A bipartisan three-judge panel in North Carolina ruled that a Republican-led effort in the state Legislature to restructure state and county election boards is unconstitutional.

Their ruling, which contained no dissenting opinions, leaves in place the current composition of the state election board, which consists of three Democratic members and two Republican members.

Representatives of the Republican-led parliament did not indicate on Tuesday whether they would appeal the decision.

The legislation, passed last year by the Republican supermajority, would have upset the balance between state and county election boards in the state, creating an eight-member state election board, with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans running for office. the state legislature would have been appointed to the council. . Provincial election boards would be created for similar impasses.

Under current law, the state’s governor appoints the members of the five-member state election board. The process for county election boards, which currently have five members, is more complex, but the governor appoints the chairmen.

Election experts and Democrats, including Governor Roy Cooper, claimed the bill would lead to gridlock on many key election issues.

The three-judge panel, composed of two Republicans and one Democrat, called the effort a “stark and egregious removal of the governor’s appointment power” and said it “violates the governor’s constitutional duties.”

Republicans who support the law face an increasingly short window to appeal the decision in time for the 2024 elections, and will most likely have to go to the state Supreme Court if they want a decision before November.

The most important First Amendment cases of the internet age, which will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, could center on a single question: Are platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X most like newspapers, malls or phone companies?

The two cases come before the court in politics because they involve laws in Florida and Texas aimed at protecting conservative speech by banning leading social media sites from removing posts based on the views they express.

But the excessive demand posed in the cases at hand transcends ideology. At issue is whether technology platforms have the right to free speech to make editorial judgments. Choosing the right analogy from the court’s precedents could decide the case, but none of the available analogies fit perfectly.

If the platforms are like newspapers, they can publish whatever they want without government intervention. If they are like private malls open to the public, they may be required to let visitors say what they want. And if they’re like phone companies, they have to relay everyone’s speech.

“It is not at all clear how our existing precedents, which predate the Internet age, should apply to major social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote. a 2022 dissent when one of the cases briefly reached the Supreme Court.

Supporters of the state laws say they promote free speech, giving the public access to all points of view. Opponents say the laws would trample on the platforms’ own First Amendment rights and turn them into cesspools of filth, hate and lies. A opposite shortThe liberal professors urged the justices to uphold the key provision of the Texas law despite the harm they say it would cause.

What is clear is that the court’s decision, expected in June, could transform the internet.

“It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these cases for freedom of expression online,” said Scott Wilkens, an attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who submitted an application a friend-of-the-court briefing in support of neither side in the two cases, saying both sides had taken an extreme position.

The cases concern laws passed in Florida and Texas in 2021 that aim to ban major platforms from removing posts expressing conservative views. They differed in their details, but were both animated by frustration on the right, particularly the decisions of some platforms to ban President Donald J. Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In a statement Issued as he signed the Florida bill, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said the law was intended to advance right-wing views. “If Big Tech’s censors enforce the rules inconsistently to discriminate in favor of Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology, they will now be held accountable,” he said.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, also a Republican, said about the same thing when he signed his state law. “It is now the law,” he said, “that conservative views in Texas cannot be banned on social media.”

The two trade groups that challenged the laws — NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association — said the platforms had the same First Amendment rights as conventional news media.

“Just as Florida might not tell The New York Times which op-eds to publish or Fox News which interviews to air,” the groups say told the judges, “It may not tell Facebook and YouTube what content to distribute. When it comes to disseminating speech, decisions about which messages to include and exclude are made by private parties – not the government –.”

The states took the opposite position. Texas law, Ken Paxton, state attorney general, wrote in short“simply enables voluntary communication on the world’s largest telecommunications platforms between speakers who want to speak and listeners who want to listen, treating the platforms like telegraph or telephone companies.”

The two laws met different fates in the lower courts.

The Texas case involved a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned a lower court’s order blocking state law.

“We reject the platforms’ attempt to waive free-wheeling censorship from the freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution,” Justice Andrew S. Oldham wrote for the majority. “The platforms are not newspapers. Their censorship is not a speech.”

