other state

Tensions flared on the eve of a critical week ahead for Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111-billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, amid new urgency for talks aimed at settling antitrust litigation brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and 11 other states.

Over the weekend, opposition intensified to a proposed settlement as details trickled out, including a proposal to establish a bipartisan editorial board to monitor cable news channel CNN, one of Warner’s premier properties that Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison would control along with CBS News.

It wasn’t clear Sunday whether a proposed settlement would require Warner to sell off assets — something Bonta repeatedly has insisted upon. Critics of the deal urged Bonta and other state attorneys general to resist pressure to reach a settlement that would allow Ellison’s deal to move forward.

“State Attorneys General, please hang tough against the giant proposed Paramount-Warner Brothers merger,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote on social media late Saturday.

“Paramount, run by the Ellisons, should not own both CBS and CNN. California must not cave and take a deal that leaves both under the same owner,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) wrote.

Bonta and Ellison have made progress in the talks in recent days, according to four people familiar with the matter not authorized to speak publicly.

However, New York’s Letitia James and at least two other attorneys general who joined Bonta’s lawsuit in July privately have expressed reservations about the proposed compromises, believing they don’t go far enough to mitigate concerns about the power Paramount-Warner Bros. would wield over the film and TV industries should the merger go through, according to the people familiar with the matter.

James isn’t on board with Bonta’s proposed settlement, two of the people said. A potential split within Bonta’s coalition could be a setback because Bonta needs the other state attorneys general who joined his legal effort to sign off on any deal.

A spokesperson for Bonta did not respond Sunday to a request for comment.

Paramount maintains its deal to bring HBO, CNN, CBS, TBS, Comedy Central and two legendary film and television studios together would create a stronger company that could withstand the fierce competition from tech giants such as Apple, Netflix, Google (which owns YouTube) and Amazon. The two studios, on their own, would not be strong enough on their own to remain viable in the streaming age, the company has said.

On Thursday, Paramount lawyers plan to demand that U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland require the states and the Writers Guild of America to post a $1.88-billion bond that would cover some of Paramount’s delay-related deal costs should the company eventually prevail.

The states and the WGA, which also sued to block the merger, have balked at the request, which was designed by Paramount to create fissures within the coalition of states, which also include Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Ellison wants the merger finalized by Oct. 1, when his company will be obligated to make a higher payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders. The company has threatened to move its Hollywood base from its historic Melrose Avenue lot to Tennessee or Texas should the antitrust battle stretch into October.

The prospective loss of an iconic California business — a century-old film studio that helped establish Hollywood — has rattled state and local politicians, who are fearful of losing more jobs at a time when Los Angeles film production levels already are at alarming lows.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California governor, have publicly called on Bonta to settle the suit rather than prepare for a trial next spring. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, Bass’ opponent in the L.A. mayor race, has been one of few California politicians in support of Bonta’s fight.

In an opinion essay Sunday, a trio of 1st Amendment and antitrust experts dismissed Paramount’s threat to leave Los Angeles as a ploy that doesn’t make business sense.

“Ellison’s threat is empty, and the AG should call that out — not give into it,” the experts — Fiona Scott Morton, Gene Kimmelman and Norm Eisen — wrote in the Contrarian.

Both Morton, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management, and Kimmelman formerly served in the U.S. Justice Department during Democratic administrations. Eisen, founder of the group Democracy Defenders Action, is helping lead the Block the Merger campaign.

“Paramount [would be] sinking the cost of moving before it knows what businesses it owns and how best to combine and organize them — which makes expensive strategic mistakes inevitable,” the trio wrote. “A company that raises its own costs while leaving behind the most valuable labor in the industry does not threaten California; it threatens itself.”

The group noted Paramount, in its regulatory filings, still lists its Times Square offices in New York as its corporate headquarters — not its Melrose Avenue campus in Hollywood.

“There is also the possibility that Ellison is planning to move Paramount to Tennessee regardless of how the lawsuit resolves,” the group wrote.

Bonta and Paramount have discussed including in any settlement a condition that Paramount would keep its operations in California for a set period, according to people familiar with the proposal but not authorized to comment.

Merger opponents planned a Sunday evening rally outside Bonta’s offices in Oakland to encourage him to stand tough. The group plans subsequent demonstrations this week outside James’ office in New York City and the Paramount lot in Hollywood.

The jockeying comes as President Trump, who favors the Ellison takeover of CNN and Warner Bros., has sought to block several prominent news organizations, including CNN and Politico, from reporting from the White House.

“Trump just locked CNN out of the White House. Now his billionaire allies want to own it,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) added in a Sunday post. “State attorneys general: Don’t settle. Hold the line. Block this merger.”

WASHINGTON — The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study.

A report by Protect Democracy found that 34.8 million people — about one in 10 Americans — now live in a different district than they did during the 2024 election cycle. And about one-fifth of all Americans now live in a district where more than a quarter of voters are new to the district compared with the last election cycle.

The findings display the stark overhaul that partisan redistricting fights kicked off by President Trump last year have caused for Americans across the country. The new congressional maps are increasingly drawn in ways that favor partisan politics over factors like geography and shared communities. That raises concerns among scholars about how the country’s hyperpolarized politics are affecting American democracy.

“If this trend continues, it really brings into question whether or not elected officials are really representing their constituents anymore, or if the voters are being randomly picked by mapmakers to squeeze out partisan advantage,” said Ben Raderstorf, a policy advocate at Protect Democracy and one of the paper’s co-authors.

