July 19, 2023 - High Country Politics - Government and Elections News from the American West

Lauren Boebert’s fundraising lags Democratic challenger Adam Frisch | Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-CO) raises $450K as her GOP challenger has yet to start fundraising | Anti-LGBTQ laws are being struck down around the country for violating First Amendment rights | Utah Supreme Court considers challenge to GOP gerrymandered Congressional map | Denver Mayor Mike Johnston declares a state of emergency around homelessness | Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Ziggy Marley, Mavis Staples, Robert Randolph Band play Vail on July 24.

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Welcome to High Country - politics in the American West. My name is Sean Diller; regular listeners might know me from Heartland Pod’s Talking Politics, every Monday.

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COLORADO NEWSLINE:

Lauren Boebert’s Democratic challenger raised 3x what she did in the 2nd quarter

BY: SARA WILSON - JULY 17, 2023 4:07 PM

Democrat Adam Frisch raised over three times what Republican incumbent Rep. Lauren Boebert did over the last three months in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, as the seat appears likely to be a competitive — and expensive — race in 2024.

In 2022, Boebert beat Frisch for a second term by 546 votes. Both candidates are actively fundraising with 16 months until a general election rematch.

Frisch reported raising about $2.6 million during the most recent campaign finance reporting period, which ran from April to June, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. The former Aspen City Council member spent about $1.4 million and has about $2.5 million in cash on hand.

During his 2022 campaign, Frisch raised about $6.7 million, including personal loans, and spent about $6.4 million.

Boebert reported raising over $800,000 from April to June. She spent a bit over $400,000 and has about $1.4 million in the bank.

In 2022, Boebert raised almost $8 million and spent about $7.4 million.

Both candidates brought in a large amount of donations under $200 that don’t need to be individually listed on reports — about 66% of Frisch’s cash and 47% of Boebert’s.

Frisch listed about 1,400 individual donations from Colorado residents for a total of about $280,000. Boebert listed about 600 donations from people in Colorado, raising about $150,000.

Both Boebert and Frisch spent heavily on advertising during the quarter. Frisch reported spending over $600,000 on contact list acquisition and digital advertising and another $290,000 on direct mail. 

Boebert spent $52,000 on digital advertising and over $100,000 on direct mail. She reported spending over $28,000 on campaign-related travel during the quarter.

The 3rd Congressional District encompasses the Western Slope, San Luis Valley and swings east to Pueblo County.

In other districts - 

Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo in the 8th Congressional District raised about $450,000 during the quarter. She spent about $120,000 and has about $625,000 in cash on hand.

Republican Scott James has announced his candidacy but has not reported any raising or spending so far this cycle.

The National Republican Congressional Committee listed the district as a target race for 2024, priming it for an influx of national party attention and resources. At the same time, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will also likely pour money into the race, listing Caraveo as a potential vulnerable freshman member.

The 8th Congressional District includes Denver’s northeast suburbs into Weld County.

ARIZONA MIRROR:

.Anti-LGBTQ laws in the US are getting struck down for limiting free speech

DR. MARK SATTA

JULY 13, 2023 7:11 AM

Anti-LGBTQ laws passed in 2023 included measures to deny gender-affirming care to trans children. Photo by Mario Tama | Getty Images via The Conversation

Nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures in the U.S. in 2023. Many of those bills seek to reduce or eliminate gender-affirming care for transgender minors or to ban drag performances in places where minors could view them.

Most of those bills have not become law. But many of those that have did not survive legal scrutiny when challenged in court.

A notable feature of these rulings is how many rely on the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. In several of the decisions, judges used harsh language to describe what they deemed to be assaults on a fundamental American right.

Here’s a summary of some of the most notable legal outcomes:

Drag performances

Several states passed laws aimed at restricting drag performances. These laws were quickly challenged in court. So far, judges have sided with those challenging these laws.

On June 2, 2023, a federal judge permanently enjoined Tennessee’s attempt to limit drag performances by restricting “adult entertainment” featuring “male or female impersonators.” When a law is permanently enjoined, it can no longer be enforced unless an appeals court reverses the decision.

The judge ruled on broad grounds that Tennessee’s law violated freedom of speech, writing that it “reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness and overbreadth fatal to statutes that regulate First Amendment rights.” He also ruled that the law was passed for the “impermissible purpose of chilling constitutionally-protected speech” and that it engaged in viewpoint discrimination, which occurs when a law regulates speech from a disfavored perspective.

Three weeks later, a federal judge granted a temporary injunction against Florida’s anti-drag law on similar grounds.

And in Utah, a federal judge required the city of St. George to grant a permit for a drag show, ruling that the city had applied an ordinance in a discriminatory manner in order to prevent the family-friendly drag show from happening. As in the other cases, the judge’s ruling was based on First Amendment precedent.

