In a scene straight out of the old west, a group of riders on horseback was ambushed by a man who emerged from the woods and fired “dozens of rounds” at them, Florida deputies said.

One rider was hospitalized with a gunshot wound, theJackson County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

The victim was identified as veterinarian Susan Wells of Lillian, Alabama, and she was standing near her horse trailer when a bullet went through her left calf, Al.com reported.

It happened around 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 4, along a dirt road north of Campbellton, near the Alabama state line.

A suspect has been arrested, but investigators have not released a motive.

“Within minutes, deputies and Florida Highway Patrol Troopers were on scene. Law enforcement quickly determined that a single suspect came out of a wooded area and fired dozens of rounds at a group of horse riders, hitting one victim,” the sheriff’s office said.

Democratic Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine are calling on lawmakers in the commonwealth to repeal a state constitutional amendment that forbids same-sex marriage.

In their letter sent Monday, Kaine and Warner, both former governors, wrote that while they were able to co-sponsor and support the federal Respect for Marriage Act, which was signed into law by President Biden in December, they still have concerns about the U.S. Supreme Court overturning its previous decision on Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the national right to same-sex marriage.

The senators pointed to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the court’s June decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. Thomas said the court should revisit other decisions related to the right to privacy, including access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights.

“If Obergefell is overturned, then LGBTQ Virginians will likely lose the right to marry the person they love unless the General Assembly repeals the ban in Virginia’s constitution,” Warner and Kaine wrote in their letter to members of Virginia’s General Assembly. “Virginia’s circuit courts would be prohibited from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples due to the prohibition in the Commonwealth’s constitution.”

Virginia’s Senate voted 25-14 on Monday to support Joint Resolution 242, the first step in an effort to repeal the constitutional amendment, ratified in 2006, that defines marriage in Virginia only as “between one man and one woman,” according to the Richmond-Times Dispatch.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested Monday that there may be a constitutional right to abortion baked into the 13th Amendment — an area she said went unexplored by the Supreme Court in its momentous decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped short of definitively ruling out other aspects of the Constitution that might apply.

“It is entirely possible that the Court might have held in Dobbs that some other provision of the Constitution provided a right to access reproductive services had that issue been raised,” the judge wrote. “However, it was not raised.”

Kollar-Kotelly noted that there is some legal scholarship suggesting that the 13th Amendment — which was ratified at the end of the Civil War and sought to ban slavery and “involuntary servitude” — provides just such a right. She is asking the parties in the criminal case, which involves charges of blocking access to abortion clinics, to present arguments by mid-March.

In particular, the judge is asking them to address ”whether the scope of Dobbs is in fact confined to the Fourteenth Amendment” and “whether, if so, any other provision of the Constitution could confer a right to abortion as an original matter … such that Dobbs may or may not be the final pronouncement on the issue, leaving an open question.”

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A federal appeals court has denied South Carolina Republicans' motion for a stay in the ongoing challenge over the state's congressional district map.

Leading GOP lawmakers will now take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court in attempt to avoid redrawing the map that a three-judge federal panel last month deemed unconstitutional as a discriminatory racial gerrymander.

The judges ruled in early January that the boundaries passed last year by the Republican-dominated state Legislature marked an intentional splitting of Black voters in South Carolina's 1st District, which runs from Charleston to Hilton Head Island.

The Feb. 4 order postponed the date by which new maps may be presented. If the Supreme Court takes the case and affirms the federal panel's ruling, the state's coastal 1st District will not be redrawn until 30 days after the high court's final decision. The panel had previously ordered lawmakers to submit new maps by the end of March.

Jake Charles
@JacobDCharles

Another day, another federal law invalidated under Bruen's new test. & another straining to dismiss analogues. This time, it's the federal law prohibiting firearm possession during the time a person is an unlawful user of illegal drugs.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.okwd.118991/gov.uscourts.okwd.118991.36.0.pdf

Jake Charles
@JacobDCharles

Oh, look, here's the court dismissing what it calls a "trick" but which looks eerily like....analogical reasoning...