In the case of Florida, the 11th Circuit largely defended a preliminary injunction blocking state law.

“Social media platforms exercise editorial judgment that is inherently expressive,” Judge Kevin C. Newsom wrote for the panel. “When platforms choose to remove users or posts, deprioritize content in viewers’ feeds or search results, or penalize violations of their community standards, they are engaging in First Amendment-protected activity.”

Forcing social media companies to pass on virtually all messages, their representatives told the judges“would encourage platforms to spread all kinds of objectionable views – such as Russian propaganda claiming that the invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is justified, neo-Nazi or KKK texts that deny or support the Holocaust, and children encourage risky or unhealthy behavior, such as eating disorders.”

Supporting instructions are usually divided along predictable lines. But there was one notable exception. To the surprise of many, several prominent liberal professors submitted an application a short appeal to the judges to enforce a key provision of Texas law.

“There are serious, legitimate public policy concerns regarding the law at issue in this case,” the professors wrote, in part Laurens Lessig from Harvard, Tim Wu of Columbia and Zephyr lesson of Fordham. “They could lead to many forms of amplified hate speech and harmful content.”

But they added that “bad laws can set a bad precedent” and urged the justices to reject the platforms’ plea to be treated as news channels.

“To put it plainly: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are not newspapers,” the professors wrote. “They are not space-constrained publications that rely on editorial discretion in choosing which topics or issues to highlight. Rather, they are platforms for widespread public expression and discourse. They’re their own beast, but they’re much closer to a public shopping center or a railway line than they are to The Manchester Union Leader.

In an interview, Professor Teachout linked the Texas case the Citizens United decisionwhich struck down a campaign finance law that regulated corporate spending under the First Amendment.

“This case threatens to be yet another extension of companies’ right to speech,” she said. “It could become a Trojan Horse because the sponsors of the legislation are so unsavory. We should be very careful about expanding corporate speech rights just because we don’t like certain laws.”

Other professors, including Richard L. Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles, warned the judges a brief support of the challengers that banning the platforms from removing political posts could have serious consequences.

“If Florida and Texas’ social media laws remain in place,” the letter said, “they would thwart platforms’ ability to moderate social media posts that risk undermining American democracy and inciting violence.”

The justices will consult two key precedents in an effort to determine where to draw the constitutional line in the cases to be argued Monday: Moody to NetChoiceNo. 22-277, and NetChoice vs. PaxtonNo. 22-555.

One of them, Pruneyard Mall vs. Robins from 1980 was a sprawling private shopping center in Campbell, California, whose 21 acres included 65 stores, 10 restaurants and a movie theater. It was open to the public but, as Judge William H. Rehnquist put it in his opinion for the court, “did not permit any publicly expressive activity, including the distribution of petitions, not directly related to its commercial purposes. ”

That policy was challenged by high school students who opposed a U.N. resolution against Zionism and were prevented from handing out pamphlets and requesting signatures on a petition.

Judge Rehnquist, who would be elevated to chief justice in 1986, wrote that state constitutional provisions requiring the mall to allow people to engage in expressive activities on its premises did not violate the center’s First Amendment rights.

In the second case Miami Herald vs. TornilloIn 1974, the Supreme Court overturned a Florida law that would have given politicians the “right to reply” to newspaper articles critical of them.

The case was brought by Pat L. Tornillo, who was dissatisfied with colorful editorials in The Miami Herald opposing his candidacy for the Florida House of Representatives. The newspaper said Mr Tornillo, a union official, had engaged in “shakedown statesmanship”.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, writing for a unanimous court in striking down the law, said the country was in the midst of “tremendous change.”

“Over the past half century,” he wrote, “a communications revolution has brought radio and television into our lives, the promise of a global community through the use of communications satellites, and the specter of a ‘wired’ nation. ‘

But Chief Justice Burger concluded that “the vast accumulation of unchecked power in the modern media empire” did not allow the government to usurp the role of editors in deciding what to publish.

