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Far-right judges are crafting a theory that would empower courts to strike down trillions of dollars in federal spending.
Perhaps these Republicans really do disagree with a plan put forth by a member of their leadership mandating periodic expiration of popular entitlement spending. But at least some of their judges are all for it—and want to transform the idea into constitution law. Recently, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals crafted a theory that would empower courts to strike down mandatory spending on federal programs, compelling Congress to either reappropriate the money or let the programs die. This radical and antidemocratic reading of the Constitution would threaten Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, unemployment benefits, child nutrition assistance, and so much more. Democrats and Republicans would be foolish to ignore the rebellion against federal spending that’s brewing in the 5th Circuit.
The conservative assault on entitlement programs arose during litigation against a frequent target of GOP ire: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog agency created in 2010 that protects Americans against exploitative fraud and deceit in home mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans, and retail banking. For years now, right-wing litigators have argued that the CFPB is unconstitutional because it is funded independently: The agency draws its budget from the Federal Reserve, which in turn draws its budget from interest on securities. Because Congress does not directly appropriate money to the CFPB every year, lawyers claimed, its funding violates the Constitution’s appropriations clause.
At least seven different federal courts dismissed this theory until it landed in the 5th Circuit, the nation’s Trumpiest appeals court. In May 2022, Judge Edith Jones—a Ronald Reagan appointee and hard-right bomb-thrower—wrote a 39-page concurrence asserting that the CFPB is funded unconstitutionally. Four other judges joined her. Then, in October, a three-judge panel formally declared that the CFPB’s independent budget mechanism renders the entire agency unconstitutional. Judge Cory Wilson, writing for the panel, revoked the CFPB’s ability to issue or enforce any regulations. (All three members of the panel were appointed by Donald Trump.) Thus, under the current law of the 5th Circuit, the CFPB effectively does not exist.
You might wonder: What does this skirmish over a small financial agency have to do with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual entitlement spending? The answer: everything. In her concurrence, Jones took pains to clarify that her reasoning was not limited to the CFPB. Jones announced that all “appropriations to the executive must be temporally bound.” If Congress does not put a “time limit” on funding, it gives the executive branch too much discretion over spending. Under the Constitution, she claimed, the executive must “come ‘cap in hand’ to the legislature at regular intervals” to ensure that it remains “dependent” and “accountable.” Judge Wilson approvingly cited this idea in his own opinion formally invalidating the CFPB, highlighting the “egregious” nature of the agency’s “perpetual funding feature.”
All told, seven judges on the 5th Circuit have now endorsed the notion that courts must strike down appropriations that allow “perpetual funding” of government agencies or programs. If their view becomes the law of the land, it will empower courts to abolish trillions of dollars in entitlement spending. Why? Because today two-thirds of annual federal spending is “mandatory”—including some of our nation’s most beloved social safety net programs. All of this spending amounted to $5.2 trillion in fiscal year 2021 that would suddenly be at risk of elimination by judicial fiat.
Does this principle derive from the Constitution? Of course not. The appropriations clause at question simply states that all money drawn from the treasury must be “in consequence of appropriations made by law.” There is no textual requirement that Congress reauthorize appropriations periodically. In fact, Article 1 of the Constitution suggests the exact opposite: It bars Congress from appropriating money to the Army “for a longer term than two years,” implying that other kinds of long-term appropriations are permissible. If they weren’t, then why would Army appropriations need an explicit time limit?
Moreover, in their respective opinions, Judges Jones and Wilson complained that mandatory appropriations violate the separation of powers by giving the executive branch too much control over the purse strings. But as Republican Sen. Rick Scott demonstrated in proposing that all federal legislation sunset after five years—the subject of Biden’s critique on Tuesday—Congress can revoke mandatory spending anytime it wants. It is perfectly capable of reducing or even zeroing out funds whenever it chooses. The far greater infringement on separation of powers would occur if unelected judges rescinded Congress’ ability to decide which programs deserve automatic funding.
Rather than grapple with constitutional text, Jones and Wilson used their opinions to toss out platitudes and policy concerns. Jones began her concurrence by complaining, “This nation careens past $30 trillion in national debt, risking bankruptcy during our or our children’s lifetimes.” Wilson began his opinion by quoting Thomas Jefferson’s fears about “elective despotism,” which are relevant only if you think current government spending is despotic. When a judicial opinion opens with a partisan swipe instead of a precedent or constitutional provision, you can bet it’s not actually rooted in the law.
