US elections live: Biden expected to talk about supreme court reform in speech marking Civil Rights Act anniversary | US elections 2024

Hello, I’m Abené Clayton running the blog from Los Angeles. Joe Biden is expected to announce three proposed reforms to the US supreme court.

In an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Monday, the president called for three primary changes to the high court.

• Eighteen-year term limits

• A binding code of ethics

• A new constitutional amendment that would virtually reverse a supreme court decision in July granting former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office

Biden’s speech comes on the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Joanna Walters

A trial looming in a lawsuit challenging North Dakota’s abortion ban was canceled Monday as the judge in the case, state district judge Bruce Romanick, weighs whether to throw out the lawsuit. It was not immediately clear why the trial was canceled.

The notice comes nearly a week after the state and plaintiffs, who include the formerly sole abortion clinic in North Dakota, made their pitches to the judge as to why he should dismiss the two-year-old case, or continue to trial, the Associated Press reports. The trial was due to begin late August.

North Dakota outlaws abortion as a felony crime for people who perform the procedure, but with exceptions to prevent the mother’s death or a “serious health risk” to her, as well as for cases of rape or incest within the first six weeks.

The plaintiffs, which include the Red River Women’s Clinic and doctors trained in obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine, alleged the abortion ban violates the state constitution because it is unconstitutionally vague about its exceptions for doctors and that its health exception is too narrow. They wanted the trial to proceed.

Joanna Walters

Kamala Harris highlighted endorsements from mayors of border towns in swing state Arizona today as she looks to blunt the impact of Republican criticism of her handling of illegal border crossings.

Harris’s campaign for president said she was backed by the mayors of Bisbee, Nogales, Somerton, and San Luis, as well as by Yuma county supervisors Martin Porchas and Tony Reyes, the Associated Press reports.

Republicans say Harris did not do enough as US vice-president to clamp down on illegal immigration.

I trust her to meet the needs of border cities and towns without taking advantage of us for her own political gain, like her opponent,” the Somerton mayor, Gerardo Anaya, said in a statement. Somerton is a city of about 14,000 people in the state’s southwestern corner.

As vice-president, Harris was tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders. The Biden administration wanted to develop and put in place a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.

Border arrests have fallen from record highs last December.

Read my colleague Lauren Gambino’s piece on Harris’s record on immigration policy, here.

The Iowa ban, which takes effect today, permits abortions past six weeks in cases of rape or incest, or in medical emergencies.

Fourteen other states, including much of the midwest, enacted near-total bans on abortion since the US supreme court overturned Roe.

Three other states – Georgia, South Carolina and Florida – have banned abortion past about six weeks of pregnancy.

Roe’s demise led to surge in support for abortion rights, even in red states. Sixty-one per cent of Iowans, including 70% of women, say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll found last year.

A six-week abortion ban went into effect in Iowa on Monday, cutting off access to the procedure before many women know they are pregnant.

The Republican-dominated Iowa state legislature passed the ban last year, but a lengthy court battle initially stopped it from taking effect. Last month, the Iowa supreme court ruled that the ban could be enforced, leading a lower-court judge to order the ban to take effect at 8am local time.

Leah Vanden Bosch, development and outreach director of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, said in a statement:

The upholding of this abortion ban in Iowa is an absolute devastation and violation of human rights, depriving Iowans of their bodily autonomy. We know a ban will not stop the need for abortions.

Up until Sunday, abortion had been legal in Iowa up to roughly 22 weeks of pregnancy. Now, abortion clinics in the state have indicated that they will continue offering the procedure to the legal limit.

The closest options for Iowans who want abortions after six weeks of pregnancy will probably be Minnesota and Illinois, Democratic-run states that border Iowa and that have become abortion havens since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.

The Iowa ban permits abortions past six weeks in cases of rape or incest, or in medical emergencies.

Two Democratic state governors who are being considered by Kamala Harris’s campaign as her potential running mate, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker of Illinois, have criticized the strict six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa today.

Shapiro directly blamed Donald Trump for the Iowa law, and urged voters not to re-elect the Republican former president.

Pritzker, whose state borders Iowa, welcomed Iowa residents to visit Illinois if the new law blocks their access to “whatever care they need”. He added:

Please know – as you work to maneuver around this dangerous and unjust law – we are here for you.