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦
@RonFilipkowski

This is going to be a really fun Republican primary. The Koch Brothers are now George Soros.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on Thursday allowing alleged domestic abusers to keep their guns is perhaps the most radical Second Amendment decision in the history of the federal judiciary. It is not, however, a surprise. Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in last year’s Bruen case invited lower courts to strike down any gun restrictions that “our ancestors would never have accepted.” This standard is infinitely malleable given the hopeless ambiguities in the historical record. But even where the record is clear, Thomas’ test leads to heinous results given that the “ancestors” in question were often violently racist and misogynistic white men. As the 5th Circuit tacitly acknowledged, “our ancestors” would “never have accepted” disarming domestic abusers because they did not believe domestic violence was a crime.

And yet, despite the reach of Bruen, I am fairly confident that five justices will reverse the 5th Circuit and uphold a variety of laws that our ancestors would have rejected, including the federal ban on owning a gun while subject to a restraining order for domestic violence. Why? Because I do not think five justices agree with Bruen. Yes, it was a 6–3 decision. Yes, every justice in the majority joined Thomas’ opinion in full. But one justice, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote a separate opinion laying out a different standard that cannot be squared with Thomas’. And another, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined him. Under the Kavanaugh-Roberts test, disarming alleged abusers—and other individual adjudged to be dangerous—is almost certainly constitutional.

Although Kavanaugh formally signed onto Thomas’ opinion, he spent the bulk of his separate concurrence recasting it as something very different. Kavanaugh wrote that he wanted “to underscore two important points about the limits” of Thomas’ opinion. First, he clarified that the decision does not affect “the existing licensing regimes” in 43 states that let any law-abiding adult carry a concealed weapon. “As the court explains,” Kavanaugh declared, “New York’s outlier may-issue regime is constitutionally problematic because it grants open-ended discretion to licensing officials and authorizes licenses only for those applicants who can show some special need apart from self-defense.” In other words, New York’s “outlier” law violates the Second Amendment because it grants state officials so much latitude in determining who deserves to carry a gun.

Turn now to Kavanaugh’s second “important point” about “the limits” of Bruen. The justice reiterated a famous passage in D.C. v. Heller, the 2008 decision that first established an individual right to bear arms. In Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that this right “is not unlimited,” adding: “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. … We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.” Kavanaugh reprinted this entire passage just to endorse it.

Jaime Avalos had a bad feeling about his impending trip to Mexico. For weeks leading up to the immigration interview in Juárez, he was plagued with premonitions of irrevocable consequences.

"It was really nerve-racking," Avalos told Insider, describing the unshakable feeling in his gut. "I feel like if I go to this appointment, I'm not going to come back."

Nevertheless, Avalos, accompanied by his American wife, traveled to the US Consulate in Juárez, in August 2022, for the interview, a necessary step as he began the process of trying to secure US residency, and eventually, he hoped, citizenship.

Avalos, 28, was born in Mexico but spent nearly his entire life in Texas after his mother brought him to the United States when he was just a year old. The August interview marked the beginning of his effort to become a citizen of the only country he had ever called home, after a decade shielded by his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, often referred to as DACA, status, which prevented him from being deported despite being undocumented.

The meeting quickly deteriorated into a nightmare, though, when Avalos learned that his mother had briefly taken him back to Mexico when he was 7 years old — a trip he says he doesn't remember — before he was able to establish permanent residency in the US. The revelation that he had illegally reentered the country not only dashed his immediate dreams of becoming a resident, but saddled him with a 10-year ban on returning to the US.

Now stranded in a foreign country far from his home, wife, child, and life, Avalos remains at the whims of an overwhelmed, oft-callous US immigration system as the months keep passing by.

Don Winslow
@donwinslow

.@TheGoodLiars have captured #MAGA again.