Indeed, the Supreme Court has never supported anything approaching the 5th Circuit’s current assault on long-term appropriations. That’s why Jones’ and Wilson’s opinions are so long on budget-hawk rhetoric and short on anything approaching law. The Justice Department is currently appealing the anti-CFPB ruling to SCOTUS, and there is an excellent chance the justices will take it up: It just isn’t tenable for a federal agency to have no power in the entire 5th Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Even the banking industry, which loathes the CFPB, is worried that the agency’s destruction would wreak regulatory havoc. And it’s difficult to imagine that five justices would take the leap toward implementing a Rick Scott–style doctrine that lets the judiciary sunset trillions of dollars in mandatory spending, stripping millions of Americans of federal assistance.
Then again, it is currently impossible to predict how far this Supreme Court is willing to go. The conservative majority has repeatedly courted chaos, tossing out precedent higgledy-piggledy and leaving the country in a constant state of suspense over what the law is. The fact that we have to take this threat seriously is, in itself, a big part of the problem. Elected Republicans may have backed away from slashing Social Security and Medicare, likely because it would be incredibly unpopular. But the firebrands they put on the bench are entirely unaccountable to the voters. And their campaign to write Scott’s ideas into the Constitution cannot be stopped by any election.
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Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Sanders and the 10 other Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee sent a letter to Schultz on Tuesday demanding he testify at a March 9 hearing on his company’s compliance with federal labor laws. If Schultz ignores or refuses the request, Sanders said, he’s willing to use the committee’s subpoena power to force him to appear.
“This is corporate greed,” said Sanders, 81, who has run for president twice and spent a political lifetime fighting corporations and monied interests over policies that he said hurt the working class. “Workers have a constitutional right to organize. And even if you are a large, multinational corporation owned by a billionaire you don’t have the right to violate the law. And we intend to be asking Mr. Schultz some very hard questions.”
Starbucks spokesman Andrew Trull said the company is reviewing the letter and “we will continue our ongoing dialogue with key stakeholders, including the chairman's office to offer clarifying information in reference to these issues.” He did not say whether Schultz will appear.
Sanders’ demand for testimony from Schultz is an opening act in his new role as chairman of the HELP panel, which has expansive jurisdiction over issues that have been central to his more than four decades in public service. And thanks to Democrats adding a seat to their majority in last year's election, Sanders can fully exercise the oversight powers of the gavel and potentially issue subpoenas without Republican support.
Sanders said he’s not done challenging individual corporations, mentioning Amazon as another company he believes has acted illegally against unions. And “if you are a multinational pharmaceutical company that’s been ripping off the American people and charging us outrageously high prices, you should be nervous, because I’m going to hold you accountable,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. “I’m going to do something about it.”
It's unclear how much he can accomplish in a divided Congress. While the committee will serve as a bully pulpit for the Senate’s most famous progressive, passing significant legislation through the Senate — not to mention the Republican-led House – will be a heavy-to-impossible lift over the next two years. And finding areas of consensus will be a new test for the cantankerous far-left senator as he is watched uneasily by the industries he regulates and members of his own committee from both parties.
Sanders said he has “two roles”— one as chairman, with a more realistic focus on results, and another promoting his signature issues like “Medicare for All,” tuition-free college and paid child care, among others. He said he plans to take his “show on the road,” doing a series of town halls, roundtables and field hearings around the country. Next week, he’ll hold a town hall inside the Capitol, bringing teachers unions together to discuss teacher pay.
“I am chairman of the committee and I want to accomplish as much as I can … that’s what I’m paid to do and I intend to do it,” he said. “On the other hand, there are issues out there that I do not expect will be passed in this Congress, but are very important and they have to be talked about.”
Republicans are skeptical Sanders can make the kinds of deals necessary to push significant legislation through the committee.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican on the panel, said Sanders’ style is “a lot of storm and fury” and light on real accomplishments, meaning “little will be done to get through the committee, and very little will reach the floor.”
Sanders and his Democratic allies point to bipartisan deals he has made in the past, along with some of his unexpected relationships he's made with Republicans who share slices of his interests. While he spends most of his time talking about his progressive goals, they said, he is also an 16-year veteran of the Senate with an ability to compromise.
For his part, Sanders noted his deal with the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to improve veterans’ benefits almost 10 years ago and his work with former rival President Joe Biden, who beat him in the 2020 Democratic primary, to pass COVID relief policy in 2021 and negotiate a massive package of social spending programs that next year. That legislation ultimately stalled.
