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[JURIST] The West Virginia Legislature [official website] on Friday overrode the governor's veto, passing a bill [text, HB 2586] banning abortion after 20 weeks. Governor Earl Ray Tomblin [official website] said he vetoed the law because of concerns over its constitutionality and would have preferred a later gestational period for banning abortion. The bill excludes [AP report] certain cases of medical emergencies and is set to take effect in May. West Virginia is now the 11th state to ban abortion after 20 weeks. The legislation is based on the premise that fetuses can feel pain starting around 20 weeks, a...

The 18-year long reign of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has finally come to an end in Louisiana. In a landslide victory in Saturday’s runoff election, Republican Bill Cassidy defeated the incumbent and captured the ninth Senate seat for the GOP, capping off a victorious midterm election for his party. The road was rocky for Landrieu from the start. The public found out about her improper use of taxpayer funds, then the fact she doesn’t even own a home in Louisiana. Then, she dissed her constituents. Because of all her missteps and Cassidy’s growing lead, Democrats quickly gave up on Landrieu...

In what is likely a sign of things to come in 2016, the conservative Koch brothers-backed group Americans For Prosperity released an ad on Wednesday seeking to tie Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to controversial ObamaCare adviser Jonathan Gruber. Gruber made headlines earlier this year for saying it was the “stupidity of the American voter” that helped the Obama administration pass the Affordable Care Act. The ad says Landrieu repeated President Obama’s ObamaCare “Lie of the Year” that if you liked your healthcare plan you could keep it, before launching into the Gruber attack. “An ObamaCare architect bragged about deceiving Americans...

With Mary Landrieu exiting the Senate, the usual rounds of finger pointing and recriminations have already begun. In the eyes of her supporters, the reasons are numerous and obvious. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the unpopularity of the President or the issues she espoused. No, the only reason that a Republican will occupy that seat next year is that the South is full of hateful, bigoted, stars and bars waving racists and homophobes. This, they will claim, is the result of an ongoing process which began simmering after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,...

This meme is in story after story. Since when is Florida not the "deep south"?? Was it not also part of the old Confederacy?? It certainly isn't a border state up near Virginia and Kentucky!

In the final insult of a devastating 2014 election for Democrats, Sen. Mary Landrieu, the party’s last remaining statewide officeholder from the Deep South, was trounced Saturday in the head-to-head Louisiana Senate runoff election. Republican Bill Cassidy’s resounding victory is the ninth Senate seat picked up by the GOP in this year’s elections, three more than the party needed to take control of the chamber. With nearly all the ballots counted, Cassidy led Landrieu by 14 points, 57 percent to 43 percent.

Live Results from Louisiana Secretary of State for US Senate Race and two House races. All three seem to be over. Three Democrats being whipped badly by three Republicans.

Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu lost her reelection bid Saturday in a runoff race with Republican challenger Rep. Bill Cassidy, despite a relentless, against-long-odds effort.

How it ended up on a Washington D.C. website called The Free Beacon is still a mystery, but Robert J Wright and Erin McCarty’s on air reaction to their 710 KEEL interview with Senator Mary Landrieu is ‘going viral’. In the segment following their eight minute chat with the incumbent Senator, the KEEL morning hosts joked about how Landrieu controlled the interview by time and again coming back to her charges of fraud against Republican opponent Bill Cassidy.

The values that are pre-eminent for Republican Party voters are probably freedom, independence, autonomy, limited government and self-reliance, and a strong belief in the powers of capitalism and a free market,” Cross said. “We see them in the South: the calls or less government, the call for people to take personal responsibility, the inveighing against the dependent class.” And in Louisiana and other energy-producing states, he said, the perceived antipathy of national Democrats for the oil and gas industry helps swell Republican ranks. “We’re looking at something more than just a bad year,” said Charlie Cook, the Shreveport native who...

When Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu lost her re-election runoff on Saturday it put Barack Obama in the record books as the two-term president with the most midterm losses for his party. The record previously was held by Harry Truman. Truman’s Democratic Party lost 74 seats in 1946 and 1950, while under Obama the Democrats have lost a total of 75 seats in 2010 and 2014. He could lose one more if Republican Martha McSally beats Democratic Rep. Ron Barber in Arizona in an election recount, Breitbart News reports. McSally is currently ahead by only 200 votes. …

Republicans will hold at least 246 House seats come January, according to election results on Saturday, giving the GOP a commanding majority that matches the party's post-World War II high during Democratic President Harry S. Truman's administration. The GOP retained control of two seats in runoffs in Louisiana, expanding the advantage for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who can afford defections from his increasingly conservative caucus and still get legislation passed. Combined with the Republican takeover of the Senate, Congress will be all-GOP for the final two years of President Barack Obama's second term.

Michael Tomasky is not content to argue, in the wake of Mary Landrieu's defeat, that Democrats should write off the South as politically-unfriendly territory. In his Daily Beast item of today, Tomasky goes to great lengths to trash the region in the ugliest of terms. "Reactionary, prejudice-infested, fetid, reject[ing] nearly everything that’s good about this country, just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment," is how Tomasky slurs most of the South, saying "almost the entire South" is as he describes it.

Landrieu is a household name in Louisiana. A Southern, conservative Democratic stronghold for generations, the Gulf States have edged toward the GOP since the mid-1990s, when Bill Clinton made fiscal discipline a national value, yet his party failed to follow suit. Still standing true on American values, limited government, and individual liberty, Southern Democrats felt less welcome in their party, and started moving to the GOP. Except for US Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who has had it pretty easy in the Big Easy. A staunch defender of the oil industry, a reliable provider of federal earmarks, she flew out...

Republican Congressman Bill Cassidy still holds a double-digit lead over incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu going into tomorrow’s Louisiana Senate runoff. The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Louisiana Voters shows Cassidy leading Landrieu by 16 points – 56% to 40%. Four percent (4%) are still undecided.

With the runoff just two days away in Louisiana’s Senate race, the excitement of the final contest in the 2014 midterms is so thick one could cut it with a knife … at least on the GOP side. Since independent pollsters gave up on the finale of Mary Landrieu’s Senate career, Republican pollsters are the only ones taking surveys — or at least the only ones publishing the results. The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker takes a look at the latest results from WPA Opinion Research, working on behalf of the conservative group Independent Women’s Voice, and finds Bill Cassidy out...

Local radio hosts in Louisiana mocked Sen. Mary Landrieu for giving a poor interview immediately after having the embattled Democrat on the air on Wednesday. During an interview on 710 KEEL News Radio in Shreveport, La., conducted by Robert Wright and Erin McCarty, Landrieu continued her drum beat for the last week of the runoff election by answering every question with accusations against her opponent Rep. Bill Cassidy and his medical work at LSU. ....

**SNIP** The Senate race will be the main attraction of the night, as we wait to see whether Landrieu can retain her title as a political survivor or if Cassidy will become seat number 54 for Republicans in the next Senate class. Having won two of her three previous elections through runoffs, Landrieu’s campaign continues to express optimism that she can pull out another surprise victory this year. The last time Landrieu faced a runoff in 2002, she was widely expected to lose the contest. But in the final days of the campaign, a late-breaking story fueled rumors that the...

Republicans appear poised to expand their Senate majority with a runoff election in Louisiana on Saturday that would cap big wins for their party in the Nov. 4 midterm elections. Republican Representative Bill Cassidy is running against Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, and has a comfortable lead in polls. If he wins, he would be the ninth Republican to capture a previously Democratic seat. His victory would give Republicans 54 seats in the 100-member Senate, enough for a majority but not the 60 seats needed to avoid the tactical blocking procedure known as...

The number of people who cast their ballots early in Louisiana dropped off from the Nov. 4 primary election to the Dec. 6 runoff election in every statewide category except one: registered Republican voters. About 85,900 registered Republicans took advantage of early voting for the Dec. 6 runoff. That's almost 3,000 more than voted early for the Nov. 4 election, and amounts to a 4 percent bump in early voting overall from a month ago. The jump in early Republican voters is noteworthy, given that early voting overall dropped by 10 percent from the November primary to the December runoff....