Election day 2023 live: abortion rights and Biden key issues as millions of Americans go to the polls | Abortion

The prosecutor overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of US president Joe Biden, is testifying today, in a situation marking the first time a special counsel will appear before the US Congress in the middle of a case, the Associated Press reports.

Special counsel David Weiss is appearing for a transcribed interview before members of the House Judiciary Committee as the US attorney battles Republican allegations that he did not have full authority in the years-long case into the younger Biden.

Mr Weiss is prepared to take this unprecedented step of testifying before the conclusion of his investigation to make clear that he’s had and continues to have full authority over his investigation and to bring charges in any jurisdiction,” Wyn Hornbuckle, a spokesperson for Weiss, said in a statement issued yesterday.

The rare move by the Justice Department to allow a special counsel or any federal prosecutor to face questioning before the conclusion of an investigation indicates just how seriously the department is taking accusations of interference.

Weiss’ appearance comes after months of back-and-forth negotiations between Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department as lawmakers subpoenaed several investigators and attorneys involved in the Hunter Biden case.

The interview today is expected to focus on testimony from an Internal Revenue Service agent who claimed that under Weiss, the investigation into the president’s son was “slow-walked” and mishandled.

What information, if any, Weiss will be able to provide to Congress is unclear as under Justice Department policy and the law, he will be unable to address the specifics of his investigation.

Some more background on this in our next post….

In the year since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, a version of this conversation has played out across the country – and at the ballot box.

In 2022, abortion rights supporters won every abortion-related referendums put to voters. This year, Ohio will become the first reliably red state to vote on whether to explicitly add abortion rights to the state constitution since the fall of Roe.

Millions of dollars have flooded into Ohio in the last several weeks. Recent filings show that Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, a name for the coalition backing Issue 1, has reported bringing in nearly $30m since August, including $3.5m from a group linked to billionaire George Soros.

That’s far more than the anti-abortion side has raised: Protect Women Ohio, a coalition that’s leading the charge against Issue 1, reported raising just shy of $10m. Money flowed into the coalition through its action fund, which received donations from the influential anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America and the Concord Fund, an organization linked to conservative power broker Leonard Leo.

Issue 1 lawn signs are visible across the state, with “Vote Yes” signs often placed right beside signs urging people to “Vote No”. Ohio residents reported being bombarded with ads for one side or the other.

But the barrage of information about the vote has also left many Ohioans bewildered. Some of the confusion stems from the fact that this is the second time Ohioans have gone to the polls this year to vote on an “Issue 1”. In August, Ohioans voted on a measure that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution. At that time, people who supported abortion rights were urged to vote “no”. Now, they have to vote “yes” to protect the procedure.

Full report here.

Meanwhile, here is the Guardian’s piece, tracking where abortion laws stand in every state. Almost 17 months after Roe fell at the hands of a hard-right controlled Supreme Court, abortion is now nearly completely banned in 14 US states.

The vote on Issue 1 in Ohio today will have both political and medical consequences that stretch beyond the state. Issue 1 is the only abortion-related referendum this year, and the results will indicate whether the backlash to the demise of Roe v Wade will continue to translate into wins at the ballot box.

If Issue 1 fails, the Ohio state supreme court will be free to reinstate a six-week abortion ban, outlawing the procedure before many people even know they’re pregnant. Ohioans who want abortions will need to flee to other states for the procedure, contributing to pressure on abortion clinics throughout the country.

Supporters of Issue 1 are cautiously optimistic: an October poll found that 58% of Ohio residents planned to vote yes. “You just start going through these doomsday scenarios of what happens if we have an abortion ban,” said Representative Emilia Sykes, a Democrat whose district includes Akron, Ohio. “We are going to prevail on Tuesday, and hopefully continue to send the message to leave us alone. Really, just leave us alone.”

Over the last several weeks, Parinita Singh, 32, has spent roughly 30 hours canvassing houses in support of Issue 1.

At one home, with a sign out front reading “Be a Patriot: VOTE PRO-LIFE”, she entered into a cordial but spirited verbal sparring match with a man in his 80s. The pair touched on seemingly every argument in the US abortion debate: is a fetus a person or a clump of cells? Can’t people just choose to give up their kids for adoption? Should men get a say? What about religion?

The man, who declined to give his name to the Guardian, tried to press Bible pamphlets into Singh’s hands.

“God doesn’t force his opinions on anybody,” he told her.

“Sounds like he is, if he’s telling women not to have abortions,” Singh replied.

The US supreme court is set to weigh the legality of a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns, Reuters reports.

