Austin-Bergstrom International Airport lost power before dawn Wednesday, leading to canceled flights and frustrated flyers.

But by 7:30 a.m., the lights started to come back on at the Austin airport’s main terminal, after a two-and-a-half-hour power outage grounded flights during the facility’s busiest time of day.

Internet service also was restored, which means the Transportation Security Administration checkpoints can resume screening passengers.

Austin Energy said in an email that underground equipment malfunctioned around 4:30 a.m., leading to the outage. Electricians used fault indicators — devices that light up to indicate a circuit issue — to isolate the cause of the problem.

Crews completed repairs and restored power to the airport around 8 a.m. According to the Austin Energy spokesperson Matthew Mitchell, crews are continuing to evaluate the issue to identify any changes we may need to make in the future.

"Anytime there's an outage we try to figure out, is that problem repeatable? And if so, how can we put safeguards and redundancies in place to ensure that that doesn't happen again," Mitchell said. "That standard procedure when you have an outage, but especially for one for one like this, you look at it and say 'okay, how can we avoid this in the future?'"

(Reuters) - A group representing the top judges in all 50 states is urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to shield actions taken by state legislatures affecting federal elections - such as reconfiguring electoral districts and imposing voting restrictions - from the scrutiny of state courts.

The bipartisan Conference of Chief Justices filed the brief on Tuesday in a closely watched case involving a map drawn by the Republican-led North Carolina legislature of the state's 14 U.S. House of Representatives districts. The state's top court struck down the map on Feb. 4, concluding that the districts were crafted in a manner intentionally biased against Democrats, diluting their "fundamental right to equal voting power."

The Conference of Chief Justices argued that the U.S. Constitution does not prevent state courts from reviewing such congressional maps for violations of state constitutions, as the Republican state legislators defending the map argue.

The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the Republican arguments seeking to exempt U.S. congressional electoral maps from legal review in state courts. A lower state court on Feb. 23 rejected a redrawn map submitted by the legislature and instead adopted a different map drawn by a bipartisan group of experts.

The conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case in its next term, which begins in October, with a decision due by June.

A federal judge in Texas has ruled partially in favor of plaintiffs that argued that requiring insurance companies to cover medications for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, violates their rights on religious grounds.

Jonathan Mitchell, who founded a one-person law firm in 2018 intending to challenge decades-old Supreme Court rulings, brought the case Braidwood Management Inc., vs. Xavier Becerra, in the Northern District of Texas.

There, United States district judge Reed O’Conner ruled in favor of plaintiffs who argued that paying for insurance that covers PrEP violates their religious beliefs because PrEP “enable[s and encourages] homosexual behavior.”

In the 42-page ruling, O’Connor writes, “The PrEP mandate violates Braidwood’s rights under [Religious Freedom Restoration Act].”

Mitchell helped draft Texas’s Senate Bill 8, the restrictive 2021 abortion law that made everyday people bounty hunters who could sue anybody they believed may have been involved with the procedure.

O’Connor was appointed by George W. Bush in 2007. He is no stranger to controversial rulings.

Democrats running for state attorneys general are seeing a surge in donations and a polling upswing in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade — making several races formerly seen as longshots newly competitive.

Challengers in Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Texas are more optimistic about their chances of flipping party control of the powerful post at a time attorneys general will have more sway than ever over who can have an abortion, under what circumstances, and which charges to file in cases when abortion restrictions are violated.

At the same time, Democratic incumbents in tight races in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin are increasingly confident about winning reelection, buoyed by a wave of voter and donor attention on abortion rights.

This influx of campaign cash is the latest evidence Democrats point to as they argue voters will deliver them upset victories up and down the ballot in November, and that Republicans’ anti-abortion stance will boost turnout and sway independents.

The Democratic Attorneys General Association — the party’s only national campaign arm to explicitly require its candidates to support abortion rights — usually trails its GOP counterpart in fundraising. But in the second quarter of this year, when Roe fell, it outraised the Republican group, $6.47 million to $6.3 million. And while Republicans’ fundraising ticked up 7 percent from the previous quarter this year, Democrats’ shot up 70 percent. And Ford says that included sizable increases in both small-dollar and major donations.

A federal judge in Louisiana ruled Tuesday that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Dr. Anthony Fauci will have to turn over any emails they sent to social media companies about misinformation or the censorship of social media content.

The ruling is part of a lawsuit filed in May by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, accusing the Biden administration of working with social media companies to suppress free speech, particularly surrounding COVID-19 and elections

For the past four months, the attorneys general and the White House have been arguing over which documents need to be produced in the lawsuit. Judge Terry Doughty, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, ruled that the Biden administration will have to turn over Jean-Pierre and Fauci’s relevant emails in 21 days, over objections from the Department of Justice, which argued that turning over the documents would show internal communications.

Scott Jensen, Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, is fleeing from his own position against abortion after his poll numbers took a dive.

“I would try to ban abortion,” Jensen vowed in a March interview with Minnesota Public Radio. In the past, he has also said he would work to ban it without exceptions for rape and incest “unless the mother’s life is in danger.”

Now, with voters outraged over the issue after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Jensen has released a new video insisting abortion is a “protected constitutional right” in the state and “no governor can change that.”

Ian Millhiser
@imillhiser

I expect this to go nowhere. But will definitely keep an eye on it.

Could easily see Thomas, Alito, or Gorsuch filing an opinion signing onto this nonsense.

John Doe
@fedjudges

A new cert petition asserting the 14th Amendment establishes fetal personhood has been filed:
https://supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-201/236882/20220901130349933_Petition%20Brief.pdf