“A responsible press is undoubtedly a desirable goal,” he wrote, “but press responsibility is not mandated by the Constitution, and like many other virtues it cannot be legislated.”

At the height of one of the most watched trials in South Carolina history, the packed courtroom was silent except for one woman: the clerk, who in March 2023 read aloud the guilty verdicts that put Alex Murdaugh, a prominent attorney, in ended up in prison. life sentence for the murder of his wife and son.

Now a new hearing begins Monday to determine whether the clerk, Rebecca Hill, improperly influenced the jurors who voted to convict the 55-year-old Murdaugh and whether Mr. Murdaugh should get a new trial.

A state law enforcement agency is investigating allegations by Mr. Murdaugh's lawyers that Ms. Hill made comments during the trial that could have swayed jurors' votes. The allegations include that Ms. Hill told jurors not to be “fooled” by Mr. Murdaugh's defense, that she had private conversations with a juror, and that she told jurors before they began deliberating that “this wouldn't last long. ”

Ms Hill has not been charged and she has denied many of the most serious allegations. She and the jurors are expected to testify Monday at a hearing in Columbia, S.C., that is part of Mr. Murdaugh's appeal on his convictions.

Judge Jean Toal, a former chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, will determine what Ms. Hill did, whether her actions could have changed the outcome of the trial and whether Mr. Murdaugh should get a new trial. It is not yet known whether she will rule from the bench on Monday or will issue advice later.

The allegations against Ms. Hill, which Mr. Murdaugh's lawyers first raised in September, are a new twist in the tragic story of the Murdaugh killings, a crime that has horrified and fascinated observers across the country since June 2021, when Mr. Murdaugh's wife, Maggie, and their youngest son, Paul, were shot dead.

Mr. Murdaugh has always maintained his innocence. But a key video shown at his trial showed him at the family dog ​​kennels with his wife and son shortly before they were killed, contradicting his claim that he was not with them at the time been. Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before delivering the guilty verdicts read out by Ms. Hill.

Mr. Murdaugh had stolen millions of dollars from clients and law partners for years before the murders. Prosecutors said in the murder case that he committed the killings in a bizarre, failed attempt to gain sympathy and keep his law firm from scrutinizing his finances.

Although he disputes his murder convictions, Mr. Murdaugh has admitted to stealing large sums of money over the years. He pleaded guilty to a series of financial crimes in November and was sentenced to a further 27 years in prison.

Ms. Hill was a fixture in the Walterboro, S.C., courtroom during Mr. Murdaugh's murder trial. She later wrote a book about the process, for which she wrote the foreword recently admitted to plagiarism from a draft of a BBC article.

Since the allegations against Ms. Hill came to light, several jurors have said in written statements to police that they heard no inappropriate comments from Ms. Hill and felt no pressure to convict Mr. Murdaugh.

Lawyers for the South Carolina attorney general who prosecuted the case have argued in court filings that the claims about Ms. Hill are “baseless and not credible.” They have argued that a juror's memories of inappropriate comments made by Ms. Hill could be the result of the juror misremembering things prosecutors said during the trial.

Even if Ms. Hill made inappropriate comments, the state's attorneys argued, the comments were not enough to influence the jurors' decision.

The hearing begins at 9:30 a.m. Monday at the Richland County Courthouse in Columbia.

Mr. Murdaugh, who has been disbarred, is a fourth-generation lawyer whose family had enormous influence in the legal world of South Carolina's Lowcountry region. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had each run a prosecutor's office in the area – a total of more than 80 years – and the family ran a law firm in the small town of Hampton for even longer.

Ethan Crumbley, who was often left home alone, texted his mother in March 2021 that he had seen a demon in their house, a demon hurling dishes across the kitchen. Days later, his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, discussed how their teenage son was “excited and excited,” weighing whether to give him Xanax.