Gender-affirming care

On June 20, 2023, a federal judge permanently enjoined an Arkansas law, passed in 2021 over the veto of then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson, preventing transgender minors from receiving various kinds of gender-affirming medical care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

The judge held that Arkansas’ law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause – which ensures laws are applied equally regardless of social characteristics like race or gender – because the law discriminated on the basis of sex.

Arkansas claimed its law was passed in order to protect children and to safeguard medical ethics. The judge agreed that these were legitimate state interests, but rejected Arkansas’ claim that its law furthered those ends.

The judge also held that Arkansas’ law violated the First Amendment free speech rights of medical care providers because the law would have prevented them from providing referrals for gender transition medical treatment.

During June 2023, federal judges in Florida and Indiana granted temporary injunctions against enforcement of similar state laws. This means that these laws cannot be enforced until a full trial is conducted – and only if that trial results in a ruling that these laws are constitutional.

Free speech for the LGBTQ community

In striking down these unconstitutional state laws on First Amendment grounds, many judges went out of their way to reinforce the point that freedom of speech protects views about sexual orientation and gender identity that may be unpopular in conservative areas.

In his ruling on the St. George, Utah case, U.S. District Judge David Nuffer stressed that “Public spaces are public spaces. Public spaces are not private spaces. Public spaces are not majority spaces. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution ensures that all citizens, popular or not, majority or minority, conventional or unconventional, have access to public spaces for public expression.”

Nuffer also noted that “Public officials and the city governments in which they serve are trustees of constitutional rights for all citizens.” Protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens includes protecting the constitutional rights of members of the LGBTQ community and of other gender-nonconforming people.

Free speech rights also extend to those who want to use speech in order to help promote the well-being of LGBTQ people. In ruling that Arkansas’ law violated the First Amendment, Judge Jay Moody stated that the state law “prevents doctors from informing their patients where gender transition treatment may be available” and that it “effectively bans their ability to speak to patients about these treatments because the physician is not allowed to tell their patient where it is available.” For this reason, he held that the law violated the First Amendment.

As additional anti-LGBTQ state laws are challenged in court, judges are likely to continue to use the First Amendment to show how such laws fail to respect Americans’ fundamental free speech rights.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The Conversation

NEW YORK TIMES:

Utah G.O.P.’s Map Carved Up Salt Lake Democrats to dilute their power. Is that legal?

The Utah Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday over whether a congressional map drawn to dilute Democratic votes was subject to judicial review, or a political issue beyond its reach.

By Michael Wines

July 11, 2023

Last week, Utah’s Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical of arguments put forward by the State Legislature that it had essentially unreviewable power to draw a map of the state’s congressional districts that diluted the votes of Democrats.

The Republican-controlled Legislature approved a map in 2021 that carved up Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, the state’s most populous county, and scattered its voters among the state’s four U.S. House districts, all of which were predominantly Republican.

The lawmakers acted after repealing a law — enacted by Utah voters in a 2018 ballot initiative — that outlawed political maps unduly favoring a candidate or political party.

The Legislature’s map was widely acknowledged at the time to be a partisan gerrymander, including by the Republican governor, Spencer J. Cox, who noted at the time that both parties often produced skewed maps.

The question before the justices on Tuesday was whether the state’s courts could hear a lawsuit challenging the Legislature’s map, or whether partisan maps were a political issue beyond their jurisdiction. It was not clear when the court would hand down a ruling.

Much of Tuesday’s hearing — which was streamed on the state court’s website — focused on the Legislature’s repeal of the 2018 ballot initiative, given the provision in the State Constitution that all political power resides with the people and that they have the right “to alter and reform” their government.

Mark Gaber is a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy law firm based in Washington that represents the plaintiffs in the case before the court. He said, “the Legislature has for decades engaged in this anti-democratic distortion of the process. And the people said: ‘We have had enough. We are going to alter and reform our government and recognize that we hold the political power in this state.’”

Taylor Meehan, a lawyer with the law firm Consovoy McCarthy who is representing the Legislature, said Utah citizens had many ways to exercise political influence even after the repeal. “The people can advocate for a constitutional amendment,” Ms. Meehan said. “The people also can elect and lobby and propose ideas to their Legislature. The Legislature will still be politically accountable for whether they vote maps up or down.”

Chief Justice Matthew Durrant questioned the claim. “That seems like an empty promise,” he said. “Ultimately, under the system you’re suggesting, the Legislature is always going to have the final say.”

In court filings, legislators said that the State Constitution gave them exclusive authority to draw political maps, and that the plaintiffs were trying to impose “illusory standards of political equality” on the mapmaking process.

