“The law, Assembly Bill 2839 makes it illegal for an individual to produce “knowingly distributing an advertisement or other election communication, as defined, that contains certain materially deceptive content,” within 120 days of an election and up to 60 days after. Affected candidates can file for a civil action enjoining distribution of the media, and seek damages from its creator.”
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“content creator Christopher Kohls filed a lawsuit arguing the law was overbroad, violating his First Amendment rights to make parody content. Kohls has a YouTube channel with more than 300,000 subscribers, and his videos often consist of political parodies featuring political candidates seemingly mocking themselves.”
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“Judge John A. Mendes, a judge on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, sided with Kohls, ruling that the law doesn’t pass constitutional muster because it does not use “the least restrictive means available for advancing the State’s interest.”
“Counter speech is a less restrictive alternative to prohibiting videos such as those posted by Plaintiff, no matter how offensive or inappropriate someone may find them,” Mendez’s opinion reads. “AB 2839 is unconstitutional because it lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”
Mendez’s ruling argues that the law, which is aimed at cracking down on “deepfakes” and other forms of false speech intended at misrepresenting an opponent’s views and actions, ends up making illegal a much wider range of speech than these specific statements.
“While Defendants attempt to analogize AB 2839 to a restriction on defamatory statements, the statute itself does not use the word ‘defamation’ and by its own definition, extends beyond the legal standard for defamation to include any false or materially deceptive content that is ‘reasonably likely’ to harm the ‘reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.'”
While the law did contain a provision exempting parody content that contains a disclosure, the requirement was onerous, mandating that it be “no smaller than the largest font size of other text appearing in the visual media.”
Just one part of the law was found to pass constitutional muster—a requirement audio-only media be disclosed at the beginning at the message, and every two minutes during the duration of the content.
“While the Court gives substantial weight to the fact that the California Legislature has a ‘compelling interest in protecting free and fair elections,’ this interest must be served by narrowly tailored ends.” Mendez writes. “Supreme Court precedent illuminates that while a wellfounded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment.””
“”Criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something,” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch observed in 2019. Gorsuch elaborates on that theme in his new book Over Ruled, showing how the proliferation of criminal penalties has given prosecutors enormous power to ruin people’s lives, resulting in the nearly complete replacement of jury trials with plea bargains.
“Some scholars peg the number of federal statutory crimes at more than 5,000,” Gorsuch and co-author Janie Nitze note, while “estimates suggest that at least 300,000 federal agency regulations carry criminal sanctions.” The fact that neither number is known with precision, they suggest, speaks volumes about the “unpredictable traps for the unwary” set by the government’s ever-expanding rules.
To illustrate “the human toll” of “too much law,” the book tells the story of Florida fisherman John Yates, whose grueling legal odyssey began with the charge that he had discarded undersized red grouper. That alleged act supposedly violated a law aimed at deterring the destruction of potentially incriminating financial records. Gorsuch also recalls the pretrial suicide of 26-year-old computer programmer Aaron Swartz, whom prosecutors threatened with “decades in prison and millions in fines” for downloading a bunch of articles from an online academic library without permission.
Over Ruled emphasizes how overmatched ordinary people are in disputes with bureaucrats empowered to write the rules under which they operate. Those nemeses include officials charged with dispensing government benefits, deciding whether immigrants can remain in the country, and enforcing the frequently arbitrary and petty restrictions inspired by COVID-19. Gorsuch also decries draconian prison sentences and mass incarceration, again illustrating how his supposedly right-wing instincts frequently overlap with progressive concerns. His compassion for people confronted by bewildering, absurdly punitive legal codes defies ideological stereotypes.”
“The “historical tradition” test announced in Bruen has no real substance, cannot be applied consistently by lower court judges, and has led to absurd and immoral results. Just last June, for example, the Supreme Court had to intervene after an appeals court, in a perfectly honest application of the Bruen decision, ruled that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders have a constitutional right to own a gun.
But, while the Court’s decision in that case, United States v. Rahimi, reversed one of the federal judiciary’s most astonishing post-Bruen decisions, it left Bruen’s confounding historical test in place. Under Rahimi, “a court must ascertain whether the new law is ‘relevantly similar’ to laws that our tradition is understood to permit” — whatever the hell that means.
In a separate concurring opinion in Rahimi, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions complaining that judges can’t figure out how Bruen is supposed to work. As one of those opinions stated, “courts, operating in good faith, are struggling at every stage of the Bruen inquiry. Those struggles encompass numerous, often dispositive, difficult questions.”
This chaos is likely to continue until Bruen is overruled. The history and tradition test announced in the case provides lower court judges with no meaningful guidance on which gun laws are constitutional. And Bruen allows judges who are determined to reach pro-gun conclusions no matter what the consequences to strike down virtually any gun law — which may explain Broomes’s decision in the Morgan case.”
