Phyllis Zorn, a reporter at the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion, Kansas to settle her federal lawsuit over the 2023 police raid on the newspaper, reports the Kansas Reflector. Lawyers for Zorn and the city filed the motion to dismiss on August 11, three years to the day after the raid. — Read the rest

The post A Kansas reporter raided by police settles for $850,000 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Chuck Edwards Gets Out, Max Miller Stays In

Two Republican representatives under scrutiny for allegations against them have made different decisions over the last 24 hours.

Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) is dropping his bid for reelection. The congressman was accused of sexual harassment, and an investigation by the House Ethics Committee found he made repeated, aggressive and cringe-inducing advances toward two subordinates, including sending one more than 30 cartons of ice cream on one occasion. In another case, Kate Riga wrote, he printed out his text messages with one of the women and drew hearts on them.

After much prayer and reflection, I’ve decided to withdraw from my re-election campaign. I will complete my current term. Serving Western North Carolina has been the honor of my life. Thank you for your trust, prayers, and support. God bless WNC and America.

— Congressman Chuck Edwards (@RepChuckEdwards) August 5, 2026

Edwards is a staunch Trump supporter and gave the president a “French Fries Certification” pin as he toured damage from Hurricane Helene, seemingly a reference to Edwards’ past as a McDonalds executive. Edwards also got into a confrontation with a constituent in a bizarre incident covered by TPM last year.

Ohio congressman Max Miller is a different story. Facing a deadline today to drop out, he has seemingly been trying to shore up voters’ and/or Trump’s faith in him, demanding the House Ethics Committee investigate allegations of domestic abuse and violence lodged against him and going on CNN last night in an attempt to rebut various allegations. (He claimed, for example, he had not used illegal drugs in “several years,” and that needles seen by his bed were for testosterone replacement therapy, something he noted Pete Hegseth approves of for “our entire military who are males.”) Nicole Lafond covered that bizarre cable appearance here.

Both are in tight races. Election prognosticators had in recent days given Democrats a better chance in Edwards’ NC-11, the district covering most of Western North Carolina. His exit may give Republicans time to replace him on the ballot with a stronger opponent to face Democrat Jamie Ager, a farmer.

Republicans have the opposite problem in Miller’s district, OH-7. Though Trump won it by 11, a June poll showed him leading Democrat Brian Poindexter, an iron worker, by just one point.

Right-Wing Ballot Measures Flame Out

While we don’t yet have results in the most closely-watched race of the evening — the Michigan Democratic primary — an important theme emerged far down the ballot on Tuesday: Voters in red states rejecting ballot measures designed to give conservatives more control.

• In Kansas, voters opposed by a healthy margin a push by conservative activists, including the state’s notorious attorney general Kris Kobach, to switch the state to electing judges.
• As Kate Riga writes, this was the latest sneaky attempt by Republicans to overturn a 2019 ruling protecting abortion rights in the state. They continue to fail.
• In Missouri, meanwhile, voters resoundingly rejected two ballot measures: one designed to make amending the state constitution through a voter initiative virtually impossible, and one that would have done away with the state’s income tax.

The final margins on those two GOP amendments in Missouri are really wild. Better than 4 to 1 against for both!

— The Downballot (@the-downballot.com) 2026-08-05T04:42:28.823Z

Tabs

• The Missouri secretary of state waited until the last minute to reject an effort by hundreds of people in the state to put Republicans new, 7-1 gerrymander of the state’s congressional map up for a voter referendum. The decision — which, Kate writes, “seemed to mostly rest on the fact that the ability to challenge a map is not explicitly written into the state constitution” — was immediately challenged in court. TPM obtained the lawsuit, which you can read here.
• Texas Governor Greg Abbott has a Stop the Steal-promoting “election integrity” advisor who is engaged in spiritual battle against demons, Texas Monthly writes.

Woman of the Hour

It’s Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who has concerns about Todd Blanche and will not be voting for him. Blanche needs one of two still-undecided Republicans — Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — in order to have enough votes for confirmation. The whole thing with Collins is that she usually only votes “no” on Trump administration priorities when there are enough “yes” votes that hers isn’t needed. We’ll see if, in this tough election year, anything is different this time around.

Are We at War?

Yes, as we run out of defensive weapons.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On August 4, Kansas voters will decide whether to replace the state’s longstanding merit selection system for Supreme Court justices with direct elections. Republicans want voters to believe the proposed constitutional amendment is just about transparency and giving the public more power over who sits on the state’s highest court, but the debate in Kansas is also part of a broader Republican push to inject more partisanship into state judicial elections. But the differences in where they want partisan elections and where they do not give the game away.

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