On the bipartisan veterans’ legislation, which aimed to improve access to health care after a series of controversies, “he put his heart and soul in it,” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the previous chairwoman of the HELP committee and a member of the Veterans panel while Sanders and McCain were negotiating. “He learned, he listened, he compromised.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Sanders often has a differing view than those in the caucus, “but he usually ends up where the team is.”
Sanders ticked off Republicans he has worked with — moderate Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, both of whom sit on the committee and have deep interest in rural health issues. He said he’s holding regular meetings with Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the panel who is known for compromise.
And this week, Sanders is holding a news conference with Sen. Mike Braun, an Indiana Republican who is on the panel, to demand that railroads provide workers with more sick days.
Braun said he's met with Sanders to discuss health care, and while they come at it from opposite angles — Sanders wants it to be government-run, Braun wants to reform the industry to lower costs — they fundamentally agree that there are problems. “When you take everything else away, people are still worried about the high cost of health care,” Braun said.
Outside of the Capitol, health insurance industry experts are watching what moves Sanders might make around Medicare Advantage, an increasingly popular program where private companies offer plans that are reimbursed by the government for care. Others like health care worker unions are eager to work with Sanders as hospitals around the country grapple with staff shortages and health care worker burnout.
With his new perch, Sanders seems inclined to stay in the Senate. He said he’s not interested in replacing the departing Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh, and refuses to talk about his own political future at all.
“I intend to use this committee to address the real issues are facing working class people,” he said.
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The 7.8 magnitude earthquake was felt in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. (photo: Omer Yasin Ergin/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earthquake rescue efforts ‘not as fast as we wanted them to be’.
Casualties from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which struck in the early hours on Monday, as well as several powerful aftershocks, have surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful earthquake hit northwest Turkey.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged during a visit to Adiyaman province on Friday that the government’s response could have been better.
“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said rescue teams had become “frantic” as hope for finding survivors dimmed with each passing hour.
Rescuers were “digging into the rubble and hoping to find some people dead or alive because now it has been more than 96 hours and the hopes here are fading”, he said, standing in front of a collapsed block of buildings in Kahramanmaras in southern Turkey, close to the epicentre of the first magnitude 7.8 earthquake.
“The families are here, waiting anxiously,” he added. “The scale of devastation is beyond imagination.”
Some time later, rescuers managed to dig out a man alive from under the rubble 110 hours since the earthquake struck, Serdar said.
Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the Turkish city of Gaziantep, said entire families have been lost.
“We were talking to a woman here. She said ‘I have four of my brothers, my mother, my cousins and all of her nieces and nephews … all gone in an instant when the building just completely pancaked upon itself.”
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, criticised the government’s response.
“The earthquake was huge but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” Kilicdaroglu said in a statement.
With anger simmering over delays in the delivery of aid and getting the rescue effort under way, the disaster is likely to play into Erdogan’s bid for reelection, with the vote scheduled for May 14. The election may now be postponed due to the disaster.
‘We cannot cope’
The number of deaths in Turkey rose to 20,665 on Friday, the country’s health minister said. In Syria, more than 3,500 have been killed. Many more people remain under rubble.
In Syria, the government on Friday approved humanitarian aid deliveries across the front lines of the country’s 12-year war, a move that could speed up the arrival of help for millions of desperate people.
The World Food Programme said earlier it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the state of war complicated relief efforts.
Dr Mohamed Alabrash, a general surgeon at the Central Hospital of Idlib in northwestern Syria, issued an urgent appeal for assistance.
“We face a shortage of medication and instruments,” he told Al Jazeera. “The hospital is full of patients, and so is the intensive care unit.”
“We cannot cope with this huge number of patients. The patients’ injuries are very heavy, and we need more support.”
The doctor said medical workers at the facility were under extreme pressure, working around the clock.
“All medical staff are working for 24 hours and we’ve consumed all the materials that we have, from medication to ICU materials,” Alabrash said, adding that the hospital’s generators were almost out of fuel.
Hope amid the ruins
Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to find buried survivors. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.
In Turkey’s Samandag district, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs whispering “Inshallah” (God willing) and carefully reached into the rubble to pick out a 10-day-old baby.
His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and carried to a field hospital. Emergency workers also took away his mother, dazed and pale but conscious on a stretcher, video images showed.
Across the border in Syria, rescuers from the White Helmets group used their hands to dig through plaster and cement until they reached the bare foot of a young girl, still wearing pink pyjamas, grimy but alive.
But hopes were fading that many others would be found alive.
In the Syrian town of Jandaris, Naser al-Wakaa sobbed as he sat on the pile of rubble and twisted metal that had been his family’s home, burying his face in the baby clothes that had belonged to one of his children.
