Supreme Court Archives - California Political Review

The Supreme Court has clawed back concealed-carry laws. Could switchblades be next?

July 21, 2026 By Bob Egelko Leave a Comment

Now that the Supreme Court has overturned most state restrictions on carrying concealed firearms in public, the next target could be California’s ban on carrying switchblade knives, which open at the flick of a switch or the push of a button.

Since 1957, the state has prohibited publicly carrying or selling switchblade knives with blades 2 inches or longer, with criminal penalties of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals previously rejected a challenge by an advocacy group called Knife Rights and made that ruling final Thursday.

But eight of the court’s Republican-appointed judges objected and said the Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutional right to carry guns applies equally to knives.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

“Perhaps no tool has been more important to man’s survival than the knife,” wrote Judge Eric Tung, an appointee of President Donald Trump, in an opinion dissenting from the court’s refusal to reconsider its ruling.

He contended the court was violating self-defense standards declared by the Supreme Court in a momentous 2022 ruling, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which Justice Clarence Thomas said any government restriction on gun possession must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation,” dating back to the country’s founding.

“California prohibits any law-abiding citizen from carrying a tool that has been used and carried for hundreds of years,” Tung said, and there appears to be “no historical tradition of totally banning the public carrying of knives (including switchblades).”

Tung was joined by Judges Consuelo Callahan, Ryan D. Nelson, Daniel P. Collins, Kenneth K. Lee, Daniel Bress, Patrick Bumatay and Lawrence VanDyke. In a separate opinion, VanDyke — whose dissent from another firearms ruling last year included a video showing him handling guns in his chambers — said the case showed that “our court will find a way to uphold any weapons restriction that a liberal State can dream up.”

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Concealed Carry, Supreme Court, switchblades

Supreme Court upholds laws banning trans athletes from women’s sports

July 1, 2026 By Bianca Quilantan and Josh Gerstein 1 Comment

The 6-3 ruling upholds state laws in Idaho and West Virginia.

The Supreme Court has upheld state laws prohibiting transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls sports, dealing a major blow to anti-discrimination protections for trans students.

In a ruling Tuesday, the justices upheld laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban trans athletes from women’s sports, saying the federal law against sex discrimination in education, Title IX, allows schools to separate women’s and men’s sports teams by biological sex.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

The high court’s majority also rejected claims that such measures violate the constitutional rights of transgender people.

The court’s liberal justices agreed with their conservative colleagues that Title IX doesn’t give transgender athletes the right to compete on teams corresponding to their gender identity. But they said the constitutional question was more complex and required closer examination by lower courts into the impact of trans athletes in particular sports and at particular ages.

Idaho and West Virginia argued that their laws are meant to protect athletes assigned female at birth from physical harm due to biological differences between men and women. They also argue that Title IX applies to “biological sex” and that their laws do not discriminate against transgender women and girls.

“This began in West Virginia, but its impact reaches every corner of the country,” said West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who oversaw the case when he was state attorney general. “Future generations of female athletes will benefit from the certainty, fairness, and opportunity this decision protects.”

Neither state law has been in effect as the cases worked their way through the courts over the past five years. But more than two dozen states have similar laws on the books.

The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee have barred trans athletes from competing in women’s sports. And the NCAA, which oversees college sports, already barred transgender athletes from women’s sports in response to an executive order President Donald Trump signed shortly after returning to the White House.

Click here to read the full article in Politico

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: Girls Sports, Supreme Court, Title IX

US Supreme Court Issues Huge Ruling On Voting Rights Act; Et Tu California?

April 30, 2026 By Katy Grimes Leave a Comment

What about California’s racial gerrymander with Supreme Court declaring Louisiana congressional map an ‘unconstitutional racial gerrymander?’

The United States Supreme Court just ruled Wednesday that drawing Congressional districts based on race under the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, 6-3.

The Reader’s Digest condensed version: Democrats can no longer rig maps based on race.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 52 U. S. C. §10301 et seq., was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, joined by Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas, Roberts, Barrett and Gorsuch.

Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissented.

While the Court did not strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act entirely, it specified that drawing districts solely based on race is unconstitutional.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

The Court dealt a blow to a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, siding with Louisiana Republicans and President Donald Trump’s administration by blocking an electoral map that created a second majority-Black congressional district,” the Daily Caller reported.

Louisiana v. Callais was centered on whether Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which had added a second majority-Black district, amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 52 U. S. C. §10301 et seq., was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it.

Louisiana must not only redraw its congressional map, this decision could lead to racially drawn districts in all states being thrown out.

What does this mean for California’s mid-decade racial redistricting scheme?

Louisiana v. Callais was a test of race-based redistricting under the Constitution. This SCOTUS ruling against Louisiana could undermine and/or invite challenges to California’s redistricting efforts given that they involve racial considerations. What will this mean to Gov. Newsom’s intentional creation of majority-minority districts or race-predominant maps? Perhaps this decision could tie Californoa’s redistricting to broader lawsuits alleging violations of the 15th Amendment and Voting Rights Act in California.

In an effort to influence the 2026 midterm elections, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta announced their intentions to blow up California’s independent redistricting commission, effectively tampering with the state’s electoral maps mid-decade… because TRUMP.

In August, California’s legislative Democrats kicked the voter approved independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission to the curb for the next few elections, when they introduced their package of three bills, SB 280, AB 604, and ACA 8, to redraw California’s congressional districts mid-decade, described in detail by California Globe contributor Chris Micheli here, the Globe reported.

The maps were drawn by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), “which is not even a registered lobbyist,” Assemblyman Carl DeMaio noted. “How much money was paid to Paul Mitchell, who boasted that he had a team of eight people” working with him. Mitchell is drawing the new districts for the governor, the Globe reported.

In January, Attorney Mark Meuser filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily block California’s redistricting scheme while the appeal plays out. He explained:

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: gerrymadering, redistricting, Supreme Court

Californians may need to mail ballots early as Supreme Court signals support for new election day deadline

March 24, 2026 By David G. Savage 2 Comments

WASHINGTON — Californians may be forced to put their ballots in the mail well before election day to be certain they will be counted.

That’s the likely outcome of a Republican challenge to mail ballots that came before the Supreme Court on Monday.

The court’s six conservatives sounded ready to rule that federal law requires that ballots must be received by election day if they are to be counted as legal.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

In the 19th century, Congress set a national day for federal elections on a Tuesday in early November, but it did not say how or when states would count their ballots. The Constitution leaves it to states to decide the “times, places and manners for holding elections.”

California and 13 other states count mail ballots that were cast before or on election day but arrive a few days late. And most states accept late ballots from members of the military who are stationed overseas.

By law, California counts mail ballots that arrive within seven days of election day. In 2024, more than 406,000 of these late-arriving ballots were counted in California, about 2.5% of the total.

Other Western states — Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Alaska — also count late-arriving mail ballots.

But President Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by mail leads to fraud, and the Republican National Committee has gone to court to challenge the state laws that allow for counting the legally cast ballots of citizens which are postmarked on time but arrive late.

GOP lawyers argued that the phrase “election day” has always meant ballots must be in the hands of election officials on that day. In their questions and comments, all six conservatives agreed.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. saw a real prospect of fraud. There could be “a big stash of ballots” that arrive late and “flip the outcome,” he said.

Democrats and election law experts say that the proposed new rule conflicts with more than a century of practice, because most states allowed for some people to vote by mail if they were traveling on election day. They argued that election day is like the federal tax day of April 15. While tax returns must be postmarked then, the tax returns are legal even if they arrive at the Internal Revenue Service a few days later.

