argument

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco is not lazy, I’ll give him that.

During his unsuccessful run for governor this year, you may recall that the MAGA devotee found time to seize more than 650,000 ballots from the Proposition 50 redistricting race, claiming he suspected there were tens of thousands more votes cast than there should have been — a favorite (and false) complaint of election deniers.

There were not.

Undaunted by reality, and likely law, Bianco announced he was going to have his deputies recount the votes, even though this kind of interference in the chain of custody of ballots never had occurred anywhere in the United States.

This unprecedented seizure of ballots — something election-denier-in-chief President Trump has been hinting at trying himself for years — quickly became a national news story, and a national concern.

With midterms looming and more than one MAGA sheriff out there, what would stop another conspiracy-minded, badge-wearing maverick from doing something similar this November, potentially throwing our national election into turmoil?

The specter of Bianco setting a precedent for like-minded conspiracists to follow prompted two significant lawsuits — one led by the election experts at the UCLA Voting Rights Project and the other from state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.

The state Supreme Court heard arguments in those cases Monday, and while we’ll have to wait for the official rulings, things did not seem to go well for the sheriff.

What surprised me most, or maybe just relieved me, was how thin Bianco’s arguments were to support his actions. In the end, his legal team came with little more than contortions and cartwheels, trying to twist Bianco’s overreach into existing law.

His lawyer, Bradley Hertz, attempted to argue that legislators, when crafting laws protecting ballots, meant different rules to apply to investigations of elections preceding formal prosecutions. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.

Hertz seemingly was trying to convince the court that Bianco legally could pull his shenanigans as long as he didn’t actually find criminal wrongdoing, which would trigger a different set of rules.

“That seems bizarre,” Justice Goodwin H. Liu said during a back-and-forth with Hertz.

Indeed.

But it was Justice Joshua Groban who hit at the national implications of what Bianco had done — and what it could mean for the midterms if this court ruled in his favor.

“It seems like under your broad view of the warrant power … the sheriff could could seize ballots even before election day, right?” Groban asked. “Even before they were counted.”

It’s terrible to have ballots seized after they’re counted. It’s devastating if they were to be taken before there was an official tally, because how would anyone trust that there hadn’t been tampering? Simply seizing uncounted ballots, no matter what happens next, would create such paranoia and uncertainty that the election results almost certainly would be called into question — something that could play into the favor of, say, a wannabe authoritarian who fears he’s likely to lose a fair vote count.

Even Hertz seemed to acknowledge such a scenario was bad.

“If search warrants were allowed during the election or preelection, that would obviously wreak havoc,” he said. “There would be, kind of, a cat out of the bag, so to speak. You can’t count ballots if they’re not in the possession of the registrar.”

But then Hertz tried to come up with logic that what Bianco was arguing wouldn’t mean that ballots could be seized anytime, anyhow, and that instead courts could find a way to allow seizing only after the official count. The court did not seem convinced that this was a good idea, or that that is what the law should or did allow.

If that case didn’t go well for Bianco, it was the second case brought by Bonta that really might end up being a hard loss.

For years, decades really, in California and across the country, there has been a group of sheriffs who have argued they are a law onto themselves because they are elected, not hired or appointed. Some of these sheriffs argue that they are literally above federal law.

In California, there has at times been momentum to rein in this line of thinking by creating clear boundaries in law, but the state Legislature always has backed down in the face of opposition from law enforcement.

One potential curb on sheriffs’ power comes from a single line in our state Constitution that seems to say the state attorney general has supervisory power over them. But the meaning and power of this particular clause has long been debated and seldom invoked.

Bonta, however, invoked it against Bianco, claiming the the sheriff had to back off the ballot-seizing because Bonta had authority to order him to stop. Bianco did stop, to his credit. But the standoff was heard by the court Monday and likely will force clarity on an issue that has long lacked it.

Here again, the justices seemed amenable to Bonta’s argument that sheriffs, at least to some extent, answer to him as the state’s chief law enforcement officer. But the justices seemed far more cautious on this issue, and even the state’s attorney conceded that “it’s actually pretty remarkable how little our Constitution says about county sheriffs.”

