KTBB News, Weather, Talk

Justice Jimmy Blacklock, a conservative ally of Gov. Greg Abbott, has been named the new chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He replaces Nathan Hecht, the court’s longest serving justice, who stepped down at the end of December due to the mandatory judicial retirement age.

Abbott appointed his general counsel, James P. Sullivan, to take the seat vacated by Blacklock’s promotion.

“The Supreme Court of Texas plays a crucial role to shape the future of our great state, and Jimmy Blacklock and James Sullivan will be unwavering guardians of the Texas Constitution serving on our state’s highest judicial court,” Abbott said in a statement.

As chief justice, Blacklock will take on a larger role in the administration of the court. During his tenure, Hecht helped reform the rules of civil procedure and was a fierce advocate for legal aid and other programs to help low-income Texans access the justice system. But, as he told The Texas Tribune in December, when it comes to rulings, “the chief is just one voice of nine.”

Adding Sullivan to the court will further secure the court’s conservative stronghold. While Hecht came up in an era when state courts were less politically relevant, Blacklock and Sullivan are both young proteges of an increasingly active conservative legal movement.
Blacklock attended Yale Law School and clerked on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and after a stint in private practice, he joined the Texas Office of the Attorney General under Abbott. He helped lead Texas’ aggressive litigation strategy against the Obama administration, defending the state’s restrictive abortion and voter identification laws, gay marriage restrictions and crusade against the Affordable Care Act.

When Abbott became governor, Blacklock became his general counsel. Abbott appointed him to the bench in December 2017, when he was just 38 years old.

The Texas Supreme Court has transformed over the last few decades from a plaintiff-friendly venue dominated by Democrats to the exclusive domain of increasingly conservative Republicans. Abbott, a former justice himself, has played a huge role in this shift, appointing six of the nine current justices, including Sullivan.

Sullivan graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He spent four years as Texas assistant solicitor general during Abbott’s tenure as attorney general, and in 2018, became Abbott’s deputy general counsel. In 2021, he became the governor’s general counsel.

“As General Counsel for the Office of the Governor, James Sullivan has provided superior legal advice and rendered opinions on some of the most consequential legal issues in Texas,” Abbott said in a statement. “He has the integrity, temperament, and experience Texas needs as a Texas Supreme Court Justice.”

It’s now seen as one of the most conservative high courts in the country, issuing consequential rulings on abortion, COVID restrictions, health care for trans minors and local control in just the last few years. While Democrats have tried to pin these often unpopular rulings on the justices during election years, incumbents tend to easily win reelection in these relatively low-awareness down-ballot races.

Blacklock defeated Harris County District Judge DaSean Jones in November by more than 16 points. In a statement Monday, he thanked Hecht for his “extraordinary legacy of service.”

“The Supreme Court of Texas belongs to the People of Texas, not to the judges or the lawyers,” he said. “Our job at the Court is to apply the law fairly and impartially to every case that comes before us. My colleagues and I are committed to defending the rule of law and to preserving our Texas and United States Constitutions.”

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the original article, click here.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states like Texas to ban nearly all abortions, the number of pregnancy terminations in the United States actually increased. This paradox, which pleases abortion advocates as much as it frustrates their conservative counterparts, hinges mostly on pills.

An average of 2,800 Texans receive abortion-inducing medications through the mail each month from states that still allow abortion, according to #WeCount, a tracking project from the Society of Family Planning.

Until recently, abortion-ban states like Texas mostly gnashed their teeth and railed against their blue state counterparts for allowing this underground enterprise to flourish. But now, they’re using lawsuits and legislation to more directly attack these abortion pill providers.

In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a first-of-its-kind civil lawsuit against a New York doctor for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a Texas resident, setting up a conflict between Texas’ abortion ban and New York’s shield laws. Legislators are filing bills for the upcoming session that would give the state more tools to try to root out this practice. And they do all of this knowing the incoming Trump administration has their back.

“We’re getting to the point where, if we don’t start swinging, start adopting new tools, these websites and the 20,000 abortion pills coming into the state [each year] are going to become the new status quo,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life. “I don’t judge legislators for trying something that doesn’t work. But we are demanding that they start swinging.”

