TV News LIES

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday shut down Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) effort to penalize the dozens of Democratic legislators who fled the state last summer in an attempt to block a rare mid-decade redistricting effort.

Abbott asked the all-Republican court in an emergency petition last August to find that the Texas House’s Democratic leader, Houston Rep. Gene Wu, had vacated his office when he and more than 50 other Democrats refused to return to Texas to pass a new GOP-drawn congressional map.

In a Friday opinion, authored by Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock, the Lone Star State‘s high court rejected the request.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” wrote Blacklock, who was first appointed to the bench by Abbott in 2018.

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Tina Peters, a former elections clerk who was the first local official convicted over efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, will go free from prison after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted her sentence Friday.

Polis told Colorado Public Radio earlier in the day from the governor’s office that he would cut her almost nine-year prison sentence to 4 1/2 years. By June 1, she will have been in prison for more than 600 days.

The governor added that Peters “did not interfere with any election, did not have to do with ballot counting, but it was illegal access to the computer room.”

“She thought she was trying to back up the software before it was updated,” Polis said. “She did it illegally. There’s no question about it. And she deserves to go to prison. And I think this is a more appropriate, even harsh, frankly, sentence for that crime.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid by Virginia Democrats to revive a voting map designed to help their party wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives from President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in November’s midterm elections.

The justices declined to halt a ruling by Virginia’s top court that blocked a voter-approved pro-Democratic map for the midterms, denying a request by Democrats in the state. The court’s action came in a brief and unsigned order that provided no rationale. No justice publicly dissented.

Democrats pursued the revised electoral map - crafted to flip four Republican-held U.S. House of Representatives seats to Democrats - as part of a nationwide political battle initiated last year by Trump to redraw the boundaries of U.S. electoral districts for partisan benefit.

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Democratic state representatives in Minnesota began a sit-in in their house chamber on Thursday night after the Republican speaker failed to put a gun violence prevention bill up for a vote.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reported the sit-in began at about 9pm local time.

Samantha Sencer-Mura, a Democratic representative from Minneapolis, first announced the plan on Wednesday from the floor of the state’s house of representatives, giving speaker Lisa Demuth, a candidate for governor, 24 hours to give the bill a vote before the sit-in would start.

The Minnesota senate, controlled by Democrats, narrowly passed the gun violence prevention omnibus earlier this month. The house, where there is a 67-67 vote tie and a Republican speaker in charge, has so far not taken up the bill.

The push for new gun laws came after a school shooting at Annunciation Catholic church last August, where two students were killed and others injured during a school-wide mass. Minnesota also saw the killings of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shootings of state lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, last summer.

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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was urged by the top Justice Department ethics lawyer to recuse himself from any legal cases connected to his former client, President Donald Trump, according to a new CNN report on Thursday.

Just after Blanche took on the role of deputy attorney general in March 2025, Joseph Tirrell gave Blanche and Emil Bove, his then top-deputy, "a printed PowerPoint presentation on ethics," a former senior DOJ ethics official told CNN.

This was the first time that Blanche was formally told he would need to remove himself from Trump-related cases — something that has not been reported before.

"Around the same time, the department’s top career lawyer advised that Bove potentially had a conflict of interest by being involved in firings of DOJ lawyers," CNN reported.

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President Donald Trump will find out in the coming weeks whether the Supreme Court's rejection of his signature tariffs was a one-off or if the justices have more bad news in store for him.

Before adjourning for the summer, the court must still rule on more than 30 cases, including a few that test Trump’s expansive view of presidential power.

Some outstanding decisions could have implications for this year’s midterm elections.

Two pending decisions could protect the rights of gun owners.Others will determine if states can ban transgender athletes from female sports teams, if the maker of the popular Roundup weedkiller can be sued for not warning about possible cancer risks, and whether the federal government can systematically turn back asylum seekers before they reach the U.S. border with Mexico.

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