation right now and how disruptive an attempt to implement these new regulations 54 days out from election day would be in a situation where mail ballots have already gone out in some states. North Carolina, Wisconsin, Alabama have all already started sending ballots to voters. Every state has to send mail ballots at least to military and overseas voters by September 19th.

11:26And throughout all of this, USPS and the federal government have been unable to clearly say whether even they are ready to implement these rules, whether the portal that they're building is complete, whether they have the staff and the time and the functionality to do all the things that the regulations require them to do. So at At this stage of the election cycle, to even be contemplating a change on this scale is crazy, which is, I think, why we have seen kind of an unusually broad coalition of election officials, you know, Democrats and Republicans, secretaries of state, county clerks, all going to the court and saying, you know, even if they don't address the legality of the issue, you know, practically speaking, the implementation of a rule like this in September of an election year would be just unbelievably disruptive to the process of elections and would almost certainly result in voters not getting their ballots.

12:26So you would expect that the Supreme Court would listen to what the election officials are telling them. They don't have to make a decision on the merits, right? They can just rely on the fact that it's too late to make these changes. Right. This is an emergency stay request. So we're in a kind of emergency posture on the shadow docket. There won't be, you know, oral argument. They don't have to do, you know, a full kind of opinion and everything. All they have to do is either, you know, grant or deny this government's stay request. And how much reasoning they want to give us is unfortunately kind of up to them.

13:02I hope that they do some explanation of the decision to kind of, you know, give some guidance to the lower courts on these questions. But listeners may be familiar with the Purcell principle, which comes up in election litigation a lot. you know, this kind of judicial doctrine that federal courts should be mindful of the administrative chaos that their decisions can have late in an election cycle, and that they should be cautious when issuing orders to do so in a way that minimizes voter confusion and strain on the election system. And if ever there were a case where the Purcell doctrine should apply, it's this one, where the federal government is trying to impose new regulations and new procedures on election processes nationwide at the 11th hour.

13:50And the states are saying we simply can't do it. And so, you know, I am hopeful. I'm fairly confident that the court will see both the legal and practical realities here and not toss a bomb into election administration less than two months out. But we won't know until they tell us. As you discussed, the Supreme Court took an off-ramp, relying on procedure, on standing, so they wouldn't have to make a decision on the merits. The last time this mail-in ballot question came to them, they must have known that this was coming right back to them. So all this litigation and confusion since then is because they avoided making a decision on the merits in a case where the law seems pretty clear.

14:37And it's going to end up right there. Well, and they sat on it the first time around. You know, the stay request of the original PI before the regulations were finalized, the Supreme Court didn't act on it for almost three weeks. And so, you know, this is a crisis, I think, in part of their own making, because they knew it was going to come back. But, you know, I imagine this time around, they will move more quickly, given, you know, where we are in the calendar. At least I hope so. But the legal issues are, I think, pretty straightforward here. You know, the Constitution very clearly assigns the responsibility to legislate the time, place, and manner of federal elections to the states, subject only to preemption by Congress.

15:18And it does not give the executive branch any authority, you know, whether it's coming from the White House or the U.S. Postal Service, to regulate elections absent clear authorization from Congress, which they don't have here. Congress has never passed a statute giving the Postal Service the power to reject, you know, mail ballots if they don't meet their own internal technical requirements. Congress has very specifically identified a handful of categories of non-mailable materials that USPS can reject, and ballots are not one of them. Some people treat ChachiPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done.

15:58ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChachiPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video.

16:40It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, A new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts. I've been talking to Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center. So let's turn to what may happen during the elections, Because the Justice Department has been deploying election monitors in the primary season. Trump told The Times that he regretted not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election.

17:31His administration is exploring criminal charges against election officials for different reasons. And Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA has issued what it calls guidance for judges on potential requests for subpoenas to seize election materials like ballots and voting machines. What could happen? Could we have intimidation at the polls, seizing of voting machines afterwards, seizing of ballots? There's a whole range of things that could happen. It is true, and I think not particularly controversial to say that, you know, the federal government's posture in this election cycle is unlike anything we have seen, you know, certainly for decades, maybe, you know, in any of our lifetimes, where, you know, the entire federal government apparatus has seemingly been reoriented around the president's views on how elections should run and the president's grievances for his past election losses.

18:34We have people who are now in charge at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security who are fully bought into the conspiracies and falsehoods around the 2020 election and who have, you know, weaponized the federal government's law enforcement authorities in pursuit of those theories. You know, there are some things that they are doing that under a different administration will be totally normal. Like DOJ has sent election monitors out into the states to check for compliance with certain federal laws for decades. And that is, you know, under most circumstances, a totally normal thing that shouldn't cause any alarm.

19:11But when you have that program being run by somebody like Hermit Dillon, who is at the same time, sending threats of criminal prosecution to election officials and, you know, demanding that election officials turn over their unredacted voter files to the federal government, which is something that the federal government just doesn't do. They don't do voter registration. You know, it does create an atmosphere that I think is designed to cause confusion, to generate fear and to reduce the public's trust in the election system. You know, there are still many federal laws that prohibit a lot of the things that, you know, people are worried about.