In 2023, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law a sweeping set of protections for abortion providers. The shield law meant New York wouldn’t cooperate with another state’s efforts to “prosecute, penalize, sue one of our health care providers who prescribed abortion medication,” Hochul said.

“You can continue hell-bent down your path on continuing this radical behavior,” she said, addressing anti-abortion states like Texas. “But we’ll be just as hell-bent on stopping you.”

Almost immediately, providers in New York joined those in Massachusetts, California and other shield law states in providing abortion pills via telehealth appointments and mail-order pharmacies to patients in abortion-ban states. The health care they provided was fully legal in the state they were based in, but clearly illegal in the states their patients are based in, and they undertook this work knowing they were courting legal challenges.

If anything, it’s a surprise how long it took, said Mary Ziegler, an abortion legal historian at UC Davis School of Law.

“Everyone has been expecting this and preparing for this,” Ziegler said. “And it’s no surprise that it’s Texas that brought this first suit.”

In mid-December, Paxton filed a lawsuit in Collin County alleging Dr. Maggie Carpenter, the founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access, provided a Texas woman with abortion pills in violation of state law.

Carpenter’s group not only provides direct patient care but also advises other shield providers on technical and legal support. The group was co-founded by Carpenter, Dr. Linda Prine and Julie Kay, a former ACLU attorney who led the lawsuit that overturned Ireland’s abortion ban.

“This is someone who is part of a network, part of a movement,” Ziegler said. “They’re prepared for this test of the shield law.”

But Texas was prepared, too, and legal experts are not certain how exactly this will play out. Nothing in New York’s shield law prevents a Texas court from hearing a case against a New York doctor, said Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor who specializes in conflicts of state law at the George Washington University law school.

If Carpenter doesn’t show up to the hearing, Paxton’s office will likely ask the court for a default judgement. If that is granted, Paxton can ask a New York state court to enforce it, which is where the shield law may come into play.

But much of the shield law’s protections are about protecting doctors from criminal investigations and regulatory consequences, like losing their medical licenses. In a civil suit, like the one Paxton has filed, it’s much harder for one state to undermine another’s ruling, Berman said. The U.S. Constitution specifically requires that a civil judgement issued in one state, like Texas, is enforceable in all states, regardless of their other laws.

This clause applies most clearly to private lawsuits — if a court orders you to pay someone you’ve harmed to make them whole, that judgement is enforceable no matter where you live.

“You don’t want it to be that if I sue you and win in Texas, and you flee to New Mexico, that I have to sue you all over again in New Mexico, and then you flee to California and it starts again,” Berman said.

But when it’s a state, not an individual, bringing the lawsuit, the judgement may not be as easily enforced. There’s an exception for “penal judgements,” when one state is using a civil lawsuit to try to enforce their state laws.

“This is clearly not just one random person suing another random person,” Ziegler said. “New York’s best argument is that this is the state of Texas enforcing its abortion policy through a lawsuit, which is a penal judgement, and they wouldn’t have to deal with that.”

But this is a rarely litigated question the federal courts haven’t meaningfully waded into in decades. Complicating matters further is a provision in New York’s shield law that would allow Carpenter to sue Texas right back, opening the door to more questions about sovereign immunity and state-on-state litigation.

It is, put simply, “a mess,” Ziegler said.

“If New York wins, as in they don’t have to enforce the judgment, that doesn’t mean that the state 100% would know what happens with other types of defendants,” she said. “And if Texas wins, I don’t think that’s going to be the end of abortion pills, or necessarily a guarantee that Texas’s abortion rate will plummet. There are no quick fixes.”

Seago, with Texas Right to Life, agrees. He sees the Carpenter lawsuit as a “very encouraging step,” but said there’s no one legal strategy that will bring the practice of mailing abortion pills into Texas to a stop.

“There’s a long list of areas of law that have not been tested, and areas where we need to start getting precedent,” he said. “We need to start getting some specific fact patterns before judges for them to determine whether some of the laws we already have on the books apply.”

Some of these lawsuits will be brought by Paxton’s office, but Seago said he anticipates private wrongful death lawsuits, as well as lawsuits against people who “aid or abet” in illegal abortions, as prohibited by Texas’ ban on most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.

“There’s no silver bullet,” he said. “These are really difficult cases because these websites are run by individuals and others in other countries, their websites, their domains are out of our jurisdiction, the pharmacies they are using are outside of the country as well.”