“Bilal, oh Bilal,” he wailed, shouting the name of one of his dead children.
The head of Turkey’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation, Bulent Yildirim, went to Syria to see the impact there. “It was as if a missile has been dropped on every single building,” he said.
Some 24.4 million people in Syria and Turkey have been affected, according to Turkish officials and the United Nations, in an area spanning roughly 450km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east.
In Syria, people were killed as far south as Hama, 250km (155 miles) from the epicentre.
Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries have faced questions about their response.
Many people have set up shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins. Many survivors are desperate for food, water and heat.
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A view of drones during a military exercise in an undisclosed location in Iran. (photo: Iranian Army/WANA/Reuters)
The overnight strikes with Iranian-made drones capped a day in which Russian forces unleashed a major barrage of missiles on critical sites around Ukraine.
The drone attack caused serious damage to Ukraine’s already battered power grid, which Russia has repeatedly targeted in what military analysts say is a strategy of plunging the country into cold and darkness to lower morale.
The strikes, the first heavy aerial assault in weeks, occurred as fighting on the ground has intensified, with Ukrainian officials saying that Russian forces are mounting a major new push to seize control of the entire Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Air-defense systems destroyed 20 of the Shahed-136 drones from 6 p.m. to midnight, the Ukrainian Air Force said in a statement early Saturday. But three energy facilities in the Dnipro region of southeastern Ukraine were hit, including one in Kryvyi Rih for the second time in a day.
“They targeted our critical infrastructure,” Serhii Lysak, the head of the regional military administration, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app, calling the damage “significant.”
Drones were shot down over the southern regions of Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa, The Kyiv Independent reported, citing the Ukrainian military’s southern command.
The drone attack occurred after Russian forces fired more than 100 missiles in a day of strikes across Ukraine, in what the Ukrainian air force described as a “massive” assault. Twelve people were injured across the country, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, and the state-owned power utility said that several thermal and hydroelectric power plants had been badly hit.
The company, Ukrenergo, on Saturday called the situation “difficult, but under control,” saying that power rationing had been put in place in some areas and that repair work was continuing.
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"What in the American Horror Story do we have here?" (photo: Wasim Muklashy/Shutterstock)
The neighbors are accused of stalking a Black couple and vandalizing their property.
Courtney W. Mallery and his wife Nicole own the Freedom Acres Ranch, a 1,000-acre plot of land with a range of goats, pigs, chickens and every good thing a farm should have. Then, in 2020, they began waking up to beheaded, butchered and missing animals. Graphic images shared with Ark Republic showed baby goats that were allegedly poisoned and a cow with its insides spilling on the ground.
The Mallerys claim their white neighbors are to blame for these heinous acts, which are also possibly racially motivated. And if that’s the case, their neighbors didn’t stop at the animals: they also allegedly tried to kill and butcher the couple as well.
Read more from Ark Republic:
Frequently, they must replace surveillance equipment after they see strangers pointing a device towards their cameras which ends up jamming them and taking out the signal. Plus, their electricity lines have been cut and neighbors have stolen well water by running an illegal line from their source.
One day, Courtney was chased by a white man when repairing a portion of his fence. The aggressor, who was in a car, gunned for Courtney who made it to his vehicle in just enough time to dash away in a hellish pursuit. Once he made it to the end of his property, the man steered the other way.
One evening, Nicole was followed by a white woman who almost ran her car off the road then put on high beams and pulled out what looked like a gun. The confrontation was exceptionally unnerving because Nicole was returning from a church function with her visiting nieces and nephew.
Mr. Mallery told Ark Republic this is all a ploy to take his land, which El Paso County Sheriff Emory Gerhart allegedly condoned. The Mallerys say he’d been notified of the events happening at the ranch but hadn’t made a single police report. After two years and 19 complaints, six restraining orders and 170 calls, the sheriff threatened to arrest the couple if they dialed 911 again, Nicole said.
Unfortunately, he kept his promise.
On Monday, the Mallerys were arrested on felony warrants for stalking. Despite their extensive allegations, the one harassment complaint filed against the Mallerys seemed to be the only one that stuck, per 9News. Now, the NAACP is stepping in.
“I would really hope that the El Paso County Sheriff’s department and several others in rural areas understand that we’re taking this very seriously,” said Portia Prescott, president of the Rocky Mountain NAACP via 9News. “It needs to be taken a lot more seriously than they have taken it in the past,” Prescott said.
