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The Pitched Battles for Partisan Control in State Legislatures

Published

13 hours ago

January 13, 2025

The Pitched Battles for Partisan Control in State Legislatures

In Minnesota, Democratic legislators are threatening to stay away from the state capitol this week to prevent Republicans from trying to claim control of the House of Representatives.

In Michigan, Republican senators, who are just one seat behind the Democrats, want a special election as soon as possible to fill a seat they believe can be flipped.

And in Virginia, Democratic candidates in three special elections last week were pushing hard to retain their majorities in both legislative chambers, as Democrats try to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.

As state legislatures convene around the country this month, several knife-edge fights for partisan control have magnified the degree to which political polarization has become ingrained, not just in Congress, but in statehouses across the country.

The battle to gain the upper hand puts pressure in particular on Democratic lawmakers, who, unlike the past four years, face even higher stakes. They are already are playing defense as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office again, bolstered by the Republican takeover of Congress.

“With Trump and his MAGA allies in the states returning to office, building and defending Democratic power in the states is essential,” said Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

Republicans now control a majority of statehouses. But Democrats captured four state legislatures in 2022, and they parlayed that power into progressive laws related to abortion, voting rights and more.

In 2024, though, Republicans, arguing that Democrats had gone too far, regained the majority in the Michigan House, tied in the Minnesota House and made strong inroads in Vermont.

Since Election Day, the most dramatic battle has been unfolding in Minnesota. State Senator Kari Dziedzic, a Democrat from Minneapolis, died of cancer, leaving the chamber deadlocked at 33-33.

“There’s nothing that can be done until a special election happens,” Representative Lisa Demuth, the House Republican leader and speaker-designate, said in an interview. “The problem with saying, ‘Well, it’ll be in a couple of weeks, we should just act like we’re at 67 anyway’ — that’s not how math works.”

She has also suggested that a Republican majority would refuse to seat Representative Brad Tabke, a Democrat who won re-election by 14 votes after 20 absentee ballots were lost. Six of those 20 voters later testified that they had voted for Mr. Tabke, giving him an insurmountable margin. A judge is expected to rule at any moment, but Ms. Demuth said there should be a special election, regardless of what the judge decided.

In response, Democrats have floated the possibility of boycotting the session, with the aim of denying the Republicans the necessary quorum — a majority of total members must be present — to kick it off.

Recent walkouts elsewhere have underscored the partisan divide. In Texas, House Democrats fled the state for Washington in 2021 to temporarily deny Republicans the two-thirds quorum needed to pass a restrictive voting measure.

In Oregon — which also has a two-thirds quorum requirement — Republican Senators intent on stalling bills on climate policy, taxes and abortion walked out so frequently that voters altered the state constitution to ban such absenteeism. Most Republican Senators were also barred from seeking re-election.

But a walkout of the kind being discussed in Minnesota would be without precedent, said Bill Kramer, the vice president and counsel of MultiState, a state and local government relations firm.

“I can’t remember any time where it’s been like this at the very start of session,” he said. “You put the rules in place, you elect a speaker, you elect committee chairs — all of those types of things which put in place the agenda procedurally for the next two years.”

In Virginia, two of the contests last week were for the Senate, and one for the House; before these special elections, Democrats were clinging to single-vote majorities in both chambers, which they claimed when they won the House in 2023. At stake, to some degree, was the agenda of outgoing Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, who is prevented by the state constitution from running for a second term.

Turnout was light for the election in Loudoun County, where one House race and one Senate race were on the ballot. Harish Sundaraman, 24, said he was voting for both Democrats, even though he did not fully subscribe to the party’s policies. He would have liked to have known a little more about the candidates, he said. But he was motivated by his views on abortion rights, which Democrats hope to advance in the coming legislative session.

“I thought if I vote Democrat in this local election, it might be helpful,” said Mr. Sundaraman, who works in information technology in Washington, D.C.

Ultimately, two Democrats and a Republican prevailed, leaving the balance of power unchanged.

Overall, Republicans now control the legislature in 28 states, and Democrats 18. (The other states are split, unresolved or led by a bipartisan coalition.)

A single vote can be momentous, even in states where one party dominates. In North Carolina, a legislator who unexpectedly switched her party affiliation from Democrat to Republican enabled Republican leaders to enact a 12-week limit on most abortions in 2023, overriding Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

Few sitting state legislators have had more experience with the whiplash of paper-thin margins than the members of the Pennsylvania House. After 2022, Pennsylvania was one of only two states where different parties held control of the legislature’s two chambers. Though Republicans held a comfortable majority in the Senate, the Democrats’ hold on the House was nerve-wrackingly precarious, at times vanishing altogether.

In 2024, despite losses by Democrats in the presidential race, a U.S. Senate seat and several Congressional seats, not a single seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives flipped. The Democrats thus maintained the same one-seat majority they had two years earlier.

Then, in December, a Democratic member had a medical emergency, and he has been in the hospital ever since. As it had multiple times in the previous two years, the House returned to a functional tie.