If Bianco loses on this issue, it would be huge. It would mean that Bianco not only overstepped his power by seizing the ballots, but that he also had forever lessened the power of California sheriffs by clarifying they do answer to the attorney general. I’m sure that will be very popular with other sheriffs.

We’ll see what the justices say, but at least it seems likely that this embarrassing chapter of California election history will end in favor of the law, and democracy.

Maybe Bianco really does believe his conspiracy theories. After all, “there are some people who believe they had breakfast with Elvis on Sunday,” pointed out Chad Dunn, who argued the case for the Voting Rights Project.

“We can’t satisfy them,” Dunn warned.

More importantly, we shouldn’t — even when they wear a badge. Our laws already have robust protections for elections, and rogue sheriffs aren’t one of them.

It will take someone better versed in finance, corporate law, family psychology and, perhaps, the impact of great wealth on brain chemistry than I to analyze the recent actions of Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison.

To a cultural journalist, however, it seems like he continues to make himself the best argument yet for opposing his company’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Mere days after taking to the media to insist that he is a misunderstood film buff who just wants to save Hollywood, he threatened to help destroy it.

If California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and state attorneys general from 11 other states, including New York, New Jersey, Washington and Colorado, refuse to negotiate a settlement of their antitrust lawsuit, Ellison said he will yank Paramount Studios, and potentially Warner Bros., out of California.

Um, OK, Ultron.

So that’s how Ellison wants to prove that he will be a steward of the flailing entertainment industry — by threatening to rip out a big part of its still-beating heart and implant it in Texas or Tennessee?

Will he be taking the Hollywood sign as well, to stick atop the Grand Ole Opry or, better yet, the Alamo?

Not only does this grant Bonta VIP access to the moral highground, it all but negates Ellison’s recent New York Times guest essay. Especially the part in which he wrote: “The states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators, while the W.G.A. argues that our combined market power will hurt writers.”

If one man can decide, in a fit of pique, to scoop up a huge portion of the entertainment industry and float it thousands of miles away, I’d say that’s a decent argument for “too much influence.”

Also, good luck with the landing. Texas and Tennessee are both fine states with vibrant cities, undeniable corporate incentives and lower costs of living, but their draconian abortion laws and restrictive LGBTQ+ legislation may give many in the entertainment industry pause.

Still, according to Ellison, it’s Bonta and his gang who are trying to make things political, not him; in his essay, Ellison claimed that the suit is mostly about preventing his ownership of CNN, despite his insistence that (the hiring of Bari Weiss to oversee CBS News to the contrary) the news network would remain autonomous.

As a journalist, I would love to believe that Bonta and the other attorneys general are simply going to bat for the Fourth Estate; with President Trump openly longing for the day when Ellison controls CNN, it is no doubt a concern. But as Ellison seems intent on personally underscoring, the bigger issue is how to prevent a dwindling number of individuals from controlling enormous portions of an industry that not only employs millions, but also plays a vital role in shaping the nature of art and culture in this country and the world.

(Never mind the queasy fact that Ellison is being bankrolled by his billionaire father Larry, who is putting many, if not all, of his eggs in the AI basket, to the detriment of his employees.)

Shaping art and culture is, of course, precisely why Ellison wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, almost literally at all costs. When he first lost the bid for Warner Bros. to Netflix, he (and his dad) responded by offering enough money (including a $7-billion payout should the deal not clear antitrust regulation) to make Ted Sarandos blink. Money has always been a ladder to power and influence in this country, and the widening wealth gap, not to mention the current administration, has turned the ladder into a rocket ship. (See please Elon Musk.)

Ellison has continually stressed his love of cinematic storytelling. Under the proposed Paramount Warner, he promises to produce 30 theatrical films and 170 television series a year and create more work for everyone.

That would be lovely (if fiscally difficult) to believe. If only he hadn’t just tried to hold the state that gave birth to cinematic storytelling hostage by threatening to kidnap one of its kids.