The following November, James Crumbley, ignoring what seemed like warning signs that Ethan was having mental health problems, bought his son a semiautomatic pistol. Ethan, then 15, used the gun to kill four Oxford High School students, the worst school shooting in Michigan history.

On Tuesday, 45-year-old Jennifer Crumbley will appear in court charged with involuntary manslaughter for the deaths — new territory when it comes to prosecuting school shootings. James Crumbley, 47, faces a separate trial scheduled for March also on charges of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the killings.

While adults have been prosecuted before when children commit violent crimes, the Oxford High School case goes a step further by attempting to hold parents criminally liable for an intentional mass shooting. Oakland County Prosecutor Karen D. McDonald has said the Crumbleys are guilty for giving their son access to a gun while ignoring warnings that he was in trouble.

Both parents have pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers have said they had no idea Ethan was capable of such violence.

“One of the fundamental principles of American criminal law is that you are not responsible for someone else's actions,” said Ekow N. Yankah, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. But Mr Yankah said the Crumbleys provided perfect evidence to test that principle, pointing to what he called a “damning” set of facts against the couple.

“It is difficult to think of a set of facts that are more inviting for prosecution,” he said.

Extensive trial testimony and court documents have portrayed the couple as negligent parents. They drank heavily, fought loudly in front of Ethan, and often left him home alone, despite his shaky mental health.

After James Crumbley bought the gun, his wife took Ethan to the shooting range.

When a teacher reported seeing Ethan searching for ammunition online, his mother didn't seem concerned.

“LOL I'm not mad at you,” Jennifer Crumbley texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

On the day of the attack, after a teacher found Ethan with a violent drawing depicting a shooting, his parents refused a school counselor's request to take him home.

After their son's arrest, the Crumbleys appeared to flee to avoid prosecution and police discovered them hiding in the basement of a Detroit art studio. (Attorneys for the parents said the Crumbleys had not fled, but had left town for their own safety, and planned to return for the arraignment.)

It is unclear whether Ethan, now 17, will be called to testify, but his lawyers said they will advise him to invoke his right to remain silent. Ethan appeals his life sentence without parole.

Unable to post $1 million combined bail, the parents have been held in the Oakland County Jail for more than two years. Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl A. Matthews will preside over both trials, which will take place separately at the couple's request.

Since the shooting on Nov. 30, 2021, Ms. McDonald, the prosecutor in affluent Oakland County, outside Detroit, has turned gun violence into a personal crusade. In an interview shortly after the shooting, Ms. McDonald said she saw the attack as an opportunity to promote responsible gun ownership.

She also formed a committee to study ways to prevent gun violence. Spurred in part by the shooting, the Michigan Legislature recently passed a measure requiring gun owners to store their firearms in a locked container when a minor is likely to be on the premises. Ethan said the gun he used was unlocked.

In 2000, Arthur Busch, a former prosecutor in nearby Flint, Michigan, handled a school shooting case there. Kayla Rolland, a first-grader in a suburb near Flint, was shot and killed by a six-year-old classmate.

Prosecutors said the boy, who found the gun in a home where he lived with relatives, treated the weapon as if it were a toy. His uncle, who was charged with involuntary manslaughter for leaving the gun accessible, pleaded no contest and spent two years and five months in prison before being released on probation.

Still, Mr. Busch said the Crumbley case could be difficult to prosecute.

“The fact that they bought him a gun when he was having serious mental health issues is pretty reckless,” Mr. Busch said. “But the more the public looks at this, I think there are parents who might say, 'That could be me. I have an insolent, oppositional child and I'm liable for that? That doesn't seem fair to me. ''

The Supreme Court on Friday decided to rule on whether former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible to run in Colorado’s Republican primary because he was involved in an insurrection in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The case, which could change the course of this year’s presidential election, will be heard on February 8. The court will likely decide quickly as the primaries will start soon.

Mr Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the Colorado Supreme Court barred him from voting last month. That decision is on hold while the judges investigate the case.

The case centers on the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which prohibits those who had taken an oath “in support of the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they “have engaged in insurrection ”. or rebellion against it, or aid or comfort given to its enemies.