“Immigrants, including those living in the U.S. illegally, can get a green card if they marry an American citizen. But U.S. law generally requires those who entered the U.S. illegally to leave the country and re-enter legally to be eligible for a green card. Doing so, however, can trigger a 3- or 10-year ban from the U.S., prompting many mixed-status families not to pursue that option.
While the Biden administration has argued its initiative promotes family unity in households that include U.S. citizens, Texas and the other Republican-controlled states said in a lawsuit filed Friday that the policy rewards illegal immigration. The red states, which have challenged nearly every major Biden administration immigration move, said the policy misused the immigration parole authority.
On Monday, Barker, the federal judge in Texas appointed by former President Donald Trump, issued an administrative order prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security from granting parole to those applying for the Keeping Families Together policy.”
“A federal judge on Friday permanently banned Arizona from enforcing a new law restricting how closely people may film police, finding that the law violates a core First Amendment right to record law enforcement officers.”
“A federal judge delivered a stinging rebuke to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature over rules and a new state law that banned minors from receiving “puberty blockers” and other types of gender-affirming care.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle on Tuesday blocked the state from applying the ban to three minors whose parents are part of an ongoing lawsuit, saying they would “suffer irreparable harm” if they were not allowed to continue access to hormones and other types of treatment.”
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“The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care for adults and adolescents. But medical experts said gender-affirming care for children rarely, if ever, includes surgery. Instead, doctors are more likely to recommend counseling, social transitioning and hormone replacement therapy.”
“”If the goal of HB2319 is to prevent interference with law enforcement activities, the Court fails to see how the presence of a person recording a video near an officer interferes with the officer’s activities,” Tuchi wrote in his order issuing a temporary injunction against the law.”
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“multiple federal appeals courts have upheld the right to film police as a core First Amendment activity.”
“Former President Donald Trump’s reaction to the 2020 election arguably violated several federal and state laws. But any effort to prosecute him for those alleged violations would face the possibly insurmountable challenge of proving criminal intent.
Given Trump’s long history of embracing self-flattering assertions at odds with reality, it seems plausible that he sincerely believed, despite all the countervailing evidence, that the election was subverted by systematic fraud. If so, his various efforts to prevent Joe Biden from taking office would have been, from his perspective, attempts to correct a grievous wrong rather than attempts to illegally obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
The select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot showed that people close to Trump recognized who had actually won the election and tried to dissuade him from embracing wild conspiracy theories to the contrary. But that testimony did not conclusively prove that Trump privately agreed with those advisers even while publicly promoting the stolen-election fantasy. A recent ruling by a federal judge in California supplies further evidence to support that interpretation, suggesting that Trump knowingly submitted false claims about election fraud in Georgia as part of a federal lawsuit.”
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“Carter ruled that the crime-fraud exception applies to four emails related to Trump and Eastman’s “knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.” Carter says the emails indicate that Trump made those claims even though he knew they had been discredited.
In a state lawsuit filed on December 4, 2021, Carter notes, “President Trump and his attorneys alleged…that Fulton County improperly counted a number of votes,” including “10,315 deceased people, 2,560 felons, and 2,423 unregistered voters.” When they decided to file a federal lawsuit challenging the election results, Trump and his lawyers “discussed incorporating by reference the voter fraud numbers alleged in the state petition.” But in a December 30 email, Eastman “relayed ‘concerns’ from President Trump’s team ‘about including specific numbers in the paragraph dealing with felons, deceased, moved, etc.'”
The next day, Eastman elaborated on those concerns: “Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”
Trump apparently was unfazed. “President Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them,” Carter writes. “President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers ‘are true and correct’ or ‘believed to be true and correct’ to the best of his knowledge and belief.”
In other words, Carter says, “the emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public.” The emails therefore “are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.””
“Walgreens fills prescriptions. It is not in the business of drug enforcement. If some of the prescriptions filled by Walgreens were written by dirty doctors or went to people who abused them, it is not on individual pharmacists to figure that out.
Expecting pharmacists to be drug cops, too, ensures that more pharmacies will be hesitant to fill legitimate prescriptions, leaving patients in the lurch. It also threatens to worsen America’s pharmacist shortage.
In a number of recent cases, pharmacies and pharmacists have been sued for not filling prescriptions. including opioid prescriptions. It seems we’ve put them in a classic damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.”
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“To sum it up: Walgreens filled prescriptions for a legal substance, but because some people went on to distribute or use the drugs in ways the government has forbidden, the company has to pay the government huge sums of money. Meanwhile, the inability of people to get prescription painkillers has given way to reliance on much more dangerous substances, like fentanyl, from which many more people are dying of overdoses. People keep taking opioids, and the government keeps making it harder for them to do so safely.”