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: ballots, California Politics, Supreme Court

US Supreme Court – still waiting for an answer on Proposition 50

February 4, 2026 By James V. Lacy 1 Comment

Filing for Congressional races begins in less than a week

With February 9 being the start date for candidates to file to run for Congress in California’s Congressional districts, the U.S. Supreme Court still has not acted on the application of the Plaintiff California GOP members for a Preliminary Injunction pending an appeal of the divided Three-Judge panel’s decision in Los Angeles finding Gavin Newson’s Proposition 50 gerrymander to be legal. If the Supreme Court were convinced to grant the application, the previous Congressional District lines of the nonpartisan commission would be used in the next election, and the lines would remain unchanged from prior elections this decade. But unless that happens, the new Proposition 50 lines, which are intended to drastically reduce Republican influence in California Congressional elections for the next three cycles, will be in place as a result of their adoption by voters in the last special election.

All necessary papers have now been filed with the Supreme Court and it is simply a matter of time when the Court will act on them. Papers filed include the Plaintiff CA GOP members’ request for the injunction and accompanying briefs, the U.S. Department of Justice’s excellent brief in support of the Plaintiffs, and Friend of the Court briefs in support of the Preliminary Injunction from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (a particularly good one citing strong case law previously overlooked), the America First Policy Institute, the Center for Election Confidence, and a group of individuals suing in a separate case involving Louisiana’s congressional lines. The California GOP Plaintiffs also filed a well-done “Reply” brief.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

Papers in opposition include the Response of the Newsom Defendants, and their Defendant-Intervenor allies League of United Latin American Citizens and the Democratic Congressional Committee, and a supporting Friend of the Court brief from liberal election law Professor Richard L. Hasen. (Fewer allies of the Newsom Defendants filed briefs in the Supreme Court than in the underling litigation in Los Angeles.)

Click here to read the full article at James V. Lacy’s Substack

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Politics, Prop 50, Supreme Court

This Supreme Court case could strike a major blow to California’s vote-counting system

January 21, 2026 By Bob Egelko 1 Comment

The future of mail-in voting — in particular, the power of states like California to count votes that are mailed by Election Day but received afterward — will soon be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s the same court that overturned a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013 that required states and cities with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal government approval before changing their election laws.

It’s also the court that ruled in 2019 that federal judges cannot interfere with partisan “gerrymandering,” the redrawing of election districts for political purposes. Another ruling in 2021 allowed Arizona to reject ballots that were delivered by someone other than the voter.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

And the court’s conservative majority indicated at a recent hearing that they are likely to overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a ban on district lines that harm racial or ethnic minorities. Such a ruling could affect multiple congressional districts in California that were drawn to enhance minority representation, and it’s not clear whether the state could preserve those districts by passing its own laws.

But the case that the justices are about to hear may have a different outcome. Though the advocates divide mostly along partisan lines — counting ballots that arrive after Election Day is favored by Democratic Party leaders and opposed by Republican leaders, including President Donald Trump — more than 30% of American voters cast their ballots by mail in 2024, nearly as many of them Republicans as Democrats.

And Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who has written extensively on election law issues, says the court may have signaled its intentions by agreeing to review the case after a federal appeals court in New Orleans, in a ruling by three judges appointed by Trump, said mailed ballots can be counted only if they arrive by Election Day.

“Often the court will take a case to reverse” the lower-court ruling, which would have remained in effect if the court had denied review, Hasen said in an interview. “The most likely outcome is that the Supreme Court says states can decide to accept late-arriving ballots.”

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California Politics, Supreme Court, Voting

High court ruling from 2006 could clear way for redistricting in Texas, California

November 30, 2025 By Bob Egelko 1 Comment

In 2006, the Supreme Court, in an unsigned ruling with little explanation, allowed Arizona to enforce strict new voter identification requirements in an upcoming election on the grounds that it was too late for courts to intervene.

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

Now that ruling, in the Purcell case, seems likely to allow Texas and other Republican-led states to gain House seats in next year’s election by redrawing their districts. By the same standard, California’s Proposition 50, the pro-Democratic redesign of House districts approved by the voters on Nov. 4, will most likely take effect in 2026.

That doesn’t mean the new maps will ultimately be upheld by the courts. A federal court panel in Texas, led by an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled 2-1 on Nov. 18 that the state’s redistricting, designed to gain five House seats for Republicans, was illegally crafted to weaken the voting power of racial minorities. Republican officials, in a suit filed Nov. 5 in Los Angeles, contended one new Prop 50 district was illegally designed to favor a Latino candidate.