Congress can lift the ban, the provision says, but only with a two-thirds majority in each chamber.

Although Chapter 3 dealt with the aftermath of the Civil War, it was written in general terms and, according to most scholars, remains valid today. Congress granted broad amnesties in 1872 and 1898. But these acts were retroactive, scholars say, and did not limit the provision’s future power.

A judge in Colorado ruled that Mr. Trump was guilty of insurrection, but accepted his argument that Section 3 did not apply to him. He reasoned that Mr. Trump had not taken the right kind of oath and that the provision did not apply to the office of president. The Presidency.

The Colorado Supreme Court upheld the first part of the ruling – that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election; trying to change the number of votes; encouraging false slates from competing voters; pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution; and called for the march on the Capitol.

But the majority reversed the part of the decision that said Section 3 did not apply to the presidency.

“President Trump asks us to hold,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, “that Section 3 disqualifies any oath-breaking insurrectionist.” except the most powerful and that it bans oathbreakers from virtually every office, state and federal, except the highest in the country. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

The state Supreme Court has addressed a number of other issues. Congress does not need to act for the courts to disqualify candidates, the report said. Mr. Trump’s eligibility is not the kind of political issue that falls outside the jurisdiction of the courts. The report of the House of Representatives of January 6 was rightly admitted into evidence. Mr. Trump’s speech that day was not protected by the First Amendment.

The Court added that states have the authority under the Constitution to assess the qualifications of presidential candidates. “If we were to adopt President Trump’s position,” the majority wrote, “Colorado would not be able to exclude from the ballot even candidates who clearly do not meet the age, residency, and citizenship requirements” of the Constitution.

An election official in Maine last month adopted much of the Colorado Supreme Court’s reasoning in excluding Mr. Trump from the primary vote there. He has appealed that ruling to a state court in Maine.

Maine’s secretary of state is poised to issue a decision next week that could strengthen a citizen-led movement to keep former President Donald J. Trump out of primary elections across the country — or counter a groundbreaking court ruling in Colorado this week.

At a hearing last week at Maine’s State House in Augusta, Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state, weighed three separate complaints challenging Trump’s eligibility to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot. Two of them are based on the same section of the Constitution that the Colorado Supreme Court cited Tuesday in its 4-to-3 decision finding that Mr. Trump cannot hold office again because of his actions leading up to the attack on January 6, 2021 .the Capitol amounted to an insurrection.

More than 30 states have filed some form of challenge to Trump’s eligibility, but many have already been rejected. Most take place in the courts, but in Maine — due to a quirk in the Constitution — the secretary of state weighs in first, with voters filing petitions, not lawsuits. Her decision can then be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The ruling in Colorado was the first in history to bar a presidential candidate from voting under the 14th Amendment, which was created after the Civil War. One section of the amendment prohibits those who have taken an oath “to support the Constitution” from holding office if they have “been guilty of an insurrection or rebellion against the same,” or have given “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof ‘.

Mr Trump’s campaign has said it will appeal the decision to the US Supreme Court; Should the Supreme Court take up the case, other challenges across the country will likely be stayed.

After the ruling in Colorado, Ms. Bellows, an elected Democrat, invited lawyers from both parties to Maine to submit additional memoranda and said her decision would likely come next week.

The Republican primaries in Maine and Colorado are both scheduled for March 5, known as Super Tuesday because so many states are holding primaries that day. But states must start sending ballots to military and overseas voters 45 days before a federal election — Jan. 20, in the case of the March 5 primary, adding urgency to the situation.

If the Supreme Court agrees to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal, the Colorado court’s decision would not take effect on Jan. 4 as scheduled, and Mr. Trump would remain eligible to appear on the ballot there pending the outcome of the appeal, Colorado said. state officials.

An appeal would also likely interrupt other efforts to keep him from voting across the country. But it was unclear this week what it would mean in Maine, where the trial so far is taking place outside the courts.