With the U.S. Supreme Court having barred federal courts from deciding partisan gerrymander cases, state courts are becoming a crucial battleground for opponents of skewed maps. Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on state constitution protections for voting at the University of Kentucky, said the growing body of legal precedents in state gerrymandering cases was important because many state constitutions shared similar protections for elections and voters, often derived from one another.

Courts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Alaska, New York and, last week, New Mexico have ruled that partisan gerrymanders can be unconstitutional. So have courts in Ohio and North Carolina. However, the Ohio court proved unable to force the legislature to comply with its rulings, and the North Carolina decision was overturned in April after elections shifted the court’s majority from Democratic to Republican.

The Kentucky Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that state’s congressional and legislative maps in September. And a lawsuit contesting an extreme Republican gerrymander of the Wisconsin Legislature is widely expected after an April election gave liberals a majority on the state’s high court.

Perhaps the closest analogy to the Utah gerrymander is in Nashville, where the latest congressional map by the Republican-led state legislature divided the city’s former Democratic-majority U.S. House district among three heavily Republican districts. Democrats have not challenged the map in state courts, presumably because they see little prospect of winning in a State Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.

In Utah’s case, however, the State Supreme Court’s five justices do not have reputations for bending easily to political winds. They are chosen through a merit-based selection process.

The Utah plaintiffs — the state chapter of the League of Women Voters, the advocacy group Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and a handful of Utah voters —

say that the gerrymandered map ignores a host of state constitutional provisions, including guarantees of free speech, free association and equal protection — provisions that they say should be read as prohibiting partisan maps.

Republican legislators contend that they had the right to repeal the 2018 redistricting law, just as they could any other state law. And they say that the plaintiffs’ aim is no different than their own: to tilt the playing field in their side’s favor.

But Katie Wright, the executive director of Better Boundaries — the group that led the effort to pass the redistricting law and that is backing the lawsuit — argued that there was a difference between the two. She noted that the Utah Legislature’s disclosure of its new maps in 2021 sparked an unusually large public outcry that continues even today.

“The reason we have this gerrymandered map is to keep the people who are in power in power,” she said. “But Utahns have not given up.”

Michael Wines writes about voting and other election-related issues. Since joining The Times in 1988, he has covered the Justice Department, the White House, Congress, Russia, southern Africa, China and various other topics.  More about Michael Wines

A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2023, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Utah’s Supreme Court Weighs State Gerrymandering Case. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | 

COLORADO SUN:

Denver’s new mayor declares state of emergency on homelessness, sets goal of housing 1,000 unsheltered people by end of 2023

Elliott Wenzler

9:54 AM MDT on Jul 18, 2023

In his first full day as Denver’s new mayor, Mike Johnston declared a state of emergency around homelessness and announced that he plans to house 1,000 unsheltered people by the end of the year.

Johnston said he will tour 78 neighborhoods across the city to accomplish his goal and that his staff will work with landlords, property owners and hotels to find housing availability. His administration is also looking at nearly 200 public plots to place tiny home communities where people experiencing homelessness can be housed.

“This is what we think is the most important crisis the city is facing,” Johnston said at a news conference at the Denver’s City and County Building. “We took the oath yesterday to commit to taking on this problem.”

Homelessness has been an increasingly polarizing issue in Denver and it was a major focus on Johnston’s mayoral campaign. He vowed to create tiny home communities on city-owned property as a way to get people off the street.

Johnston said the state of emergency declaration will help the city access state and “possibly” federal funding. He also said it would allow the city to more quickly work through construction, renovation and permitting processes for new housing units.

“And it sends a real message to all the rest of the state that we are deeply focused on this. We have real evidence to support that housing first as a strategy will get the great majority of people access to the support they need to stay housed and then access follow up resources,” he said. 

Johnston’s inaugural address Monday was centered on the theme of what he called the “dream of Denver.” He mentioned housing costs, safety, mental illness, addiction and reimagining downtown as top priorities.

Johnston said “Those of us on this stage took an oath today. But for us to succeed, every Denverite must take their own oath- an oath to dream, to serve, and to deliver. To dream (of) a Denver bold enough to include all of us. To serve our city above ourselves. To march on shoulder to shoulder, undeterred by failure, until we deliver results.”

And your unsolicited concert pick of the week, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue! With special guests Ziggy Marley, Mavis Staples, and the Robert Randolph Band. Monday July 24 at the Gerald Ford Amphitheatre in Vail. I’ve seen every one of these acts, and I’ll just any one of them would be worth the trip on their own.  

Welp, that’s it for me! From Denver I’m Sean Diller. Original reporting for the stories in today’s show comes from Colorado Sun, New York Times, Colorado Newsline, Arizona Mirror, and Denver’s Westword.

Thank you for listening! See you next time.

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