Politics
David H. Souter, a retired Supreme Court Justice, has died
WASHINGTON — Retired Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter, the shy and frugal small-town New Englander who was touted as a conservative but surprised his Republican backers and nearly everyone else by becoming a staunch liberal on the high court, has died, the court said in a statement Friday. He was 85.
Souter stepped down in 2009 after nearly two decades on the court where he cast key votes to uphold laws on campaign finance, environmental protection, civil rights and church-state separation. He also played a crucial role in upholding a woman’s right to choose abortion in 1992.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts said in a statement that “Justice Souter served our court with great distinction for nearly 20 years. He brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service.”
Souter often said he liked the court work, but he did not like living in Washington and looked forward to returning home.
“After retiring to his beloved New Hampshire in 2009, he continued to render significant service to our branch by sitting regularly on the court of appeals for the First Circuit,” Roberts said.
As an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, Souter was expected to join with then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and other conservatives who were determined to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that expanded abortion rights.
But when a Pennsylvania test case came before the court in 1992, Souter instead joined moderate Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy to affirm the right to abortion. Souter saw the issue as a matter of precedent.
Repealing the constitutional right to abortion would be “a surrender to political pressure,” he wrote. “To overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to re-examine a watershed decision would subvert the Court’s legitimacy beyond any serious question.”
That decision stood for 30 years, but in 2022, three new justices appointed by President Trump played key roles in overturning the constitutional right to abortion and leaving it to the states to decide.
Souter had also cast key votes to maintain church-state separation. In 1992, he joined a 5-4 decision that upheld the strict ban on school-sponsored prayers at graduations. The five justices who voted to uphold the abortion right and the ban on school prayers were all Republican appointees.
But they no longer reflected the views of a more socially conservative GOP, and Souter was denounced by some in the party as a turn-coat. By the late 1990s, “No more Souters” had become a rallying cry for conservative legal activists.
“Justice Souter was a judicial version of a disappearing phenomenon: the moderate New England Republican,” said Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School. “He was not a true liberal and would not have been a liberal on the court of the 1960s and ‘70s. But he believed in privacy and civil rights and precedents, and that made him a liberal on the court of his day.”
He was unusual in other ways. Shortly after he arrived as a new justice in 1990, he was dubbed one of the city’s “most eligible bachelors” in the Washington Post, leading to a series of dinner invitations. He usually found himself seated between a single woman and a guest who spoke only Japanese, he later joked.
Souter became adept at turning down invitations. He would dine with Justice John Paul Stevens and his wife, or with O’Connor, but mostly he worked and ate alone. He spent evenings jogging along the waterfront near his small apartment.
Whenever the court took an extended break, Souter drove to the farmhouse where he grew up in tiny Weare, N.H., so he could hike.
He was in good health and not yet 70 when President Obama moved into the White House in early 2009. Soon after, Souter passed word that he intended to retire. Obama chose Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina on the high court, to replace him.
Souter was dubbed a “stealth nominee” when he arrived in Washington in 1990, and he remained a mystery when he left. He did no interviews and made no public statements.
Back in New Hampshire, he continued to serve part time as a retired judge on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, deciding low-profile cases out of the public spotlight.
Souter was not the first justice to surprise the president who appointed him, but he may be among the last. Since Souter’s time — and indeed, partly in reaction to him — presidents have carefully selected court nominees with public records showing they shared similar views on legal issues.
Souter had deep ties to the Republican Party. He carried a gold watch that was a prized possession of a great-great-grandfather who attended the Republican party convention of 1860 that nominated Abraham Lincoln as president.
The GOP supported environmental conservation and the separation of church and state when Souter was growing up. But it grew increasingly more conservative over the decades, and Souter didn’t always agree.
In July 1990, he was a 50-year-old bachelor who lived alone in a farm house with peeling paint and books on the floor. He had just been named to the U.S. court of appeals in Boston. Until then, he had spent his entire career as a prosecutor, state attorney and judge in New Hampshire.
His scholarly manner and devotion to the law had won him influential admirers, including then-Sen. Warren Rudman and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who was then-White House chief of staff to the first President Bush.
