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Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder gambled in Texas by pouring millions of dollars of outside money into the state to pick off three Republican Texas Supreme Court justices. He lost.
Texas voters rejected his message at the ballot box, resoundingly reelecting all three justices he targeted.
With the support of former President Barack Obama and former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Holder created a Democratic Party redistricting initiative, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), to target Republicans in 11 states, The Center Square first reported. The NDRC’s stated goal is to fundamentally alter the 2031 redistricting cycle nationwide.
After upending the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Holder’s group targeted several state supreme courts and state legislatures, including the Texas Supreme Court. The Texas Supreme Court is the highest court that rules on civil cases. Every general election, three seats are on the ballot.
This year, incumbent justices Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine and Jane Bland, all Republicans, ran for reelection. Holder targeted their races, endorsing their challengers: DaSean Jones, Christine Weems, and Bonnie Lee Goldstein. The NDRC, political action committees and heavyweight donors poured money into Texas targeting the three justices, whose fundraising efforts were significantly restricted by law by comparison.
Holder accused the justices and Texas Supreme Court justices of being “driven more by ideology than impartiality,” which he said “issued disastrous decisions that have caused real harm to the people.”
Holder, who served under Obama, was the first attorney general in U.S. history to be held in criminal contempt by Congress. In June, Attorney General Merrick Garland was the second.
Holder’s tenure was marked by controversy, including arguing in 2009, “in things racial we have always been and … continue to be … essentially a nation of cowards.”
In 2009, a Department of Justice Fast and Furious operation resulted in numerous deaths, including of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, prompting an extensive joint congressional investigation. In 2014, Holder denied culpability, resigned and denied he was forced out, after multiple members of Congress called for his resignation.
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, maintained, “Eric Holder is the most divisive U.S. Attorney General in modern history, and has eroded more confidence in our legal system than any Attorney General before him through abuse of his office and failure to uphold the values of our Constitution.”
Ten years later, critics argue Holder’s still divisive, pointing to the NRDC’s claim that “Republicans seized control of the redistricting process to create an artificial political advantage for themselves, gerrymandering their way to power in Congress and state legislatures by disenfranchising voters, especially Democrats and people of color.”
In response to Holder’s efforts, Justice Blacklock told The Center Square, “Eric Holder apparently wants judges who will not follow the laws passed by our legislature if he doesn’t like those laws. He seems to want judges that will amend our constitution by judicial decree rather than allowing the people of Texas to amend their constitution if they choose to, but that’s not how this works, and he should know that.
“A judge’s job is to follow the law passed by the legislature, not to change the law. A judge’s job is to follow the constitution, not to change it. The legislature can change the laws that it has passed, and the people of Texas can change the constitution but that’s not a judge’s job.”
Texas voters agreed.
On Tuesday, Blacklock was reelected, receiving 58% of the vote. Devine was reelected, receiving 57% of the vote. Bland was reelected, receiving 56% of the vote.
After he was reelected, Blacklock told The Center Square, “The historic results in judicial races across Texas are a resounding rejection of efforts by Eric Holder and other left-wing groups to influence our state’s judiciary.
“Texans have spoken clearly. They want law and order, not chaos and crime. Texans want judges who will follow the text of the Constitution, not judges who will rewrite the law to serve a political agenda.
“I am grateful for every vote I received. My job now is to apply the law fairly and equally for all Texans, no matter who they are or who they voted for.”
Texans also resoundingly elected three new judges, all Republicans, to the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals. This is the highest court in Texas that rules on criminal cases. Every general election, three seats from this court are also on the ballot.
Texans overwhelmingly elected Republicans David Schenck, who received 58% of the vote; Gina Parker, who received 58%; and Lee Finley, who received nearly 59%.
The results of the election are in: Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.
Trump’s win comes after a campaign in which he consistently targeted immigrants, transgender youth, and other vulnerable communities with hateful rhetoric. He also threatened retribution against dissidents and political opponents.
I know that many of us fear what these results mean for our communities, our nation and ourselves. We know that a second Trump administration will be even more aggressive and effective than it was before — because Trump has repeatedly said so.
As outlined in Project 2025, under a second Trump administration, our federal government will deport immigrants in dragnet raids, target his political adversaries, spy on private citizens, promote discrimination against marginalized communities, and control what we can and can’t do with our bodies. This dystopian view of American life threatens our fundamental freedoms. We know from prior experience that our fear is real.