This is the latest major case to test the willingness of the court’s conservative majority to further expand gun rights.

Oral arguments are scheduled today in an appeal by Joe Biden’s administration of a lower court’s ruling striking down the law – intended to protect victims of domestic abuse – as a violation of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”

The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the measure failed a stringent test set by the Supreme Court in a 2022 ruling that required gun laws to be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” in order to survive a Second Amendment challenge.

Advocacy groups for victims of domestic violence have warned of the grave danger posed by armed abusers, citing studies that show that the presence of guns increases the chances that an abused intimate partner will die.

In a nation bitterly divided over how to address firearms violence including frequent mass shootings, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority has taken an expansive view of the Second Amendment and has broadened gun rights in three landmark rulings since 2008.

Its 2022 ruling in a case called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen recognized a constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self defense, striking down a New York state law.

The current case involves Zackey Rahimi, a Texas man who pleaded guilty to illegally possessing guns in violation of the law at issue on Tuesday while he was subject to a restraining order for assaulting his girlfriend in a parking lot and later threatening to shoot her, leading to a series of court decisions and appeals.

Biden’s administration has said the law should survive because of the long tradition in the US of taking guns from people deemed dangerous.
Supporters of Rahimi have argued that judges too easily issue restraining orders in an unfair process that results in the deprivation of the constitutional gun rights of accused abusers.
A ruling is expected by the end of June.

The supreme court itself is under pressure to institute ethics rules, in the wake of scandals chiefly involving its most conservative judges.

Voters go to the polls in almost 40 states today in crucial elections that will prove a major test of sentiment on Democratic and Republican leadership and key policies less than one year out from the presidential election.

Ohio has put the right to an abortion directly on the ballot, asking voters to choose whether to include the right in the state constitution. Such measures have had success in several states that have tested them since Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, including red state Kansas and swing state Michigan.

Abortion is also a major voting issue in Virginia today, where results are expected to prove a bellwether for how things could go across the country next year, too, on abortion and on Republicans’ appeal to voters.

Virginia Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, a rising GOP star, wants to pass a law limiting abortion rights to 15 weeks, as what the party hopes will be a kind of compromise between the harsh bans enacted elsewhere and the Roe-era right to an abortion up to fetal viability of around 25 weeks. Democrats narrowly control the state senate while Republicans control the lower chamber, the house of delegates, in the state’s general assembly. If the GOP can flip the house today, it’s all systems go for Youngkin, raising his national profile as a moderate (by today’s hard right standards) Republican even higher.

If Democrats cling onto control in the Virginia senate and then Democratic governor Andy Beshear is re-elected in the strongly pro-Trump state of Kentucky, then the party will take huge cheer from either or both of those victories.

Beshear has been trying to avoid being roped in with Joe Biden, during his election campaign, as the US president is polling poorly across the board but particularly with the kind of independents and moderate conservatives he lured away from Donald Trump in 2020 and, especially after Roe, in the midterm elections last year.

Good morning, Tuesday is the biggest voting day in America before the presidential election next November and while millions of voters go to the polls in almost 40 states there are some key races and issues that everyone is watching.

The polls are open in many places already and we’ll bring you the news as it happens during the day – and also tonight when polls close and we start to see which way things are leaning.

Here’s what’s afoot:

• The right to an abortion will be a leading issue in voting today across the country, as it was in the midterms last November and will be in 2024, after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, ending the federal right to an abortion. It’s directly on the agenda in Ohio today, with a ballot measure to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. And it’s front and center in Virginia, where the governor wants to introduce a 15-week ban on the procedure.

• Virginia is one to watch as all 140 seats in the state’s general assembly are up for grabs. The GOP control the lower house of delegates and want to flip the upper chamber, the Democrat-majority senate and hand high-profile Republican governor Glenn Youngkin the trifecta. That would smooth passage of the litmus-test 15-week abortion limit he wants to pass.

• In two big gubernatorial races, Kentucky’s popular Democratic governor Andy Beshear is running for re-election against Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron and in Mississippi, Republican governor Tate Reeves, is running for re-election against the Democrat Brandon Presley, a former small-town mayor who’s a cousin of Elvis Presley.

• Election day means that the court is not sitting in New York where Donald Trump and his business empire are going through a $250m fraud trial that threatens to end his business career in the state where it all began. After an uproarious stint on the stand yesterday, Trump’s back in Florida for a rally tomorrow while daughter Ivanka testifies as a witness at the civil trial.

• The US supreme court is set to hear oral arguments in a key case that tests the legality of a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic-violence restraining orders to have guns.