As negotiating tactics go, it certainly undermines whatever public approval he hoped to gain with his “I’m just a guy, standing in front of the movie biz asking it to love me” bit.

Change is coming for Paramount Studios — the lot on Melrose Avenue — either way. If Paramount Skydance acquires Warner Bros., production will likely shift to the Warner Bros. lot, with Paramount leased or sold.

Now, it seems, Ellison is willing to have a fire sale — he’ll certainly need to raise a bunch of cash if he’s going to quickly flee to redder pastures. As for the thousands of local workers who depend on Paramount production to make a living, well, Ellison and his executives may be able to afford to relocate or (more probably) commute out of state, but most of the people who actually make movies and television cannot.

Business, of course, is business and it has become financially and politically fashionable to desert California to avoid whatever local law, regulation or tax you now find unfair. Tech mavens, including Musk, have ditched California for the Lone Star State. Ellison’s father recently took Oracle out of Redwood City, first to Austin, Texas, then to Nashville, workers be damned.

But Ellison taking Paramount and potentially Warner Bros. out of Los Angeles isn’t about business. It’s pure politics, of the savage, oligarchical variety.

Given the stakes, it’s difficult to imagine that some sort of deal won’t be struck that allows the sale to go through. But Ellison isn’t saving the entertainment industry, he’s leveraging it.

And if he has to spit in Hollywood’s face to save his own, well, apparently that’s fine too.

This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.

By some, anyway.

Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.

This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.

Trump’s Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”

“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.

Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.

“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.

Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”

An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.

To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.

While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.

Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.

It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.

It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.

Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.

“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”

That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”

The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.

Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.

One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.

Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.

The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).

“There is a serious breakdown in on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”

So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.

Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.

Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.

Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.

After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.

More chilling, and direct, were more comments from Miller.

“It’s an abomination,” he said of the ruling.

But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”

Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.

Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.

MILWAUKEE — A federal judge on Wednesday considered whether to throw out a jury’s guilty verdict against former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, who was convicted of felony obstruction for helping an immigrant evade federal officers.

The case was an early test of how the courts would respond to President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

Dugan had been scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday, but U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman postponed the proceedings indefinitely to instead hear arguments about whether to overturn her conviction.

Adelman did not rule from the bench and did not indicate when he might issue a decision. Dugan and attorneys for both sides left the courtroom without commenting to reporters.

Former judge’s attorney points to a Virginia case

Dugan’s attorney Steven Biskupic argued that her conviction was invalid and should be overturned. He said that was necessary because a federal appeals court in April overturned a key Virginia immigration case that the judge and prosecutors had cited in the Dugan case.

Biskupic argued that based on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturning that ruling, Dugan was improperly convicted, procedurally, under a certain federal law.

“Our primary argument is this was an invalid theory of conviction,” Biskupic said.

In the Virginia case, an immigrant who was in the country illegally was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and later escaped. He was recaptured and indicted on a charge of obstructing a pending immigration proceeding.

The federal appeals court found that the ICE action did not constitute a “pending proceeding,” as is required under the federal obstruction law.

Dugan’s attorneys argue that she should not have been charged because there was no “pending proceeding” against the immigrant in her courtroom being sought by ICE agents, only a warrant filed for his arrest. The filing of a warrant does not constitute a “proceeding” under the law, Biskupic argued.

Prosecutors countered that the facts in the Virginia case are different and don’t apply to Dugan’s. They also argued that other cases support Dugan’s conviction.

“The court should stick with its ruling,” said Richard Frohling, acting U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Wisconsin.

In response to a question from the judge, he contended that the appeals court was wrong to overturn the Virginia case. The judge also quizzed Frohling on what constitutes a proceeding under the law and how long it lasts.

“It could be a couple minutes, it could be a couple years,” Frohling said. “It all depends on the context.”

Dugan’s sentencing was postponed so the court can hear new arguments

Dugan, 67, faces up to five years in prison after a jury convicted her on Dec. 19. But it is unlikely that Dugan would be sentenced to prison. Federal sentencing guidelines generally call for probation for defendants like her who have no criminal history and are convicted of a nonviolent crime.