That is why the ACLU has a concrete plan to fight back. When President-elect Trump comes for our communities, he’s gotta through all of us.
During Trump’s first term, the ACLU filed 434 legal challenges against his administration, successfully blocking some of Trump’s most egregious policies, like the Muslim ban and separating immigrant families. When Trump once again set his sights on the White House, the ACLU’s legal and advocacy experts drafted a roadmap to combat his administration head-on. On day one, they are prepared to:
As soon as the 119th Congress is sworn in, we will urge members to use their constitutional powers to provide oversight, investigate wrongdoing, and reject restrictive executive branch policies. At the state level, we’ll work with lawmakers to build a firewall for freedom and enact laws that protect people from government abuse. In our communities, we’re working to educate people on what is at risk, what happens next, and how we can fight for our freedoms together.
The Trump administration’s anti-liberty and fundamentally anti-American policies will be met with the full firepower of the ACLU, the might of our allies, and the commitment of the American people. Above all else, that gives me hope. The next four years will be challenging, but we’re ready to put up the fight of the century. You can count on it.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that students eligible for free or reduced price school meals cannot be charged processing fees beginning in 2027.
School districts currently work with processing companies to offer cashless payment systems for families. But the companies can charge “processing fees” for each transaction. By law, students who are eligible for reduced price meals cannot be charged more than 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch. With processing fees, however, families can end up paying 10 times that amount. Processing companies charge as much as $3.25 or 4% to 5% per transaction, according to a recent report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
For families with lower incomes who can’t afford to load large sums in one go, processing fees can arrive weekly or even more frequently, increasing costs disproportionately. Families that qualify for free or reduced lunch pay as much as 60 cents per dollar in fees when paying for school lunches electronically, according to the report.
The new Agriculture Department’s policy becomes effective starting in the 2027-2028 school year. With this rule, the USDA will lower costs for families with income under 185% of federal poverty guidelines, which equals $57,720 for a family of four.
“USDA and schools across America share the common goal of nourishing schoolchildren and giving them the fuel they need to learn, grow and thrive,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a statement Friday. “While today’s action to eliminate extra fees for lower-income households is a major step in the right direction, the most equitable path forward is to offer every child access to healthy school meals at no cost. We will continue to work with Congress to move toward that goal so all kids have the nutrition they need to reach their full potential.”
The decision by the USDA follows a CFPB report that found online school meal payments predominantly affect low-income families. School lunch fees collectively cost families upwards of $100 million each year, according to the report.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has mandated that school districts inform families of their options since 2017, but even when parents are aware, having to pay by cash or check to avoid fees can be burdensome.
“It’s just massively inconvenient,” said Joanna Roa, 43, who works at Clemson University in South Carolina as a library specialist and has two school-aged children.
Roa said that when her son was in first grade and she saw the $3.25-per-transaction fee for lunch account transactions, she and her husband decided to send him to school with packed lunches instead.
“A dollar here and there, I expected,” she said. “But $3.25 per transaction, especially here in rural South Carolina where the cost of living is a lot lower — as are the salaries — is a lot.”
Roa said packing lunch for two kids every day became a burden in both time and effort for two working parents. For the past two years, thanks to surplus funds, her school district has been providing free school lunches which has changed the equation, but Roa said that could end at any point.
In its review of the 300 largest public school districts in the U.S., the CFPB found that 87% of sampled districts contract with payment processors. Within those districts, the companies charge an average of $2.37 or 4.4% of the total transaction, each time money is added to a child’s account.
While payment companies maintain that school districts can negotiate fees and rates before they agree to contracts, the CFPB found that complex company structures “may insulate companies from competition and make school districts less likely to negotiate.” Just three companies — MySchoolBucks, SchoolCafe, and LINQ Connect — dominate the market, according to the report.
Without the ability to choose which company to work with, “families have fewer ways to avoid harmful practices,” the agency said, “including those that may violate federal consumer protection law.”
In a significant ruling, U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone determined that the Philadelphia Police Department did not violate the First Amendment rights of officers who were fired or disciplined for posting racist, violent, or offensive content on social media. The decision, issued on Monday, came just days before the case was set to go to trial. Beetlestone concluded that the posts were “likely to cause significant interference” with police and city operations, which outweighed the officers’ claims of free speech protection.