Last legislative session was the quietest in decades for abortion. After successfully banning nearly all abortions, Republicans were wary about continuing to push an issue that is widely unpopular with voters.

This session, coming off a Republican rout in November, Seago is hopeful that lawmakers will feel more empowered to continue restricting abortions, and especially abortion pills.

“Texas is uniquely positioned to lead on these cutting-edge pro-life issues,” Seago said. “Some of our friends in red states are still playing defense. They’re fighting off constitutional amendments. They’re still fighting off exceptions to their laws. We’re in a solid place to start fighting back.”

Texas has no mechanism to put a constitutional amendment to increase abortion access on the ballot without the approval of lawmakers, and while Democrats have filed bills to add more exceptions to the abortion laws, they are once again expected to not get any traction.

But whether conservative efforts to further restrict abortion pills will take hold also remains to be seen. Rep. Nate Schatzline, a conservative Republican from Fort Worth, has filed House Bill 1651, which would make it a deceptive trade practice to send abortion pills through the mail without verifying that they were prescribed by an in-state doctor after an in-person exam.

Another bill, HB 991, filed by Republican Rep. Steve Toth of The Woodlands, would allow lawsuits against websites that provide information about obtaining abortion pills. Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C, an information repository about telehealth abortion access, said they expect any challenge to their work to run afoul of free speech protections.

“Texas is a state that values free speech, but despite that, they’re taking action to try and limit free speech with respect to abortion,” she said. “It’s a bit hypocritical.”

Wells said they take seriously any legislation that might further restrict access to abortion in states like Texas. But she said even if all the domestic access routes were shut off by lawsuits and legislation, there are international providers prepared to keep providing pills to people who need them.

“It’s ironic that a lot of these legal actions and court decisions and attempts to restrict access are what is shining a spotlight on … the fact that abortion pills are available by mail,” she said. “Every time there’s a decision like that, we just see the traffic to our site just exponentially increase. These anti-choice actions are the best advertisement.”

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration took steps to shore up abortion access and protect providers and patients in states where the procedure remained legal. The incoming presidential administration is expected to undo most of those protections and more vociferously go after entities that are attempting to help people skirt state abortion laws.

One open question is whether Trump will direct the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the approval of Mifepristone, a common abortion-inducing drug that conservatives tried to get moved off the market. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected those efforts, but nothing about that ruling would stop a new FDA from reviewing that approval.

Additionally, many are watching to see whether the Trump administration will issue new guidance on the Comstock Act, a 19th-century zombie law that hasn’t been enforced in decades. The Comstock Act prohibits mailing anything that could be used to facilitate an illegal abortion, which legal experts say could wreak havoc across the medical supply chain.

While trying to enforce the Comstock Act would spark significant legal challenges, it is a much more direct route to shutting down the infrastructure these shield providers have built, Ziegler said.

“This lawsuit [from Texas] isn’t likely to change much of these shield providers’ behavior, because they’ve been expecting this,” she said. “But there’s much more anxiety about the possibility of Comstock prosecutions, because those would be federal charges.”

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the original article, click here.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More Americans say immigration should be a top focus for the U.S. government in 2025, as the country heads toward a new Republican administration in which President-elect Donald Trump has promised the mass deportations of migrants and an end to birthright citizenship.

About half of U.S. adults named immigration and border topics in an open-ended question that asked respondents to share up to five issues they want the government to work on this year, according to a December poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s up from about one-third who mentioned the topic as a government priority in an AP-NORC poll conducted the previous year.

The issue of immigration has risen in salience across the board — among Democrats and Republicans, men and women, and adults both young and old. But Republicans, in particular, have converged around this issue in recent years. About 7 in 10 Republicans say immigration or a U.S.-Mexico border wall should be a top focus, up from 45% just two years ago.

This means that Trump will return to the White House with his base, and much of the country, interested in his signature issue. That’s a marked contrast to when he left Washington four years ago with his successor, Democrat Joe Biden, offering a more welcoming posture toward migrants.

