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WASHINGTON ― The Senate on Wednesday inched closer to confirming Thomas Farr to be a lifetime federal judge, despite strong opposition from civil rights groups and Democrats over his long career of trying to weaken black voters’ rights.

The Senate voted 50-50 on a procedural step to advance Farr’s nomination to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Vice President Mike Pence came in to break the tie. Every Democrat voted against Farr, as did Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who is opposing all of President Donald Trump’s nominees until he gets a vote on a bill to protect special counsel Robert Mueller.

Farr’s final confirmation vote is expected later this week.

Civil rights groups and the Congressional Black Caucus have been trying to sink Farr’s nomination for nearly a year.

Ahead of Mississippi’s runoff election for US Senate on Tuesday, a national civil rights group has sued the state’s governor and top election officials over stringent absentee ballot requirements that make it impossible for many voters to have their ballots counted.

Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy both failed to secure a majority in the November 6 election, triggering a runoff. But Mississippi county election officials didn’t begin sending absentee ballots out until Saturday, November 17, according to the lawsuit from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Many out-of-state voters received those ballots around Thanksgiving. Under Mississippi law, an absentee ballot must be notarized and received by county election officials by 5 p.m. on the day before Election Day.

(CNN)The affirmative action case against Harvard brought on behalf of Asian-American students has entered an important second phase, as both sides face December deadlines for final submissions to US District Judge Allison Burroughs.

In the case first filed four years ago this week, the organization Students for Fair Admissions asserts that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants, partly by giving them lower “personal” scores to lessen their chances of admission. At the root of the scores, the group contends, are stereotypes of Asians as “book-smart” and “one-dimensional,” “not personable.”
Harvard counters that the data evidence, considered at its fullest, reveals no Asian-American bias and that the challengers’ overall claim is “predicated on data-mining” that omits factors showing that Asian-American applicants fare well overall.

A lawsuit accusing the publisher of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer of coordinating a “terror campaign” of online harassment against a Jewish real estate agent cannot be dismissed on First Amendment grounds, a federal judge in Montana ruled this week.

In his ruling denying a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Dana L. Christensen, the chief judge for United States District Court in Missoula, Mont., wrote that the real estate agent, Tanya Gersh, was a private citizen, not a public figure, and that the publisher, Andrew Anglin, incited his followers to harass her as part of a personal campaign.

The events that spurred the lawsuit began in the fall of 2016, when The Daily Stormer published a series of articles attacking Ms. Gersh, of Whitefish, Mont., for her interactions with Sherry Spencer, the mother of the white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.

A handful of states approved pro-democracy measures, often by wide margins. These measures are expected to make voter registration easier, reduce gerrymandering and give back the franchise to people with past felony convictions.

These ideas are popular with liberals, centrists and a good number of conservatives too. And progressive activists have come to understand that this issue needs to be one of their top priorities.

If the quality of our democracy doesn’t improve, many other policy priorities could be impossible to achieve. I think the United States finally has the pro-democracy movement that it needs — a movement not only to fight back against efforts by Republican leaders to make voting harder but also to go on the offensive. My column today is about that pro-democracy movement and what should come next for it.