The controversy began in 2019 when the Plain View Project, a database cataloging thousands of offensive social media posts by current and former law enforcement officers across the U.S., identified troubling posts by nearly 200 Philadelphia officers. These posts reportedly included racist language, support for violence, and associations with extremist groups. As a result, the Philadelphia Police Department took disciplinary action, leading to suspensions, firings, or retirements of affected officers.
While most officers who lost their jobs had their dismissals later overturned by arbitration, one officer’s firing was upheld. In total, 20 officers ultimately filed a federal civil rights lawsuit claiming retaliation by the city for exercising free speech rights.
Initially, the lawsuit was dismissed in February 2022. However, in June 2023, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it, asserting that it had been dismissed prematurely. Subsequently, the city petitioned for the case to be resolved by Judge Beetlestone without a trial, which she approved, issuing her final ruling on Monday.
In her opinion, Judge Beetlestone elaborated on how the officers’ statements, all of which were public, could damage community trust and undermine the credibility of officers in court. This, she argued, made them unsuitable for the critical role of policing and justified the city’s response.
Following the decision, attorneys for the city and several of the disciplined officers refrained from commenting, while an attorney representing a separate group of officers did not respond to requests for comment.
All nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to uphold a ruling by Pennsylvania’s high court regarding provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots are found to be defective.
The order on Friday follows a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on October 23, which struck down a challenge from the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Butler County that Pennsylvania’s Election Code does not allow voters’ provisional ballots to be counted if their mail-in ballot is returned on time, even if a voter suspects or is told that their mail-in ballot was rejected.
The case stems from a lawsuit filed by Butler County voters Faith Genser and Frank Matis, both of whom voted in the 2024 primary election by mail. After being told their ballots were rejected because they failed to enclose the tickets in a secrecy envelope before returning them, Genser and Matis voted in person. The pair were later told that their provisional ballots were also not counted.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that provisional ballots must be counted even if a voter submitted a mail-in ballot by the state’s deadline. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the court’s opinion Friday, said that even if a stay was placed on the Pennsylvania high court’s decision, it would “not impose any binding obligation on any of the Pennsylvania officials who are responsible for the conduct of this year’s election.”
“The lower court’s judgment concerns just two votes in the long-completed Pennsylvania primary,” read the opinion by Alito, who was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
Alito added that “because the only state election officials who are parties in this case are the members of the board of elections in one small county, we cannot order other election boards to sequester affected ballots. For these reasons, I agree with the order denying the application.”
The Trump campaign also filed and won a lawsuit in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, earlier this week to extend a voting deadline for mail-in votes.
The deadline to apply for on-demand mail-in ballots was Tuesday. Bucks County Judge Jeffrey Trauger, however, granted the Trump campaign’s request to extend the deadline to the end of the business day on Friday. The Trump campaign complained that some voters were turned away while in line waiting to apply for the ballots.
Polls in the state remain tight, with a new survey by YouGov and The Times of London showing Harris with a 2 percentage point advantage over Trump, 50 percent to 48 percent, among registered voters. The poll had a 3.5 percentage point margin of error and was conducted from October 25 to October 31.
An IRS lifestyle audit is an investigation conducted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to examine an individual’s or business’s lifestyle and financial activities to identify potential tax noncompliance.
Purpose:
The primary goal of a lifestyle audit is to identify discrepancies between reported income and actual lifestyle expenditures, which may indicate unreported income, tax evasion, or other financial irregularities.
Lifestyle audits are often triggered by:
During a lifestyle audit, the IRS may:
Potential Outcomes:
To minimize the risk of a lifestyle audit:
Fentanyl has been a major factor in the drug crisis in America, and now first responders are going to have more protection against the effects. As of October 1, 2024, Senate Bill 718 makes it a second degree felony to expose first responders to fentanyl.
More specifically, the new law states that anyone over the age of 18 who is in possession of fentanyl or fentanyl analogs, as described in Florida statute 893.135(1)(c)4.a.(I)-(VII), and “recklessly exposes a first responder to” it in a way that causes the first responder to overdose or experience “serious bodily injury”, will be committing a second degree felony.
For the purposes of this law, a first responder is defined as a correctional or probation officer, state or local law enforcement officer, paramedic, firefighter, and medical technician acting in an “official capacity”.
The law also amends statute 893.21 so that immunity will be provided to anyone who, in good faith, attempts to get medical assistance because he, she, or anyone else is overdosing on drugs or alcohol.