But when House members gathered on Tuesday, the first day of the new session, the election of a speaker went forward smoothly and relatively quickly, without the backroom deals and prolonged drama that had surrounded the vote two years ago. Partly as a result of compromises with Republicans over House procedural rules, the legislature promptly re-elected the previous Democratic speaker in a voice vote.

“I think everybody has learned their lesson,” said Representative Michael Schlossberg, a Democrat, describing himself as the “majority whip with no room for error.” The last two years have had their challenges, he said, but a narrow partisan margin does have its advantages, forcing compromise and discipline.

As for lessons for his counterparts in other states, he offered this: “Do not confuse short-term advantage with long-term advantage.”

And, mentioning various maneuvers for partisan gain that had ultimately backfired, he added: “Don’t get too cute.”

Courtney Mabeus-Brown contributed reporting from Loudoun County, Va.

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Special Counsel Report Says Trump Would Have Been Convicted in Election Case

Published

6 hours ago

January 14, 2025

Press Room

Special Counsel Report Says Trump Would Have Been Convicted in Election Case

Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday morning that he believed the evidence was sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.

“The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Mr. Smith wrote.

He continued: “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

The Justice Department delivered the 137-page volume — representing half of Mr. Smith’s overall final report, with the volume about the classified documents case still confidential — to Congress just after midnight Tuesday morning.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of a president-elect, capping a momentous legal saga that saw the man now poised to regain the powers of the nation’s highest office charged with crimes that struck at the heart of American democracy. And although Mr. Smith resigned as special counsel late last week, his recounting of the case also served as a reminder of the vast array of evidence and detailed accounting of Mr. Trump’s actions that he had marshaled.

The partial release came only a day after the judge in Florida who oversaw Mr. Trump’s other federal case — the one accusing him of mishandling classified documents — issued a ruling allowing a portion of the material to be made public. But the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump himself, also barred the Justice Department from immediately releasing — even to Congress — a second volume of the report concerning the documents case.

For more than a week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers — who were shown a draft copy of Mr. Smith’s report in advance of its release — denounced it as little more than an “attempted political hit job which sole purpose is to disrupt the presidential transition.” At least one Trump ally, the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, has come forward to complain that he, too, might be implicated in the report as an unindicted co-conspirator in the election interference case.

In August 2023, Mr. Smith charged Mr. Trump in Federal District Court in Washington with three intersecting conspiracy counts accusing him of plotting to overturn his loss in the 2020 election. Mr. Smith also filed a separate indictment in Florida, charging Mr. Trump with illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office and conspiring with two co-defendants to obstruct the government’s repeated effort to retrieve them.

But after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, Mr. Smith dropped the cases because of a Justice Department policy that prohibits prosecuting sitting presidents. Under a separate department regulation, he turned in a final report about both cases — one volume on each — to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

Last week, the Justice Department said Mr. Garland planned to hold off on issuing the volume about the classified documents case until all legal proceedings related to Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants were completed.

Lawyers for the co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, fought the release by obtaining an initial injunction last week from Judge Cannon, who had dismissed the classified documents case last summer.

In her order on Monday, Judge Cannon told the defense and prosecution to appear before her on Friday in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., to argue over the department’s plan to release the classified-documents volume to Congress.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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Los Angeles braces for ‘explosive fire growth’ as high winds near

Published

7 hours ago

January 13, 2025

Press Room

Los Angeles braces for ‘explosive fire growth’ as high winds near

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Los Angeles was braced for near “hurricane force” winds on Monday that weather forecasters said could fan the devastating wildfires that have swept across southern California as damage estimates mounted.

As firefighters struggled to contain the deadly blazes that continued to rage in the suburbs of the US’s second-largest city, the National Weather Service issued a “red flag alert” warning amid deteriorating conditions.

Winds of up to 75 miles an hour were expected to hit the region from Monday night until Wednesday morning, according to the NWS, combining with extremely dry conditions to create “critical fire weather”.

“The National Weather Service is predicting close to hurricane-force level winds, and so we’re making urgent preparations,” LA mayor Karen Bass said on Monday. “My top priority, and the priority of everyone else, is to do everything we can to protect lives as these winds approach.”

Authorities have since last Tuesday battled blazes that have burnt more than 40,000 acres of land. California governor Gavin Newsom warned the fires could become the costliest disaster in US history as he clashed with president-elect Donald Trump over the state’s response.

The cause of the fires has not yet been determined, but several lawsuits were filed against utility Southern California Edison on Monday alleging it had failed to properly shut off power lines despite warnings, leading to the outbreak of the Eaton fire.

Shares in its parent Edison International fell 11.9 per cent on Monday.

A Southern California Edison spokesperson said: “SCE understands that a lawsuit related to the Eaton fire has been filed but has not yet been served with the complaint,” adding that the company “will review the complaint when it is received. The cause of the fire continues to be under investigation.”