She resigned from her position as a Milwaukee County circuit judge two weeks after her conviction amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers. She had been a judge for nine years.

Dugan was present for Wednesday’s arguments but did not speak.

The Trump administration brought the case against Dugan as the president pressed ahead with his sweeping immigration crackdown. Trump’s administration and his allies branded Dugan as an activist judge, while Dugan’s attorneys said she was being unfairly targeted and argued, unsuccessfully, that she was immune from being charged because she was a judge.

Dugan’s case marked the first time that a state judge in Wisconsin went to trial on charges of obstructing immigration agents. She was acquitted of concealing an individual to prevent arrest, a misdemeanor.

Dugan helped an immigrant wanted by ICE agents

On April 18, 2025, immigration officers went to the Milwaukee County courthouse after learning Eduardo Flores-Ruiz had reentered the country illegally and was scheduled to appear before Dugan for a hearing in a state battery case.

Dugan confronted agents outside her courtroom and directed them to the chief judge’s office because she told them their administrative warrant wasn’t sufficient grounds to arrest Flores-Ruiz.

After the agents left, she led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a private jury door. Agents spotted Flores-Ruiz in the corridor, followed him outside and arrested him after a foot chase. A week later, FBI agents arrested Dugan in the courthouse, leading her outside in handcuffs.

Flores-Ruiz was deported in November.

Bauer writes for the Associated Press.

BOSTON — A federal judge on Tuesday heard from voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states that want the courts to halt President Trump’s executive order seeking to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot.

The plaintiffs argued in two lawsuits that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. They also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on state election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution.

“This is going to be a sea change in the way that some states administer their ballots,” said Michael Cohen, who was part of a team representing California, adding that “it will be difficult to overstate the disruption that this will cause.”

Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation.

His latest order is being challenged through multiple lawsuits, including two filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the League of Women Voters in one of the two Boston cases, has called the order “a dangerous attempt to disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide.” The group said the order transforms “the U.S. Postal Service from a neutral mail carrier to an arbiter of who may cast a ballot by mail.”

“This case challenges an extraordinary and abusive assertion of executive power over the administration of federal elections,” the organization said in its complaint.

The hearing comes less than a week after another judge declined to halt the order. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in Washington, agreed with the Trump administration’s contention that it was too early to block the order because it has yet to be implemented.

The administration, in its motions to dismiss the lawsuits, argued that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring their claims. They also argued the motions are premature and that plaintiffs lack the legal basis to bring their Administrative Procedure Act claim, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

Stephen Pezzi, a lawyer for the Trump administration, said the harms the plaintiffs referred to were subjective, since much can change with the voting list before it is finalized. He also said no one would be prosecuted for violating the executive order.

Missouri Solicitor Gen. Lou Capozzi, speaking for the states supporting the list, argued it was too early to say how his state might use the list, but that it was “unlikely” any voter would be removed this year from the voter rolls because of it.

“We are not exactly sure how we would use it,” Capozzi said, adding that “we don’t want this process to be strangled in the crib, so to speak.”

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani took the requests for motions to halt the order, along with motions to dismiss the cases under advisement.

During oral arguments, Talwani expressed concerns about whether the federal system envisioned under the executive order could be ready for the upcoming midterm elections and about the risks posed to election workers who rely on a state list that differs from the federal one. She also raised doubts about the reliability of a federal list — noting, for example, women who changed their names after getting married or someone who has moved from state to state might be missed.

“Isn’t there a reasonable fear and concern on behalf of voters that they will be precluded?” Talwani asked.

Trump issued the order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government create a list of eligible voters and then directed the postal service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list. Election officials argued that it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos, and the postal union has objected to the idea of mail carriers policing ballots.

The postal service has published a proposed rule required by Trump’s executive order in the Federal Register. Among other things, the rule would not apply to primary elections or overseas ballots.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has groundlessly claimed mail voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigations, including ones run by Republicans, found it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.

Casey writes for the Associated Press.