When the Supreme Court’s liberal leader, William J. Brennan, suffered a stroke and announced his retirement, Souter’s name made the president’s short list of possible nominees.
Bush was anxious to avoid a fight with Senate Democrats over abortion and civil rights. Republicans still smarted from the Senate’s defeat in 1987 of Judge Robert Bork, whose strongly conservative writings convinced critics he was too extreme to be confirmed.
Souter seemed an ideal nominee. He was conservative, or at least old-fashioned. He wrote with a fountain pen, not a computer. And he ignored television. He only learned Brennan was stepping down when a postal clerk in his town shared the news.
Two days later, Souter stood in the White House press room as Bush announced his nomination. Souter was said to have no “paper trail,” but Sununu privately assured activists that he would be a “home run for conservatives.”
Liberal Democrats, led by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were Souter’s sharpest critics that summer, while the arch-conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina led the fight to confirm him. In less than two years, it became clear that both sides had miscalculated.
By the mid-1990s, Souter had allied himself with Stevens, another moderate Republican who also seemed to move left, and with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, the two appointees of President Clinton. They formed a liberal bloc in cases where the court split along ideological lines.
David Hackett Souter was born in Melrose, Mass., on Sept. 17, 1939, the only child of Joseph and Helen Souter. His father was a banker and his mother a gift shop clerk. When he was 11, the family moved to the New Hampshire farm house in Weare that remained Souter’s primary home until after his retirement.
As a Harvard undergraduate, Souter dated a young woman and spoke of marrying her. But when he won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and went to England to study at Oxford University, she found someone else.
Souter told friends he was disappointed he never married. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1966, he eschewed the big-city law firms and returned to the small-town life and rugged mountains of the New Hampshire he loved.
Friends and former clerks say Souter was never a true conservative as his early backers said, nor was he a solid liberal as he was portrayed years later.
Souter was “a judge’s judge,” said Penn Law Professor Kermit Roosevelt, who clerked for him in 1999. “He didn’t have a political agenda. People had a mistaken idea of what they were getting when he was appointed.”
Former state Controller Betty Yee dropped out of the governor’s race on Monday, citing low levels of support from voters and donors.
Yee, a Democrat, was part of a sprawling field of politicians vying to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. But despite the bevy of prominent candidates running to lead the nation’s most populous state and the world’s fourth-largest economy, this year’s governor’s race has lacked a clear front-runner well known by the electorate.
“It was becoming clear that the donors were not going to be there. Even some of my former supporters just felt like they needed to move on as well,” Yee said in a virtual news conference Monday morning, adding that her internal polling showed voters did not prioritize “competence and experience … and that’s really been my wheelhouse in terms of how we grounded this campaign.”
The former two-term state controller did not immediately endorse another candidate and said she would take a few days to assess the field before making an announcement.
The race was upended this month when then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, among the leading Democrats in the contest, was accused of sexual assault and other misconduct. The East Bay Area Democrat, who is facing multiple criminal investigations, promptly ended his gubernatorial bid and resigned from Congress.
Yee said the contest would probably go down as “one of the most unusual, unpredictable and unsettling races in modern California history.”
“I certainly could not have imagined the twists and the disturbing turns that this race has taken,” she said. “But through it all, my values and my vision for California has never wavered.”
“Voters are scared right now, and I think they really are placing a lot of prominence on a fighter in chief against this Trump administration,” she said.
Though she was prepared to be a governor that would push back against the Trump administration, Yee said her calm demeanor did not help her grab attention.
“We are living in like a reality TV era, where to get traction, you have to either be the loudest, you have to have gimmicks. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get attention. I got no gimmicks. I have no scandals,” she said before calling herself “Boring Betty.”
Yee, 68, was well regarded by Democrats during her tenure in Sacramento.
But she never had the financial resources to aggressively compete in a state with many of the most expensive media markets in the nation.
Yee reported raising nearly $583,000 in 2025 for her gubernatorial bid, according to campaign fundraising reports filed with the California secretary of state’s office. Yee’s announcement that she is dropping out of the race came days before the latest financial disclosures will be publicly reported.
