Ron DeSantis Dealt Major Blow on Abortion Ad Fight Till Election Day

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was dealt a setback in his efforts to ban TV advertisements for a state ballot initiative expanding abortion rights.

A federal judge, Mark Walker, on Tuesday extended a temporary restraining order that blocks the state government from taking action against the ads for 14 days or until he rules on his initial preliminary injunction, likely delaying his decision until after Election Day on November 5, when the initiative will be decided by Florida voters.

DeSantis, through lawyers at the Florida Department of Health, has threatened to charge TV stations that run the ads, sending out cease and desist letters to them after the stations started running the commercials earlier this month. Brian Barnes, a lawyer for the department, said in federal court Tuesday prior to Walker’s ruling that one of the ads was confusing and could stop mothers from seeking emergency care.

Florida currently bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The ballot initiative, Amendment 4, would increase access to abortion until fetal viability, typically considered to be around 24 weeks. DeSantis’s decision to go after the TV stations that have run ads supporting the amendment has already led to backlash from within the state government, with one lawyer in the Department of Health, John Wilson, resigning over DeSantis’s authoritarian tactics.

“A man is nothing without his conscience,” Wilson wrote in his letter.

DeSantis has also used other state powers to fight against the ballot initiative, using his official X account to spread misinformation, even as two hurricanes raged through Florida. The state has also sent police officers to the homes of people who signed a petition supporting the ballot initiative, which DeSantis has defended by invoking conservative fears of voter fraud. But, as Walker ruled Tuesday, there are constitutional lines the governor can’t cross.

Judge Aileen Cannon has refused a motion to recuse herself from the trial of Donald Trump’s would-be assassin.

Last month, Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested at the Mar-a-Lago golf course and charged with attempting to assassinate Trump.

In a seven-page decision released Tuesday, Cannon dismissed a motion from Routh’s attorney, arguing that the former president’s constantly praising her did not create the “appearance of partiality.”

“As Defendant acknowledges, I have no control over what private citizens, members of the media, or public officials or candidates elect to say about me or my judicial rulings,” Cannon wrote. “Nor am I concerned about the political consequences of my rulings or how those rulings might be viewed by ‘some in the media.’”

“I have never spoken to or met former President Trump except in connection with his required presence at an official judicial proceeding, through counsel,” Cannon wrote. “I have no ‘relationship to the alleged victim’ in any reasonable sense of the phrase.”

Cannon made the unprecedented decision in July to toss out the felony classified documents case against Trump by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Her move has been criticized by legal scholars but repeatedly celebrated by Trump.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Cannon’s name is on a list of possible candidates for Trump’s attorney general, if he wins the election next week.

As paper ballots are lit on fire by vigilantes and Donald Trump threatens to punish the “enemy from within,” Meta is not only allowing extremist groups on its platform but even is auto-generating anti-government militia Facebook groups.

According to data compiled by the Tech Transparency Project for Wired, after January 6, the number of Facebook groups and pages used by the alt-right to organize with each other has only grown. The Tech Transparency Project found more than 200 Facebook pages and nearly 200 anti-government pages that recruit for extremist movements. Nearly two dozen of these pages and groups have been created in the past six months.

Meta has not only looked the other way but even used its own technology to auto-generate these groups for militias. Though some chapters of American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) on the platform have been moderated or banned, in May, Facebook automatically created a page for an Arizona chapter of AP3. In June, it did the same for an AP3 “training range” in New Mexico. On the site, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.”

“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project, told Wired.

This isn’t the first time that Meta has been caught auto-generating pages for terrorist or white supremacist groups. In 2020, a whistleblower alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission to the issue.

Most recently, groups such as the “Patriot Group” or “The Party of Trump,” the latter of which has 171,000 members, have urged their members to do ballot dropbox “monitoring,” including encouraging Trump supporters to stand guard at ballot boxes with AR-15s.

With the election a week away, as Paul asks: “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”

Donald Trump’s response to a comedian making a racist joke about Puerto Rico at his New York rally at Madison Square Garden came up very short.

On Tuesday morning, ABC News’s Rachel Scott asked Trump about Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke on Sunday where he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” and Trump denied knowing anything about him or the joke.

“I don’t know him; someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” Trump said. The former president also claimed he had not heard the comments, despite widespread news and TV coverage and campaign spokespeople disavowing the joke Sunday and Monday.

Trump then went on to call the New York rally a “lovefest” during a rally later on Tuesday.

Trump pointedly refused to condemn or disavow Hinchcliffe’s joke directly, which will not help with the fallout his campaign is receiving. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which boasts a 500,000-strong Puerto Rican population, the “joke” has quickly spread through social media and WhatsApp and drawn backlash from a nonpartisan Puerto Rican organization urging its members not to vote for Trump.

Trump’s nonapology won’t go over well with some of his more influential critics, particularly the Catholic Archbishop of San Juan, who has demanded a personal apology from the former president along with the chairman of the Puerto Rico Republican Party.

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, didn’t bail out the former president either, claiming that he hadn’t “actually seen the joke” Monday and complaining about people taking offense.

“I’m not gonna comment on the specificity of the joke … but I think that we have to stop getting offended at every little thing in the United States of America, I’m just so over it,” Vance said.

With Puerto Ricans making up a large population in the U.S. mainland, including several battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, Trump’s response could end up costing him key votes that he needs to win. The right (and smart) thing to do would be for Trump to clearly and categorically apologize and disavow Hinchcliffe and his “joke,” but Trump isn’t known for his willingness to take responsibility when things go badly.

Republicans in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania have been dealt a significant blow to their dubious voter suppression efforts.

Earlier this month, six Republican congressmen in the state filed a federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania secretary of state alleging that ballots cast by Pennsylvania residents living overseas were fraudulent. The suit claimed that state law makes it possible for ineligible voters to cast ballots without providing any proof of identity, leading to inaccurate results. The lawsuit even claimed that “Iranian nationals” could “easily” take advantage of the system and falsify ballots. 

But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Charles Conner, a George W. Bush appointee, deemed this all to be nonsense. He dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the Republican congressmen were relying on “phantom fears of foreign malfeasance to excuse their lack of diligence,” and had “no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this lawsuit.”

Overseas ballots have been under federal jurisdiction for years under the Uniform and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which is mostly associated with military service members stationed abroad. Many Trump supporters, like Elon Musk, have decried this normal law as a fraudulent Democratic plot to steal the 2024 election, and similar lawsuits have been filed in Michigan and North Carolina.

It’s likely that Republicans have realized that overseas voters aren’t all military, pro-GOP people—a shift that could seriously cost them. “Everyone thought overseas meant military. Not true,” Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell told The Washington Post. “Approx 63% of [overseas] ballots in 2020 were nonmilitary.” But rather than looking inward to determine how to appeal to a broader electorate, the GOP has instead chosen to try to stop people from voting. And while this latest effort was defeated in Pennsylvania, the groundwork for claims of another “stolen” election is still being set right in front of us.