Under Maine law, registered voters can challenge access to a candidate’s ballot by petitioning the Secretary of State. The state faced three such challenges to Trump’s voting eligibility: one from a group of former elected officials, and two from individual residents.

Mark Brewer, the chairman of the University of Maine’s political science department, said little attention had been paid to the complaints in Maine until the Colorado ruling.

“Now everyone is looking at where else this could happen,” he said.

The Michigan challenge is also being closely watched. Lawyers on both sides have asked the state Supreme Court to rule next week, but the court could schedule oral arguments first or wait to see if the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Colorado case.

Similar lawsuits filed by a longtime Republican presidential candidate, John Anthony Castro, have been dismissed by federal judges in Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Florida, and withdrawn in a dozen other states.

Sworn in nearly three years ago as Maine’s first female secretary of state, Ms. Bellows grew up in tiny Hancock, Maine, and served two terms as a senator. She is the former executive director of the nonprofit Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine and the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine.

Dr. Brewer said he couldn’t predict her decision, but noted that in her shoes he would find it difficult to rule as the Colorado court did.

“Whatever you think he did, the former president has not been charged with insurrection,” said Dr. Brewer in an interview. “Even if he had been charged, he hasn’t had his day in court yet, so in the eyes of the law he’s not guilty of anything.”

But Ethan Strimling, a former Portland mayor and Democratic state lawmaker who led one of the challenges with two former Republican lawmakers, said the Colorado court’s decision changes that equation.

“There is no longer any truth to that argument because two courts have now found that he incited insurrection,” Mr. Strimling said, referring to the Colorado Supreme Court ruling and a lower court ruling that preceded it. “I think that provides a lot of clarity.”

Lawyers for Mr. Trump argued in their follow-up letter that the Colorado decision should not be relevant to the Maine proceeding because the two challenges are separate actions under different laws and standards, and because the former president was not given a “full and fair opportunity.” had. to litigate the facts in Colorado.

In addition, they reiterated that the Secretary of State has no legal authority to exclude Mr. Trump from voting in Maine.

“The Constitution reserves the exclusive power of the Electoral College and Congress to determine whether someone may become president,” they argued in a final letter last week. “The challengers are essentially asking the secretary to strip those institutions of the power to solve Section Three problems.”

While two of the three challenges in Maine focus on the 14th Amendment, the third, filed by Paul Gordon, a Portland attorney, argues that Mr. Trump should be ineligible to vote under the 22nd Amendment, which says that “ no one should be elected president more than twice.” The basis for his argument is that Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed to have won the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump could “remove this obstacle” to qualifying for the ballot, Mr. Gordon said in his complaint, by “acknowledging that he lost the 2020 election and by rejecting all prior statements that undermine the integrity of that undermine elections.”

Nick Corasaniti, Ernesto Londoño And Mitch Smith reporting contributed.

President Biden and Democrats on Capitol Hill are seriously considering Republican demands for a deeply restrictive immigration policy in return for billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, a move that activists say would destroy America’s obligations to welcome desperate migrants fleeing war and oppression .

Mr. Biden has said he is willing to make “significant compromises” on border security to appease Republicans, who will not support more aid to Ukraine without a new immigration crackdown.

Republicans last week blocked a $111 billion emergency spending bill that includes about $50 billion in security aid to Ukraine and made a counteroffer that amounted to a Trump-era border wish list.

Mr. Biden has accused Republicans of holding military aid to Ukraine hostage in exchange for “an extreme Republican partisan agenda at the border.”

Here’s a look at the state of negotiations:

What Republicans want

Republicans have said they want to make it harder to get asylum in the United States — a demand the White House has signaled it is willing to consider.

But Republicans say that’s not enough.

They also want to reinstate policies that would quickly turn people away at the border or force them to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases are heard. Former President Donald J. Trump used these methods to effectively close the border to migrants during his administration.

Republicans are seeking to expand a policy known as “expedited removal” to quickly deport undocumented immigrants. They also want to limit the use of an immigration policy known as humanitarian parole, which has allowed thousands of Afghans, Ukrainians and others fleeing war and violence to come to the United States.