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Authorities said Guillermina Fuentes participated in "ballot harvesting" in the border community of San Luis. (photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)
Guillermina Fuentes was sentenced to one month for alleged unlawful ballot collection – and advocates say prosecuting cases like hers suppresses the right to vote
It’s not uncommon here for residents to frequently cross the border into Mexico to go shopping or see a dentist, as the vast majority of residents are US citizens who can go back and forth freely. And they do not take their right to vote in the US for granted. Election days in San Luis were typically joyous occasions, with music and celebrations in the streets.
Luis Marquez, the president of the local school district and a community leader in San Luis, said they felt “like a state fair”.
“Everybody would get involved, people would have their carne asada and music and it was just something very active,” he said.
But election celebrations have stopped here in recent years. A 2016 law pushed by state Republicans made it a felony punishable by prison time to collect a voter’s ballot unless the collector is their relative, household member, or caregiver. Since then, the excitement and joy surrounding voting have been replaced with fear. “Now, it’s been really quiet,” Marquez said. “There’s no action.”
In some states, there’s no prohibition on collecting ballots from other community members, a common occurrence in places where residents have limited access to polls. But Arizona is one of more than 30 states that restrict or ban the practice.
The law was signed in 2016 and upheld by the US supreme court in 2021 after it was challenged in the lower courts. Since then, the Arizona attorney general’s office has prosecuted four community members, including the city’s former mayor, who was jailed for 30 days, for alleged unlawful ballot collection.
Allies of Donald Trump say these arrests are indicative of the type of voter fraud that cost him the 2020 election. But democracy advocates say prosecuting these cases suppresses the right to vote.
“This is what opponents of the ballot collection law always feared – the arbitrary enforcement of the law against people of color, women of color, without any kind of evidence of any type of fraud or intent to do wrongdoing,” said Darrell Hill, policy director for the ACLU of Arizona. “These are people who are just helping their neighbors, helping their community, and are now facing serious charges.”
On 13 October, Fuentes, a 66-year-old grandmother, former farm worker, school board member, and local Democratic leader, was sentenced to one month in jail and two years of probation for collecting four completed mail ballots that belonged to community members during the August 2020 primary. Fuentes and her neighbor, Alma Juarez, were the first people prosecuted under the state’s ballot collection law.
Her prosecution by the office of former Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, who was running for US Senate throughout much of the legal proceeding, became fodder for conspiracy theorists and the rightwing elections group True the Vote, which publicized the case nationally.
In an interview after she was released from jail, Fuentes described the initial shock of her indictment. At the time of her offense, Brnovich’s office had petitioned the supreme court to hear a case focused on the law, and there were legal questions about whether it was constitutional.
“When I was about to go to jail, I was so sad and frustrated, and I couldn’t believe that I was going, because I see it like a witch-hunt,” she said. Brnovich, who is no longer in office, could not be reached for comment and Todd Lawson, the prosecutor with the attorney general’s office who worked on the case, did not respond to a request for comment.
On 19 October, Brnovich announced two more indictments against women in the Democratic-leaning town within a county that voted for Trump by six points in 2020. The attorney general’s office alleges that the women collected eight ballots between them.
Fuentes’s daughter, Lizette Esparza, said she wakes up each morning in fear of how conspiracy theorists will talk about her family on social media.
“We’re living in a nightmare right now,” said Esparza, who serves as the superintendent of the local elementary school district. She also worries about how her mom’s ordeal will affect the community. “They’re not going to want to go to vote, especially now because now they’re scared.”
Casting ballots in San Luis
Like a town square, the San Luis post office is a major hub of this border community. During business hours, cars steadily stream through the parking lot as residents, on their way to or from work or school pick-up, run inside to check their PO boxes.
San Luis doesn’t have home mail delivery. The city spans roughly 34 sq miles, and it’s not uncommon for people to pick up mail for friends and neighbors, who may share PO boxes. The community is poor, with an average per-capita income of just over $15,000. Many residents don’t have their own vehicles and there’s very limited public transportation.
Casting a ballot in-person can be difficult for people in San Luis. Like Fuentes, who dropped out of high school after 10th grade to join her parents and siblings planting and harvesting lettuce crops in Arizona and California, many San Luis residents are farm workers who speak little English and spend long hours in the fields.
“They leave at five in the morning and come back at seven or eight at night,” Esparza explained. “When in the day are they going to have to go and vote?”
Arizona has permitted no-excuse voting by mail for more than 30 years. And before the ballot collection law was passed, it was not uncommon for residents of San Luis to rely on friends, neighbors, or volunteers to help bring their ballots to the post office or to help return them to a voting center or dropbox.