But even with the widespread uptick in concern about immigration, that issue is still overshadowed by economic worries. About three-quarters of Americans want the government to focus on addressing broad economic concerns, similar to the past few years. There’s a range of economic issues Americans want addressed — about 3 in 10 referenced general economic issues, a similar share pointed to inflation, and roughly 1 in 10 mentioned either unemployment or taxes.

About one-third of Americans identify foreign policy as an important issue, with health care issues and politics — both identified broadly — close behind.

Republicans are especially likely to want government action on immigration

Trump won back the White House with immigration playing a key role in his campaign, often disparaging migrants to the U.S. and claiming that they commit violent crimes, though studies have shown no link between immigration and crime.

Some of his immigration reforms are likely to face legal challenges as Trump seeks to sharply limit the number of immigrants welcome in the U.S. But addressing those issues remains paramount for Americans as he prepares to take office.

About 8 in 10 Republicans want the government to prioritize economic issues, while about 7 in 10 Republicans say immigration or the border wall should be a top priority.

Most Democrats, meanwhile, are focused on the economy, but they don’t have a clear second priority. Instead, about 4 in 10 name health care and health issues, a small uptick from a year earlier. About one-third of Democrats mention political issues, the environment or climate change, or immigration.

But even Democrats are more likely to want the government to make progress on immigration than they were the year before, when only about 2 in 10 Democrats considered it something that should be a primary focus for the federal government.

That doesn’t mean, though, that they align with Trump’s hard-line approach. One Democrat said the government should focus on “border control, not mass deportation,” while another said “better pathways to citizenship” should be the goal. In their responses to the poll, Republicans tended to mention “illegal immigration” and “a stronger border” as an important focus. One Republican supported “closing the border, deporting illegal immigrants, starting with criminals first.”

The focus among Republicans on immigration and the economy dovetails with two of the biggest challenges Biden confronted during his tenure, which saw both high inflation and sharp growth in migration.

Illegal border crossings reached a record level in 2023, adding fuel to Trump’s relentless focus on border security and his promise to deport migrants en masse. The numbers fell during 2024 after Biden announced a crackdown on asylum claims, but Trump argued those moves were too little, too late.

Americans under 30 really want the government to prioritize inflation

The youngest adults are particularly likely to want the government to work on economic issues.

Americans under 30 are significantly more likely than older adults to mention economic issues, inflation and personal financial topics as a vital focus for government in 2025. About 4 in 10 young adults name inflation, compared with roughly one-quarter of older adults. And about one-quarter of young adults say they want the government focused on housing costs, whereas only about 1 in 10 adults ages 60 or older say the same.

Trump made gains among young adults in 2024 compared with his performance four years earlier, but his youngest voters were much more motivated by the economy than by immigration, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters.

The same sentiment prevails as Trump prepares to take office. Compared with 2023, the December poll found, Americans under 30 are more likely to highlight general economic issues and immigration as things they want government to focus on — but they are much less focused on immigration than older adults. Only about one-third of adults under 30 said immigration should be a focus, compared with about 6 in 10 adults 60 or older.

Older Americans are also broadly focused on the economy, but their priorities are a little different — for instance, about 1 in 10 Americans over 60 want the government focused on Social Security in the coming year. Very few Americans under 30 mentioned Social Security as a concern.

NEW YORK (AP) —Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis on Monday named Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego as the archbishop of Washington, tapping one of his most progressively like-minded allies to head the Catholic Church in the U.S. capital at the start of Donald Trump’s second administration.

At a press conference, McElroy said he prayed the incoming administration would work to make America a better place. But he also identified Trump’s threats of mass deportations of immigrants as a point of potential conflict, saying such policies were “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”

McElroy, 70, replaces the retiring Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who steps down after having navigated the archdiocese through the fallout of the 2018 eruption of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

The Vatican announced McElroy’s new job on Monday, the Catholic feast of the Epiphany, in a bulletin that flagged another important appointment in Francis’ reform agenda. The pope named Italian Sister Simona Brambilla the first-ever woman to head a Vatican dicastery, in this case the one responsible for religious orders.

Francis, who was elected pope on a mandate of reform, has long had his eye on McElroy, making him bishop of San Diego in 2015 and then elevating him as a cardinal in 2022.

McElroy has been one of a minority of U.S. bishops to harshly criticize the campaign to exclude Catholic politicians who support abortion rights from Communion, a campaign Francis has publicly criticized by insisting that bishops must be pastors, not politicians.