Senate Bill 718 was originally prepared by the Criminal Justice Committee, filed on December 6, 2023; and voted through in the Senate and House with votes of 30-0 and 100-12, respectively. It was presented to Governor DeSantis on April 4, 2024, and he approved it on April 8, 2024.
In a closely watched decision, the highest court in Massachusetts has rejected the theory that third-party website tracking technology violates G. L. c. 272, § 99, the Massachusetts Wiretap Act.
In Vita v. New England Baptist Hospital et al, SJC-13542, plaintiff Kathleen Vita alleged that the websites of two hospital defendants illegally collected information about her browsing activities with tracking software, and simultaneously transmitted that information to third-party software developers that commercialized her data. No private medical records or messages with health care providers were alleged to have been intercepted or transmitted. The SJC rejected the plaintiff’s theory that the Wiretap Act prohibited website tracking and reversed the trial court’s denial of the hospitals’ motions to dismiss.
The SJC based its ruling on a close review of the text and legislative history of the Wiretap Act. Enacted in 1968, the Act was intended to prohibit aiding the secret recording of the “contents” of “any wire or oral communication.” G. L. c. 272, § 99 A, C. The Legislature’s concern was the interception of person-to-person conversations and messages using hidden electronic surveillance devices. While the Legislature crafted the statute to flexibly prohibit secret electronic eavesdropping by new and evolving technologies, it did not define “communications.”
Relying on context and dictionary definitions for the term “communications” to parse whether the statute might include website browsing activity, the SJC reasoned, “we cannot conclude with any confidence that the Legislature intended ‘communication’ to extend so broadly as to criminalize the interception of web browsing and other such interactions.”
Given this ambiguity, the court invoked the rule of lenity, that when it is “unable to ascertain the intent of the Legislature, the defendant is entitled to the benefit of any rational doubt.” Because Vita’s allegations fell within this ambiguity, as she did not claim any person-to-person communication was recorded, her claims were not “clearly within the Wiretap Act’s ambit.” Her interactions were “not with another person but with a website” on which the hospitals published information.
The SJC concluded, “[i]f the Legislature intends for the Wiretap Act’s criminal and civil penalties to prohibit the tracking of a person’s browsing of, and interaction with, published information on websites, it must say so expressly.” While the court acknowledged “the serious threat to privacy by the proliferation of third-party tracking,” it said those concerns “should be addressed to the Legislature,” or through other statutes “more specifically directed at the improper handling of confidential information.” But the decision was clear that litigants cannot look to the Wiretap Act as a remedy for the alleged secret recording and transmission of website interactions without user consent.
The Vita ruling is a victory for businesses that develop and use website tracking software, tools on which the modern digital economy relies. Businesses should continue to track closely this evolving area of law, particularly where plaintiffs in Massachusetts may heed the SJC’s guidance to look to statutes beyond the Wiretap Act. Privacy proponents are also likely to answer the dissent’s impassioned call for the Massachusetts Legislature to broaden existing laws to encompass the tracking alleged in Vita.
Companies should also remain mindful that their websites will remain subject to a patchwork of shifting and sometimes inconsistent state and federal laws. It is important to note that other states may not follow the example in Massachusetts for interpreting their own wiretap laws, particularly in light of the fact that the SJC’s ruling turned on the absence of a definition of “communications” in a nearly 60 year old law, when other statues have more updated definitions. Courts outside of the Commonwealth might also adopt the reasoning of the dissent, which argued for construing website tracking as encompassed by the term “communications” in the Wiretap Act.
Before adopting new technologies that interact with user data, businesses should consult with experienced counsel to ensure they adopt state-of-the-art risk mitigation measures.
Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas.
The two employees were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government. But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need.
“We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones,” said Abdo Mohamed, a researcher and data scientist. “But Microsoft really failed to have the space for us where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves.”
Mohamed, who is from Egypt, said he now needs a new job in the next two months to transfer a work visa and avoid deportation.
Another fired worker, Hossam Nasr, said the purpose of the vigil was both “to honor the victims of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and to call attention to Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide” because of the use of its technology by the Israeli military.
Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft.
The same group had months earlier called on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to take action against Nasr for his public stances on Israel.
Nasr, an Egyptian-raised 2021 graduate of Harvard University, is also a co-organizer of Harvard Alumni for Palestine.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.