19:51It is unlawful for armed federal agents to be deployed to the polls. It is unlawful for the military or the National Guard to be deployed to the polls. Voter intimidation laws exist in all 50 states and D.C. and Puerto Rico. And there is a federal voter intimidation law that is, you know, privately enforceable. And so, you know, a lot of these things, I think, are unlikely to succeed, but they don't have to succeed if they scare people out of voting. You know, that is just as much a problem as if they, you know, actually go in and physically disrupt the conduct of elections. And so, you know, our message to voters has been don't let the federal government or anyone else scare you out of exercising your right to vote.

20:36And there is a robust national nonpartisan election protection infrastructure that is designed to make sure that every eligible American is able to cast a ballot and that those ballots are counted. You know, we may see attempts by DOJ or DHS to skirt those legal lines, to try and station their agents near the polls, if not at the polls, to scare people. Or we may see subpoenas from DOJ seeking, you know, to take custody of ballots or election materials, which is why I think, you know, the UCLA Safeguarding Democracy Project is sending guidance out for judges to, you know, about what they should be considering.

21:14because there are different equities involved when you're thinking about a live election and chain of custody of ballots that, you know, the kinds of things that wouldn't normally factor in when you're considering, you know, a search warrant or a criminal subpoena or something like that. But, you know, I think fortunately or unfortunately, I don't know, the government has not been particularly quiet about their views on elections or what they, you know, are considering doing. And so I don't think it will come as a surprise if they do try and disrupt the conduct of the midterm elections, but I am confident that they will fail because they have no basis for any of this.

21:46And, you know, the last time that Donald Trump led an effort to overturn election results in 2020, it was a spectacular failure because there is simply no evidence to back up any of the false claims that they're making about how our elections work. And, you know, our elections are run by dedicated civil servants of, you know, both parties, of neither party across the country. You have Democrats and Republicans, Secretary of State, county clerks who are just trying to do their jobs. And I understand why people might be anxious about the federal government's attempts to enlarge its role in the conduct of our elections.

22:22But so far, they have been entirely unable to do that. And the courts have continued to check their efforts to insert themselves into the election process. There are election deniers in some state and county election offices. Is there a fear that there may be election interference on a state or county level? I mean, that's that is an issue that we have unfortunately faced for the last several election cycles. You know, in 2024 and 2022, we had county officials who tried to refuse to certify election results if they didn't like them or, you know, who have, you know, attempted to unlawfully purge voters from the rolls at the last minute.

23:04But, you know, we have legal tools to respond to those things, to compel certification of election results, to ensure that voters are not unlawfully removed from the rolls if they're eligible. So I'm less concerned about kind of state and local level interference because we have a well documented kind of judicial and legal playbook for those kinds of things. we've never really faced this kind of direct interference attempt from the federal government before that is new and although the federal government has no you know explicit legal authority when it comes to elections other than what is specifically granted to them by certain federal statutes they have a lot of general law enforcement authority and police powers that i think this administration has shown a willingness to abuse and go beyond and so you know, there are legal remedies for those kinds of things, too.

23:57But if we are in the middle of a live election, and, you know, ballots are still being counted, you know, disruption of that process could be really serious. And so that's why, you know, I think it is incumbent on state and local officials who have a role in the election process to be prepared for, you know, attempts at potential federal interference and to know how to respond. I think it's, you know, partially in the hands of voters to make sure that they have a plan for getting to the polls and a backup plan if, you know, something doesn't work out to make sure that they get their ballot in and have, you know, their voice counted.

24:29And that's why we have, you know, civil society groups like, you know, like Campaign Legal Center and, you know, our many partners across the country who have been preparing for these midterm elections for years at this point to make sure that we do everything in our power to have a safe and secure election where the results match the votes. And we'll wait to see what the Supreme Court decides on mail ballots. Thanks so much, Jonathan. A pleasure having you on. That's Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, Louisiana is one of the red states trying to stop the abortion pill from being available by mail, even in states where abortion is legal.

25:15I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

25:54Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video. It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts.

26:37Louisiana is one of at least five red states trying to restrict abortion access outside its borders, in blue states where abortion is legal. Just four years after the Supreme Court ruled that individual states should decide whether to allow abortion, Medication abortion with the drug Mifeprestone now accounts for a majority of abortions in the U.S. And nearly 30 percent of those are conducted by telehealth. Louisiana, which has banned most abortions since 2022, is trying to block providers in states where abortion is legal from sending drugs for medication abortions, challenging a 2023 FDA policy that permanently loosened requirements on in-person dispensing of the drug.

27:27In a case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Louisiana is seeking a stay to prevent the FDA from allowing online and mail availability of the abortion drug mifepristone nationwide, even where it's legal. Joining me is Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis Law School and an expert in reproductive rights. Mary, what's Louisiana asking the Fifth Circuit to do? Louisiana already has reason to think that this case will work out in their favor because the district court earlier had ruled that eventually it seems pretty likely that Louisiana will get the relief it's seeking. But the district court was going to give the Trump administration a chance to do its review of Mifepristone first.