Martin Pengelly

Questions continued to mount about the political transformation of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, after the release of emails from a former friend in which Vance called Trump a “morally reprehensible human being” and said: “I hate the police.”

The messages between Vance and Sofia Nelson, who sent them to the New York Times, were largely dated between 2014 and 2017. In one, Vance sent Nelson a section of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestseller about his Appalachian boyhood. Vance wrote:

Here’s an excerpt from my book. I send this to you not just to brag, but because I’m sure if you read it you’ll notice reference to ‘an extremely progressive lesbian’. I recognise now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I am really sorry. I hope you’re not offended, but if you are, I’m sorry! Love you, JD.

Read the full story here: JD Vance calls Trump ‘morally reprehensible’ in resurfaced emails

Kamala Harris has condemned a six-week abortion ban that takes effect in Iowa today, calling it a “Trump abortion ban”.

From Monday, most abortions are prohibited in the state after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.

In a video statement, Harris said:

Today, Iowa put in place a Trump abortion ban, which makes Iowa the 22nd state in our country to have a Trump abortion ban. And this ban is going to take effect before many women even know they’re pregnant. And what this means is that one in three women of reproductive age in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban.

Hillary Clinton has welcomed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s “commonsense” calls to reform the supreme court.

The former secretary of state, in a post to X, said these proposals will “repair [the] promise” that no one is above the law, and help to “restore the American people’s lost trust in the Court”.

Dan Milmo

Kamala Harris’s election campaign has accused Elon Musk of spreading “manipulated lies” after the Tesla chief executive posted a doctored video featuring the vice-president on his X account.

Musk reposted a manipulated Harris campaign video on Friday evening in which a fake Harris voiceover says: “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire,” and that anyone who criticises her is “both sexist and racist”.

The video has been viewed 128m times on Musk’s account after the world’s richest man posted it with the words “this is amazing” followed by a laughing emoji. Musk owns X, which he rebranded from Twitter last year.

Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator, accused Musk of violating the platform’s guidelines. According to X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy, users are barred from sharing “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm” although allowances are made for satire provided it does not “cause significant confusion about the authenticity of the media”.

A spokesperson for Harris’s presidential campaign said:

The American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice-President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Dick Durbin, the Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee, has voiced support for Joe Biden’s call for supreme court reforms.

Durbin, in a statement posted to X, wrote:

If Chief Justice Roberts won’t use his existing authority to implement an enforceable code of conduct, Congress must. We should use our established authority to require the Court to implement reforms consistent with *every* other federal court.

Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan rumored to be in the running for Kamala Harris’s potential ticket mate, has said she expects the vice-president to announce her running mate “in the next six, seven days”.

Whitmer, in an interview on CBS, said:

Everything’s truncated, and [Harris] is going to make that decision probably in the next six, seven days. I would imagine we’ll know who her running mate is, and we’ll get ready for convention.

Leonard Leo, the rightwing dark money organizer who just issued a statement slamming Joe Biden’s call for supreme court reforms, has played a key role in the conservative effort to move the judiciary to the right.

Leo’s advocacy and financial network played a major role in Donald Trump’s judicial nominations and confirmation hearings as part of his years-long push to make the courts more friendly to conservatives and their causes.

Justice Clarence Thomas once joked that Leo was the “No 3 most powerful person in the world”.

Leo is a Catholic conservative activist widely known as the force behind the Federalist Society, which has helped transform the US courts system, ultimately through the installation of three hardline justices on the supreme court that has handed down epochal rulings on abortion rights, presidential immunity and more.

Leonard Leo, the rightwing donor, has hit back at Joe Biden’s call for supreme court reforms, saying they were about “Democrats destroying a court they don’t agree with”.

Leo, in a statement, said that if Biden and the Democrats were “truly serious” about ethics reform, they would calls for bans on “all gifts and hospitality of any kind to any public official in any branch of government”, including in Congress, where he said “the real corruption is”. He concluded:

Let me be clear: If Democrats want to adopt an across the board ethics ban for all branches, I am in favor of that: no jets, no meals, no speaking honorariums, no gifts for anyone from anyone for any reason in any branch, starting with Congress. Until they support that, let’s all be honest about what this is: a campaign to destroy a court that they disagree with.