He has also questioned why the U.S. bishops’ conference, which has leaned conservative in its leadership, consistently insists on identifying abortion as its “preeminent” priority. McElroy has questioned why greater prominence is not given to issues such as racism, poverty, immigration and climate change.

He has also expressed support for LGBTQ+ youth and denounced the bullying often directed at them, further aligning himself with Francis’ priorities as pope.

“McElroy is competent, kind, empathetic, and willing to fight on the side of the vulnerable,” said Natalia Imperatori-Lee, chairperson of the religion and philosophy department at Manhattan University. She said his nomination was particularly timely given the polarization in the U.S.

“McElroy has experience leading a diocese marked by diversity and challenges, and I can’t think of a bigger challenge than to be so close to the seat of the U.S. government in 2025,” she said in an email.

McElroy, a graduate of Harvard University with a master’s in history from Stanford University, is a native of San Francisco and had ministered there until Francis moved him to San Diego.

Vincent Miller, professor of theology at the University of Dayton, pointed to McElroy’s writings on Christian nationalism and patriotism — in which he argued for a “morally sound and unitive” patriotism as opposed to an isolationist one — as particularly relevant today.

“McElroy is uniquely prepared for this moment,” Miller said in a social media post. “At a moment when constitutional democracy is in crisis in the US, on the anniversary of an insurrection that sought to undermine it, Francis has moved one of his most capable and uniquely qualified bishops into position to respond to the needs of this moment.”

McElroy’s appointment to Washington comes just a few weeks after Trump, who takes office Jan. 20, nominated Brian Burch as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Burch, president and co-founder of the advocacy group CatholicVote, has criticized Francis and some of his policies, including his emphasis on “synodality” or making the church a more inclusive place.

McElroy, who was a papal nominee to the Vatican’s big synod process, made clear Monday that he was fully on board with Francis’ vision of a church that doesn’t discriminate. Speaking in Spanish to address Washington’s sizeable Latino community, McElroy cited Francis’ famous line “todos, todos, todos,” to emphasize that everyone is welcome in the church, no one excluded.

He did, though, acknowledge likely points of disagreement with the incoming Trump administration. Climate change, he said, was “one of the greatest challenges” facing the world, while immigration would likely be a source of conflict if the administration fulfills its threat of mass deportations of migrants.

“The Catholic Church teaches that a country has the right to control the borders, and our nation’s desire to do that is a legitimate effort,” he said. “At the same time, we are called always to have the sense of the dignity of every human person, and thus plans which have been talked about on some level of having a wider indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”

The Archdiocese of Washington includes the District of Columbia and the Maryland counties of Montgomery, Prince George’s, St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles. It has a total population of 3,050,847, of whom 671,187 are Catholic.

Its outgoing archbishop, Gregory, took over in 2019 at a time of turmoil for one of the nation’s most important archdioceses. Its two previous leaders, ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Cardinal Donald Wuerl, were caught up in a new wave of the long-running clerical sexual abuse scandal.

Wuerl stepped down after he lost the trust of his priests, and McCarrick was defrocked after a Vatican investigation found he abused adults as well as minors.

Francis not only tapped Gregory to lead but then made him a prince of the church in 2020, making him the first Black American cardinal in the process.

McElroy was indirectly tainted by the McCarrick scandal after revelations that a whistleblower had told him in 2016 that McCarrick slept with seminarians. McElroy acknowledged having received the report but said the whistleblower refused to provide him with corroborating evidence.

Bishop Joseph Strickland, an arch-conservative whom Francis ousted as bishop of Tyler, Texas last year, cited the McCarrick connection in strongly criticizing Monday’s appointment.

“The blatant corruption of Pope Francis and the US Cardinals is on full display with the appointment of a McCarrick clone to the same archdiocese where his evil reigned twenty years ago,” Strickland tweeted.

The Archdiocese of Washington is home to The Catholic University of America, which is run by the church and is viewed as more conservative than many other Catholic universities in the U.S. run by the Jesuits.

The dean of CUA’s school of theology and religious studies, Professor Joseph Capizzi, said he looked forward to working with McElroy.

“I hope he becomes engaged,” Capizzi said. “I hope we can influence him and he can influence us.”