San Luis residents interviewed explained that they consider many in the community who are not blood relatives, like neighbors and close friends, their family. Limiting ballot collection to just family members, household members, and caregivers doesn’t make sense, they said.
“People who enacted this law are people who don’t want people in San Luis and Native communities to vote,” said Anne Chapman, Fuentes’ attorney. “That’s what this is about.”
GOP restrictions on voting
The Republican party’s effort to restrict certain groups of people from voting has taken many forms over the last decade since the US supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
One of them is placing limits on ballot collection, or as Republican lawmakers pejoratively call it, “ballot harvesting”. Republican officials justify the laws by claiming that an individual or organization could pressure a voter to vote in a certain way if they return a ballot on their behalf.
“The intent behind the bill is to make sure that we have integrity in our electoral process, that there is a chain of custody when it comes to mail-in ballots,” said then state senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored Arizona’s law when she was a state representative. Ballot collection, she said, “is ripe for a lot of things to go wrong”.
Arizona’s law, passed by the legislature in 2016, faced a lengthy legal challenge. Democratic groups sued, and in 2018, a federal district court sided with Arizona after a trial. But Democrats appealed to the ninth circuit court of appeals, which struck the law down, finding that it violates the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minority voters.
Republican lawmakers, the court found, passed it with the intention of suppressing the votes of Native American, Hispanic and Black voters, who often face issues with mail service and access to transportation and who are more likely to rely on the assistance of third parties to return their ballots.
Brnovich appealed to the US supreme court, which upheld the law in a 6-3 ruling in July 2021 that had major implications for voting rights across the country. In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan lamented how the majority opinion further weakens the Voting Rights Act.
“What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote. “What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting’.”
On 4 August 2020, the day of Arizona’s primary election, the law was still relatively new and was still being litigated in the courts. Fuentes was stationed outside a local cultural center to support city council candidates and hand out campaign literature. At one point during the day, Fuentes’s neighbor, Juarez, approached her and handed her a ballot.
What Fuentes didn’t realize was that Gary Snyder, a local Republican, was recording cellphone video outside the polling place. In the 2020 primary, Snyder was running for city council as a write-in candidate and in 2022 he would run for state Senate. Both attempts were unsuccessful.
He shared the footage with David Lara, another local Republican who had unsuccessfully run for office numerous times in San Luis. In an interview, Lara and Snyder said the footage showed the type of voter fraud that has swung elections in San Luis for decades.
“If there would have been 10 Gary Snyders with cameras, we would have caught many people doing the same thing all throughout the day,” Lara said.
“Out of 10 elections in San Luis, eight or nine have been won because of fraud,” he added.
In the video recorded by Snyder, Fuentes appears to write something on the ballot and then hands Juarez a stack of ballots to bring into the polling place. The interaction was the type of voter assistance Fuentes had provided for countless other community members. Yuma county officials later verified that the voters signed their own ballot envelopes, and the ballots were counted.
The Yuma county sheriff’s office and the state attorney general’s office eventually learned of the footage, and Brnovich’s Election Integrity Unit launched an investigation. People in San Luis reported that uniformed sheriff’s deputies knocked on their doors early in the morning to ask about their voting history, which alarmed many residents, according to a brief filed by Arizona voting rights groups in the supreme court case.
Prosecutors charged Fuentes with conspiracy, forgery and two counts of ballot abuse. In court documents, the state said Fuentes “appears to have been caught on video running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods, and then using another person to bring the ballots the last few yards into the ballot box”. She pleaded guilty to one count of ballot abuse, a felony, and the state dropped the more serious charges.
Lara and Snyder said that Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, the leaders of True the Vote – a far-right group that has promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud – reached out to them. The claims of ballot harvesting in San Luis became a crucial component of 2000 Mules, a documentary directed by the rightwing film-maker Dinesh D’Souza in May 2022 which falsely claimed that voter fraud, specifically a significant amount of ballot harvesting by so-called “ballot mules”, swung the results of the 2020 election.
“They’re the ones that actually helped us to make this problem national,” Lara said in an interview.
But many in San Luis said they don’t trust Lara and Snyder, whom they described as disgruntled former candidates for office who are trying to discredit Democrats. The Yuma county supervisor Lynne Pancrazi said she was upset by the national reputation they have attached to San Luis. They “are giving such a bad name to this community”, she said.
Fuentes jailed, held in isolation
Across San Luis in mid-October, people who know Fuentes appeared shocked that their friend and former mayor was two dozen miles away in Yuma, Arizona, jailed and held in isolation for a month either because of her age and health or her position as a public figure. Chapman said the jail has given different explanations for why she was held in a cell alone.