But under what has become known as the “Purcell principle,” courts must refrain from judging or overturning a state’s voting rules shortly before an election.

“Court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase,” the Supreme Court said in its 2006 ruling, with no apparent dissents.

The ruling allowed Arizona to enforce a 2004 ballot measure requiring voters to present a passport or other proof of citizenship when they register, and to show identification when they vote in person on Election Day. In a suit by Indian tribes and community organizations, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the state law five weeks before the 2006 election, but the Supreme Court set that ruling aside without deciding whether it violated voting rights.

Since then, the court has relied on Purcell to reject lower-court rulings against state election laws in the weeks or months before an election, usually laws that restricted voter registration or participation.

For example, a ruling in 2020 set aside an order by a federal judge in Wisconsin giving election officials additional time to count absentee ballots, which were increasingly being cast during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use new election maps in an upcoming primary that packed most of the state’s Black voters into a single House district — although the court, when it later considered the legality of the maps, ruled in 2023 that they violated the Voting Rights Act.

That approach endangers voting rights, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley and a liberal legal scholar. He noted that Texas lawmakers had adopted their new House maps on Oct. 25 and that the federal court rushed to release its ruling on Nov. 18. That was less than three weeks before the filing deadline for candidates in the primary election that is scheduled in March.

“There’s no way that a challenge could have been brought sooner,” Chemerinsky said in an interview. “If the court says nonetheless that Purcell precludes this, it sends such a clear message to state legislators: You can do anything you want within a certain amount of time before the election.”

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: California, redistricting, Supreme Court, Texas

Man Who Attempted to Kill Brett Kavanaugh Identifies as Transgender Woman, Court Docs Show

September 21, 2025 By James Lynch 2 Comments

The man who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as a transgender woman, according to newly revealed court documents.

In a recent court filing, Nicholas Roske’s defense attorneys call their client “Sophie” and explain in a footnote that they will use female pronouns to refer to him “out of respect.”

Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review

“The case is captioned as United States v. Nicholas John Roske,” lawyers for Roske state in the filing, obtained by the Daily Wire. “That name remains Ms. Roske’s legal name, and she has not asked to recaption the case. Out of respect for Ms. Roske, the balance of this pleading and counsel’s in-court argument will refer to her as Sophie and use female pronouns.”

The Justice Department is seeking a 30-year prison sentence for Roske after he pled guilty in April to attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh in spring 2022. Law enforcement arrested Roske outside Kavanaugh’s home in June 2022. Roske was carrying a pistol and burglary tools when he was arrested.

“This attempt against the life of a Supreme Court Justice was an attack on the entire judicial system that cannot go unpunished,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

“This Department of Justice condemns political violence and our prosecutors will ensure that this disturbed individual faces severe consequences for his deranged actions.”

Roske’s attempt on Kavanaugh’s life is one of several high-profile instances of political violence linked to the transgender movement.

Tyler Robinson, the suspect charged with killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, lived with a transgender lover and, according to his family members, had recently become more political, especially on gay and transgender issues. Robinson told his lover that he killed Kirk because his “hate” could not be “negotiated out,” according to text messages authorities disclosed when announcing the charges.

Click here to read the full article in the National Review

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court, Transgender

The Supreme Court has clawed back concealed-carry laws. Could switchblades be next?

US Supreme Court – still waiting for an answer on Proposition 50

Filing for Congressional races begins in less than a week

This Supreme Court case could strike a major blow to California’s vote-counting system

High court ruling from 2006 could clear way for redistricting in Texas, California

Man Who Attempted to Kill Brett Kavanaugh Identifies as Transgender Woman, Court Docs Show

Recent Posts

Connect With CPR On Twitter

One set of parents said they weren’t told their junior-high daughter was being treated as male at school. Others said teachers lied to them about how their daughter was referred to as at school.

Filing for Congressional races begins in less than a week

Recent Posts

Connect With CPR On Twitter