Despite being elected to the state Board of Equalization twice and as state controller twice, Yee was not widely known by most Californians. She never cracked double digits in gubernatorial polls.
Her name will still appear on the ballot. She was among the candidates who rebuffed state Democratic Party leaders’ request this year to reconsider their viability amid fears that the party could be shut out of the November general election because of the state’s unique primary system. The top two vote-getters in the June primary will move on to the November general election, regardless of party affiliation.
Though California’s electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic, the makeup of the gubernatorial field makes it statistically possible for Republicans to win the top two spots if Democratic voters splinter among their party’s candidates. Yee said fear of that scenario playing out “kind of took over” the gubernatorial race.
“Was it possible? Yes. Was it plausible? No, we’re in California. That was not going to happen,” she said, adding that the top-two primary system “has got to go.”
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Yee said she was disappointed that other Asian American donors and community members did not show up for her as “robustly” as they had in the past.
“We had the opportunity to make history,” she said. “I’m going to want to do a deep dive about … what was it about my campaign that just did not resonate with them.”
Still, Yee was beloved by Democratic Party activists and previously served as the party’s vice chair.
No Democratic candidate reached the necessary threshold to win the party’s official endorsement at its February convention, but Yee came in second with support from 17% of delegates despite calls for her to drop out of the race.
“Every poll shows that this race is wide open, and I know this party,” she said in an interview at the convention. “Frankly, I’ve been in positions where it’s been a crowded field, and we work hard and candidates emerge.”
Yee became emotional Monday as she thanked her supporters and family, including her husband, siblings and mother. “She’s now 103 years old, and her life and voice and wisdom are my compass,” Yee said.
The gubernatorial primary will take place June 2, though voters will start receiving mail ballots in about two weeks.
But while that is a new element in the talks, the cultural divide in how to negotiate is not.
That divide was evident 11 years ago, in the gilded halls of the 160-year-old Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from five other countries struggled to close a preliminary agreement with Iran. It was, perhaps, the closest analogue to what is unfolding now in Islamabad.
Every day the American delegation would speak about how many centrifuges had to be disassembled and how much uranium needed to be shipped out of country. Yet when Iranian officials — including Abbas Araghchi, now the Iranian foreign minister — stepped out of the elegant, chandeliered rooms to brief reporters, most of the questions about those details were waved away. The Iranians talked about preserving respect for their rights and Iran’s sovereignty.
“I remember we finally got the parameters agreed upon at the hotel,” Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator at the time, said on Monday. “And then a few days later the supreme leader came out and said, ‘Actually, some very different terms were required.’”
Ms. Sherman, who went on to become deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, would go into these negotiations with a large posse. She often had the C.I.A.’s top Iran expert in the room, or nearby. So was the energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, an expert in nuclear weapons design. Proposals floated by the Iranians would be sent back to the U.S. national laboratories, where weapons are designed and tested, for expert analysis of whether the agreements being discussed would keep Iran at least a year away from a bomb.
But Mr. Trump’s negotiating team travels light, with no entourage of experts and few briefings. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law and the special envoy, learned their negotiating skills in New York real estate and say a deal is a deal. They say they have immersed themselves in the details of the Iran program, and know it well.
Politics
Soros-linked dark money network fuels Virginia redistricting push backed by national Democrats
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Virginians for Fair Elections, a main group fighting to get Virginia voters to approve a ballot referendum that will allow the state to redraw its congressional maps, has been pumped with millions in cash from a web of George Soros-backed dark money groups and top Democratic Party officials.
The money the group has garnered ahead of Tuesday’s vote, which is poised to allow Democrats in the House of Representatives to potentially take four seats from Republicans going into the midterms, also comes from leading Democratic Party figures and organizations like Nancy Pelosi and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Other left-wing juggernauts pumping money into the Democratic Party’s redistricting effort in Virginia include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which once championed the adoption of “independent redistricting commissions,” national green energy group the League of Conservation Voters, and the U.S. House of Representatives campaign arm for the Democratic Party, according to a Fox News Digital review of state campaign finance records and records from the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), which tracks public spending in Virginia.
