california atty

A Northern California judge on Monday permanently barred Shasta County from implementing a voter-approved initiative that sought to dramatically reshape voting in the conservative stronghold.

Measure B, which was passed by 56% of voters in the June primary, sought to require hand-counted ballots, eliminate most mail-in voting and require residents to present government-issued photo identification to cast a ballot on election day.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the state’s top elections official, sued Shasta County days after the primary, arguing that Measure B violates state election laws. Shasta County Superior Court Judge Benjamin Hanna temporarily blocked the measure in August.

In his final ruling Monday, Hanna wrote that the provisions of Measure B “are wholly contrary to existing state law.”

“The regulation and administration of the electoral process is a matter of statewide concern, and Shasta County’s status as a charter county does not entitle it to enact invalid legislation simply because some in this community do not agree with the existing law,” the ruling continued.

Attorney Alexander Haberbush, who represented a group of Measure B supporters, did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment. But Haberbush told local television station KRCR that they are “reviewing every option, including an appeal.”

“Today’s ruling tells the voters of every charter county in California that they have no say over how their own elections are run. This ruling goes far further than any state law requires,” he told the station.

The battle over election integrity took hold in the mostly rural Shasta County in 2023. At the time, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, fueled by President Trump’s unsubstantiated election fraud claims, stopped using Dominion voting machines and opted to hand-count ballots for the county’s more than 110,000 registered voters. The move quickly prompted a new state law that banned them from doing so.

The fight has continued amid Trump’s calls for the government to “nationalize” state-run elections and restrict voting by mail.

Weber in a statement Monday described Measure B as a “colossal waste of time and taxpayer funds” and an attempt to disenfranchise voters.

“Today’s decision affirms what was a forgone conclusion from the beginning,” she said. “As long as there are those willing to enact reckless, illegal, and poorly drafted laws, on behalf of Californians, we will see them in court.”

President Trump illegally usurped Gov. Gavin Newsom’s command of the California National Guard by ordering a surge troops deployed into Los Angeles and across the state amid protests against the White House’s mass deportation program last year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday.

The two-one decision split the president’s own appointees to the court, with Judge Eric D. Miller of Seattle siding with Judge Jennifer Sung of Portland, a Biden pick, and Judge Mark J.Bennett of Honolulu dissenting.

“The order exceeded the President’s statutory authority and encroached on Congress’s calling forth power, in violation of the constitutional separation of powers,” Sung wrote for the majority, calling Trump’s order “unconstitutional.”

The decision also appeared to foreclose what California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called “the Trump Administration’s transparent attempt” to preserve its right to call up California troops again under the same obscure statute — a novel legal maneuver administration lawyers said let the president seize command without invoking the far stronger Insurrection Act.

The 9th Circuit trio was among the first to weigh the law last June, after Trump federalized 4,000 National Guard soldiers in response to unrest over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.

California sued. US District Judge Charles R. Breyer quickly ruled to block the deployment. But Sung, Bennett and Miller stayed his order, finding that the California deployment could go forward under an obscure and virtually untested subsection of the law.

That decision set a “great level of deference” as the standard of review for deployments, meaning courts had very little power to test the president’s rationale for sending troops into American streets.

At the time, the decision represented one of the president’s most sweeping second-term victories: a plug-and-play legal mechanism to deploy soldiers against civilians in cities across the country.

In Portland that fall, another 9th Circuit panel stayed U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut’s order to stand down troops, using the first trio’s precedent.

The Portland decision — based in part on data the Department of Justice later admitted was false — prompted an extraordinary filing by Judge Jay Bybee, who all but pleaded with the court to rehear the case and interpret the law differently.

“There is no greater threat to the sovereignty of the states than an assertion of federal control over their domestic affairs,” Bybee wrote.

The issue quickly found its way to the Supreme Court, after a 7th Circuit panel found the president had provided “insufficient evidence” for deployment even under the 9th Circuit’s deference standard.

On Dec. 23, the Justices adopted a celebrated Georgetown scholar’s academic reading of the statute, saying it only allowed the president to commandeer national guard troops if the situation had already outmatched the standing army.

Federalized troops were ordered to leave Los Angeles in December.

On Friday, the 9th Circuit held that Trump’s claim that Los Angeles was in the grips of a rebellion last June “did not reflect a colorable assessment within a range of honest judgment.”

Using “the plain text of the statute,” and “dictionary definitions of the disputed term,” the majority found the president had not furnished evidence of a “a violent, armed, organized, open and avowed uprising against the government as a whole” — nor anything close to it.

Instead, Justice Department lawyers had relied on subsidiary definitions of “rebellion” that the 9th Circuit warned would allow the president to call up troops to quell almost any resistance, including peaceful protests.

“Resistance that is not violent, armed, organized, and against the government as a whole generally does not require a military response,” Sung wrote.

“Because Defendants have failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to legally execute the laws in California, they have not carried their burden to show that the President had the authority to federalize California’s National Guard,” Sung wrote.