Soaking in the October sun outside the San Luis library, Pancrazi, who served as a character witness at a hearing before Fuentes’s sentencing, described Fuentes’s quiet but caring demeanor.
“She’s not a criminal,” Pancrazi said. “She’s someone who was helping her community just like she’s done her entire life.”
Manuel Castro, a pastor at the Gethsemane Baptist church in San Luis, agreed. “It’s too much punishment for people doing a little mistake,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a little mistake.”
The harsh sentence will also help conservatives “further the narrative that there is actual fraud in our elections, which there was no evidence of here”, said Andy Gaona, a Phoenix-based election lawyer who represented Fuentes in a special action petition with a state appeals court.
San Luis residents also lamented the inequities in voter fraud prosecution. Brnovich’s office requested a year in prison for Fuentes, and while the judge only sentenced her to a month in jail plus two years’ probation, even that is inconsistent with the sentences others have received for similar crimes.
Chapman commissioned a report from Rich Robertson, a legal investigator and former journalist, to put the state’s recommended sentence into perspective.
Robertson’s report detailed 79 prosecutions for voting crimes in Arizona between 2005 and August 2022. In general, he found that, other than Fuentes, people without a prior criminal history or who are not already imprisoned do not receive jail or prison time for voting crimes.
“Nobody goes to jail or prison for this stuff, unless they’ve already had some kind of priors,” Robertson said. He found two exceptions: one person who received a suspended sentence, and another was also convicted of influencing a witness and not just a voting crime.
In one notable example included in Robertson’s report, Brnovich’s office requested a lighter sentence for Tracey Kay McKee, a 64-year-old Republican white woman in the more affluent city of Scottsdale, Arizona, who pleaded guilty to casting a ballot in her dead mother’s name. She was sentenced in April to two years of probation and no jail time.
Juarez, who carried the voted ballots into the polling place, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to one year of probation and no jail time.
Robertson said he believes there were “a lot of political aspects” to this prosecution and that Fuentes was given a harsher sentence because of the national attention and her prominence as a target in the far-right “Stop the Steal” campaign.
“There was a lot of political pressure being exerted all over the place to make an example out of this particular defendant,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the national spotlight being on Yuma county and Ms Fuentes, I don’t think this outcome would have been the same.”
Norm Eisen, a longtime election lawyer who advised the Obama White House on ethics and government reform, called Fuentes’s sentence an “outrageous miscarriage of justice”.
“The relatively narrow conduct that formed the basis of the sentencing should not result in jail time and indeed in the vast majority of the United States, would not do so,” he said.
He called Brnovich’s sentencing request “a tragic and a cruel posture”, especially in “a smaller community where this kind of a sentencing has a chilling effect, even on legal behavior”.
At a hearing in October, Fuentes’s attorneys presented a number of character witnesses who spoke about her childhood, her work growing a business, and her position as a leader in the community. But at Fuentes’s sentencing hearing, Yuma county superior court judge Roger Nelson said he did not believe she accepted responsibility for her crime and that her role as a community leader, although admirable, actually works against her.
“Many of the things that were put forward as mitigating factors, I think they’re also aggravating factors,” he said. “You have been a leader in the San Luis community for a long time. People look up to you, people respect you, and they look to what you do.”
Life after jail
Fuentes was released from jail in November and is now back in the community on probation, coming to terms with having lost her voting rights for the next two years because of her felony conviction. She said she already knows of San Luis residents who have stopped voting after seeing what she went through.
“I say don’t be afraid,” she said, explaining what she tells her friends and neighbors in San Luis. “And they say, because you weren’t afraid, you were in jail, Guilla.”
Fuentes said that the San Luis community stood behind her throughout the legal process, showing up to support her and her family when she was at her lowest. The day she was released from jail, her family and friends gathered at her mom’s house. She walked in and saw the large crowd holding signs and two big pots of menudo, a traditional Mexican soup, that she had requested as her first meal back.
It was just what she needed – to be around friends and a home-cooked meal after spending a month in isolation. “I lost 10 pounds in jail and I gained them back the day I left,” she said.
When Brnovich announced indictments of two more women – San Luis city council member Gloria Torres and Nadia Lizarraga-Mayorquin – in October for allegedly collecting other people’s ballots, Marquez said he feared that more people would face jail time. A representative for Kris Mayes, Arizona’s newly elected Democratic attorney general, said the office was still undecided on how it will handle their prosecutions, but Mayes has said she will transition the office’s Election Integrity Unit from prosecuting voter fraud to protecting voting rights.
