Despite falling one seat short of an outright supermajority in November’s election, North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore has insisted that “for all intents and purposes,” Republicans have veto-proof control of the chamber.

Perhaps that’s because GOP leaders have come up with a workaround.

New rules proposed by Republican leadership would make it easier for representatives to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes. One rule change would allow the House speaker to call a vote to override a veto without notice. Another rule change would allow the speaker to vary the order in which business is conducted once the House is gaveled in.

It’s a significant change to rules that have been in place for at least a decade. Previously, at least two days’ notice was required before a veto override vote, and any changes to the order of business had to have majority approval.

The rules were passed on a temporary basis without opportunity for debate on the House floor Wednesday, with the promise that a full, permanent rules package would be negotiated “in a few weeks.” The vote was strictly along party lines, and Moore told reporters Wednesday he expects these rules to become permanent.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost wants the Ohio Supreme Court to reinstate the state's ban on most abortions sooner rather than later.

Yost's office appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court after the 1st District Court of Appeals sent a dispute over Ohio's abortion ban back to a Hamilton County judge. The court's decision allows abortions to continue in Ohio through 21 weeks and 6 days into pregnancy.

Ohio's 2019 law bans doctors from performing abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is about six weeks into pregnancy. Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Christian Jenkins placed that law on hold indefinitely and ruled that the Ohio Constitution protects the right to an abortion.

Yost's office challenged that decision, but the 1st District Court of Appeals rejected the appeal as premature. Now, Yost's office is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to weigh in.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Manny Diaz, the former Miami mayor who had pledged to rebuild the Florida Democratic Party after years of losses, abruptly announced his immediate resignation as party chair on Monday amid growing calls for his ouster.

Diaz’s departure came after Florida Democrats suffering some of their worst losses ever, including the re-election of Gov. Ron DeSantis by 19 points over Charlie Crist, the election of a supermajority in the Florida Legislature and the flipping of several counties including once-reliable blue Miami-Dade County.

Diaz, in a statement to Democrats Monday, said he was unable to carry out his plans to build a year-round operation that would carry the party forward, blaming unnamed Democrats and others. He also decried national groups for not providing more funding the state party.

“During my tenure, I hoped to address these issues, and build a united party without silos, focused exclusively on our purpose- to elect Democrats,” Diaz wrote in his statement, first reported by the Florida Phoenix. “Instead, I found obstacles to securing the resources and a long-standing, systemic and deeply entrenched culture resistant to change; one where individual agendas are more important than team; where self-interest dominates and bureaucracies focus on self-preservation.”

(Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday blocked parts of a recently passed New Jersey law restricting where people in the state may carry guns, an early test of some states' efforts to pass gun control measures in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year expanding gun rights nationwide.

U.S. District Judge Renee Marie Bumb said that the state's new restrictions violated the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The law banned carrying guns in public libraries, museums, bars and restaurants and on private property without the owner's explicit permission, as well as transporting loaded guns in vehicles,

She issued a temporary restraining order barring enforcement of those bans while several people pursue a legal challenge to the law. The challenge was brought by three individuals and gun-rights advocacy groups.

Other parts of the law, which was signed last month by Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, are not part of the lawsuit and remain in effect. They include provisions tightening gun licensing requirements and handgun safety rules.

Tyler Jones, a spokesperson for Murphy, said the governor's office was disappointed that the judge had struck down "common sense restrictions" and would work to get them reinstated.

President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have moved quickly to appoint scores of judges during the past two years, outpacing former President Donald Trump, but they have stalled in the South.

The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both US senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.

The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts – nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers – has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.

“That is where the entrenchment of hyper-conservatism is real and difficult to uproot,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

The pattern of vacancies, particularly in the South, is not lost on the Biden selection team, led by political veterans with deep experience in judicial selection and confirmation. (Biden, himself, as a senator from Delaware, once led the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

“All of these seats are deeply important to us. We care about all of these vacancies,” Paige Herwig, senior counsel to the President, told CNN. “It’s not a secret that a large number of vacancies are in states with two Republican senators. But we are always here in good faith. We are here to work with home state senators.”

ithout dramatic cuts to water consumption, Utah's Great Salt Lake is on track to disappear within five years, a dire new report warns, imperiling ecosystems and exposing millions of people to toxic dust from the drying lake bed.

The report, led by researchers at Brigham Young University and published this week, found that unsustainable water use has shrunk the lake to just 37 percent of its former volume. The West's ongoing mega-drought - a crisis made worse by climate change - has accelerated its decline to rates far faster than scientists had predicted.

But current conservation measures are critically insufficient to replace the roughly 40 billion gallons of water the lake has lost annually since 2020, the scientists said.

The report calls on Utah and nearby states to curb water consumption by a third to a half, allowing 2.5 million acre feet of water to flow from streams and rivers directly into the lake for the next couple of years. Otherwise, it said, the Great Salt Lake is headed for irreversible collapse.

"This is a crisis," said Brigham Young University ecologist Ben Abbott, a lead author of the report. "The ecosystem is on life support, [and] we need to have this emergency intervention to make sure it doesn't disappear."

Naveen Razik
@naveenjrazik

Meanwhile on the democrat side of the chamber @RepKatiePorter #118thCongress @SBSnews