The bare-knuckled partisan redistricting battle for the House began when Trump urged the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas, the second most populous state, to redraw its congressional map to help the party. The highly unusual plan prompted an immediate response from California, the most populous state, which held a successful referendum to tilt its map toward Democrats.

Other states followed, and Republicans are positioned to potentially gain nine seats because of redistricting.

The Protect Democracy report warns that such partisan tactics reduce faith in American elections generally and insulate incumbent lawmakers from public opinion. That can make political organizing more difficult, the report cautioned, potentially worsening the country’s already highly polarized politics. Both parties may also enter a “doom loop” where they embrace more aggressive and frequent redistricting efforts to avoid ceding any ground to their rivals.

In some states such as Missouri, the mid-decade redistricting has created confusion for voters about which district they live in and which candidates will appear on their November ballot. After conflicting lower court rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court last week blocked new Missouri districts backed by Trump that had been used in the primary, leaving the state to revert to its previous districts for the general election.

The report concludes with a call for new electoral structures the authors believe would eliminate the potential downsides of partisan redistricting, like proportional representation or a formal truce between the parties to implement nonpartisan districting plans.

Nine states already use nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional district lines but those provisions have limits. California, for instance, suspended its nonpartisan maps with a referendum last year in response to Texas’ redistricting measures.

Such remedies would face long odds in Congress and statehouses, but scholars believe there are few other avenues to turn down the temperature in the partisan redistricting fights.

“This is only going to get worse until somebody stops it,” Raderstorf said. “The logic of gerrymandering points inevitably towards maximalist partisan advantage on both sides. There is no off-ramp other than reform. It is the only way to break the cycle.”

Brown writes for the Associated Press.

California and nearly two dozen other states warned the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday that allowing the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with President Trump’s new rules for mail ballots in the November election would cause “chaos” and could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

“In some States … compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,” the states argued. “In the remaining States, there would be chaos — and a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”

The Democrat-led coalition — which includes California, 23 other states and the District of Columbia — also cited objections from lower-ranking state and elections officials in conservative states that have not objected to the Postal Service’s position, including the lieutenant governor and other officials in Utah saying implementation of the new rules would “be an unmitigated disaster.”

Similar warnings have emanated from Florida, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin.

“Whatever else may be said of USPS’ new rule, it would wreak havoc on States and their voters if it takes effect at this late point,” the Democrat-led states wrote, pointing out that some States, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, have already begun to mail out ballots.

The states’ arguments were in response to the Trump administration over the weekend filing an emergency appeal to the high court, asking it to overturn a lower-court ruling halting the plan from being implemented for the Nov. 3 election.

The new rules — developed in response to a March executive order from Trump — require states to submit their complete voter lists to the Postal Service, and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service. They require the Postal Service to then reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.

Trump’s order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own list of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.

Trump and other supporters of the changes — including top officials from a dozen Republican-led states — argue they are necessary to prevent widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens. Elections experts say there is no evidence of such widespread fraud, despite robust audits and other searches for it.

The Democrat-led states sued to block the changes on multiple grounds, including that neither Trump nor the Postal Service have any authority to regulate state-run elections, that the changes would illegally prevent eligible voters from casting ballots, and that the timeline imposed by the new rule — formally issued by the Postal Service on Aug. 21 — made compliance by November impossible.

Independent voting rights groups also sued, alleging the new rules threatened to disenfranchise voters and make their work educating voters on their options for casting a ballot impossible to carry out.

A Postal Service whistleblower recently added skepticism to the agency’s ability to implement the new rules on its end, alleging in a statement published by congressional Democrats that the agency’s online portal for verifying ballots was built in a “slapdash” manner, is “fundamentally flawed” and threatens as built to reject thousands of ballots if just a single one cannot be properly read.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted requests from the states and the independent groups to halt the plans from being implemented nationwide, issuing a preliminary injunction requiring the Postal Service to cease all work on them.

The Trump administration then bypassed the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to ask the Supreme Court for relief from Talwani’s order.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, the administration’s top litigator, argued that the warnings from states that the changes are unworkable, represent an overreach of federal authority or would cause chaos in November are all baseless.

“The Rule ensures that States remain responsible for determining voter eligibility and eligibility to vote by mail, and it does not dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures,” Sauer wrote. “The Rule thus plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

Sauer argued that if the court does not allow the changes to proceed, it would cause “serious irreparable harm on the federal government, the States themselves, and the voting public” by “nullifying the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud.”

Experts have consistently rejected those claims — including in their own filings before the high court.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, joined three other election experts to argue to the lower court that the Trump administration’s claims of injury were “speculative and weak.” They noted that the administration had “offered no evidence” in court that the new rules would “stop any appreciable amount of voter fraud or even that voter fraud through the mails is a widespread problem that USPS should address.”

Meanwhile, they wrote, there was “undisputed evidence” presented to the lower court that the Postal Service is “still not prepared to implement its new rule or do so accurately and efficiently, even as states have begun mailing out their ballots,” and that the “harm to the states and to voters is enormous, as the rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red and blue states.”

The Democrat-led states also noted that the Trump administration hadn’t proven that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate threat, but had shown it is ill prepared itself to implement the changes without causing widespread disruption — as evidenced in part by the whistleblower’s claims.

It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will rule, though a relatively quick decision is expected given the emergency nature of the appeal.