Republicans say the overhaul is necessary to cope with border crossings that have recently topped 10,000 per day.

What the White House might consider

The White House has indicated it is open to several Republican proposals, according to Biden administration officials, lawmakers in both parties and people familiar with the matter.

Democrats have agreed in principle to raising the standard that migrants must meet when they claim they need asylum in the United States because they fear persecution in their home countries, according to people involved in the talks.

The White House has also said it would consider a policy similar to the Trump-era emergency rule known as Title 42, which allowed border agents to quickly expel migrants at the border, according to Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina involved in the talks.

The White House has included some Republican Party demands in the emergency funding request that Republicans blocked, such as a significant expansion of detention capacity. The bill spent more than $4 billion on the Department of Homeland Security to expand storage facilities at the border.

And the White House has considered the idea of ​​reinstating the practice of detaining migrant families who cross the border together — another line item in the Republican Party’s latest proposal.

But other Republican proposals could be difficult for the White House to accept, such as forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while their cases are heard and limiting humanitarian paroles. The White House has emphasized that it has not signed any of the proposals.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, declined to comment Wednesday on the specific immigration proposals being discussed in the negotiations.

“We must find a compromise between both sides,” Ms Jean-Pierre said.

Politics

The White House is under pressure from all sides.

The southern border poses a major burden on Mr. Biden, who has failed to stem the tide of crossings. The negotiations have only exposed a crisis that has led to a bipartisan response against Mr. Biden.

The negotiations also cut to the heart of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy. The president has pledged to support Ukraine’s fight against Russian invaders for as long as necessary and has characterized the aid as a matter of American credibility.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was in Washington this week, lobbying lawmakers and warning that his country will lose the war without American support.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, has called on Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the House in session next week to give members more time to negotiate.

“If Republicans are serious about getting something done at the border, why are so many in a hurry to leave?” Mr Schumer said this on Wednesday.

But the pessimism grew.

“It is, I think, nowhere near any kind of agreement,” said Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota.

Progressive Democrats and immigration advocates, meanwhile, are furious that the White House is even considering Republicans’ proposed restrictions.

“How will they credibly campaign against Trump’s immigration agenda if they are the ones leading the fight to pass it into law?” said Andrea Flores, former director of border management at the National Security Council. “They are going against the grain of the party to support the most exclusionary immigration policy in more than 100 years.”

Hamed Aleaziz contributed to reporting.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday decided to decide an issue at the heart of the federal election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and hundreds of charges stemming from the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Can the government charge suspects? in those cases under a federal law that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official congressional proceeding?

The decision to hear the case will complicate and perhaps even delay the start of Mr Trump’s trial, now set to take place in Washington in March. The Supreme Court’s final ruling, which may not come until June, will likely address the viability of two of the key charges against Mr. Trump. It could severely limit special counsel Jack Smith’s efforts to hold the former president accountable for the violence perpetrated by his supporters at the Capitol.

The court’s final decision could also invalidate convictions already handed down against dozens of Mr. Trump’s followers who took part in the attack. That would be a huge blow to the government’s prosecution of the January 6 riot cases.

The case the court agreed to involves Joseph Fischer, who has been indicted on seven charges for his role in the attack on the Capitol. Prosecutors say he attacked police as Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 election. Like hundreds of other rioters whose actions disrupted the certification proceedings at the Capitol, Mr. Fischer was charged with the obstruction count, formally known as 18 USC 1512.

Mr. Fischer requested dismissal of part of the charges filed under the Obstruction Act, which was passed as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a statute primarily aimed at white-collar crime. Prosecutors have routinely used the charge of obstruction, rather than more politically controversial charges such as insurrection or seditious conspiracy, to describe how members of the pro-Trump mob disrupted the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Judge Carl J. Nichols of the Federal District Court in Washington granted Mr. Fischer’s motion to dismiss, saying the law required defendants “to take some action with respect to a document, record, or other item” — something he said was missing from Mr. Fischer’s behavior in the Capitol.

A divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed Judge Nichols’ decision, ruling that the law “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding.” Three Jan. 6 defendants, including Mr. Fischer, ultimately asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the law had been properly applied to the attack on the Capitol.

Obstruction charges were never an easy resolution in the cases arising from the storming of the Capitol. When the law was passed in the early 2000s, the law aimed to curb corporate malfeasance by banning things like destroying documents or tampering with witnesses or evidence.

Defense attorneys representing the Jan. 6 rioters argued that federal prosecutors improperly expanded their scope to cover the violence that erupted at the Capitol and interfered with the proceedings in which lawmakers had met to certify the outcome of the determine elections.

The attorneys also objected to the use of the charge against people who stormed the Capitol, saying many did not act “corruptly” as the law requires because they believed they were protesting a stolen election.

“The statute has been used to over-criminalize the Jan. 6 cases,” said Norm Pattis, attorney for Jake Lang, one of the three defendants who appealed to the Supreme Court. “Congress never intended it that way.”

Mr. Pattis said the Supreme Court’s review was “significant” in hundreds of criminal cases arising from the Capitol riot and was also “yet another reason the 2024 case against Donald Trump should be postponed.”

Two of the four charges in the federal election interference indictment against Mr. Trump are based on the obstruction charge. He has been charged with personally obstructing the certification proceedings at the Capitol on January 6 and is separately accused of conspiring with others to obstruct the proceedings.

The Supreme Court’s review, while potentially damaging to the indictment, would not affect the other two charges against Mr. Trump. One accuses him of conspiring to defraud the United States by using ruthless lies that the election was stolen from him in an attempt to overturn his defeat. The other accuses him of a plot to deprive millions of Americans of the right to have their votes counted.

But if the Supreme Court rules that the obstruction law does not apply to the mob attack on the Capitol, it could cripple Smith’s plans to pin the violence on Trump.

Recent court papers in the election case have strongly suggested that prosecutors intended to use the obstruction charge as a way to show the jury graphic videos of the attack on the Capitol and perhaps even introduce testimony from rioters who claim they had stormed the building on behalf of Mr Trump. .

The possibility that the Supreme Court could review the obstruction count — and one day invalidate it — has hung over Trump’s election case for months. But the court’s decision to act came at a particularly delicate time on Wednesday: two days after Mr. Smith asked the justices to expedite an appeal of Mr. Trump’s separate efforts to have the case dismissed based on broad claims of presidential immunity.

While the Supreme Court has not yet decided whether it will consider Mr. Trump’s immunity arguments, it has — in the space of a week — become deeply embroiled in the election interference proceedings. His decisions on the obstruction charge and on immunity could radically change the shape, scope and timing of the case, which long seemed like it would be the first of four charges Trump would face before a jury.

Attorney General Elizabeth B. Prelogar had urged the justices to refuse review of the case, saying the law was broad enough to cover Mr. Fischer’s actions even if there were no documents or other items in the were at issue.

“A defendant obstructs an official proceeding by physically blocking it — as happened here when petitioners and others violently occupied the Capitol for hours, preventing the joint session of Congress from doing its work,” she wrote.

She added that there were documents in the case anyway.

“Preventing members of Congress from validating state certifications thus constitutes an evidence-based obstruction,” she wrote, adding that a review was premature. “At a minimum, the government should be allowed to present its case to a jury and prove that petitioners obstructed a proceeding by (partially) preventing the relevant decision makers from viewing the evidence at the time and place designated for that purpose are specified.”

Regardless of how the Supreme Court ultimately rules, Trump’s lawyers will likely use his decision to review the obstruction charge to strengthen their arguments that the trial in Washington should be postponed, perhaps until after the 2024 presidential race is decided.

From the beginning of the case, Mr. Trump has pursued a sustained strategy of delay. If he can continue the process until after the election and win the race, he would be in a position to simply order that the charges against him be dropped.