Democrats in the Arizona house introduced a bill this session to repeal the ballot collection ban, but it’s unlikely to move forward given the Republican majority.
“It’s starting again for other people,” Castro said. “It never ends. It’s never finished. It’s so hard for the community, really. It’s so hard.”
READ MORE 
Dead trees line the banks of Shasta Lake in Redding, California. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The report, published Tuesday and conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, depicts a state that has been battered by drought, disease and insects that suck the life out of vulnerable trees. Tree mortality was particularly severe and widespread in the central Sierra Nevada and in northern areas.
Forest researchers are able to identify dead trees based on red, yellow or brown foliage — compared with the healthy green needles that firs and pine trees are meant to have. Some dead trees immediately fall over; others slowly crumble.
From mid-July to early October, researchers assessed nearly 40 million acres of land across California. Douglas fir trees saw the biggest spike in mortality rates compared with previous years. An estimated 3 million Douglas firs died, across 190,000 acres, in 2022 — a massive increase of 1,650 percent compared with 2021.
There were nearly 13 million dead white firs across 1.5 million acres, an increase of 691 percent, and more than 15 million red fir trees died across less than a million acres, an increase of 242 percent.
When trees endure long droughts, it makes it hard for them to fight off beetles, maintain their health or recover from adversity, according to Susie Kocher, a forestry adviser at the University of California’s center for agriculture and natural resources.
For Kocher, a registered professional forester, the results aren’t shocking. She witnessed the tree die-off firsthand near her home in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Her neighborhood is dotted with trees stained with red needles — a signal the trees have died.
“It’s not a surprise that drought leads to dead trees,” Kocher said. “Any person looking out their window as they’re driving [near the Lake Tahoe Basin] can see the tree die-off right there. Specifically, I see it all around where I live in the forest.”
It’s hard to keep count of the number of wilting trees when she drives through the basin because “there are too many,” she said.
The new survey paints a picture of severe tree loss in the area surrounding the Lake Tahoe Basin. The Tahoe National Forest saw the highest loss out of all of the state’s national parks with 5 million dead trees across 260,000 acres.
Drought conditions are the main driver of tree mortality. At the end of the summer, 94 percent of the state was experiencing severe or worse drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The conditions contributed to festering tree diseases and insect outbreaks on drought-stressed trees.
Insects themselves were a major problem. The survey found that Douglas-fir tussock moths, caterpillars that feed on the needles of Douglas fir and spruce trees, were one of the leading causes of death after drought. The caterpillars chew on tree needles, feeding on the foliage and leaving raw exposed twigs, to the point that they are more susceptible to bark beetles and other diseases. Wood-boring beetles killed nearly 400,000 trees across 40,000 acres. Pine beetles contributed to 11 percent of tree decay.
The survey also found that Cytospora canker, a deadly tree fungus that infects trees stressed by insect feeding and drought, was another major reason behind tree death.
Still, this isn’t the worst tree die-off California has seen. Between 2010 and 2016, during years of historically intense drought, the Forest Service counted an estimated 102 million trees dead — 62 million trees died in 2016 alone.
Oppressive drought conditions played a “grim reaper” role between 2020 and 2022, carving through trees that had avoided large-scale die-off and forest fires from 2012 through 2015, said John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at the University of California at Merced.
The lingering toll of drought will continue to drive tree deaths in the years to come.
“There is this realization that our forests today will look different in the future,” Abatzoglou said. “There is probably going to be some continued die-off, even though it’s been wet this year. The trees are already sort of going.”
More dead trees may mean more fuel for the next round of forest fires in California, Kocher warns. Dead trees allow for wildfires to spread quicker during dry, blazing conditions, and she suggested removing the decayed timber from the landscape as a preventive measure.
Last year, the state saw record-setting dryness and more than 360,000 acres of earth scorched by wildfire. The Mosquito Fire, which burned more than 76,000 acres of land and killed two people, was the largest wildfire in California last year. Flames from the Mosquito Fire unleashed volcano-like plumes in the skies around northern California.
Reducing the number of trees in areas not severely affected by droughts could reduce forest density and allow individual trees to have access to more moisture and soil.
“In areas where we haven’t had big die-offs, it’s really important to thin the live trees out,” Kocher said, “and in areas where we have had die-offs, it’s important to take the dead trees out so they don’t contribute so much to future fires.”
California is not the only state struggling with tree mortality. In Texas, record heat and drought, which caused 99 percent of the state to experience drought conditions, also weakened trees this summer. Last week, when ice storms hit some of these same areas, thousands of trees collapsed.
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