California
Judge: Women on boards law is unconstitutional
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Los Angeles judge has ruled that California’s landmark law requiring women on corporate boards is unconstitutional.
Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis said the law that would have required boards have up to three female directors by this year violated the right to equal treatment. The ruling was dated Friday.
The conservative legal group Judicial Watch had challenged the law, claiming it was illegal to use taxpayer funds to enforce a law that violates the equal protection clause of the California Constitution by mandating a gender-based quota.
The law was on shaky ground from the get-go with a legislative analysis saying it could be difficult to defend and then-Gov. Jerry Brown saying he was signing it despite the potential for it to be overturned by a court. Brown said he signed the bill to send a message during the #MeToo era.
In the three years it has been on the books, it’s been credited with improving the standing of women in corporate boardrooms.
The state defended the law as constitutional saying it was necessary to reverse a culture of discrimination that favored men and was put in place only after other measures failed. The state also said the law didn’t create a quota because boards could add seats for female directors without stripping men of their positions.
Although the law carried potential hefty penalties for failing to file an annual report or comply with the law, a chief in the secretary of state’s office acknowledged during the trial that it was toothless.
No fines have ever been levied and there was no intention to do so, Betsy Bogart testified. Further, a letter that surfaced during trial from former Secretary of State Alex Padilla warned Brown weeks before he signed the law that it was probably unenforceable.
“Any attempt by the secretary of state to collect or enforce the fine would likely exceed its authority,” Padilla wrote.
The law required publicly held companies headquartered in California to have one member who identifies as a woman on their boards of directors by the end of 2019. By January 2022, boards with five directors were required to have two women and boards with six or more members were required to have three women.
The Women on Boards law, also known by its bill number, SB826, called for penalties ranging from $100,000 fines for failing to report board compositions to the California secretary of state’s office to up to $300,000 for multiple failures to have the required number of women board members.
Fewer than half the nearly 650 applicable corporations in the state reported last year that they had complied. More than half didn’t file the required disclosure statement, according to the most recent report.
Supporters of the law hailed it for achieving more gains for women. Other states considered or passed similar legislation.
Deputy Attorney General Ashante Norton said alternatives to a law mandating seats for women had been tried to no avail. In 2013, for example, the Legislature passed a resolution to get companies to add women to their boards, but few did.
Before the California law went into effect, women held 17% of the seats on company boards in the state, based on the Russell 3000 Index of the largest companies in the U.S., according to the advocacy group 50/50 Women on Boards. As of September, the percentage of board seats held by women climbed to more than 30% in California, compared to 26% nationally.
Still, some 40% of the largest companies in California needed to add women to their boards to comply with the law, the group said.
Washington
Supreme Court rules for Sen. Cruz in campaign finance case
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Monday sided with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in his challenge to a provision of federal campaign finance law, in a ruling that a dissenting justice said runs the risk of causing “further disrepute” to American politics.
The justices, in a 6-3 decision that divided the court along ideological lines, agreed that the somewhat obscure section of the law violates the Constitution. The decision comes just as campaigning for the 2022 midterm elections is intensifying.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that the provision “burdens core political speech without proper justification.”
The Biden administration had defended the provision as an anti-corruption measure, and in a dissent Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority, in striking it down, “greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop.”
The case may be important for some candidates for federal office who want to make large loans to their campaigns. But the administration has also said that the great majority of such loans are for less than $250,000 and therefore the provision Cruz challenged does not apply.
The case involves a section of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. The provision says that if a candidate lends his or her campaign money before an election, the campaign cannot repay the candidate more than $250,000 using money raised after Election Day. The loans can still be repaid with money raised before the election.
Cruz argued that makes candidates think twice about lending money because it substantially increases the risk that any candidate loan will never be fully repaid. A lower court agreed the provision was unconstitutional.
Cruz lent his campaign $260,000 the day before the 2018 general election for the purpose of challenging the law.
The government has said that in the five election cycles before 2020, candidates for Senate made 588 loans to their campaigns, about 80% of them under $250,000. Candidates for the House of Representatives made 3,444 loans, nearly 90 percent under $250,000.
The case is Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, 21-12.
Alabama
Convicted murderer caught after escape
MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — A man convicted of murder in west Alabama more than a decade ago was captured Monday a day after escaping from a minimum-security corrections center near Mobile, prison officials said.
Jeffery Strugg, 31, was discovered missing from community-based facility in Prichard on Sunday, according to a notice from the Alabama Department of Corrections. The agency didn’t release any information about how Strugg got out.
He surrendered without any violence in Mobile County, corrections officials said.
Strugg was 18 when he was sentenced to 29 years in prison after being convicted in the 2007 killing of Dewone Smiley, 15, in Selma, court records show. Strugg was accused of entering an apartment and shooting Smiley, a student at Selma High School, to death in front of two witnesses.
Strugg is eligible for parole consideration on Dec. 1.