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“Dark money is flooding into Virginia,” GOP strategist Matt Gorman told Fox News Digital. “Democrats talked all about the cost of living during the campaign, but all they did once in office was raise taxes and rig elections. It’ll be the same elsewhere across the country in 2026 too.”
A woman casts her vote at a polling place in Burke, Fairfax County, Virginia, in 2026. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg)
Fox News Digital reported in March that the left-wing group fighting to redraw Virginia’s maps raised more than $38 million, according to VPAP’s donation totals based on state campaign finance records. As of right before the mid-April referendum vote, just a handful of weeks later, that total ballooned to more than $64 million.
In 2026, the largest giver to Virginians for Fair Elections was House Majority Forward, the nonprofit counterpart of House Democrats’ House Majority PAC, which has donated over $38 million, records show.
Meanwhile, entities directly tied to Soros, or that obtained significant funding which can be traced back to the billionaire Democrat megadonor, come in second and third in terms of total giving to the group, per VPAP’s accounting of donation totals.
One of those groups, the Fund for Policy Reform Inc, was founded by Soros. The other, titled The Fairness Project, has been funded by groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund and the Tides Foundation, which Soros has given significant funding to.
George Soros pictured on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Another one of the top donors to the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections is American Opportunity Action, described as “a pure pass-through entity” by Parker Thayer, a dark money expert from the conservative Capital Research Center. The group is so new that it does not even appear to have any 990s filed with the IRS but is still one of Virginians for Fair Elections’ top donors, according to VPAP and state campaign finance records.
Top Democratic Party members of Congress from outside Virginia, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., and Katherine Clark, D-Mass., also donated tens-of-thousands of dollars, according to a review of state campaign finance records. Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s leadership PAC donated $100,000 as well, while the Democratic Party of Virginia put up just shy of a million dollars, per VPAP’s accounting.
Meanwhile, a group founded by Obama wingman Eric Holder, who previously championed “independent redistricting commissions,” provided a more than $10,000 in-kind contribution to the left-wing redistricting group, state election filings show. The League of Conservation Voters, and the Soros-backed MoveOn.org were also among Virginians for Fair Election’s top donors. In terms of labor union support, SEIU gave half-a-million, while AFT gave $100,000.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the other top donors pumping thousands or millions into the redistricting battle, but did not receive a response ahead of publication.
“No one wanted to take this action, but in a democracy, we can’t let entire states rig their congressional maps just to bend to the will of one person,” Alexis Magnan-Callaway, a spokesperson for The Fairness Project, told Fox News Digital in March.
“We have to respond. This amendment is a temporary, one-time exception that gives Virginia voters a voice and meets the needs of the current moment, while ensuring Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting process will resume after the 2030 census,” she continued. “This isn’t about favoring one party over another. This is about restoring fairness across the board by temporarily changing Virginia’s congressional districts.”
A main group in Virginia opposing the redistricting effort led by Democrats, Virginians For Fair Maps, raised a little over $3 million at the time of Fox News Digital’s late March report. However, the right-wing redistricting group in Virginia appears to have gained some ground since then as well, albeit still far behind the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections funding totals.
As of just before the referendum vote Tuesday, the anti-redistricting referendum group raised its fundraising total to nearly $20 million, with most of that money coming from a group by the same name that is also a significant donor to the Virginia Republican Party.
Other donations to the group come from a series of several much smaller donors, such as $50,000 from the National Shooting Sports Foundation and $100,000 from a wealthy D.C.-area real-estate investor, who donates primarily to GOP campaigns. That investor is the top individual donor at $100,000 out of just a handful of individual contributions, according to VPAP.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin speaks during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference at the Washington Hilton on June 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
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Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has reportedly given more than $500,000 in efforts against the redistricting measure, per reporting from the Virginia Scope. He also has been a leading voice in Virginia holding events to campaign against the measure despite no longer being in office.
Wealthy tech entrepreneur and Republican donor Peter Thiel has reportedly donated to Justice for Democracy PAC, which has been part of the anti-redistricting effort alongside Virginians for Fair Maps as well.
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