Insurance stocks were also hit as anticipated damages mounted. Wells Fargo analysts estimated insurance losses could top $30bn and potentially reach as much as $40bn. On Friday, JPMorgan analysts had pencilled in an industry-wide hit of $20bn, a level that would already have been the largest in the state’s history.

On Monday, Newsom said he was proposing $2.5bn in additional emergency funding to aid LA in the recovery, clean-up and reopening of schools. “California is organising a Marshall Plan to help Los Angeles rebuild faster and stronger,” he said in a statement. The funding will need to be approved by the state legislature.

The largest of the outbreaks, the Pacific Palisades fire, was just 14 per cent contained late on Monday, prompting fears that strong gusts in the coming days would reverse progress in combating the blazes.

The weather service warned that “extreme fire danger” would continue until Wednesday and said that the category of alert in place — a “particularly dangerous situation red flag warning” — was reserved for “extreme of the extreme fire weather scenarios”.

“In other words, this set-up is about as bad as it gets,” the NWS warned as it cautioned powerful winds could create “explosive fire growth”.

The death toll hit 24 on Monday, officials said, and was expected to climb as authorities combed through the wreckage in search of missing people.

Firefighters work to clear a firebreak on a hillside covered with retardant in an attempt to contain the Palisades fire © Ringo Chiu/Reuters

The disaster has spilled over into the political arena, with Trump on Sunday attacking the state’s authorities for failing to halt the destruction. “The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out,” he posted on his Truth Social network.

The incoming Republican president has accused California’s governor, a Democrat, of depleting water reserves to protect an endangered species of fish, and of refusing to sign a “water restoration declaration”. Newsom’s office said no such declaration exists.

“That mis- and disinformation I don’t think advantages or aids any of us,” Newsom told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, noting he had invited the president-elect to visit affected areas but had yet to receive a response. “Responding to Donald Trump’s insults, we would spend another month.”

Meanwhile, city officials warned against price gougers who have increased prices for rental properties as thousands of people fled their homes.

LAist, a local news site, found a Zillow listing for a furnished home in Bel Air going for $29,500 a month — 86 per cent higher than in September.

Cartography by Steven Bernard

News

What Causes California Fires? Power Lines Can Be a Contributor.

Published

7 hours ago

January 13, 2025

Press Room

What Causes California Fires? Power Lines Can Be a Contributor.

Investigators are still working to identify what caused the spate of fires that ignited around Los Angeles last week, but residents are concerned that electrical infrastructure may have sparked at least one of them.

Since 1992, more than 3,600 wildfires in California have been related to power generation, transmission and distribution, according to data from the U.S. Forest Service. Some of the most destructive fires have been traced back to problems with utility poles and power lines.

Extent of power line fires near Los Angeles

Roughly a dozen power line fires have burned more than 200,000 acres in areas northwest of the city since 1970.

Source: CalFire

Extents of recent fires, as of Jan. 13, are outlined in black.

By The New York Times

CalFire releases data on past large wildfires and determines their causes in different natural and human-related categories, such as lightning or arson. The agency lists more than 12,500 fires since the late 1800s, though the causes of more than half are unknown or unidentified.

Lightning and use of equipment are among the most common known causes, but over the past few decades, the share of fires known to be caused by power infrastructure has grown across the state.

The 20 most destructive California wildfires

At least eight of California’s most destructive wildfires had power-related causes. Those fires are shown in bold.

Source: CalFire

By The New York Times

Residents of Altadena, Calif., sued Southern California Edison on Monday, saying the utility’s electrical equipment set off the Eaton fire, which has burned more than 13,000 acres and 5,000 structures in the city and neighboring areas. The company has said it is investigating the fire’s origin.

Power distribution lines were found to have caused some of California’s largest-ever fires in recent years.

The Thomas fire in 2017 was started when high winds forced Southern California Edison’s power lines to collide, a situation known as “line slap.” Burning material fell to the ground in the Upper Anlauf Canyon, about 35 miles from the current Palisades fire, and the resulting fire burned for almost 40 days.

The 2018 Camp fire, in Northern California, started when an electrical arc between one of Pacific Gas & Electric’s power lines and a steel tower sent molten metal onto the underlying vegetation. That fire claimed more than 80 lives and destroyed over 18,000 structures.

In the summer of 2021, California’s largest single-source wildfire, the Dixie fire, started when a tree made contact with several of PG&E’s distribution lines near the Cresta Dam in Northern California. Electricity continued flowing in one of the lines, which started the fire, and nearly a million acres across four counties burned.

California isn’t the only state dealing with power-related wildfires in recent years. Texas’ largest wildfire, the Smokehouse Creek fire, burned over a million acres in 2024. Xcel Energy accepted responsibility for the fire after investigators found that high winds had broken a utility pole, causing a power line to fall and ignite the dried grasses below.

Similar situations have caused wildfires in Oregon as well. The 2020 Labor Day fires destroyed thousands of homes and killed at least nine people, in part, after power wasn’t shut down during high winds.